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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#31001
Rodrigo R. Soares
#31013
Overall Influence
Rodrigo Reis Soares is an economist specializing in development economics. He is Lemann Professor of Brazilian Public Policy and International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and the Lemann Foundation Chair at Insper.
Go to Profile#31002
Fernando Tesón
#31014
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Fernando Tesón is an Argentine-American legal scholar who is known for his contributions to the philosophy of law and to neoclassical liberal theory. He is the Tobias Simon Eminent Scholar at Florida State University College of Law. His publications include Humanitarian Intervention: An Inquiry into Law and Morality ; Rational Choice and Democratic Deliberation [with Guido Pincione]; A Philosophy of International Law ; and many articles in law, philosophy, and international relations journals and collections of essays. Before entering academia, Professor Tesón was a career diplomat for the Argentina Foreign Ministry in Buenos Aires for four years.
Go to Profile#31003
David S. Katz
#31015
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
David S. Katz FRHistS is Director of the History of Ideas Program and a member of the Department of History at Brandeis University and Professor Emeritus of early modern European history at Tel Aviv University in Israel, where he taught from 1978 until retiring in 2019. He held the Abraham Horodisch Chair for the History of Books at Tel Aviv University and was Director of the Lessing Institute for European History and Civilization . Katz received his B.A. from Columbia University and his D.Phil. from Oxford University where he was a pupil of Hugh Trevor-Roper . He was elected a fellow of...
Go to Profile#31004
David Benaron
#31016
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
David A. Benaron is an American digital health entrepreneur, physician, and former Stanford University professor. His work in the field of medical optical imaging, digital health wearables, and predictive behavioral and health Artificial Intelligence led to the founding of multiple public companies. He is a member of SPIE , and a founding editorial board member of the Journal of Biomedical Optics.
Go to Profile#31005
Herb Brooks
#31017
Overall Influence
1937 - 2003 (66 years)
Herbert Paul Brooks Jr. was an American ice hockey player and coach. His most notable achievement came in 1980 as head coach of the gold medal-winning U.S. Olympic team at Lake Placid. At the Games, Brooks' American team upset the heavily favored Soviet team in a match that came to be known as the "Miracle on Ice."
Go to Profile#31006
Heather Unruh
#31018
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Heather Unruh is an American journalist and former television news anchor. She worked for News Center 5 at WCVB for more than fifteen years. Education Unruh is a 1986 graduate of Lincoln High School in Stockton, California and a 1989 graduate of DePauw University.
Go to Profile#31007
Sheikh Anwarul Haq
#31019
Overall Influence
1917 - 1995 (78 years)
Sheikh Anwarul Haq , was a Pakistani jurist and an academic who served as the 9th Chief Justice of Pakistan from 23 September 1977 until resigning on 25 March 1981. He signed the death warrant for former Prime Minister Z.A Bhutto in a controversial murder case. Bhutto was executed on April 4, 1979.
Go to Profile#31008
Andrea Zittel
#31020
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Andrea Zittel is an American artist based in Joshua Tree, CA whose practice encompasses spaces, objects and modes of living in an ongoing investigation that explores the questions "How to live?" and "What gives life meaning?"
Go to Profile#31009
Hemendra Nath Chatterjee
#31021
Overall Influence
Hemendra Nath Chatterjee was an Indian scientist from West Bengal known for the earliest publication of a formula for Orally Rehydrated Saline for diarrhea management in 1952. Although his results were published in The Lancet, they didn't receive much recognition from Western scientists until later. Some argue this was for cultural reasons as his treatment protocol included traditional medicine, and also because the scientific underpinnings of ORS weren't well understood. However, some argue he shouldn't be given credit for its invention at all, as some of his results contradict the results o...
Go to Profile#31010
Donald Pleasence
#31022
Overall Influence
1919 - 1995 (76 years)
Donald Henry Pleasence was an English actor. He began his career on stage in the West End before transitioning into a screen career, which included starring in a 1954 BBC adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, before playing numerous supporting and character roles in films including RAF Flight Lieutenant Colin Blythe in The Great Escape , the villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice , SEN 5241 in THX 1138 , and the deranged Clarence "Doc" Tydon in Wake in Fright .
Go to Profile#31011
Jed Buchwald
#31023
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Jed Zachary Buchwald is Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at Caltech. He was previously director of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT. He won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2011.
Go to Profile#31012
Ravi V. Bellamkonda
#31024
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
#31013
Mitsuru Matsui
#31025
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
is a Japanese cryptographer and senior researcher for Mitsubishi Electric Company. Career While researching error-correcting codes in 1990, Matsui was inspired by Eli Biham and Adi Shamir's differential cryptanalysis, and discovered the technique of linear cryptanalysis, published in 1993. Differential and linear cryptanalysis are the two major general techniques known for the cryptanalysis of block ciphers.
Go to Profile#31014
Alex Szalay
#31026
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Alex Szalay is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of physics and astronomy and computer science at the Johns Hopkins University School of Arts and Sciences and Whiting School of Engineering. Szalay is an international leader in astronomy, cosmology, the science of big data, and data‐intensive computing. In 2023, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#31015
János Körner
#31027
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
János Körner is a Hungarian mathematician who works on information theory and combinatorics. Körner studied Mathematics at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest with a degree in 1970 and was then at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences until 1992. From 1981 to 1983 he was at the Bell Laboratories and in 1987–88 at Télécom Paris in Paris. He has been a professor at the Sapienza University of Rome since 1993.
Go to Profile#31016
Charles Oatley
#31028
Overall Influence
1904 - 1996 (92 years)
Sir Charles William Oatley OBE, FRS FREng was Professor of Electrical Engineering, University of Cambridge, 1960–1971, and developer of one of the first commercial scanning electron microscopes. He was also a founder member of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Go to Profile#31017
Jun Kondō
#31029
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Jun Kondō was a Japanese theoretical physicist. His research is noted for the Kondo effect. He was an emeritus fellow of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology . Kondō died from pneumonia on 11 March 2022, at the age of 92.
Go to Profile#31018
Carlo Lottieri
#31030
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Carlo Lottieri is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Verona. He holds a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the University of Genoa, a M.A. from the Institut Universitaire d’Etudes Européens , a M.A. and a Ph.D. from the Paris-Sorbonne University. His research interests cover Philosophy of Law, Federalism, Libertarianism, political theology, Religion and Public Life, Military Ethics, Elitism, Evolutionary Theory of Law, Commons and Private Property, Modern State. He edited many works by Bruno Leoni in English, French, Italian, Spanish and Czech.
Go to Profile#31019
Lê Dũng Tráng
#31031
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Lê Dũng Tráng, is a Vietnamese-French mathematician. Life and work At the end 1949, Lê Dũng Tráng came to France, where he attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He obtained a Ph.D. degree at the University of Paris in 1969 and 1971 under the supervision of Claude Chevalley and Pierre Deligne. From 1975 to 1999, he was professor at the University of Paris VII and research director of the CNRS. From 1983 to 1995 he was also a professor at the École Polytechnique. From 2002 to 2009 he headed the department of mathematics at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics , in Trieste, Ita...
Go to Profile#31020
Vesna Milosevic-Zdjelar
#31032
Overall Influence
Vesna Milosevic-Zdjelar is a Serbian-born Canadian astrophysicist, science educator and author. Her specialty is teaching astrophysics to students enrolled in non-science programs at the University of Winnipeg.
Go to Profile#31021
Dieter Pohl
#31033
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Dieter Pohl is a German historian and author who specialises in the Eastern European history and the history of mass violence in the 20th century. Education and career Dieter Pohl studied history and political science at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 1984 to 1990, graduating with a Masters of Arts. Under the direction of Hans Günter Hockerts, he completed his PhD dissertation Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941–1944 in 1995. From 1995 to August 2010, Pohl was a researcher, and then a department head, at the Munich Institute for Contemporary History. S...
Go to Profile#31022
David Roberts
#31034
Overall Influence
1943 - 2021 (78 years)
David Stuart Roberts was an American climber, mountaineer, college professor, and author of books and articles about climbing and the history of the American Southwest. He was particularly noted for his books The Mountain of My Fear and Deborah: A Wilderness Narrative, chronicling major ascents in Alaska in the 1960s, which had a major impact on the form of mountaineering literature.
Go to Profile#31023
Pat LaMarche
#31035
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Patricia Helen LaMarche is an American political figure and activist with the Green Party of the United States; she was the party's vice-presidential candidate in the 2004 United States presidential election, with David Cobb as its presidential candidate, and was one of seven co-chairs of the party’s national committee, and was elected to that position on July 24, 2005.
Go to Profile#31024
Mark Reed
#31036
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Mark Arthur Reed was an American physicist and professor at Yale University. He is noted particularly for seminal research on quantum dots. Career and education He coined the term quantum dots, for demonstrating the first zero-dimensional electronic device that had fully quantized energy states. Reed did research in electronic transport in nanoscale and mesoscopic systems, artificially structured materials and devices, molecular electronics, biosensors and bioelectronic systems, and nanofluidics. He was the author of more than 200 publications, had given over 75 plenary and over 400 invited talks, and held 33 U.S.
Go to Profile#31025
Peter Harvey
#31037
Overall Influence
1944 - 2013 (69 years)
Peter Michael St Clair Harvey was an Australian journalist and broadcaster. Harvey was a long-serving correspondent and contributor with the Nine Network from 1975 to 2013. Career Harvey studied his journalism cadetship with the Sydney newspaper The Daily Telegraph and won a Walkley Award in 1964. He worked at radio stations 2UE and 2GB before moving to London and working for BBC Radio. He then went on to The Guardian and the American Newsweek magazine as a reporter in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
Go to Profile#31026
Martin Hellwig
#31038
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Martin Friedrich Hellwig is a German economist. He has been the director of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods since 2004, after spending his academic career as a professor at University of Bonn , University of Basel , Harvard University , and University of Mannheim . Between 2000 and 2004 he was the head of the German . He is a fellow of the European Economic Association.
Go to Profile#31027
Jane den Hollander
#31039
Overall Influence
Jane Elizabeth den Hollander is an Australian University Administrator and was the sixth Vice-Chancellor of Deakin University. Den Hollander is currently serving as the Interim Vice Chancellor of Murdoch University.
Go to Profile#31028
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
#31040
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is a Professor and Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Biography Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is a scholar and historian, born in Gwanda, Matabeleland S., Zimbabwe.
Go to Profile#31029
Gishan Dissanaike
#31041
Overall Influence
Gishan Dissanaike is a financial economist. He is the Interim Dean of Cambridge Judge Business School and holds the Adam Smith Professorial Chair in Corporate Governance at the University of Cambridge. He has previously been the Head of the Finance & Accounting Subject Group at Cambridge University's Judge Business School. He was also the Director of the Cambridge MPhil Programme in Finance, a cross-faculty programme involving three faculties - the Faculty of Economics, Faculty of Mathematics and Cambridge Judge Business School. He is the son of George Dissanaike.
Go to Profile#31030
Raymond Lohier
#31042
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Raymond Joseph Lohier Jr. is a Canadian-born American lawyer who serves as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Formerly, he was an assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and a senior trial attorney in the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. He was the chief of the securities and commodities fraud task force in the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's office. He was recommended by New York Senator Charles Schumer for nomination to the seat on the Second Circuit that was vacated by Judge Sonia Sotomayor when she was elevated to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Go to Profile#31031
Evan Wallach
#31043
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Evan Jonathan Wallach is an American lawyer and senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. A former judge of the United States Court of International Trade, he is one of the nation's foremost experts on war crimes and the law of war.
Go to Profile#31032
Masashi Yanagisawa
#31044
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
is a Japanese-American molecular biologist and physician, famous for his discovery of the hormone endothelin and the neuropeptide orexin, the absence of which is the cause of narcolepsy. He is currently the Director of the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine, University of Tsukuba, and an adjunct professor at the Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
Go to Profile#31033
Jalaluddin Umri
#31045
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Syed Jalaluddin Umri was an Islamic scholar and writer. He was the Amir of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind from 2007 to 2019. Early life and education Jalaluddin Umri was born in 1935 in a village called Puttagram, District of North Arcot, Tamil Nadu, British India. He was a graduate of Jamia Darussalam, Oomerabad, Tamil Nadu. He received a master's degree in Islamic Studies from Jamia Darussalam. He also received a bachelor's degree in English literature from Aligarh Muslim University.
Go to Profile#31034
Peter Hedström
#31046
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Peter Hedström is one of the founders of the field of analytical sociology. He has made contributions to the analysis of social contagion processes and complex social networks, as well as to the philosophical and meta-theoretical foundations of analytical sociology. He is one of the key contributors to the literature on social mechanisms.
Go to Profile#31035
Mark Yudof
#31047
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Mark George Yudof is an American law professor and academic administrator. He is a former president of the University of California , former chancellor of the University of Texas System , and former president of the University of Minnesota .
Go to Profile#31036
Majid Hassanizadeh
#31048
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Seyed Majid Hassanizadeh is a professor of hydrogeology at Utrecht University, where he heads the Hydrogeology group at the Faculty of Geosciences. His research focuses on flow of fluids and transport of solutes and colloids in porous media, through theory development, experimental studies, and modeling work. In particular, he focuses on two-phase flow, reactive transport in variably-saturated porous media, transport of micro-organisms, and biodegradation.
Go to Profile#31037
Joe Painter
#31049
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Joe Painter FAcSS is a British geographer and academic, specialising in political geography. As of 2023, he is a professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University, part of the Politics-State-Space, IBRU Centre for Borders Research and Urban Worlds research groups.
Go to Profile#31038
David E. Aspnes
#31050
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
David Erik Aspnes is an American physicist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences . Aspnes developed fundamental theories of the linear and nonlinear optical properties of materials and thin films, and the technology of spectroscopic ellipsometry . SE is a metrology that is indispensable in the manufacture of integrated circuits.
Go to Profile#31039
Heather Cox Richardson
#31051
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Heather Cox Richardson is an American academic historian, author, and educator. She is a professor of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians. She previously taught history at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Go to Profile#31040
Zoran Đinđić
#31052
Overall Influence
1952 - 2003 (51 years)
Zoran Đinđić was a Serbian politician who served as the prime minister of Serbia from 2001 until his assassination in 2003. He was the mayor of Belgrade in 1997. Đinđić was a long-time opposition politician and held a doctorate in philosophy.
Go to Profile#31041
Dejan Stanković
#31053
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Dejan Stanković is a Serbian professional football manager and former player. He captained the Serbia national team from 2007 until 2011, when he announced his retirement from international football. He is currently the manager of Hungarian team Ferencváros.
Go to Profile#31042
John Charles
#31054
Overall Influence
1931 - 2004 (73 years)
William John Charles was a Welsh footballer who played as a centre-forward or as a centre-back. Best known for his first stint at Leeds United and Juventus, he was rated by many as the greatest all-round footballer ever to come from Wales. Charles is sometimes considered to be one of the greatest footballers in history.
Go to Profile#31043
Henry M. Hoenigswald
#31055
Overall Influence
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
Henry Max Hoenigswald was a German scholar of linguistics, who in 1939 escaped to the United States where he had a long and productive academic career as a scholar of historical linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#31044
Gerald Ellis Rosen
#31056
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Gerald Ellis Rosen is a former United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. Professional career Prior to taking the bench, Rosen was a senior partner in the law firm of Miller, Canfield, Paddock and Stone. While at Miller Canfield, Rosen was a trial lawyer, specializing in commercial, employment and constitutional litigation and litigated a number of important, high-profile cases.
Go to Profile#31045
D. Babu Paul
#31057
Overall Influence
1941 - 2019 (78 years)
Dr Daniel Babu Paul was an Indian civil servant, writer, member of the Indian Administrative Service All-India rank 7 from the Batch of 1964 and member Ombudsman for local self-government institutions of Kerala during 2000–2001. He was the Former Finance Secretary, Government of Kerala. He retired in the rank of Chief Secretary.
Go to Profile#31046
Patricia Pranke
#31058
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Patricia Helena Lucas Pranke is a Brazilian stem cell researcher at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. Between 2003 and 2005, Pranke was one of two scientists who helped the Federal Government of Brazil write the National Biosafety Law, regulating research on human embryonic stem cells in Brazil.
Go to Profile#31047
Cielito Habito
#31059
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Cielito Flores Habito or "Ciel" Habito is a Filipino economist, professor, and columnist. He served concurrently as the Director-General of the National Economic and Development Authority and Socio-Economic Planning Secretary during the Ramos administration.
Go to Profile#31048
Neva Abelson
#31060
Overall Influence
1910 - 2000 (90 years)
Neva Irene Martin Abelson was a distinguished research physician who co-discovered the life-saving blood test for the Rh blood factor . The Philip and Neva Abelson Hall at Washington State University was named in her honor.
Go to Profile#31049
Robert Jaulin
#31061
Overall Influence
1928 - 1996 (68 years)
Robert Jaulin was a French ethnologist. After several journeys to Chad, between 1954 and 1959, among the Sara people, he published in 1967 La Mort Sara in which he exposed the various initiation rites through which he had passed himself, and closely analyzed Sara geomancy. In La Paix blanche , he redefined the notion of ethnocide in relation to the extermination by the Western world of the Bari culture, located between Venezuela and Colombia. If a genocide designs the physical extermination of a people, an ethnocide refers to the extermination of a culture.
Go to Profile#31050
David Hillis
#31062
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
David Mark Hillis is an American evolutionary biologist, and the Alfred W. Roark Centennial Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is best known for his studies of molecular evolution, phylogeny, and vertebrate systematics. He created the popular Hillis Plot depiction of the evolutionary tree of life.
Go to Profile