Search People Result | Academic Influence

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 …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#30801

Bobby Gould

#30813

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Robert Hewitt Gould is an English former footballer and manager. Early life Gould was born in Wyken, Coventry, Warwickshire on 12 June 1946. He is the son of Henry Gould and Helen McKellar Gould . He spent his youth living in Wyken and attended Caludon Castle School for his secondary education.

#30802

Jennifer Welsh

#30814

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Jennifer Mary Welsh is a Canadian professor of international relations, currently working as the Canada 150 Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University. Welsh is the Director of the Centre for International Peace and Security Studies at McGill's Max Bell School of Public Policy, and a co-director of the Canadian Research Network on Women, Peace and Security. Welsh is a frequent commentator in Canadian media on foreign affairs.

#30803

Claude Lecouteux

#30815

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Claude Lecouteux is a French philologist and medievalist who specializes in Germanic studies. He is Professor Emeritus and Chair of the Literature and Civilization of Medieval Germanic Peoples at Sorbonne University.

#30804

Karen Parshall

#30816

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Karen Hunger Parshall is an American historian of mathematics. She is the Commonwealth Professor of History and Mathematics at the University of Virginia with a joint appointment in the Corcoran Department of History and Department of Mathematics. From 2009 to 2012, Parshall was the Associate Dean for the Social Sciences in the College of Arts in Sciences at UVA, and from 2016 to 2019 she was the chair of the Corcoran Department of History.

#30805

Roy Amara

#30817

Overall Influence

1925 - 2007 (82 years)

Roy Charles Amara was an American researcher, scientist, futurist and president of the Institute for the Future best known for coining Amara's law on the effect of technology. He held a BS in Management, an MS in the Arts and Sciences, and a PhD in Systems Engineering, and also worked at the Stanford Research Institute.

#30806

Marc Crawford

#30818

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Marc Joseph John Crawford is a Canadian professional ice hockey coach and former player. He is currently the head coach of the ZSC Lions of the National League . Crawford won the Stanley Cup in 1996 as head coach of the Colorado Avalanche. He played as a forward for the Vancouver Canucks.

#30807

Henrikh Mkhitaryan

Henrikh Mkhitaryan

#30819

Overall Influence

1989 - Present (37 years)

Henrikh Mkhitaryan is an Armenian professional footballer who plays as an attacking midfielder or winger for club Inter Milan. Mkhitaryan won four Armenian Premier League titles with Pyunik, and joined Metalurh Donetsk in 2009; he moved to city rivals Shakhtar Donetsk in 2010 for €6.1 million. At Shakhtar, Mkhitaryan set the league goalscoring record in the 2012–13 season, and was named the league's Footballer of the Year. After also winning three domestic doubless, he signed for Bundesliga club Borussia Dortmund for a club-record fee of €27.5 million, making him the most expensive Armenian ...

#30808

Jean-Pierre Landau

#30820

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Jean-Pierre Landau is a high-ranking French civil servant. Career In 1974 Landau joined the General Inspection of Finances. From 1989 to 1993, he served as Executive Director for France at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington D.C.

#30809

Frances Mayes

#30821

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Frances Mayes is an American writer. Her 1996 memoir Under the Tuscan Sun was on the New York Times Best Seller list for over two years and was the basis for the film Under the Tuscan Sun. Biography Frances Mayes was born on March 23, 1940 in Fitzgerald, Georgia to Garbert Mayes, a cotton mill manager, and Frankye Mayes. Mayes was the youngest of three sisters. Garbert Mayes died of cancer at age 47, when Frances was 14.

#30810

Paul Thomas

#30822

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Paul Thomas AM is the founding Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of the Sunshine Coast. From March 1994 to December 1995, Thomas was the Planning President of the university, then named the Sunshine Coast University College. In 1996, he became the inaugural Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Sunshine Coast. He retired from office in 2010.

#30811

Uğur Ümit Üngör

#30823

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Uğur Ümit Üngör is a Dutch–Turkish academic, historian, sociologist, and professor of Genocide studies, specializing as a scholar and researcher of Holocaust studies and studies on mass violence. He served as Professor of History at the Utrecht University and Professor of Sociology at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

#30812

Christopher T. Russell

#30824

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Christopher Thomas Russell is head of the Space Physics Center at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UCLA, professor in UCLA's Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, and Director of the UCLA Branch of the California Space Grant Consortium. He received a B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1964 and a Ph.D. from UCLA in 1968. In 1977 he was awarded the James B. Macelwane Medal and in 2003 the John Adam Fleming Medal by the American Geophysical Union . He is also a Fellow of the AGU. Asteroid 21459 Chrisrussell was named after him in 2008. In 2017, he was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal.

#30813

William J. McGuire

#30825

Overall Influence

1925 - 2007 (82 years)

William James McGuire was an American social psychologist known for his work on the psychology of persuasion and for developing Inoculation theory. He was a faculty member at Yale University from 1970 until he retired in 1999, and chaired the psychology department there from 1971 to 1973. He was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology from 1967 to 1970.

#30814

Kapil Kapoor

#30826

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Kapil Kapoor is an Indian scholar of linguistics and literature and an authority on Indian intellectual traditions. He is former Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University and served as professor at the Centre for Linguistics and English, and at the Centre for Sanskrit Studies there before retiring in 2005. He is Editor-in-Chief of the 11-Volume Encyclopedia of Hinduism published by Rupa & Co. in 2012. He is a member of the Kapoor family.

#30815

Michael McQuillan

#30827

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Michael Liam McQuillan is a Scottish mathematician studying algebraic geometry. As of 2019 he is Professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. Career Michael McQuillan received the doctorate in 1992 at Harvard University under Barry Mazur .

#30816

Heinz Lehmann

#30828

Overall Influence

1911 - 1999 (88 years)

Heinz Edgar Lehmann was a German-born Canadian psychiatrist best known for his use of chlorpromazine for the treatment of schizophrenia in 1950s and "truly the father of modern psychopharmacology."

#30817

Edward James Olmos

Edward James Olmos

#30829

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Edward James Olmos is a Mexican-American actor, producer and director. He is best known for his roles as Lieutenant Martin "Marty" Castillo in Miami Vice , American Me , William Adama in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica , teacher Jaime Escalante in Stand and Deliver , Detective Gaff in Blade Runner and its sequel Blade Runner 2049 and the voice of Mito in the 2005 English dub of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. In 2018 through 2023, he has played the father of two members of an outlaw motorcycle club in the FX series Mayans M.C.

#30818

Matthew J. Slaughter

Matthew J. Slaughter

#30830

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Matthew J. Slaughter is the Paul Danos Dean and the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He is also the founding Faculty Director of Tuck's Center for Global Business and Government. In addition, he is currently a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; an adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; a member of the advisory committee of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, a member of the academic advisory board of the International Tax Policy Forum; and an academic advisor to ...

#30819

Aaron Twerski

#30831

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Aaron D. Twerski is an American lawyer and professor. He is the Irwin and Jill Cohen Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, as well as a former Dean and professor of tort law at Hofstra University School of Law.

#30820

Jennifer Elisseeff

Jennifer Elisseeff

#30832

Overall Influence

Jennifer Hartt Elisseeff is an American biomedical engineer, ophthalmologist and academic. She is the Morton Goldberg Professor and Director of the Translational Tissue Engineering Center at Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Wilmer Eye Institute with appointments in Chemical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Materials Science and Orthopedic Surgery. Elisseeff's research is in the fields of regenerative medicine and immunoengineering.

#30821

Asuman Aksoy

#30833

Overall Influence

Asuman Güven Aksoy is a Turkish-American mathematician whose research concerns topics in functional analysis, metric geometry, and operator theory including Banach spaces, measures of non-compactness, fixed points, Birnbaum–Orlicz spaces, real trees, injective metric spaces, and tight spans. She works at Claremont McKenna College, where she is Crown Professor of Mathematics and George R. Roberts Fellow.

#30822

James Horner

#30834

Overall Influence

1953 - 2015 (62 years)

James Roy Horner was an American composer of film scores. He worked on over 160 film and television productions between 1978 and 2015, and was the winner of two Academy Awards, among many other accolades. He was known for the integration of choral and electronic elements alongside traditional orchestrations, and for his use of motifs associated with Celtic music.

#30823

Ted Jacobson

#30835

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Theodore A. "Ted" Jacobson is an American theoretical physicist. He is known for his work on the connection between gravity and thermodynamics. In particular, in 1995 Jacobson proved that the Einstein field equations describing relativistic gravity can be derived from thermodynamic considerations.

#30824

Benno Müller-Hill

#30836

Overall Influence

1933 - 2018 (85 years)

Benno Müller-Hill was a German biologist and author. Together with Walter Gilbert, Müller-Hill purified the lac repressor, the first genetic control protein to be isolated. Müller-Hill has lectured widely and written books on the misuse of science by the Nazis.

#30825

Anil Bhardwaj

#30837

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Anil Bhardwaj is an Indian astrophysicist. He is the director of the Physical Research Laboratory, which is a unit of the Department of Space of Government of India in Ahmedabad, India. Early life Bhardwaj graduated in maths, statistics and physics with honours. He earned his Master of Science degree in physics from Lucknow University. He received his Doctorate in applied physics in 1992 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi.

#30826

Steve Gadd

#30838

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Stephen Kendall Gadd is an American drummer, percussionist, and session musician. Gadd is one of the best-known and highly regarded session and studio drummers in the industry, recognized by his induction into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1984. Gadd's performances on Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" and "Late in the Evening" and Steely Dan's "Aja" are examples of his style. He has worked with other popular musicians from many genres including Simon & Garfunkel, Paul McCartney, James Taylor, Harry Chapin, Joe Cocker, Bonnie Raitt, Grover Washington Jr., Michael Brecker, Michael...

#30827

Jay Golden

#30839

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Jay S. Golden is an academic and researcher. Golden is the Pontarelli Professor of Environmental Sustainability & Finance at Syracuse University where he also directs the Dynamic Sustainability research lab.

#30828

John Russon

#30840

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

John Russon is a Canadian philosopher, working primarily in the tradition of Continental Philosophy. In 2006, he was named Presidential Distinguished Professor at the University of Guelph, and in 2011 he was the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute's Canadian Lecturer to India.

#30829

Al Arbour

#30841

Overall Influence

1932 - 2015 (83 years)

Alger Joseph Arbour was a Canadian ice hockey player, coach, and executive. He is third to Joel Quenneville for games coached in National Hockey League history and fifth all-time in wins, behind Scotty Bowman, Joel Quenneville, Ken Hitchcock and Barry Trotz. Under Arbour, the New York Islanders won four consecutive Stanley Cups from 1980 to 1983. Born in Sudbury, Ontario, Arbour played amateur hockey as a defenceman with the Windsor Spitfires of the Ontario Hockey League. He played his first professional games with the Detroit Red Wings in 1953. Claimed by the Chicago Black Hawks in 1958, Arbour would help the team win a championship in 1961.

#30830

Roger Angel

#30842

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

James Roger Prior Angel is a British-born American astronomer. He is Regents Professor and Professor of Astronomy and Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. Education He graduated from St Peter's College, Oxford, with a BA, in 1963, from California Institute of Technology, with an MA in 1966, and from the University of Oxford, with a D Phil, in 1967.

#30831

Dorothy Cotton

#30843

Overall Influence

1930 - 2018 (88 years)

Dorothy Cotton was an American civil rights activist, who was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and a member of the inner circle of one of its main organizations, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference . As the SCLC's Educational Director, she was arguably the highest ranked female member of the organization.

#30832

Ruby Dee

#30844

Overall Influence

1922 - 2014 (92 years)

Ruby Dee was an American actress, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, and civil rights activist. She originated the role of "Ruth Younger" in the stage and film versions of A Raisin in the Sun . Her other notable film roles include The Jackie Robinson Story and Do the Right Thing .

#30833

Louis Marin

#30845

Overall Influence

1931 - 1992 (61 years)

Louis Marin was a French philosopher, historian, semiotician, and art critic. He was born in La Tronche, France. He is a French post-structuralistic thinker. He attended the University of Paris, Sorbonne and graduated with a Licence in Philosophy in 1952. His degree was followed in 1953 with an Agrégé in Philosophy and with a Docteur d'Etat in 1973. Marin taught at the University of Nanterre, Paris from 1967 to 1970, the University of California, San Diego from 1970 to 1974, Johns Hopkins University from 1974 to 1977, and finally at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris from 1977 to 1992.

#30834

T. C. W. Blanning

#30846

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Timothy Charles William Blanning is an English historian who served as Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge from 1992 to 2009. Career Timothy Charles William Blanning attended the King's School in Bruton. He went up to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree and completing his doctorate there in 1967. In 1965, he was elected to a research fellowship at Sidney Sussex, and in 1968 was elected to a fellowship there. He was appointed to an assistant lectureship at the University of Cambridge in 1972, being promoted to lecturer four years later.

#30835

Volodymyr Viatrovych

Volodymyr Viatrovych

#30847

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Volodymyr Mykhailovych Viatrovych is a Ukrainian historian, civic activist and politician. Viatrovych was the Director of the Center for Research of Liberation Movement in 2002–2010. Viatrovych is a member of the board of trustees of the National Museum-Memorial of Victims of the Occupation Regimes "Loncky street Prison"" Museum. From 2008 to 2010, he was director of the Archives of the Security Service of Ukraine. In 2010-2011 he was senior visiting scholar at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, working in particular with the archival documents of Mykola Lebed. He was Director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance since 25 March 2014 until September 2019.

#30836

Jeffrey Rauch

#30848

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Jeffrey B. Rauch is an American mathematical physicist, specializing in partial differential equations. Rauch obtained his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1967, and his Ph.D. from New York University in 1971 .

#30837

Olivier Zunz

#30849

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Olivier Zunz is a social historian, and Commonwealth Professor at the University of Virginia, known for his work on the twentieth-century history of the American urban society and the development of modern philanthropy. He is also a leading Tocqueville historian.

#30838

Chris Beyrer

#30850

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Chris Beyrer is the Director of the Duke Global Health Institute. He was previously a professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States. He was president of the International AIDS Society from 2014 to 2016.

#30839

Freimut Börngen

#30851

Overall Influence

1930 - 2021 (91 years)

Freimut Börngen was a German astronomer and a prolific discoverer of minor planets. A few sources give his first name wrongly as "Freimuth". The Minor Planet Center credits him as F. Borngen. He studied galaxies with the Schmidt telescope at the Karl Schwarzschild Observatory in Tautenburg, Germany. In 1995 he retired, but continued to work as a freelancer for the observatory. As a by-product of his work, he discovered numerous asteroids . The research on asteroids had to be done in his spare time, as the search for small objects was not considered prestigious enough by the GDR research managers.

#30840

Joachim Friedrich Quack

#30852

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Joachim Friedrich Quack is a German Egyptologist and Demotic Language specialist. Education He studied Egyptology, Semitic and Biblical Archaeology at the University of Tübingen and abroad at the École pratique des hautes études and Collège de France in Paris 1990 where he graduated with a Master's degree and "very good with distinction".

#30841

Kaoru Ono

#30853

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Kaoru Ono is a Japanese mathematician, specializing in symplectic geometry. He is a professor at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Kyoto University. Ono received from the University of Tokyo his undergraduate degree in 1984, his master's degree in 1987, and his Ph.D. in 1990. Within symplectic geometry, his research has focused on Floer theory and holomorphic symplectic geometry involving holomorphic curves and pseudoholomorphic curves and their applications. He has collaborated extensively with Kenji Fukaya, Oh Yong-Geun, and Hiroshi Ohta .

#30842

Christopher Gray

#30854

Overall Influence

1950 - 2017 (67 years)

Christopher Stewart Gray was an American journalist and architectural historian, noted for his weekly column "Streetscapes" in The New York Times, about the history of New York City architecture, real estate and public improvements.

#30843

Massimo Carmassi

#30855

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Massimo Carmassi is an Italian architect. Biography Massimo Carmassi graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in Florence in 1970. In 1974, he established the Project Office of the Commune of Pisa and directed it till 1990. From 1981 to 1985, he was the chairman of the Architectural Association in Pisa and its district. Carmassi is recipient of the Heinrich Tessenow gold medal awarded by the Heinrich-Tessenow-Gesellschaft e.V. ; he was appointed as a member of the class of Architecture in the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno of Florence and of the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca. He is a m...

#30844

Jason Varitek

#30856

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Jason Andrew Varitek , nicknamed "Tek", is an American professional baseball coach and former catcher. He is the game planning coordinator, a uniformed coaching position, for the Boston Red Sox. After being traded as a minor league prospect by the Seattle Mariners, Varitek played his entire 15-year career in Major League Baseball for the Red Sox. A three-time All-Star and Gold Glove Award winner at catcher, as well as a Silver Slugger Award winner, Varitek was part of both the 2004 World Series and 2007 World Series Championship teams, and was viewed widely as one of the team's leaders. In December 2004 he was named the captain of the Red Sox, only their fourth captain since 1923.

#30845

Olle Inganäs

#30857

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Olle Inganäs , is a Swedish Professor of Biomolecular and Organic Electronics at Linköping University, Sweden. Professor Inganäs received his doctorate in 1984 from Linköping University. His research interests are in polymer optoelectronics and bioelectronics, conjugated polymer physics and polymer electrochemistry.

#30846

Kristin Scott Thomas

Kristin Scott Thomas

#30858

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Dame Kristin Ann Scott Thomas is a British/French actress. A five-time BAFTA Award and Olivier Award nominee, she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Four Weddings and a Funeral and the Olivier Award for Best Actress in 2008 for the Royal Court revival of The Seagull. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in The English Patient .

#30847

Frederick Hatfield

#30859

Overall Influence

1942 - 2017 (75 years)

Frederick C. Hatfield , nicknamed Dr. Squat, was an American world champion powerlifter and PhD holder in sports sciences. He was also the co-founder and president of the International Sports Sciences Association, an organization of fitness experts which certifies personal fitness trainers from around the world. He went on to make the ICOPRO bodybuilding protein and supplements for Vince McMahon's World Bodybuilding Federation. After the promotion folded, McMahon continued to market the product until 1995.

#30848

Ursula Andress

#30860

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Ursula Andress is a Swiss-German actress, former model and sex symbol who has appeared in American, British and Italian films. Her breakthrough role was as Bond girl Honey Ryder in the first James Bond film, Dr. No . She later starred as Vesper Lynd in the 1967 Bond parody Casino Royale. Other credits include Fun in Acapulco , 4 for Texas , She , The 10th Victim , The Blue Max , The Southern Star , Perfect Friday , Red Sun , The Sensuous Nurse , Slave of the Cannibal God , The Fifth Musketeer , Clash of the Titans , and Peter the Great .

#30849

Gary B. Mesibov

#30861

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Gary B. Mesibov is a licensed psychologist, psychology professor, editor and an author. Education Mesibov received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford University and his Master of Arts degree from the University of Michigan. He received his doctorate from Brandeis University and completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina.

#30850

Gene F. Franklin

Gene F. Franklin

#30862

Overall Influence

1927 - 2012 (85 years)

Gene F. Franklin was an American electrical engineer and control theorist known for his pioneering work towards the advancement of the control systems engineering – a subfield of electrical engineering. Most of his work on control theory was adapted immediately into NASA's U.S. space program, most famously in the control systems for the Apollo missions to the Moon in 1960s–1970s.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions