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).
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List of the most influential people
#32351
Erik Thorbecke
#32363
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Erik Thorbecke is a development economist. He is a co-originator of the widely used Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty measure and played a significant role in the development and popularization of Social Accounting Matrix. Currently, he is H. E. Babcock Professor of Economics, Emeritus, and Graduate School Professor at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#32352
Herman Goldstein
#32364
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
#32353
Pete Carril
#32365
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Peter Joseph Carril was an American basketball coach. He is best known as head coach of Princeton University for 30 years and for his use of the "Princeton offense". He also coached at Lehigh University and as an assistant with the Sacramento Kings in the National Basketball Association .
Go to Profile#32354
Reinhard Oehme
#32366
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Reinhard Oehme was a German-American physicist known for the discovery of C non-conservation in the presence of P violation, the formulation and proof of hadron dispersion relations, the "Edge of the Wedge Theorem" in the function theory of several complex variables, the Goldberger-Miyazawa-Oehme sum rule, reduction of quantum field theories, Oehme-Zimmermann superconvergence relations for gauge field correlation functions, and many other contributions.
Go to Profile#32355
Steen Rasmussen
#32367
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Steen Rasmussen is a Danish physicist mainly working in the areas of artificial life and complex systems. He is currently a professor in physics and a center director at University of Southern Denmark as well as an external research professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His formal training was at the Technical University of Denmark and University of Copenhagen . He spent 20 years as a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory the last five years as a leader of the Self-Organized Systems team. He has been part of the Santa Fe Institute since 1988.
Go to Profile#32356
Efua Sutherland
#32368
Overall Influence
1924 - 1996 (72 years)
Efua Theodora Sutherland was a Ghanaian playwright, director, dramatist, children's author, poet, educationalist, researcher, child advocate, and cultural activist. Her works include the plays Foriwa , Edufa , and The Marriage of Anansewa . She founded the Ghana Drama Studio, the Ghana Society of Writers, the Ghana Experimental Theatre, and a community project called the Kodzidan . As Ghana's earliest playwright-director, she was an influential figure in the development of modern Ghanaian theatre, and helped to introduce the study of African performance traditions at university level. She was...
Go to Profile#32357
Brutus Beefcake
#32369
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Edward Harrison Leslie is an American retired professional wrestler, best known for his work in the World Wrestling Federation under the ring name Brutus "the Barber" Beefcake. He later worked for World Championship Wrestling under a wide variety of names.
Go to Profile#32358
Ryan Murphy
#32370
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Ryan Patrick Murphy is an American television writer, director, and producer. He has created and produced a number of television series including Nip/Tuck , Glee , American Horror Story , American Crime Story , Pose , 9-1-1 , 9-1-1: Lone Star , Ratched , American Horror Stories , and Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story .
Go to Profile#32359
Roberto Pazzi
#32371
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Roberto Pazzi is an Italian novelist and poet. His works have been translated into twenty six languages. Pazzi graduated in classics in Bologna with a thesis on Luciano Anceschi and aesthetics on the poetry of Umberto Saba. He taught cultural anthropology and the philosophy of history and sociology of art and literature in high school and a college in Ferrara.
Go to Profile#32360
Mikael Stenmark
#32372
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Mikael Stenmark is a Swedish philosopher who is Dean of the Faculty of Theology since 2008 and Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Department of Theology, Uppsala University, Sweden. He has published papers in the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of science, and environmental ethics and on science-religion issues. Stenmark is the author of "Rationality in Science, Religion and Everyday Life" , for which he was awarded The John Templeton Foundation Prize for Outstanding Books in Theology and the Natural Sciences in 1996.
Go to Profile#32361
Keith Laws
#32373
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Keith R. Laws is a professor of neuropsychology at the School of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. Professor Laws' research centres on how cognitive functions and processes relate to brain structure and function; notably for research on cognitive functioning in people suffering from neurological and psychiatric disorders. Laws, with his colleagues, created one of the first research groups to investigate impairment of everyday knowledge in patients with schizophrenia and to demonstrate worse cognitive outcomes in women suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Laws' work on the link betw...
Go to Profile#32362
Rowena Green Matthews
#32374
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Rowena Green Matthews, born in 1938, is the G. Robert Greenberg Distinguished University professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research focuses on the role of organic cofactors as partners of enzymes catalyzing difficult biochemical reactions, especially folic acid and cobalamin . Among other honors, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002 and the Institute of Medicine in 2004.
Go to Profile#32363
Jacques Santer
#32375
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Jacques Santer is a Luxembourgish politician who served as the ninth president of the European Commission from 1995 to 1999. He served as Finance Minister of Luxembourg from 1979 until 1989, and the 20th Prime Minister of Luxembourg from 1984 to 1995, as a member of the Christian Social People's Party , which was the leading party in the Luxembourg government between 1979 and 2013. As Prime Minister of Luxembourg he also led the negotiations on the Single European Act, which effectively set aside the 20-year-old Luxembourg Compromise.
Go to Profile#32364
Julius Kim
#32376
Overall Influence
Julius Jason Kim is a Korean-American theologian and former president of The Gospel Coalition. Biography Born in Los Angeles, Kim spent part of his childhood in South Korea before returning to California at the age of 12. He received a BA from Vanguard University, M.Div. from Westminster Seminary California, and Ph.D. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Go to Profile#32365
Kari Karhunen
#32377
Overall Influence
1915 - 1992 (77 years)
Kari Onni Uolevi Karhunen was a Finnish probabilist and a mathematical statistician. He is best known for the Karhunen–Loève theorem and Karhunen–Loève transform. Education and career Karhunen received his master's degree in 1938 and his doctorate in 1950 from the University of Helsinki. The topic of his thesis was Über lineare Methoden in der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung, in English On linear methods in probability and statistics. The advisor of his thesis was the mathematician Rolf Nevanlinna.
Go to Profile#32366
Pierce Brodkorb
#32378
Overall Influence
1908 - 1992 (84 years)
William Pierce Brodkorb was an American ornithologist and paleontologist. Interested in birds since childhood, he was taught to prepare birds at the age of 16. Later, he received the opportunity to work as a staff technician in the Ornithology Division of the Field Museum. He entered the University of Michigan in 1933 and obtained his PhD degree in 1936.
Go to Profile#32367
Sherrod Brown
#32379
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Sherrod Campbell Brown is an American politician serving as the senior United States senator from Ohio, a seat which he has held since 2007. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the U.S. representative for from 1993 to 2007 and the 47th secretary of state of Ohio from 1983 to 1991. He started his political career in 1975 as an Ohio state representative.
Go to Profile#32368
Henryk Skarżyński
#32380
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Henryk Skarzynski is a Polish doctor otolaryngologist, audiologist and phoniatrist, creator and director of Warsaw Institute of Physiology and Pathology of Hearing and World Hearing Center in Kajetany.
Go to Profile#32369
Anthony Saunders
#32381
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Anthony Saunders is the John M. Schiff Professor of Finance at New York University Stern School of Business and is currently on the Executive Committee of the Salomon Center of the Study of Financial Institutions.
Go to Profile#32370
Mario Vella
#32382
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Mario Vella is a Maltese philosopher, economist and politician. He was Governor of the Central Bank of Malta from 2016 to 2020. Biography Studies and academic career Vella was born to a Maltese family in Tripoli, Libya, and lived his boyhood within the Italian community there. He started his education at a Catholic school in Tripoli, then returned to Malta with his family and attended De La Salle College at Cottonera.
Go to Profile#32371
Seana Shiffrin
#32383
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Seana Valentine Shiffrin is Professor of Philosophy and Pete Kameron Professor of Law and Social Justice at the University of California, Los Angeles. Shiffrin's work spans issues in moral, political and legal philosophy, as well as matters of legal doctrine, that concern equality, autonomy and the social conditions for their realization. She is an associate editor of Philosophy and Public Affairs and was elected a Fellow of the American Academic of Arts and Sciences in 2010.
Go to Profile#32372
Manuel Tuñón de Lara
#32384
Overall Influence
1915 - 2015 (100 years)
Manuel Tuñón de Lara was a Spanish historian. Life Born in Madrid on 8 September 1915. He earned law degree from the University of Madrid in 1936. In 1932 he had joined the Communist Youth Union, in 1937 becoming director of the cadre school of the Unified Socialist Youth, and earning a place on the central committee. At the end of the Spanish Civil War he was interned in a concentration camp.
Go to Profile#32373
Paul T. Bateman
#32385
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Paul Trevier Bateman was an American number theorist, known for formulating the Bateman–Horn conjecture on the density of prime number values generated by systems of polynomials and the New Mersenne conjecture relating the occurrences of Mersenne primes and Wagstaff primes.
Go to Profile#32374
Maxine Waters
#32386
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Maxine Moore Waters is an American politician serving as the U.S. representative for since 1991. The district, numbered as the 29th district from 1991 to 1993 and as the 35th district from 1993 to 2013, includes much of southern Los Angeles, as well as portions of Gardena, Inglewood and Torrance.
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Reggie Theus
#32387
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Reginald Wayne Theus is an American basketball coach and former player. He played 13 seasons in the National Basketball Association , where he was a two-time NBA All-Star. He is currently the men's basketball head coach and athletic director at Bethune–Cookman. He was the head coach for the NBA's Sacramento Kings and in college with the New Mexico State Aggies and the Cal State Northridge Matadors men's teams. He was also an assistant coach for the Louisville Cardinals under Rick Pitino.
Go to Profile#32376
Stephen Roche
#32388
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Stephen Roche is an Irish former professional road racing cyclist. In a 13-year professional career, he peaked in 1987, becoming the second of only two cyclists to win the Triple Crown of victories in the Tour de France and the Giro d'Italia general classification, plus the World road race championship, the first being Eddy Merckx. Roche's rise coincided with that of fellow Irishman Sean Kelly.
Go to Profile#32377
F. Gwendolen Rees
#32389
Overall Influence
1906 - 1994 (88 years)
Florence Gwendolen Rees, FRS was a Welsh zoologist and parasitologist. She was the first Welsh woman to become a fellow of the Royal Society. By the time she was 80 years old, she had published 68 papers.
Go to Profile#32378
Mitch Richmond
#32390
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Mitchell James Richmond III is an American former professional basketball player. He played collegiately at Moberly Area Community College and Kansas State University. He was a six-time NBA All-Star, a five-time All-NBA Team member, and a former NBA Rookie of the Year. In 976 NBA games, Richmond averaged 21.0 points per game and 3.5 assists per game. Richmond was voted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2014. His jersey No. 2 was retired in his honor by the Sacramento Kings, for whom he played seven seasons.
Go to Profile#32379
Phil LaMarr
#32391
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Phillip LaMarr is an American actor, comedian, and screenwriter. He was one of the original featured cast members on the sketch comedy television series Mad TV, where he stayed for five seasons. His voice acting roles in animated series include John Stewart / Green Lantern in Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, Hermes Conrad in Futurama, the title characters of Samurai Jack and Static Shock, and Wilt in Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. LaMarr has also provided voices for video game franchises including Metal Gear, Jak and Daxter, Darksiders, Final Fantasy, Infamous, Dead Island, Kingdom Hearts, and Mortal Kombat.
Go to Profile#32380
Michael Schenker
#32392
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Michael Schenker is a German guitarist. He played in the rock band UFO and leads the Michael Schenker Group . He was an early member of the hard rock band Scorpions, a band co-founded by his elder brother Rudolf Schenker. In the mid-1970s, Schenker joined UFO, playing lead and rhythm guitar. He left the band in 1978 to briefly rejoin Scorpions for the recording of Lovedrive, and then to form MSG. He has rejoined UFO three times, producing an album each time. Schenker continues to perform and record. He has been called "a legendary figure in the history of metal guitar".
Go to Profile#32381
Patrick French
#32393
Overall Influence
1966 - 2023 (57 years)
Patrick Rollo Basil French was a British writer, historian and academician. He was the author of several books including: Younghusband: the Last Great Imperial Adventurer , a biography of Francis Younghusband; The World Is What It Is , an authorised biography of Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul that won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States of America; and India: A Portrait .
Go to Profile#32382
James B. Carrell
#32394
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
James B. Carrell is an American and Canadian mathematician, who is currently an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. His areas of research are algebraic geometry, Lie theory, transformation groups and differential geometry.
Go to Profile#32383
Robert Oxnam
#32395
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Robert Bromley Oxnam is an American China scholar and President Emeritus of the Asia Society New York. He ran the society for more than a decade, and led financial-cultural tours of China for Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and former U.S. President George H. W. Bush. He became well known in the public media after his 2005 autobiography, A Fractured Mind, in which he revealed that he had been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder.
Go to Profile#32384
Shōji Ueda
#32396
Overall Influence
1913 - 2000 (87 years)
Shōji Ueda was a photographer of Tottori, Japan, best known for his distinctive, dreamlike black-and-white images with staged figures, taken on the Tottori sand dunes. The term Ueda-chō has been used to refer to his cool and mysterious atmospheric style.
Go to Profile#32385
Jennine Capó Crucet
#32397
Overall Influence
Jennine Capó Crucet is an American novelist, and short story writer. Life Capó Crucet attended Cornell University where she received a B.A. in English and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She also graduated from the University of Minnesota with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska.
Go to Profile#32386
Leonardo Bonucci
#32398
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Leonardo Bonucci is an Italian professional footballer who plays as a centre-back for Bundesliga club Union Berlin and the Italy national team. Considered one of the best defenders of his generation, Bonucci is known for his technique, ball-playing skills, tackling and his ability to play in either a three or four-man defence.
Go to Profile#32387
Agnieszka Holland
#32399
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Agnieszka Holland is a Polish film and television director and screenwriter, best known for her political contributions to Polish cinema. She began her career as an assistant to directors Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, and emigrated to France shortly before the 1981 imposition of the martial law in Poland.
Go to Profile#32388
Mila Kunis
#32400
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Milena Markovna "Mila" Kunis is an American actress. Born in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, and raised in Los Angeles, Kunis began playing Jackie Burkhart on the Fox television series That '70s Show at the age of 14. Since 1999, she has voiced Meg Griffin on the Fox animated series Family Guy.
Go to Profile#32389
Lillian Mills
#32401
Overall Influence
Lillian F. Mills is an American accountant and the first female dean of the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business. Mills completed bachelor's and master's degrees in accounting at the University of Florida in 1980 and 1981, respectively, before moving to the University of Michigan to earn a doctorate in the subject, where she was advised by Joel Slemrod and published the dissertation Essays in Corporate Tax Compliance and Financial Reporting in 1996. She was a research fellow at the United States Department of the Treasury and worked as a certified public accountant for two firms from 1981 to 1989 before joining the University of Arizona faculty in 1997.
Go to Profile#32390
Victor Westhoff
#32402
Overall Influence
1916 - 2001 (85 years)
Victor Westhoff was a botanist at the Radboud University Nijmegen. Westhoff published 700 scientific papers on phytosociology and conservation, as well as articles on classical music. He was a member of the International Association for Vegetation Science.
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Mario Schjetnan
#32403
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Mario Schjetnan is a Mexican architect and landscape architect that manages to "unite social concerns, aesthetics and, increasingly, ecology- all by way of interpreting and celebrating Mexico's rich and diverse culture." He is co-founder of the interdisciplinary firm Grupo de Diseño Urbano in Mexico City known for designs in which the building is subordinate to the landscape. Among his numerous awards are the Prince of Wales/Green Prize in Urban Design for Xochimilco Ecological Park and the ASLA President's Award for Excellence for Parque El Cedazo.
Go to Profile#32392
Carlos Conca
#32404
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Carlos Conca is a Chilean applied mathematician, engineer and scientist. He is the first Chilean scientist to be recognized by the French government with a distinction in the field of Exact and Natural Sciences.
Go to Profile#32393
Anatoly Samoilenko
#32405
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Anatoly Mykhailovych Samoilenko was a Ukrainian mathematician, an Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine , the Director of the Institute of Mathematics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine .
Go to Profile#32394
Elizabeth Roemer
#32406
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Elizabeth "Pat" Roemer was an American astronomer and educator who specialized in astronomy with a particular focus on comets and minor planets. She was well-known for the recovery of lost comets, as well as for her discovery of two asteroids, the co-discovery of Jupiter's moon Themisto, and for the asteroid 1657 Roemera that was named in her honor.
Go to Profile#32395
Salim Mansur
#32407
Overall Influence
Salim Mansur is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. He is a former columnist for the London Free Press and the Toronto Sun, and has contributed to various publications including National Review, the Middle East Forum and Frontpagemag. He often presents analysis on the Muslim world, Islam, South Asia, Middle East. He is also a member of the Freedom Party of Ontario.
Go to Profile#32396
William T. Carpenter
#32408
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
William T. Carpenter is an American psychiatrist, a pioneer in the fields of psychiatry and pharmacology who served as an expert witness in the John W. Hinckley trial for the attempted assassination of U.S. President Ronald Reagan. His primary professional interest is in severe mental illness, especially schizophrenia, to the prevention and treatment of which he has made significant contributions in psychopathology, assessment methodology, testing of new treatments, and research ethics.
Go to Profile#32397
John M. Abowd
#32409
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
John Maron Abowd is the Associate director for research and methodology and chief scientist of the US Census Bureau, where he serves on leave from his position as the Edmund Ezra Day Professor of Economics, professor of information science, and member of the Department of Statistical Science at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#32398
Thomas Nail
#32410
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Thomas Nail is a Professor of Philosophy at The University of Denver. Biography Nail received a B.A in philosophy from the University of North Texas, and a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. His dissertation was on the theme of political revolution in the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. This research was the foundation of his first book, Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo, published in 2012.
Go to Profile#32399
George Carr Frison
#32411
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
George Carr Frison was an American archaeologist. He received the Society for American Archaeology's Lifetime Achievement Award, the Paleoarchaeologist of the Century Award, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He was Wyoming’s first State Archaeologist, and was a founder of the University of Wyoming Anthropology Department. He died in September 2020 at the age of 95.
Go to Profile#32400
Jean-Godefroy Bidima
#32412
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Jean-Godefroy Bidima is a Cameroonian philosopher, currently living in the United States. Bidima is the former director of the program at the International College of Philosophy in Paris and as of 2015 is a professor in French and Italian and Yvonne Arnoult Chair in Francophone Studies at Tulane University in New Orleans. His fields of interest are cited as " Continental philosophy, literatures and arts of the Francophone world, African philosophies, juridical anthropology and medical ethics". He is the author of numerous books and articles on African philosophy, including Histoire et traver...
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