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
#31901
Mary Collins
#31913
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Mary Katharine Levinge Collins, Lady Hunt is a British Professor of virology and the director of the Queen Mary University of London Blizard Institute. She served as Provost at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. Formerly, Collins taught in the Division of Infection and Immunity at University College London, and was the head of the Division of Advanced Therapies at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, and the Director of the Medical Research Council Centre for Medical Molecular Virology. Her research group studies the use of viruses as vectors for ...
Go to Profile#31902
Sandra Schmid
#31914
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Sandra Louise Schmid is the first Chief Scientific Officer of the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub. She is a Canadian cell biologist by training; prior to her move to CZI, she was Professor and Chair of the Cell Biology Department at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Throughout her academic career, she has authored over 105 publications on the molecular mechanism and regulation of clathrin-mediated endocytosis and the structure and function of the GTPase dynamin and mechanisms governing membrane fission. She was the first to identify dynamin's key role in endocytosis. She is a co-f...
Go to Profile#31903
Kurt Amplatz
#31915
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
Kurt Anton Amplatz was an Austrian radiologist and medical device inventor. He is best known for the invention of the Amplatzer Septal Occluder as well as the Amplatzer Cribriform Occluder, which is used for closing atrial septal defect, a common congenital heart defects found in infants. These devices are inserted by percutaneous catheter placement, thus avoiding open heart surgery. In 1958, he performed one of the first percutaneous catheterizations of the heart. Amplatz spent most of his 40-year career in Radiology as the Chairman of Interventional Radiology at the University of Minnesota.
Go to Profile#31904
Frankie Knuckles
#31916
Overall Influence
1955 - 2014 (59 years)
Francis Warren Nicholls Jr. , known professionally as Frankie Knuckles, was an American DJ, record producer, and remixer. He played an important role in developing and popularizing house music, a genre of music that began in Chicago during the early 1980s and subsequently spread worldwide. In 1997, Knuckles won the Grammy Award for Remixer of the Year, Non-Classical. Due to his importance in the development of the genre, Knuckles was often called "The Godfather of House Music".
Go to Profile#31905
Roland Boer
#31917
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Roland Boer is an Australian theologian and scholar of Marxism. He was awarded the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2014. Career Boer obtained a bachelors degree in divinity from the University of Sydney. He was a professor at University of Newcastle .
Go to Profile#31906
Imre Szeman
#31918
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Imre Szeman is a Canadian cultural theorist, professor, and public intellectual. He is Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Szeman was previously University Research Chair of Environmental Communication at the University of Waterloo, Canada Research Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta , and Senator William McMaster Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. In 2020, Szeman was named as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2022, he was the Leverhulme Visiting Professor in Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow.
Go to Profile#31907
Susan Whitfield
#31919
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Susan Whitfield is a British scholar, currently Professor in Silk Road Studies at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures , University of East Anglia. She previously worked at the British Library in London, England. She specialises in the history and archaeology of the Silk Road but has also written on human rights and censorship in China.
Go to Profile#31908
Michael Winterbottom
#31920
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Michael Winterbottom is an English film director. He began his career working in British television before moving into features. Three of his films—Welcome to Sarajevo, Wonderland and 24 Hour Party People—have competed for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. He and co-director Mat Whitecross won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 56th Berlin International Film Festival for their work on The Road to Guantanamo.
Go to Profile#31909
Ann E. Harrison
#31921
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Ann E. Harrison is the 15th Dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and the second woman to head the top-ranked business school. Dean Harrison is a renowned economist and one of the most highly-cited scholars on foreign investment and multinational firms.
Go to Profile#31910
Thavamani Jegajothivel Pandian
#31922
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Thavamani Jegajothivel Pandian , a retired professor of Madurai Kamaraj University , is an Indian geneticist and ecologist, known for his pioneering studies in bioenergetics and animal ecology. A recipient of the WorldFish Naga Award, he is a former chairman of the Task Force Committee on Aqua and Marine Biotechnology of the Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India, a former president and a fellow of The World Academy of Sciences and an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, National Academy of Sciences, India, Indian Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
Go to Profile#31911
Surajit Chandra Sinha
#31923
Overall Influence
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Surajit Chandra Sinha was an Indian anthropologist. Background Born in Durgapur Upazila in the Bengal Presidency , he was the eldest son of Maharaja Bhupendra Chandra Sinha of Susang, who was a student of Presidency College, Calcutta and a well-known landscape painter. His mother was a daughter of Jogendranath Moitra, the zamindar of Sithlai in Pabna District. Her family members traced their origins to the reign of Emperor Jahangir. Sinha's youngest sister is Purba Dam, the eminent exponent of Rabindrasangeet.
Go to Profile#31912
Michael Vaughan
#31924
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Michael Paul Vaughan is an English cricket commentator and former cricketer who played all forms of the game. He served as England captain for the test team from 2003 to 2008, the one-day international team from 2003 to 2007, and was the first Twenty20 England captain from 2005 to 2007. He represented Yorkshire in the domestic arena.
Go to Profile#31913
Josef Paul Kleihues
#31925
Overall Influence
1933 - 2004 (71 years)
Josef Paul Kleihues was a German architect, most notable for his decades long contributions to the "critical reconstruction" of Berlin. His design approach has been described as "poetic rationalist".
Go to Profile#31914
Eve Ewing
#31926
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Eve Louise Ewing is an American sociologist, author, poet, and visual artist from Chicago, Illinois. Ewing is a tenured professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Her academic research in the sociology of education includes her 2018 book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side, a study of school closures in Chicago. She is the former editor at Seven Scribes and the author of the poetry collection Electric Arches which was released in September 2017. In 2019, she published 1919, a poetry collection centered around the Chicago race riot of 1919.
Go to Profile#31915
Ruby Cohn
#31927
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Ruby Cohn was an American theater scholar and a leading authority on playwright Samuel Beckett. She was a professor of Comparative Drama at the University of California, Davis for thirty years. Early life and education Born in 1922 in Columbus, Ohio, Ruby Burman moved with her family to New York City, where she completed high school and graduated from Hunter College. During World War II she joined the WAVES and served as a document courier. After the war she returned to Europe and completed a doctoral degree at the University of Paris. In January 1953 while a student at the Sorbonne she at...
Go to Profile#31916
Jan-Ove Palmberg
#31928
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Jan-Ove Palmberg, born 1943, is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Linköping University. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Chalmers University of Technology in 1969 and 1975 respectively. He was appointed a Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Linköping University in 1975. In 1983–1990 he was the Dean of the Institute of Technology, in 2003-2006 he was the Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and in 2007 he was the Head of the Department of Management and Engineering.
Go to Profile#31917
Peter Wisoff
#31929
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Peter Jeffrey Kelsay Wisoff is an American physicist and former NASA astronaut. Wisoff qualified as mission specialist and flew in four Space Shuttle missions, with his first launch in 1993 and his last in 2000.
Go to Profile#31918
Gloria Conyers Hewitt
#31930
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Gloria Conyers Hewitt is an American mathematician. She was the fourth African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. Her main research interests were in group theory and abstract algebra. She is the first African American woman to chair a math department in the United States.
Go to Profile#31919
Mark Aronoff
#31931
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Mark Aronoff , a native of Montreal, Quebec, is a morphologist and distinguished professor at Stony Brook University. The editor of Language from 1995 to 2001 and president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2005, he has been elected a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#31920
Patricia Daley
#31932
Overall Influence
Patricia O. Daley is a British human geographer and academic, specialising in forced migration, political ecology, and Africa. She is Professor of Human Geography of Africa at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#31921
Edwin Frederick O'Brien
#31933
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Edwin Frederick O'Brien is an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He has been a cardinal since 2012 and headed the Order of the Holy Sepulchre from 2011 to 2019. O'Brien served as archbishop of the Archdiocese of Baltimore from 2007 to 2011 and as archbishop of the Archdiocese of the Military Services, USA, from 1997 to 2007. He was an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of New York from 1996 to 1997.
Go to Profile#31922
James Hopson
#31934
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
James Allen Hopson is an American paleontologist and professor at the University of Chicago. His work has focused on the evolution of the synapsids , and has been focused on the transition from basal synapsids to mammals, from the late Paleozoic through the Mesozoic Eras. He received his doctorate at Chicago in 1965, and worked at Yale before returning to Chicago in 1967 as a faculty member in Anatomy, and has also been a research associate at the Field Museum of Natural History since 1971. He has also worked on the paleobiology of dinosaurs, and his work, along with that of Peter Dodson,...
Go to Profile#31923
Yves Pouliquen
#31935
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Yves Pouliquen was a French ophthalmologist. His work focused on the pathology of the cornea. Pouliquen was born in Mortain. In 1992, he was made a member of the Académie nationale de médecine. In 1994 he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca and on 29 November 2001 he was elected to the Académie Française. Since 2006, he was the president of the Fondation Singer-Polignac.
Go to Profile#31924
Sylvie Vartan
#31936
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Sylvie Vartan is a Bulgarian-French singer and actress. She is known as one of the most productive and tough-sounding yé-yé artists. Her performances often featured elaborate show-dance choreography, and she made many appearances on French and Italian TV.
Go to Profile#31925
David Dumville
#31937
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
David Norman Dumville is a British medievalist and Celtic scholar. He attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic; Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; and received his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1976, presenting the thesis "The textual history of the Welsh-Latin Historia Brittonum". He is professor emeritus of Celtic & Anglo-Saxon at the University of Aberdeen. He has previously taught or held posts at Swansea University , the University of Pennsylvania , and the University of Cambridge, . Among other academic appointments, he was visiti...
Go to Profile#31926
Dustin Pedroia
#31938
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Dustin Luis Pedroia is an American former professional baseball second baseman who played his entire Major League Baseball career for the Boston Red Sox, from 2006 to 2019. He was a four-time All-Star, and won the American League Rookie of The Year Award in 2007 and the AL Most Valuable Player and Silver Slugger Award in 2008. He has also received four Gold Glove Awards and was named AL Defensive Player of the Year in 2013.
Go to Profile#31927
İhsan Ketin
#31939
Overall Influence
1914 - 1995 (81 years)
İhsan Ketin was a Turkish earth scientist. Early years He was born in 1914 in the Central Anatolian town of Kayseri, located at the foothills of Mt. Aergus . He won a state scholarship to study natural sciences abroad, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's plans of modernizing the newly formed Republic of Turkey. He started his undergraduate studies in Natural Sciences at Berlin University in 1934, and subsequently completed his doctorate at Bonn University in 1938 under the supervision of Hans Cloos, thus becoming the first native of Turkey with a doctorate degree in geology in the Republic of Turkey.
Go to Profile#31928
Mary Maples Dunn
#31940
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
Mary Maples Dunn was an American historian. She served as the eighth president of Smith College for ten years beginning in 1985. Dunn was also the director of the Schlesinger Library from 1995 to 2000. She was acting president of Radcliffe College when it merged with Harvard University, and she became the acting dean of the newly created Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study after the merger.
Go to Profile#31929
Paul K. Wright
#31941
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Paul Kenneth Wright is a mechanical engineer best known for his work on the UC Berkeley-based CyberCut/CyberBuild project, which established a set of standards that streamlined the conversion of creative manufacturing designs into rapid prototyping. Wright's NYU research group is also known for developing the first open-architecture control-of-manufacturing systems, and for developing Internet-based CAD/CAM systems.
Go to Profile#31930
Dieter Rucht
#31942
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Dieter Rucht is a German sociologist. He is known for his contributions to the protest and social movement literature. Until his retirement in June 2011, he was co-director of the research group Civil Society, Citizenship, and Political Mobilization in Europe at the Social Science Research Center Berlin and honorary professor at the institute of sociology of the Free University of Berlin .
Go to Profile#31931
Franz Erhard Walther
#31943
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Franz Erhard Walther is an interdisciplinary installation and conceptual artist known for his fabric objects and activations. Early life and education Born in 1939 in Fulda, Walther studied successively at the Werkkunstschule Offenbach and the Städelschule from 1957.
Go to Profile#31932
Philippe Jorion
#31944
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Philippe Jorion is an author, professor and risk manager. He is the author of more than 100 publications on the topic of risk management and international finance, and is credited with pioneering the Value at Risk approach to risk management.
Go to Profile#31933
Nicholas C. Handy
#31945
Overall Influence
1941 - 2012 (71 years)
Nicholas Charles Handy was a British theoretical chemist. He retired as Professor of quantum chemistry at the University of Cambridge in September 2004. Education and early life Handy was born in Wiltshire, England and educated at Clayesmore School. He studied the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge and completed his PhD on theoretical chemistry supervised by Samuel Francis Boys.
Go to Profile#31934
Pascale Cossart
#31946
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Pascale Cossart is a French bacteriologist who is affiliated with the Pasteur Institute of Paris. She is the foremost authority on Listeria monocytogenes, a deadly and common food-borne pathogen responsible for encephalitis, meningitis, bacteremia, gastroenteritis, and other diseases.
Go to Profile#31935
Asghar Farhadi
#31947
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Asghar Farhadi is an Iranian film director and screenwriter. He is considered one of the most prominent filmmakers of Iranian cinema as well as world cinema in 21st century. His films have gained stardom for him for their focus on the human condition, and portrayals intimate and challenging stories of internal family conflicts. In 2012, he was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. That same year, he also received the Legion of Honour from France.
Go to Profile#31936
Alex Eskin
#31948
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Alex Eskin is an American mathematician. He is the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on rational billiards and geometric group theory.
Go to Profile#31937
Wallace Givens
#31949
Overall Influence
1910 - 1993 (83 years)
James Wallace Givens, Jr. was a mathematician and a pioneer in computer science. He is the eponym of the well-known Givens rotations. Born the son of two teachers in Alberene, Virginia , he obtained his bachelor's degree from their young alma mater, Lynchburg College in 1928 at the age of 17; his master's degree from the University of Virginia under Ben Zion Linfield in 1931 ; and his doctorate from Princeton University in 1936 under Oswald Veblen.
Go to Profile#31938
Thomas King
#31950
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Thomas King is a Canadian writer and broadcast presenter who most often writes about First Nations. Early life and education Thomas Hunt King was born in Roseville, California, on April 24, 1943. He self-identifies as being of Cherokee, Greek, and German descent. King says his father left the family when the boys were very young, and that they were raised almost entirely by their mother. In his series of Massey Lectures, eventually published as a book The Truth About Stories , King tells that after their father's death, he and his brother learned that their father had two other families, nei...
Go to Profile#31939
Janet Soskice
#31951
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Janet Martin Soskice is a Canadian-born English Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher. Soskice was educated at Somerville College, Oxford. She is professor of philosophical theology and a fellow of Jesus College at the University of Cambridge. Her theological and philosophical work has dealt with the role of women in Christianity, religious language, and the relationship between science and religion.
Go to Profile#31940
Juan Grabois
#31952
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Juan Grabois is an Argentine lawyer, professor, writer and social leader. He is the founder of the Movimiento de Trabajadores Excluidos , the Confederaiton of Popular Economy Workers , and the Patria Grande Front.
Go to Profile#31941
Dave Edmunds
#31953
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
David William Edmunds is a Welsh singer-songwriter, guitarist and record producer. Although he is mainly associated with pub rock and new wave, having many hits in the 1970s and early 1980s, his natural leaning has always been towards 1950s-style rock and roll and rockabilly.
Go to Profile#31942
Pascal Auscher
#31954
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Pascal Auscher is a French mathematician working at University of Paris-Sud. Specializing in harmonic analysis and operator theory, he is mostly known for, together with Steve Hofmann, Michael Lacey, Alan McIntosh and Philippe Tchamitchian, solving the famous Kato's conjecture.
Go to Profile#31943
Koji Kondo
#31955
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Koji Kondo is a Japanese music composer, pianist, and sound director for the video game company Nintendo. He is best known for his many contributions to the Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda series of video games, among others produced by the company. Kondo was hired by Nintendo in 1984, becoming the first person hired by them to specialize in video game music. His work in the Mario and Zelda series have been cited as among the most memorable in video games, such as the Super Mario Bros. overworld theme.
Go to Profile#31944
Basil D'Oliveira
#31956
Overall Influence
1931 - 2011 (80 years)
Basil Lewis D'Oliveira CBE OIS was an England international cricketer of South African Cape Coloured background, whose potential selection by England for the scheduled 1968–69 tour of apartheid-era South Africa caused the D'Oliveira affair.
Go to Profile#31945
Phil Harding
#31957
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Philip Harding DL FSA is a British field archaeologist. He became a familiar face on the Channel 4 television series Time Team. Harding trained on various excavations with the Bristol University Extra Mural Department and other bodies from 1966; he has been a professional archaeologist since 1971.
Go to Profile#31946
Arsenio Hall
#31958
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Arsenio Hall is an American comedian, actor and talk show host. He hosted the late-night talk show, The Arsenio Hall Show, from 1989 until 1994, and again from 2013 to 2014. He has appeared in Martial Law, Coming to America , Coming 2 America , and Harlem Nights . He was also the host of Star Search and appeared as Alan Thicke's sidekick on the talk show Thicke of the Night.
Go to Profile#31947
Milton Nascimento
#31959
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Milton Silva Campos do Nascimento , also known as Bituca, is a Brazilian singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. Nascimento has won five Grammy Awards, including Best World Music Album for his album Nascimento in 1998.
Go to Profile#31948
Laurent Koscielny
#31960
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Laurent Koscielny is a French former professional footballer who played as a centre back. Born in Tulle, Koscielny began his football career playing for a host of youth clubs before moving to Guingamp in 2003, where he quickly progressed through the youth ranks, making his professional debut the following season. After becoming frustrated at being played out of position as a right back, he joined Tours for an undisclosed fee, quickly establishing himself as the team's star player in his desired position, ultimately aiding in the club's promotion into Ligue 1, while also being named in the Ligue 2 Team of the Season.
Go to Profile#31949
Yvonna Sessions Lincoln
#31961
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Yvonna Sessions Lincoln is an American methodologist and higher-education scholar. Currently a Distinguished Professor of Higher Education and Human Resource Development at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, Lincoln holds the Ruth Harrington Endowed Chair of Educational Leadership. As an author, she has been largely collected by libraries.
Go to Profile#31950
Danny Kortchmar
#31962
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Daniel "Danny Kootch" Kortchmar is an American guitarist, session musician, producer and songwriter. Kortchmar's work with singer-songwriters such as Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, David Crosby, Carole King, David Cassidy, Graham Nash, Neil Young, Steve Perry, and Carly Simon helped define the signature sound of the singer-songwriter era of the 1970s. Jackson Browne and Don Henley have recorded many songs written or co-written by Kortchmar, and Kortchmar was Henley's songwriting and producing partner in the 1980s.
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