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
#3301
Peggy McIntosh
#3306
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Peggy McIntosh is an American feminist, anti-racism activist, scholar, speaker, and senior research scientist of the Wellesley Centers for Women. She is the founder of the National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum . She and Emily Style co-directed SEED for its first twenty-five years. She has written on curricular revision, feelings of fraudulence, hierarchies in education and society, and professional development of teachers.
Go to Profile#3302
Warith Deen Mohammed
#3307
Overall Influence
1933 - 2008 (75 years)
Warith Deen Mohammed , also known as W. Deen Mohammed, Imam W. Deen Muhammad and Imam Warith Deen, was an African-American Muslim leader, theologian, philosopher, Muslim revivalist, and Islamic thinker.
Go to Profile#3303
Leonora Carrington
#3308
Overall Influence
1917 - 2011 (94 years)
Mary Leonora Carrington was a British-born surrealist painter and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the women's liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s.
Go to Profile#3304
Elfriede Jelinek
#3309
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She is one of the most decorated authors to write in German and was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power". Along with Peter Handke and Botho Strauss, she is considered to be among the most important living playwrights of the German language.
Go to Profile#3305
Alexander Nehamas
#3310
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Alexander Nehamas is a Greek-born American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy and comparative literature and the Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1990. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and Member of the American Philosophical Society , the Academy of Athens since 2018. He works on Greek philosophy, aesthetics, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and literary theory.
Go to Profile#3306
F. Thomson Leighton
#3311
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Frank Thomson "Tom" Leighton is the CEO of Akamai Technologies, the company he co-founded with the late Daniel Lewin in 1998. As one of the world's preeminent authorities on algorithms for network applications and cybersecurity, Dr. Leighton discovered a solution to free up web congestion using applied mathematics and distributed computing.
Go to Profile#3307
Andrew Yao
#3312
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Andrew Chi-Chih Yao is a Chinese computer scientist and computational theorist. He is currently a professor and the dean of Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University. Yao used the minimax theorem to prove what is now known as Yao's Principle.
Go to Profile#3308
Robin Wells
#3313
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Robin Elizabeth Wells is an American economist. She is the co-author of several economics texts, mostly with her husband Paul Krugman. Life and career Wells received her BA from the University of Chicago and her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Wells did a post-doctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has taught or done research at the University of Michigan, the University of Southampton, Stanford University, MIT, and Princeton University.
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Paul Gambaccini
#3314
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Paul Matthew Gambaccini is an American-British radio and television presenter and author in the United Kingdom. He has dual United States and British nationality, having become a British citizen in 2005.
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Shelly Kagan
#3315
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Shelly Kagan is Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, where he has taught since 1995. He is best known for his writings about moral philosophy and normative ethics. In 2007, Kagan's course about death was offered for free online, and was very popular. This led to him publishing a book on the subject in 2012. Kagan was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.
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Ehsan Yarshater
#3316
Overall Influence
1920 - 2018 (98 years)
Ehsan Yarshater was an Iranian historian and linguist who specialized in Iranology. He was the founder and director of The Center for Iranian Studies, and Hagop Kevorkian Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Columbia University.
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Erich Kähler
#3317
Overall Influence
1906 - 2000 (94 years)
Erich Kähler was a German mathematician with wide-ranging interests in geometry and mathematical physics, who laid important mathematical groundwork for algebraic geometry and for string theory. Education and life Erich Kähler was born in Leipzig, the son of a telegraph inspector Ernst Kähler. Inspired as a boy to be an explorer after reading books about Sven Hedin that his mother Elsa Götsch had given to him, the young Kähler soon focused his passion for exploration on astronomy. He is said to have written a 50-page thesis on fractional differentiation while still in high school, hoping that it would earn him a PhD.
Go to Profile#3313
Carmen Reinhart
#3318
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Carmen M. Reinhart is a Cuban-American economist and the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School. Previously, she was the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, Founding Contributor of VoxEU, and a member of Council on Foreign Relations. She is als...
Go to Profile#3314
Lou Adler
#3319
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Lester Louis Adler is an American record and film producer and the co-owner of the Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood, California. Adler has produced and developed a number of iconic musical artists, including The Grass Roots, Jan & Dean, The Mamas & the Papas, and Carole King. King's album Tapestry, produced by Adler, won the 1972 Grammy Award for Album of the Year and has been called one of the greatest pop albums of all time.
Go to Profile#3315
Owen Flanagan
#3320
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Owen Flanagan is the James B. Duke University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Professor of Neurobiology Emeritus at Duke University. Flanagan has done work in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, ethics, contemporary ethical theory, moral psychology, as well as on cross-cultural philosophy.
Go to Profile#3316
Alice Cooper
#3321
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Alice Cooper is an American rock singer whose career spans over five decades. With a raspy voice and a stage show that features numerous props and stage illusions, including pyrotechnics, guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood, reptiles, baby dolls, and dueling swords, Cooper is considered by many music journalists and peers to be "The Godfather of Shock Rock". He has drawn equally from horror films, vaudeville, and garage rock to pioneer a macabre and theatrical brand of rock designed to shock audiences.
Go to Profile#3317
André Martinet
#3322
Overall Influence
1908 - 1999 (91 years)
André Martinet was a French linguist, influential due to his work on structural linguistics. In linguistic theory, Martinet is known especially for his studies on linguistic economy and double articulation.
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Leo Castelli
#3323
Overall Influence
1907 - 1999 (92 years)
Leo Castelli was an Italian-American art dealer who originated the contemporary art gallery system. His gallery showcased contemporary art for five decades. Among the movements which Castelli showed were Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Dada, Pop Art, Op Art, Color field painting, Hard-edge painting, Lyrical Abstraction, Minimal Art, Conceptual Art, and Neo-expressionism.
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Norman Smith
#3324
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Norman Smith was an English musician, record producer and engineer. In the 1960s, he notably engineered all of the Beatles' EMI studio recordings up to the end of 1965 and produced three Pink Floyd albums including their first, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn . He later had a successful recording career as Hurricane Smith, achieving a transatlantic hit single with "Oh, Babe, What Would You Say?" in 1972.
Go to Profile#3320
Samuel Moyn
#3325
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
#3321
Albert Schwarz
#3326
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Albert Solomonovich Schwarz is a Soviet and American mathematician and a theoretical physicist educated in the Soviet Union and now a professor at the University of California, Davis. Early life Schwarz was born in Kazan, Soviet Union. His parents were arrested in the Stalinist purges in 1937. He has two children: a son, Michael A. Schwarz, and a daughter.
Go to Profile#3322
Stanley Miller
#3327
Overall Influence
1930 - 2007 (77 years)
Stanley Lloyd Miller was an American chemist who made important experiments concerning the origin of life by demonstrating that a wide range of vital organic compounds can be synthesized by fairly simple chemical processes from inorganic substances. In 1952 he performed the Miller–Urey experiment, which showed that complex organic molecules could be synthesised from inorganic precursors. The experiment was widely reported, and provided evidence for the idea that the chemical evolution of the early Earth had caused the natural synthesis of organic compounds from inanimate inorganic molecules.
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Dennis Ross
#3328
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Dennis B. Ross is an American diplomat and author. He has served as the Director of Policy Planning in the State Department under President George H. W. Bush, the special Middle East coordinator under President Bill Clinton, and was a special adviser for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia to the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
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Kevin Keegan
#3329
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Joseph Kevin Keegan is an English former footballerer and manager. A forward, he played for several professional clubs from 1968 to 1984. Widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time, Keegan was recognised for his dribbling ability as well as his finishing and presence in the air. Having begun his career at Scunthorpe United, he moved to Liverpool in 1971 and then to Hamburger SV in 1977, enjoying great success at both clubs. During this period, he was a regular member of the England national team. After leaving Hamburg, where he was affectionately known as 'Mighty Mouse', Keegan played for Southampton and Newcastle United before retiring.
Go to Profile#3325
Colin Dexter
#3330
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Norman Colin Dexter was an English crime writer known for his Inspector Morse series of novels, which were written between 1975 and 1999 and adapted as an ITV television series, Inspector Morse, from 1987 to 2000. His characters have spawned a sequel series, Lewis from 2006 to 2015, and a prequel series, Endeavour from 2012 to 2023.
Go to Profile#3326
Partha Dasgupta
#3331
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Sir Partha Sarathi Dasgupta is an Indian-British economist who is Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge.
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Lisa Feldman Barrett
#3332
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
#3328
Anders Åslund
#3333
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Per Anders Åslund is a Swedish economist and former Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He is also a chairman of the International Advisory Council at the Center for Social and Economic Research .
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Steven Rosefielde
#3334
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Steven R. Rosefielde is professor of comparative economic systems at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. Red Holocaust In Red Holocaust, Rosefielde's main point is that communism in general, although he focuses mostly on Stalinism, is less genocidal, and that is a key distinction from Nazism. According to German historian , the term is not popular among scholars in Germany or internationally. Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine writes that usage of this term "allows the reality it describes to immediately attain, in the West...
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Zeev Sternhell
#3335
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Zeev Sternhell was a Polish-born Israeli historian, political scientist, commentator on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and writer. He was one of the world's leading theorists of the phenomenon of fascism. Sternhell headed the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and wrote for Haaretz newspaper.
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Iris Marion Young
#3336
Overall Influence
1949 - 2006 (57 years)
Iris Marion Young was an American political theorist and socialist feminist who focused on the nature of justice and social difference. She served as Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and was affiliated with the Center for Gender Studies and the Human Rights program there. Her research covered contemporary political theory, feminist social theory, and normative analysis of public policy. She believed in the importance of political activism and encouraged her students to involve themselves in their communities.
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Jean-Pierre Vernant
#3337
Overall Influence
1914 - 2007 (93 years)
Jean-Pierre Vernant was a French historian and anthropologist, specialist in ancient Greece. Influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Vernant developed a structuralist approach to Greek myth, tragedy, and society which would itself be influential among classical scholars. He was an honorary professor at the Collège de France.
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Frances Fox Piven
#3338
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Frances Fox Piven is an American professor of political science and sociology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she has taught since 1982. Piven is known equally for her contributions to social theory and for her social activism. A public advocate of the war on poverty and subsequent welfare-rights protests both in New York City and on the national stage, she has been instrumental in formulating the theoretical underpinnings of those movements. Over the course of her career, she has served on the boards of the ACLU and the Democratic Socialists of America, and has als...
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Eugene Landy
#3339
Overall Influence
1934 - 2006 (72 years)
Eugene Ellsworth Landy was an American psychologist known for his unconventional and controversial 24-hour therapy program and treatment of celebrity clients. Landy's regimen involved supervising and micromanaging his client's life with a team of counselors and doctors. His most notable patient was the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, with whom he formed a controversial business and creative partnership in the 1980s.
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Gil Norton
#3340
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Gil Norton is an English record producer known for his work with alternative rock bands such as Pixies, Echo & the Bunnymen, Foo Fighters, Tribe, Jimmy Eat World, Dashboard Confessional, Feeder, the Distillers, Maxïmo Park, Counting Crows, Terrorvision, the Triffids, Del Amitri, James, the Feelers, the Beekeepers, Twin Atlantic, General Fiasco, Span, Busted, Bayside, and Intergallactic Lovers.
Go to Profile#3336
John Llewelyn
#3341
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
John Llewelyn was a Welsh-born British philosopher whose extensive body of work, published over a period of more than forty years, spans the divide between Analytical and Continental schools of contemporary thought. He has conjoined the rigorous approach to matters of meaning and logic typical of the former and the depth and range of reference typical of the latter in a constructive and critical engagement with the work of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas.
Go to Profile#3337
Francis Pangilinan
#3342
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Francis Pancratius "Kiko" Nepomuceno Pangilinan is a Filipino lawyer, politician, and farm owner who served as a Senator from 2001 to 2013 and from 2016 to 2022. He was the Senate Majority Leader from 2004 to 2008.
Go to Profile#3338
Asef Bayat
#3343
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Asef Bayat is an Iranian-American scholar. He is currently the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, Sociology, and Middle Eastern studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was previously a Professor of Sociology and Middle Eastern studies and held the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He served as Academic Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World and ISIM Chair of Islam and the Modern World at Leiden University .
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Zbigniew Herbert
#3344
Overall Influence
1924 - 1998 (74 years)
Zbigniew Herbert was a Polish poet, essayist, drama writer and moralist. He is one of the best known and the most translated post-war Polish writers. While he was first published in the 1950s , soon after he voluntarily ceased submitting most of his works to official Polish government publications. He resumed publication in the 1980s, initially in the underground press. Since the 1960s, he was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His books have been translated into 38 languages.
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Elizabeth J. Feinler
#3345
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Elizabeth Jocelyn "Jake" Feinler is an American information scientist. From 1972 until 1989 she was director of the Network Information Systems Center at the Stanford Research Institute . Her group operated the Network Information Center for the ARPANET as it evolved into the Defense Data Network and the Internet.
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Brian Barry
#3346
Overall Influence
1936 - 2009 (73 years)
Brian Barry, was a moral and political philosopher. He was educated at the Queen's College, Oxford, obtaining the degrees of B.A. and D.Phil. under the direction of H. L. A. Hart. Along with David Braybrooke, Richard E. Flathman, Felix Oppenheim, and Abraham Kaplan, he is widely credited with having fused analytic philosophy and political science. Barry also fused political theory and social choice theory and was a persistent critic of public choice theory.
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Niki de Saint Phalle
#3347
Overall Influence
1930 - 2002 (72 years)
Niki de Saint Phalle was a French-American sculptor, painter, filmmaker, and author of colorful hand-illustrated books. Widely noted as one of the few female monumental sculptors, Saint Phalle was also known for her social commitment and work.
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Jean Van Hamme
#3348
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Jean, knight Van Hamme is a Belgian novelist and comic book writer. He has written scripts for a number of Belgian/French comic series, including Histoire sans héros, Thorgal, XIII and Largo Winch.
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Sonu Shamdasani
#3349
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Sonu Shamdasani is a London-based author, editor in chief, and professor at University College London. His research and writings focus on Carl Gustav Jung and cover the history of psychiatry and psychology from the mid-nineteenth century to current times.
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Chuck Berry
#3350
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Charles Edward Anderson Berry was an American singer, guitarist and songwriter who pioneered rock and roll. Nicknamed the "Father of Rock and Roll", he refined and developed rhythm and blues into the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive with songs such as "Maybellene" , "Roll Over Beethoven" , "Rock and Roll Music" and "Johnny B. Goode" . Writing lyrics that focused on teen life and consumerism, and developing a music style that included guitar solos and showmanship, Berry was a major influence on subsequent rock music.
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Alexander Beilinson
#3351
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Alexander A. Beilinson is the David and Mary Winton Green University professor at the University of Chicago and works on mathematics. His research has spanned representation theory, algebraic geometry and mathematical physics. In 1999, Beilinson was awarded the Ostrowski Prize with Helmut Hofer. In 2017, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2018, he received the Wolf Prize in Mathematics and in 2020 the Shaw Prize in Mathematics.
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Medha Patkar
#3352
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Medha Patkar is a politician and activist working on certain political and social issues raised by tribals, dalits, farmers, labourers and women facing injustice in India. She is an alumnus of TISS, a premier institute of social science research in India..
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Simon Armitage
#3353
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Simon Robert Armitage is an English poet, playwright, musician and novelist. He was appointed Poet Laureate on 10 May 2019. He is professor of poetry at the University of Leeds. He has published over 20 collections of poetry, starting with Zoom! in 1989. Many of his poems concern his home town in West Yorkshire; these are collected in Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems. He has translated classic poems including the Odyssey, The Death of King Arthur, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He has written several travel books including Moon Country and Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way.
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Brian Cantwell Smith
#3354
Overall Influence
Brian Cantwell Smith is a philosopher and cognitive scientist working in the fields of cognitive science, computer science, information studies, and philosophy, especially ontology. His research has focused on the foundations and philosophy of computing, both in the practice and theory of computer science, and in the use of computational metaphors in other fields, such as philosophy, cognitive science, physics, and art. He is currently professor of information, computer science, and philosophy at University of Toronto.
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Joel Feinberg
#3355
Overall Influence
1926 - 2004 (78 years)
Joel Feinberg was an American political and legal philosopher. He is known for his work in the fields of ethics, action theory, philosophy of law, and political philosophy as well as individual rights and the authority of the state. Feinberg was one of the most influential figures in American jurisprudence of the last fifty years.
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