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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School

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Ranking

List of the most influential people

#33501

Clara Claiborne Park

#33513

Overall Influence

1923 - 2010 (87 years)

Clara Claiborne Park was an American college English teacher and author who was best known for her writings about her experiences raising her autistic daughter, the artist Jessica Park. Her 1967 book, The Siege was credited as one of the first books to allay the blame that parents, especially mothers, were made to feel at having caused their child's autism through their cold detachment.

#33502

Ranil Wickremesinghe

#33514

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Ranil Wickremesinghe is a Sri Lankan politician who is the 9th and current President of Sri Lanka. He also holds several ministerial positions, including the Minister of Finance, Minister of Defence, Minister of Technology and Minister of Women, Child Affairs and Social Empowerment.

#33503

Ken Raymond

#33515

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Kenneth Norman Raymond is a bioinorganic and coordination chemist. He is Chancellor's Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor of the Graduate School, the Director of the Seaborg Center in the Chemical Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the President and Chairman of Lumiphore.

#33504

David Mikics

#33516

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

David Mikics is the Moores Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and the Honors College, University of Houston. His book on Stanley Kubrick in the Yale Jewish Lives series was published in 2020. His book about Saul Bellow entitled Bellow’s People: How Saul Bellow Made Life Into Art was published in 2016. Mikics, a Guggenheim Fellow for 2017, is a regular columnist for Tablet magazine. He lives with his wife and son in Brooklyn and Houston.

#33505

Lorenz Bruno Puntel

#33517

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Lorenz Bruno Puntel is a Brazilian philosopher based in Germany, who established the school of Structural-systematic philosophy. Professor emeritus at the University of Munich, Puntel has been named as one of the great contemporary philosophers, articulating his ideas from the most varied traditions.

#33506

Peter A. Stott

#33518

Overall Influence

Peter A. Stott is a climate scientist who leads the Climate Monitoring and Attribution team of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the Met Office in Exeter, UK. He is an expert on anthropogenic and natural causes of climate change.

#33507

Mark Burnett

#33519

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

James Mark Burnett is a television producer and author who is the former Chairman of MGM Worldwide Television Group. He created and produced the reality shows Survivor, The Apprentice, The Voice, and Shark Tank .

#33508

Xin Zhou

#33520

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Xin Zhou is a mathematician known for his contributions in scattering theory, integrable systems, random matrices and Riemann–Hilbert problems. He is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Duke University. Zhou had obtained M.Sc. from the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1982 and then got his Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of Rochester. He received the Pólya prize in 1998 and was awarded with the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999. He is most well known for his work with Percy Deift on the steepest descent method for oscillatory Riemann–Hilbert problems.

#33509

Suzanne Kessler

#33521

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Suzanne Kessler is an American social psychologist known for the application of ethnomethodology to gender. She and Wendy McKenna pioneered this application of ethnomethodology to the study of gender and sex with their groundbreaking work, Gender an Ethnomethodological Approach. Twenty years later, Kessler extended this work in a second book, Lessons from the Intersexed.

#33510

Neelie Kroes

#33522

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Neelie Kroes is a retired Dutch politician of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy and businessperson who served as European Commissioner from 22 November 2004 to 1 November 2014. Kroes studied Economics at the Rotterdam School of Economics obtaining a Master of Economics degree. Kroes worked as a researcher at her alma mater from September 1963 to April 1968, and as a corporate director for a transport company in Delft from April 1968 until August 1971, and for the chamber of commerce of Rotterdam from July 1969 until August 1971. Kroes became a Member of the House of Representative...

#33511

Uddhav Thackeray

#33523

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray is an Indian politician who served as the 19th Chief Minister of Maharashtra from 2019 to 2022 and the Leader of the House, Maharashtra Legislative Assembly from 2019 to 2022. He is a member of Maharashtra Legislative Council since 2020, the president of Maha Vikas Aghadi since 2019 and the president of Shiv Sena since 2022. He was also the leader of Shiv Sena from 2013 to 2022, working President from 2003 to 2013 and the editor-in-chief of Saamana from 2006 to 2019.

#33512

Dan Povenmire

#33524

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Daniel Kingsley Povenmire is an American animator, voice actor, writer, director, and producer. With Jeff "Swampy" Marsh, Povenmire co-created the Disney animated series Phineas and Ferb and Milo Murphy's Law, in both of which he voiced the character Heinz Doofenshmirtz. In October 2020, Povenmire announced a new series for Disney Channel titled Hamster & Gretel, which premiered in 2022.

#33513

Gerald Durrell

#33525

Overall Influence

1925 - 1995 (70 years)

Gerald Malcolm Durrell, was a British naturalist, writer, zookeeper, conservationist, and television presenter. He founded the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Jersey Zoo on the Channel Island of Jersey in 1959. He wrote approximately forty books, mainly about his life as an animal collector and enthusiast, the most famous being My Family and Other Animals . Those memoirs of his family's years living in Greece were adapted into two television series and one television film . He was the youngest brother of novelist Lawrence Durrell.

#33514

Rajaâ Cherkaoui El Moursli

#33526

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Rajaâ Cherkaoui El Moursli is a Moroccan Professor of nuclear physics, at the faculty of science within the Mohammad V University of Rabat. She won the L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science for her work on the Higgs Boson.

#33515

Jerry Hobbs

#33527

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Jerry R. Hobbs is an American researcher in the fields of computational linguistics, discourse analysis, and artificial intelligence. Education Hobbs earned his doctor's degree from New York University in 1974 in computer science and has taught at Yale University and the City University of New York.

#33516

John Bowker

#33528

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

John Westerdale Bowker is an English Anglican priest and pioneering scholar of religious studies. A former Director of Studies and Dean of Chapel at Corpus Christi and Trinity College, Cambridge he is credited with introducing religious studies as a discipline to Cambridge University. He has been a Professor of religious studies at the universities of Cambridge, Lancaster, Pennsylvania and North Carolina State University. He is an Honorary Canon of Canterbury Cathedral, a consultant for UNESCO, a BBC broadcaster and author and editor of numerous books.

#33517

Hattie Naylor

#33529

Overall Influence

Hattie Naylor is an English playwright. Her 2009 Ivan and the Dogs won the Tinniswood Award for original radio drama and was nominated in the 2010 Olivier Awards for Outstanding Contribution to Theatre. It has since been developed into a film directed by Andrew Kôtting called Lek and the Dogs . Other productions include Weighting Extraordinary Bodies, national tour 2015/16. Her work as a librettist includes Picard in Space with Will Gregory directed by Jude Kelly, for the Electronica Festival at the Southbank 2012. The Night Watch, her adaptation of Sarah Water’s novel, Manchester Royal Ex...

#33518

Donna Halper

#33530

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Donna Lee Halper is a Boston-based historian and radio consultant. Beginning in 1968, Halper worked as a radio disc jockey and music director, and is credited with discovering the progressive rock band Rush while at WMMS in Cleveland in 1974. She has taught courses in broadcasting, media criticism, and media history, and is author of a number of books, including the first book-length study devoted to the history of women in American broadcasting, Invisible Stars: A Social History of Women in American Broadcasting. In March 2023, it was announced that she would be inducted into the Massachuse...

#33519

Robin M. Hochstrasser

#33531

Overall Influence

1931 - 2013 (82 years)

Robin M. Hochstrasser was a Scottish-born American chemist. Biography Hochstrasser was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1952 he received his B.S. from Heriot-Watt University and 3 years later got his Ph.D. from University of Edinburgh. In 1957 he joined the faculty at the University of British Columbia. From 1962 to 1967 he was Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellow and in 1963 he taught chemistry at University of Pennsylvania. During his 50 years of teaching, he trained 75 Ph.D. students and more than 90 postdoctoral fellows. Between 1955 and 1957 he served in the Royal Air Force. He also publishe...

#33520

Michael Stratton

#33532

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Sir Michael Rudolf Stratton, is a British clinical scientist and the third director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. He currently heads the Cancer Genome Project and is a leader of the International Cancer Genome Consortium.

#33521

Wang Xiangsui

#33533

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Wang Xiangsui is a professor at Beihang University in Beijing, China and a retired senior Colonel in the People's Liberation Army. He is also a co-author of Unrestricted Warfare, a book which dictates that no country is capable of defeating a superpower, such as the United States, on its own terms. The book outlines steps that could weaken such superpowers, through unconventional means, including manipulation of banking systemss, control of the media and natural resources.

#33522

Colin Kahl

#33534

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Colin Hackett Kahl is an American government official and academic who served as under secretary of defense for policy in the administration of President Joe Biden from April 28, 2021, to July 14, 2023. Previously, he served as national security advisor to the vice president under then-Vice President Joe Biden . After the Obama administration, Kahl served as a Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow at Stanford University.

#33523

John Whitefield Kendrick

#33535

Overall Influence

1917 - 2009 (92 years)

John Whitefield Kendrick was a pioneer in productivity measurement and economic accounting. Kendrick worked as an economist from 1946 to 1953 at the Office of Business Economics, the predecessor to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and from 1955 to 1988 as a professor at George Washington University. In 1963 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

#33524

Riccardo Muti

#33536

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Riccardo Muti is an Italian conductor. He currently holds two music directorships, at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and at the Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini. Muti has previously held posts at the Maggio Musicale in Florence, the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, and the Salzburg Whitsun Festival.

#33525

Jay Cutler

#33537

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Jason Isaac Cutler known professionally as Jay Cutler is an American retired professional bodybuilder. An IFBB Pro League bodybuilder, Cutler is a four-time Mr. Olympia winner, having won in 2006, 2007, 2009, and 2010; and a six-time runner-up, the most in history.

#33526

Tyson Gay

#33538

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Tyson Gay is a retired American track and field sprinter who competed in the 100 and 200 meters. His 100 m personal best of 9.69 seconds is the American record and makes him tied for the second fastest athlete over 100 m ever, along with Yohan Blake of Jamaica.

#33527

Mark Thomson

#33539

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Mark Thomson is a Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In January 2018 he was announced as the new Executive Chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council.

#33528

Thomas Lumley

#33540

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Thomas Lumley is an Australian statistician who serves as the chair of biostatistics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Lumley is also a member of the "R Core Team." He was elected as a fellow of the ASA in 2012. Lumley was also elected a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2015.

#33529

Damian Lewis

#33541

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Damian Watcyn Lewis is a British actor, musician and producer. He is best known for portraying U.S. Army Major Richard Winters in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. He won a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award for his portrayal of U.S. Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody in the Showtime series Homeland, and nominations for both for his performance as Henry VIII of England in Wolf Hall. He portrayed Bobby Axelrod in the Showtime series Billions in six out of seven seasons, and appeared in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as actor Steve McQueen.

#33530

Charlie Gere

#33542

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Charlie Gere is a British academic who is professor of media theory and history at The Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, The University of Lancaster and previously, director of research at the Institute for Cultural Research at The University of Lancaster. He is author of several books and articles on new media art, art and technology, continental philosophy and technology. His main research interest is in the cultural effects and meanings of technology and media, particularly in relation to post-conceptual art and philosophy.

#33531

John Forsythe

#33543

Overall Influence

1918 - 2010 (92 years)

John Forsythe was an American stage, film/television actor, producer, narrator, drama teacher and philanthropist whose career spanned six decades. He also appeared as a guest on several talk and variety shows and as a panelist on numerous game shows.

#33532

Paul Bettany

#33544

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Paul Bettany is an English actor. He is best known for his roles as J.A.R.V.I.S. and Vision in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including the Disney+ miniseries WandaVision , for which he garnered a Primetime Emmy Award nomination.

#33533

Amitabh Mattoo

#33545

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Amitabh Mattoo is one of India's leading thinkers and writers on Modern and Contemporary History, Political science, International relations. He was awarded Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2009. He is a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University and honorary professor of international relations at the University of Melbourne. Until 19 June 2018, he served as Advisor to the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, with the status of a Cabinet Minister. Mattoo is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the German Institute for Global and Area Studies and was recently elected unanimously as its Deputy Chair.

#33534

Frank Thomas

#33546

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Frank Edward Thomas Jr. , nicknamed "the Big Hurt", is an American former professional baseball designated hitter and first baseman in Major League Baseball . He played for three American League teams from 1990 to 2008, all but the last three years with the Chicago White Sox. A five-time All-Star, he is the only player in major league history to have seven consecutive seasons with at least a .300 batting average, 100 runs batted in , 100 runs scored, 100 walks, and 20 home runs. Thomas also won the AL batting title in 1997 with a .347 mark. Thomas is a two-time AL MVP and won a World Series ...

#33535

Pramod Viswanath

#33547

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Pramod Viswanath is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for contributions to the theory and practice of wireless communications.

#33536

Paul S. Wesson

#33548

Overall Influence

1949 - 2015 (66 years)

Paul S. Wesson, B.Sc., Ph.D., D.Sc., F.R.A.S was a professor of astrophysics and theoretical physics. Education and career He was educated at the Universities of London and Cambridge in England, and spent most of his career at the University of Waterloo in Canada. He also spent sabbatical leaves at Berkeley and Stanford in California, and was associated in his later years with the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, Canada. He supervised numerous graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and served as Science Director of the California Institute for Physics and Astronomy.

#33537

Eduardo Mendoza Garriga

Eduardo Mendoza Garriga

#33549

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Eduardo Mendoza Garriga is a Spanish novelist. Early life Garriga studied law in the first half of the 1960s and lived in New York City between 1973 and 1982, working as interpreter for the United Nations, and then tried to become a lawyer and then he realized that he wanted to be a writer. He maintained an intense relationship with novelists Juan Benet and Juan García Hortelano, poet Pere Gimferrer and writer Félix de Azúa. He currently lives in London.

#33538

Ruth Ella Moore

Ruth Ella Moore

#33550

Overall Influence

1903 - 1994 (91 years)

Ruth Ella Moore was an American bacteriologist and microbiologist, who, in 1933, became the first African-American woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in a natural science. She was a professor of bacteriology at Howard University. A decade later, she was installed as the head of the department of bacteriology, which she renamed to the department of microbiology. During that period she was promoted to associate professor of microbiology.

#33539

Michihiro Kandori

#33551

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Michihiro Kandori is a Japanese economist. He is a professor at the University of Tokyo. Kandori is the President of the Game Theory Society, replacing Matthew O. Jackson in 2023. Career He received a B.A. from University of Tokyo in 1982 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1989. His seminal papers about social norms and evolutionary game theory together have received 5,000 citations to date, according to Google Scholar. Kandori serves as the Vice Director of the University of Tokyo Market Design Center.

#33540

David Hyde Pierce

David Hyde Pierce

#33552

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

David Hyde Pierce is an American actor. For his portrayal of psychiatrist Dr. Niles Crane on the NBC sitcom Frasier from 1993 to 2004, he received four Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series as well as two Screen Actors Guild Awards. He also received a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his portrayal of Lieutenant Frank Cioffi in the Broadway musical Curtains .

#33541

Camilla Benbow

#33553

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Camilla Persson Benbow is a Swedish-born American educational psychologist and a university professor. She studies the education of intellectually gifted students. Biography Camilla Benbow is the Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College. She is an educational psychologist who has focused on education of intellectually gifted young people. Benbow is co-director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth , a longitudinal study that examines the development of over 5,000 individuals over their life-spans. Her interests focu...

#33542

Darrel Frost

#33554

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Darrel Richmond Frost is an American herpetologist and systematist. He was previously head curator of herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History, as well as president of both the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles and the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists . Four taxa are named in his honor: the toad genus Frostius , the tree frog Dendropsophus frosti, Darrel's Chorus Frog Microhyla darreli, and Frost's arboreal alligator lizard Abronia frosti.

#33543

Ernst Weber

#33555

Overall Influence

1901 - 1996 (95 years)

Ernst Weber , Austria-born American electrical engineer, was a pioneer in microwave technologies and played an important role in the history of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, where in 1945 he founded the Microwave Research Institute . Weber was also the first president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and one of the founders of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering .

#33544

Sylvia Wiegand

#33556

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Sylvia Margaret Wiegand is an American mathematician. Early life and education Wiegand was born in Cape Town, South Africa. She is the daughter of mathematician Laurence Chisholm Young and through him the grand-daughter of mathematicians Grace Chisholm Young and William Henry Young. Her family moved to Wisconsin in 1949, and she graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1966 after three years of study. In 1971 Wiegand earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation was titled Galois Theory of Essential Expansions of Modules and Vanishing Tensor Powers.

#33545

Marie desJardins

#33557

Overall Influence

Marie desJardins is an American computer scientist, known for her research on artificial intelligence and computer science education. She is also active in broadening participation in computing. Biography DesJardins grew up in Columbia, Maryland. She received an A. B. in Engineering and Computer Science from Harvard University in 1985. She received a Ph.D in Computer Science from University of Berkeley in 1992.

#33546

Tamar El Or

#33558

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Tamar El-Or is an Israeli sociologist and author holding the Sarah Allen Shaine chair of sociology and anthropology at the Hebrew University. Research El-Or's Ph.D. dissertation was a study of ultra-Orthodox women in Israel that was published as a book, Educated and Ignorant, in both Hebrew and English. Therein, El-Or discusses the possibility of educating for ignorance, or teaching certain groups to expect and respect intellectual restrictions. This research in gender and religion debated feminist questions of choice, empowerment, and resistance via the life of Orthodox women.

#33547

Henri Verneuil

#33559

Overall Influence

1920 - 2002 (82 years)

Henri Verneuil was a French-Armenian playwright and filmmaker, who made a successful career in France. He was nominated for Oscar and Palme d'Or awards, and won Locarno International Film Festival, Edgar Allan Poe Awards, French Legion of Honor, Golden Globe Award, French National Academy of Cinema and Honorary Cesar awards.

#33548

Edward S. Shapiro

#33560

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Edward S. Shapiro is a historian of American history and American Jewish history. He received his BA at Georgetown University and his PhD at Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation was The American Distributists and the New Deal. Most of Shapiro's career was spent as professor of American history at Seton Hall University. He is the father of Marc B. Shapiro.

#33549

Scott Stapp

#33561

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Scott Stapp is an American singer, best known as the lead vocalist and lyricist of the rock band Creed. He has also fronted the band Art of Anarchy and has released three solo albums: The Great Divide , Proof of Life , and The Space Between the Shadows .

#33550

Carl Hovde

#33562

Overall Influence

1926 - 2009 (83 years)

Carl Frederick Hovde was an American educator who from 1968 until 1972 was the Dean of Columbia College, the undergraduate division of Columbia University. In that position, he served an important role in restoring order and calm on the campus after the six-week-long student protests in spring 1968 that had been led by the Students for a Democratic Society.

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