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
#30951
Shirley Manson
#30963
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Shirley Ann Manson is a Scottish musician and actress. She is the lead singer of the American alternative rock band Garbage, and host of The Jump with Shirley Manson . Manson gained media attention for her forthright style, rebellious attitude, and distinctive deep voice. For the majority of her career, Manson commuted between her home city of Edinburgh and the U.S. to record with Garbage, which originally formed in Madison, Wisconsin; she now lives and works primarily in Los Angeles, while maintaining a second home in Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#30952
Heidi Cullen
#30964
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Heidi M. Cullen is the Director of Communications and Strategic Initiatives at MBARI, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute . Cullen was previously the chief scientist for the non-profit environmental organization, Climate Central, located in Princeton, New Jersey. In addition, she is a guest lecturer at nearby Princeton University, and the author of the book, The Weather of the Future. An expert and commentator about issues related to climate change and the environment, she was an on-air personality at The Weather Channel, and is a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsyl...
Go to Profile#30953
Jeffrey Karp
#30965
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Jeffrey Karp is a Canadian biomedical engineer working as a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the principal faculty at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Affiliate Faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology through the Harvard–MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. He is also an affiliate faculty at the Broad Institute.
Go to Profile#30954
Bill Bottrell
#30966
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
William A. Bottrell is an American record producer and songwriter. He has collaborated with Michael Jackson, Madonna, Electric Light Orchestra and Sheryl Crow. Biography Between 1967 and 1970, Bottrell attended Crescenta Valley Senior High in La Crescenta, California, he spent his junior year at The Frankfurt International School in Oberursel, West Germany. He graduated in 1970 from Crescenta Valley Senior High. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara between 1970 and 1972, studying for a bachelor's degree in music.
Go to Profile#30955
Jane Piore Gilman
#30967
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Jane Piore Gilman is an American mathematician, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. Her research concerns topology and group theory. Education and career Gilman is one of three children of physicist Emanuel R. Piore. She did her undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1965, and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1971. Her thesis, supervised by Lipman Bers, was entitled Relative Modular Groups in Teichmüller Spaces. She worked for a year as an instructor at Stony Brook University before joining Rutgers in 1972.
Go to Profile#30956
Jack Gibson
#30968
Overall Influence
1908 - 1994 (86 years)
John Travers Mends Gibson was an English schoolmaster, scholar, academic and a distinguished British Himalayan mountaineer. Early life and career Gibson was the son of naval officer Charles Gibson and Emmeline Mary Fletcher and was born on 3 March 1908. He studied at Mowden Preparatory School in Brighton before he was sent in 1921 to Haileybury and Imperial Service College for schooling and later joined the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge, he earned a half blue in fencing. He almost made it to the British Olympic Team. In 1929, he began his career as a professor in Chillon College, Switzerland, responsible for teaching pupils History and winter sports.
Go to Profile#30957
Sarmila Bose
#30969
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Sarmila Bose is an Indian-American journalist and academic. She has served as a senior research associate at the Centre for International Studies in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, a controversial book on the Bangladesh Liberation War.
Go to Profile#30958
Joachim Boldt
#30970
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Joachim Boldt is a German anesthesiologist who fabricated or falsified data, including those reporting clinical trial results. Medical research fabrication Boldt was previously considered to be a leading researcher of medicinal colloids. He was an advocate for the use of colloidal hydroxyethyl starch to boost blood pressure during surgery. However, a meta-analysis of trials that excluded Boldt's fabricated data found that the intravenous use of hydroxyethyl starch is associated with a significant increased risk of death and acute kidney injury compared with other resuscitation solutions. He...
Go to Profile#30959
Cedric Maxwell
#30971
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Cedric Bryan Maxwell is an American retired professional basketball player now in radio broadcasting. Nicknamed "Cornbread", he played 11 seasons in the National Basketball Association , and played a key role in two championships with the Boston Celtics.
Go to Profile#30960
Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle
#30972
Overall Influence
1918 - 2015 (97 years)
Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle was an American neurophysiologist and Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. He discovered and characterized the columnar organization of the cerebral cortex in the 1950s. This discovery was a turning point in investigations of the cerebral cortex, as nearly all cortical studies of sensory function after Mountcastle's 1957 paper, on the somatosensory cortex, used columnar organization as their basis.
Go to Profile#30961
Armando Iannucci
#30973
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Armando Giovanni Iannucci is a Scottish satirist, writer, director, producer, performer and panellist. Born in Glasgow to Italian parents, Iannucci studied at the University of Glasgow followed by the University of Oxford. Starting on BBC Scotland and BBC Radio 4, his early work with Chris Morris on the radio series On the Hour transferred to television as The Day Today.
Go to Profile#30962
Lonnie Johnson
#30974
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Lonnie George Johnson is an American inventor, aerospace engineer, and entrepreneur, whose work includes a U.S. Air Force-term of service and a twelve-year stint at NASA, where he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He invented the Super Soaker water gun in 1989, which has been among the world's bestselling toys ever since.
Go to Profile#30963
Vanessa C. Tyson
#30975
Overall Influence
Vanessa Catherine Tyson is an American political scientist and politician. She is an associate professor of politics at Scripps College and a political science fellow at Stanford University. Tyson was an unsuccessful candidate for California's 57th State Assembly district in the 2020 election, finishing in fifth place with 8.6% of the vote in the nonpartisan primary.
Go to Profile#30964
Alice T. Schafer
#30976
Overall Influence
1915 - 2009 (94 years)
Alice Turner Schafer was an American mathematician. She was one of the founding members of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 1971. Early life Alice Elizabeth Turner was born on June 18, 1915, in Richmond, Virginia. She received a full scholarship to study at the University of Richmond. She was the only female mathematics major. At the time, women were not allowed in the campus library. She was a brilliant student and won the department's James D. Crump Prize in mathematics in her junior year. She completed her B.A. degree in mathematics in 1936.
Go to Profile#30965
Thomas Sheehan
#30977
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Thomas Sheehan is an American philosopher who is the current professor at the Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University and Professor Emeritus at the Department of Philosophy, Loyola University Chicago. He is known for his books on Heidegger and Roman Catholicism. His philosophical specialties are in philosophy of religion, twentieth-century European philosophy, and classical metaphysics. He is the author of The First Coming, a controversial account of Easter.
Go to Profile#30966
Peter van der Veer
#30978
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Peter van der Veer is a Dutch academic who is the Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen in Germany. He has taught anthropology at the Free University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University and the University of Pennsylvania. Van der Veer works on religion and nationalism in Asia and Europe.
Go to Profile#30967
Andrew Bynum
#30979
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Andrew Bynum is an American former professional basketball player. He played the majority of his career with the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association . After they selected him in the first round of the 2005 NBA draft with the 10th overall pick, the center won two NBA championships with the team in 2009 and 2010. He was named an All-Star and selected to the All-NBA Team in 2012.
Go to Profile#30968
M. G. S. Narayanan
#30980
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Muttayil Govindamenon Sankara Narayanan, commonly known as M. G. S. Narayanan is an Indian historian, academic and political commentator. He headed the Department of History at Calicut University from 1976 to 1990. and served as the Chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research.
Go to Profile#30969
Dalmacio Negro Pavón
#30981
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Dalmacio Negro Pavón is a Spanish university professor and author, member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Moral and Social Sciences. He is an attorney at law and holds an MA in philosophy and a PhD in political science. Former positions include: associate professor of "Foundations in Philosophy", associate professor of "Philosophy in History" and professor of "History of ideas and Political Forms" at Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain.
Go to Profile#30970
Colin Nichols
#30982
Overall Influence
Colin G. Nichols FRS is the Carl Cori Endowed Professor, and Director of the Center for Investigation of Membrane Excitability Diseases at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Education Nichols was educated at the University of Leeds where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry and Physiology in 1982, followed by a PhD in 1985 for research on cardiac muscle in mammals supervised by Brian R. Jewell.
Go to Profile#30971
Alvin Radkowsky
#30983
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
Alvin Radkowsky was an American nuclear physicist and chief scientist at U.S. Navy nuclear propulsion division. His work in the 1950s led to major advances in nuclear-ship technology and civilian use of nuclear power.
Go to Profile#30972
Jasper Rine
#30984
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jasper Donald Rine is an American scientist, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development at the University of California, Berkeley. Rine received his B.S. from the State University of New York at Albany in 1975 and his Ph.D. in molecular genetics from the University of Oregon in 1979. He then joined the Berkeley faculty in 1982. He is also a former director of the Human Genome Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, an honorific leadership group of the American Society for Microbiology.
Go to Profile#30973
Ian H. Witten
#30985
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
#30974
Peter J. Bickel
#30986
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Peter John Bickel is an American statistician and Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Education and career Bickel studied physics at the California Institute of Technology. He graduated from University of California, Berkeley, with a Ph.D., in 1963, where he studied under Erich Leo Lehmann.
Go to Profile#30975
Carey Price
#30987
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Carey Price is a Canadian professional ice hockey goaltender currently under contract for the Montreal Canadiens of the National Hockey League . He is considered one of the best goaltenders in the world by many colleagues, fans, and members of the media. As of the 2022–23 NHL season, Price is the winningest goaltender in Canadiens history with 361 wins.
Go to Profile#30976
Bob Brown
#30988
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Robert James Brown is an Australian former politician, medical doctor and environmentalist. He was a senator and the parliamentary leader of the Australian Greens. Brown was elected to the Australian Senate on the Tasmanian Greens ticket, joining with sitting Greens Western Australia senator Dee Margetts to form the first group of Australian Greens senators following the 1996 federal election. He was re-elected in 2001 and in 2007. He was the first openly gay member of the Parliament of Australia and the first openly gay leader of an Australian political party.
Go to Profile#30977
Sidney Pollard
#30989
Overall Influence
1925 - 1998 (73 years)
Siegfried Sidney Pollard was a British economic and labour historian, and Professor at the University of Sheffield. He pioneered the study of the role of economic management in the processes of industrialization - an industrialization which he thought was best examined at regional levels rather than national levels.
Go to Profile#30978
Fatou Diome
#30990
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Fatou Diome is a French-Senegalese writer known for her best-selling novel The Belly of the Atlantic, which was published in 2001. Her work explores immigrant life in France, and the relationship between France and Africa. Fatou Diome lives in Strasbourg, France.
Go to Profile#30979
Christopher Stubbs
#30991
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Christopher Stubbs is an experimental physicist currently on the faculty at Harvard University in both the Department of Physics and the Department of Astronomy. He is the current Dean of Science at Harvard University and a former Chair of Harvard's Department of Physics.
Go to Profile#30980
F. James Rohlf
#30992
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
F. James Rohlf is an American biostatistician, currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Stony Brook University and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Positions The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas. Research Assistant: 1958–1959. Teaching Assistant: Fall 1959. Research Associate: Summer 1962. Visiting Assistant Professor of Entomology: Spring 1965. Research Associate: Spring 1966. Associate Professor of Statistical Biology: 1966–1969.The University of California, Santa Barbara, California. Assistant Professor of Biology: 1962–1966.IBM, Yorktown Heights, New York.
Go to Profile#30981
William T. Allen
#30993
Overall Influence
1948 - 2019 (71 years)
William T. Allen was a professor of corporate law at New York University law school, and the Chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery from 1985 to 1997. He also worked for the bank and business law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.
Go to Profile#30982
Ruben Habito
#30994
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Rubén L. F. Hábito is a Filipino Zen rōshi of the Sanbō Kyōdan lineage. Biography Hábito started out as a Jesuit priest doing missionary work in Japan. There, he began practising under Yamada Kōun, a Zen rōshi who taught Christian students, which was unusual for the time. In 1988, Hábito received dharma transmission from Yamada. Ruben subsequently left the Jesuit order in 1989, and in 1991 founded the Maria Kannon Zen Center, a lay organization in Dallas, Texas.
Go to Profile#30983
Helen Chan Wolf
#30995
Overall Influence
Helen Chan Wolf is an artificial intelligence pioneer who worked on facial recognition technology and Shakey the robot, the world's first autonomous robot, at SRI International. Career In the early 1960s, Wolf worked with Charles Bisson and Woody Bledsoe at Panoramic Research to train computers in recognising human faces . Early computer programs used humans to coordinate a set of features from images of faces and then a computer for the recognition. These features included things such as the positions the inside and outside corners of eyes and mouth. Operators such as these could process arou...
Go to Profile#30984
Paul Kiparsky
#30996
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
René Paul Victor Kiparsky is a Finnish linguist and professor of linguistics at Stanford University. He is the son of the St. Petersburg -born linguist and Baltist/ Slavicist Valentin Kiparsky. Kiparsky is especially known for his contributions to phonology. These include coining the terms elsewhere principle, and phonological opacity , and creating the frameworks of Lexical Phonology and Morphology and its successor, Stratal Optimality Theory. A noted Pāṇini scholar, he has also made fundamental contributions to historical linguistics and generative metrics, as well as working in morphosyn...
Go to Profile#30985
Yoko Kanno
#30997
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Yoko Kanno is a Japanese composer, arranger and music producer best known for her work on the soundtracks of anime series, video games, television dramas and movies. She has written scores for Cowboy Bebop, Terror in Resonance, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Wolf's Rain, Turn A Gundam and Darker than Black. Kanno is also a keyboardist and the frontwoman for Seatbelts, who perform many of her compositions.
Go to Profile#30986
Jorge Jesus
#30998
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Jorge Fernando Pinheiro de Jesus is a Portuguese professional football manager and former player, who is the manager of Saudi Pro League club Al Hilal. He started his career with Sporting CP, going on to play for 12 other clubs in 17 years as a professional, which included nine Primeira Liga seasons.
Go to Profile#30987
Robert Caret
#30999
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Robert Laurent Caret is an American academic and the former chancellor of the University System of Maryland. He became chancellor on July 1, 2015. Caret, a native of New England, became chancellor of the University System of Maryland after completing presidencies at San Jose State University, Towson University and the University of Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#30988
Vincent Brümmer
#31000
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Vincent Brümmer was a South African-born Christian theologian who worked for most of his career in the Netherlands. From 1967 to 1997 he was the Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Utrecht.
Go to Profile#30989
Theodore Porter
#31001
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Theodore M. Porter is a professor who specializes in the history of science in the Department of History at UCLA. He has authored several books, including The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900; and Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, the latter a vast reference for sociology of quantification. His most recent book, published by Princeton University Press in 2018, is Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity. He graduated from Stanford University with an A.B. in history in 1976 and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1981.
Go to Profile#30990
Laurence Lampert
#31002
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Laurence Lampert is a Canadian philosopher and a leading scholar in the field of Nietzsche studies. Philosopher Michael Allen Gillespie of Duke University has described Lampert as "North America's greatest living Nietzsche scholar." He is also well known for his interpretations of Plato and the German-American political philosopher Leo Strauss.
Go to Profile#30991
James I. Kirkland
#31003
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
James Ian Kirkland is an American paleontologist and geologist. He has worked with dinosaur remains from the south west United States of America and Mexico and has been responsible for discovering new and important genera. He named Animantarx, Cedarpelta, Eohadrosaurus , Jeyawati, Gastonia, Mymoorapelta, Nedcolbertia, Utahraptor, Zuniceratops, Europelta and Diabloceratops. At the same site where he found Gastonia and Utahraptor, Kirkland has also excavated fossils of the therizinosaur Falcarius.
Go to Profile#30992
Burton Pike
#31004
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Burton Pike was an American translator of Robert Musil, as well as a distinguished professor emeritus of comparative literature and Germanic languages and literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. Life and career Burton Pike was born on June 12, 1930. He did his undergraduate studies at Haverford College and received his PhD from Harvard University. He taught at the University of Hamburg, Cornell University, and Queens College and Hunter College of the City University of New York. He was also a visiting professor at Yale University.
Go to Profile#30993
Vida Blue
#31005
Overall Influence
1949 - 2023 (74 years)
Vida Rochelle Blue Jr. was an American professional baseball player. He was a left-handed pitcher in Major League Baseball from 1969 to 1986, most notably as an integral member of the Oakland Athletics dynasty that won three consecutive World Series championships from 1972 to 1974. He won the American League Cy Young Award and Most Valuable Player Award in 1971.
Go to Profile#30994
Paul Knochel
#31006
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Paul Knochel is a French chemist and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. Biography Paul Knochel was born in Strasbourg. He studied chemistry at the IUT in Strasbourg, then at the ENSCS . From 1979 to 1982, he completed his thesis entitled "Nitroallyl-halogenide und -ester als effiziente Verknüpfungsreagenzien" at ETH Zurich in Prof. Dieter Seebach's group. He then spent 4 years at the CNRS at the Pierre et Marie Curie University in Paris in the group of Prof. Jean-François Normant. During this period, he studied carbozincation reactions using allylic reagents and prepared bimetallic compounds bearing two different metals on the same carbon atom.
Go to Profile#30995
Clarence Ellis
#31007
Overall Influence
1943 - 2014 (71 years)
Clarence "Skip" Ellis was an American computer scientist, and Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. While at the CU-Boulder, he was the director of the Collaboration Technology Research Group and a member of the Institute of Cognitive Science. Ellis was the first Black Person to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science , and the first Black Person to be elected a Fellow of the ACM . Ellis was a pioneer in Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Groupware. He and his team at Xerox PARC created OfficeTalk, one of the first groupware systems.
Go to Profile#30996
Joan Muysken
#31008
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Joan Muysken is a Dutch professor emeritus of Economics at the Maastricht University. Higher education Muysken received his PhD in Economics from the University of Groningen on the aggregation of production functions.
Go to Profile#30997
John Brian Harley
#31009
Overall Influence
1932 - 1991 (59 years)
Brian Harley was a geographer, cartographer, and map historian at the universities of Birmingham, Liverpool, Exeter and Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He helped found the History of Cartography Project and was the founding co-editor of the resulting The History of Cartography. In recent years, Harley's work has gained broad prominence among geographers and social theorists, and it has contributed greatly to the emerging discipline of critical cartography.
Go to Profile#30998
Ferdinand Dennis
#31010
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Ferdinand Dennis is a writer, broadcaster, journalist and lecturer, who is Jamaican by birth but at the age of eight moved to England, where his parents had migrated in the late 1950s. Dr James Procter notes: "Perhaps as a result of his Caribbean background , Dennis is a writer ultimately more concerned with routes than roots. This is foregrounded in much of his fictional work, notably his most recent and ambitious novel to date, Duppy Conqueror , a novel which moves from 1930s Jamaica to postwar London and Liverpool, to Africa. Similarly, Dennis' non-fiction centres on journeying rather tha...
Go to Profile#30999
Michael Omartian
#31011
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Michael Omartian is an American singer-songwriter, arranger, keyboardist, and music producer. He produced number-one records in three consecutive decades. He has earned 11 Grammy Awards nominations and won three. He spent five years on the A&R staff of ABC/Dunhill Records as a producer, artist, and arranger; then was hired by Warner Bros. Records as an in-house producer and A&R staff member. Omartian moved from Los Angeles to Nashville in 1993, where he served on the Board of Governors of the Recording Academy, and has helped to shape the curriculum for the first master's degree program in th...
Go to Profile#31000
Kent Bloomer
#31012
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Kent C. Bloomer was an American sculptor, professor and author who is a well known proponent and creator of architectural ornament. He taught classes on ornament at the Yale School of Architecture for over forty years, and many of his public works of ornament have become well known landmarks. He wrote several books and articles on visual perception and architectural ornament, including the principal authorship, with Charles Moore, of “Body, Memory and Architecture,” 1977.
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