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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#33801
Barry Sanders
#33813
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Barry Sanders is an American writer and academic. His projects occur increasingly at the intersection of art and activism, and include The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism, which Project Censored named one of the top-ten censored stories of 2009, and "Over These Prison Walls," which invites collaborations between artists and incarcerated youth. He is the author of fourteen books and over fifty essays and articles . His 2002 essay for Cabinet, "Bang the Keys Softly: Type-Writers and Their Dis-Contents," has been reprinted in Courier as well as Ghost in the Machine the catalo...
Go to Profile#33802
Anne Balsamo
#33814
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Anne Marie Balsamo is a scholar whose career encompasses contributions as a theorist, designer, educator, and entrepreneur in the fields of feminist technology studies, media studies, design research, public interactives, cultural heritage, and media archeology.
Go to Profile#33803
Gopal Prasad
#33815
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Gopal Prasad is an Indian-American mathematician. His research interests span the fields of Lie groups, their discrete subgroups, algebraic groups, arithmetic groups, geometry of locally symmetric spaces, and representation theory of reductive p-adic groups.
Go to Profile#33804
Darrell Royal
#33816
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
Darrell K Royal was an American gridiron football player and coach. He served as the head football coach at Mississippi State University , the University of Washington , and the University of Texas , compiling a career college football record of 184–60–5. In his 20 seasons at Texas, Royal's teams won three national championships , 11 Southwest Conference titles, and amassed a record of 167–47–5. He won more games than any other coach in Texas Longhorns football history. Royal also coached the Edmonton Eskimos of the Canadian Football League for one season in 1953. He never had a losing season as a head coach for his entire career.
Go to Profile#33805
James Gillogly
#33817
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
James J. Gillogly is an American computer scientist and cryptographer. Biography Early life His interest in cryptography stems from his boyhood, as did his interest in mathematics. By junior high he was inventing his own ciphers and challenging his father, entomologist Lorin Gillogly, to solve them.
Go to Profile#33806
Elad Levy
#33818
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Elad I. Levy is an American neurosurgeon, researcher, and innovator who played a major role in the development and testing of thrombectomy, which improved quality of life and survival of stroke patients. He has focused his career and research on developing evidence based medicine and literature showing the benefits of thrombectomy for the treatment of stroke. He is currently Professor of Neurosurgery and Radiology, and the L. Nelson Hopkins, MD Professor Endowed Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at the State University of New York at Buffalo .
Go to Profile#33807
Robert Vaughn
#33819
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Robert Francis Vaughn was an American stage, film and television actor, author, political activist and advertising spokesperson whose career spanned nearly six decades. Born in New York City, Vaughn died from acute leukemia in Danbury, Connecticut, eleven days before his 84th birthday.
Go to Profile#33808
Nicole Brown Simpson
#33820
Overall Influence
1959 - 1994 (35 years)
Nicole Brown Simpson was the ex-wife of the former professional American football player, O. J. Simpson, to whom she was married from 1985 to 1992. She was the mother of their two children, Sydney and Justin.
Go to Profile#33809
Glenn Ricart
#33821
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Glenn Ricart is a computer scientist. He was influential in the development of the Internet going back to 1969 and early implementation of the TCP/IP protocol. Since then he has been active in technology and business as well as donating his time to philanthropic and educational movements.
Go to Profile#33810
Everardo Rocha
#33822
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Everardo Pereira Guimarães Rocha is a Brazilian anthropologist dedicated to the study of consumption, advertising, and Brazilian culture. He earned his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the National Museum of Brazil at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1989. He is a Professor in the Department of Communication and its graduate program at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, where he has taught since 1976.
Go to Profile#33811
Gordon Wright
#33823
Overall Influence
1912 - 2000 (88 years)
Gordon Wright was an American historian. He focused on modern European history and was the pre-eminent historian on modern French history. He has been recognized nationally and internationally for his work and his method of teaching.
Go to Profile#33812
Brigitte Baptiste
#33824
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Brigitte Luis Guillermo Baptiste, is a Colombian cultural landscape ecologist and an expert on environmental issues and biodiversity in Colombia. She is a member of the Multidisciplinary Expert Panel of the Intergovernmental Science and Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and has been part of the national representation to the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research. She served as director of the Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute from 2011 until 2019. In September 2019, Baptiste became the director of Universidad Ean. She consider th...
Go to Profile#33813
Charles Ofria
#33825
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Dr. Charles A. Ofria is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, the director of the Digital Evolution Lab there, and Director of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action. He is the son of the late Charles Ofria, who developed the first fully integrated shop management program for the automotive repair industry. Ofria attended Stuyvesant High School and graduated from Ward Melville High School in 1991. He obtained a B.S. in Computer Science, Pure Mathematics, and Applied Mathematics from Stony Brook University in 1994, and a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#33814
Bill Manhire
#33826
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
William Manhire is a New Zealand poet, short story writer, emeritus professor, and New Zealand's inaugural Poet Laureate . He founded New Zealand's first creative writing course at Victoria University of Wellington in 1975, founded the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2001, and has been a strong promoter of New Zealand literature and poetry throughout his career. Many of New Zealand's leading writers graduated from his courses at Victoria. He has received many notable awards including a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in 2007 and an Arts Foundation Icon Award in 2...
Go to Profile#33815
George Samuel Hurst
#33827
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
George Samuel Hurst was a health physicist and professor of Physics at the University of Kentucky. He was known for patent hoarding and in his later years, was involved in several patent disputes through his company, Elographics.
Go to Profile#33816
José-Miguel Bernardo
#33828
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
José-Miguel Bernardo Herranz is a Spanish mathematician and statistician. He is a noted Bayesian and known for introducing the concept of reference priors. Bernardo was born in Valencia, Spain. He received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Valencia in 1974, and a second PhD in statistics from University College London in 1976. Since 1978, he has been a professor of statistics at the University of Valencia.
Go to Profile#33817
Heiner Koch
#33829
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Heiner Koch is a German prelate of the Catholic Church. He has been the Archbishop of Berlin since September 2015. He was an auxiliary bishop in Cologne from 2006 to 2013 and Bishop of Dresden-Meissen from 2013 to 2015.
Go to Profile#33818
Judith Goslin Hall
#33830
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Judith Goslin Hall is a pediatrician, clinical geneticist and dysmorphologist who is a dual citizen of the United States and Canada. Early life and education The daughter of a minister, Judith Goslin Hall was born on July 3, 1939, in Boston, Massachusetts. She graduated from Garfield High School in Seattle and then attended Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass. from which she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1961.
Go to Profile#33819
Zack de la Rocha
#33831
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Zacharias Manuel de la Rocha , also commonly referred to by his initials ZDLR, is an American musician, singer, songwriter, rapper, and political activist. He is best known as the vocalist and lyricist of the rock band Rage Against the Machine. Through both Rage Against the Machine and his activism, de la Rocha has spoken in opposition to corporate America, the military-industrial complex and government oppression.
Go to Profile#33820
Dennis DeConcini
#33832
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Dennis Webster DeConcini is an American lawyer, philanthropist, politician and former U.S. senator from Arizona. The son of former Arizona Supreme Court judge Evo Anton DeConcini, he represented Arizona in the Senate as a Democrat from 1977 until 1995. After his re-election in 1988, no Arizona Democrats were elected to the Senate for 30 years until Kyrsten Sinema won his former seat in 2018.
Go to Profile#33821
Chris Rea
#33833
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Christopher Anton Rea is an English rock and blues singer and guitarist from Middlesbrough. Known for his distinctive voice and his slide guitar playing, Rea has recorded twenty five solo albums, two of which topped the UK Chart, The Road to Hell in 1989 and its successor, Auberge, in 1991. He had already become "a major European star by the time he finally cracked the UK Top 10" with the single "The Road to Hell ".
Go to Profile#33822
Amir Yaron
#33834
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Amir Yaron is an Israeli-American economist and the current Governor of the Bank of Israel. Prior to serving as Governor, Yaron served as Professor of Banking and Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#33823
Dong Kingman
#33835
Overall Influence
1911 - 2000 (89 years)
Dong Kingman was a Chinese American artist and one of America's leading watercolor masters. As a painter on the forefront of the California Style School of painting, he was known for his urban and landscape paintings, as well as his graphic design work in the Hollywood film industry. He has won widespread critical acclaim and his works are included in over 50 public and private collections worldwide, including Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Brooklyn Museum; deYoung Museum and Art Institute, Chicago.
Go to Profile#33824
Espen Hammer
#33836
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Espen Hammer is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. Focusing on modern European thought from Kant and Hegel to Adorno and Heidegger, Hammer’s research includes critical theory, Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy, phenomenology, German idealism, social and political theory, and aesthetics. He has also written widely on the philosophy of literature and taken a special interest in the question of temporality.
Go to Profile#33825
Ryan S. Baker
#33837
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Ryan S. Baker is professor of education and computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, and also directs the Penn Center for Learning Analytics. He is known for his role in establishing the educational data mining scientific community, for the Baker Rodrigo Ocumpaugh Monitoring Protocol , and for establishing the first automated detector of student disengagement. He was awarded the Educational Research Award for 2018 by the Council of Scientific Society Presidents.
Go to Profile#33826
Keum-Shik Hong
#33838
Overall Influence
Keum-Shik Hong is a South Korean mechanical engineer, academic, author, and researcher. He is a professor emeritus in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Pusan National University. He is also a Distinguished Professor in the Institute For Future, Qingdao University, China.
Go to Profile#33827
Tani E. Barlow
#33839
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Tani Barlow is an American historian. She is the George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Formerly, Barlow was a professor of history and women studies at the University of Washington. She is known for her research on feminism in China.
Go to Profile#33828
Predrag Finci
#33840
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Predrag Finci is a Bosnian–British philosopher, author, and essayist. Biography Predrag Finci started his career as an actor. In 1968 Finci played the role of Gavrilo Princip in the film Sarajevski atentat directed by Fadil Hadžić. Later he studied philosophy at the University of Sarajevo and at the University of Paris X: Nanterre under Mikel Dufrenne. He was a visiting researcher at the Freiburg University under the supervision of Werner Marx. He completed his MA in 1977 and PhD in philosophy in 1981. He was a professor of aesthetics at the University of Sarajevo until 1993 when, during the Bosnian war, he left Sarajevo for London.
Go to Profile#33829
Wesley R. Elsberry
#33841
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Wesley Royce Elsberry is a data scientist with an interdisciplinary background in marine biology, zoology, computer science, and wildlife and fisheries sciences. He also became notably involved in the defense of evolutionary science against creationist rejection of evolution.
Go to Profile#33830
Marinus Boezem
#33842
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Marinus Lambertus van den Boezem is a Dutch artist. He is known for his radical view of art and his works in public space. Together with Wim T. Schippers, Ger van Elk and Jan Dibbets, Boezem is seen as one of the main representatives of conceptual art and arte povera in the Netherlands in the late 1960s.
Go to Profile#33831
Jacques Lévy
#33843
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Jacques Lévy is a professor of geography and urbanism at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne . He is the director of Chôros Laboratory and of the Doctoral Program in Architecture and Science of the City. He is the cofounder of the scientific journal EspacesTemps.net . He published in French, along with Michel Lussault, the dictionary of geography and space of societies, Dictionnaire de la géographie et de l’espace des sociétés.He has contributed to in the epistemological and theoretical reform of geography as a science of the spatial dimension of the social, open to the social sciences and philosophy.
Go to Profile#33832
S. Allen Counter
#33844
Overall Influence
1944 - 2017 (73 years)
Samuel Allen Counter Jr. was a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and inaugural director of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations. Early life Samuel Allen Counter Jr. was born in Americus, Georgia. His mother, Anne , was a nurse and his father managed businesses, but died prematurely of a heart attack. Counter grew up in south Florida in the segregated town of Boynton Beach and attended his first civil rights protest as the youngest participant at a "swim-in" at a white-only beach.
Go to Profile#33833
Tore Janson
#33845
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Tore Janson is a Swedish linguist. Janson was professor of Latin at the University of Gothenburg, and later became professor of African languages at the same alma mater. He retired in 2001, but has since been affiliated with the University of Stockholm.
Go to Profile#33834
Luke O'Neill
#33846
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Luke Anthony John O'Neill is an Irish biochemist. He has been a professor of biochemistry in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology at Trinity College Dublin since 2009. Early life and education O'Neill was born on 17 June 1964 in Dublin, Ireland, to Kevin O'Neill and Carmel O'Neill . He was educated at St Peter's School and Presentation College in Bray, County Wicklow, and went to Trinity College Dublin, where he was awarded an undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences in 1985. He completed his postgraduate study at the University of London, where he was awarded a PhD in pharmacology, fo...
Go to Profile#33835
Monica Morrow
#33847
Overall Influence
Monica Morrow is a breast cancer surgeon and Chief of Breast Surgery at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, NY. Her first day seeing patients in clinic as Chief at MSKCC was Tuesday, February 19, 2008. She formerly served as the chairman of surgical oncology at the Fox Chase Cancer Center. She is the President-elect of the Society for Surgical Oncology.
Go to Profile#33836
John Candy
#33848
Overall Influence
1950 - 1994 (44 years)
John Franklin Candy was a Canadian actor and comedian who is best known for his work in Hollywood films. Candy first rose to national prominence in the 1970s as a member of the Toronto branch of the Second City and its SCTV sketch comedy series. He rose to international fame in the 1980s with his roles in comedic films such as Stripes , Splash , Brewster's Millions , Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Spaceballs , The Great Outdoors , Uncle Buck , and Cool Runnings . He was also known for his supporting roles in The Blues Brothers , National Lampoon's Vacation , Little Shop of Horrors , and Home...
Go to Profile#33837
Eui-Cheol Shin
#33849
Overall Influence
Eui-Cheol Shin is a Korean medical immunologist, academic, and author. He is a professor at the Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology , and director of The Center for Viral Immunology at the Institute for Basic Science , a Korean government-funded research institute.
Go to Profile#33838
Michael Tippett
#33850
Overall Influence
1905 - 1998 (93 years)
Sir Michael Kemp Tippett was an English composer who rose to prominence during and immediately after the Second World War. In his lifetime he was sometimes ranked with his contemporary Benjamin Britten as one of the leading British composers of the 20th century. Among his best-known works are the oratorio A Child of Our Time, the orchestral Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, and the opera The Midsummer Marriage.
Go to Profile#33839
Nicholas Barry Davies
#33851
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Nicholas Barry Davies FRS is a British field naturalist and zoologist, and Emeritus Professor of Behavioural Ecology at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a Emeritus Fellow of Pembroke College.
Go to Profile#33840
Rebecca L. Cann
#33852
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Rebecca L. Cann is a geneticist who made a scientific breakthrough on mitochondrial DNA variation and evolution in humans, popularly called Mitochondrial Eve. Her discovery that all living humans are genetically descended from a single African mother who lived <200,000 years ago became the foundation of the Out of Africa theory, the most widely accepted explanation of the origin of all modern humans. She is currently Professor in the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Go to Profile#33841
Jürgen Handke
#33853
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Jürgen Handke is a German professor of English linguistics. Life Handke originally studied English, sports, and philosophy to become a teacher at Universität Hannover from 1975 to 1980 and did his postgraduate in linguistics at the University of Reading from 1981 to 1983.
Go to Profile#33842
Michael Alpers
#33854
Overall Influence
Michael Philip Alpers , , is an Australian medical researcher, and John Curtin distinguished Professor of International Health, at Curtin University. Education Alpers graduated from University of Adelaide with a B.Sc. and M.B.B.S. and from University of Cambridge with an M.A.
Go to Profile#33843
Jane Gibson
#33855
Overall Influence
1924 - 2008 (84 years)
Audrey Jane Gibson was a British-American microbiologist and biochemist who worked in the field of photosynthetic bacteria. She discovered that selenium is required by the metabolism of coliform bacteria and described a new species of sulphur bacterium in the genus Chloroherpeton. She became a Professor at Cornell University in 1979 and was editor of the scientific journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
Go to Profile#33844
Deb Roy
#33856
Overall Influence
Deb Roy is a Canadian scientist, tenured professor at MIT, and the director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication. Roy received a bachelor of applied science in computer engineering from the University of Waterloo, and a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. He previously was the executive director of the MIT Media Lab and directed the Cognitive Machines group at the Media Lab, and the Laboratory for Social Machines.
Go to Profile#33845
Alan Lopez
#33857
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Alan Donald Lopez is an Australian global and public health scholar and epidemiologist who focuses on the measurement of population health and the global descriptive epidemiologist of tobacco. He was a Melbourne Laureate Professor and the Rowden-White Chair of Global Health and Burden of Disease Measurement at The University of Melbourne. He is also the Director of the Global Burden of Disease Group in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health and a member of the Disease Control Priorities Project.
Go to Profile#33846
Richard A. Jones
#33858
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Richard Anthony Jones is an American attorney and jurist serving as a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington. He previously served as a deputy prosecuting attorney for King County, Washington, attorney for the Port of Seattle, and assistant United States attorney in the region, in addition to private practice.
Go to Profile#33847
Mary Ann Esposito
#33859
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Mary Ann Esposito is an American chef, cookbook writer, and the television host of Ciao Italia with Mary Ann Esposito, which started in 1989 and is the longest-running television cooking program in America.
Go to Profile#33848
James T. Patterson
#33860
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
James T. Patterson is an American historian, who was the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Brown University for 30 years. He was educated at Harvard University. His research interests include political history, legal history, and social history, as well as the history of medicine, race relations, and education. In 1981–1982, he was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University.
Go to Profile#33849
Larry Rosenberg
#33861
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Larry Rosenberg is an American Buddhist teacher who founded the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1985. He is also a resident teacher there. Rosenberg was a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and Harvard Medical School. In addition to teaching at the Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge, he is also a senior teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#33850
Chip Ganassi
#33862
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Floyd Ganassi Jr. better known as Chip Ganassi, is an American businessman, former racing driver, current team owner and member of the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America. He has been involved with the North American auto racing scene for over 30 years. He is owner and CEO of Chip Ganassi Racing which operates teams in the IndyCar Series, WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, FIA World Endurance Championship, and Extreme E. He is the only team owner in history to have won the Indianapolis 500, the Daytona 500, the Brickyard 400, the Rolex 24 at Daytona, the 12 Hours of Sebring and most recently...
Go to Profile