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
#33401
Sven Leyffer
#33413
Overall Influence
Sven Leyffer is an American computational mathematician specializing in nonlinear optimization. He is a Senior Computational Mathematician in the Laboratory for Applied Mathematics, Numerical Software, and Statistics at Argonne National Laboratory.
Go to Profile#33402
Wilfredo Gómez
#33414
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Wilfredo Gómez Rivera , sometimes referred to as Bazooka Gómez, is a Puerto Rican former professional boxer and three-time world champion. He is frequently mentioned among the best Puerto Rican boxers of all time by sports journalists and analysts, along with Félix Trinidad, Miguel Cotto, Wilfred Benítez, Esteban De Jesús, Edwin Rosario, and Carlos Ortíz.
Go to Profile#33403
Ido Erev
#33415
Overall Influence
Ido Erev holds a PhD from the University of North Carolina, 1990 in Cognitive/Quantitative Psychology. Erev is a full professor at the Technion's Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences. Academic contribution Erev is widely regarded for his contributions to learning in behavioral economics and experimental economics.
Go to Profile#33404
George Legrady
#33416
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
George Legrady is a multidisciplinary digital media artist and university professor in photography and computational media arts. Early life and education Legrady was born in Budapest, Hungary, and emigrated to Montreal, Quebec, Canada at age 6 with his parents and brothers Miklos and Thomas under political refugee status in November 1956 during the Hungarian Revolution. His father, :nl:Thomas Legrady was a musician and composer. His paternal great-grandfather Légrády Tivadar was a lithographer and co-founder with his brother :hu:Légrády Károly, of the Légrády Testvérek publishing house in Budapest.
Go to Profile#33405
Mike Morris
#33417
Overall Influence
Michael S. Morris, is a physics professor at Butler University. He earned a PhD in physics from Caltech under the supervision of Kip Thorne. Among his nine published peer-reviewed papers, his most notable theoretical contribution is his pioneering analysis of time travel through traversable wormholes, coauthored in 1987 with Kip Thorne, and Ulvi Yurtsever. Kip Thorne tells the story of this discovery in his 1995 book Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy.
Go to Profile#33406
Ken Okuyama
#33418
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ken Okuyama is a Japanese industrial designer. He is the owner of the Ken Okuyama Design company. Okuyama formerly worked for Pininfarina, designing and supervising projects such as the Enzo Ferrari and Ferrari P4/5.
Go to Profile#33407
Mark Lawrenson
#33419
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Mark Thomas Lawrenson is a former professional footballer who played as a defender for Liverpool, among others, during the 1970s and 1980s. After a short career as a manager, he then became a radio, television and internet pundit for the BBC, TV3, BT Sport and Today FM, retiring at the end of the 2021–22 football season. Born and raised in England, Lawrenson qualified to play for the Republic of Ireland through his grandfather, Thomas Crotty, who was born in Waterford.
Go to Profile#33408
Dermot Barnes-Holmes
#33420
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Dermot Barnes-Holmes is a Professor of the School of Psychology at Ulster University and was Foundation Professor at the Department of Psychology at National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He is known for an analysis of human language and cognition through the development of Relational Frame Theory with Steven C. Hayes, and its application in various psychological settings. He was the world's most prolific author in the experimental analysis of human behaviour between the years 1980 and 1999. He was awarded the Don Hake Basic/Applied Research Award at the 2012 American Psychological Association Conference in Orlando, Florida.
Go to Profile#33409
Ali Teoman Germaner
#33421
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Ali Teoman Germaner , was a Turkish sculptor. He is also known as Aloş. Life He was born in 1934 in İstanbul. Between 1949 and 1954 he was educated in the İDGSA Sculpture Department in the studios of Rudolf Belling, Zühtü Müridoğlu and Ali Hadi Bara. In 1960 he went to Paris with a scholarship from the French government. Between the years 1961 and 1965 he could be found at the École des Beaux-Arts. He studied sculpture in the studio of René Collamarini and gravür in the studio of W. S. Hayter.
Go to Profile#33410
Albrecht Neubert
#33422
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Albrecht Gotthold Neubert was a German translation scholar and lecturer in English language. Together with Gert Jäger and Otto Kade he was a notable member of the Leipzig School. Memberships Saxon Academy of Sciences and HumanitiesEast German Academy of SciencesInstitute for Applied Linguistics, Kent State UniversityNew York Academy of SciencesInternational Association of Applied LinguisticsInternational Federation for Modern Languages and LiteraturesGesellschaft für Angewandte LinguistikDeutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft
Go to Profile#33411
Mark McGurl
#33423
Overall Influence
Mark McGurl is an American literary critic specializing in 20th-century American literature. He is the Albert L. Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford University. Background McGurl received his B.A. from Harvard University and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Johns Hopkins University. He has also worked as a journalist for The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. In 2011, McGurl received the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing.
Go to Profile#33412
Ray Kappe
#33424
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Ray Kappe was an American architect and educator. In 1972, he resigned his position as Founding Chair of the Department of Architecture at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and along with a group of faculty, students and his wife, Shelly Kappe, started what eventually came to be known as the Southern California Institute of Architecture . In 2003, Kappe began working with LivingHomes to design modular homes.
Go to Profile#33413
William Allis
#33425
Overall Influence
1901 - 1999 (98 years)
William Phelps Allis was an American theoretical physicist specializing in electrical discharges in gases. He was the grandson of Edward P. Allis, founder of the E.P. Allis Company, which became Allis-Chalmers.
Go to Profile#33414
Drummond Bone
#33426
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Sir James Drummond Bone, FRSE, FRSA , is a Byron scholar and was Master of Balliol College at the University of Oxford until April 2018. He previously served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool from 2002 to 2008, and Principal of Royal Holloway, University of London, from 2000 to 2002.Currently residing in Fife, Scotland.
Go to Profile#33415
Don W. Fawcett
#33427
Overall Influence
1917 - 2009 (92 years)
Don Wayne Fawcett was a pioneer of electron microscopy and one of its greatest practitioners for studying the organization of cells and tissues. His greatest achievement was his description of the structure of spermatozoa and the male reproductive system.
Go to Profile#33416
Gilles Vigneault
#33428
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Gilles Vigneault is a Canadian poet, publisher, singer-songwriter, and Quebec nationalist and sovereigntist. Two of his songs are considered by many to be Quebec's unofficial anthems: "Mon pays" and "Gens du pays", and his line Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver became a proverb in Quebec. Vigneault is a Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec, Knight of the Legion of Honour, and Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Go to Profile#33417
Lloyd Motz
#33429
Overall Influence
1909 - 2004 (95 years)
Lloyd Motz was an American astronomer. Biography Born in Pennsylvania, Motz graduated from the City College of New York 1930 and earned a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University in 1936. Motz began teaching at Columbia the same year he completed his Ph.D., but over the years also taught courses at the City College of New York, Queens College, Polytechnic University, and The New School. From 1959 to 1992 he mentored in a program he initiated, the Columbia University Science Honors Program for high school students. College courses he taught included introductory astronomy, astronomical physics, and celestial mechanics.
Go to Profile#33418
Henno Martin
#33430
Overall Influence
1910 - 1998 (88 years)
Henno Martin was a German professor of geology who, along with Hermann Korn, lived for two years in the Namib Desert to avoid internment during the Second World War. Personal life Martin was born in Freiburg, Germany on 15 March 1910. His studies at the universities of Bonn, Zürich, and Göttingen culminated in a Ph.D on "Post-Archean Tectonics in Southern Central Sweden". In 1935 he emigrated along with Korn to what was then South-West Africa and worked as a consulting geologist. Namibia was at that time administered by its neighbor, South Africa and in 1939 South Africa, following the United Kingdom, declared war on Germany.
Go to Profile#33419
Ben Finney
#33431
Overall Influence
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
Ben Rudolph Finney was an American anthropologist known for his expertise in the history and the social and cultural anthropology of surfing, Polynesian navigation, and canoe sailing, as well as in the cultural and social anthropology of human space colonization. As "surfing's premier historian and leading expert on Hawaiian surfing going back to the 17th century" and "the intellectual mentor, driving force, and international public face" of the Hokulea project, he played a key role in the Hawaiian Renaissance following his construction of the Hokulea precursor Nalehia in the 1960s and his co-...
Go to Profile#33420
Branislav Ivanović
#33432
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Branislav Ivanović is a Serbian former professional footballer. A versatile defender, Ivanović played as a right back, although he can also play as a centre back. Ivanović began his career with hometown club FK Srem. In January 2004 he transferred to top division side OFK Beograd. Two years later, he moved to Russia to play for Lokomotiv Moscow in the Russian Premier League, where he would spend two seasons, winning his first honour, the 2007 Russian Cup. In January 2008, Ivanović was signed by Premier League side Chelsea for a £9 million fee. He won nine major honours with Chelsea, including...
Go to Profile#33421
Igor Kaczurowskyj
#33433
Overall Influence
1918 - 2013 (95 years)
Ihor Kaczurowskyj was a Ukrainian poet, translator, novelist and short story writer, literary scholar, university lecturer, journalist. Life Ihor Kaczurowskyj was born on 1 September 1918 in Nizhyn in a family of graduated of the Kyiv University. His father practised law, afterwards specialized in economy as well, for some time the held the rank of a state secretary assistant in the Central Council of Ukraine .
Go to Profile#33422
Richard Swan
#33434
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Richard Gordon Swan is an American mathematician who is known for the Serre–Swan theorem relating the geometric notion of vector bundles to the algebraic concept of projective modules, and for the Swan representation, an l-adic projective representation of a Galois group. His work has mainly been in the area of algebraic K-theory.
Go to Profile#33423
Mike Rose
#33435
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Mike Rose was an American scholar of education who studied literacy and the struggles of working-class America. He was a Research Professor of Social Research Methodology in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.
Go to Profile#33424
Roy Goode
#33436
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Sir Royston Miles "Roy" Goode is an academic commercial lawyer in the United Kingdom. He founded the Centre for Commercial Law Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. He was awarded the OBE in 1972 followed by the CBE in 1994 before being knighted for services to academic law in 2000.
Go to Profile#33425
Benjamin Harshav
#33437
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Benjamin Harshav , born Hrushovski ; June 26, 1928 – April 23, 2015 was a literary theorist specialising in comparative literature, a Yiddish and Hebrew poet , and an Israeli translator and editor. He served as professor of literature at the University of Tel Aviv and as a professor of comparative literature, Hebrew language and literature, and Slavic languages and literature at Yale University. He was the founding editor of the Duke University Press publication Poetics Today. He received the EMET Prize for Art, Science and Culture in 2005 and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and S...
Go to Profile#33426
Mac Wellman
#33438
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Mac Wellman, born John McDowell Wellman on March 7, 1945, in Cleveland, Ohio, is an American playwright, author, and poet. He is best known for his experimental work in the theater which rebels against theatrical conventions, often abandoning such traditional elements as plot and character altogether. In 1990, he received an Obie Award for Best New American Play . In 1991, he received another Obie Award for Sincerity Forever. He has received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers Award, and the 2003 Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement, as well as the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to ...
Go to Profile#33427
Ian McShane
#33439
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Ian David McShane is an English actor. He is known for his television performances, particularly as the title role in the BBC series Lovejoy , Al Swearengen in Deadwood and its 2019 film continuation, as well as Mr. Wednesday in American Gods . For the original series of Deadwood, McShane won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Drama and received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. For the film, he was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie.
Go to Profile#33428
Janick Gers
#33440
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Janick Robert Gers is an English musician who is best known as one of the three guitarists in heavy metal band Iron Maiden. He initially joined to replace Adrian Smith, but remained in the band even after Smith rejoined. Gers was previously a member of Gillan and co-founder of the band White Spirit in 1975.
Go to Profile#33429
Robert L. Phillips
#33441
Overall Influence
Robert Phillips is an American entrepreneur, academic and author. He was previously director of marketplace optimization sciences at Uber. He is also founder of Nomis Solutions, a Silicon Valley company specializing in pricing science and practice for financial institutions. Previously, he was professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Business School and director of Columbia University’s Center for Pricing and Revenue Management. Phillips is author of the book Pricing and Revenue Optimization, a textbook on revenue management and pricing optimization tactics. He was also co-editor of ...
Go to Profile#33430
Barbara Bielecka
#33442
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Barbara Bielecka is a Polish Functionalist architect and a member of the Faculty of Architecture at the Gdańsk University of Technology. She designed the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lichen, Poland's largest church, the sixth largest by area in the world. It was constructed between 1994 and 2004. In May 1985, she joined the Commission of Urban Planning and Architecture at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków.
Go to Profile#33431
Pino Caballero Gil
#33443
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Pino Caballero Gil is a Spanish scientist. She is a professor in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of La Laguna where she coordinates the CryptULL cryptology research group.
Go to Profile#33432
Chris Stein
#33444
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Christopher Stein is an American musician known as the co-founder and guitarist of the new wave band Blondie. He is also a producer and performer for the classic soundtrack of the hip hop film Wild Style, and writer of the soundtrack for the film Union City, as well as an accomplished photographer.
Go to Profile#33433
Marie-Laure Ryan
#33445
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent literary scholar and critic. She has written several books and articles on narratology, fiction, and cyberculture and has been awarded several times for her work. She attended the University of Geneva to study literature as an undergraduate, before moving to the United States in 1968. attending graduate school at the University of Utah, where she received her M.A. in Linguistics and German, alongside a Ph.D in French. She later obtained a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of California San Diego.
Go to Profile#33434
Everett Carll Ladd
#33446
Overall Influence
1937 - 1999 (62 years)
Everett Carll Ladd Jr. was an American political scientist based at the University of Connecticut. He was best known for his analysis and collection of public opinion polls. He directed the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut; the Center's mission is to collect and preserve the reports and the original raw computerized data of polls and surveys since the 1930s. At his death, he had amassed 14,000 surveys from many countries. He was also an expert on the opinions and careers of social scientists.
Go to Profile#33435
Gabriella Campadelli-Fiume
#33447
Overall Influence
Gabriella Campadelli-Fiume is a virologist with a primary research focus on herpes simplex virus, fusion and viral entry. She is a retired professor of virology from the University of Bologna, Italy.
Go to Profile#33436
Ira F. Stone
#33448
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Rabbi Ira F. Stone is a leading figure in the contemporary renewal of the Musar movement, a Jewish ethical movement. Career Stone was ordained as a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1979, and proceeded to serve congregations in Seattle and Philadelphia while also teaching at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. He served as rabbi of Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel in Philadelphia from 1988 until his retirement in 2015. Stone became the founding director of the Center for Contemporary Mussar in 2017.
Go to Profile#33437
Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz
#33449
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, born in Rio de Janeiro on July 19, 1956, is one of Brazil's most noted physicists and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. The scientific director of the São Paulo Research Foundation and a full professor of quantum electronics at the Gleb Wataghin Physics Institute at the State University of Campinas , Brito Cruz is engaged in research in which he uses femtosecond lasers to study ultrafast phenomena.
Go to Profile#33438
Anoop Misra
#33450
Overall Influence
Anoop Misra is an Indian endocrinologist and a former honorary physician to the Prime Minister of India. He is the chairman of Fortis Centre for Diabetes, Obesity and Cholesterol and heads, National Diabetes Obesity and Cholesterol Foundation . A former Fellow of the World Health Organization at the Royal Free Hospital, UK, Misra is a recipient of the Dr. B. C. Roy Award, the highest Indian award in the medical category. The Government of India awarded him the fourth highest civilian honour of the Padma Shri, in 2007, for his contributions to Indian medicine.
Go to Profile#33439
Nick Bruno
#33451
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Nick Joseph Bruno has been the president of the University of Louisiana at Monroe, also known as ULM, since November 8, 2010. He was appointed by the Baton Rouge-based University of Louisiana System Board of Supervisors. Bruno is the eighth president of ULM. He succeeded James E. Cofer Sr., who had resigned to become president of Missouri State University. Bruno's selection was made official in an announcement by University of Louisiana System president Randy Moffett. Bruno's official investiture was on 2011 October 2.
Go to Profile#33440
Sharmila Tagore
#33452
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Sharmila Tagore is an Indian actress primarily known for her work in Hindi and Bengali films. Regarded as one of Indian cinema's most accomplished actresses, Tagore is a recipient of two National Film Awards, a Filmfare Award, a Filmfare OTT Award and the Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to Hindi cinema. In 2013, the Government of India, honoured her with Padma Bhushan, India's third highest civilian honour for her contributions to the Indian culture through performing arts.
Go to Profile#33441
Ted Sizer
#33453
Overall Influence
1932 - 2009 (77 years)
Theodore Ryland Sizer was a leader of educational reform in the United States, the founder of the Essential school movement and was known for challenging longstanding practices and assumptions about the functioning of American secondary schools. Beginning in the late 1970s, he had worked with hundreds of high schools, studying the development and design of the American educational system, leading to his major work Horace's Compromise in 1984. In the same year, he founded the Coalition of Essential Schools based on the principles espoused in Horace's Compromise.
Go to Profile#33442
Salvador Laurel
#33454
Overall Influence
1928 - 2004 (76 years)
Salvador Roman Hidalgo Laurel , also known as Doy Laurel, was a Filipino lawyer and politician who served as the vice president of the Philippines from 1986 to 1992 under President Corazon Aquino and briefly served as the last prime minister from February 25 to March 25, 1986, when the position was abolished. He was a major leader of the United Nationalist Democratic Organization , the political party that helped topple the regime of President Ferdinand Marcos with the 1986 People Power Revolution.
Go to Profile#33443
Leonard Dinnerstein
#33455
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Leonard Dinnerstein was an American historian and author. He was a professor at the University of Arizona and was a specialist on Antisemitism in the United States. He was born in the Bronx, to parents Abraham and Lillian, née Kubrick. The Dinnerstein's were of Jewish descent, with ancestors from Austria, Romania, what became Belarus.
Go to Profile#33444
Lloyd B. Minor
#33456
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Lloyd Brooks Minor is an American surgeon, researcher, educator, and academic administrator. Since December 2012, he has served as the Carl and Elizabeth Naumann Dean of Stanford University School of Medicine at Stanford University. Previously, he was the provost of Johns Hopkins University.
Go to Profile#33445
Carol Garrison
#33457
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Carol Z. Garrison was the 6th President of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama System unanimously voted to appoint her to the office on July 23, 2002. She stepped down from presidency on August 16, 2012.
Go to Profile#33446
Crispin Nash-Williams
#33458
Overall Influence
1932 - 2001 (69 years)
Crispin St John Alvah Nash-Williams FRSE was a British mathematician. His research interest was in the field of discrete mathematics, especially graph theory. Biography Nash-Williams was born on 19 December 1932 in Cardiff, Wales. His father, Victor Erle Nash-Williams , was an archaeologist at University College Cardiff, and his mother had studied classics at Oxford. As a small boy, Nash-Williams attended Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford, which was then headed by Wilfrid Oldaker. A biographer has said that Oldaker was a formative influence on Nash-Williams.
Go to Profile#33447
Sarath Amunugama
#33459
Overall Influence
Sarath Amunugama, JP is a leading Sri Lankan academic, who is a professor of French and the founding Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Visual & Performing Arts, Colombo. He is a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Kelaniya.
Go to Profile#33448
Brian O'Driscoll
#33460
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Brian Gerard O'Driscoll is an Irish former professional rugby union player. He played at outside centre for the Irish provincial team Leinster and for Ireland. He captained Ireland from 2003 until 2012, and captained the British & Irish Lions for their 2005 tour of New Zealand. He is regarded by critics as one of the greatest rugby players of all time.
Go to Profile#33449
Adrian Mannarino
#33461
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Adrian Mannarino is a French professional tennis player. He has a career-high ATP singles ranking of world No. 22, attained on 19 March 2018. He has won five ATP Tour singles titles, three on hard-courts and two on grass. He is currently the No. 2 French player.
Go to Profile#33450
Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi
#33462
Overall Influence
1941 - 2011 (70 years)
Nawab Mohammad Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi was an Indian cricketer and a former captain of the Indian cricket team. Pataudi was appointed India's cricket captain at the age of 21, and described as "one of greatest". Pataudi was also called the "best fielder in the world" of his time by commentator John Arlott and former England captain and contemporary, Ted Dexter.
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