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
Hiroo Kanamori
#12353
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Hiroo Kanamori is a Japanese seismologist who has made fundamental contributions to understanding the physics of earthquakes and the tectonic processes that cause them. Career Kanamori and American seismologist Thomas C. Hanks developed the moment magnitude scale which replaced the Richter magnitude scale as a measurement of the relative strength of earthquakes.
Go to Profile#302
Steven Gubser
#12461
Overall Influence
1972 - 2019 (47 years)
Steven Scott Gubser was a professor of physics at Princeton University. His research focused on theoretical particle physics, especially string theory, and the AdS/CFT correspondence. He was a widely cited scholar in these and other related areas.
Go to Profile#303
Jeremy Kahn
#12515
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Jeremy Adam Kahn is an American mathematician. He works on hyperbolic geometry, Riemann surfaces and complex dynamics. Education Kahn grew up in New York City and attended Hunter College High School. He was a child prodigy who mastered quadratic equations at the age of 7, at the age of 8 designed an equation identical to the one Carl Gauss designed at the age of 9, and proved the Pythagorean Theorem at the age of 10. Kahn was part of the Johns Hopkins University Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth longitudinal cohort. At the age of 11, he scored a 780 out of a possible 800 on the math portion of the SAT-I exam.
Go to Profile#304
Pietro Perona
#12526
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Pietro Perona is an Italian-American educator and computer scientist. He is the Allan E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology and director of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center in Neuromorphic Systems Engineering. He is known for his research in computer vision and is the director of the Caltech Computational Vision Group.
Go to Profile#305
H. Dieter Zeh
#12550
Overall Influence
1932 - 2018 (86 years)
Heinz-Dieter Zeh , usually referred to as H. Dieter Zeh, was a professor of the University of Heidelberg and theoretical physicist. Education and career Zeh was born in Braunschweig and studied physics at the Technical University of Braunschweig and nuclear physics at the University of Heidelberg under J. Hans D. Jensen. At Heidelberg, he also investigated alpha particle formation in nuclei with Hans-Jörg Mang and Zeh investigated the topic for his PhD thesis under Mang. Between 1964 and 1965, Zeh was a research assistant at California Institute of Technology and in 1965 and between 1967 and 1968 at the University of California, San Diego.
Go to Profile#306
Leonard Herzenberg
#12585
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Leonard Arthur "Len" Herzenberg was an immunologist, geneticist and professor at Stanford University. His contributions to the development of cell biology made it possible to sort viable cells by their specific properties.
Go to Profile#307
K. VijayRaghavan
#12595
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Dr. Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan is an emeritus professor and former director of the National Centre for Biological Sciences. On 26 March 2018, the Government of India appointed him as the principal scientific adviser to succeed Dr. R Chidamabaram. His term as Principal Scientific Adviser ended on April 2, 2022. In 2012, he was elected a fellow of The Royal Society and in April 2014 he was elected as a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. He was conferred the Padma Shri on 26 January 2013 and is also a recipient of the Infosys Prize in the life sciences category in 2009...
Go to Profile#308
Matthew Cook
#12622
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Matthew Cook is a mathematician and computer scientist who is best known for having proved Stephen Wolfram's conjecture that the Rule 110 cellular automaton is Turing-complete. Biography Cook was born in Morgantown, West Virginia and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois and the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program. In 1987, Cook qualified as a member of the six-person US team to the International Mathematical Olympiad and won a bronze medal. In 1990, Cook went to work for Wolfram Research, makers of the computer algebra system Mathematica.
Go to Profile#309
Athanassios S. Fokas
#12716
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Athanassios Spyridon Fokas is a Greek mathematician, with degrees in Aeronautical Engineering and Medicine. Since 2002, he is Professor of Nonlinear Mathematical Science in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#310
Trinh Xuan Thuan
#12750
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Trịnh Xuân Thuận is a Vietnamese-American astrophysicist. Biography Trịnh Xuân Thuận was born in Hanoi, Vietnam. He completed his B.S. at the California Institute of Technology, and his Ph.D. at Princeton University. He has taught astronomy at the University of Virginia, where he is a professor, since 1976, and is also a research associate at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris. He was a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion.
Go to Profile#311
Ronald Drever
#12765
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
Ronald William Prest Drever was a Scottish experimental physicist. He was a professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, co-founded the LIGO project, and was a co-inventor of the Pound–Drever–Hall technique for laser stabilisation, as well as the Hughes–Drever experiment. This work was instrumental in the first detection of gravitational waves in September 2015.
Go to Profile#312
Steve Squyres
#12832
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Steven Weldon Squyres is an American geologist and planetary scientist. He was the James A. Weeks Professor of Physical Sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His research area is in planetary sciences, with a focus on large solid bodies in the Solar System such as the terrestrial planets and the moons of the Jovian planets. Squyres was the principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission .
Go to Profile#313
Gerry Neugebauer
#12863
Overall Influence
1932 - 2014 (82 years)
Gerhart "Gerry" Neugebauer was an American astronomer known for his pioneering work in infrared astronomy. Neugebauer was born in Göttingen, Germany and was the son of Otto Neugebauer, an Austrian-American mathematician and historian of science, and Grete Bruck. After moving to the United States at age seven, he received his B.A. in physics from Cornell University in 1954 and his Ph.D. in physics from California Institute of Technology in 1960, with a thesis on the photoproduction of negative and positive pions from deuterium.
Go to Profile#314
Federico Capasso
#12991
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Federico Capasso is an applied physicist and is one of the inventors of the quantum cascade laser during his work at Bell Laboratories. He is currently on the faculty of Harvard University. Biography Federico Capasso received the Doctor of Physics degree, summa cum laude, from the University of Rome, Italy, in 1973 and after doing research in fiber optics at Fondazione Ugo Bordoni in Rome, joined Bell Labs in 1976.
Go to Profile#315
Tom Maniatis
#13028
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Tom Maniatis , is an American professor of molecular and cellular biology. He is a professor at Columbia University, and serves as the Scientific Director and CEO of the New York Genome Center. Education Maniatis received B.A. and M.S. degrees from the University of Colorado in Boulder, and a PhD in Molecular Biology from Vanderbilt University. He carried out postdoctoral studies at Harvard University and at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.
Go to Profile#316
Ryan Rohm
#13100
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Ryan Milton Rohm is an American string theorist. He is one of four physicists known as the Princeton string quartet, and is responsible for the development of heterotic string theory along with David Gross, Jeffrey A. Harvey and Emil Martinec, the other members of the Princeton String Quartet.
Go to Profile#317
H. Richard Crane
#13122
Overall Influence
1907 - 2007 (100 years)
Horace Richard Crane was an American physicist, the inventor of the Race Track Synchrotron, a recipient of President Ronald Reagan's National Medal of Science "for the first measurement of the magnetic moment and spin of free electrons and positrons". He was also noted for proving the existence of neutrinos. The National Academy of Sciences called Crane "an extraordinary physicist". The University of Michigan called him "one of the most distinguished experimental physicists of the 20th century". Crane was a chairman of the department of physics and a professor of physics at the University of...
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George F. Simmons
#13124
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
George Finlay Simmons was an American mathematician who worked in topology and classical analysis. He is known as the author of widely used textbooks on university mathematics. Life He was born on 3 March 1925 in Austin, Texas.
Go to Profile#319
Thomas H. Jordan
#13193
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Thomas H. Jordan is an American seismologist, and former director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at The University of Southern California. He was formerly the head of the Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
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George C. Schatz
#13202
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
George Chappell Schatz , the Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, is a theoretical chemist best known for his seminal contributions to the fields of reaction dynamics and nanotechnology.
Go to Profile#321
Howard Berg
#13212
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Howard Curtis Berg was the Herchel Smith Professor of Physics and professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University, where he taught biophysics and studied the motility of the bacterium Escherichia coli .
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Allen Knutson
#13215
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Allen Ivar Knutson is an American mathematician who is a professor of mathematics at Cornell University. Education Knutson completed his undergraduate studies at the California Institute of Technology and received a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996 under the joint advisorship of Victor Guillemin and Lisa Jeffrey.
Go to Profile#323
Xinwen Zhu
#13272
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (43 years)
Xinwen Zhu is a Chinese mathematician and professor at Stanford University. His work deals primarily with geometric representation theory and in particular the Langlands program, tying number theory to algebraic geometry and quantum physics.
Go to Profile#324
Anthony R. Hunter
#13320
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Anthony Rex Hunter is a British-American biologist who is a professor of biology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California San Diego. His research publications list his name as Tony Hunter.
Go to Profile#325
Alexander S. Kechris
#13323
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Alexander Sotirios Kechris is a set theorist and logician at the California Institute of Technology. Contributions Kechris has made contributions to the theory of Borel equivalence relations and the theory of automorphism groups of uncountable structuress. His research interests cover foundations of mathematics, mathematical logic and set theory and their interactions with analysis and dynamical systems.
Go to Profile#326
Bruce Reznick
#13335
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Bruce Reznick is an American mathematician long on the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is a prolific researcher noted for his contributions to number theory and the combinatorial-algebraic-analytic investigations of polynomials. In July 2019, to mark his 66th birthday, a day long symposium "Bruce Reznick 66 fest: A mensch of Combinatorial-Algebraic Mathematics" was held at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
Go to Profile#327
Carlton M. Caves
#13348
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Carlton Morris Caves is an American theoretical physicist. He is currently professor emeritus and research professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Mexico. Caves works in the areas of physics of information; information, entropy, and complexity; quantum information theory; quantum chaos, quantum optics; the theory of non-classical light; the theory of quantum noise; and the quantum theory of measurement. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#328
Bob Behnken
#13371
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Robert Louis Behnken is an American engineer, a former NASA astronaut, and former Chief of the Astronaut Office. Behnken holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and the rank of colonel in the U.S. Air Force, where he served before joining NASA in 2000. He flew aboard Space Shuttle missions STS-123 and STS-130 as a mission specialist, accumulating over 708 hours in space, including 55 hours of spacewalk time. He is married to fellow astronaut Megan McArthur.
Go to Profile#329
David Hestenes
#13382
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
David Orlin Hestenes is a theoretical physicist and science educator. He is best known as chief architect of geometric algebra as a unified language for mathematics and physics, and as founder of Modelling Instruction, a research-based program to reform K–12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics education.
Go to Profile#330
R. Stanley Williams
#13389
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Richard Stanley Williams is a research scientist in the field of nanotechnology and a Senior Fellow and the founding director of the Quantum Science Research Laboratory at Hewlett-Packard. He has over 57 patents, with 40 more patents pending. At HP, he led a group that developed a working solid state version of Leon Chua's memristor.
Go to Profile#331
Andrea M. Ghez
#13406
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Andrea Mia Ghez is an American astrophysicist, Nobel laureate, and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Lauren B. Leichtman & Arthur E. Levine chair in Astrophysics, at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
Go to Profile#332
Randal Bryant
#13422
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Randal E. Bryant is an American computer scientist and academic noted for his research on formally verifying digital hardware and software. Bryant has been a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University since 1984. He served as the Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon from 2004 to 2014. Dr. Bryant retired and became a Founders University Professor Emeritus on June 30, 2020.
Go to Profile#333
Julian Cole
#13456
Overall Influence
1925 - 1999 (74 years)
Julian David Cole was an American mathematician. He is known for his groundbreaking work in mathematical applications to aerodynamics and transonic flow, and in non-linear equations more generally. He graduated 36 PhD students and won many of the most significant scientific honors over his career, including simultaneous election to the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering in 1976.
Go to Profile#334
Hossam Haick
#13470
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
Hossam Haick is an Arab-Israeli scientist and engineer, and the current dean of undergraduate studies at the Israel Institute of Technology. He is a pioneer known for inventing the Nano Artificial Nose for detection of disease from exhaled breath, by which he was highlighted as MIT's Innovators under 35; and which is widely used for sniffing out diseases' biomarkers in labs and industries. He has many contributions in multidisciplinary fields such as Nanotechnology, Nanosensors, , Volatile Biomarkers, and Molecular Electronics.
Go to Profile#335
Jay Pasachoff
#13500
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Jay Myron Pasachoff was an American astronomer. Pasachoff was Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy at Williams College and the author of textbooks and tradebooks in astronomy, physics, mathematics, and other sciences.
Go to Profile#336
David Sanders
#13568
Overall Influence
David Sanders is an associate professor of biological sciences at Purdue University. He grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, and then attended the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from Yale College in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. He conducted his Ph.D. research in Biochemistry with Daniel E. Koshland, Jr., who was then editor of the journal Science, at the University of California at Berkeley. Sanders demonstrated that the response regulators in the two-component regulatory systems were phosphorylated on an aspartate residue and that they were protein phosphatases with a covalent intermediate.
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Barry M. McCoy
#13571
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Barry Malcolm McCoy is an American physicist, known for his contributions to classical statistical mechanics, integrable models and conformal field theories. He earned a B.Sc. from California Institute of Technology , and a Ph.D. from Harvard University , the thesis entitled Spin Correlations of the Two Dimensional Ising Model advised by Tai Tsun Wu. The two of them also wrote the book The Two Dimensional Ising Model .
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Richard H. Price
#13587
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Richard H. Price is an American physicist specializing in general relativity. Price graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1960, and went on to earn a dual degree in physics and engineering from Cornell University in 1965. He earned his PhD in 1971 from Caltech under the supervision of Kip Thorne. He spent his career from 1971 to 2004 at the University of Utah, where he holds the title of emeritus professor. In 2004, he joined the Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy at the University of Texas at Brownsville. As of 2015, he became senior lecturer in physics at MIT. He is also on the adju...
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Jack Wisdom
#13641
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Jack Wisdom is a Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. from Rice University in 1976 and his Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in 1981. His research interests are the dynamics of the Solar System.
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David Lee
#13670
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
David Morris Lee is an American physicist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics with Robert C. Richardson and Douglas Osheroff "for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3." Lee is professor emeritus of physics at Cornell University and distinguished professor of physics at Texas A&M University.
Go to Profile#341
Tan Jiazhen
#13790
Overall Influence
1909 - 2008 (99 years)
Tan Jiazhen , also known as C. C. Tan, was a Chinese geneticist. He was an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of United States National Academy of Sciences. Tan was a main founder of modern Chinese genetics.
Go to Profile#342
Arvind
#13875
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Arvind is the Johnson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery . He was also elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2008 for contributions to dataflow and multithread computing and the development of tools for the high-level synthesis of digital electronics hardware.
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Spencer R. Weart
#13879
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Spencer R. Weart is the former director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics from 1971 until his retirement in 2009. Life Originally trained as a physicist, he is now a historian of science. He earned his B.A. in Physics at Cornell University in 1963 and a Ph.D. in Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1968. He then did postdoctoral studies at the Hale Observatories and California Institute of Technology, publishing papers on solar physics; from 1971 to 1974 he studied history of science in the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#344
Berni Alder
#13921
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Berni Julian Alder was a German-born American physicist specialized in statistical mechanics, and a pioneer of computational modelling of matter. Biography Alder was born in Duisburg, Prussia, in September 1925, to Jewish parents, a chemist and a homemaker. After the Nazis came to power, the family moved to Zurich, Switzerland. Fearing an invasion by Nazi Germany after the outbreak of World War II, the family applied for a visa to the United States, which was granted in 1941. They left by sealed train from neutral Switzerland to Spain, then to Portugal, where they took a ship to the US. Foll...
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David Ho
#13954
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
David Da-i Ho is a Taiwanese American AIDS researcher, physician, and virologist who has made a number of scientific contributions to the understanding and treatment of HIV infection. He championed for combination anti-retroviral therapy instead of single therapy, which turned HIV from absolute terminal disease into a chronic disease.
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Geoffrey C. Fox
#13974
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Geoffrey Charles Fox is a British-born American theoretical physicist and computer scientist, and professor of informatics and computing, and physics at Indiana University. Fox was educated at the Leys School and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1964, he was the senior wrangler at Cambridge, the best performer in the mathematics tripos. In the same year, he also played in the annual chess match against Oxford University.
Go to Profile#347
Theodore Zoli
#13995
Overall Influence
Theodore P. Zoli, III is an American structural engineer, and a leading designer of cable-stayed bridges. He is currently the National Bridge Chief Engineer at HNTB Corporation and is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow.
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Jim Kajiya
#14143
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
James Kajiya is a pioneer in the field of computer graphics. He is perhaps best known for the development of the rendering equation. Kajiya received his PhD from the University of Utah in 1979, was a professor at Caltech from 1979 through 1994, and is currently a researcher at Microsoft Research.
Go to Profile#349
Saul Teukolsky
#14190
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Saul Arno Teukolsky is a theoretical astrophysicist and a professor of Physics and Astronomy at Caltech and Cornell University. His major research interests include general relativity, relativistic astrophysics, and computational astrophysics.
Go to Profile#350
Barry R. Weingast
#14216
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Barry Robert Weingast is an American political scientist and economist, who is currently the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Weingast's research concentrates on the relationship between politics and economics, particularly economic reform, regulation, and the political foundation of markets.
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