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
#33201
Veronica Beechey
#33213
Overall Influence
1946 - 2021 (75 years)
Veronica Beechey was a British feminist sociologist and patient's rights advocate. Early life and education Beechey was born in Hastings and grew up in Battle, Sussex. She attended Ashford School for Girls and Hastings College. She studied sociology at Essex University, achieving a first in her degree, before going to Oxford to complete a doctorate.
Go to Profile#33202
Joseph Wortis
#33214
Overall Influence
1906 - 1995 (89 years)
Joseph Wortis was an American psychiatrist, longtime editor of the scientific journal Biological Psychiatry, and a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Early life Joseph Wortis was born in Brooklyn, New York, one of five children of Jewish immigrant parents . He attended New York University, where he majored in English literature before switching to pre-med. He graduated in 1927. Accepted into Yale medical school, he went instead to Europe and studied medicine in Vienna , Munich and Paris.
Go to Profile#33203
Duncan Rice
#33215
Overall Influence
1942 - 2022 (80 years)
Sir Charles Duncan Rice was a Scottish academic who was Principal of the University of Aberdeen from September 1996 to 1 April 2010. He previously served at New York University in the United States, as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science and Vice-Chancellor .
Go to Profile#33204
Patty Murray
#33216
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Patricia Lynn Murray is an American politician who has served as president pro tempore of the United States Senate since 2023 and the senior United States Senator from Washington since 1993. A member of the Democratic Party, Murray served in the Washington State Senate from 1989 to 1993. She was Washington's first female U.S. senator and is the first woman in American history to hold the position of president pro tempore. Murray is also the youngest senator to occupy the office of president pro tempore in more than five decades. As president pro tempore, Murray is third in the line of succession to the U.S.
Go to Profile#33205
Andres Kasekamp
#33217
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Andres Ilmar Kasekamp is the director of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute and Professor of Baltic Politics at the University of Tartu, Estonia . Andres Kasekamp served as chairman of the Board of the Open Estonia Foundation from 2004 to 2008. His main research interests are extreme-right movements and contemporary Baltic history.
Go to Profile#33206
Joan Fontcuberta
#33218
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Joan Fontcuberta is a Spanish conceptual artist and photographer whose best-known works, such as Fauna and Sputnik, examine the truthfulness of photography. In addition, he is a writer, editor, teacher, and curator.
Go to Profile#33207
Ian Kinsler
#33219
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Ian Michael Kinsler is an American-Israeli former professional baseball second baseman. He played in Major League Baseball for 14 seasons for the Texas Rangers, Detroit Tigers, Los Angeles Angels, Boston Red Sox, and San Diego Padres. Kinsler was a four-time All Star, two-time Gold Glove winner, and a member of the 2018 World Series champion Boston Red Sox.
Go to Profile#33208
Robbie Coltrane
#33220
Overall Influence
1950 - 2022 (72 years)
Anthony Robert McMillan , known professionally as Robbie Coltrane, was a Scottish actor and comedian. He gained worldwide recognition in the 2000s for playing Rubeus Hagrid in the Harry Potter film series. He was appointed an OBE in the 2006 New Year Honours by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to drama. In 1990, Coltrane received the Evening Standard British Film AwardPeter Sellers Award for Comedy. In 2011, he was honoured for his "outstanding contribution" to film at the British Academy Scotland Awards.
Go to Profile#33209
Jesús Ballesteros
#33221
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Jesús Ballesteros is a Spanish philosopher and jurist. Education In 1965, he earned his law degree with highest qualifications. In 1971, he obtained a doctoral degree from the University of Valencia after defending a thesis about Giuseppe Capograssi.
Go to Profile#33210
Evgeni Plushenko
#33222
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Evgeni Viktorovich Plushenko is a Russian former figure skater. He is a four-time Olympic medalist , a three-time World champion , a seven-time European champion , a four-time Grand Prix Final champion , and a ten-time Russian national champion . Plushenko's four Olympic medals once tied with Sweden's Gillis Grafström's record for most Olympic medals in figure skating, which has since been surpassed by Scott Moir and Tessa Virtue. He also won a record total of 22 titles on the Grand Prix circuit.
Go to Profile#33211
Joachim Küpper
#33223
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Joachim Küpper is a professor of romance studies and comparative literature at the Freie Universität Berlin. Küpper has published on authors from various periods, including Homer, Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Francisco de Quevedo, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Alessandro Manzoni, Balzac, Flaubert, Theodor Fontane, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. In addition, he works on problems of literary theory and intellectual history. He is the author of eight monographs and approximately 100 articles, as well as the editor of numerous volumes and scholarly journals.
Go to Profile#33212
Petter Solberg
#33224
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Petter Solberg is a Norwegian former professional rally and rallycross driver. Solberg debuted in the World Rally Championship in 1998 and was signed by the Ford factory team in 1999. The following year, Solberg started his successful partnership with the Subaru World Rally Team.
Go to Profile#33213
Nancy Rabalais
#33225
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Nancy Nash Rabalais is an American marine ecologist. Born in Wichita Falls, Texas, she is the daughter of Kathryn Charlotte Preusch and Stephen Anthony Nash, a mechanical engineer, and the second of four children. She researches dead zones in the marine environment and is an expert in eutrophication and nutrient pollution.
Go to Profile#33214
Nuno Espírito Santo
#33226
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Nuno Herlander Simões Espírito Santo , often referred to as simply Nuno, is a Portuguese football manager and former footballer who played as a goalkeeper. He was recently the manager of Saudi Pro League club Al-Ittihad.
Go to Profile#33215
Ellen Bryant Voigt
#33227
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Ellen Bryant Voigt is an American poet. She served as the Poet Laureate of Vermont. Biography Voigt was born May 9, 1943, in Danville, Virginia. She grew up in Chatham, Virginia, graduated from Converse College, and received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She has taught at M.I.T. and Goddard College where in 1976 she developed and directed the nation's first low-residency M.F.A. in Creative Writing program. Since 1981 she has taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
Go to Profile#33216
Glenn White
#33228
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Glenn J. White is Professor of Astronomy at the Open University, UK, and Research Group Leader of the Astronomy Group at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. He carries out research on star formation and on exoplanets.
Go to Profile#33217
Landon Curt Noll
#33229
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Landon Curt Noll is an American computer scientist, co-discoverer of the 25th Mersenne prime and discoverer of the 26th, which he found while still enrolled at Hayward High School and concurrently at California State University, Hayward.
Go to Profile#33218
Manfred Korfmann
#33230
Overall Influence
1942 - 2005 (63 years)
Manfred Osman Korfmann was a German archeologist. He excavated Hisarlik, the present site of Troy situated in modern-day Turkey. He continued his research in Turkey, excavating from 1982 to 1987 at Besik Bay, a few kilometres from the famous site of Hisarlik . In 1988 the Turkish government gave him an exclusive excavation license for Troy itself . Over many years, his team excavated large sections of the lower part of Troy, beneath the later Roman-era ruins. During the excavation campaign and under the direction of Korfmann, altogether 13,240 square meters of land were excavated by 370 archaeologists.
Go to Profile#33219
Yamuna Krishnan
#33231
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Yamuna Krishnan is a professor at the Department of Chemistry, University of Chicago, where she has worked since August 2014. She was born to P.T. Krishnan and Mini in Parappanangadi, in the Malappuram district of Kerala, India. She was earlier a Reader in National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, India. Krishnan won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for science and technology, the highest science award in India in the year 2013 in the Chemical Science category.
Go to Profile#33220
Dušan Bajević
#33232
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Dušan "Duško" Bajević is a Bosnian professional football manager and former player. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest Bosnian football managers of all time and has won more trophies than any other manager from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Go to Profile#33221
Dorothy M. Horstmann
#33233
Overall Influence
1911 - 2001 (90 years)
Dorothy Millicent Horstmann was an American epidemiologist, virologist, and pediatrician whose research on the spread of poliovirus in the human bloodstream helped set the stage for the development of the polio vaccine. She was the first woman appointed as a professor at the Yale School of Medicine and she held a joint appointment in the Yale School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#33222
Danie G. Krige
#33234
Overall Influence
1919 - 2013 (94 years)
Danie Gerhardus Krige GCOB was a South African statistician and mining engineer who pioneered the field of geostatistics and was professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, Republic of South Africa. The technique of kriging is named after him. Krige's empirical work to evaluate mineral resources was formalised in the 1960s by French engineer Georges Matheron.
Go to Profile#33223
C. Allin Cornell
#33235
Overall Influence
1938 - 2007 (69 years)
Carl Allin Cornell was an American civil engineer, researcher, and professor who made important contributions to reliability theory and earthquake engineering and, along with Luis Esteva, developed the field of probabilistic seismic hazard analysis by publishing the seminal document of the field in 1968.
Go to Profile#33224
William W. Freehling
#33236
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
William Wilhartz Freehling is an American historian, and Singletary Professor of the Humanities Emeritus at the University of Kentucky. Early life Freehling was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 26, 1935, a son of Norman Freehling and Edna Freehling. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1958. He wrote his undergraduate honors thesis under noted U.S. historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. He received his M.A. in 1959 and his Ph.D. in 1964, from the University of California, Berkeley, with historian Kenneth M. Stampp serving as his dissertati...
Go to Profile#33225
Alan Williams
#33237
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Alan Emlyn Williams was an ex-foreign correspondent, novelist and writer of thrillers. Personal life He was educated at Stowe, Grenoble and Heidelberg Universities, and at King's College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1957 with a B.A. in modern languages. His father was the actor and writer Emlyn Williams. Noël Coward was his godfather. His younger brother Brook was also an actor.
Go to Profile#33226
Thomas Appelquist
#33238
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Thomas William Appelquist is a theoretical particle physicist who is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Yale University. He received his bachelor's degree from Illinois Benedictine College and his Ph.D. in 1968 from Cornell University under Donald R. Yennie with thesis Parametric Representations of Renormalized Feynman Amplitudes. In 1970, following a postdoctoral appointment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, he joined the faculty at Harvard University. In 1975, he moved to Yale and was appointed professor of physics in 1976. From 1983 until 1989, he served as chair of Yale's department of physics.
Go to Profile#33227
Chris Coleman
#33239
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Christopher Patrick Coleman is a Welsh professional football manager and former player. He was most recently the manager of Greek Super League club Atromitos. As a player, Coleman usually played in defence, while also occasionally appearing as a forward. He began his career at Manchester City, leaving as a teenager to make his debut for hometown team Swansea City in 1987. In 1991, he joined Crystal Palace, whom he represented in the Premier League. He spent a year-and-a-half at league champions Blackburn Rovers before signing for Fulham in 1997, helping the team to two promotions from the third tier to the top flight.
Go to Profile#33228
Antonio La Viña
#33240
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Antonio Gabriel "Tony" Maestrado La Viña is a Filipino lawyer, educator, and environmental policy expert. A former undersecretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources , executive director of the Manila Observatory, and dean of the Ateneo School of Government, he currently teaches law, governance, and philosophy in the Ateneo de Manila University, University of the Philippines, University of Santo Tomas, De La Salle University, Xavier University, San Beda University, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Lyceum of the Philippines University, Pamantasang ng Lungsod ng May...
Go to Profile#33229
David Brown
#33241
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
David Clifford Brown was an English musicologist, most noteworthy for his major study of Tchaikovsky’s life and works. Brown attended Gravesend Grammar School and then studied English, Latin and music at the University of Sheffield, graduating in 1951, and took his MusB there . During national service he studied Russian and was commissioned in the Intelligence Corps. He taught in secondary schools before becoming music librarian of the University of London, working at Senate House 1959–62. In 1962 he became a lecturer at the University of Southampton, becoming senior lecturer in 1970 and reader in 1975; he was awarded a doctorate for his book on Thomas Weelkes in 1971.
Go to Profile#33230
Bikash Bhattacharjee
#33242
Overall Influence
1940 - 2006 (66 years)
Bikash Bhattacharjee was an Indian painter from Kolkata in West Bengal. Through his paintings, he depicted the life of the average middle-class Bengali – their aspirations, superstitions, hypocrisy and corruption, and even the violence that is endemic to Kolkata. He worked in oils, acrylics, water-colours, conté and collage. In 2003, he was awarded the highest award of Lalit Kala Akademi, India's National Academy of Arts, the Lalit Kala Akademi Fellowship.
Go to Profile#33231
Jerker Rönnberg
#33243
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jerker Rönnberg is a Swedish professor of psychology with the emphasis on disability science at Linköping University. Rönnberg was born in Backe, Sweden. He was awarded a Ph.D. in psychology at Uppsala University in 1980, became a reader at Umeå University in 1981 and a senior lecturer at Linköping University in 1983. From 1983 to 1984 he was a visiting researcher at the University of Toronto. Since 1997 he is a professor at Linköping University. He is also the director of the Swedish Institute for Disability Research and Linnaeus Centre HEAD at Linköping University.
Go to Profile#33232
Rolf-Dieter Müller
#33244
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Rolf-Dieter Müller is a German military historian and political scientist, who has served as Scientific Director of the German Armed Forces Military History Research Office since 1999. Rolf-Dieter Müller is also a former professor of military history at Humboldt University.
Go to Profile#33233
Alberto Bressan
#33245
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Alberto Bressan is an Italian mathematician at Penn State University. His primary field of research is mathematical analysis including hyperbolic systems of conservation lawss, impulsive control of Lagrangian systems, and non-cooperative differential games.
Go to Profile#33234
Lisa Brooks
#33246
Overall Influence
Lisa Brooks is a historian, writer, and professor of English and American studies at Amherst College in Massachusetts where she specializes in the history of Native American and European interactions from the American colonial period to the present.
Go to Profile#33235
René Drucker Colín
#33247
Overall Influence
1937 - 2017 (80 years)
René Raúl Drucker Colín was a Mexican scientist, investigator and journalist in the fields of physiology and neuroscience. He was born in United states. From 1985 through 1990, he was the Director of Neuroscience at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He was also the President of the Mexican Academy of Sciences from 2000 through 2008
Go to Profile#33236
Kenneth A. Ross
#33248
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Kenneth Allen Ross is a mathematician and an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Oregon. He served as an associate editor for Mathematics Magazine. He was president of the Mathematical Association of America from 1995 to 1996. He is a recipient of the Charles Y. Hu Award for distinguished service to mathematics.
Go to Profile#33237
Cynthia Estlund
#33249
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Cynthia Estlund is the Catherine A. Rein Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law. Career Estlund teaches labor law, employment law, and property law and has published numerous articles on the subject of labor and employment. In her book Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy , she argued that the workplace is a site of both comparatively successful integration and intense cooperation and sociability, and explored the implications for democratic theory and for labor and employment law. She has over twenty publications in peer-reviewed journals,...
Go to Profile#33238
Michael Scott Doran
#33250
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Michael Scott Doran is an American analyst of the international politics of the Middle East. He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He was previously a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He has been a visiting professor at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and taught at the University of Central Florida. He was appointed to the National Security Council and was also deputy assistant secretary for public diplomacy at the U.S.
Go to Profile#33239
Laci Green
#33251
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Laci Green is an American YouTuber. Her content focuses on sex education; Green also hosted Braless, the first MTV YouTube channel, as part of a 12-week deal with MTV. The first episode aired November 4, 2014. In 2016, Time named her one of the 30 most influential people on the Internet. In 2017, she celebrated her tenth anniversary on YouTube.
Go to Profile#33240
Heidi Jo Newberg
#33252
Overall Influence
Heidi Jo Newberg is an American astrophysicist known for her work in understanding the structure of our Milky Way galaxy. Among her team's findings are that the Milky Way is cannibalizing stars from smaller galaxies and that the Milky Way is larger and has more ripples than was previously understood. She is a founding participant in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration , and is a leader of the astrophysical MilkyWay@home volunteer computing project team. She is a professor in the Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy...
Go to Profile#33241
Stefan Breuer
#33253
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Stefan Breuer is a German sociologist who specializes in the writings of Max Weber and the German political right between 1871 and 1945. Life and career Born in 1948, Breuer studied political science, history and philosophy at the universities of Mainz, Munich and Berlin. Between 1974 and 1984, he was an assistant researcher in political science at Leibniz University Hannover. Since 1984, he has been professor of sociology at the University of Hamburg, and since 2014 a professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#33242
Geoff Ryman
#33254
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Geoffrey Charles Ryman is a Canadian writer of science fiction, fantasy, slipstream and historical fiction. Biography Ryman was born in Canada and moved to the United States at age 11. He earned degrees in History and English at UCLA, then moved to England in 1973, where he has lived most of his life. He is gay.
Go to Profile#33243
Heng Ji
#33255
Overall Influence
Heng Ji is a computer scientist who works on information extraction and natural language processing. She is well known for her work on joined named entity recognition and relation extraction, as well as for her work on cross-document event extraction. She has been coordinating the popular NIST TAC Knowledge Base Population task since 2010. She has been recognised as one of AI's 10 to watch by IEEE Intelligent Systems in 2013, and has won multiple awards, including a NSF Career Award in 2009, Google Research awards in 2009 and 2014, and an IBM Watson Faculty Award in 2012.
Go to Profile#33244
Nathaniel Persily
#33256
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, where he has taught since 2013. He is a scholar of constitutional law, election law, and the democratic process. Education and early career Persily received his B.A./M.A. in political science from Yale University in 1992; his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1998, where he served as president of the Stanford Law Review; and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2002. Following law school, Persily clerked for the Honorable David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for ...
Go to Profile#33245
Scott Tremaine
#33257
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Scott Duncan Tremaine is a Canadian-born astrophysicist. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Canada and the National Academy of Sciences. Tremaine is widely regarded as one of the world's leading astrophysicists for his contributions to the theory of Solar System and galactic dynamics. Tremaine is the namesake of asteroid 3806 Tremaine. He is credited with coining the name "Kuiper belt".
Go to Profile#33246
Ian R. Porteous
#33258
Overall Influence
1930 - 2011 (81 years)
Ian Robertson Porteous was a Scottish mathematician at the University of Liverpool and an educator on Merseyside. He is best known for three books on geometry and modern algebra. In Liverpool he and Peter Giblin are known for their registered charity Mathematical Education on Merseyside which promotes enthusiasm for mathematics through sponsorship of an annual competition.
Go to Profile#33247
Mark D. Hill
#33259
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Mark D. Hill is a computer scientist and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has been cited over 27,000 times. He is the John P. Morgridge Professor and Gene M. Amdahl Professor of Computer Science. Hill specializes in computer architecture, parallel computing, memory systems, and performance evaluation.
Go to Profile#33248
Robert H. Socolow
#33260
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Robert Harry Socolow is an American theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. Education Robert Socolow has stated his parents and teachers imbued him with Weltschmerz and Tikkun Olam . He received his bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard College in 1959. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Harvard University in 1964. Between 1964 and 1966 he was National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Physics, at the University of California at Berkeley and the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva.
Go to Profile#33249
Katherine K. Young
#33261
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Katherine K. Young is a Canadian religious studies professor at McGill University. Originally a scholar of Hinduism, in later life her interests have turned to the topic of misandry. Life She was awarded her M.A. from the University of Chicago and her Ph.D. from McGill University, for research on the history of religions, specializing in Hinduism. After completing her doctorate Young remained at McGill as a faculty member where she continues to teach.
Go to Profile#33250
Gonçalo M. Tavares
#33262
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Gonçalo Manuel de Albuquerque Tavares, known professionally as Gonçalo M. Tavares, was born in August, 1970 in Luanda, Angola and is a Portuguese writer and professor of Theory of Science in Lisbon. He published his first work in 2001 and since then has been awarded several prizes. His books have been published in more than 30 countries and the book Jerusalem has been included in the European edition of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die.
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