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
#32001
Mantle Hood
#32013
Overall Influence
1918 - 2005 (87 years)
Mantle Hood was an American ethnomusicologist. Among other areas, he specialized in studying gamelan music from Indonesia. Hood pioneered, in the 1950s and 1960s, a new approach to the study of music, and the creation of the first American university program devoted to ethnomusicology, at the University of California, Los Angeles . He was known for a suggestion, somewhat novel at the time, that his students learn to play the music they were studying.
Go to Profile#32002
Claudio Abbado
#32014
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Claudio Abbado was an Italian conductor who was one of the leading conductors of his generation. He served as music director of the La Scala opera house in Milan, principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, music director of the Vienna State Opera, founder and director of Lucerne Festival Orchestra, founder and director of Mahler Chamber Orchestra, founding Artistic Director of Orchestra Mozart and music director of European Union Youth Orchestra.
Go to Profile#32003
Jack Layton
#32015
Overall Influence
1950 - 2011 (61 years)
John Gilbert Layton was a Canadian academic and politician who served as the leader of the New Democratic Party from 2003 to 2011 and leader of the Official Opposition in 2011. He previously sat on Toronto City Council, occasionally holding the title of acting mayor or deputy mayor of Toronto during his tenure as city councillor. Layton was the member of Parliament for Toronto—Danforth from 2004 until his death.
Go to Profile#32004
Barbara Windsor
#32016
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
Dame Barbara Windsor was an English actress, known for her roles in the Carry On films and for playing Peggy Mitchell in the BBC One soap opera EastEnders. She joined the cast of EastEnders in 1994 and won the 1999 British Soap Award for Best Actress, before ultimately leaving the show in 2016 when her character was killed off.
Go to Profile#32005
Richard F. Thompson
#32017
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Richard Frederick Thompson was an American behavioral neuroscientist. He was the William M. Keck Professor of Psychology and Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California, with a parallel appointment as professor of neurology. Thompson was known for his work on learning and memory. His graduate student, David A. McCormick discovered that the cerebellum was critical in learning and performance in classical conditioning. During his career, he served as editor-in-chief of the scientific journals Physiological Psychology, Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, and Be...
Go to Profile#32006
Phillip Hallam-Baker
#32018
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Phillip Hallam-Baker is a computer scientist, mostly known for contributions to Internet security, since the design of HTTP at CERN in 1992. Self-employed since 2018 as a consultant and expert witness in court cases, he previously worked at Comodo, Verisign, and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is a frequent participant in IETF meetings and discussions, and has written a number of RFCs. In 2007 he authored the dotCrime Manifesto: How to Stop Internet Crime; Ron Rivest used it as a source of project ideas for his course on Computer and Network Security at MIT in 2013.
Go to Profile#32007
Jack Baldwin
#32019
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Sir Jack Edward Baldwin was a British chemist. He was a Waynflete Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and head of the organic chemistry at Oxford. Education Baldwin was the second son of Frederick C N Baldwin and Olive F Headland. He was educated at Brighton Grammar School and Lewes County Grammar School. He attended Imperial College, London . He received his Ph.D. working under the direction of Sir Derek H.R. Barton, FRS, Nobel Laureate, who described him as his best student.
Go to Profile#32008
Louis René Beres
#32020
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Louis René Beres is emeritus professor of political science and international law at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He was born on August 31, 1945, in Zürich, Switzerland, and earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1971. Beres has written many books and currently also writes editorials for various major newspapers and magazines.
Go to Profile#32009
Colin Howson
#32021
Overall Influence
1945 - 2020 (75 years)
Colin Howson was a British philosopher. He was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he joined the faculty on 1 July 2008. Previously, he was Professor of Logic at the London School of Economics. He completed a PhD on the philosophy of probability in 1981. In the late 1960s he had been a research assistant of Imre Lakatos at LSE. He died on Sunday 5 January 2020.
Go to Profile#32010
Olle Häggström
#32022
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Olle Häggström is a professor of mathematical statistics at Chalmers University of Technology. Häggström earned his doctorate in 1994 at Chalmers University of Technology with Jeffrey Steif as supervisor. He became an associate professor in the same university in 1997, and professor of mathematical statistics at University of Gothenburg in 2000. In 2002 he was back at Chalmers University of Technology as professor. He mainly researches on probability theory such as Markov chains, percolation theory and other models in statistical mechanics.
Go to Profile#32011
Niyazi Serdar Sarıçiftçi
#32023
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Niyazi Serdar Sarıçiftçi is a Turkish-Austrian physicist. He is professor for physical chemistry at the Johannes Kepler University Linz. There, he leads the Institut for Physical Chemistry as well as the Institut for Organic Solar Cells .
Go to Profile#32012
Michael Crawford
#32024
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Michael Hewson Crawford, is a British ancient historian and numismatist. Having taught at Christ's College, Cambridge and the University of Cambridge, he was Professor of Ancient History at University College London from 1986 until he retired in 2005.
Go to Profile#32013
Steven Adler
#32025
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Steven Adler is an American musician. He is the former drummer and co-songwriter of the hard rock band Guns N' Roses, with whom he achieved worldwide success in the late 1980s. Adler was fired from Guns N' Roses over his heroin addiction in 1990, following which he reformed his pre-Guns N' Roses band Road Crew and briefly joined BulletBoys. During the 2000s, Adler was the drummer of the band Adler's Appetite, and from 2012, he had held the same position in the band Adler. In early 2017, he declared that he had no intention to continue with the band and that the band has been dissolved, with t...
Go to Profile#32014
Lawrence Witmer
#32026
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Lawrence M. Witmer is an American paleontologist and paleobiologist. He is a Professor of Anatomy and a Chang Ying-Chien Professor of Paleontology at the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine in Ohio University. Witmer is considered to be one of the world's foremost experts on soft-tissue anatomy of the skull in extinct animals such as dinosaurs and pterosaurs. One of Witmer's largest contributions to vertebrate paleontology was the creation of the Extant Phylogenetic Bracket approach to ancestral character state reconstruction. This methodology inc...
Go to Profile#32015
Andrzej Przyłębski
#32027
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Andrzej Przyłębski is a Polish philosopher, author of six books on neokantianism and on hermeneutics; past Służba Bezpieczeństwa informer codename TW Wolfgang; between 2016 and 2022 serving as an ambassador to Germany.
Go to Profile#32016
William M. Gray
#32028
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
William "Bill" Mason Gray was emeritus professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University , and the head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at CSU's Department of Atmospheric Sciences. He is widely regarded as a pioneer in the science of tropical cyclone forecasting and one of the world's leading experts on tropical storms. After retiring as a faculty member at CSU in 2005, Gray remained actively involved in both climate change and tropical cyclone research until his death.
Go to Profile#32017
Afrojack
#32029
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Nick Leonardus van de Wall , better known as Afrojack, is a Dutch DJ, music producer and remixer. In 2007, he founded the record label Wall Recordings; his debut album Forget the World was released in 2014. Afrojack regularly features as one of the ten best artists in the Top 100 DJs published by DJ Mag. He is also the CEO of LDH Europe.
Go to Profile#32018
Chrystia Freeland
#32030
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Christina Alexandra Freeland is a Canadian politician serving as the tenth and current deputy prime minister of Canada since 2019 and the minister of finance since 2020. A member of the Liberal Party, Freeland represents the Toronto riding of University—Rosedale in the House of Commons. She was first appointed to Cabinet following the 2015 federal election.
Go to Profile#32019
Angelika Amon
#32031
Overall Influence
1967 - 2020 (53 years)
Angelika Amon was an Austrian American molecular and cell biologist, and the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Amon's research centered on how chromosomes are regulated, duplicated, and partitioned in the cell cycle. Amon was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.
Go to Profile#32020
Alessandro Pizzorno
#32032
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
Alessandro Pizzorno was an Italian sociologist, political scientist and philosopher. Career He completed his philosophy studies at the University of Turin, and in social sciences in Vienna and Paris.
Go to Profile#32021
Robert T. Craig
#32033
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Robert T. Craig is an American communication theorist from the University of Colorado, Boulder who received his BA in Speech at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and his MA and PhD in communication from Michigan State University. Craig was on the 1988 founding board of the journal "Research on Language and Social Interaction," a position he continues to hold. From 1991 to 1993 Craig was the founding editor of the International Communication Association journal "Communication Theory" which has been in continuous publication since 1991. He is currently the editor for the ICA Handbook series.
Go to Profile#32022
Kolo Touré
#32034
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Kolo Abib Touré is an Ivorian professional football manager and former player. He most recently managed Championship side Wigan Athletic. Beginning his career as a defender with ASEC Mimosas, Touré moved to English team Arsenal in 2002, where he made 326 appearances for the club and was a member of the 03–04 'invincibles' side. In 2009, he moved to Manchester City, where he was joined a year later by his younger brother, Yaya Touré, helping City earn their first league title in 44 years. In 2013, Touré signed for Liverpool. He is one of the eight players who have won the Premier League with two clubs, having won it with Arsenal and City.
Go to Profile#32023
Zhou Guozhi
#32035
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Zhou Guozhi is a Chinese material scientist and physical chemist. He is an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences , and a professor of material science and engineering in Shanghai University.
Go to Profile#32024
Alessandro Melis
#32036
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Alessandro Melis is an Italian architect and the curator of the Italian National Pavilion at the 17th Venice Biennale. He is also a professor of architecture and the inaugural endowed chair of the New York Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#32025
Carol Spradling
#32037
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Carol Spradling is an American professor, computer scientist who served as the first Director of the School of Computer Science and Information Systems at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri. She is known for her work with computer ethics, profession-based education, interactive media, and expanding the involvement of underrepresented groups and women in computing. Dr. Spradling taught computer science courses and served as a provost fellow and a liaison to the Northland Center For Advanced Professional Studies program. Spradling served on the Missouri Department of High...
Go to Profile#32026
Van C. Mow
#32038
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Van C. Mow is a Chinese-born-American bioengineer, known as one of the earliest researchers in the field of biomechanics. Van C. Mow has published over 315 full-length peer-reviewed, archival papers and book chapters, has delivered over 450 podium presentations at bioengineering meetings, and he has delivered over 450 invited seminars, keynote, plenary and distinguished named lectures in orthopaedic biomechanics. According to Google Scholar, his papers have been cited over 33,500 times, and he has an h-index of 100 as of October 5, 2015.
Go to Profile#32027
Philip P. Wiener
#32039
Overall Influence
1905 - 1992 (87 years)
Philip P. Wiener was an American philosopher who was a specialist on Pragmatism, Charles S. Pierce, Leibnitz, the history and philosophy of science, and the history of ideas. He co-founded the Journal of the History of Ideas.
Go to Profile#32028
Paul Costa Jr.
#32040
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Paul Costa Jr. is an American psychologist associated with the Five Factor Model. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1970. Author of over 300 academic articles, several books, he is perhaps best known for the Revised NEO Personality Inventory, or NEO PI-R, a psychological personality inventory; a 240-item measure of the Five Factor Model: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience. Additionally, the test measures six subordinate dimensions of each of the "FFM" personality factors, developed together with Robert McCrae. Work on t...
Go to Profile#32029
Jacques Roubaud
#32041
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Jacques Roubaud is a French poet, writer and mathematician. Life and career Jacques Roubaud taught Mathematics at University of Paris X Nanterre and Poetry at EHESS. A member of the Oulipo group, he has published poetry, plays, novels, and translated English poetry and books into French such as Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. French poet and novelist Raymond Queneau had Roubaud's first book, a collection of mathematically structured sonnets, published by Éditions Gallimard, and then invited Roubaud to join the Oulipo as the organization's first new member outside the founders.
Go to Profile#32030
Lin Chao
#32042
Overall Influence
Lin Chao is a Chinese Brazilian American evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Chao gained his PhD in 1977 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as a student of Bruce R. Levin , and was a NIH postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University in the laboratory of Edward C. Cox. He spent most of his career in the Department of Biology of the University of Maryland, College Park and is currently at the Ecology, Behavior and Evolution Section of the University of California, San Diego.
Go to Profile#32031
Gavin Ashenden
#32043
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Gavin Roy Pelham Ashenden is a British Catholic layman, author and commentator, and Associate Editor of the Catholic Herald. Formerly a priest of the Church of England, and subsequently a continuing Anglican bishop, he was appointed Chaplain to the Queen from 2008 until his resignation in 2017.
Go to Profile#32032
Zhiwu Chen
#32044
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Zhiwu Chen is a professor of finance at The University of Hong Kong, specializing in finance theory, securities valuation, and the economy of China. He is a public intellectual in China, with a Sina Weibo following of over 9 million; in 2010 The Time Weekly named him one of "Ten Public Intellectuals Influencing China" and in 2012 public relations agency Burson-Marsteller named him one of China's ten most influential political voices on Weibo.
Go to Profile#32033
Daniel A. Dailey
#32045
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Daniel A. Dailey is a United States Army soldier who served as the 15th Sergeant Major of the Army from January 30, 2015, to August 9, 2019. Prior to his tenure as the Sergeant Major of the Army, he served as the Command Sergeant Major for the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command.
Go to Profile#32034
Howard Shore
#32046
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Howard Leslie Shore is a Canadian composer, conductor and orchestrator noted for his film scores. He has composed the scores for over 80 films, most notably the scores for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies. He won three Academy Awards for his work on The Lord of the Rings, with one being for the song "Into the West", an award he shared with Eurythmics lead vocalist Annie Lennox and writer/producer Fran Walsh, who wrote the lyrics. He is a consistent collaborator with director David Cronenberg, having scored all but one of his films since 1979, and collaborated with Martin S...
Go to Profile#32035
Mary Chapin Carpenter
#32047
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Mary Chapin Carpenter is an American country and folk music singer-songwriter. Carpenter spent several years singing in Washington, D.C.-area clubs before signing in the late 1980s with Columbia Records. Carpenter's first album, 1987's Hometown Girl, did not produce any charting singles. She broke through with 1989's State of the Heart and 1990's Shooting Straight in the Dark.
Go to Profile#32036
Diana Krall
#32048
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Diana Jean Krall is a Canadian jazz pianist and singer known for her contralto vocals. She has sold more than 15 million albums worldwide, including over six million in the US. On December 11, 2009, Billboard magazine named her the second greatest jazz artist of the decade , establishing her as one of the best-selling artists of her time.
Go to Profile#32037
Michael Y. Scudder
#32049
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Michael Yale Scudder Jr. is a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Education and legal career In 1989, Scudder graduated from Bishop Dwenger High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Scudder received his Bachelor of Business Administration from Saint Joseph's College as co-valedictorian, and his Juris Doctor in 1998 magna cum laude from the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, where he was inducted into the Order of the Coif. Scudder worked as an auditor for Ernst and Young before attending law school and is a Certified Public Accou...
Go to Profile#32038
Mendel Sachs
#32050
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Mendel Sachs was an American theoretical physicist. His scientific work includes the proposal of a unified field theory that brings together the weak force, strong force, electromagnetism, and gravity.
Go to Profile#32039
Brian Morton
#32051
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Brian Morton is a Scottish writer, journalist and former broadcaster, specialising in jazz and modern literature. Early life and education Born in Paisley, near Glasgow and raised in Dunoon, Morton was educated at the University of Edinburgh and taught in the late 1970s at the University of East Anglia and the University of Tromsø in Norway.
Go to Profile#32040
Wayne Marshall
#32052
Overall Influence
Wayne Marshall is an American ethnomusicologist college professor at the Berklee College of Music His scholarship focuses on the musical and cultural production of the Caribbean and the Americas, and their circulation in the wider world, with particular attention to digital technologies. He is currently writing a book on music, networked media and transnational youth culture. He co-edited and contributed to the book Reggaeton and has published in journals such as Popular Music and Callaloo, while writing for popular outlets including The Wire and the Boston Phoenix. Marshall holds a Ph.D. fro...
Go to Profile#32041
Mehdi Jazayeri
#32053
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Mehdi Jazayeri is the founding dean of the faculty of informatics of the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland, and author of several textbooks on computer software. He was awarded the Influential Educator Award in 2012 by the ACM SIGSOFT.
Go to Profile#32042
James W. Hall
#32054
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
James W. Hall is an American author and professor from Florida. He has written twenty-three novels, four books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and a collection of essays. A longtime professor of literature and creative writing at Florida International University, Hall is perhaps best known for a series of crime/mystery novels starring the character Thorn. A loner who ties flies to catch bonefish, Thorn partners with his private-eye friend Sugarman to thwart a range of villains. Hall's writing often features a South Florida backdrop and explores the contrast between squalor and pove...
Go to Profile#32043
Michael Thompson
#32055
Overall Influence
Michael Thompson is an American photographer who began his career as an assistant to Irving Penn after training at the Brooks Institute of Photography in California. His father was a studio photographer in Washington State. Thompson's photography has appeared in W, Details, Allure, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ and The New York Times Magazine. His commercial photography includes campaigns for Gap, Elizabeth Arden, Chanel, and the PDN Award winner "I Am African." His commercials include those for the fragrance "Lovely" by Sarah Jessica Parker , the "Frank Gehry Collection" for Tiffany...
Go to Profile#32044
Robert M. Citino
#32056
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Robert M. Citino is an American military historian and the Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian at the National WWII Museum. He is a leading authority on modern German military history, with an emphasis on World War II and the German influence upon modern operational doctrine.
Go to Profile#32045
Randy White
#32057
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Randy Alan White is an American pastor and proponent of prosperity theology. He is the co-founder of Without Walls International Church, a large, non-denominational church in Florida. Without Walls International Church Without Walls International Church was founded by Randy White and Paula White in 1991.
Go to Profile#32046
Peter Fratzl
#32058
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Peter Fratzl is an Austrian physicist and director at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam. Life After studying in Strasbourg and Paris, and graduating as an engineer from the École polytechnique in 1980, Fratzl received his doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna . After that, he received his habilitation in the field of solid-state physics and worked as an assistant and associate professor at the Institute of Materials Physics at the University of Vienna . In addition to his role as director of the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces , Fratzl is also an external collaborator at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Osteology in Vienna .
Go to Profile#32047
Joan Bresnan
#32059
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Joan Wanda Bresnan FBA is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She is best known as one of the architects of the theoretical framework of lexical functional grammar.
Go to Profile#32048
Gary Marchionini
#32060
Overall Influence
Gary Marchionini is an American information scientist and educator at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . Early life and education Marchionini received a PhD in 1981 from Wayne State University in the subject of "Curriculum Development: Mathematics Education". His thesis was titled Computer enhanced practice and introductory algebra.
Go to Profile#32049
Radu Grigorovici
#32061
Overall Influence
1911 - 2008 (97 years)
Radu Grigorovici was a Romanian physicist. Biography Radu Grigorovici was born on November 20, 1911, in Chernivtsi, being the only son of the Bucovina Social Democrats Gheorghe and Tatiana Grigorovici. After graduating from Aron Pumnul High School he studied at the Chernivtsi University, and in 1931 he got a degree in chemical sciences and in 1934 a degree in physical sciences. At the same university, he was then a trainer at the Experimental Physics Laboratory of Professor Eugen Bădărău.
Go to Profile#32050
Kenneth Leithwood
#32062
Overall Influence
Kenneth "Ken" Leithwood is an educational researcher and professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto, Canada. His research has focused on school leadership, processes of school reform, and assessment of educational policy.
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