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
#31951
Manoj Juneja
#31963
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Manoj Juneja is the Deputy Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer of the United Nations World Food Programme . Prior to joining WFP, he served in 2011-12 as Deputy Director-General for Operations at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization , and in 2003-04 as Executive Director at the International Labour Organization .
Go to Profile#31952
Frank Haig
#31964
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Frank Rawle Haig, S.J. is an American Jesuit priest, physicist and academic administrator. He served as the third President of Wheeling Jesuit University from 1966 to 1972 and the seventh president of Le Moyne College from 1981 until 1987.
Go to Profile#31953
Mark W. Spong
#31965
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Mark W. Spong is an American roboticist. He is a professor of systems engineering and electrical and computer engineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering & Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas . He served as dean of the Jonsson School and the Lars Magnus Ericsson Chair in Electrical Engineering from 2008 to 2017. Before he joined UTD, he was the Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering, professor of electrical engineering, research professor of Coordinated Science Laboratory and Information Trust Institute, and director of Center for Autonomous Engineering Sy...
Go to Profile#31954
David Trotman
#31966
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
David John Angelo Trotman is a mathematician, with dual British and French nationality. He is a grandson of the poet and author Oliver W F Lodge and a great-grandson of the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge. He works in an area of singularity theory known as the theory of stratifications, and particularly on properties of stratifications satisfying the Whitney conditions and other similar conditions important for understanding topological stability.
Go to Profile#31955
Matthew Shenoda
#31967
Overall Influence
Matthew Shenoda is an Egyptian-American poet, writer, and professor based in the United States. Born July 14, 1977 in California to Coptic parents who immigrated from Egypt, Matthew Shenoda is a writer and educator whose poems and writings have appeared in a variety of newspapers, journals, radio programs and anthologies. His work has been supported by the California Arts Council and the Lannan Foundation among others.
Go to Profile#31956
William Bridges
#31968
Overall Influence
1933 - 2013 (80 years)
William Bridges was an American author, speaker, and organizational consultant. He emphasized the importance of understanding transitions as a key for organizations to succeed in making changes. He says transition is the psychological process of adapting to change. Transition consists of three phases: letting go of the past, the "neutral zone" where the past is gone but the new isn't fully present, and making the new beginning.
Go to Profile#31957
Yung Ho Chang
#31969
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Yung Ho Chang is a Chinese-American architect and Professor of MIT Architecture. He was formerly the head of the Department of Architecture at MIT. He studied at the Nanjing Institute of Technology before moving to the US. Then he received his M.Arch. from the University of California, Berkeley, and taught in the US for 15 years before returning to Beijing to establish China's first private architecture firm, Atelier FCJZ. He has exhibited internationally as an artist as well as architect and is widely published, including the monograph Yung Ho Chang/Atelier Feichang Jianzhu: A Chinese Practice.
Go to Profile#31958
Malcolm C. Smith
#31970
Overall Influence
Malcolm Clive Smith FREng, FIEEE is a British electrical engineer. He is a professor of control engineering at the University of Cambridge. He is notable for his contributions to feedback control and systems theory. He is also the inventor of the inerter, used in mechanical network synthesis.
Go to Profile#31959
Peter Wynn
#31971
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Peter Wynn was an English mathematician. His main achievements concern approximation theory – in particular the theory of Padé approximants – and its application in numerical methods for improving the rate of convergence of sequences of real numbers.
Go to Profile#31960
Edna Shavit
#31972
Overall Influence
1935 - 2015 (80 years)
Edna Shavit was an Israeli professor affiliated with the theater department of Tel Aviv University. She was married to Yoram Gal between 1994 and 2003. In the 1960s, Shavit played Lucky in a local production of Waiting for Godot and went on to direct the play in the 1970s Shavit was the director of You and Me and the Next War, a satirical cabaret by Hanoch Levin with songs set to music by Alex Kagan and Beni Nagari.
Go to Profile#31961
Samuel R. Gross
#31973
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Samuel Raymond Gross is an American lawyer and the Thomas and Mabel Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Gross is best known for his work in false convictions and exonerations, notably the Larry Griffin death penalty case.
Go to Profile#31962
Les Miles
#31974
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Leslie Edwin Miles is a former American football coach. He most recently served as the head coach at Kansas. His head coaching career began with the Oklahoma State Cowboys, where he coached from 2001 to 2004. Following that, he coached LSU from 2005 to 2016. Miles is nicknamed "the Hat" for his signature white cap, as well as "the Mad Hatter" for his eccentricities and play-calling habits. Prior to being a head coach, he was an assistant coach at Oklahoma State as well as at the University of Michigan, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and with the Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League .
Go to Profile#31963
Thomas P. Bostick
#31975
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Thomas Paul Bostick was the 53rd Chief of Engineers of the United States Army and Commanding General of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Since the creation of West Point in 1802 as the Nation's first engineering school, Bostick is the only African American graduate of the academy to serve as the Chief of Engineers and Commanding General of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Following his military career, Bostick served as the Chief Operating Officer and President of Intrexon Bioengineering . He serves on the Boards of CSX, Perma-Fix, Fidelity Investments' Equity and High Income Fund, HireVue, and Allonnia.
Go to Profile#31964
B.o.B
#31976
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Bobby Ray Simmons Jr. , known professionally as B.o.B, is an American rapper and record producer. Raised in Decatur, Georgia, Simmons was signed to Jim Jonsin's Rebel Rock Entertainment imprint in 2006. Two years later, Jonsin and Simmons signed a joint venture recording contract with fellow Georgia rapper T.I.'s Grand Hustle Records, an imprint of Atlantic Records. Following his major-label deal, Simmons quickly achieved commercial success when his debut single "Nothin' on You" , reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart in 2009, and earned a Grammy Award for Record of the Year nom...
Go to Profile#31965
Nando de Freitas
#31977
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Nando de Freitas is a researcher in the field of machine learning, and in particular in the subfields of neural networks, Bayesian inference and Bayesian optimization, and deep learning. Biography De Freitas was born in Zimbabwe. He did his undergraduate studies and MSc at the University of the Witwatersrand, and his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge . From 2001, he was a professor at the University of British Columbia, before joining the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford from 2013 to 2017. He now works for Google's DeepMind.
Go to Profile#31966
Robert Megginson
#31978
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Robert Eugene Megginson is an American mathematician, the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. His research concerns functional analysis and Banach spaces; he is the author of the textbook An Introduction to Banach Space Theory .
Go to Profile#31967
Frederick A. de Armas
#31979
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Frederick A. de Armas is a literary scholar, critic and novelist who is Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in Humanities at the University of Chicago. Biography Frederick A. de Armas was born in Havana, Cuba on February 9, 1945. He attended elementary school at La Salle and when his parents moved to France, he went to boarding school at Le Rosey in Switzerland. After his family lost their possessions as a result of the Cuban Revolution, he moved to the United States. De Armas holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , and ha...
Go to Profile#31968
Anupam Saikia
#31980
Overall Influence
Anupam Saikia is an Indian mathematician and at present professor in the Department of Mathematics at IIT Guwahati, India. He is known for his work related to arithmetic number theory, in particular applications to Iwasawa Theory and p-adic measures. He has also published articles in mathematical cryptography.
Go to Profile#31969
John Alcock
#31981
Overall Influence
1942 - 2023 (81 years)
John Alcock is an American behavioral ecologist and author. He is currently the Emeritus' Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. His research interests include the evolution of diversity in insect populations, studying the adaptive value of different ways in which males find mating partners. He has authored several books, including The Kookaburras' Song: Exploring Animal Behavior in Australia , Sonoran Desert Summer , The Triumph of Sociobiology , and Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach . He authored Sonoran Desert Spring which was illustrated by Marilyn ...
Go to Profile#31970
Antoni Muntadas
#31982
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Antoni Muntadas is a postconceptual multimedia artist, who resides in New York since 1971. His work often addresses social, political and communications issues through different media: such as photography, video, text and image publications, the Internet, and multi-media installations.
Go to Profile#31971
Nikolay Fedorenko
#31983
Overall Influence
1917 - 2006 (89 years)
Nikolay Prokofyevich Fedorenko was a Russian economist and chemist. He was the head of the Central Economic Mathematical Institute in Moscow from 1963 to 1985. Biography Fedorenko graduated from Moscow Institute of Fine Chemical Technologies.
Go to Profile#31972
Richard Bronson
#31984
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Richard D. Bronson is an American professor emeritus of mathematics at Fairleigh Dickinson University where he served as Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Acting Dean of the College of Science and Engineering, Interim Provost of the Metropolitan Campus, Director of Government Affairs, and Senior Executive Assistant to the President. He served as an officer of the International Association of University Presidents, where he was actively involved in the creation of the United Nations Academic Impact initiative and the World Innovative Summit in Education, held annually in Qatar.
Go to Profile#31973
Hunter R. Rawlings III
#31985
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Hunter Ripley Rawlings III is an American classics scholar and academic administrator. He is best known for serving as the 17th President of the University of Iowa from 1987 until 1995 and as the 10th President of Cornell University from 1995 until 2003. He also served as Cornell's interim president in 2005–2006 and again from 2016–2017. Currently, Rawlings is Professor and University President Emeritus at the Department of Classics.
Go to Profile#31974
Nobu Tamura
#31986
Overall Influence
Nobumichi Tamura, often shortened to Nobu Tamura, is a French-born Japanese American paleoartist and physicist. He currently lives in California, United States. Biography Tamura became a physicist with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and is an artist specializing in the field of paleoart.
Go to Profile#31975
Terence Miller
#31987
Overall Influence
1918 - 2015 (97 years)
Terence George Miller was a British academic and professor of geology. He was appointed Principal of the University of Rhodesia in 1967. During this period, his political views brought him hate mail and he rapidly came into conflict with the government. When in 1969 Rhodesia declared itself a republic, with a racist constitution, Prof. Miller resigned his position and returned to the UK, joining the University of Reading as visiting professor, before being appointed Director of the newly formed Polytechnic of North London in 1971.
Go to Profile#31976
Mary Ann Lila
#31988
Overall Influence
Mary Ann Lila is the director of N.C. State University's Plants for Human Health Institute located at the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis, North Carolina. The institute is part of N.C. State's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. In her role with PHHI, Lila is a David H. Murdock Distinguished Professor and part of N.C. State's Department of Food, Bioprocessing and Nutrition Sciences. She is a researcher and has been called "the rock star of blueberry research."
Go to Profile#31977
Weeb Ewbank
#31989
Overall Influence
1907 - 1998 (91 years)
Wilbur Charles "Weeb" Ewbank was an American professional football coach. He led the Baltimore Colts to consecutive NFL championships in 1958 and 1959 and the New York Jets to victory in Super Bowl III in January 1969. He is the only coach to win a championship in both the National Football League and American Football League .
Go to Profile#31978
Clement Markert
#31990
Overall Influence
1917 - 1999 (82 years)
Clement Lawrence Markert was an American biologist credited with the discovery of isozymes . He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and served as president of several biology societies.
Go to Profile#31979
Ingrid Moses
#31991
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Ingrid Moses , an Australian academic and former university administrator, is an emeritus professor at the University of Canberra. After a long academic career in Australia, Moses served as the Chancellor of the University of Canberra between 2006 and 2011.
Go to Profile#31980
Michael Elowitz
#31992
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Michael B. Elowitz is a biologist and professor of Biology, Bioengineering, and Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology, and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2007 he was the recipient of the Genius grant, better known as the MacArthur Fellows Program for the design of a synthetic gene regulatory network, the Repressilator, which helped initiate the field of synthetic biology. He was the first to show how inherently random effects, or 'noise', in gene expression could be detected and quantified in living cells, leading to a growing recognition of the many roles that noise plays in living cells.
Go to Profile#31981
Emomali Rahmon
#31993
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Emomali Sharipovich Rahmonov is a Tajik politician who has been serving as 3rd President of Tajikistan since 16 November 1994. Previously he was the Chairman of the Supreme Assembly of Tajikistan, as the de facto head of state from 20 November 1992 to 16 November 1994 . Since 18 March 1998, he has also served as the leader of the left-wing People's Democratic Party of Tajikistan, which dominates the Parliament of Tajikistan. On 30 September 1999, he was elected vice-president of the UN General Assembly for a one-year term.
Go to Profile#31982
Fabien Eboussi Boulaga
#31994
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Fabien Eboussi Boulaga was a Cameroonian philosopher. Biography Born in 1934 in Bafia, Eboussi Boulaga earned his high school diploma from the Akono Minor Seminary , before joining the Society of Jesus in 1955. He was ordained as a priest in 1969, and became an official member of the Society of Jesus in 1973. He became known as a polemical figure, for example in his book Bantou problématique , and in his theological stance, notably in La démission , which caused an outcry in ecclesiastical circles; this latter publication called for the organised departure of missionaries. Three years later,...
Go to Profile#31983
Donald Symons
#31995
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Donald Symons is an American anthropologist best known as one of the founders of evolutionary psychology, and for pioneering the study of human sexuality from an evolutionary perspective. He is one of the most cited researchers in contemporary sex research. His work is referenced by scientists investigating an extremely diverse range of sexual phenomena. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker describes Symons' The Evolution of Human Sexuality as a "groundbreaking book" and "a landmark in its synthesis of evolutionary biology, anthropology, physiology, psychology, fiction, and cultural analysis, written with a combination of rigor and wit.
Go to Profile#31984
Alexei Kudrin
#31996
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Alexei Leonidovich Kudrin is a Russian liberal politician and economist. Previously he served as the Chairman of the Accounts Chamber from 2018 to 2022 and as Minister of Finance from 2000 to 2011. Since December 9, 2022 Corporate Development Advisor at Yandex.
Go to Profile#31985
Larry Sanders
#31997
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Lawrence Sanders is an American-British academic, social worker, politician, and former Health and Social Care Spokesperson of the Green Party of England and Wales. He is the older brother of Bernie Sanders, United States Senator from Vermont, and two-time U.S. presidential candidate.
Go to Profile#31986
William Gosling
#31998
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
William Gosling is a British electrical engineer, Emeritus Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Bath, and pioneer of system design in electrical engineering. Biography Gosling received his ARCS at the Imperial College in London in 1953 under George Paget Thomson, and spent his career both in industry and education. Early 1960s he wrote a series of books, which contributed to the establishment of systems design and systems engineering.
Go to Profile#31987
Kris Humphries
#31999
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Kristopher Nathan Humphries is an American retired professional basketball player who played in the National Basketball Association . He played in the NBA for the Utah Jazz, Toronto Raptors, Dallas Mavericks, New Jersey / Brooklyn Nets, Boston Celtics, Washington Wizards, Phoenix Suns, and the Atlanta Hawks. Humphries played college basketball for the Minnesota Golden Gophers of the University of Minnesota, and for the United States men's national basketball team.
Go to Profile#31988
Jürgen Jasperneite
#32000
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Jürgen Jasperneite is a German Engineer and Professor for Computer networks at the OWL University in Lemgo, North Rhine-Westphalia. Here he is the founding director of the Fraunhofer IOSB-INA in Lemgo and a board member of the University Institute Industrial IT .
Go to Profile#31989
Yashwant Sinha
#32001
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Yashwant Sinha is an Indian administrator and politician. He served as the Minister of Finance from 1990 until 1991 under Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar and again from March 1998 to July 2002 under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He also served as the Minister of External Affairs from July 2002 until May 2004. He was a senior leader of the BJP before he left the party on 21 April 2018.
Go to Profile#31990
Knut Kleve
#32002
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Knut Kleve was a Norwegian classical philologist and a professor at the University of Bergen and at the University of Oslo. He was particularly known for his efforts on restoration of papyrus fragments from the ancient Roman town Herculaneum.
Go to Profile#31991
Peter Hain
#32003
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Peter Gerald Hain, Baron Hain , is a British politician who served as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 2005 to 2007, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions from 2007 to 2008 and twice as Secretary of State for Wales from 2002 to 2008 and from 2009 to 2010. A member of the Labour Party, he was Member of Parliament for Neath between 1991 and 2015.
Go to Profile#31992
Carole Boyce Davies
#32004
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Carole Boyce Davies is a Caribbean-American professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University, the author of the prize-winning Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Claudia Jones and the classic Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject , as well as editor of several critical anthologies in African and Caribbean literature. She is currently the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, an endowed chair named after the 9th president of Cornell University. Among several other awards, she was the recipient of two major awards, both in 2017: the Frantz Fa...
Go to Profile#31993
Yi Cheong
#32005
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Yi Cheong is a member of the former Imperial Family of Korea and was a Korean-Japanese noble during Korea under Japanese rule in 1945–1947. He is a great-great-grandson of Heungseon Daewongun and the eldest son of Yi U and Park Chan-ju.
Go to Profile#31994
Hans Helmut Kornhuber
#32006
Overall Influence
1928 - 2009 (81 years)
Hans Helmut Kornhuber was a German neurologist and neurophysiologist. Biography Hans Helmut Kornhuber was born as the second of three children of Dr. med. Gertrud and Dr. Arnold Kornhuber. He grew up at a small place Methgen near Königsberg. Eight years old he was admitted to the Friedrich Kollegium in Königsberg. Schooltime ended with preliminary maturity in summer 1944. He was interested in chemistry and got into contact with the chemical institute of the University of Königsberg. With the capitulation of Königsberg on 9 April Kornhuber became a soviet prisoner of war for four and a half years.
Go to Profile#31995
Sammy Cahn
#32007
Overall Influence
1913 - 1993 (80 years)
Samuel Cohen , known professionally as Sammy Cahn, was an American lyricist, songwriter, and musician. He is best known for his romantic lyrics to films and Broadway songs, as well as stand-alone songs premiered by recording companies in the Greater Los Angeles Area. He and his collaborators had a series of hit recordings with Frank Sinatra during the singer's tenure at Capitol Records, but also enjoyed hits with Dean Martin, Doris Day and many others. He played the piano and violin, and won an Oscar four times for his songs, including the popular hit "Three Coins in the Fountain".
Go to Profile#31996
Anna Costanza Baldry
#32008
Overall Influence
1970 - 2019 (49 years)
Anna Costanza Baldry was an Italian social psychologist and criminologist. She was a professor at Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli. An expert on issues related to violence against women and children, Baldry consulted with such organizations as the United Nations and NATO. For her contributions to society, she was awarded the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.
Go to Profile#31997
Jerry Hall
#32009
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jerry Faye Hall is an American model and actress. She began modeling in the 1970s and became one of the most sought after models in the world. She transitioned into acting, appearing in the 1989 film Batman. Hall was the long-term partner of Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger, with whom she has four children. She was the fourth wife of Rupert Murdoch until they divorced in 2022.
Go to Profile#31998
Hayden Fry
#32010
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
John Hayden Fry was an American college football player and coach. He served as the head football coach at Southern Methodist University from 1962 to 1972, North Texas State University—now known as the University of North Texas—from 1973 to 1978, and the University of Iowa from 1979 to 1998, compiling a career coaching record of 232–178–10. Fry played in college at Baylor University. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach in 2003.
Go to Profile#31999
Sen Sōshitsu XV
#32011
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (103 years)
Sen Sōshitsu XV is the 15th-generation Grand Master of Urasenke, which is one of the most widely known schools of Japanese tea, and served in official capacity from 1964 to 2002. In 1949, he received the Zen title Hōunsai . Following his retirement, he adopted the name Sen Genshitsu , with the honorary title Daisōshō, in order to distinguish him from his son and successor, Sen Sōshitsu XVI. For over seven decades, Dr. Sen Genshitsu has traveled across the world in order to promote the ethos of "Peacefulness through a Bowl of Tea".
Go to Profile#32000
Martin Freer
#32012
Overall Influence
Martin Freer is a British Nuclear Physicist, professor, and was previously head of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham. He won the 2010 Rutherford Medal and Prize for establishing the existence of nuclear configurations analogous to molecules.
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