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
#32401
Gordon Briscoe
#32413
Overall Influence
1938 - 2023 (85 years)
Gordon Briscoe AO was an Aboriginal Australian academic and activist. In 1997, he was awarded a PhD from the Australian National University. He was also a soccer player. Early life Born in Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia, Briscoe was descended from the Marduntjara and Pitjantjatjara nations of Central Australia. He was removed from his mother as a child and was educated at St Francis House in Adelaide.
Go to Profile#32402
Toshiyuki Kobayashi
#32414
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Toshiyuki Kobayashi is a Japanese mathematician known for his original work in the field of Lie theory, and in particular for the theory of discontinuous groups and the application of geometric analysis to representation theory. He was a major developer in particular of the theory of discontinuous groups for non-Riemannian homogeneous spaces and the theory of discrete breaking symmetry in unitary representation theory.
Go to Profile#32403
Manouchehr Sotoudeh
#32415
Overall Influence
1913 - 2016 (103 years)
Manouchehr Sotoudeh was an Iranian geographer and scholar of Persian literature who was famously known for his studies on Iranian languages and ethnic groups. Sotudeh earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tehran after studying Persian language and literature.
Go to Profile#32404
Akbar Adibi
#32416
Overall Influence
1939 - 2000 (61 years)
Akbar Adibi was an Iranian electronic engineer, VLSI researcher, and university engineering professor. Biography Akbar Adibi was born on February 12, 1939, in the city of Songhor, in North East of province Kermanshah in Iran. He received his Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering Department from Tehran University in 1965 and he was offered a position as a university instructor at the Tehran Polytechnic . In 1965–66, he worked for the Alstom Power Plant, Tehran, Iran, In 1966–73, he served as an instructor at the Tehran Polytechnic, Tehran, Iran.
Go to Profile#32405
Leah Ward Sears
#32417
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Leah Ward Sears is an American jurist and former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia. Sears was the first African-American female chief justice of a state supreme court in the United States. When she was first appointed as justice in 1992 by Governor Zell Miller, she became the first woman and youngest person to sit on Georgia's Supreme Court.
Go to Profile#32406
Ed McMahon
#32418
Overall Influence
1923 - 2009 (86 years)
Edward Leo Peter McMahon Jr. was an American announcer, game show host, comedian, actor, singer, and combat aviator. McMahon and Johnny Carson began their association in their first TV series, the ABC game show Who Do You Trust?, running from 1957 to 1962. McMahon then made his famous thirty-year mark as Carson's sidekick, announcer and second banana on NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson from 1962 to 1992.
Go to Profile#32407
Detlef Schrempf
#32419
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Detlef Schrempf is a German-American former professional basketball player. He played college basketball for the Washington Huskies from 1981 to 1985, and was drafted into the National Basketball Association by the Dallas Mavericks in the first round of the 1985 NBA draft, with the eighth overall pick. He was an All-NBA Third Team member in 1995, a three-time NBA All-Star, the first European player ever to achieve this award, and the NBA Sixth Man of the Year twice.
Go to Profile#32408
Nellee Hooper
#32420
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Nellee Hooper is a British record producer, remixer and songwriter known for his work with many major recording artists beginning in the late 1980s. He also debuted as a motion picture music composer with Scottish composer Craig Armstrong and Marius de Vries for the soundtrack for Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet in 1996.
Go to Profile#32409
Yasmin Khan
#32421
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Yasmin Khan is a historian of British India and Associate Professor of History at Kellogg College, Oxford. Education and career Born in 1977 to Pakistani and Anglo-Irish parents in Kingston-upon-Thames, Khan completed her BA in history at St Peter's College, Oxford. Khan completed her DPhil at St Anthony's College, Oxford in 2005 in Imperial and Commonwealth History.
Go to Profile#32410
Cyril Höschl
#32422
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Cyril Höschl is a Czech psychiatrist and university lecturer. After the Velvet Revolution he was the first freely elected Dean of the third Medical Faculty of Charles University and from 1997-2003 he served as Vice-Dean for Reform Studies and International Relations at the same faculty. He was the director of the Prague Psychiatric Center and head of the Department of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology of the Third Faculty of Medicine of the Charles University in Prague. On 1 January 2015 the Prague Psychiatric Center was transformed into the National Institute of Mental Health in Klecany, T...
Go to Profile#32411
Margot Kidder
#32423
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Margaret Ruth Kidder , known professionally as Margot Kidder, was a Canadian-American actress whose career spanned five decades. Her accolades include three Canadian Screen Awards and one Daytime Emmy Award. Though she appeared in an array of film and television roles, Kidder is most widely known for her performance as Lois Lane in the Superman film series, appearing in all four original films.
Go to Profile#32412
Michael Schur
#32424
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Michael Herbert Schur is an American television producer, writer, director and actor. He was a producer and writer for the comedy series The Office, and co-created Parks and Recreation with Office producer Greg Daniels. He created The Good Place, co-created the comedy series Brooklyn Nine-Nine and was a producer on the series Master of None. He also played Mose Schrute on The Office. In 2021, he was one of three co-creators of the Peacock comedy series Rutherford Falls.
Go to Profile#32413
Tahir Mamman
#32425
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Tahir Mamman is a Nigerian lawyer, professor and academic who is the current minister of education of Nigeria. He was the director-general of the Nigerian Law School from 2005 to 2013. He was a one time vice chancellor of Baze University, Abuja and member governing board of the Niger Delta Development Commission .
Go to Profile#32414
James G. Exum
#32426
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
James Gooden Exum Jr. also known as Jim Exum is an American jurist who served on the North Carolina Supreme Court from 1975 to 1994, and as chief justice from 1986 to 1994. Under his leadership, the court "expanded civil rights, took a new approach to criminal justice, and increased available remedies in tort law." Associate Justice Mark A. Davis has compared the Exum Court to the Warren Court at the federal level.
Go to Profile#32415
Kenney Jones
#32427
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Kenneth Thomas "Kenney" Jones is an English drummer best known for his work in the groups Small Faces, Faces, and the Who. Jones was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012 as a member of Small Faces/Faces.
Go to Profile#32416
Evan O'Dorney
#32428
Overall Influence
1993 - Present (33 years)
Evan Michael O'Dorney is an American mathematician who is a postdoctoral associate at Carnegie Mellon University. As a home-schooled high school student and college student, he won many contests in mathematics and other subjects, including the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee, 2011 Intel Science Talent Search, four International Math Olympiad medals, and three Putnam Fellowships. A 2013 report by the National Research Council called him "as famous for academic excellence as any student can be".
Go to Profile#32417
Kent Norman
#32429
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Kent L. Norman is an American cognitive psychologist and an expert on computer rage. He graduated from Southern Methodist University in 1969 and earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Iowa in 1973.
Go to Profile#32418
Paul Schultz Martin
#32430
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Paul Schultz Martin was an American geoscientist at the University of Arizona who developed the theory that the Pleistocene extinction of large mammals worldwide was caused by overhunting by humans. Martin's work bridged the fields of ecology, anthropology, geosciences, and paleontology.
Go to Profile#32419
August Meier
#32431
Overall Influence
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
August Meier was a professor of history at Kent State University and an author. He was a leading scholar on African American history. He edited several books with Elliott Rudwick. The New York Public Library has a collection of his papers.
Go to Profile#32420
Sonia Contera
#32432
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Sonia Antoranz Contera is a Spanish physicist. She serves as Professor of Biological Physics at the University of Oxford, a senior fellow at the Oxford Martin School, and a senior research fellow at Green Templeton College.
Go to Profile#32421
Keith Sinclair
#32433
Overall Influence
1922 - 1993 (71 years)
Sir Keith Sinclair was a New Zealand poet and historian. Academic career Sinclair was the oldest child of Ernest Duncan Sinclair and Florence Pyrenes Kennedy. Born and raised in Auckland, Sinclair was a student at Auckland University College, which was then part of the University of New Zealand. He was awarded a master's degree in 1946 and PhD at the college and was made a professor of history at the University of Auckland in 1963.
Go to Profile#32422
Barbara Harris
#32434
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Barbara Clementine Harris was an American bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States. She was the first woman consecrated a bishop in the Anglican Communion. She was elected suffragan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, on September 24, 1988, and was consecrated on February 11, 1989. Eight thousand people attended the service, which was held at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, Massachusetts. She served in the role of suffragan bishop for 13 years, retiring in 2003.
Go to Profile#32423
Beanie Sigel
#32435
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Dwight Equan Grant , better known by his stage name Beanie Sigel, is an American rapper from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He first became known for his association with Jay-Z, as he became a flagship artist for his now-defunct label imprint, Roc-A-Fella Records. Through the label, Grant released his debut studio album, The Truth in February 2000 to critical and commercial success.
Go to Profile#32424
Ray Winstone
#32436
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Raymond Andrew Winstone is an English television, stage and film actor with a career spanning five decades. Having worked with many prominent directors, including Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, Winstone is perhaps best known for his "hard man" roles, usually delivered in his distinctive London accent. The first of these was That Summer! for which he received a nomination for the BAFTA Award for Best Newcomer. He rose to prominence starring as Will Scarlet in the series Robin of Sherwood from 1984 to 1986.
Go to Profile#32425
Eduardo Rabossi
#32437
Overall Influence
1930 - 2005 (75 years)
Eduardo Rabossi was an Argentine philosopher and human rights activist. Biography Eduardo Rabossi was born in Buenos Aires on March 20, 1930 and graduated in Law at the University of Buenos Aires in 1955. Afterwards, he obtained his M.A. on philosophy at Duke University. The UBA was intervened by the military government in 1966, so he resigned to his work as a teacher and worked in investigations at the Oxford university instead.
Go to Profile#32426
Ron Francis
#32438
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Ronald Michael Francis Jr. is a Canadian ice hockey sports executive and former player. He currently serves as the general manager of the Seattle Kraken. He spent most of his career as either a player or executive for the Hartford Whalers/Carolina Hurricanes organization, 23 years in total .
Go to Profile#32427
Dan Miron
#32439
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Dan Miron is an Israeli-born American literary critic and author. An expert on modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, Miron is a Professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently the Leonard Kaye Professor of Hebrew and Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#32428
Gary Schuster
#32440
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Gary Benjamin Schuster was the interim president of the Georgia Institute of Technology, a position he held from July 1, 2008, when former president G. Wayne Clough stepped down, until April 1, 2009, when George P. "Bud" Peterson was named Georgia Tech's permanent president. He still holds the office Vasser Woolley Chair of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
Go to Profile#32429
Andrey Milekhin
#32441
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Andrey Vladimirovich Milekhin is a Soviet and Russian scientist, who is engaged in practical psychology and sociology in the field of marketing, media and social-economic research. At present, he is the President of Romir research holding, VP of Gallup International, Doctor of Science, Candidate of Psychological Sciences, honorary member of Guild of Marketers Professor of School of Contemporary Social Sciences at Moscow State University, Member of Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and Eurasian Academy of TV & Radio.
Go to Profile#32430
Liu Yu
#32442
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Liu Yu is a Chinese writer and political scientist. She is an associate professor of political science at Tsinghua University in Beijing. A prominent spokeswoman for Chinese liberalism, Liu's book , an introduction of the workings of American democracy to a Chinese audience, was acclaimed as a creative and well-written cornerstone of the ideological movement.
Go to Profile#32431
Paul Dini
#32443
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Paul McClaran Dini is an American screenwriter and comic creator. He has been a producer and writer for several Warner Bros. Animation/DC Comics animated series, most notably Batman: The Animated Series , and the subsequent DC Animated Universe. Dini and Bruce Timm co-created the characters Harley Quinn and Terry McGinnis.
Go to Profile#32432
Maurice Shock
#32444
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Sir Maurice Shock was a British university administrator and educationalist. Shock was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham and later read philosophy, politics and economics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he obtained a first-class degree.
Go to Profile#32433
Brad Childress
#32445
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Brad Childress is a former American football coach. He worked for over 40 years as a coach for various college programs and National Football League franchises. He was the offensive coordinator for Wisconsin from 1994 to 1998, the offensive coordinator for the Philadelphia Eagles from 1999 to 2005, the head coach of the Minnesota Vikings from 2006 to 2010, the offensive coordinator for the Cleveland Browns in 2012, and the offensive coordinator for the Kansas City Chiefs in 2016.
Go to Profile#32434
Robert Kirk
#32446
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Robert Kirk is a British philosopher. He is emeritus professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. Kirk is best known for his work on philosophical zombies—putatively unconscious beings physically and behaviourally identical to human beings. Although Kirk did not invent this idea, he introduced the term zombie in his 1974 papers "Sentience and Behaviour" and "Zombies v. Materialists". In the latter he offered a formulation of physicalism that aimed to make clear that if zombies are possible, physicalism is false: an argument that was not much noticed until David Chalmers's development of it in The Conscious Mind.
Go to Profile#32435
Harry Dym
#32447
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Harry Dym is a mathematician at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Dym's research interests include operator theory, interpolation theory, and inverse problems. Dym earned his Ph.D. in 1965 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Henry McKean. He introduced the Dym equation, which bears his name.
Go to Profile#32436
Susan Nolen-Hoeksema
#32448
Overall Influence
1959 - 2013 (54 years)
Susan Kay Nolen-Hoeksema was an American professor of psychology at Yale University. Her research explored how mood regulation strategies could correlate to a person's vulnerability to depression, with special focus on a construct she called rumination as well as gender differences.
Go to Profile#32437
Ahmad Jalali
#32449
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ahmad Jalali is an Iranian scholar and philosopher. He authored a dozen articles in social, cultural, historical, philosophical, political and international fields. Jalali was instrumental in registering five Iranian sites as World Heritage Site in UNESCO.
Go to Profile#32438
Carol Downer
#32450
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Carol Downer is an American feminist lawyer and non-fiction author who focused her career on abortion rights and women's health around the world. She was involved in the creation of the self-help movement and the first self-help clinic in LA, which later became a model and inspiration for dozens of self-help clinics across the United States.
Go to Profile#32439
Ellen M. Immergut
#32451
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Ellen Margaretha Immergut is a political scientist known for her work on electoral and political competition on welfare state reforms, policy analysis, health politics in Europe, and the impact of right-wing populism on social policies.
Go to Profile#32440
Howard Wilson Emmons
#32452
Overall Influence
1912 - 1998 (86 years)
Howard Wilson Emmons was an American professor in the department of Mechanical Engineering at Harvard University. During his career he conducted original research on fluid mechanics, combustion and fire safety. Today he is most widely known for his pioneering work in the field of fire safety engineering. He has been called "the father of modern fire science" for his contribution to the understanding of flame propagation and fire dynamics. He also helped design the first supersonic wind tunnel, identified a signature of the transition to turbulence in boundary layer flows , and was the first to observe compressor stall in a gas turbine compressor .
Go to Profile#32441
Ahmed I. Zayed
#32453
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Ahmed I. Zayed is an Egyptian American mathematician. His research interests include Sampling Theory, Wavelets, Medical Imaging, Fractional Fourier transform，Sinc Approximations, Boundary Value Problemss, Special Functions and Orthogonal polynomials, Integral transforms.
Go to Profile#32442
Glenn Patterson
#32454
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Glenn Patterson FRSL is a writer from Belfast, Northern Ireland, best known as a novelist. In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Early life Patterson was born in Belfast, where he attended Methodist College Belfast. He graduated from the University of East Anglia , where he was a product of the UEA creative writing course under Malcolm Bradbury.
Go to Profile#32443
Lawrence Kasdan
#32455
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Lawrence Edward Kasdan is an American filmmaker. He is the co-writer of the Star Wars films The Empire Strikes Back , Return of the Jedi , The Force Awakens , and Solo: A Star Wars Story . He also co-wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Bodyguard , and is the writer-director of Body Heat , The Big Chill , Silverado , The Accidental Tourist , and Dreamcatcher . He is known for updating old Hollywood genres—film noir, science-fiction, westerns—in a classical dramatic style with quick-witted dialogue, but dealing with contemporary social themes. As a director, he has made various personal film...
Go to Profile#32444
Brenda Fitzgerald
#32456
Overall Influence
Brenda Fitzgerald is an American obstetrician-gynecologist who served as Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the Donald Trump administration from July 2017 to January 2018. Her tenure was one of the shortest in the office's history, excluding interim appointments. Previously, she was the Commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health from 2011 to 2017.
Go to Profile#32445
Julia Kotlarsky
#32457
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Julia Kotlarsky is a New Zealand academic, and as of 2018 is a full professor at the University of Auckland. Academic career After her 2005 PhD thesis titled 'Management of globally distributed component-based software development projects' at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, Kotlarsky moved to the University of Warwick, and then in 2012 joined Aston University as a full professor. In 2018 she moved to University of Auckland.
Go to Profile#32446
James R. Thompson
#32458
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
James Robert Thompson Jr. was an American politician, lobbyist, and federal prosecutor who served as the 37th governor of Illinois from 1977 to 1991. He was Illinois's longest-serving governor, having been elected to four consecutive terms and holding the office for fourteen years.
Go to Profile#32447
Andrew J. Elliot
#32459
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Andrew J. Elliot is a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. His research on the hierarchical model of approach and avoidance motivation focuses on combining classic and contemporary methods to test various theories. Elliot's work in social psychology is cited frequently by those in the field, causing him to be named one of Thomson Reuters' ISI Highly Cited for the Social Sciences in 2010.
Go to Profile#32448
Bud Moore
#32460
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Walter Maynard "Bud" Moore Jr. was a NASCAR car owner who operated the Bud Moore Engineering team. A decorated veteran of World War II, he described himself as "an old country mechanic who loved to make 'em run fast".
Go to Profile#32449
Philippe Nozières
#32461
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
Philippe Pierre Gaston François Nozières was a French physicist working at Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France. He was born on 12 April 1932 in Paris and died on 15 June 2022, aged 90. Education In 1952, Nozières began his scientific career working on semiconductor experiments in the group of Pierre Aigrain at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He wrote a master's thesis on the point-contact transistor. In 1955, received a fellowship study with David Pines at Princeton University, working on many-body theory. He spent the summer of 1956 at Bell Labs, where he exchanged ideas with a variety of condensed matter theorists, including Philip W.
Go to Profile#32450
Heng Li
#32462
Overall Influence
Heng Li is a Chinese bioinformatics scientist. He is an associate professor at the department of Biomedical Informatics of Harvard Medical School and the department of Data Science of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He was previously a research scientist working at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts with David Reich and David Altshuler. Li's work has made several important contributions in the field of next generation sequencing.
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