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
#33451
Ramchandra Gandhi
#33463
Overall Influence
1937 - 2007 (70 years)
Ramchandra Gandhi was an Indian philosopher. He was a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. He was the son of Devdas Gandhi and Lakshmi and also brother of Rajmohan Gandhi, Gopalkrishna Gandhi and Tara Gandhi Bhattacharjee.
Go to Profile#33452
John Keane
#33464
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Born in southern Australia, John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney. For 25 years he also held a position at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin , which he resigned from in November 2023.
Go to Profile#33453
Reginald Bartholomew
#33465
Overall Influence
1936 - 2012 (76 years)
Reginald Stanley Bartholomew was an American diplomat who served as U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon , Spain , and Italy . He was also a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy and Council on Foreign Relations. Additionally, he was also a member of the United States National Security Council staff .
Go to Profile#33454
Ons Jabeur
#33466
Overall Influence
1994 - Present (32 years)
Ons Jabeur is a Tunisian professional tennis player. She has a career-high ranking by the Women's Tennis Association of world No. 2, achieved on 27 June 2022. Jabeur is the current Tunisian number one, and the highest-ranked African and Arab tennis player in WTA and ATP rankings history. She has won five singles titles on the WTA Tour, as well as eleven singles titles and one doubles title on the ITF Circuit. Jabeur was the runner-up at Wimbledon in 2022 and 2023 and at the US Open in 2022, becoming the first African and Arab woman to contest a major singles final.
Go to Profile#33455
Zia Haider Rahman
#33467
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Zia Haider Rahman is a British novelist and broadcaster. His novel In the Light of What We Know was published in 2014 to international critical acclaim and translated into many languages. He was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Britain’s oldest literary prize, previous winners of which include Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie and Cormac McCarthy.
Go to Profile#33456
Robert Webster
#33468
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Robert Gordon Webster is an avian influenza authority who correctly posited that pandemic strains of flu arise from genes in flu virus strains in nonhumans; for example, via a reassortment of genetic segments between viruses in humans and nonhumans rather than by mutations in annual human flu strains.
Go to Profile#33457
Stellan Skarsgård
#33469
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Stellan Skarsgård is a Swedish actor. He is known for his collaborations with director Lars von Trier, appearing in Breaking the Waves , Dancer in the Dark , Dogville , Melancholia , and Nymphomaniac . Skarsgård's English-speaking film roles include The Unbearable Lightness of Being , The Hunt for Red October , Good Will Hunting , Ronin , and King Arthur .
Go to Profile#33458
Jonas Gahr Støre
#33470
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Jonas Gahr Støre is a Norwegian politician who has served as the 36th and current Prime Minister of Norway since 2021 and has been Leader of the Labour Party since 2014. He served under Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2005 to 2012 and as Minister of Health and Care Services from 2012 to 2013. He has been a Member of the Storting for Oslo since 2009.
Go to Profile#33459
Julian Higgins
#33471
Overall Influence
Julian P. T. Higgins is a British biostatistician, Professor of Evidence Synthesis and Director of Research at the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Bristol. Higgins was previously Chair in Evidence Synthesis at the University of York, and Programme Leader at the MRC Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge. He is also a founding trustee and a Past-President of the Society for Research Synthesis Methodology.
Go to Profile#33460
Billy Gunn
#33472
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Monty "Kip" Sopp , better known by his ring name Billy Gunn, is an American professional wrestler and coach, currently signed to All Elite Wrestling where he is one third of the current AEW World Trios Champions with Max Caster and Anthony Bowens as The Acclaimed in their first reign.
Go to Profile#33461
Kenneth E. Thorpe
#33473
Overall Influence
Kenneth E. Thorpe is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Health Policy at Emory University, the Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management in the Rollins School of Public Health, and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services . He is also the Executive Director of the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease and the Emory Institute for Advanced Policy Solutions.
Go to Profile#33462
Sam Jones
#33474
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Samuel Jones was an American professional basketball player who was a shooting guard for the Boston Celtics in the National Basketball Association . A five-time NBA All-Star, he was known for his quickness and game-winning shots, especially during the NBA playoffs. Jones has the second most NBA championships of any player , behind only his teammate Bill Russell . He was also one of only three Celtics to be part of each of the Celtics' eight consecutive championships from 1959 to 1966. Jones is a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#33463
Thomas Hou
#33475
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Thomas Yizhao Hou is the Charles Lee Powell Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for his work in numerical analysis and mathematical analysis.
Go to Profile#33464
Georgina Mace
#33476
Overall Influence
1953 - 2020 (67 years)
Dame Georgina Mary Mace, was a British ecologist and conservation scientist. She was Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystems at University College London, and previously Professor of Conservation Science and Director of the Natural Environment Research Council Centre for Population Biology, Imperial College London and Director of Science at the Zoological Society of London .
Go to Profile#33465
Elaine Stritch
#33477
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Elaine Stritch was an American actress, known for her work on Broadway and later, television. She made her professional stage debut in 1944 and appeared in numerous stage plays, musicals, feature films and television series. Stritch was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1995.
Go to Profile#33466
Rudrangshu Mukherjee
#33478
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Rudrangshu Mukherjee is a historian and author of several history books. He was formerly the Opinions Editor for The Telegraph newspaper, Kolkata and the Chancellor for Ashoka University, where he also serves as Professor of History. He was the founding Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka when the University began in 2014 and was succeeded in 2017 by Pratap Bhanu Mehta.
Go to Profile#33467
Tang Xiao'ou
#33479
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Tang Xiao’ou is a Chinese billionaire computer scientist and founder of SenseTime, an artificial intelligence company. He is also a Professor of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Go to Profile#33468
Mary Anne Mohanraj
#33480
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Mary Anne Amirthi Mohanraj is an American writer, editor, and academic of Sri Lankan birth. Background Mohanraj was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka but moved to the United States at the age of two and grew up in New Britain, Connecticut.
Go to Profile#33469
Alan Hale
#33481
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Alan Hale is an American professional astronomer, who co-discovered Comet Hale–Bopp along with amateur astronomer Thomas Bopp. Hale specializes in the study of Sun-like stars and the search for extra-solar planetary systems, and has side interests in the fields of comets and near-Earth asteroids. He has been an active astronomer most of his life and currently serves as the president of the Earthrise Institute, which he founded, and which has as its mission the use of astronomy as a tool for breaking down international and intercultural barriers. The International Astronomical Union has named...
Go to Profile#33470
Kiyozō Kazama
#33482
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Kiyozō Kazama is a Japanese professor of comparative linguistics, specializing in Latin and Greek, and emeritus professor at Tokyo University. He studied comparative grammar under Kōzu Harushige at the department of linguistics at Tokyo University, and graduated in 1952. He studied abroad under a scholarship grant at Vienna University and returned to become assistant, and then full, professor at his alma mater. He was awarded his doctorate in September 1978 on the subject of kinship terminology in Indo-European languages. On his retirement, he subsequently taught at Hosei University. He i...
Go to Profile#33471
George C. Fuller
#33483
Overall Influence
George C. Fuller . was Professor of Practical Theology, Emeritus, and former president of Westminster Theological Seminary. He served as president from 1984 to 1991. Fuller was a pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America .
Go to Profile#33472
Reubin Askew
#33484
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Reubin O'Donovan Askew was an American politician, who served as the 37th governor of Florida from 1971 to 1979. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 7th U.S. Trade representative from 1979 to 1980 under President Jimmy Carter. He led on tax reform, civil rights, and financial transparency for public officials, maintaining an outstanding reputation for personal integrity.
Go to Profile#33473
Marron Curtis Fort
#33485
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Marron Curtis Fort was an American-born German linguist and professor who specialized in the study of Saterland Frisian and Low German spoken in northern Germany. Fort was a German citizen and lived in Leer. Fort's work in print and appearances in radio and television have contributed greatly to the preservation and furthering of the Saterland Frisian language and Low German language and culture in general.
Go to Profile#33474
Manley West
#33486
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Manley Elisha West OM was a Jamaican pharmacologist who studied the marijuana plant. He investigated medicines for glaucoma. Education West was born in Fairy Hill, Portland Parish, Jamaica. He studied at Titchfield High School and later moved to the UK, attendingThames High School in Surrey. Eventually he began to study pharmacology at the University of London. He worked in St Helier Hospital. West remained there for his postgraduate studies, earning a PhD in 1967.
Go to Profile#33475
Saul David
#33487
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Julian Saul David is a British academic military historian and broadcaster. He is best known for his work on the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Anglo-Zulu War, as well as for presenting and appearing in documentaries on British television covering imperial and military themes.
Go to Profile#33476
Paul Zumthor
#33488
Overall Influence
1915 - 1995 (80 years)
Paul Zumthor, was a medievalist, literary historian, and linguist. He was a Swiss from Geneva. Biography He studied in Paris with Gustave Cohen and worked on French etymology with Walther von Wartburg. In studying medieval French poetry, he formulated the concept of mouvance . He also emphasised "vocality" in medieval poetry, the place of the human voice.
Go to Profile#33477
Alexandre Marc
#33489
Overall Influence
1904 - 2000 (96 years)
Alexandre Marc, was a French writer and philosopher. He was the founder of personalist, federalist, communitarian thinking. He belonged to the non-conformists of the 1930s. Early life and education Marc was born as Alexandr Markovitch Lipiansky in Odessa, Russian Empire in 1904, in a Jewish family. During the Russian revolution he was expelled from the country, and moved to Paris where he completed his secondary education at the Lycée Saint-Louis in the mid-twenties. He studied philosophy at Jena. When he returned to France, he obtained a law degree and he graduated from Sciences Po in 1927.
Go to Profile#33478
Tom Foley
#33490
Overall Influence
1929 - 2013 (84 years)
Thomas Stephen Foley was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 49th speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1989 to 1995. A member of the Democratic Party, Foley represented Washington's fifth district for thirty years He was the first Speaker of the House in over a century since Galusha Grow in 1862 to be defeated in a re-election campaign
Go to Profile#33479
Julianne Dalcanton
#33491
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Julianne Dalcanton is an American astronomer, professor of astronomy, researcher and comet discoverer. Since September 2021 she is the director of the Simons Foundation Center for Computational Astrophysics.
Go to Profile#33480
Hayley Mills
#33492
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Hayley Catherine Rose Vivien Mills is an English actress. The daughter of Sir John Mills and Mary Hayley Bell and younger sister of actress Juliet Mills, she began her acting career as a child and was hailed as a promising newcomer, winning the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer for her performance in the British crime drama film Tiger Bay , the Academy Juvenile Award for Disney's Pollyanna and Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actress in 1961.
Go to Profile#33481
Kelly DeVries
#33493
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Kelly Robert DeVries is an American historian specializing in the warfare of the Middle Ages. He is often featured as an expert commentator on television documentaries. He is professor of history at Loyola University Maryland and Honorary Historical Consultant at the Royal Armouries, UK.
Go to Profile#33482
Yuri Slezkine
#33494
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Yuri Lvovich Slezkine is a Russian-born American historian and translator. He was a professor of Russian history, Sovietologist, and served as Director of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004-2013. He is best known as the author of the books The Jewish Century and The House of Government: A Saga of The Russian Revolution .
Go to Profile#33483
Rod Boswell
#33495
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Roderick William Boswell AM FAA FTSE is an Australian physicist. He is a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra, in the Space Plasma, Power and Propulsion group of the Plasma Research Laboratory. He invented a technology which become the basis for the development of a new type of rocket thruster, the Helicon Double Layer Thruster: the ongoing development of the Australian Plasma Thruster is supported by the European Space Agency.
Go to Profile#33484
André Sapir
#33496
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
André Sapir is a Belgian economist and professor at the Solvay Brussels School of Economics & Management . He is also a senior fellow at Bruegel, the Brussels-based think tank. Professional career Sapir holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with Bela Balassa. He then was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, from 1977 to 1982, before returning to his native Brussels.
Go to Profile#33485
Per-Erik Ellström
#33497
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Per-Erik Ellström, is a Swedish professor of education at Linköping University. Per-Erik Ellström was born in Köping, Sweden. In 1975, he obtained a master’s degree in psychology at Uppsala University, Sweden and in 1984 a doctoral degree in education at Linköping University. In 1998, he was appointed as a professor of education at Linköping University with special emphasis on education and learning in the work place.
Go to Profile#33486
Jean Audouze
#33498
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Jean Audouze is a French astrophysicist. He is a research director at CNRS and teaches at the Paris Institute of Political Science "Sciences Po". From 1993 to 1996 he was president of the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in La Villette, and in 1998 he was named as director of the Palais de la Découverte, changing places with Michel Demazure who took Audouze's former position at La Villette. Awarded the Kalinga Prize in 2004.
Go to Profile#33487
Stuart Corbridge
#33499
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Stuart Edward Corbridge, FRGS is a British geographer and academic specialising in geopolitics, development studies, and India. From September 2015 to July 2021, he was Vice-Chancellor and Warden of Durham University. From 2013 to 2015, he was Provost and Deputy Director of the London School of Economics. He was also Professor of Development Studies at LSE.
Go to Profile#33488
Peter Jonas
#33500
Overall Influence
1946 - 2020 (74 years)
Sir John Peter Jonas was a British arts administrator and opera company director. Life and career Jonas was born in London, the son of Hilda , a fashion model, and Walter Jonas, who ran a dye works and a factory. His father was a German Jewish emigrant, from Hamburg, and his mother was of Jamaican and Lebanese descent. Jonas studied at Worth School, and took an English Literature degree at the University of Sussex. He later studied History of Music at Royal Northern College of Music Manchester, and the Royal College of Music London, with a final semester at Eastman School of Music, Universit...
Go to Profile#33489
Guy Pearce
#33501
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Guy Edward Pearce is an Australian actor. He started his career portraying Mike Young in the Australian television series Neighbours. Pearce received international attention for his breakout role in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and subsequently took starring roles in Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential , Christopher Nolan's Memento and Simon Wells's The Time Machine . He is also known for his performances in the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road , Kathryn Bigelow's war drama The Hurt Locker and Tom Hooper's historical drama The King's Speech . He has appeared ...
Go to Profile#33490
Kent Syverud
#33502
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Kent D. Syverud is the 12th Chancellor and President of Syracuse University. He began his term of office on January 13, 2014. He was previously the dean at Washington University School of Law and Vanderbilt University Law School.
Go to Profile#33491
Reinhart Maurer
#33503
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Reinhart Klemens Maurer is a philosopher and professor from Xanten, Germany. Maurer studied philosophy, German and English at the universities of Münster, Kiel and Vienna. In 1964, he made his Ph.D. Maurer later wrote his post-doctoral research in 1969 at the University of Stuttgart under the supervision of Robert Spaemann. Between 1962 and 1975, he was a research assistant and then a lecturer at the Institute for Philosophy and Pedagogy at the University of Stuttgart and from 1975 to 1997, he served as a professor at the Institute for Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin .
Go to Profile#33492
Calvin Johnson
#33504
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Calvin Johnson Jr., is an American former football wide receiver who played in the National Football League for nine seasons with the Detroit Lions. Nicknamed "Megatron" after the Transformers character of the same name, he is regarded as one of the greatest wide receivers of all time. He played college football at Georgia Tech, where he won the Fred Biletnikoff Award as a junior, and was selected by the Lions second overall in the 2007 NFL Draft.
Go to Profile#33493
Arun Agrawal
#33505
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Arun Agrawal is a political scientist and the Samuel Trask Dana Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. Agrawal is the coordinator for the International Forestry Resources and Institutions network and does research in Africa and South Asia.
Go to Profile#33494
Nikolai Baskakov
#33506
Overall Influence
1905 - 1996 (91 years)
Nikolai Aleksandrovich Baskakov was a Soviet Turkologist, linguist, and ethnologist. He created a systematization model of the Turkic language family , and studied Turkic-Russian contacts in the 10-11th centuries CE. During 64 years of scientific work , Baskakov published almost 640 works including 32 books. The main area of Baskakov's scientific interests was linguistics, but he also studied folklore and ethnography of the Turkic peoples, and also was a musician and composer.
Go to Profile#33495
Jeremy Ashkenas
#33507
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Jeremy Ashkenas is a computer programmer known for the creation and co-creation of the CoffeeScript and LiveScript programming languages respectively, the Backbone.js JavaScript framework and the Underscore.js JavaScript library. While working in the graphics department at The New York Times, he shared the 2015 Gerald Loeb Award for Images/Graphics/Interactives. After working at the Times, he was an employee of Observable, Inc. As of 2020, he works at Substack Inc. Jeremy returned to The New York Times in June 2022 as Director of Graphics for Opinion.
Go to Profile#33496
Mrinal Datta Chaudhuri
#33508
Overall Influence
1934 - 2015 (81 years)
Mrinal Datta-Chaudhuri , popularly known as MDC, was an Indian theoretical economist, academic and a professor of the Delhi School of Economics. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. The Government of India awarded him the third highest civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan, in 2005, for his contributions to literature and education.
Go to Profile#33497
Gary Okihiro
#33509
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Gary Y. Okihiro is an American author and scholar. Currently at Yale, he was a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University in New York City and the founding director of Columbia's Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. Okihiro received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1976.
Go to Profile#33498
Frank Broyles
#33510
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
John Franklin Broyles was an American college football player and coach, college athletics administrator, and broadcaster. He served as the head football coach for one season at the University of Missouri in 1957 and at the University of Arkansas from 1958 to 1976, compiling a career coaching record of 149–62–6. Broyles was also the athletic director at Arkansas from 1974 to 2007. His mark of 144–58–5 in 19 seasons at the helm of the Arkansas Razorbacks football gives him the most wins and the most coached games of any head coach in program history. With Arkansas, Broyles won seven Southwest ...
Go to Profile#33499
Ellen Gruenbaum
#33511
Overall Influence
2000 - 1999 (-1 years)
Ellen Gruenbaum is an American anthropologist. A specialist in researching medical practices that are based on a society's culture. Personal life Gruenbaum was born in St. Louis, Missouri, US, and received her A.B. in anthropology at Stanford University in 1974. She went on to the University of Connecticut to earn her M.A. in 1974 and her Ph.D. in 1982 in anthropology. Her doctoral thesis was "Health services, health, and development in Sudan : the impact of the Gezira irrigated scheme".
Go to Profile#33500
Curtis Cooper
#33512
Overall Influence
Curtis Niles Cooper is an American mathematician who is currently a professor at the University of Central Missouri, in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. GIMPS Using software from the GIMPS project, Cooper and Steven Boone found the 43rd known Mersenne prime on their 700 PC cluster on December 15, 2005. The prime, 230,402,457 − 1, is 9,152,052 digits long and is the ninth Mersenne prime for GIMPS.
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