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
#29801
Peter C. Perdue
#29813
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Peter C. Perdue is an American author, professor, and historian. He is a professor of Chinese history at Yale University. Perdue has a Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in the field of History and East Asian Languages. His research interests lie in modern Chinese and Japanese social and economic history, history of frontiers, and world history. He has also written on grain markets in China, agricultural development, and environmental history.
Go to Profile#29802
Guy Pratt
#29814
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Guy Adam Pratt is a British bassist. He has worked with artists including Pink Floyd, Roxy Music, Gary Moore, Madonna, Peter Cetera, Michael Jackson, the Smiths, Robert Palmer, Echo & the Bunnymen, Tears for Fears, Icehouse, Bananarama, Iggy Pop, Tom Jones, Debbie Harry, Whitesnake, Womack & Womack, Kirsty MacColl, Coverdale•Page, Lemon Jelly, the Orb, All Saints, Stephen Duffy, Robbie Robertson and A. R. Rahman. In addition to his work as a session musician, Pratt has been a member of the Australian rock band Icehouse, and is currently a member of the band Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets w...
Go to Profile#29803
John Paul Frank
#29815
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
John Paul Frank was an American lawyer and scholar involved in landmark civil rights, school desegregation, and criminal procedure cases before the United States Supreme Court. Biography Frank attended the University of Wisconsin and obtained a B.A. and M.A. in history. In 1940, Frank graduated with an LL.B. from the University of Wisconsin Law School with Order of the Coif honors. He clerked for Justice Hugo Black of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1942 to 1943. Frank spent the next two years as the assistant to the Secretary of the Interior and then to the U.S. Attorney General. He studied at Yale Law School and obtained a S.J.D.
Go to Profile#29804
Scott Ian
#29816
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Scott Ian is an American musician, best known as the rhythm guitarist, lyricist and co-founder of the thrash metal band Anthrax, of which he is the sole continuous member. Ian is also the guitarist, lyricist, and a founding member of the crossover thrash band Stormtroopers of Death, and is the rhythm guitarist for the metal bands the Damned Things and Mr. Bungle. He has hosted The Rock Show on VH1 and has appeared on VH1's I Love the... series, Heavy: The Story of Metal, and SuperGroup.
Go to Profile#29805
Johnny Damon
#29817
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Johnny David Damon is an American former professional baseball outfielder who played in Major League Baseball from 1995 to 2012. During his MLB career, Damon played for the Kansas City Royals , Oakland Athletics , Boston Red Sox , New York Yankees , Detroit Tigers , Tampa Bay Rays and Cleveland Indians . He also played for the Thailand national baseball team and was a member of the squad for the 2013 World Baseball Classic qualifiers.
Go to Profile#29806
Paolo Zamboni
#29818
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Paolo Zamboni is an Italian doctor and scientist. He is full Professor and Director of the School of Vascular Surgery at the University of Ferrara in Italy. He is known for his description and proposed cure of the vascular disease chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency strongly related with multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases such as Ménière and Parkinson's, but the existence of this disease is very controversial, with significantly more detractors than supporters, and there is no good evidence that the surgery helps MS patients.
Go to Profile#29807
David Abulafia
#29819
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
David Samuel Harvard Abulafia is an English historian with a particular interest in Italy, Spain and the rest of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He spent most of his career at the University of Cambridge, rising to become a professor at the age of 50. He retired in 2017 as Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History. He is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He was Chairman of the History Faculty at Cambridge University, 2003-5, and was elected a member of the governing Council of Cambridge University in 2008. He is visiting Beacon Professor at the new University of Gibraltar, where he also serves on the Academic Board.
Go to Profile#29808
Philip Augar
#29820
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Sir Philip Augar is a British author, and was an equities broker in the City of London, England for twenty years from the 1970s, first with NatWest and J. Henry Schroder, and was part of the team that negotiated the sale of Schroders investment bank to Citigroup.
Go to Profile#29809
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
#29821
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg was the 15th President of the George Washington University, serving from 1988 to 2007. On August 1, 2007, he retired from the presidency and became GW's President Emeritus and University Professor of Public Service at the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration.
Go to Profile#29810
Carrie Rentschler
#29822
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Carrie A. Rentschler is a scholar of feminist media studies and associate professor at McGill University located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Rentschler's work focuses on how media produces culture and its effects on women's lives and the reproduction of rape culture. She advocates anti-violence through the production of media to reduce violent crime.
Go to Profile#29811
Billy Bremner
#29823
Overall Influence
1942 - 1997 (55 years)
William John Bremner was a Scottish professional footballer and manager. Regarded as one of the game's great midfielders, he combined precision passing skills with tenacious tackling and physical stamina. He played for Leeds United from 1959 to 1976, serving as captain from 1965, in one of the most successful periods in the club's history.
Go to Profile#29812
Anne Cutler
#29824
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
Elizabeth Anne Cutler FRS FBA FASSA was an Australian psycholinguist, who served as director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. A pioneer in her field, Cutler's work focused on human listeners' recognition and decoding of spoken language. Following her retirement from the Max Planck Institute in 2012, she took a professorship at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University.
Go to Profile#29813
Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink
#29825
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Jerrel Floyd "Jimmy" Hasselbaink is a Surinamese born - Dutch professional football manager and former player who is now an assistant coach for the England national team. Born in Suriname, he and his family would later move to the Dutch city of Zaandam where he began playing football, initially as a goalkeeper, later transitioning to the role of a right winger and finally a forward. He began his senior career with Telstar and AZ Alkmaar, before leaving the Netherlands for Portuguese club Campomaiorense in August 1995. He joined Boavista the following year and won the Taça de Portugal with the club in 1997.
Go to Profile#29814
Carla Cordua
#29826
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (101 years)
Carla Cordua is a Chilean philosopher. Life Cordua was born in Los Ángeles, Chile on Christmas Day, 1925. She entered the University of Chile in 1948 and studied under Bogumil Jasinowski and Oscar Marín.
Go to Profile#29815
Eleny Ionel
#29827
Overall Influence
Eleny-Nicoleta Ionel is a Romanian mathematician whose research concerns symplectic geometry, including the study of the Gromov–Witten invariants and Gopakumar–Vafa invariant. Among her most significant results are the construction of relative Gromov-Witten invariants of symplectic manifolds, and the proof of the vanishing in codimension at least g of the tautological ring of the moduli space of genus-g curves.
Go to Profile#29816
Jeanne Ferrante
#29828
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Jeanne Ferrante is an American computer scientist active in the field of compiler technology. As a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering, Ferrante has made important contributions regarding optimization and parallelization.
Go to Profile#29817
Aurélien Barrau
#29829
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Aurélien Barrau is a French physicist and philosopher, specialized in astroparticle physics, black holes and cosmology. He is the director of the Grenoble Center for Theoretical Physics, works in the CNRS Laboratory for Subatomic Physics and Cosmology , and is a professor at the Joseph Fourier University .
Go to Profile#29818
Nolan Wallach
#29830
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Nolan Russell Wallach is a mathematician known for work in the representation theory of reductive algebraic groups. He is the author of the 2-volume treatise Real Reductive Groups. Education and career Wallach did his undergraduate studies at the University of Maryland, graduating in 1962. He earned his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1966, under the supervision of Jun-Ichi Hano.
Go to Profile#29819
Jennifer Freyd
#29831
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Jennifer Joy Freyd is an American psychologist, researcher, author, educator, and speaker. Freyd is an extensively published scholar who is best known for her theories of betrayal trauma, DARVO, institutional betrayal, and institutional courage.
Go to Profile#29820
Jerry Avorn
#29832
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Jerry Avorn is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief Emeritus of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He founded one of the largest programs using health care utilization data to track medication use and outcomes, and invented the practice of "academic detailing" in which pharmacists, nurses, and physicians educate doctors about cost-effective prescribing practices using the same tactics that drug companies employ to market their products. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1969 and M.D. from Harvard Med...
Go to Profile#29821
Michelle Simmons
#29833
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Michelle Yvonne Simmons is an Australian quantum physicist, recognised for her foundational contributions to the field of atomic electronics. She is founding director of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation & Communication Technology, and is Scientia Professor of Quantum Physics in the Faculty of Science at the University of New South Wales.
Go to Profile#29822
Omar Vizquel
#29834
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Omar Enrique Vizquel González , nicknamed "Little O", is a Venezuelan former professional baseball shortstop. During his 24-year Major League Baseball career, Vizquel played for the Seattle Mariners, Cleveland Indians, San Francisco Giants, Texas Rangers, Chicago White Sox, and Toronto Blue Jays. In Venezuela he played for Leones del Caracas. From 2014 to 2017, he was the Detroit Tigers' first-base, infield and baserunning coach. He was manager for the Toros de Tijuana of the Mexican League.
Go to Profile#29823
Haridimos Tsoukas
#29835
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Haridimos "Hari" Tsoukas is a Greek theorist on organization and leadership. Tsoukas currently is The Columbia Ship Management Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Cyprus, and Distinguished Research Environment Professor of Organization Studies at the Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. From 2003 to 2008, he served as Editor-in-chief of Organization Studies, a major management journal. He has conducted pioneering research in the fields of knowledge-based perspectives on organizations, the epistemology of practice, epistemological issues in organization theory, an...
Go to Profile#29824
Go Nagai
#29836
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Kiyoshi Nagai, better known by the pen name Go Nagai, is a Japanese manga artist and a prolific author of science fiction, fantasy, horror and erotica. He made his professional debut in 1967 with Meakashi Polikichi, but is best known for creating popular 1970s manga and anime series such as Cutie Honey, Devilman and Mazinger Z. He is credited with creating the super robot genre and for designing the first mecha robots piloted by a user from within a cockpit with Mazinger Z, and for pioneering the magical girl genre with Cutie Honey, the post-apocalyptic manga/anime genre with Violence Jack, and the ecchi genre with Harenchi Gakuen.
Go to Profile#29825
Ady Stern
#29837
Overall Influence
Ady Stern is an Israeli physicist. Adiel Stern is a professor at the Condensed Matter Physics Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Stern and fellow researchers claim to have demonstrated the existence of 'quasiparticles' with one quarter the charge of an electron.
Go to Profile#29826
Altangerel Perle
#29838
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Altangerel Perle is a Mongolian palaeontologist. He is employed at the National University of Mongolia. He has described species such as Goyocephale lattimorei, Achillobator giganticus and Erlikosaurus andrewsi. He has been honored by Polish palaeontologist Halszka Osmólska, who named the species Hulsanpes perlei after him.
Go to Profile#29827
Marc Kamionkowski
#29839
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Marc Kamionkowski is an American theoretical physicist and currently the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include particle physics, dark matter, inflation, the cosmic microwave background and gravitational wavess.
Go to Profile#29828
Anupama Chopra
#29840
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Anupama Chopra is an Indian author, journalist, film critic and director of the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. She is also the founder and editor of the digital platform Film Companion, which offers a curated look at cinema. She has written several books on Indian cinema and has been a film critic for NDTV, India Today, as well as the Hindustan Times. She also hosted a weekly film review show The Front Row With Anupama Chopra, on Star World. She won the 2000 National Film Award for Best Book on Cinema for her first book Sholay: The Making of a Classic. She presently critiques movies and interv...
Go to Profile#29829
Kira Radinsky
#29841
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Kira Radinsky is a Ukraine-born Israeli computer scientist, inventor and entrepreneur, specializing in predictive data mining. She gained recognition after being selected by the MIT Technology Review to the "35 Innovators Under 35" list. Her work was described in the popular press as predicting the first in 130 years outbreak of cholera in Cuba, based on the pattern identified by mining of 150 years of data from various sources: in poor countries, floods within a year after a drought often follow by a cholera outbreak.
Go to Profile#29830
Maurice Loyal Huggins
#29842
Overall Influence
#29831
Joe Carter
#29843
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Joseph Chris Carter is an American former professional baseball player. He played in Major League Baseball as an outfielder and first baseman for the Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Indians, San Diego Padres, Toronto Blue Jays, Baltimore Orioles, and San Francisco Giants. Carter hit a walk-off home run to win the 1993 World Series for the Blue Jays, their second consecutive championship. Carter is one of only two players to end a World Series with a home run, the other being Bill Mazeroski.
Go to Profile#29832
Étienne Pardoux
#29844
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Étienne Pardoux is a French mathematician working in the field of Stochastic analysis, in particular Stochastic partial differential equations. He is currently Professor at Aix-Marseille University.
Go to Profile#29833
Sandy Skoglund
#29845
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Sandy Skoglund is an American photographer and installation artist. Skoglund creates surrealist images by building elaborate sets or tableaux, furnishing them with carefully selected colored furniture and other objects, a process of which takes her months to complete. Finally, she photographs the set, mostly including live models. The works are characterized by an overwhelming amount of one object and either bright, contrasting colors or a monochromatic color scheme.
Go to Profile#29834
Christian Keysers
#29846
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Christian Keysers is a French and German neuroscientist. Education and career He finished his school education at the European School, Munich and studied psychology and biology at the University of Konstanz, the Ruhr University Bochum, University of Massachusetts Boston, the Shepens eye research Institute of the Harvard Medical School as well as with Marvin Minsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then started his research career at the University of St Andrews by investigating cells in the temporal cortex with David Perrett, and described cells that respond when the monkey views particular faces in a way that correlates with conscious perception.
Go to Profile#29835
Devra Davis
#29847
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Devra Lee Davis is an American epidemiologist, toxicologist, and author of three books about environmental hazards. She was founding director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, and is a former professor of epidemiology at University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. She has served on several governmental and non-governmental organizations, conducting research and advocacy into effects of pesticides, asbestos, and wireless radiation on human health, especially cancers.
Go to Profile#29836
David Rudman
#29848
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
David Rudman is an American puppeteer, actor, puppet builder, writer, director, and producer known for his involvement with the Muppets and Sesame Street. Rudman currently performs the roles of Scooter, Janice, and Beaker for The Muppets Studio, which were all originated by Richard Hunt, as well as Cookie Monster and Baby Bear on Sesame Street.
Go to Profile#29837
Peter Costello
#29849
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Peter Howard Costello is an Australian businessman, lawyer and former politician who served as the treasurer of Australia in government of John Howard from 1996 to 2007. He is the longest-serving treasurer in Australia's history. Costello was a member of parliament of the Australian House of Representatives from 1990 to 2009, representing the Division of Higgins. He also served as the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party from 1994 to 2007.
Go to Profile#29838
Thomas Kalil
#29850
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Thomas Amadeus Kalil is an expert on technology and innovation policy, and is currently the Chief Innovation Officer at Schmidt Futures. He was previously Deputy Director for Policy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Obama, and was also the Senior Advisor for Science, Technology and Innovation for the United States National Economic Council.
Go to Profile#29839
Andrew Fabian
#29851
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Andrew Christopher Fabian is a British astronomer and astrophysicist. He was Director of the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge from 2013 to 2018. He was a Royal Society Research Professor at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge from 1982 to 2013, and Vice-Master of Darwin College, Cambridge from 1997 to 2012. He served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society from May 2008 through to 2010.
Go to Profile#29840
Hans Eiberg
#29852
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Hans Eiberg, is a Danish geneticist, known for his discovery of the genetic mutation causing blue eyes. Hans Eiberg graduated as a M.Sc. in 1970. He has worked with genetics at the Institute for Medical Biochemistry and Genetics of Copenhagen University since 1971, and became an associate professor at the institute in 1975.
Go to Profile#29841
Christopher Eccleston
#29853
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Christopher Eccleston is an English actor. A twice BAFTA Award nominee, he has been active in television and film, which includes his role as the ninth incarnation of the Doctor in the BBC sci-fi series Doctor Who , playing Matt Jamison in The Leftovers , and his collaborations with filmmakers Danny Boyle and Michael Winterbottom.
Go to Profile#29842
David Nimmer
#29854
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
David Nimmer is an American lawyer, law professor, renowned as an expert in United States copyright law. He received an A.B. with distinction and honors in 1977 from Stanford University and his J.D. in 1980 from Yale Law School, where he served as editor of the Yale Law Journal. David Nimmer is of counsel to Irell & Manella LLP in Los Angeles, California. He also serves as a Professor from Practice at University of California, Los Angeles Law School and Distinguished Scholar at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. In 2000, he was elected to the American Law Institute. He has served as a...
Go to Profile#29843
Arthur Wahl
#29855
Overall Influence
1917 - 2006 (89 years)
Arthur Charles Wahl was an American chemist who, as a doctoral student of Glenn T. Seaborg at the University of California, Berkeley, first isolated plutonium in February 1941. He was a worker on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos until 1946, when he joined Washington University in St. Louis. Beginning in 1952, he was the Henry V. Farr Professor of Radiochemistry; he received the American Chemical Society Award in Nuclear Chemistry in 1966 and retired in 1983. He moved back to Los Alamos in 1991 and continued his scientific writing until 2005. He died in 2006 of Parkinson's disease and pneum...
Go to Profile#29844
Price V. Fishback
#29856
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Price V. Fishback is an economic historian. He is a professor of economics at the University of Arizona and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research on American economic history has included employment and labor in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries especially in the coal industry, and government programs of the New Deal. His work has been recognised by the Cliometric Society via their awarding him a Clio Can in recognition of his "exceptional support of cliometrics". Prior to arriving to the University of Arizona, Fishback was an Assistant and...
Go to Profile#29845
Rama Govindarajan
#29857
Overall Influence
Rama Govindarajan is an Indian scientist specialized in the field of fluid dynamics. She previously worked at the Engineering Mechanics Unit of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research from 1998 to 2012 and as a professor at the TIFR Hyderabad Centre for Interdisciplinary Sciences from 2012 to 2016. As of 2019 she is working as a professor at International Centre for Theoretical Sciences , Bengaluru. Govindarajan is a recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award for the year 2007.
Go to Profile#29846
Harriet Holter
#29858
Overall Influence
1922 - 1997 (75 years)
Harriet Holter was a Norwegian social psychologist. Career She graduated with the cand.oecon. degree in 1946, and was eventually hired as a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Social Research, which was established in 1950.
Go to Profile#29847
Jon Juaristi
#29859
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Jon Juaristi Linacero is a Spanish poet, essayist and translator in Spanish and Basque, as well as a self-confessed former ETA militant. He lives in Madrid. Biography Education and employment A Ph.D. in Romance philology, he studied at the University of Deusto and in Seville.
Go to Profile#29848
Joshua D. Wright
#29860
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Joshua Daniel Wright is an American economist and legal scholar who served as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission from 2013 to 2015. At the time of his nomination, Wright was the fourth economist to serve as a commissioner of the FTC.
Go to Profile#29849
Peter Fulde
#29861
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Peter Fulde is a physicist working in condensed matter theory and quantum chemistry. Fulde received a PhD degree at the University of Maryland in 1963. After spending more than one year as a postdoc with Michael Tinkham in Berkeley, he returned in 1965 to Germany where he obtained a chair for theoretical physics in 1968 at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt/M. From 1971 to 1974 he was in charge of the theory group of the Institute Max von Laue-Paul Langevin in Garching. In 1971 he became a director at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart where he serv...
Go to Profile#29850
Michael Yates
#29862
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Michael D. Yates is an economist and a labor educator, and editorial director of the socialist publishing house Monthly Review Press. He advocates a socialist view of economics. Early life and education Yates was born in a small coal mining town about 40 miles north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His grandmother worked on a barge boat as a cook and a servant for families in Manhattan, Newport and other wealthy enclaves. His immediate family had a long history working at dangerous, unhealthy jobs in the coal mines. At the age of 14, his mother took a job unloading dynamite at the entrance of the coal mines.
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