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
#34801
Bei Ling
#34813
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Bei Ling is a Chinese poet, and journal editor. He is usually associated with the Chinese misty poets. Life He came to the United States as an exchange student, he was a fellow at Brown University. After the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, in 1992, he founded the literary journal .
Go to Profile#34802
Vadapalli Chandrasekhar
#34814
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Vadapalli Chandrasekhar is an Indian inorganic and organometallic chemist and is currently a distinguished professor and the centre director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Hyderabad. He is known for his studies on the chemistry of inorganic clusters and rings and is an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy National Academy of Sciences, India, The World Academy of Sciences and the Indian Academy of Sciences The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar...
Go to Profile#34803
Bart De Strooper
#34815
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Bart De Strooper is a Belgian molecular biologist and professor at Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie and KU Leuven and the UK Dementia Research Institute and University College London, UK. De Strooper's research seeks to translate genetic data into the identification and tratment of neurodegenerative diseases and treatments. interest are the secretases, proteases which cleave the amyloid precursor protein , resulting in amyloid peptides.
Go to Profile#34804
Lawrence C. Washington
#34816
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Lawrence Clinton Washington is an American mathematician at the University of Maryland who specializes in number theory. Biography Washington studied at Johns Hopkins University, where in 1971 he received his B.A. and master's degree. In 1974 he earned his PhD at Princeton University under Kenkichi Iwasawa with thesis extensions. He then became an assistant professor at Stanford University and from 1977 at the University of Maryland, where he became in 1981 an associate professor and in 1986 a professor. He held visiting positions at several institutions, including IHES , Max-Planck-Institut...
Go to Profile#34805
Askia M. Touré
#34817
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Askia Muhammad Touré is an African-American poet, essayist, political editor, and leading voice of the Black Arts Movement. Toure helped to define a new generation of black consciousness by creating a triumphal identity for the purpose of uplifting the African heritage beyond the oppressive ideas that dominated the time.
Go to Profile#34806
Michael Norton
#34818
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Michael Irwin Norton is the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is also known for identifying and naming the IKEA effect. Education Norton received his B.A. from Williams College in 1997 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2002.
Go to Profile#34807
Yang Liming
#34819
Overall Influence
1919 - 2003 (84 years)
Yang Liming , also known as Li-Ming Yang, was a Chinese theoretical physicist and professor at Peking University. A doctoral student of the Nobel laureate Max Born, he made contributions to the research of nuclear shell structure, many-body theory, and the interacting boson model. He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1991, together with his wife, computer scientist Xia Peisu.
Go to Profile#34808
Umberto Bossi
#34820
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Umberto Bossi is an Italian politician and former leader of , a party seeking autonomy or independence for Northern Italy or Padania. He is married to the Sicilian Manuela Marrone, and has four sons, of whom one was from his first wife.
Go to Profile#34809
Walker Connor
#34821
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Walker F. Connor was Distinguished Visiting Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College . Connor is best known for his work on nationalism, and is considered one of the founders of the interdisciplinary field of nationalism studies.
Go to Profile#34810
Keith Van Horn
#34822
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Keith Adam Van Horn is an American former professional basketball player. Van Horn played for the New Jersey Nets, Philadelphia 76ers, New York Knicks, Milwaukee Bucks, and the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association .
Go to Profile#34811
Michael L. Kurtz
#34823
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Michael L. Kurtz is an American professor emeritus of history at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond. Kurtz is known for his research into the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Kurtz has written two books on the assassination of Kennedy. Crime of the Century was published in 1982 by University of Tennessee Press and The JFK Assassination Debate: Lone Gunman versus Conspiracy was published in 1996 by University Press of Kansas. Ten years after its release, Crime of the Century was described as the only book on the assassination written by an academic historian. Shortly before the rele...
Go to Profile#34812
John K. Walton
#34824
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
John Kimmons Walton is a professor at the University of the Basque Country, Leioa, Spain. Walton is an expert on the history of the development of tourism, and particularly the English seaside. Walton was previously Professor of Modern Social History at Lancaster University, Professor of Social History at the University of Central Lancashire, and Professor of Social History in the Institute of Northern Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University. He was a Member of the Chetham Society, serving as a Member of Council from 1989 and as General Editor from 1991 to 2004.
Go to Profile#34813
Steve Chapman
#34825
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Steven Kenneth Chapman is Vice-Chancellor of Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia. Previously he was Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. Early life Steve Chapman was born on 12 May 1959 in South Shields, County Durham. Chapman studied at Newcastle University, where he received a First Class BSc degree in Chemistry and completed a PhD in Chemistry . Steve Chapman carried out his postdoctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a NATO Research Fellowship from 1983 to 1985.
Go to Profile#34814
Joel McHale
#34826
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Joel Edward McHale is an Italian born-American actor, comedian, and television presenter. He is best known for hosting The Soup and his role as Jeff Winger on the NBC sitcom Community . He has performed in the films Spider-Man 2 , Spy Kids: All the Time in the World , Ted , and The Happytime Murders .
Go to Profile#34815
Sebastian Bach
#34827
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Sebastian Philip Bierk , known professionally as Sebastian Bach, is a Canadian-American singer who achieved mainstream success as the frontman of the hard rock band Skid Row from 1987 to 1996. He has acted on Broadway and has made appearances in film and television such as Trailer Park Boys and Gilmore Girls. He continues his music career as a solo artist.
Go to Profile#34816
Charles Meneveau
#34828
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Charles Meneveau is a French-Chilean born American fluid dynamicist, known for his work on turbulence, including turbulence modeling and computational fluid dynamics. Charles Meneveau, the Louis M. Sardella Professor in Mechanical Engineering and an associate director of the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science at the Johns Hopkins University, focuses his research on understanding and modeling hydrodynamic turbulence, and on complexity in fluid mechanics in general. He combines computational, theoretical and experimental tools for his research, with an emphasis on the multi...
Go to Profile#34817
William Ward Armstrong
#34829
Overall Influence
William Ward Armstrong is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 1966 and is most known as the originator Armstrong's axioms of dependency in a Relational database.
Go to Profile#34818
Erick Weinberg
#34830
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Erick J. Weinberg is a theoretical physicist and professor of physics at Columbia University. Weinberg received his undergraduate degree from Manhattan College in 1968. He obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1973 under the supervision of Sidney Coleman, with whom he discovered the Coleman–Weinberg mechanism for spontaneous symmetry breaking in quantum field theory. Weinberg works on various branches in high-energy theory, including black holes, vortices, Chern–Simons theory, magnetic monopoles in gauge theories and cosmic inflation. He also serves as the Editor of Physical Review D,...
Go to Profile#34819
Tammy Duckworth
#34831
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Ladda Tammy Duckworth is an American politician and retired Army National Guard lieutenant colonel serving as the junior United States senator from Illinois since 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, she represented Illinois's 8th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 2013 to 2017.
Go to Profile#34820
Kon Ichikawa
#34832
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Kon Ichikawa was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His work displays a vast range in genre and style, from the anti-war films The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain , to the documentary Tokyo Olympiad , which won two BAFTA Film Awards, and the 19th-century revenge drama An Actor's Revenge . His film Odd Obsession won the Jury Prize at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.
Go to Profile#34821
Travis Tritt
#34833
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
James Travis Tritt is an American country singer. He signed to Warner Bros. Records in 1989, releasing seven studio albums and a greatest hits package for the label between then and 1999. In the 2000s, he released three studio albums on Columbia Records and one for the now-defunct Category 5 Records. Seven of his albums are certified platinum or higher by the Recording Industry Association of America ; the highest-certified is 1991's It's All About to Change, which is certified triple-platinum. Tritt has also charted more than 40 times on the Hot Country Songs charts, including five number ...
Go to Profile#34822
M. Eric Johnson
#34834
Overall Influence
M. Eric Johnson is Dean of the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University. Formerly, he was Associate Dean and the Benjamin Ames Kimball Professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. He was also Director of the Glassmeyer/McNamee Center for Digital Strategies. Prior to Tuck, he was a professor at management at Vanderbilt University and a development engineer at Hewlett-Packard.
Go to Profile#34823
Doris Betts
#34835
Overall Influence
1932 - 2012 (80 years)
Doris Betts was a short story writer, novelist, essayist and Alumni Distinguished Professor Emerita at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was the author of three short story collections and six novels.
Go to Profile#34824
Eknath Prabhakar Ghate
#34836
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Eknath Prabhakar Ghate is a mathematician specialising in number theory and working at the School of Mathematics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for science and technology, the highest science award in India, for the year 2013 in the mathematical sciences category.
Go to Profile#34825
Daniel Edward Koshland
#34837
Overall Influence
#34826
Makoto Ōoka
#34838
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
Makoto Ōoka was a Japanese poet and literary critic. He pioneered the collaborative poetic form renshi in the 1990s, in which he has collaborated with such well-known literary figures as Charles Tomlinson, James Lasdun, Joseph Stanton, Shuntarō Tanikawa and Mikirō Sasaki.
Go to Profile#34827
César Camacho
#34839
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
César Leopoldo Camacho Manco , better known as simply César Camacho, is a Peruvian-born Brazilian mathematician and former director of the IMPA. His area of research is dynamical systems theory. Camacho earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971 under the supervision of Stephen Smale.
Go to Profile#34828
Doc Watson
#34840
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Arthel Lane "Doc" Watson was an American guitarist, songwriter, and singer of bluegrass, folk, country, blues, and gospel music. He won seven Grammy awards as well as a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. His fingerpicking and flatpicking skills, as well as his knowledge of traditional American music, were highly regarded. Blind from a young age, he performed publicly both in a dance band and solo, as well as for over 15 years with his son, guitarist Merle Watson, until Merle's death in 1985 in an accident on the family farm.
Go to Profile#34829
Gisaburō Sugii
#34841
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
is a Japanese anime director and Nihonga artist. He is best known for his work as director of the Touch series, the movie adaptation of the Arashi no Yoru ni children's book series, and the movie Night on the Galactic Railroad. He is a member of the Directors Guild of Japan and the Japanese Animation Creators Association.
Go to Profile#34830
Lotte Hollands
#34842
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Lotte Hollands is a Dutch mathematician and mathematical physicist who studies quantum field theory, supersymmetric gauge theory, and string theory. She is an associate professor and Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow in the Department of Mathematics at Heriot-Watt University.
Go to Profile#34831
Diane Lane
#34843
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Diane Colleen Lane is an American actress. Born and raised in New York City, Lane made her film debut at age 14 in A Little Romance . The film that could have catapulted her to star status, Streets of Fire , was both a commercial and critical failure, and her career languished as a result. After taking a break, Lane returned to acting to appear in The Big Town and Lady Beware , but did not make another big impression on a sizable audience until the western miniseries Lonesome Dove , for which she was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.
Go to Profile#34832
Bhama Srinivasan
#34844
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Bhama Srinivasan is a mathematician known for her work in the representation theory of finite groups. Her contributions were honored with the 1990 Noether Lecture. She served as president of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 1981 to 1983.
Go to Profile#34833
Lin Nu
#34845
Overall Influence
Lin Nu was a Chinese merchant and scholar in the early Ming dynasty. He is the ancestor of the late Ming philosopher Li Zhi. His family was Han Chinese in origin and the branch that remained true to Han culture cut off the Lin Nu's branch for marrying a foreigner and converting to another religion.
Go to Profile#34834
Welington de Melo
#34846
Overall Influence
1946 - 2016 (70 years)
Welington Celso de Melo was a Brazilian mathematician. Known for his contributions to dynamical systems theory, he served as full professor at Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada from 1980 to 2016. Melo wrote numerous papers, one being a complete description of the topological behavior of 1-dimensional real dynamical systems . He proved the global hyperbolicity of renormalization for r unimodal maps . He was a recipient of the 2003 TWAS Prize.
Go to Profile#34835
Mariska Hargitay
#34847
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Mariska Magdolna Hargitay is an American actress, director, producer and philanthropist. The daughter of bodybuilder and actor Mickey Hargitay and actress Jayne Mansfield, her accolades include a Golden Globe Award, two People's Choice Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award.
Go to Profile#34836
Štefan Znám
#34848
Overall Influence
1936 - 1993 (57 years)
Štefan Znám was a Slovak- Hungarian mathematician, believed to be the first to ponder Znám's problem in modern times. Znám worked in the field of number theory and graph theory. He also co-founded journal Matematické obzory.
Go to Profile#34837
J. Kevin McMahon
#34849
Overall Influence
J. Kevin McMahon is president and CEO of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, a $50 million private, nonprofit agency in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The trust, established in 1984, promotes the cultural and economic growth of downtown Pittsburgh through the development of a fourteen-block arts and entertainment center in downtown Pittsburgh—the Cultural District.
Go to Profile#34838
B. B. Chakrabarti
#34850
Overall Influence
Binay Bhushan Chakrabarti, commonly known as B. B. Chakrabarti, is an Indian academic and professor of management and finance. He was the Director of Indian Institute of Management Ranchi . Now the director is Prof Shailendra Singh, another professor of IIM Lucknow.
Go to Profile#34839
Jacqueline Hewitt
#34851
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Jacqueline Nina Hewitt is an American astrophysicist. She was the first person to discover an Einstein ring. She is a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society. Early life and education Hewitt was born in Washington, D.C., on September 4, 1958, to parents Warren E. Hewitt, a retired international lawyer from the State Department, and Gertrud Hewitt. She attended Bryn Mawr College where she graduated magna cum laude with a degree in economics in 1980. Hewitt took an astronomy class at Haverford College her sophomore year, which sparked her interest in science. She attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for graduate school.
Go to Profile#34840
Thomas F. Cooley
#34852
Overall Influence
1943 - 2021 (78 years)
Thomas Ferguson Cooley was the Paganelli-Bull Professor of Economics at the New York University Stern School of Business. He served as Dean of the Stern School from 2002 to January 2010. He was also a professor of economics in the NYU Faculty of Arts and Science. Cooley was a widely published scholar in the areas of macroeconomic theory, monetary theory and policy, and the financial behavior of firms.
Go to Profile#34841
David Jerison
#34853
Overall Influence
David Saul Jerison is an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an expert in partial differential equations and Fourier analysis.
Go to Profile#34842
Dick Williams
#34854
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Richard Hirschfeld Williams was an American left fielder, third baseman, manager, coach and front-office consultant in Major League Baseball. Known especially as a hard-driving, sharp-tongued manager from 1967 to 1969 and from 1971 to 1988, he led teams to three American League pennants, one National League pennant, and two World Series triumphs. He is one of nine managers to win pennants in both major leagues, and joined Bill McKechnie in becoming only the second manager to lead three franchises to the Series . He and Lou Piniella are the only managers in history to lead four teams to seasons of 90 or more wins.
Go to Profile#34843
Ernst-Rüdiger Olderog
#34855
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Ernst-Rüdiger Olderog is a German computer scientist. He is a full professor at the University of Oldenburg in Oldenburg, northern Germany. He heads the Correct Systems Design group whose research is focused on programming language theory. Their research goal is methods for the systematic development of correct software for parallel and distributed systems under real-time constraints. In 1994, Prof. Olderog was awarded the Leibnitz Prize of the German Research Foundation for his work. He authored a number of scientific books and served as editor-in-chief of the journal Acta Informatica and as chairman of the IFIP Working Group 2.2 on Formal Description of Programming Concepts.
Go to Profile#34844
Nick Trakakis
#34856
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Nick Trakakis is an Australian philosopher who is Assistant Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Phenomenology of Religion of the Australian Catholic University. He has previously taught at Monash University and Deakin University, and during 2006–2007 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. He works mainly at the intersections of philosophy , religion, and theology.
Go to Profile#34845
Colin J. McInnes
#34857
Overall Influence
Colin John McInnes FLSW is Pro Vice Chancellor at Aberystwyth University and holds a personal professorial chair in the Department of International Politics there, where his research focuses on global health politics. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. In 2014 he was appointed by the Secretary of State for International Development as a Non-Executive Director of the UK National Commission for UNESCO, with special responsibility for the Social and Human Sciences, and represents the UK on UNESCO’s Social and Human Sciences Commission.
Go to Profile#34846
Julia Haller
#34858
Overall Influence
Julia A. Haller is an American ophthalmologist who is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Ophthalmology at Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University. She also holds the William Tasman, M.D. Endowed Chair at Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, where she is Ophthalmologist-in-Chief.
Go to Profile#34847
Thomas Wolff
#34859
Overall Influence
1954 - 2000 (46 years)
Thomas Hartwig Wolff was an American mathematician, working primarily in the fields of harmonic analysis, complex analysis, and partial differential equations. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, he regularly played poker with his classmate Bill Gates. While a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley from 1976 to 1979, under the direction of Donald Sarason, he obtained a new proof of the corona theorem, a famously difficult theorem in complex analysis. He was made Professor of Mathematics at Caltech in 1986, and was there from 1988–1992 and from 1995 to his death in a car accident in 2000.
Go to Profile#34848
John Hartson
#34860
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
John Hartson is a Welsh former professional footballer, coach and sports television pundit for S4C, Sky Sports, Premier Sports TV and BT Sport. As a player he was a striker, notably for Scottish club Celtic where his time with the Hoops saw three Scottish Premier League titles. Hartson also played in the Premier League with Arsenal, West Ham United, Wimbledon, Coventry City and West Bromwich Albion, and in the Football League for Luton Town and Norwich City.
Go to Profile#34849
H. G. Carrillo
#34861
Overall Influence
1960 - 2020 (60 years)
H. G. Carrillo was an American fiction writer and academic. In the 1990s, he began writing as "H. G. Carrillo," and he eventually adopted that identity in his private life as well. Carroll constructed a false claim that he was a Cuban immigrant who had left Cuba with his family at the age of seven; in fact, he was an African-American. Carroll wrote frequently about the Cuban immigrant experience in the United States, including in his only novel, Loosing My Espanish . He was an assistant professor of English at George Washington University from 2007 to 2013, and was later chair of the PEN/Faul...
Go to Profile#34850
Helen Margetts
#34862
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Helen Zerlina Margetts , is Professor of Internet and Society at the Oxford Internet Institute , University of Oxford and from 2011 to 2018 was Director of the OII. She is currently Director of the Public Policy Programme at The Alan Turing Institute. She is a political scientist specialising in digital era governance and politics, and has published over a hundred books, journal articles and research reports in this field.
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