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
#32101
Benjamin Ginsberg
#32113
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Benjamin Langer Ginsberg is an American lawyer. He is most well known for his work representing the Republican Party and its political campaigns, candidates, members of Congress and state legislatures and governors, as well as corporations, trade associations, businesses, and individuals participating in the political process.
Go to Profile#32102
Steven Sharfstein
#32114
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Steven Samuel "Steve" Sharfstein is an American psychiatrist. He was secretary of the American Psychiatric Association from 1991 to 1995, its vice president from 2002 to 2004, and president from 2005 to 2006. Sharfstein also received the Human Rights Award from the American Psychiatric Association in 2007.
Go to Profile#32103
Eula Biss
#32115
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Eula Biss is an American non-fiction writer who is the author of four books. Biss has won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a founding editor of Essay Press and a Guggenheim Fellow.
Go to Profile#32104
Barry Windham
#32116
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Barry Clinton Windham is an American retired professional wrestler. The son of wrestler Blackjack Mulligan, he is best known for his appearances with the National Wrestling Alliance and World Championship Wrestling .
Go to Profile#32105
Heinrich Albertz
#32117
Overall Influence
1915 - 1993 (78 years)
Heinrich Albertz was a German Protestant theologian, priest and politician of the Social Democratic Party . He served as Governing Mayor of Berlin from 1966 to 1967. Life Heinrich Albertz was born in Breslau , in the Prussian province of Silesia, to the court preacher and consistorial councilor Hugo Albertz and his second wife Elisabeth, née Meinhof. His elder half brother was the Resistance fighter Martin Albertz. Having obtained his baccalaureate in 1933, he went on to study theology at the universities of Breslau, Halle and Berlin. Under the Nazi regime, he maintained contact to circles of the banned Social Democratic Party.
Go to Profile#32106
Chris Poland
#32118
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Chris Poland is an American guitarist, best known as the former guitarist of the thrash metal band Megadeth. Since 2002, Poland has been the guitarist of the instrumental rock/jazz fusion bands OHM and OHMphrey, among others, and has appeared on several projects and albums from a variety of different genres.
Go to Profile#32107
Jenny Heijun Wills
#32119
Overall Influence
Jenny Heijun Wills is a Korean Canadian writer and scholar, whose memoir Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction in 2019. The book also won a Manitoba Book Award in 2020 for Best First Book. It was a finalist for two other book prizes.
Go to Profile#32108
Kalyan Bidhan Sinha
#32120
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Kalyan Bidhan Sinha is an Indian mathematician. He is a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, and Professor Emeritus for life of the Indian Statistical Institute.
Go to Profile#32109
Edwin Charles Tubb
#32121
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Edwin Charles Tubb was a British writer of science fiction, fantasy and western novels. The author of over 140 novels and 230 short stories and novellas, Tubb is best known for The Dumarest Saga , an epic science-fiction saga set in the far future. Michael Moorcock wrote, "His reputation for fast-moving and colourful SF writing is unmatched by anyone in Britain."
Go to Profile#32110
Jon Clardy
#32122
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Jon Clardy is currently the Hsien Wu and Daisy Yen Wu professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on the isolation and structural characterization of natural products, and currently investigates the role of biologically active small molecules in mediating symbiotic interactions and disease.
Go to Profile#32111
Shrikanth Narayanan
#32123
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Shrikanth Narayanan is an Indian-American Professor at the University of Southern California. He is an interdisciplinary engineer-scientist with a focus on human-centered signal processing and machine intelligence with speech and spoken language processing at its core. A prolific award-winning researcher, educator, and inventor, with hundreds of publications and a number of acclaimed patents to his credit, he has pioneered several research areas including in computational speech science, speech and human language technologies, audio, music and multimedia engineering, human sensing and imaging...
Go to Profile#32112
Brian Holmes
#32124
Overall Influence
Brian Holmes is a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he teaches an intensive summer seminar. He has worked with the French graphics collective Ne Pas Plier from 1999 to 2001 and the French cartography collective Bureau d'Études.
Go to Profile#32113
Stewart Kwoh
#32125
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Stewart Kwoh is an American attorney, educator, and civil rights leader. Kwoh is the founding President and Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Los Angeles, formerly known as the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California .
Go to Profile#32114
Paul J. Lioy
#32126
Overall Influence
1947 - 2015 (68 years)
Paul James Lioy was a United States environmental health scientist born in Passaic, New Jersey, working in the field of exposure science. He was one of the world's leading experts in personal exposure to toxins. He published in the areas of air pollution, airborne and deposited particles, Homeland Security, and Hazardous Wastes. Lioy was a professor and division director at the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, Rutgers University - School of Public Health. Until 30 June 2015 he was a professor and vice chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine, Rutgers University - Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Go to Profile#32115
Soner Cagaptay
#32127
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Soner Cagaptay is a Turkish-American political scientist based in the United States. He is director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is a historian by training and is an expert on Turkey–United States relations, Turkish politics, and Turkish nationalism.
Go to Profile#32116
Judson A. Brewer
#32128
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Judson Alyn Brewer is an American psychiatrist, neuroscientist and author. He studies the neural mechanisms of mindfulness using standard and real-time fMRI, and has translated research findings into programs to treat addictions. Brewer founded MindSciences, Inc. , an app-based digital therapeutic treatment program for anxiety, overeating, and smoking. He is director of research and innovation at Brown University's Mindfulness Center and associate professor in behavioral and social sciences in the Brown School of Public Health, and in psychiatry at Brown's Warren Alpert Medical School.
Go to Profile#32117
Andrew Pollard
#32129
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Sir Andrew John Pollard is the Ashall Professor of Infection & Immunity at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. He is an Honorary Consultant Paediatrician at John Radcliffe Hospital and the Director of the Oxford Vaccine Group. He is the Chief Investigator on the University of Oxford COVID-19 Vaccine trials and has led research on vaccines for many life-threatening infectious diseases including typhoid fever, Neisseria meningitidis, Haemophilus influenzae type b, streptococcus pneumoniae, pertussis, influenza, rabies, and Ebola.
Go to Profile#32118
Peter Goldblatt
#32130
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Peter Goldblatt is a South African botanist, working principally in the United States. Life Goldblatt was born in Johannesburg, South Africa on October 8, 1943. His undergraduate studies were undertaken at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesberg , from where he went on to graduate studies at the University of Cape Town, where he received his doctorate in 1970. He held a position as lecturer in botany at Witwatersrand and then Cape Town before emigrating to the United States in 1972. In the US he took up a position as a researcher at the Missouri Botanical Gardens, in St. Louis, where he has remained since, holding the position of Senior Curator since 1990.
Go to Profile#32119
Tom Watson
#32131
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Thomas Sturges Watson is an American retired professional golfer on the PGA Tour Champions, formerly on the PGA Tour. In the 1970s and 1980s, Watson was one of the leading golf players in the world, winning eight major championships and heading the PGA Tour money list five times. He was the number one player in the world according to McCormack's World Golf Rankings from 1978 until 1982; in both 1983 and 1984, he was ranked second behind Seve Ballesteros. He also spent 32 weeks in the top 10 of the successor Sony Rankings in their debut in 1986.
Go to Profile#32120
Richard Beals
#32132
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Richard William Beals is an American mathematician who works on partial differential equations and functional analysis. He is known as the author or co-author of several mathematical textbooks. Beals studied at Yale University earning a B.A. in 1960, an M.A. in 1962, and a Ph.D. in 1964 under Felix Browder with thesis Non-Local Boundary Value Problems for Elliptic Partial Differential Operators. In the academic year 1965/1966 he was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where he became in 1966 an assistant professor and later a professor. In 1977 he became a professor a...
Go to Profile#32121
Amal El-Mohtar
#32133
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Amal El-Mohtar is a Canadian poet and writer of speculative fiction. She has published short fiction, poetry, essays and reviews, and has edited the fantastic poetry quarterly magazine Goblin Fruit since 2006.
Go to Profile#32122
Carlos Gussenhoven
#32134
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Carlos Gussenhoven is a professor of linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen. He specializes in phonetics and phonology. Books Carlos Gussenhoven, On the Grammar and Semantics of Sentence Accents , Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1984, Carlos Gussenhoven & Natasha Warner, editors, Laboratory Phonology VII, Mouton de Gruyter, 2002, Carlos Gussenhoven, The Phonology of Tone and Intonation , Cambridge University Press, 2004, Tomas Riad & Carlos Gussenhoven, Tones and Tunes: Typological Studies in Word and Sentence Prosody , Mouton de Gruyter, 2007, Carlos Gussenhoven & Tomas Riad, Tones and Tunes: ...
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Sally Baldwin
#32135
Overall Influence
1940 - 2003 (63 years)
Sally Baldwin was a University of York social sciences professor. Early life and education Baldwin was born Sarah Marie Kilday in Coatbridge, Scotland. At the University of Glasgow she studied English Language and Literature, in which she gained a first class degree. She later moved to the University of York, where she gained a diploma in social administration in 1973. She became part of the University's Social Policy Research Unit , being appointed its director in 1987.
Go to Profile#32124
Benoît Lacroix
#32136
Overall Influence
1915 - 2016 (101 years)
Benoît Lacroix was a Quebec theologian, philosopher, Dominican priest, professor in medieval studies and historian of the Medieval period, and author of almost 50 works and a great number of articles.
Go to Profile#32125
Barbara Castle
#32137
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
Barbara Anne Castle, Baroness Castle of Blackburn, was a British Labour Party politician who was a Member of Parliament from 1945 to 1979, making her one of the longest-serving female MPs in British history. Regarded as one of the most significant Labour Party politicians, Castle developed a close political partnership with Prime Minister Harold Wilson and held several roles in the Cabinet. She remains to date the only woman to have held the office of First Secretary of State.
Go to Profile#32126
Ben Gazzara
#32138
Overall Influence
1930 - 2012 (82 years)
Biagio Anthony "Ben" Gazzara was an American actor and director of film, stage, and television. He received numerous accolades, including a Primetime Emmy Award and a Drama Desk Award, in addition to nominations for three Golden Globe Awards and three Tony Awards.
Go to Profile#32127
Carol V. Robinson
#32139
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
#32128
Kenneth Lane
#32140
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Kenneth Douglas Lane is an American theoretical particle physicist and professor of physics at Boston University. Lane is best known for his role in the development of extended technicolor models of physics beyond the Standard Model.
Go to Profile#32129
Koneru Ramakrishna Rao
#32141
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Koneru Ramakrishna Rao was an Indian philosopher who served as Chancellor of GITAM , and as Chairman of GITAM school of Gandhian Studies, psychologist, parapsychologist, educationist, teacher, researcher and administrator. The Government of India awarded him the civilian honour of Padma Shri in 2011.
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Barry Supple
#32142
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Barry Emanuel Supple, CBE, FBA , is Emeritus Professor of Economic History, University of Cambridge, and a former Director of the Leverhulme Trust. He is the father of theatre and opera director Tim Supple.
Go to Profile#32131
Salma Sobhan
#32143
Overall Influence
1937 - 2003 (66 years)
Salma Sobhan was a Bangladeshi lawyer, academic and human rights activist. She became the first woman barrister in Pakistan in 1959. A member of the law faculty of the University of Dhaka, she was a co-founder of Ain-O-Salish Kendra , a national human rights watchdog.
Go to Profile#32132
Anthony King
#32144
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Anthony Stephen King was a Canadian-British professor of government, psephologist and commentator. He taught at the Department of Government at the University of Essex for many years. Early life King was born in Canada on 17 November 1934, the son of Marjorie and Harold King. He gained a B.A. in History and Economics at Queen's University, Ontario. In the 1950s, he moved to UK as a Rhodes Scholar to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford, after which he gained a D.Phil. with thesis titled "Some aspects of the history of the Liberal Party in Britain, 1906–1914".
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J. M. R. Parrondo
#32145
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Juan Manuel Rodríguez Parrondo is a Spanish physicist. He is mostly popular for the invention of the Parrondo's paradox and his contributions in the thermodynamical study of information. Biography Juan Parrondo received his bachelors degree in 1987 and defended his Ph.D at Complutense University of Madrid in 1992. He started a permanent position at UCM at 1996. In the same year he invented the well-known Parrondo's Paradox, according to which 2 losing strategies may win while working together. Since then, the paradox has been widely used in biology and finances. He has also completed a lot of...
Go to Profile#32134
Jon Delano
#32146
Overall Influence
Jon Delano is the Money & Politics Editor for KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a position he began on a full-time basis in 2001 after joining the station in 1994 as its political analyst. Career A graduate of Haverford College and University of Pennsylvania Law School, Delano spent 14 years working as chief of staff for Congressman Doug Walgren.
Go to Profile#32135
Ed Krol
#32147
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ed Krol is the former network manager at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the former assistant director of Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is also the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet and The Whole Internet .
Go to Profile#32136
Jeff Rosenthal
#32148
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Jeffrey Seth Rosenthal is a Canadian statistician and nonfiction author. He is a professor in the University of Toronto's department of statistics, cross-appointed with its department of mathematics.
Go to Profile#32137
Lee Hazlewood
#32149
Overall Influence
1929 - 2007 (78 years)
Barton Lee Hazlewood was an American country and pop singer, songwriter, and record producer, most widely known for his work with guitarist Duane Eddy during the late 1950s and singer Nancy Sinatra in the 1960s and 1970s. His collaborations with Sinatra as well as his solo output in the late 1960s and early 1970s have been praised as an essential contribution to a sound often described as "cowboy psychedelia" or "saccharine underground". Rolling Stone ranked Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra No. 9 on its list of the 20 Greatest Duos of All Time.
Go to Profile#32138
Hamid Soltanian-Zadeh
#32150
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Hamid Soltanian-Zadeh is an Iranian biomedical engineer. He was born in Yazd in 1960. Education He received BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering: electronics from the University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran in 1986 and MSE and PhD degrees in electrical engineering: systems and bio-electrical sciences from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, in 1992.
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Nicolas Tournadre
#32151
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Nicolas Tournadre is a professor at the University of Provence specializing in morphosyntax and typology. He is a member of the LACITO lab of the CNRS. His research mainly deals with ergative morphosyntax and grammatical semantics of tense, aspect, mood and evidentiality.
Go to Profile#32140
Katherine Pancol
#32152
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Katherine Pancol is a French journalist and novelist. Her books have been translated into some 30 languages, and sold millions of copies worldwide. In the United States, she is known as the author of The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles and its sequel, The Slow Waltz of Turtles , both translated by William Rodarmor.
Go to Profile#32141
Elizabeth Cowie
#32153
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Cowie is a British academic, author, and emeritus professor of film studies at the University of Kent. Biography Cowie has a degree in history, politics and sociology. After university, she found work in publishing, and from 1972 to 1976, was editorial assistant for Screen magazine. In 1982, Cowie joined the University of Kent to teach on its film studies programme.
Go to Profile#32142
Miguel Najdorf
#32154
Overall Influence
1910 - 1997 (87 years)
Miguel Najdorf was a Polish–Argentinian chess grandmaster. Originally from Poland, he was in Argentina when World War II began in 1939, and he stayed and settled there. He was a leading world player in the 1940s and 1950s, and is also known for the Najdorf Variation, one of the most popular chess openings.
Go to Profile#32143
Yaroslava Shvedova
#32155
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Yaroslava Vyacheslavovna Shvedova is a Kazakhstani former professional tennis player. Before 2008, she represented her country of birth, Russia. She won one singles title and 13 doubles titles on the WTA Tour, plus one singles and one doubles title on WTA 125 tournaments, as well as four singles and three doubles titles on the ITF Circuit. On 29 October 2012, she reached her best singles ranking of world No. 25. On 22 February 2016, she peaked at No. 3 in the doubles rankings.
Go to Profile#32144
Schahram Dustdar
#32156
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Schahram Dustdar is an Austrian computer scientist known for his work on distributed systems and elastic computing. Dustdar is a professor of computer science and head of the Distributed Systems Group at TU Wien. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2016 for contributions to elastic computing for cloud applications.
Go to Profile#32145
Clark McCauley
#32157
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Clark Richard McCauley is an American social psychologist who is Research Professor of Psychology and co-director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College.
Go to Profile#32146
Robert von Dassanowsky
#32158
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Robert von Dassanowsky FRHistS, FRSA was an Austrian-American academic, writer, film and cultural historian, and producer. He was usually known as Robert Dassanowsky. Education, career and publications Dassanowsky was born in New York City on January 28, 1965. A student of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and a graduate of UCLA , where he also served as Visiting Professor of German, Dassanowsky was a widely published academician, independent film producer, playwright, and had written for television. He held dual American and Austrian citizenship.
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Shaker Zahra
#32159
Overall Influence
Shaker A. Zahra is the Robert E. Buuck Chair of Entrepreneurship and professor of strategy and entrepreneurship, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. He is also the academic director of the Gary S. Holmes Entrepreneurship Center.
Go to Profile#32148
Ian Hislop
#32160
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Ian David Hislop is a British satirist and editor of the magazine Private Eye. He has appeared on numerous radio and television programmes and has been a team captain on the BBC quiz show Have I Got News for You since the programme's inception in 1990.
Go to Profile#32149
James F. Woodward
#32161
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
James F. Woodward is a professor emeritus of history and an adjunct professor of physics at California State University, Fullerton. He is best known for a physics hypothesis that he proposed in 1990, later expanded, that predicts several physical effects that he refers to as 'Mach effects'. Woodward claims the effect could be used as a reactionless drive for space travel.
Go to Profile#32150
Robert Polito
#32162
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Robert Polito is a poet, biographer, essayist, critic, educator, curator, and arts administrator. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography in 1995 for Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. The founding director of the New School Graduate Writing Program in New York City, he was President of the Poetry Foundation from 2013–2015, before returning to the New School as a professor of writing.
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