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
#29851
Liev Schreiber
#29863
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Isaac Liev Schreiber is an American actor, director, screenwriter, and producer. He became known during the late 1990s and early 2000s after appearing in several independent films, and later mainstream Hollywood films, including the first three Scream horror films , Ransom , Phantoms , The Hurricane , Kate & Leopold , The Sum of All Fears , The Manchurian Candidate , The Omen , Defiance , X-Men Origins: Wolverine , Taking Woodstock , Salt , Goon , Pawn Sacrifice , Spotlight , The 5th Wave , and The French Dispatch . He has also lent his voice to animated films such as My Little Pony: The Movi...
Go to Profile#29852
Simon Ostrach
#29864
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Simon Ostrach was an American academic and a pioneer in the fields of buoyancy-driven flows and microgravity science. Early life and education Ostrach was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He earned a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Engineering from Rhode Island State College, followed by an additional Master of Science and a PhD from Brown University, both in Applied Mathematics.
Go to Profile#29853
Karen Olsen Beck
#29865
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Rita Karen Olsen Beck is known for her work in diplomacy, politics, and social work. She has held posts as the First Lady of Costa Rica, Costa Rican Ambassador to Israel, and Legislative Assemblywoman. Beck was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, before moving to New York with her parents as a child. She graduated from Mary Washington College (now named the University of Mary Washington) before studying social sciences at the University of Copenhagen and earning a Master of Arts in sociology from . As a student, Beck was involved in several groups and movements to promote aid for needy people, foreshadowing her later activist work and involvement in politics.
Go to Profile#29854
William Hirstein
#29866
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
William Hirstein is an American philosopher primarily interested in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, cognitive science, and analytic philosophy. He is a professor of philosophy at Elmhurst University.
Go to Profile#29855
Christian Polak
#29867
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Christian Philippe Polak is a French businessman and author who has published several books on 19th-century Franco-Japanese relations; one Le Monde book review called him "the best specialist on this question".
Go to Profile#29856
Shawn Mendes
#29868
Overall Influence
1998 - Present (28 years)
Shawn Peter Raul Mendes is a Canadian singer-songwriter. He gained a following in 2013, when he posted song covers on the video sharing platform Vine. The following year, he caught the attention of artist manager Andrew Gertler and Island Records A&R Ziggy Chareton, which led to him signing a deal with the record label. Mendes' self-titled debut EP was released in 2014, followed by his debut studio album Handwritten in 2015. Handwritten debuted atop the US Billboard 200, making Mendes one of five artists ever to debut at number one before the age of 18. The single "Stitches" reached number on...
Go to Profile#29857
Jennifer Balakrishnan
#29869
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Jennifer Shyamala Sayaka Balakrishnan is an American mathematician known for leading a team that solved the problem of the "cursed curve", a Diophantine equation that was known for being "famously difficult". More generally, Balakrishnan specializes in algorithmic number theory and arithmetic geometry. She is the Clare Boothe Luce Associate Professor at Boston University.
Go to Profile#29858
Craig Nevill-Manning
#29870
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Craig Graham Nevill-Manning is a New Zealand computer scientist who founded Google's first remote engineering center, located in midtown Manhattan, where he was an Engineering Director. He also created Froogle , a product search engine. He is now Head of Engineering at Sidewalk Labs.
Go to Profile#29859
Jens Eisert
#29871
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Jens Eisert is a German physicist, ERC fellow, and professor at the Free University of Berlin. He is also affiliated with the Helmholtz Association and the Fraunhofer Society. Scientific work He is known for his research in quantum information science and quantum many-body theory in condensed matter physics. He has made significant contributions to entanglement theory and the study of quantum computing, as well as to the development of protocols in the quantum technologies and to the study of complex quantum systems. Work on compressed sensing quantum state tomography he has contributed to ha...
Go to Profile#29860
Julian Gough
#29872
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Julian Gough is an Irish musician, novelist, and poet. Initially known as the singer and lyricist for the Galway band Toasted Heretic, he has since established a career as a satirist, novelist, commentator and writer of children's books. Musically, he is best known for his songs "Galway and Los Angeles", "You can Always go Home" and "LSD "; his fictional works include "The Orphan and the Mob" , which won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2007, and the End Poem that appears at the end of Minecraft.
Go to Profile#29861
Zeev Maoz
#29873
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ze'ev Maoz is a Professor of Political Science and Director of the Correlates of War Project at the University of California, Davis, as well as Distinguished Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel. He is the President of the Peace Science Society during 2007-08. Before coming to UC-Davis he was head of the Graduate School of Government and Policy at Tel-Aviv University. He also served as the Head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies , as the Academic Director of the M.A. program of the National Defense College of the IDF , and as Chairman of the Department of Politica...
Go to Profile#29862
Shigeru Nakayama
#29874
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Shigeru Nakayama was a Japanese historian of science. Life Nakayama was born in 1928, in Amagasaki, and brought up there. He survived the Hiroshima atom bomb of 1945. He left Hiroshima Higher School in 1948, and graduated from Tokyo University with a degree in mathematical astronomy in 1951.
Go to Profile#29863
Venu Govindaraju
#29875
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Venu Govindaraju is an Indian-American whose research interests are in the fields of document image analysis and biometrics. He presently serves as the Vice President for Research and Economic Development. He is a SUNY Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, USA.
Go to Profile#29864
Peter Anthony Lawrence
#29876
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Peter Anthony Lawrence is a British developmental biologist at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the Zoology Department of the University of Cambridge. He was a staff scientist of the Medical Research Council from 1969 to 2006.
Go to Profile#29865
Thomas C. Hanks
#29877
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Thomas C. Hanks is an American seismologist. He works for the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. Dr. Hanks is a member of the Seismological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, the Geological Society of America, the Peninsula Geological Society at Stanford, and many related geological societies. Dr. Hanks has authored dozens of scholarly papers in strong-motion seismology and tectonic geomorphology.
Go to Profile#29866
Robert Palmer
#29878
Overall Influence
1949 - 2003 (54 years)
#29867
Sallie W. Chisholm
#29879
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Sallie Watson "Penny" Chisholm is an American biological oceanographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is an expert in the ecology and evolution of ocean microbes. Her research focuses particularly on the most abundant marine phytoplankton, Prochlorococcus, that she discovered in the 1980s with Rob Olson and other collaborators. She has a TED talk about their discovery and importance called "The tiny creature that secretly powers the planet".
Go to Profile#29868
Virginia Gutiérrez de Pineda
#29880
Overall Influence
1921 - 1999 (78 years)
Virginia Gutiérrez de Pineda was a Colombian anthropologist who pioneered work on Colombian family and medical anthropology. Biography She received her education at the National Pedagogy Institute, the Escuela Normal Superior of Colombia and the National Technology Institute, where she obtained her degree in Anthropology in 1944. She pursued graduate studies in Social and Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and, in 1962, she received her PhD in Social Sciences and Economics at the National Pedagogic University.
Go to Profile#29869
Steve McCaffery
#29881
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Steven McCaffery is a Canadian poet and scholar who was a professor at York University. He currently holds the David Gray Chair at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. McCaffery was born in Sheffield, England and lived in the UK for most of his youth attending University of Hull.
Go to Profile#29870
Jan Klabbers
#29882
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Johannes Antonius Maria "Jan" Klabbers is a Dutch Academy Professor at the University of Helsinki, on leave from his regular position as Professor of International Law at the University of Helsinki. He was Director of the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Global Governance Research, based at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Law, and deputy director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights. He has previously held several positions at the University of Amsterdam, where he also completed his doctoral degree.
Go to Profile#29871
Florian Mayer
#29883
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Florian Mayer is a German former professional tennis player. Mayer reached his career-high singles ranking of world No. 18 in June 2011. Also in 2011, Mayer won his first ATP title after four previous defeats in ATP finals.
Go to Profile#29872
Jyoti Basu
#29884
Overall Influence
1914 - 2010 (96 years)
Jyoti Basu was an Indian Marxist theorist, communist activist, and politician. He was one of the most prominent leaders of Communist movement in India. He served as the 6th and longest serving Chief Minister of West Bengal from 1977 to 2000. He was one of the founding members of the Communist Party of India . He was the member of Politburo of the party since its formation in 1964 till 2008. He was also the member of West Bengal Legislative Assembly 11 times. In his political career, spanning over seven decades, he was noted to have been the India's longest serving chief minister in an elected...
Go to Profile#29873
David Pearce
#29885
Overall Influence
1941 - 2005 (64 years)
David William Pearce OBE was Emeritus Professor at the Department of Economics at University College London . He specialised in, and was a pioneer of, environmental economics, having published over fifty books and over 300 academic articles on the subject, including his 'Blueprint for a Green Economy' series.
Go to Profile#29874
Heidi Wunderli-Allenspach
#29886
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Heidi Wunderli-Allenspach is a Swiss biologist and was the first female director of ETH Zürich. Life and work Wunderli-Allenspach was born in 1947 in Niederuzwil in the Canton of St. Gallen in Switzerland. She graduated with the master's degree in biology at ETH Zurich in 1970, and then she worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Brain Research at the University of Zurich. Thenafter she postgraduatedin Experimental Medicine and Biology at the University of Zurich. Wunderli subsequently did her Ph.D. thesis at the Department of Microbiology at the Biozentrum in Basel, and as resear...
Go to Profile#29875
Harald Welzer
#29887
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Harald Welzer is a German social psychologist. He studied sociology, psychology and literature at the University of Hannover. He has been a professor of transformation design at the University of Flensburg since 2012. His research is focused on memory, violence and the social impacts of climate change. His books have been translated into 15 languages.
Go to Profile#29876
Thomas Hughes Jukes
#29888
Overall Influence
#29877
Peter Gizzi
#29889
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Peter Gizzi is an American poet, essayist, editor and teacher. He attended New York University, Brown University and the State University of New York at Buffalo. Life Gizzi was born in Alma, Michigan to an Italian American family. He spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Gizzi has said that he "internalized the hierarchy of music over words as a kid at Catholic mass, where the liturgy was often in Latin". After graduating from high school, the poet delayed going to college and took a job in a factory winding resin tubes and in a residential treatment center working with emotionally disturbed adolescents.
Go to Profile#29878
Eckart Klein
#29890
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Eckhart Klein is a German legal scholar. From June 1994 to July 2008, he held the chair for constitutional, international, and European law at the University of Potsdam. Biography Klein was born 6 April 1943 in Oppeln, Silesia . After graduating from high school in Karlsruhe in 1962, and then completing military service, Klein studied law in Freiburg im Breisgau, Göttingen, Lausanne, and Heidelberg from 1964 to 1968.
Go to Profile#29879
Barbara Rossi
#29891
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Barbara Rossi was an American artist, one of the original Chicago Imagists, a group that in the 1960s and 1970s turned to representational art. She first exhibited with them at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1969. She is known for meticulously rendered drawings and cartoonish paintings, as well as a personal vernacular. She worked primarily by making reverse paintings on plexiglass that reference lowbrow and outsider art.
Go to Profile#29880
Walker Bleakney
#29892
Overall Influence
1901 - 1992 (91 years)
Walker Bleakney was an American physicist, one of inventors of mass spectrometers, and widely noted for his research in the fields of atomic physics, molecular physics, fluid dynamics, the ionization of gases, and blast waves. Bleakney was the chair of the department of physics at Princeton University. He was the head of the Princeton Ballistic Project during World War II.
Go to Profile#29881
Peter Scott
#29893
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Sir George Peter Scott FAcSS is a British educationalist and the former Vice-Chancellor of Kingston University in Kingston upon Thames in southwest London. Life and career Scott studied modern history as an undergraduate at Merton College, Oxford and was a visiting scholar and at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Public Policy under a Harkness Fellowship. He then worked as a leader writer for The Times, and began writing for the Times Higher Education Supplement in 1971. He went on to serve as its editor from 1976 until 1992 when he was appointed Professor of Education at the University of Leeds and Director the university's Centre for Policy Studies in Education.
Go to Profile#29882
Yuri Baturin
#29894
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Yuri Mikhailovich Baturin , is a Russian cosmonaut and former politician. He has the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation. Baturin graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1973, and is the former Assistant to the President on National Security and Secretaty of the Defense Council ; he is also an author in constitutional law. Baturin was also a cosmonaut who flew on two missions.
Go to Profile#29883
Aubrey Manning
#29895
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Aubrey William George Manning, OBE, FRSE, FRSB, was an English zoologist and broadcaster. Life Manning, the son of William, who worked for the Home and Colonial Stores, and Hilda, was born in Chiswick, but moved with his family to Englefield Green in Surrey when the Second World War broke out, to escape the Blitz.
Go to Profile#29884
Bob Berring
#29896
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Robert Charles "Bob" Berring Jr. is a noted figure in law, as a professor, librarian, scholar and researcher. Biography Born in 1949 in Canton, Ohio, Berring received his undergraduate degree from Harvard , his J.D. degree from University of California, Berkeley School of Law , and his library degree from U.C. Berkeley's then-named library school.
Go to Profile#29885
Brian Evans Conway
#29897
Overall Influence
1927 - 2005 (78 years)
Brian Evans Conway , professor emeritus in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Ottawa, was a world-renowned electrochemist, and had a long and distinguished career at the University of Ottawa that spanned five decades.
Go to Profile#29886
Nuzhat Husain
#29898
Overall Influence
Nuzhat Husain is an Indian pathologist. She is former director of Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow. Education She completed her MBBS at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Aligarh Muslim University in 1985 and MD from King George Medical College, University of Lucknow in 1989 with high merit and several awards including the President of India’s silver medal for best woman student at the University in 1985 and the KB Kunwar Gold medal for best thesis in 1989, She also worked as a post doctoral fellow at Molecular Neuro-oncology Unit, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University during 1997.
Go to Profile#29887
Ulrike Malmendier
#29899
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Ulrike M. Malmendier is a German economist who is currently a professor of economics and finance at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on behavioral economics, corporate finance, and law and economics. In 2013, she was awarded the Fischer Black Prize by the American Finance Association.
Go to Profile#29888
Larry Johnson
#29900
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Larry Demetric Johnson is an American former professional basketball player who spent his career as a power forward with the Charlotte Hornets and the New York Knicks of the National Basketball Association . In 2008, Johnson was inducted into the Southern Nevada Sports Hall of Fame. He was then inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame on November 24, 2019.
Go to Profile#29889
Deborah McGuinness
#29901
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Deborah Louise McGuinness is an American computer scientist and researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute . She is a professor of Computer, Cognitive and Web Sciences, Industrial and Systems Engineering, and an endowed chair in the Tetherless World Constellation, a multidisciplinary research institution within RPI that focuses on the study of theories, methods and applications of the World Wide Web. Her fields of expertise include interdisciplinary data integration, artificial intelligence, specifically in knowledge representation and reasoning, description logics, the semantic web, exp...
Go to Profile#29890
Takafusa Nakamura
#29902
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Takafusa Nakamura was a Japanese economist. After graduating from the Economics Department of Tokyo University, he worked as an assistant, lecturer, and assistant professor in the Education Department of the same university before becoming a professor in 1970. After retiring in 1986, he became a professor emeritus at his alma mater, and professor at Ochanomizu Women's University and Toyo Eiwa University.
Go to Profile#29891
Mun Choi
#29903
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Mun Young Choi is an American academic. He currently serves as Chancellor of the University of Missouri and President of the University of Missouri System. Prior to his appointment at Missouri he was Provost & Executive Vice President at the University of Connecticut. He has also taught at Drexel University and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He lives in Columbia, Missouri.
Go to Profile#29892
Rex Grossman
#29904
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Rex Daniel Grossman III is an American former football quarterback who played in the National Football League for 11 seasons, most notably with the Chicago Bears. He played college football at the University of Florida, where he was named AP College Football Player of the Year and won the 2002 Orange Bowl as a sophomore. Grossman was selected by the Bears in the first round of the 2003 NFL Draft.
Go to Profile#29893
Nils Christian Stenseth
#29905
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Nils Christian Stenseth is a Norwegian biologist with a focus on ecology and evolution. He is the director of the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis at the University of Oslo, CEES was given Centre of Excellence status by the Research Council of Norway in December 2006. He is also the Chief Scientist at the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research in Norway, and Honorary Professor of Tsinghua University.
Go to Profile#29894
Alex George
#29906
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Alexander Segger George is an Australian botanist. He is the authority on the plant genera Banksia and Dryandra. The "bizarre" Restionaceae genus Alexgeorgea was named in his honour in 1976. Early life Alex Segger George was born in Western Australia on 4 April 1939.
Go to Profile#29895
Milan N. Popović
#29907
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
Milan Popović was a renowned Serbian psychiatrist-psychoanalyst, a full professor of the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy. Biography He was born in 1924 in Belgrade, Serbia. He graduated from the University of Belgrade School of Medicine, specialized neuropsychiatry and was awarded a doctor's degree with the theme "Group psychotherapy of the schizophrenic in hospital conditions". He was elected associate professor of the Faculty of Philosophy of Belgrade University in 1972 and full professor in 1980.
Go to Profile#29896
Robert Edmund Edwards
#29908
Overall Influence
1926 - 2000 (74 years)
Robert Edmund Edwards , usually cited simply as R. E. Edwards, was a British-born Australian mathematician who specialized in functional analysis. He is the author of several volumes in Springer's Graduate Texts in Mathematics.
Go to Profile#29897
Daniel E. Hastings
#29909
Overall Influence
Daniel E. Hastings is an American physicist, currently the Cecil and Ida Green Education Professor and the former director of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hastings became head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics on January 1, 2019. He has served as the chief scientist of the US Air Force and on many national level boards.
Go to Profile#29898
Anil Kohli
#29910
Overall Influence
Anil Kohli is an Indian dental surgeon, medical administrator and a former president of the Dental Council of India. He is an elected fellow of the Faculty of Dental Surgery of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and holds the honorary rank of 'Brigadier' in the Army Dental Corps. He is a recipient of B. C. Roy Award, the highest Indian award in the medical category. The Government of India awarded him the fourth highest civilian honor of the Padma Shri in 1992 and followed it up with the third highest civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan, in 2005, for his contributions to medicine, makin...
Go to Profile#29899
Henri Cole
#29911
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Henri Cole is an American poet, who has published many collections of poetry and a memoir. His books have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Arabic. Biography Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, to an American father and French-Armenian mother, and raised in Virginia, United States. His father, a North Carolinian, enlisted in the service after graduating from high school and, while stationed in Marseilles, met Cole's mother, who worked at the PX. Together they lived in Japan, Germany, Illinois, California, Nevada, Missouri and Virginia, where Cole attended public schools and the College of William and Mary.
Go to Profile#29900
Nikolai Shanin
#29912
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
Nikolai Aleksandrovich Shanin was a Russian mathematician who worked on topology and constructive mathematics. He introduced the delta-system lemma and the caliber of a topological space. Further reading
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