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
#3051
Roger Dean
#3056
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
William Roger Dean is an English artist, designer, and publisher. He began painting posters and album covers for musicians in the late 1960s. The groups for whom he did the most art are the English rock bands Yes and Asia.
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David Gilmour
#3057
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
David Jon Gilmour is an English guitarist, singer and songwriter, who is a member of the rock band Pink Floyd. He joined as guitarist and co-lead vocalist in 1967, shortly before the departure of founding member Syd Barrett. Pink Floyd achieved international success with the concept albums The Dark Side of the Moon , Wish You Were Here , Animals , The Wall and The Final Cut . By the early 1980s, they had become one of the highest-selling and most acclaimed acts in music history; by 2012, they had sold more than 250 million records worldwide, including 75 million in the United States. Follow...
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James H. Cone
#3058
Overall Influence
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
James Hal Cone was an American theologian. He is best known for his advocacy of black theology and black liberation theology. His 1969 book Black Theology and Black Power provided a new way to comprehensively define the distinctiveness of theology in the black church. His message was that Black Power, defined as black people asserting the humanity that white supremacy denied, was the gospel in America. Jesus came to liberate the oppressed, advocating the same thing as Black Power. He argued that white American churches preached a gospel based on white supremacy, antithetical to the gospel of ...
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Viktor Yanukovych
#3059
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych is a former Ukrainian politician, who was the fourth President of Ukraine from 2010 to 2014. He also served as Prime Minister of Ukraine several times between 2002 and 2007 and was a member of the Verkhovna Rada from 2006 to 2010. A member of the pro-Russian Party of Regions, his removal from the presidency via revolution in 2014 led to the Russo-Ukrainian War. Since then, he has lived in exile in Russia.
Go to Profile#3055
Luigi Zingales
#3060
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Luigi Zingales is a finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of two widely-reviewed books. His book Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists is a study of "relationship capitalism". In A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity , Zingales "suggests that channeling populist anger can reinvigorate the power of competition and reverse the movement toward a 'crony system'."
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Richard Taruskin
#3061
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
Richard Filler Taruskin was an American musicologist and music critic who was among the leading and most prominent music historians of his generation. The breadth of his scrutiny into source material as well as musical analysis that combines sociological, cultural, and political perspectives has incited much discussion, debate and controversy. He regularly wrote music criticism for newspapers including The New York Times. He researched a wide variety of areas, but a central topic was Russian music from the 18th century to the present day. Other subjects he engaged with include the theory of p...
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William Kunstler
#3062
Overall Influence
1919 - 1995 (76 years)
William Moses Kunstler was an American lawyer and civil rights activist, known for defending the Chicago Seven. Kunstler was an active member of the National Lawyers Guild, a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union and the co-founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights , the "leading gathering place for radical lawyers in the country."
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Bernard Harcourt
#3063
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Bernard E. Harcourt is an American critical theorist with a specialization in the area of punishment, surveillance, legal and political theory, and political economy. He also does pro-bono legal work on human rights issues.
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Gavin Flood
#3064
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Gavin Dennis Flood is a British scholar of comparative religion specialising in Shaivism and phenomenology, but with research interests that span South Asian traditions. From October 2005 through December 2015, he served in the Faculty of Theology University of Oxford and as the Academic Director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies which is a Recognised Independent Centre of the University of Oxford. In 2008, Flood was granted the title of professor of Hindu studies and comparative religion from the University of Oxford. In 2014, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2016, ...
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Frederick Seitz
#3065
Overall Influence
1911 - 2008 (97 years)
Frederick Seitz was an American physicist, tobacco industry lobbyist, climate change denier and former head of the United States National Academy of Sciences. Seitz was the 4th president of Rockefeller University from 1968 to 1978, and the 17th president of the United States National Academy of Sciences from 1962 to 1969. Seitz was the recipient of the National Medal of Science, NASA's Distinguished Public Service Award, and other honors. He founded the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and several other material research laboratories across the United States.
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Larry Gelbart
#3066
Overall Influence
1928 - 2009 (81 years)
Larry Simon Gelbart was an American television writer, playwright, screenwriter, director and author, most famous as a creator and producer of the television series M*A*S*H, and as co-writer of the Broadway musicals A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and City of Angels.
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Guenter Lewy
#3067
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (103 years)
Guenter Lewy is a German-born American author and political scientist who is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His works span several topics, but he is most often associated with his 1978 book on the Vietnam War, America in Vietnam, and several controversial works that deal with the applicability of the term genocide to various historical events, where Lewy denies both the Romani genocide and the Armenian genocide.
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Sheldon Pollock
#3068
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Sheldon I. Pollock is an American scholar of Sanskrit, the intellectual and literary history of India, and comparative intellectual history. He is the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia University. He was the general editor of the Clay Sanskrit Library and the founding editor of the Murty Classical Library of India.
Go to Profile#3064
Robert Magliola
#3069
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Roberto Rino Magliola is an Italian-American academic specializing in European hermeneutics and deconstruction, comparative philosophy, and inter-religious dialogue. He is retired from National Taiwan University and Assumption University of Thailand.
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Ken Ribet
#3070
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Kenneth Alan Ribet is an American mathematician working in algebraic number theory and algebraic geometry. He is known for the Herbrand–Ribet theorem and Ribet's theorem, which were key ingredients in the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, as well as for his service as President of the American Mathematical Society from 2017 to 2019. He is currently a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.
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John Dominic Crossan
#3071
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
John Dominic Crossan is an Irish-American New Testament scholar, historian of early Christianity, former Catholic priest who was a prominent member of the Jesus Seminar, and emeritus professor at DePaul University. His research has focused on the historical Jesus, the theology of noncanonical Gospels, and the application of postmodern hermeneutical approaches to the Bible. His work is controversial, portraying the Second Coming as a late corruption of Jesus' message and saying that Jesus' divinity is metaphorical. In place of the eschatological message of the Gospels, Crossan emphasizes the historical context of Jesus and of his followers immediately after his death.
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Masayuki Uemura
#3072
Overall Influence
1943 - 2021 (78 years)
Masayuki Uemura was a Japanese engineer, video game producer, and professor. He was known for his work as an employee of Nintendo from 1971 to 2004, most notably for serving as a key factor in the development of the Nintendo Entertainment System.
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Frank Hahn
#3073
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Frank Horace Hahn FBA was a British economist whose work focused on general equilibrium theory, monetary theory, Keynesian economics and critique of monetarism. A famous problem of economic theory, the conditions under which money, which is intrinsically worthless, can have a positive value in a general equilibrium, is called "Hahn's problem" after him. One of Hahn's main abiding concerns was the understanding of Keynesian outcomes in general equilibrium situations.
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Marcel Marceau
#3074
Overall Influence
1923 - 2007 (84 years)
Marcel Marceau was a French mime artist and actor most famous for his stage persona, "Bip the Clown". He referred to mime as the "art of silence", performing professionally worldwide for more than 60 years.
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Johan Cruyff
#3075
Overall Influence
1947 - 2016 (69 years)
Hendrik Johannes Cruijff , internationally known as Johan Cruyff , was a Dutch professional football player and manager. Regarded as one of the greatest players in history and as the greatest Dutch footballer ever, he won the Ballon d'Or three times, in 1971, 1973, and 1974. Cruyff was a proponent of the football philosophy known as Total Football developed by Rinus Michels, which Cruyff also employed as a manager. Because of the far reaching impact of his playing style and his coaching ideas, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in modern football. For his achievements...
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Morris Dees
#3076
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Morris Seligman Dees Jr. is an American attorney known as the co-founder and former chief trial counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center , based in Montgomery, Alabama. He ran a direct marketing firm before founding SPLC. Along with his law partner, Joseph J. Levin Jr., Dees founded the SPLC in 1971. Dees and his colleagues at the SPLC have been "credited with devising innovative ways to cripple hate groups" such as the Ku Klux Klan, particularly by using "damage litigation".
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David Cannadine
#3077
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
#3073
Jacob Mincer
#3078
Overall Influence
1922 - 2006 (84 years)
Jacob Mincer , was a father of modern labor economics. He was Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Economics and Social Relations at Columbia University for most of his active life. Biography Born in Tomaszów Lubelski, Poland, in a Jewish family, Mincer survived World War II in concentration camps in Poland and Germany as a teenager. After graduating from Emory University in 1950, Mincer received his PhD from Columbia University in 1957.
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Kenneth E. Boulding
#3079
Overall Influence
1910 - 1993 (83 years)
Kenneth Ewart Boulding was an English-born American economist, educator, peace activist, and interdisciplinary philosopher. Boulding was the author of two citation classics: The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society and Conflict and Defense: A General Theory . He was co-founder of general systems theory and founder of numerous ongoing intellectual projects in economics and social science. He was married to sociologist Elise M. Boulding.
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Marco Pierre White
#3080
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Marco Pierre White is a British chef, restaurateur, and television personality. In 1995, aged 33, White became the first British chef to be awarded three Michelin stars. He has trained notable chefs such as Mario Batali, Heston Blumenthal, Shannon Bennett, Gordon Ramsay, Curtis Stone, Phil Howard and Stephen Terry. He has been dubbed "the first celebrity chef" and the enfant terrible of the UK restaurant scene.
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Onora O'Neill
#3081
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Onora Sylvia O'Neill, Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve, is a British philosopher and a crossbench member of the House of Lords. Early life and education Onora Sylvia O'Neill was born on 23 August 1941 in Aughafatten. The daughter of Sir Con O'Neill, she was educated partly in Germany and at St Paul's Girls' School, London, before studying philosophy, psychology and physiology at Somerville College, Oxford. She went on to complete a doctorate at Harvard University, with John Rawls as supervisor.
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Sandy Pearlman
#3082
Overall Influence
1943 - 2016 (73 years)
Samuel Clarke "Sandy" Pearlman was an American music producer, artist manager, music journalist and critic, professor, poet, songwriter, and record company executive. He was best known for founding, writing for, producing, or co-producing many LPs by Blue Öyster Cult, as well as producing notable albums by The Clash, The Dictators, Pavlov's Dog, and Dream Syndicate; he was also the founding Vice President of eMusic.com. He was the Schulich Distinguished Professor Chair at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montreal, and from August 2014 held a Marshall McLuhan Centenary Fell...
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
#3083
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad , born Mahmoud Sabbaghian on 28 October 1956, is an Iranian principlist and nationalist politician who served as the sixth president of Iran from 2005 to 2013. He is currently a member of the Expediency Discernment Council. He was known for his hardline views and nuclearisation of Iran. He was also the main political leader of the Alliance of Builders of Islamic Iran, a coalition of conservative political groups in the country, and served as mayor of Tehran from 2003 to 2005, reversing many of his predecessor's reforms.
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Alison Bechdel
#3084
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Alison Bechdel is an American cartoonist. Originally known for the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, she came to critical and commercial success in 2006 with her graphic memoir Fun Home, which was subsequently adapted as a musical that won a Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015. In 2012, she released her second graphic memoir Are You My Mother? She was a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Award. She is also known for originating the Bechdel test.
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Roman Jackiw
#3085
Overall Influence
1939 - 2023 (84 years)
Roman Wladimir Jackiw was a Polish-born American theoretical physicist and Dirac Medallistlist. Biography Born in Lubliniec, Poland in 1939 to a Ukrainian family, the family later moved to Austria and Germany before settling in New York City when Jackiw was about 10.
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George Boolos
#3086
Overall Influence
1940 - 1996 (56 years)
George Stephen Boolos was an American philosopher and a mathematical logician who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Life Boolos was of Greek-Jewish descent. He graduated with an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton University after completing a senior thesis, titled "A simple proof of Gödel's first incompleteness theorem", under the supervision of Raymond Smullyan. Oxford University awarded him the B.Phil. in 1963. In 1966, he obtained the first PhD in philosophy ever awarded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the direction of Hilary Putnam. After teaching th...
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Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar
#3087
Overall Influence
1930 - 2012 (82 years)
Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar was an Indian American mathematician known for his contributions to algebraic geometry. He, at the time of his death, held the Marshall Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Chair at Purdue University, and was also a professor of computer science and industrial engineering. He is known for Abhyankar's conjecture of finite group theory.
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Arnold Klein
#3088
Overall Influence
1945 - 2015 (70 years)
Arnold William Klein was an American dermatologist. In the infancy of the AIDS epidemic, Klein became one of the first doctors in Los Angeles to diagnose a case of Kaposi's sarcoma in a young patient. He also worked closely with American pop musician Michael Jackson, diagnosing him with discoid lupus erythematosus and vitiligo and supplying him with over 200 shots of demerol, aiding his addiction, starting in the mid-1980s.
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Eugene Odum
#3090
Overall Influence
1913 - 2002 (89 years)
Eugene Pleasants Odum was an American biologist at the University of Georgia known for his pioneering work on ecosystem ecology. He and his brother Howard T. Odum wrote the popular ecology textbook, Fundamentals of Ecology . The Odum School of Ecology is named in his honor.
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Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
#3091
Overall Influence
1906 - 1994 (88 years)
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen was a Romanian mathematician, statistician and economist. He is best known today for his 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, in which he argued that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity. A progenitor and a paradigm founder in economics, Georgescu-Roegen's work was decisive for the establishing of ecological economics as an independent academic sub-discipline in economics.
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Israel Finkelstein
#3092
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Israel Finkelstein is an Israeli archaeologist, professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and the head of the School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures at the University of Haifa. Finkelstein is active in the archaeology of the Levant and is an applicant of archaeological data in reconstructing biblical history. He is also known for applying the exact and life sciences in archaeological and historical reconstruction. Finkelstein is the current excavator of Megiddo, a key site for the study of the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Levant.
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Tony Lawson
#3093
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Tony Lawson is a British philosopher and economist. He is professor of economics and philosophy in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge. He is a co-editor of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, a former director of the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, and co-founder of the Cambridge Realist Workshop and the Cambridge Social Ontology Group. Lawson is noted for his contributions to heterodox economics and to philosophical issues in social theorising, most especially to social ontology.
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John Bissell Carroll
#3094
Overall Influence
1916 - 2003 (87 years)
John Bissell Carroll was an American psychologist known for his contributions to psychology, linguistics and psychometrics. Early life and education Carroll was born in Hartford, Connecticut. Early in his life, Carroll became interested in music and language. His interest in language was further sparked by becoming friends with Benjamin Lee Whorf at the age of thirteen and discussing Whorf's ideas about a close connection between culture and language. Carroll also helped to edit and publish Whorf's Language, Thought and Reality in 1956.
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Kelefa Sanneh
#3095
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Kelefa T. Sanneh is an American journalist and music critic. From 2000 to 2008, he wrote for The New York Times, covering the rock and roll, hip-hop, and pop music scenes. Since 2008 he has been a staff writer for The New Yorker. Sanneh published Major labels: A history of popular music in seven genres in 2021.
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Arthur B. McDonald
#3096
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Arthur Bruce McDonald, P.Eng is a Canadian astrophysicist. McDonald is the director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Collaboration and held the Gordon and Patricia Gray Chair in Particle Astrophysics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario from 2006 to 2013. He was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Japanese physicist Takaaki Kajita.
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Maurice Karnaugh
#3097
Overall Influence
1924 - 2022 (98 years)
Maurice Karnaugh was an American physicist, mathematician, computer scientist, and inventor known for the Karnaugh map used in Boolean algebra. Career Karnaugh studied mathematics and physics at City College of New York and transferred to Yale University to complete his B.Sc. , M.Sc. and Ph.D. in physics with a thesis on The Theory of Magnetic Resonance and Lambda-Type Doubling in Nitric-Oxide .
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Nasrin Sotoudeh
#3098
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Nasrin Sotoudeh is a human rights lawyer in Iran. She has represented imprisoned Iranian opposition activists and politicians following the disputed June 2009 Iranian presidential elections and prisoners sentenced to death for crimes committed when they were minors. Her clients have included journalist Isa Saharkhiz, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, and Heshmat Tabarzadi. She has also represented women arrested for appearing in public without a hijab, which is a punishable offense in Iran. Nasrin Sotoudeh was the subject of Nasrin, a 2020 documentary filmed in secret in Iran about Sot...
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Walter Fiers
#3099
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Walter Fiers was a Belgian molecular biologist. He obtained a degree of Engineer for Chemistry and Agricultural Industries at the University of Ghent in 1954, and started his research career as an enzymologist in the laboratory of Laurent Vandendriessche in Ghent. In 1956–57, he worked with in Copenhagen . In 1960, he obtained a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation and joined the group of Bob Sinsheimer as a postdoc. At the California Institute of Technology Walter Fiers was exposed to Molecular Biology, which was then just developing, studying viral DNA. He demonstrated the physical, covalently closed circularity of Bacteriophage PhiX-174 DNA.
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Gerhard Schröder
#3100
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Gerhard Fritz Kurt "Gerd" Schröder is a German lobbyist and former politician, who was the chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005. From 1999 to 2004, he was also the Leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany . As chancellor, he led a coalition government of the SPD and Alliance 90/The Greens. Since leaving public office, Schröder has worked for Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom.
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Joan Wallach Scott
#3101
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Joan Wallach Scott is an American historian of France with contributions in gender history. She is a professor emerita in the School of Social Science in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Scott is known for her work in feminist history and gender theory, engaging post-structural theory on these topics. Geographically, her work focuses primarily on France, and thematically she deals with how power works, the relation between language and experience, and the role and practice of historians. Her work grapples with theory's application to historical and current events, f...
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Diana Wynne Jones
#3102
Overall Influence
1934 - 2011 (77 years)
Diana Wynne Jones was a British novelist, poet, academic, literary critic, and short story writer. She principally wrote fantasy and speculative fiction novels for children and young adults. Although usually described as fantasy, some of her work also incorporates science fiction themes and elements of realism. Jones's work often explores themes of time travel and parallel or multiple universes. Some of her better-known works are the Chrestomanci series, the Dalemark series, the three Moving Castle novels, Dark Lord of Derkholm, and The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.
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Theodore Maiman
#3103
Overall Influence
1927 - 2007 (80 years)
Theodore Harold Maiman was an American engineer and physicist who is widely credited with the invention of the laser. Maiman's laser led to the subsequent development of many other types of lasers. The laser was successfully fired on May 16, 1960. In a July 7, 1960, press conference in Manhattan, Maiman and his employer, Hughes Aircraft Company, announced the laser to the world. Maiman was granted a patent for his invention, and he received many awards and honors for his work. His experiences in developing the first laser and subsequent related events are recounted in his book, The Laser Odyssey, later being republished in 2018 under a new title, The Laser Inventor: Memoirs of Theodore H.
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John F. Sowa
#3104
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
John Florian Sowa is an American computer scientist, an expert in artificial intelligence and computer design, and the inventor of conceptual graphs. Biography Sowa received a BS in mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962, an MA in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1966, and a PhD in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1999 with a dissertation titled "Knowledge Representation: Logical, Philosophical, and Computational Foundations".
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Josef Pieper
#3105
Overall Influence
1904 - 1997 (93 years)
Josef Pieper was a German Catholic philosopher and an important figure in the resurgence of interest in the thought of Thomas Aquinas in early-to-mid 20th-century philosophy. Among his most notable works are The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance; Leisure, the Basis of Culture; and Guide to Thomas Aquinas .
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