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
#30051
Peter Seeberger
#30063
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Peter H. Seeberger is a German chemist. Biography Seeberger studied chemistry at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He completed his Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1995 as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder. After being a post-doctoral fellow at Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York, he became assistant professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998, where he was promoted to Firmenich Associate Professor of Chemistry in 2002.
Go to Profile#30052
Luiz Pinguelli Rosa
#30064
Overall Influence
1942 - 2022 (80 years)
Luiz Pinguelli Rosa was a Brazilian scientist. Life and career A nuclear physicist, researcher and professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, he was also a scientific leader. He was born in Brazil and lived in the city of Rio de Janeiro.
Go to Profile#30053
Barbora Strýcová
#30065
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Barbora Strýcová , formerly known as Barbora Záhlavová-Strýcová, is a Czech former professional tennis player who was ranked world No. 1 in doubles. She won two Grand Slam titles in doubles at the 2019 Wimbledon Championships and 2023 Wimbledon Championships, both times partnered with Hsieh Su-wei. The pair also finished runners-up at the 2020 Australian Open and 2019 WTA Finals. Strýcová won 32 doubles titles on the WTA Tour, including eight at WTA 1000 level, and became world No. 1 for the first time in July 2019, holding the top ranking for a total of 27 weeks.
Go to Profile#30054
John Zerzan
#30066
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
John Edward Zerzan is an American anarchist and primitivist author. His works criticize agricultural civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocates drawing upon the ways of life of hunter-gatherers as an inspiration for what a free society should look like. Subjects of his criticism include domestication and symbolic thought .
Go to Profile#30055
Mikołaj Bojańczyk
#30067
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Mikołaj Bojańczyk is a Polish theoretical computer scientist and logician known for settling open problems on tree walking automata jointly with Thomas Colcombet, and for contributions to logic in automata theory. He is a professor at Warsaw University.
Go to Profile#30056
Dina bint Abdul-Hamid
#30068
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Dina bint Abdul-Hamid was a Hashemite princess and the Queen of Jordan from 1955 until 1957 as the first wife of King Hussein. She was the mother to Hussein's oldest child, Princess Alia bint Hussein. She and the king were married from 1955 to 1957, and in 1970 she married a high-ranking official in the PLO. She was a graduate of the University of Cambridge and a lecturer in English literature at Cairo University.
Go to Profile#30057
Robbins Burling
#30069
Overall Influence
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
Robbins Burling was an American professor of anthropology and sociolinguistics. Early life and career Burling was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Dr. F. Temple and Katherine White Burling, and was the eldest of three siblings. He received his undergraduate degree from Yale University in 1950 and his Ph.D in Anthropology from Harvard University in 1958. His teaching career began as a teaching fellow in Anthropology at Harvard University in the fall of 1953, the spring of 1954 and the spring of 1957.
Go to Profile#30058
Marc Lackenby
#30070
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Marc Lackenby is a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford whose research concerns knot theory, low-dimensional topology, and group theory. Lackenby studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge beginning in 1990, and earned his Ph.D. in 1997, with a dissertation on Dehn Surgery and Unknotting Operations supervised by W. B. R. Lickorish. After positions as Miller Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and as Research Fellow at Cambridge, he joined Oxford as a Lecturer and Fellow of St Catherine's in 1999. He was promoted to Professor at Oxford in 2006.
Go to Profile#30059
Henry Wallman
#30071
Overall Influence
1915 - 1992 (77 years)
Henry "Hank" Wallman was an American mathematician, known for his work in lattice theory, dimension theory, topology, and electronic circuit design. A native of Brooklyn and a 1933 graduate of Brooklyn College, Wallman received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1937, under the supervision of Solomon Lefschetz and became a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was associated with the Radiation Laboratory. During World War II he did classified work at MIT, possibly involving radar. In 1948, he left MIT to become a professor of electrotechnics ...
Go to Profile#30060
Reinhold Bertlmann
#30072
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Reinhold Anton Bertlmann is an Austrian-born physicist and professor of physics at the University of Vienna. He is known for his research in particle physics, where he wrote the standard textbook Anomalies in Quantum Field Theory, and in the field of Bell inequalities, in particular from the quantum comparison Bertlmann’s Socks of John Bell.
Go to Profile#30061
Michael I. Krauss
#30073
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Michael Ian Krauss is a professor emeritus of law at Antonin Scalia Law School , specializing in tort law, products liability, jurisprudence and legal ethics. He writes a Torts and Legal Ethics column for Forbes.
Go to Profile#30062
Nancy Dye
#30074
Overall Influence
1947 - 2015 (68 years)
Nancy Schrom Dye was an American historian and philosopher and college academic who served as the first female president of Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. As a professional historian, she was the author of numerous articles and several books, and she served on the editorial board of The Journal of American History.
Go to Profile#30063
Susan Ariel Aaronson
#30075
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Susan Ariel Aaronson is an American author, public speaker and an academic professor whose works are centred on the relationship between economic change and human rights and more recently focuses on data. She is a research professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, where she also founded the Digital Trade and Data Governance Hub of which she is director.
Go to Profile#30064
John Carbon
#30076
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
John A. Carbon is a professor emeritus of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Biography He earned his B.S. degree in chemistry in 1952 at the University of Illinois, and his Ph.D. degree in biochemistry in 1955 from Northwestern University. He did basic research developing new anticancer drugs at Abbott Laboratories for 12 years . He joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1968, and became professor emeritus in 1999. His research contributions include elucidation of the mechanism of genetic missense suppression in bacte...
Go to Profile#30065
Paul Scheffer
#30077
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Paul Scheffer is a Dutch author, he was professor at the Universiteit van Amsterdam between 2003 and 2011, currently he is professor of European studies at Tilburg University. Paul Scheffer is also a prominent member of the Dutch Labour Party.
Go to Profile#30066
Jeremy Treglown
#30078
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
The biographer, cultural historian and critic Jeremy Treglown is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick. He was editor of The Times Literary Supplement through the 1980s and chair of the Arvon Foundation, 2017–22.
Go to Profile#30067
Ulrike Draesner
#30079
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Ulrike Draesner is a German author. She was awarded the 2016 Nicolas Born Prize. Life and work The daughter of an architect, Draesner grew up in Munich, Germany. She received a Bavarian State scholarship for the best performing student at Gymnasium from the . She read Law, English and German literature as well as Philosophy in Munich, Salamanca, and Oxford. She worked as a lecturer Institute for German Philology from 1989 to 1993. In 1992, she received her doctorate for a dissertation on the Middle High German romance Parzival.
Go to Profile#30068
Kundō Koyama
#30080
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Kundō Koyama is a Japanese writer. He is best known for scripting the television series Iron Chef and the 2009 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film recipient Departures. Koyama has also worked under the pen name Udon Kumayakko, an anagram of his real name read backwards in Japanese.
Go to Profile#30069
Ivo Urbančič
#30081
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Ivo Urbančič was a Slovenian philosopher. He is considered by many to be one of the fathers of the phenomenological school in Slovenia. Biography Born Ivan Urbančič in Robič near Kobarid, in what was then the Italian administrative region of Julian March to a peasant Slovene family, his family left the region when he was a child to escape Fascist persecution and moved to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
Go to Profile#30070
John Yau
#30082
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
John Yau is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 1978. He has published over 50 books of poetry, artists' books, fiction, and art criticism.
Go to Profile#30071
David J. Mooney
#30083
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
David James Mooney is Robert P. Pinkas Family Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is also a founding core faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#30072
Darryl Sittler
#30084
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Darryl Glen Sittler is a Canadian former professional ice hockey player who played in the National Hockey League from 1970 until 1985 for the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Philadelphia Flyers and the Detroit Red Wings. He was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1989, the Ontario Sports Hall of Fame in 2003 and the Canadian Walk of Fame in 2016. In 2017 Sittler was named one of the '100 Greatest NHL Players' in history.
Go to Profile#30073
Esther Tyldesley
#30085
Overall Influence
Esther Tyldesley is an academic based in the School of Literature, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, where she is a professor in Asian Studies. She has also translated Chinese literature, as well language textbooks and translated academic articles for various journalists. In addition to this, she is also a member of the Society of Authors.
Go to Profile#30074
Robin Cook
#30086
Overall Influence
1946 - 2005 (59 years)
Robert Finlayson "Robin" Cook was a British Labour politician who served as a Member of Parliament from 1974 until his death in 2005 and served in the Cabinet as Foreign Secretary from 1997 until 2001 when he was replaced by Jack Straw. He then served as Leader of the House of Commons from 2001 until 2003.
Go to Profile#30075
Paul Dibb
#30087
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Paul Dibb AM is an English-born Australian strategist, academic and former defence intelligence official. He is currently emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre that is part of the Australian National University.
Go to Profile#30076
Peter Caws
#30088
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Peter J. Caws was a British American philosopher and administrator, and University Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Human Sciences at the George Washington University. Biography Peter Caws was born in Southall, Middlesex, England in 1931. He received his B.Sc. in Physics at the University of London in 1952, and his PGCE in 1953. In 1953 he emigrated to the US and received his Ph.D. in Philosophy at Yale University in 1956.
Go to Profile#30077
E. Burton Swanson
#30089
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
E. Burton Swanson is an American information scientist, and Professor Emeritus of Information Systems at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Biography Swanson received his BS in Industrial and Systems Engineering in 1962 from San Jose State University, his MBA in 1964 from the University of Michigan and his PhD in Business Administration in 1971 from University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#30078
Holger H. Hoos
#30090
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Holger H. Hoos is a German-Canadian computer scientist and a Alexander von Humboldt-professor of artificial intelligence at RWTH Aachen University. He also holds a part-time appointment as a professor of machine learning at Leiden University, and he is an adjunct professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of British Columbia, where he held a full-time professorial appointment from 2000 until 2016. His research interests are focused on artificial intelligence, at the intersection of machine learning, automated reasoning and optimization, with applications in empirical algorithmics, bioinformatics and operations research.
Go to Profile#30079
Reuven Rivlin
#30091
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Reuven "Ruvi" Rivlin is an Israeli politician and lawyer who served as the tenth president of Israel between 2014 and 2021. He is a member of the Likud party. Rivlin was Minister of Communications from 2001 to 2003, and subsequently served as Speaker of the Knesset from 2003 to 2006 and 2009 to 2013. On 10 June 2014, he was elected President of Israel. His term ended on 7 July 2021.
Go to Profile#30080
Rudolf K. Thauer
#30092
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Rudolf K. Thauer is a biologist and a retired professor of microbiology and heads the Emeritus group at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg. Thauer taught in the faculty of Biology at the University of Marburg for about 15 years and is known primarily for his work on the biochemistry of methanogens.
Go to Profile#30081
Kofi Boahene
#30093
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Kofi Owusu Boahene is a Ghanaian-born American physician, writer, researcher, and academic. He is a professor of facial plastic and reconstructive surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a facial plastic surgeon in Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. As a facial plastic surgeon, Boahene specializes solely in plastic surgery of the face, head and neck.
Go to Profile#30082
Daniel A. Wren
#30094
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Daniel A. Wren is an American business theorist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Oklahoma, especially known for his 1972 book coauthored with Arthur G. Bedeian, entitled "The evolution of management thought."
Go to Profile#30083
Shiu-Ying Hu
#30095
Overall Influence
1910 - 2012 (102 years)
Shiu-Ying Hu, BBS , or Hu Xiuying, was a Chinese botanist. She was an expert in the plant genera of Ilex , Hemerocallis , and Panax . She studied the families Orchidaceae, Compositae, and Malvaceae, and Chinese medicinal herbs and food plants. She was given the nickname "Holly Hu" by her colleagues for her extensive work with holly plants.
Go to Profile#30084
Samuel Paul Welles
#30096
Overall Influence
1907 - 1997 (90 years)
Samuel Paul Welles was an American palaeontologist. Welles was a research associate at the Museum of Palaeontology, University of California, Berkeley. He took part in excavations at the Placerias Quarry in 1930 and the Shonisaurus discoveries of 1954 and later, in what is now the Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. He accumulated an extensive collection of fossils of marine reptiles, amphibians, and fish, as well as describing the dinosaur Dilophosaurus in 1954 and the elasmosaur Fresnosaurus in 1943.
Go to Profile#30085
Philip L. Quinn
#30097
Overall Influence
1940 - 2004 (64 years)
Philip L. Quinn was a philosopher and theologian. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1962 and went on to earn a master's degree in physics from the University of Delaware in 1966. He then attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he received his master's and doctoral degrees in philosophy. Quinn joined the faculty of Brown University. At Brown, he was very popular and taught courses in the philosophy of physics, ethics, and related fields. In 1985, he assumed a position as the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Quinn served in 1994–1995 a...
Go to Profile#30086
Kenneth Kendler
#30098
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Kenneth S. Kendler is an American psychiatrist best known for his pioneering research in psychiatric genetics, particularly the genetic causes of schizophrenia. Kendler is one of the highest cited psychiatry researchers. Between 1990 and 1998 he was the 2nd highest cited psychiatrist, and for the 1997–2007 decade he was ranked 4th by Thomson Reuters' Science Watch. He has authored over 1,200 papers and in 2016 his h-index was 126. Kendler's group was also noted for the replication of a study of Avshalom Caspi on the interaction of stressful life events and a serotonin transporter polymorphism...
Go to Profile#30087
Marc Fleurbaey
#30099
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Marc Fleurbaey is a French researcher specialized in normative economics and social choice theory. He has been researcher and professor in the United Kingdom, France and the United States since 1994. He is currently professor at the Paris School of Economics.
Go to Profile#30088
Mark S. Fox
#30100
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Mark Stephen Fox is a Canadian computer scientist, Professor of Industrial Engineering and Distinguished Professor of Urban Systems Engineering at the University of Toronto, known for the development of Constraint Directed Scheduling in the 1980s and the TOVE Project to develop an ontological framework for enterprise modeling and enterprise integration in the 1990s.
Go to Profile#30089
Barry Unsworth
#30101
Overall Influence
1930 - 2012 (82 years)
Barry Unsworth FRSL was an English writer known for his historical fiction. He published 17 novels, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, winning once for the 1992 novel Sacred Hunger.
Go to Profile#30090
Molly Gloss
#30102
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Molly Gloss is an American writer of historical fiction and science fiction. Life Gloss grew up in rural Oregon and began writing seriously when she became a mother. She now lives in Portland, Oregon, and was close friends with fellow science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin. She has taught writing and literature of the American West at Portland State University, and currently is on the faculty of the Pacific University MFA program.
Go to Profile#30091
Jonathan Winters
#30103
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Jonathan Harshman Winters III was an American comedian, actor, author, television host, and artist. He started performing as a stand up comedian before transitioning his career to acting in film and television. Winters received numerous accolades including two Grammy Awards, and Primetime Emmy Award as well as a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960, the American Academy of Achievement in 1973, and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 1999.
Go to Profile#30092
Yannis Bakos
#30104
Overall Influence
Yannis Bakos is a professor at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University. His primary area of expertise is the economic and business implications of information technology, the Internet, and online media. He is the co-founder of the Workshop on Information Systems and Economics , and the co-inventor of Flexplay DVDs.
Go to Profile#30093
Geoff Meeks
#30105
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Geoffrey Meeks is a British accounting scholar and Professor of Financial Accounting at the University of Cambridge, known for his work "Accounting standards and the economics of standards." Biography Meeks obtained his BA in Economics from the University of Cambridge in 1971 and a Ph.D. in Accounting and Economics from the University of Edinburgh in 1975
Go to Profile#30094
Forman A. Williams
#30106
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Forman Arthur Williams is an American academic in the field of combustion and aerospace engineering who is Emeritus Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California San Diego.
Go to Profile#30095
Franco Pacini
#30107
Overall Influence
1939 - 2012 (73 years)
Franco Pacini was an Italian astrophysicist and professor at the University of Florence. He carried out research, mostly in High Energy Astrophysics, in Italy, France, United States and at the European Southern Observatory.
Go to Profile#30096
Paul Morley
#30108
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Paul Robert Morley is a British music journalist. He wrote for the New Musical Express from 1977 to 1983, and has since written for a wide range of publications and written his own books. He was a co-founder of the record label ZTT Records and was a member of the synthpop group Art of Noise. He has also been a band manager, promoter, and television presenter.
Go to Profile#30097
Jaroslav Kurzweil
#30109
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Jaroslav Kurzweil was a Czech mathematician. Biography Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, he was a specialist in ordinary differential equations and defined the Henstock–Kurzweil integral in terms of Riemann sums, first published in 1957 in the Czechoslovak Mathematical Journal. Kurzweil has been awarded the highest possible scientific prize of Czechia, the "Czech Brain" of the year 2006, as an acknowledgement of his life achievements.
Go to Profile#30098
Richard Peck
#30110
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Richard Wayne Peck was an American novelist known for his prolific contributions to modern young adult literature. He was awarded the Newbery Medal in 2001 for his novel A Year Down Yonder . For his cumulative contribution to young-adult literature, he received the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association in 1990.
Go to Profile#30099
Zenon Ivanovich Borevich
#30111
Overall Influence
1922 - 1995 (73 years)
Zenon Ivanovich Borevich Зенон Иванович Боревич was a Russian mathematician who worked on homological algebra, algebraic number theory, integral representations, and linear groups.
Go to Profile#30100
Nick Flynn
#30112
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Nick Flynn is an American writer, playwright, and poet. His writing is characterized by lyric, distilled moments, which blur the boundaries of various genres. Many of his books are structured using a collage technique, which creates narratives with fractured, mosaic qualities. His work can be classified as récit—a French term for writing that is not the narration of an event, but an event itself. Several of his books are what he refers to as "siblings" to each other, in that they examine similar material from various perspectives.
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