Search People Result | Academic Influence

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

#33151

Randall Kenan

#33163

Overall Influence

1963 - 2020 (57 years)

Randall Kenan was an American author. Born in Brooklyn, New York, at six weeks old Kenan moved to Duplin County, North Carolina, a small rural community, where he lived with his grandparents in a town named Wallace. Many of Kenan's novels are set around the area of his home in North Carolina. The focus of much of Kenan's work centers around what it means to be black and gay in the southern United States. Some of Kenan's most notable works include the collection of short stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, named a New York Times Notable Book in 1992, A Visitation of Spirits, and The Fire This Time.

#33152

Peter Jackson

#33164

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Peter Jackson is a British scholar and historian, specializing in the Crusades, particularly the contacts between the Europeans and the Mongols as well as medieval Muslim India. He is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at Keele University and editor of The Cambridge History of Iran: The Timurid and Safavid Periods.

#33153

William Goldman

William Goldman

#33165

Overall Influence

1931 - 2018 (87 years)

William Goldman was an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He first came to prominence in the 1950s as a novelist before turning to screenwriting. Among other accolades, Goldman won two Academy Awards in both writing categories—once for Best Original Screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and once for Best Adapted Screenplay for All the President's Men .

#33154

Ariane Mézard

#33166

Overall Influence

Ariane Mézard is a French mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Sorbonne University who works in arithmetic geometry. Education Mézard studied at the École normale supérieure de Lyon from 1992 to 1996. She received her Ph.D. under the supervision of Roland Gillard at Joseph Fourier University in 1998. She received her habilitation in 2005 during her time at Paris-Sud University.

#33155

Carlos Mijares Bracho

#33167

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Carlos G. Mijares Bracho was a Mexican architect and founder of the "grupo Menhir". Mijares studied at the Escuela Nacional de Arquitectura of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México from 1948 to 1952. After 1954 he lectured in architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana . He was considered to have been a master of brick wall work. His works include religious, industrial and residential architecture. An influence of the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto is quite distinctive in several of his works. Later he taught at the UNAM. He was a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte .

#33156

Denise Konan

#33168

Overall Influence

Denise Eby Konan is the Dean of the College of Social Sciences at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. She served as the Interim Chancellor of the University from 2005–2007. Konan is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa and prior to her appointment as Interim Chancellor, she was the department chair. She has been a member of the university faculty since 1993. Her research interests include international trade, computational economics, regional integration, multinationals, and services liberalization.

#33157

William C. Clark

#33169

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

William Cummin Clark is the Harvey Brooks Professor of International Science, Public Policy and Human Development at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. William Clark known for his long-term efforts to promote sustainability science. He co-chaired the US National Research Council report on Sustainability ‘Our Common Journey,” and in 2016 co-authored a textbook on Sustainability Science. He is also established and is now co-editor of its sustainability science section of the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He co-leads the Sustaina...

#33158

Ronald J. Stern

#33170

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Ronald John Stern is a mathematician who works on topology, geometry, and gauge theory. He is emeritus professor at the University of California, Irvine. Stern was the first in his family to receive a college education and earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. He then earned his Ph.D. in 1973 from the University of California, Los Angeles under the joint supervision of Robert Duncan Edwards and Robert F. Brown.

#33159

Aleksandr Logunov

#33171

Overall Influence

1989 - Present (37 years)

Aleksandr Andreyevich Logunov is a Russian mathematician, specializing in harmonic analysis, potential theory, and geometric analysis. Logunov received his Candidate of Sciences in 2015 from the Saint Petersburg State University under Viktor Petrovich Havin with thesis . He works at the Chebyshev Mathematics Laboratory of the Saint Petersburg State University and at the University of Tel Aviv.

#33160

Jessica Rawson

#33172

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Dame Jessica Mary Rawson, is an English art historian, curator and sinologist. She is also an academic administrator, specialising in Chinese art. After many years at the British Museum, she was Warden of Merton College, Oxford, from 1994 until her retirement in 2010. She served as pro-vice-chancellor at University of Oxford from 2006 for a term of five years.

#33161

Roger Boesche

#33173

Overall Influence

1948 - 2017 (69 years)

Roger Boesche was an American political theorist. He was the Arthur G. Coons Distinguished Professor of the History of ideas at Occidental College. Early life Roger Boesche was born on January 24, 1948, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He graduated from Stanford University, where he earned a PhD in political science.

#33162

Justine Kurland

#33174

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Justine Kurland is an American fine art photographer, based in New York City. Early life and education Kurland was born in Warsaw, New York. She earned her B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in 1996. She went on to study with Gregory Crewdson at Yale University where she received an M.F.A. in 1998.

#33163

Marcel Conche

#33175

Overall Influence

1922 - 2022 (100 years)

Marcel Conche was a French philosopher and emeritus professor at the Sorbonne University . Biography Marcel Conche was born in Altillac, France. "Philosophizing ad infinitum" has been published by SUNY Press, June 2014. It is the translation of one of his major works: "Philosopher à l'infini", published by PUF, Presses Universitaires de France, in 2005.

#33164

Matthew Perry

#33176

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Matthew Langford Perry was an American and Canadian actor. Best known for his role as Chandler Bing on the NBC television sitcom Friends , Perry also appeared on Ally McBeal and received Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his performances in The West Wing and The Ron Clark Story . He played a leading role in the NBC series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip . He became known for his leading film roles in Fools Rush In , Almost Heroes , Three to Tango , The Whole Nine Yards , Serving Sara , The Whole Ten Yards , and 17 Again .

#33165

Wendy Myrvold

#33177

Overall Influence

Wendy Joanne Myrvold is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist known for her work on graph algorithms, planarity testing, and algorithms in enumerative combinatorics. She is a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Victoria.

#33166

Kimberly W. Anderson

#33178

Overall Influence

Kimberly W. Anderson is an American chemist. She is the Gill Eminent Professor of Chemical Engineering and Associate Dean for Administration and Academic Affairs in the College of Engineering at the University of Kentucky.

#33167

Petr Vaníček

#33179

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Petr Vaníček is a Czech Canadian geodesist and theoretical geophysicist who has made important breakthroughs in theory of spectrum analysis and geoid computation. Main contributions Research One of Vaníček's main contributions of general relevance is least-squares spectral analysis, also called the Vaníček method and the Gauss-Vaniček method — a frequency spectrum computation method published in 1969 and 1971. It is based on a least-squares fit of sinusoidss to the data samples, and mitigates the drawbacks of applying Fourier analysis for analyzing long incomplete data records such as most natural datasets.

#33168

Waddy Wachtel

#33180

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Robert "Waddy" Wachtel is an American musician, composer and record producer, most notable for his guitar work. Wachtel has worked as session musician for other artists such as Linda Ronstadt, Beth Hart, Stevie Nicks, Kim Carnes, Randy Newman, Keith Richards, The Rolling Stones , Jon Bon Jovi, James Taylor, Iggy Pop, Warren Zevon, Bryan Ferry, Michael Sweet, Jackson Browne, and Andrew Gold, both in the studio and live.

#33169

Peter von Matt

#33181

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Peter von Matt is a Swiss philologist and author. Life Born in Lucerne, Peter von Matt grew up in Stans in the canton of Nidwalden. He studied Art History as well as German and English studies in Zurich and received a doctorate with Emil Staiger on Franz Grillparzer. In 1970, he received his post doctorate lecturing qualifications with a work on E. T. A. Hoffmann.

#33170

Iosif Vorovich

#33182

Overall Influence

1920 - 2001 (81 years)

Iosif Izrailevich-Girshevich Vorovich was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, scientific engineer, author and was made a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1970. He was a specialist in continuum mechanics and the theory of elasticity. He was born in the city of Starodub, Gomel Governorate.

#33171

William B. McGregor

#33183

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

William Bernard McGregor is an Australian linguist and professor in linguistics at Aarhus University. He specializes in the description of mainly non-Pama-Nyungan Australian languages and does descriptive linguistic work on Gooniyandi, Nyulnyul and Warrwa, but also studies the Shua language in Africa. He works on theoretical and typological issues from within a variation of systemic functional linguistics dubbed Semiotic Grammar developed by himself.

#33172

Hayat Mamud

#33184

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Moniruzzaman is a Bangladeshi essayist-poet. He was awarded Ekushey Padak in 2016 by the Government of Bangladesh. Early life and family Mamud was born on 2 July 1939 to a Bengali Muslim family in the village of Maura in the Hooghly district of the Bengal Province. He migrated with his parents, Muhammad Shamsher Ali and Aminah Khatun, to Dacca in East Bengal as a result of the 1950 anti-Muslim riots in West Bengal.

#33173

Theodore Y. Wu

#33185

Overall Influence

1924 - Present (102 years)

Theodore Yaotsu Wu is an American engineer. He is a Professor Emeritus of Engineering Science at the California Institute of Technology. His research contribution includes compressible fluid flow, free-streamline theory of cavities, jets and wakes, water waves and free-surface flows, mechanics of fish swimming and bird/insect flight, wind and ocean-current energy, and internal waves in the ocean.

#33174

David A. Caputo

#33186

Overall Influence

David Armand Caputo became the sixth president of Pace University in 2000. He serves as co-chair of the New York State Regents' Professional Standards and Practices Board, as a director of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, on the Council of Presidents of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, and as a director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Westchester Arts Council. Caputo also serves on the Council on Foreign Relations.

#33175

Denise Pumain

#33187

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Denise Pumain is a French geographer. Pumain specialises in urban and theoretical geography. She is a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and of the British Academy. Early life and education Pumain was born in 1946. She studied geography at the École Normale Supérieure between 1965 and 1969 and received her doctorate in human sciences and literature in 1980.

#33176

Philip Clayton

#33188

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Philip Clayton is an American philosopher of religion and philosopher of science. His work focuses on the intersection of science, ethics, and society. He currently holds the Ingraham Chair at Claremont School of Theology and serves as an affiliated faculty member at Claremont Graduate University. Clayton specializes in the philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, and philosophy of religion, as well as in comparative theology.

#33177

Cecil Taylor

#33189

Overall Influence

1929 - 2018 (89 years)

Cecil Percival Taylor was an American pianist and poet. Taylor was classically trained and was one of the pioneers of free jazz. His music is characterized by an energetic, physical approach, resulting in complex improvisation often involving tone clusters and intricate polyrhythms. His technique has been compared to percussion. Referring to the number of keys on a standard piano, Val Wilmer used the phrase "eighty-eight tuned drums" to describe Taylor's style. He has been referred to as being "like Art Tatum with contemporary-classical leanings".

#33178

Clint Watts

#33190

Overall Influence

Clint Watts is a senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University and a Foreign Policy Research Institute fellow. He previously was an infantry officer in the United States Army, and was the Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at United States Military Academy at West Point . He became a Special Agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation where he served on the Joint Terrorism Task Force . He has consulted for the FBI Counterterrorism Division and FBI National Security Branch .

#33179

Eric Brill

#33191

Overall Influence

Eric Brill is a computer scientist specializing in natural language processing. He created the Brill tagger, a supervised part of speech tagger. Another research paper of Brill introduced a machine learning technique now known as transformation-based learning.

#33180

Sybil P. Seitzinger

#33192

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Sybil P. Seitzinger is an oceanographer and climate scientist at the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions. She is known for her research into climate change and elemental cycling, especially nitrogen biogeochemistry.

#33182

David Stevenson

David Stevenson

#33194

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

David Stevenson is a British historian specialising in the period of the First World War. He is Stevenson Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science .

#33183

Nancy Farmer

#33195

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Nancy Farmer is an American writer of children's and young adult books and science fiction. She has written three Newbery Honor Books and won the U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature for The House of the Scorpion, published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers in 2002.

#33184

Alpha Condé

#33196

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Alpha Condé is a Guinean politician who served as the fourth president of Guinea from 2010 to 2021. Condé spent decades in opposition to a succession of regimes in Guinea, unsuccessfully running against President Lansana Conté in the 1993 and 1998 presidential elections and leading the Rally of the Guinean People , an opposition party. Standing again in the 2010 presidential election, Condé was elected president in a second round of voting. Upon his election, he said he would strengthen Guinea as a democracy and fight corruption.

#33185

Catherine Bell

#33197

Overall Influence

1952 - 2008 (56 years)

Catherine Bell was an American religious studies scholar who specialised in the study of Chinese religions and ritual studies. From 1985 until her death she worked at Santa Clara University's religious studies department, of which she was chair from 2000 to 2005.

#33186

Allan C. Spradling

#33198

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Allan C. Spradling is an American scientist and principal investigator at the Carnegie Institution for Science and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute who studies egg development in the model organism, Drosophila melanogaster, a fruit fly. He is considered a leading researcher in the developmental genetics of the fruit fly egg and has developed a number of techniques in his career that have led to greater understanding of fruit fly genetics including contributions to sequencing its genome. He is also an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University and at the Johns Hopkins University School of...

#33187

Peter B. Neubauer

#33199

Overall Influence

1913 - 2008 (95 years)

Peter Bela Neubauer was an Austrian-born American child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Life The Neubauer family was part of a small Jewish community in Krems an der Donau, Austria, where Peter was born on July 5, 1913. He received his medical training at the University of Vienna and the University of Bern, in Switzerland, to which he escaped during the Nazi control of Austria. He completed his psychiatric training in Bern in 1941.

#33188

Walter Erwin Diewert

#33200

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Walter Erwin Diewert is a Canadian economist. He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. He completed a B.A. degree in 1963, and an M.A. in mathematics in 1964, both at the University of British Columbia. He completed a Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley in 1968. He is a professor of economics at the University of British Columbia, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1970, and also has a joint appointment at the University of New South Wales. He is also a Vice President of the Society for Economic Measurement .

#33189

Jozo Zovko

#33201

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Jozo Zovko, OFM is a Herzegovinian Croat Franciscan priest, most notable for being a parish priest in Medjugorje during the alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1981. He was very active in the promotion of apparitions around the world. He is an adherent of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Zovko is currently under a suspension imposed on him by his bishops in 1989, 1994 and 2004 for disobedience and is forbidden to perform priestly duties in his home Diocese of Mostar-Duvno.

#33190

Robert Katzmann

Robert Katzmann

#33202

Overall Influence

1953 - 2021 (68 years)

Robert Allen Katzmann was a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He served as chief judge from September 1, 2013, to August 31, 2020. Early life and education Robert Allen Katzmann was born April 22, 1953, in New York City, New York, the son of Sylvia, a homemaker, and John Katzmann, an engineer. Katzmann received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia University in 1973. He received a Master of Arts from Harvard University in 1976. He received a Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard University in 1978. He received a Juris Doctor from Yale La...

#33191

Herminio Dagohoy

Herminio Dagohoy

#33203

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Herminio Dagohoy, O.P., is the 96th Rector Magnificus of the University of Santo Tomas , the oldest and the largest Catholic university in Manila, Philippines. Early years and education Dagohoy was born on July 8, 1964, in Hagonoy, Bulacan. He joined the Order of Preachers on May 10, 1988, after finishing Accountancy at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines in 1985. He was ordained to the priesthood on Sept. 28, 1994 at the Sto. Domingo Church.

#33192

Moshe Greenberg

#33204

Overall Influence

1928 - 2010 (82 years)

Moshe Greenberg was an American rabbi, Bible scholar, and professor emeritus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Biography Moshe Greenberg was born in Philadelphia in 1928. Raised in a Hebrew-speaking Zionist home, he studied Bible and Hebrew literature from his youth. His father, Rabbi Simon Greenberg, was the rabbi of Har Zion Temple and one of the most important leaders of the Conservative movement. Moshe Greenberg received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1954, studying Bible and Assyriology under E. A. Speiser; simultaneously, he studied post-Biblical Judaica at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America , where he was ordained as a rabbi.

#33193

Desmond King-Hele

#33205

Overall Influence

1927 - 2019 (92 years)

Desmond George King-Hele FRS was a British physicist, poet and author who crossed the divide between the arts and science to write extensively about the life of Erasmus Darwin, whom he linked with the romantic poets Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. In 1957, together with Doreen Gilmour, and as part of the Guided Weapons department of Royal Aircraft Establishment, he wrote a report proposing the use of the Blue Streak missile and Black Knight as a satellite launcher. See also Blue Streak Satellite Launch Vehicle.

#33194

Colin Lankshear

#33206

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Colin Lankshear is adjunct professor at James Cook University, Mount St Vincent University and McGill University. He is an internationally acclaimed scholar in the study of new literacies and digital technologies .

#33195

Li Choh-ming

#33207

Overall Influence

1912 - 1991 (79 years)

Li Choh-ming was a Chinese-born American economist and educator. He was the founding Vice-Chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1963. He compiled The Li Chinese Dictionary . He was an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and at Nankai University in Tianjin during his academic career.

#33196

Isabel Freire de Matos

#33208

Overall Influence

1915 - 2004 (89 years)

Isabel Freire de Matos was a writer, educator, journalist, and activist for Puerto Rican independence. Freire de Matos was the author of several children's books and the wife of Francisco Matos Paoli, a high-ranking member of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party.

#33197

K. David Harrison

#33209

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

K. David Harrison is a Canadian and American linguist, anthropologist, author, filmmaker, and activist for the documentation and preservation of endangered languages. Biography Harrison received his PhD from Yale University as a student of linguist Stephen R. Anderson and anthropologist Harold C. Conklin. He has done documentary field work on endangered Turkic languages in Siberia and Mongolia including Tuvan, Tsengel Tuvan, Tofa, Chulym, Monchak, and in India on Munda, and also in Paraguay, Chile, Papua New Guinea, India, Vietnam, and Vanuatu. He specializes in phonology, morphology, and in t...

#33198

Jean-Jacques Cassiman

Jean-Jacques Cassiman

#33210

Overall Influence

1943 - 2022 (79 years)

Jean-Jacques Cassiman was a Belgian geneticist and professor of human genetics. Education and career He graduated in 1967 from the Department of Medical Sciences of the Catholic University of Leuven and then did five years research on human genetics at Stanford University in the United States.

#33199

Donald Dell

#33211

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Donald L. Dell is an American sports attorney, writer, commentator, and former tennis player. Dell was the first sports agent in professional tennis, and represented Arthur Ashe, Stan Smith, Jimmy Connors, and Ivan Lendl during the golden age of pro tennis . He was also the founder of Professional Services , one of the nation's first sports marketing firms established in 1970.

#33200

Mark Tribe

#33212

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Mark Tribe is an American artist. He is the founder of Rhizome, a not-for-profit arts organization based in New York City. In 2013, he was appointed chair of the MFA program of the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Formerly, he was Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies at Brown University, Director of the Digital Media Center at the Columbia University School of the Arts, and Visiting Assistant Professor and Artist in Residence at Williams College. He is the author of The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of Historic Protest Speeches and the co-author of New Media Art .

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