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
#3251
Martin Gilbert
#3256
Overall Influence
1936 - 2015 (79 years)
Sir Martin John Gilbert was a British historian and honorary Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. He was the author of 88 books, including works on Winston Churchill, the 20th century, and Jewish history including the Holocaust. He was a member of the Chilcot Inquiry into Britain's role in the Iraq War.
Go to Profile#3252
Llewellyn Thomas
#3257
Overall Influence
1903 - 1992 (89 years)
Llewellyn Hilleth Thomas was a British physicist and applied mathematician. He is best known for his contributions to atomic and molecular physics and solid-state physics. His key achievements include calculating relativistic effects on the spin-orbit interaction in a hydrogen atom
Go to Profile#3253
Jacqueline Rose
#3258
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Jacqueline Rose, FBA, FRSL is a British academic who is Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Life and work Jacqueline Rose is known for her work on the relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism and literature. She is a graduate of St Hilda's College, Oxford, and gained her higher degree from the Sorbonne, Paris. She took her doctorate from the University of London, where she was supervised by Frank Kermode. Her elder sister was the philosopher Gillian Rose.
Go to Profile#3254
Jack Edmonds
#3259
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Jack R. Edmonds is an American-born and educated computer scientist and mathematician who lived and worked in Canada for much of his life. He has made fundamental contributions to the fields of combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, discrete mathematics and the theory of computing. He was the recipient of the 1985 John von Neumann Theory Prize.
Go to Profile#3255
Paul Ginsparg
#3260
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Paul Henry Ginsparg is an American physicist. He developed the arXiv.org e-print archive. Education He is a graduate of Syosset High School in Syosset, New York. He graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in physics and from Cornell University with a PhD in theoretical particle physics with a thesis titled Aspects of Symmetry Behavior in Quantum Field Theory.
Go to Profile#3256
Oskar Negt
#3261
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Oskar Reinhard Negt is a philosopher and critical social theorist. He is an emeritus professor of sociology at Leibniz University Hannover, and one of Germany's most prominent social scientists. Little of his work has been translated into English.
Go to Profile#3257
Condoleezza Rice
#3262
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Condoleezza Rice is an American diplomat and political scientist who is the current director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A member of the Republican Party, she previously served as the 66th United States secretary of state from 2005 to 2009 and as the 19th U.S. national security advisor from 2001 to 2005. Rice was the first female African-American secretary of state and the first woman to serve as national security advisor. Until the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008, Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, were the highest-ranking African Americans in the history of the federal executive branch .
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Antony Garrett Lisi
#3263
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Antony Garrett Lisi , known as Garrett Lisi, is an American theoretical physicist. Lisi works as an independent researcher without an academic position. Lisi is known for "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything," an unpublished preprint paper proposing a unified field theory based on the E Lie group, combining particle physics with Einstein's theory of gravitation. The theory is incomplete and has unresolved problems. The theory has been extensively criticized in the scientific community.
Go to Profile#3259
Jane Pauley
#3264
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Margaret Jane Pauley is an American television host, and author, active in news reporting since 1972. Pauley first became widely known as Barbara Walters's successor on the NBC morning show Today, beginning at the age of 25, where she was a co-anchor from 1976 to 1989, at first with Tom Brokaw, and later with Bryant Gumbel; for a short while in the late 1980s she and Gumbel worked with Deborah Norville. In 1989, with her job apparently threatened by Norville's addition to the program, she asked to be released from her contract, but her request was denied. Her next regular anchor position was ...
Go to Profile#3260
Richard Wiseman
#3265
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
#3261
George H. Hitchings
#3266
Overall Influence
1905 - 1998 (93 years)
George Herbert Hitchings was an American medical doctor who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sir James Black and Gertrude Elion "for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment", Hitchings specifically for his work on chemotherapy.
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Thupten Jinpa
#3267
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Thupten Jinpa Langri is a Tibetan Buddhist scholar, former monk and an academic of religious studies and both Eastern and Western philosophy. He has been the principal English translator to the Dalai Lama since 1985. He has translated and edited more than ten books by the Dalai Lama including The World of Tibetan Buddhism , A Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus , and the New York Times bestseller Ethics for the New Millennium .
Go to Profile#3263
Gu Chaohao
#3268
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Gu Chaohao was a Chinese mathematician. He graduated from National Chekiang University in 1948, and received a doctorate in physics and mathematical science from Moscow University in 1959. He was primarily engaged in research on partial differential equations, differential geometry, solitons, and mathematical physics. He served as vice president of Fudan University and from 1988 to 1993 as president of the University of Science and Technology of China. In 1980, he was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received the Highest Science and Technology Award in 2009.
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Ian Buruma
#3269
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ian Buruma is a Dutch writer and editor who lives and works in the United States. In 2017, he became editor of The New York Review of Books, but left the position in September 2018. Much of his writing has focused on the culture of Asia, particularly that of China and 20th-century Japan. He was the Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College from 2003 to 2017.
Go to Profile#3265
Bernard Baars
#3270
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Bernard J. Baars is a former Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, CA., and is currently an Affiliated Fellow there. He is best known as the originator of the global workspace theory, a theory of human cognitive architecture and consciousness. He previously served as a professor of psychology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook where he conducted research into the causation of human errors and the Freudian slip, and as a faculty member at the Wright Institute.
Go to Profile#3266
Liviu Librescu
#3271
Overall Influence
1930 - 2007 (77 years)
Liviu Librescu was a Romanian–American scientist and engineer. A prominent academic in addition to being a survivor of the Holocaust, his major research fields were aeroelasticity and aerodynamics.
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Edgar Schein
#3272
Overall Influence
1928 - 2023 (95 years)
Edgar Henry Schein was a Swiss-born American business theorist and psychologist who was professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He founded the discipline of organizational behavior, and made notable contributions in the field of organizational development in many areas, including career development, group process consultation, and organizational culture. He was the son of former University of Chicago professor Marcel Schein.
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Raul Hilberg
#3273
Overall Influence
1926 - 2007 (81 years)
Raul Hilberg was a Jewish Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the preeminent scholar on the Holocaust. Christopher R. Browning has called him the founding father of Holocaust Studies and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as seminal for research into the Nazi Final Solution.
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Graham Allison
#3274
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Graham Tillett Allison Jr. is an American political scientist and the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is known for his contributions in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the bureaucratic analysis of decision making, especially during times of crisis. His book Remaking Foreign Policy: The Organizational Connection, co-written with Peter Szanton, was published in 1976 and influenced the foreign policy of the Carter administration. Since the 1970s, Allison has also been a leading analyst of U.S. national security and de...
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Ariel Rubinstein
#3275
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ariel Rubinstein is an Israeli economist who works in economic theory, game theory and bounded rationality. Biography Ariel Rubinstein is a professor of economics at the School of Economics at Tel Aviv University and the Department of Economics at New York University. He studied mathematics and economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1972–1979 .
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Karen Uhlenbeck
#3276
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck ForMemRS is an American mathematician and one of the founders of modern geometric analysis. She is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair. She is currently a distinguished visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting senior research scholar at Princeton University.
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Karlheinz Brandenburg
#3277
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Karlheinz Brandenburg is a German electrical engineer and mathematician. Together with Ernst Eberlein, Heinz Gerhäuser , Bernhard Grill, Jürgen Herre and Harald Popp , he developed the widespread MP3 method for audio data compression. He is also known for his elementary work in the field of audio coding, the perception measurement, the wave field synthesis and psychoacoustics. Brandenburg has received numerous national and international research awards, prizes and honors for his work. Since 2000 he has been a professor of electronic media technology at the Technical University Ilmenau. Brande...
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Robert O. Pihl
#3278
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Robert O. Pihl is an American psychology researcher, professor and clinician. Since 1966, he has worked at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is also a fellow of the American Psychological Association and Canadian Psychological Association, as well as a member of many other academic organizations.
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Barbara Kingsolver
#3279
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Barbara Kingsolver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.
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Hu Jintao
#3280
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Hu Jintao is a Chinese retired politician who served as the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party from 2002 to 2012, the president of China from 2003 to 2013, and chairman of the Central Military Commission from 2004 to 2012. He was a member of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee, China's de facto top decision-making body, from 1992 to 2012. Hu was the fifth paramount leader of China from 2002 to 2012.
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Hartmut Michel
#3281
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Hartmut Michel is a German biochemist, who received the 1988 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for determination of the first crystal structure of an integral membrane protein, a membrane-bound complex of proteins and co-factors that is essential to photosynthesis.
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C. Vann Woodward
#3282
Overall Influence
1908 - 1999 (91 years)
Comer Vann Woodward was an American historian who focused primarily on the American South and race relations. He was long a supporter of the approach of Charles A. Beard, stressing the influence of unseen economic motivations in politics.
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Daniel Keyes
#3283
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Daniel Keyes was an American writer who wrote the novel Flowers for Algernon. Keyes was given the Author Emeritus honor by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2000. Biography Early life and career Keyes was born in New York City, New York. His family was Jewish. He attended New York University briefly before joining the United States Maritime Service at 17, working as a ship's purser on oil tankers. Afterward he returned to New York and in 1950 received a bachelor's degree in psychology from Brooklyn College.
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Norman Fairclough
#3284
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Norman Fairclough is an emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. He is one of the founders of critical discourse analysis as applied to sociolinguistics. CDA is concerned with how power is exercised through language. CDA studies discourse; in CDA this includes texts, talk, video and practices.
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Karen Barad
#3285
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Karen Michelle Barad is an American feminist theorist and physicist, known particularly for their theory of agential realism. Biography They are currently Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They are the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Their research topics include feminist theory, physics, twentieth-century continental philosophy, epistemology, ontology, philosophy of physics, cultural studies of science, and feminist science studies.
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Kenichi Fukui
#3286
Overall Influence
1918 - 1998 (80 years)
Kenichi Fukui was a Japanese chemist, known as the first person of East Asian ancestry to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Fukui was co-recipient of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Roald Hoffmann, for their independent investigations into the mechanisms of chemical reactions. Fukui's prize-winning work focused on the role of frontier orbitals in chemical reactions: specifically that molecules share loosely bonded electrons which occupy the frontier orbitals, that is, the Highest Occupied Molecular Orbital and the Lowest Unoccupied Molecular Orbital .
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Solomon H. Snyder
#3287
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Solomon Halbert Snyder is an American neuroscientist who has made wide-ranging contributions to neuropharmacology and neurochemistry. He studied at Georgetown University, and has conducted the majority of his research at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Many advances in molecular neuroscience have stemmed from Snyder's identification of receptors for neurotransmitters and drugs, and elucidation of the actions of psychotropic agents. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1978 for his research on the opioid receptor, and is one of the most highly cited researche...
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Evan Thompson
#3288
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Evan Thompson is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He writes about cognitive science, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Buddhist philosophy in dialogue with Western philosophy of mind and cognitive science.
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Herb Ritts
#3289
Overall Influence
1952 - 2002 (50 years)
Herbert Ritts Jr. was an American fashion photographer and director known for his photographs of celebrities, models, and other cultural figures throughout the 1980s and 1990s. His work concentrated on black and white photography and portraits, often in the style of classical Greek sculpture, which emphasized the human shape.
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Gerard Salton
#3290
Overall Influence
1927 - 1995 (68 years)
Gerard A. "Gerry" Salton was a professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Salton was perhaps the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval during his time, and "the father of Information Retrieval". His group at Cornell developed the SMART Information Retrieval System, which he initiated when he was at Harvard. It was the very first system to use the now popular vector space model for Information Retrieval.
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Manuel DeLanda
#3291
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Manuel DeLanda is a Mexican-American writer, artist and philosopher who has lived in New York since 1975. He is a lecturer in architecture at the Princeton University School of Architecture and the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, where he teaches courses on the philosophy of urban history and the dynamics of cities as historical actors with an emphasis on the importance of self-organization and material culture in the understanding of a city. DeLanda also teaches architectural theory as an adjunct professor of architecture and urban design at the Pratt Institute and serves as the Gilles Deleuze Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School.
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Thomas Callister Hales
#3292
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Thomas Callister Hales is an American mathematician working in the areas of representation theory, discrete geometry, and formal verification. In representation theory he is known for his work on the Langlands program and the proof of the fundamental lemma over the group Sp . In discrete geometry, he settled the Kepler conjecture on the density of sphere packings and the honeycomb conjecture. In 2014, he announced the completion of the Flyspeck Project, which formally verified the correctness of his proof of the Kepler conjecture.
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Bruno Pontecorvo
#3293
Overall Influence
1913 - 1993 (80 years)
Bruno Pontecorvo was an Italian and Soviet nuclear physicist, an early assistant of Enrico Fermi and the author of numerous studies in high energy physics, especially on neutrinos. A convinced communist, he defected to the Soviet Union in 1950, where he continued his research on the decay of the muon and on neutrinos. The prestigious Pontecorvo Prize was instituted in his memory in 1995.
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Heinz Zemanek
#3294
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
Heinz Zemanek was an Austrian computer pioneer who led the development, from 1954 to 1958, of one of the first complete transistorised computers on the European continent. The computer was nicknamed Mailüfterl — Viennese for "May breeze" — in reference to Whirlwind, a computer developed at MIT between 1945 and 1951.
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James A. Michener
#3295
Overall Influence
1907 - 1997 (90 years)
James Albert Michener was an American writer. He wrote more than 40 books, most of which were long, fictional family sagas covering the lives of many generations, set in particular geographic locales and incorporating detailed history. Many of his works were bestsellers and were chosen by the Book of the Month Club; he was known for the meticulous research that went into his books.
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Michael Dukakis
#3296
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Michael Stanley Dukakis is an American retired lawyer and politician who served as governor of Massachusetts from 1975 to 1979 and again from 1983 to 1991. He is the longest-serving governor in Massachusetts history and only the second Greek-American governor in U.S. history, after Spiro Agnew. He was nominated by the Democratic Party for president in the 1988 election, losing to the Republican nominee, Vice President George H. W. Bush.
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Hugh Kenner
#3297
Overall Influence
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
William Hugh Kenner was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor. He published widely on Modernist literature with particular emphasis on James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Samuel Beckett. His major study of the period, The Pound Era, argued for Pound as the central figure of Modernism, and is considered one of the most important works on the topic.
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Jonathan Zittrain
#3298
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Jonathan L. Zittrain is an American professor of Internet law and the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School. He is also a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and co-founder and director of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Previously, Zittrain was Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford and visiting professor at the New York University School of Law and Stanford Law School. He is t...
Go to Profile#3294
Gilad Shalit
#3299
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Gilad Shalit is a former MIA soldier of the Israel Defense Forces who, on 25 June 2006, was captured by Palestinian militants in a cross-border raid via tunnels near the Israeli border. Hamas held him captive for over five years until his release on 18 October 2011 as part of a prisoner exchange deal.
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Fred W. Friendly
#3300
Overall Influence
1915 - 1998 (83 years)
Fred W. Friendly was a president of CBS News and the creator, along with Edward R. Murrow, of the documentary television program See It Now. He originated the concept of public-access television cable TV channels.
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Norman Stone
#3301
Overall Influence
1941 - 2019 (78 years)
Norman Stone was a British historian and author. At the time of his death, he was Professor of European History in the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University, having formerly been a professor at the University of Oxford, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and an adviser to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. He was a board member of the Center for Eurasian Studies , and devoted some of the last years of his life to promoting Armenian genocide denial.
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Carol Dweck
#3302
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Carol Susan Dweck is an American psychologist. She holds the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professorship of Psychology at Stanford University. Dweck is known for her work on motivation and mindset. She was on the faculty at the University of Illinois, Harvard, and Columbia before joining the Stanford University faculty in 2004. She was named an Association for Psychological Science James McKeen Cattell Fellow in 2013, an APS Mentor Awardee in 2019, and an APS William James Fellow in 2020, and has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2012.
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Chris Welch
#3303
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Chris Welch is an English music journalist, critic, and author who is best known for his work from the late 1960s as a reporter for Melody Maker, Musicians Only, and Kerrang!. He is the author of over 40 music books.
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Robert Pinsky
#3304
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. His first two terms as United States Poet Laureate were marked by such visible dynamism—and such national enthusiasm in response—that the Library of Congress appointed him to an unprecedented third term. Throughout his career, Pinsky has been dedicated to identifying and invigorating poetry's place in the world. Known worldwide, Pinsky's work has earned him the PEN/Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Lenore Marshall Prize, Italy's Premio Capri, the Korean Manhae Award, and the Harold Washington Award from the City of Chicago, among other accolades.
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Nicholas Hytner
#3305
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Sir Nicholas Robert Hytner is an English theatre director, film director, and film producer. He was previously the Artistic Director of London's National Theatre. His major successes as director include Miss Saigon, The History Boys and One Man, Two Guvnors. He has also known for directing films such as The Madness of King George , The Crucible , The History Boys , and The Lady in the Van . Hytner was knighted in the 2010 New Year Honours for services to drama by Queen Elizabeth II.
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