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
#301
Lotfi A. Zadeh
#301
Overall Influence
1921 - 2017 (96 years)
Lotfi Aliasker Zadeh was a mathematician, computer scientist, electrical engineer, artificial intelligence researcher, and professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Zadeh is best known for proposing fuzzy mathematics, consisting of several fuzzy-related concepts: fuzzy sets, fuzzy logic, fuzzy algorithms, fuzzy semantics, fuzzy languages, fuzzy control, fuzzy systems, fuzzy probabilities, fuzzy events, and fuzzy information. Zadeh was a founding member of the Eurasian Academy.
Go to Profile#302
Jordan Peterson
#302
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Jordan Bernt Peterson is a Canadian psychologist, author, and media commentator. Often described as conservative, he began to receive widespread attention in the late 2010s for his views on cultural and political issues. Peterson has described himself as a classic British liberal and a traditionalist.
Go to Profile#303
Jack Kilby
#303
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Jack St. Clair Kilby was an American electrical engineer who took part in the realization of the first integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments in 1958. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on December 10, 2000.
Go to Profile#304
Joss Whedon
#304
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Joseph Hill Whedon is an American screenwriter, director, producer, comic book writer, and composer. He is the founder of Mutant Enemy Productions, co-founder of Bellwether Pictures, and is best known as the creator of several television series: the supernatural drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel , the short-lived space Western Firefly , the Internet musical miniseries Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog , the science fiction drama Dollhouse , the Marvel Cinematic Universe series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. , and the science fiction drama The Nevers .
Go to Profile#305
Grigori Perelman
#305
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman is a Russian mathematician who is known for his contributions to the fields of geometric analysis, Riemannian geometry, and geometric topology. In 2005, Perelman abruptly quit his research job at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, and in 2006 stated that he had quit professional mathematics, due to feeling disappointed over the ethical standards in the field. He lives in seclusion in Saint Petersburg, and has not accepted offers for interviews since 2006.
Go to Profile#306
Fritjof Capra
#306
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Fritjof Capra is an Austrian-born American author, physicist, systems theorist and deep ecologist. In 1995, he became a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California. He is on the faculty of Schumacher College.
Go to Profile#307
Tommy Hilfiger
#307
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Thomas Jacob Hilfiger is an American fashion designer and the founder of Tommy Hilfiger Corporation. After starting his career by co-founding a chain of jeans/fashion stores called People's Place in upstate New York in the 1970s, he began designing preppy clothing for his own eponymous menswear line in the 1980s. The company later expanded into women's clothing and various luxury items such as perfumes and went public in 1992.
Go to Profile#308
Gérard Debreu
#308
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Gérard Debreu was a French-born economist and mathematician. Best known as a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began work in 1962, he won the 1983 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Go to Profile#309
Heinz von Foerster
#309
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Heinz von Foerster was an Austrian-American scientist combining physics and philosophy, and widely attributed as the originator of second-order cybernetics. He was twice a Guggenheim fellow and also was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1980. He is well known for his 1960 Doomsday equation formula published in Science predicting future population growth.
Go to Profile#310
Giorgio Agamben
#310
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life homo sacer, and indifference. The concept of biopolitics informs many of his writings.
Go to Profile#311
David Bohm
#311
Overall Influence
1917 - 1992 (75 years)
David Joseph Bohm was an American–Brazilian–British scientist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind. Among his many contributions to physics is his causal and deterministic interpretation of quantum theory known as De Broglie–Bohm theory.
Go to Profile#312
Margaret Atwood
#312
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Since 1961, she has published eighteen books of poetry, eighteen novels, eleven books of non-fiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards.
Go to Profile#313
David Petraeus
#313
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
David Howell Petraeus is a retired United States Army general and public official. He served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from September 6, 2011, until his resignation on November 9, 2012. Prior to his assuming the directorship of the CIA, Petraeus served 37 years in the United States Army. His last assignments in the Army were as commander of the International Security Assistance Force and commander, U.S. Forces – Afghanistan from July 4, 2010, to July 18, 2011. His other four-star assignments include serving as the 10th commander, U.S. Central Command from October 13, ...
Go to Profile#314
Jamal Khashoggi
#314
Overall Influence
1958 - 2018 (60 years)
Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi was a Saudi journalist, dissident, author, columnist for Middle East Eye and The Washington Post, and a general manager and editor-in-chief of Al-Arab News Channel who was assassinated at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018 by agents of the Saudi government at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Go to Profile#315
Judea Pearl
#315
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Judea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks . He is also credited for developing a theory of causal and counterfactual inference based on structural models . In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery awarded Pearl with the Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science, "for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning". He is the author of sev...
Go to Profile#316
Henri Cartan
#316
Overall Influence
1904 - 2008 (104 years)
Henri Paul Cartan was a French mathematician who made substantial contributions to algebraic topology. He was the son of the mathematician Élie Cartan, nephew of mathematician Anna Cartan, oldest brother of composer , physicist and mathematician , and the son-in-law of physicist Pierre Weiss.
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Manuel Castells
#317
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Manuel Castells Oliván is a Spanish sociologist. He is well known for his authorship of a trilogy of works, entitled The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. He is a scholar of the information society, communication and globalization.
Go to Profile#318
George Armitage Miller
#318
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
George Armitage Miller was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and more broadly, of cognitive science. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics. Miller wrote several books and directed the development of WordNet, an online word-linkage database usable by computer programs. He authored the paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," in which he observed that many different experimental findings considered together reveal the presence of an average limit of seven for human short-term memory capacity. This paper is frequently cited by psychologists and in the wider culture.
Go to Profile#319
Tony Hoare
#319
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare is a British computer scientist who has made foundational contributions to programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, formal verification, and concurrent computing. His work earned him the Turing Award, usually regarded as the highest distinction in computer science, in 1980.
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Liu Xiaobo
#320
Overall Influence
1955 - 2017 (62 years)
Liu Xiaobo was a Chinese literary critic, human rights activist, philosopher and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who called for political reforms and was involved in campaigns to end communist one-party rule in China. He was arrested numerous times, and was described as China's most prominent dissident and the country's most famous political prisoner. On 26 June 2017, he was granted medical parole after being diagnosed with liver cancer; he died a few weeks later on 13 July 2017.
Go to Profile#321
James Lovelock
#321
Overall Influence
1919 - 2022 (103 years)
James Ephraim Lovelock was an English independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system.
Go to Profile#322
Donald Davidson
#322
Overall Influence
1917 - 2003 (86 years)
Donald Herbert Davidson was an American philosopher. He served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. Davidson was known for his charismatic personality and the depth and difficulty of his thought. His work exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, particularly in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and action theory. While Davidson was an analyt...
Go to Profile#323
Margaret Thatcher
#323
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher , was a British stateswoman and Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the first female British prime minister and the longest-serving of the 20th century. As prime minister, she implemented economic policies that became known as Thatcherism. A Soviet journalist dubbed her the "Iron Lady", a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style.
Go to Profile#324
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#324
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist whose work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty.
Go to Profile#325
Eugène Ionesco
#325
Overall Influence
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French, and was one of the foremost figures of the French avant-garde theatre in the 20th century. Ionesco instigated a revolution in ideas and techniques of drama, beginning with his "anti play", The Bald Soprano which contributed to the beginnings of what is known as the Theatre of the Absurd, which includes a number of plays that, following the ideas of the philosopher Albert Camus, explore concepts of absurdism and surrealism. He was made a member of the Académie française in 1970, and was awarded the 1970 Austrian State ...
Go to Profile#326
Zaha Hadid
#326
Overall Influence
1950 - 2016 (66 years)
Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid was an Iraqi and British architect, artist and designer, recognized as a major figure in architecture of the late-20th and early-21st centuries. Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Hadid studied mathematics as an undergraduate and then enrolled at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1972. In search of an alternative system to traditional architectural drawing, and influenced by Suprematism and the Russian avant-garde, Hadid adopted painting as a design tool and abstraction as an investigative principle to "reinvestigate the aborted and untested experiments of ...
Go to Profile#327
Rollo May
#327
Overall Influence
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Rollo Reece May was an American existential psychologist and author of the influential book Love and Will . He is often associated with humanistic psychology and existentialist philosophy, and alongside Viktor Frankl, was a major proponent of existential psychotherapy. The philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich was a close friend who had a significant influence on his work.
Go to Profile#328
Michael Dummett
#328
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett was an English academic described as "among the most significant British philosophers of the last century and a leading campaigner for racial tolerance and equality." He was, until 1992, Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. He wrote on the history of analytic philosophy, notably as an interpreter of Frege, and made original contributions particularly in the philosophies of mathematics, logic, language and metaphysics. He was known for his work on truth and meaning and their implications to debates between realism and anti-realism, a term he helped to popularize.
Go to Profile#329
J. Presper Eckert
#329
Overall Influence
1919 - 1995 (76 years)
John Adam Presper Eckert Jr. was an American electrical engineer and computer pioneer. With John Mauchly, he designed the first general-purpose electronic digital computer , presented the first course in computing topics , founded the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, and designed the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC, which incorporated Eckert's invention of the mercury delay-line memory.
Go to Profile#330
Pope Francis
#330
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Pope Francis is the head of the Catholic Church, the bishop of Rome and sovereign of the Vatican City State. Francis is the first pope to be a member of the Society of Jesus , the first from the Americas, the first from the Southern Hemisphere, and the first pope born or raised outside Europe since the 8th century papacy of Syrian pope Gregory III.
Go to Profile#331
Rem Koolhaas
#331
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
#332
Christine Lagarde
#332
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Christine Madeleine Odette Lagarde is a French politician and lawyer who has served as President of the European Central Bank since 2019. She previously served as the 11th Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund from 2011 to 2019. Lagarde had also served in the Government of France, most prominently as Minister of the Economy, Finance and Industry from 2007 until 2011. She is the first woman to hold each of those posts.
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Pope John Paul II
#333
Overall Influence
1920 - 2005 (85 years)
Pope John Paul II was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 1978 until his death in 2005. He was later canonised as Pope Saint John Paul II. In his youth, Wojtyła dabbled in stage acting. He graduated with excellent grades from an all-boys high school in Wadowice, Poland, in 1938, soon after which World War II broke out. During the war, to avoid being kidnapped and sent off to a German slave labor camp, he signed up for work in harsh conditions in a quarry. Wojtyła eventually took up acting and developed a love for the profession and participated at a local theater.
Go to Profile#334
Alain Connes
#334
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#335
David Mumford
#335
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
David Bryant Mumford is an American mathematician known for his work in algebraic geometry and then for research into vision and pattern theory. He won the Fields Medal and was a MacArthur Fellow. In 2010 he was awarded the National Medal of Science. He is currently a University Professor Emeritus in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University.
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Tony Blair
#336
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. He served as Leader of the Opposition from 1994 to 1997 and held various shadow cabinet posts from 1987 to 1994. Blair was Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007. He is the second-longest-serving prime minister in post-war British history and the longest-serving Labour politician to have held the office.
Go to Profile#337
François Englert
#337
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
#338
John Tukey
#338
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
John Wilder Tukey was an American mathematician and statistician, best known for the development of the fast Fourier Transform algorithm and box plot. The Tukey range test, the Tukey lambda distribution, the Tukey test of additivity, and the Teichmüller–Tukey lemma all bear his name. He is also credited with coining the term 'bit' and the first published use of the word 'software'.
Go to Profile#339
Dan Rather
#339
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Daniel Irvin Rather Jr. is an American journalist, commentator, and former national evening news anchor. He began his career in Texas, becoming a national name after his reporting saved thousands of lives during Hurricane Carla in September 1961. Rather spontaneously created the first radar weather report by overlaying a transparent map over a radar image of Hurricane Carla. In his first national broadcast, he helped initiate the successful evacuation of 350,000 people. He reported on some of the most significant events of the modern age, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, 9/1...
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Andrei Shleifer
#340
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Andrei Shleifer is a Russian-American economist and Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1991. Shleifer was awarded the biennial John Bates Clark Medal in 1999 for his seminal works in three fields: corporate finance , the economics of financial markets , and the economics of transition.
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Jon Pareles
#341
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Jon Pareles is an American journalist who is the chief popular music critic in the arts section of The New York Times. Early life and education Pareles was born in Connecticut. He played jazz flute and piano, and graduated from Yale University with a degree in music. He began working as a music critic in 1977.
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Edward S. Herman
#342
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Edward Samuel Herman was an American economist, media scholar and social critic. Herman is known for his media criticism, in particular the propaganda model hypothesis he developed with Noam Chomsky, a frequent co-writer. He held an appointment as Professor Emeritus of finance at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. He also taught at Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#343
Deke Slayton
#343
Overall Influence
1924 - 1993 (69 years)
Donald Kent "Deke" Slayton was a United States Air Force pilot, aeronautical engineer, and test pilot who was selected as one of the original NASA Mercury Seven astronauts. He went on to become NASA's first Chief of the Astronaut Office and Director of Flight Crew Operations, responsible for NASA crew assignments.
Go to Profile#344
Rodney Brooks
#344
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Rodney Allen Brooks is an Australian roboticist, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, author, and robotics entrepreneur, most known for popularizing the actionist approach to robotics. He was a Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is a founder and former Chief Technical Officer of iRobot and co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of Rethink Robotics and currently is the co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Robust.AI .
Go to Profile#345
Fidel Castro
#345
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was a Cuban revolutionary and politician who was the leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008, serving as the prime minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976 and president from 1976 to 2008. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist and Cuban nationalist, he also served as the first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from 1965 until 2011. Under his administration, Cuba became a one-party communist state; industry and business were nationalized, and socialist reforms were implemented throughout society.
Go to Profile#346
Yoichiro Nambu
#346
Overall Influence
1921 - 2015 (94 years)
Yoichiro Nambu was a Japanese-American physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. Known for his contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 for the discovery in 1960 of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, related at first to the strong interaction's chiral symmetry and later to the electroweak interaction and Higgs mechanism.
Go to Profile#347
Tom Brokaw
#347
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Thomas John Brokaw is an American retired network television journalist and author. He first served as the co-anchor of The Today Show from 1976 to 1981 with Jane Pauley, then as the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News for 22 years . In the previous decade he served as a weekend anchor for the program from 1973 to 1976. He is the only person to have hosted all three major NBC News programs: The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, and, briefly, Meet the Press. He formerly held a special correspondent post for NBC News.
Go to Profile#348
Ayman al-Zawahiri
#348
Overall Influence
1951 - 2022 (71 years)
Ayman Muhammad Rabi az-Zawahiri , also known as Ayman al-Zawahiri, was an Egyptian-born militant and physician who served as the second general emir of al-Qaeda from June 2011 until his death in July 2022.
Go to Profile#349
Anthony Kennedy
#349
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Anthony McLeod Kennedy is an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1988 until his retirement in 2018. He was nominated to the court in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan, and sworn in on February 18, 1988. After the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor in 2006, he was considered the swing vote on many of the Roberts Court's 5–4 decisions.
Go to Profile#350
Shirin Ebadi
#350
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian Nobel laureate, lawyer, writer, teacher and a former judge and founder of the Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran. In 2003, Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her pioneering efforts for democracy and women's, children's, and refugee rights. She was the first Muslim woman and the first Iranian to receive the award.
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