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
#31651
Edward H. Schafer
#31663
Overall Influence
1913 - 1991 (78 years)
Edward Hetzel Schafer was an American historian, sinologist, and writer noted for his expertise on the Tang dynasty, and was a professor of Chinese at University of California, Berkeley, for 35 years. Schafer's most notable works include The Golden Peaches of Samarkand and The Vermilion Bird, which both explore China's interactions with other cultures and regions during the Tang dynasty.
Go to Profile#31652
Thea Tlsty
#31664
Overall Influence
Thea D. Tlsty is an American pathologist and professor of pathology at the University of California, San Francisco . She is known for her research in cancer biology and her involvement in the discovery of cells that may be at the origin of metaplastic cancer, an invasive form of breast cancer.
Go to Profile#31653
Ernest Aryeetey
#31665
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Ernest Aryeetey , is the secretary-general of the African Research Universities Alliance and a former vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana. Prior to his appointment as vice-chancellor, he was a senior fellow and director of the Africa Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. He was also director of the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research of the University of Ghana, Legon for the period February 2003 to January 2010.
Go to Profile#31654
Mauricio Funes
#31666
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Carlos Mauricio Funes Cartagena is a Salvadoran politician and former journalist who served as President of El Salvador from 2009 to 2014. Funes won the 2009 presidential election as the candidate of the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front party and took office on 1 June 2009.
Go to Profile#31655
Swanee Hunt
#31667
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Swanee Grace Hunt is an American writer, academic, and former diplomat. Hunt is a lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and was the founding director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School. From 1993 to 1997, she served as United States Ambassador to Austria. She is a recipient of the PEN/New England Award for non-fiction.
Go to Profile#31656
Solomon Darwin
#31668
Overall Influence
Solomon Darwin is an American professor of business and the director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation and the executive director of the Center for Growth Markets at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known as the visionary leader of the Smart Village Movement and for developing "smart village frameworks" for rural villages with the support of state and local governments in India and UC Berkeley. He published four books to support his thesis : "How to Create Smart Villages: Open Innovation Solutions for Emerging Markets", "How to Think lik...
Go to Profile#31657
Chris Offutt
#31669
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Christopher John Offutt is an American writer. He is most widely known for his short stories and novels, but he has also published three memoirs and multiple nonfiction articles. In 2005, he had a story included in a comic book collection edited by Michael Chabon, and another in the anthology Noir. He has written episodes for the TV series True Blood and Weeds.
Go to Profile#31658
Don Felder
#31670
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Donald William Felder is an American musician who was the lead guitarist of the rock band Eagles from 1974 until his termination from the band in 2001. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998 with the Eagles. Felder was inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum in 2016.
Go to Profile#31659
Anne Simon
#31671
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Anne Simon is an American biology professor, scientist, and a science advisor on the American television series The X-Files, both the original series for all nine seasons and the 2016 miniseries. The first episode of the original series that she provided science consultation on was the first-season finale "The Erlenmeyer Flask", which was telecast on May 13, 1994. She became involved with the series through her connection as a family friend of series creator Chris Carter. She wrote a 2001 book about the biological science of the show, The Real Science Behind the X-Files: Microbes, Meteorites a...
Go to Profile#31660
Stephen Alter
#31672
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Stephen Alter is an author of non-fiction and fiction, who was born and raised in India, where he grew up as the son of American missionaries. He lives in Landour, Uttarakhand, India. He graduated from Woodstock School in Landour and subsequently from Wesleyan University.
Go to Profile#31661
Mitio Nagumo
#31673
Overall Influence
1905 - 1995 (90 years)
Mitio Nagumo was a Japanese mathematician, who specialized in the theory of differential equations. He gave the first necessary and sufficient condition for positive invariance of closed sets under the flow induced by ordinary differential equations .
Go to Profile#31662
Richard McBrien
#31674
Overall Influence
1936 - 2015 (79 years)
Richard Peter McBrien was a Catholic priest, theologian, and writer, who was the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, U.S. He authored twenty-five books, including the very popular Catholicism, a reference text on the Church after the Second Vatican Council.
Go to Profile#31663
Walter Mebane
#31675
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Walter Richard Mebane, Jr. is a University of Michigan professor of political science and statistics and an expert on detecting electoral fraud. He has authored numerous articles on potentially fraudulent election results, including a series of notes on the results of the Iranian presidential election, 2009. He authored a paper disputing the Organization of American States's claim of fraud in the 2019 Bolivian general election as well.
Go to Profile#31664
Oskar von Hinüber
#31676
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Oskar von Hinüber is a German Indologist. He joined the German Navy after leaving high school, and holds the rank of commander as a reservist. From 1960 to 1966 he studied at University of Tübingen, University of Erlangen–Nuremberg ,and University of Mainz, receiving his Ph.D. in 1966. From 1965 to 1981 von Hinüber served as assistant and then associate professor at Mainz and from 1981 was a professor of Indology at the University of Freiburg. He retired in March 2006.
Go to Profile#31665
Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein
#31677
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
Genevieve Marie Grotjan Feinstein was an American mathematician and cryptanalyst. She worked for the Signals Intelligence Service throughout World War II, during which time she played an important role in deciphering the Japanese cryptography machine Purple, and later worked on the Cold War-era Venona project.
Go to Profile#31666
Richard A. McCormick
#31678
Overall Influence
1922 - 2000 (78 years)
Richard A. McCormick was a leading liberal Catholic moral theologian who reshaped Catholic thought in the United States. He wrote many journal articles on Catholic social teachings and moral theory. He was an expert in Catholic medical ethics and for many years wrote the "Notes on Moral Theology" column in Theological Studies. He was "particularly articulate" among the five moral theologians who in 1964 at the Kennedy Compound crafted a political position for the Kennedy clan that would permit abortion in law.
Go to Profile#31667
Alan Brisdon
#31679
Overall Influence
Alan K. Brisdon is a British chemist and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at The University of Manchester. His research in general is based on fluorine chemistry, including on HCFCs, fluorine-containing organometallic systems, fluorophosphines and fluorine-containing materials, such as ionic liquids and fluorographenes.
Go to Profile#31668
Kenneth A. R. Kennedy
#31680
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Kenneth Adrian Raine Kennedy was an anthropologist who studied at the University of California, Berkeley. He was Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Anthropology and Asian Studies in the Division of Biological Sciences at Cornell University. Among his areas of interest have been forensic anthropology and human skeletal biology. He died in Ithaca, New York on April 23, 2014.
Go to Profile#31669
Wang Liming
#31681
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Wang Liming is the Vice President of Renmin University of China and one of the foremost scholars of civil law in China. Biography Wang was born in Xiantao, Hubei Province, China. He received his LL.B. degree from Hubei Institute of Finance and Economics in 1981, and LL.M from Renmin University of China Department of Law in 1984.
Go to Profile#31670
Adrian Monck
#31682
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Adrian Monck is the managing director, Head of Public And Social Engagement at the World Economic Forum and a former British journalism professor and writer on the media and current affairs. Education Adrian Monck graduated from Exeter College, Oxford in 1988 with an honours degree in Modern History. At Oxford he was JCR President and edited Cherwell. In 2000 he was awarded an MBA from London Business School.
Go to Profile#31671
Martin Tajmar
#31683
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Martin Tajmar is a physicist and professor for Space Systems at the Dresden University of Technology. He has research interests in advanced space propulsion systems, FEEP thrusters, breakthrough propulsion physics and possible connections between gravity and superconductivity.
Go to Profile#31672
Norman Shepherd
#31684
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Norman Shepherd is an American theologian who served as associate professor of systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary from 1963 to 1981. Shepherd had a number of views that were criticized as being contrary to the Westminster Standards, and this led him to be dismissed from his post at Westminster. First and foremost, Shepherd was found to have taught students in the classroom that Justification was by the twofold instrument of faith and good works. This directly contradicted one of the two foundational Christian truths recovered during the Protestant Reformation—and a doctri...
Go to Profile#31673
Lynne Sharon Schwartz
#31685
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Lynne Sharon Schwartz is an American prose and poetry writer. Biography Schwartz grew up in Brooklyn, the second of three children of Jack M. Sharon, a lawyer and accountant, and Sarah Slatus Sharon; she married Harry Schwartz in 1957. She holds a BA from Barnard College, an MA from Bryn Mawr, and started work on a PhD at NYU. Schwartz has taught in many universities and writing programs, including Bryn Mawr, Columbia, the University of Michigan, Washington University, Rice, and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is currently on faculty in the Writing Seminars MFA program at Bennington College.
Go to Profile#31674
Kyle Cranmer
#31686
Overall Influence
Kyle Cranmer is an American physicist and a professor at New York University at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics and Affiliated Faculty member at NYU's Center for Data Science. He is an experimental particle physicist working, primarily, on the Large Hadron Collider, based in Geneva, Switzerland. Cranmer popularized a collaborative statistical modeling approach and developed statistical methodology, which was used extensively for the discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC in July, 2012.
Go to Profile#31675
David Pryor
#31687
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
David Hampton Pryor is an American politician and former Democratic United States Representative and United States Senator from the State of Arkansas. Pryor also served as the 39th Governor of Arkansas from 1975 to 1979 and was a member of the Arkansas House of Representatives from 1960 to 1966. He served as the interim chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party, following Bill Gwatney's assassination.
Go to Profile#31676
Steve Joordens
#31688
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Steve Joordens is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He teaches introductory psychology and a seminar course on the scientific study of conscious and unconscious influences. Joordens research areas include conscious and unconscious influences, memory, and the effective use of technology for education.
Go to Profile#31677
Karen Brooks Hopkins
#31689
Overall Influence
Karen Brooks Hopkins is the president emerita of Brooklyn Academy of Music, having served as its president from 1999 to 2015. Previously she was an adjunct professor for the Brooklyn College Program for Arts Administration. In the spring of 1995, Hopkins served as the executive producer of the Bergman Festival, which celebrated the life and work of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman.
Go to Profile#31678
Charles T. Kowal
#31690
Overall Influence
1940 - 2011 (71 years)
Charles Thomas Kowal was an American astronomer known for his observations and discoveries in the Solar System. As a staff astronomer at Caltech's Mount Wilson and Palomar Mountain observatories between 1961 and 1984, he found the first of a new class of Solar System objects, the centaurss, discovered two moons of the planet Jupiter, and discovered or co-discovered a number of asteroids, comets and supernovae. He was awarded the James Craig Watson Medal for his contributions to astronomy in 1979.
Go to Profile#31679
Samuel Fuller
#31691
Overall Influence
1912 - 1997 (85 years)
Samuel Michael Fuller was an American film director, screenwriter, novelist, journalist, actor, and World War II veteran known for directing low-budget genre movies with controversial themes, often made outside the conventional studio system. Fuller wrote his first screenplay for Hats Off in 1936, and made his directorial debut with the Western I Shot Jesse James . He would continue to direct several other Westerns and war thrillers throughout the 1950s.
Go to Profile#31680
Sara Hossain
#31692
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Sara Hossain is a leading Bangladeshi lawyer. She is a barrister in the Supreme Court of Bangladesh. Hossain is the honorary executive director of the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust , a major legal aid provider. Hossain has been at the forefront of advocating for women's rights in Bangladeshi courts and played a key role in drafting legal reforms to protect women. She was the plaintiff's lawyer in the landmark case of Bangladesh National Women Lawyers Association v. Bangladesh, in which the Supreme Court supported the judicial practice of referring to international human rights law in the absence of domestic legislation.
Go to Profile#31681
Zafar Ishaq Ansari
#31693
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Zafar Ishaq Ansari was a scholar of Islamic Studies. He was the Director General of the Islamic Research Institute of the International Islamic University. Previously, he was the President of the International Islamic University Islamabad.
Go to Profile#31682
Tatsuo Nishida
#31694
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
was a professor at Kyoto University. His work encompasses research on a variety of Tibeto-Burman languages, he made great contributions in particular to the deciphering of the Tangut language. Biography Born in Osaka, Nishida graduated from the Kyoto University Faculty of Letters in 1951. In 1958 he became assistant professor at Kyoto University. During his studies Ishihama Juntarō and Izui Hisanosuke had a formative impact on him.
Go to Profile#31683
Paolo Macchiarini
#31695
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Paolo Macchiarini is a Swiss-born Italian thoracic surgeon and former regenerative medicine researcher who became known for research fraud and manipulative behavior. He has been convicted of research-related crimes in Italy and Sweden.
Go to Profile#31684
Scott Pilarz
#31696
Overall Influence
1959 - 2021 (62 years)
Scott R. Pilarz was an American Jesuit priest and academic. He served two stints as president of the University of Scranton, first from 2003 to 2011 and again from 2018 until 2021. Pilarz was announced as the successor of Kevin Quinn on March 21, 2017, serving until his death in 2021. Prior to returning to Scranton, Pilarz served as the president of Marquette University and Georgetown Prep.
Go to Profile#31685
Magdalena Abakanowicz
#31697
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Magdalena Abakanowicz was a Polish sculptor and fiber artist, known for her use of textiles as a sculptural medium and for outdoor installations. She worked as a professor of studio art at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland, from 1965 to 1990, and as a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles in 1984.
Go to Profile#31686
Lane Kiffin
#31698
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Lane Monte Kiffin is an American football coach who is the head coach of the Ole Miss Rebels. Kiffin formerly was the offensive coordinator for the USC Trojans football team from 2005 to 2006, head coach of the National Football League's Oakland Raiders from 2007 to 2008, head coach of the University of Tennessee Volunteers college football team in 2009, and head coach of the Trojans from 2010 to 2013. He was the youngest head coach in modern NFL history at the time when he joined the Raiders , and, for a time, was the youngest head coach of a BCS Conference team in college football. Kiffin w...
Go to Profile#31687
Christopher Bruell
#31699
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Christopher Bruell is an American philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Boston College. He is known for his works on ancient Greek philosophy. Books On The Socratic Education, An Introduction to the Shorter Platonic Dialogues, Rowman & Littlefield, 1999Aristotle as Teacher: His Introduction to a Philosophical Science, St. Augustine's Press, 2014
Go to Profile#31688
Raphaël Rouquier
#31700
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Raphaël Alexis Marcel Rouquier is a French mathematician and a professor of mathematics at UCLA. Education Rouquier was born in Étampes, France. Rouquier studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1988 to 1989 and from 1989 to 1990 for a DEA in mathematics under the direction of Michel Broué, where he continued to study for his PhD. Rouquier spent the second year of his PhD study at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of J. G. Thompson.
Go to Profile#31689
James Doull
#31701
Overall Influence
1918 - 2001 (83 years)
James Alexander Doull was a Canadian philosopher and academic who was born and lived most of his life in Nova Scotia. His father was the politician, jurist, and historian John Doull. Biography From the late 1940s until the mid-1980s, he taught in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He was himself educated at Dalhousie as well as at the University of Toronto, Harvard University, and the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
Go to Profile#31690
Claude Lepelley
#31702
Overall Influence
1934 - 2015 (81 years)
Claude Lepelley was a 20th-21st-century French historian, a specialist of late Antiquity and North Africa during Antiquity. His thesis, Les cités de l'Afrique romaine au Bas-Empire, defended in 1977 under the direction of William Seston, profoundly changed the understanding of the urban world in the 3rd and 4th centuries; far from declining, the cities of Africa had some prosperity.
Go to Profile#31691
Franklin Serrano
#31703
Overall Influence
Franklin Leon Peres Serrano is a Brazilian economist and professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Biography He is currently an associate professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and an associate editor of the Review of Keynesian Economics magazine .
Go to Profile#31692
Tricky Stewart
#31704
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Christopher Alan "Tricky" Stewart is an American record producer, record executive, songwriter, and music publisher. Stewart began producing music in 1992, and has since won five Grammy Awards and is responsible for over 50 million records sold. He is credited on numerous singles and albums which have reached mainstream success, across the genres of hip hop, R&B and pop. Often in tandem with production partner and R&B singer The-Dream, his production work includes Mýa's "Case of the Ex" , Britney Spears' "Me Against the Music" , Rihanna's "Umbrella" , Mary J. Blige's "Just Fine" , Beyoncé's ...
Go to Profile#31693
Yvonne Tasker
#31705
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Yvonne Tasker is a British author and professor of media and communication in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. Tasker was previously professor of film studies and dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University of East Anglia.
Go to Profile#31694
Natasha Bedingfield
#31706
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Natasha Anne Bedingfield is a British singer and songwriter. She released her debut album, Unwritten, in 2004, which contained primarily up-tempo pop songs and was influenced by R&B music. It enjoyed international success with more than 2.3 million copies sold worldwide. Bedingfield received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for the title track "Unwritten", and at the 2005 and 2006 Brit Awards, she was nominated for Best British Female Artist. Unwritten also produced her only UK number one, "These Words".
Go to Profile#31695
Alec Muffett
#31707
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Alec David Edward Muffett is an Anglo-American internet security expert and software engineer. His work includes Crack, the original password cracker for Unix, and for the CrackLib password-integrity testing library. He is active in the open-source software community.
Go to Profile#31696
Nabila El-Bassel
#31708
Overall Influence
Nabila El-Bassel is an American scholar who is notable for her research into the interaction between substance abuse and marginalized communities. She is the Willma and Albert Musher Professor of Social Work and a University Professor at Columbia University and Director of the Social Intervention Group, which she co-founded in 1990.
Go to Profile#31697
Dean Malenko
#31709
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Dean Simon , better known by the ring name Dean Malenko, is an American retired professional wrestler. He is currently signed with All Elite Wrestling as a senior producer. He is best known for his time with Extreme Championship Wrestling and World Championship Wrestling . He is also known for his time in the World Wrestling Federation as a wrestler and a road agent and New Japan Pro-Wrestling .
Go to Profile#31698
Marcus Rediker
#31710
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Marcus Buford Rediker is an American professor, historian, writer, and social activist. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1976 and attended the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study, earning an Master of Arts and Ph.D. in history. He taught at Georgetown University from 1982 to 1994 and is currently a Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History of the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh.
Go to Profile#31699
Alan Bates
#31711
Overall Influence
1934 - 2003 (69 years)
Sir Alan Arthur Bates was an English actor who came to prominence in the 1960s, when he appeared in films ranging from the popular children's story Whistle Down the Wind to the "kitchen sink" drama A Kind of Loving.
Go to Profile#31700
Aaron Doering
#31712
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Aaron Doering is an American explorer, author, public speaker, and adventure learning pioneer. He was a full professor at the University of Minnesota until 2019, and the director and co-founder of the Learning Technologies Media Lab. Doering is a laureate of the humanitarian Tech Awards, and was a fellow for the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment. He is also a fellow for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
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