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
#34851
Steven R. David
#34863
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Steven R. David is Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in international politics and security issues. Education and positions David earned his B.A. in political science from Union College in 1972. In 1975, he completed his M.A. in East Asian studies from Stanford University, and in 1977 received an M.A. from Harvard University in political science. In 1980, David earned his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. He was a post-doctoral fellow in Harvard's National Security Program for the following year.
Go to Profile#34852
Eva Harris
#34864
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Eva Harris is a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder and president of the Sustainable Sciences Institute. She focuses her research efforts on combating diseases that primarily afflict people in developing nations.
Go to Profile#34853
Colt McCoy
#34865
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Daniel "Colt" McCoy is an American football quarterback who is a free agent. He played college football at Texas, where he won several awards and honors as a senior in 2009 and is second all time in games won by an FBS quarterback. McCoy was drafted by the Cleveland Browns in the third round of the 2010 NFL Draft and has also been a member of the San Francisco 49ers, Washington Redskins, New York Giants, and Arizona Cardinals, mostly as a backup.
Go to Profile#34854
Pat Day
#34866
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Patrick Alan "Pat" Day is a retired American jockey. He is a four-time winner of the Eclipse Award for Outstanding Jockey and was inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in 1991 and the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 1999. Day won nine Triple Crown races and 12 Breeders' Cup races. He was once the leader for career Breeders' Cup wins though he was later surpassed as the events were expanded after he retired.
Go to Profile#34855
Nils Lofgren
#34867
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Nils Hilmer Lofgren is an American rock musician, recording artist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. Along with his work as a solo artist, he has been a member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band since 1984, a member of Crazy Horse, and founder/frontman of the band Grin. Lofgren was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the E Street Band in 2014.
Go to Profile#34856
George Fix
#34868
Overall Influence
1939 - 2002 (63 years)
George J. Fix was an American mathematician who collaborated on several seminal papers and books in the field of finite element method. In addition to his work in mathematics, Fix was a beer and homebrewing enthusiast and educator, as well as the author of several books about brewing. He died of cancer in 2002.
Go to Profile#34857
Chuck Daly
#34869
Overall Influence
1930 - 2009 (79 years)
Charles Jerome Daly was an American basketball head coach. He led the Detroit Pistons to two consecutive National Basketball Association championships in 1989 and 1990—during the team's "Bad Boys" era—and the 1992 United States men's Olympic basketball team to the gold medal at the 1992 Summer Olympics.
Go to Profile#34858
Michèle Tertilt
#34870
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Michèle Tertilt is a German professor of economics at the University of Mannheim. Before, Tertilt was an assistant professor at Stanford University. She also spent a year at the University of Pennsylvania and one year as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is currently a director of the Review of Economic Studies and associate editor of the Journal of Development Economics. In 2017 she received the Yrjö Jahnsson Award – a biennial award by the European Economic Association and the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation to a European economist no older than 45 years, who has made a contribution in theoretical and applied research that is significant to economics in Europe.
Go to Profile#34859
Keri Hilson
#34871
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Keri Lynn Hilson is an American R&B singer, songwriter and actress. She was born and raised in Decatur, Georgia and spent most of her youth working with producer Anthony Dent as a songwriter and background vocalist for several R&B and hip hop artists. By the age of 14, Hilson had secured a record deal with the girl group D'Signe, which later disbanded. She attended Oxford College of Emory University in Georgia while she continued writing songs for artists including Britney Spears, The Pussycat Dolls, and Mary J. Blige, with the production and songwriting team The Clutch. In 2006, Hilson signed with American producer and rapper Timbaland's record label Mosley Music.
Go to Profile#34860
Stephen Elledge
#34872
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Stephen Joseph Elledge is an American geneticist. He is the current Gregor Mendel Professor of Genetics and of Medicine at the Department of Genetics of Harvard Medical School and in the Division of Genetics of the Brigham and Women's Hospital. His research is focused on the genetic and molecular mechanisms of eukaryotic response to DNA damage and is known as the discoverer of the DNA damage response .
Go to Profile#34861
Eric Nelson
#34873
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Eric Matthew Nelson is an American historian and Professor of Government at Harvard University. Biography Eric Nelson was born in 1977 and grew up in New York City. According to Harvard Magazine, he went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art every week as a child.
Go to Profile#34862
Gennady Krasnikov
#34874
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Gennady Yakovlevich Krasnikov is a Russian scientist in the field of semiconductor physics who has been serving as the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 2020. Biography Krasnikov graduated with honors from the Faculty of Physics and Technology of the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology in 1981. From 1981, he successively held various positions, as engineer at the Research Institute of Molecular Electronics and the Mikron plant up to the General Director of JSC NIIME and Mikron . In September 2017, he participated in the election for the president the Russian Academy of ...
Go to Profile#34863
Étienne Mougeotte
#34875
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Étienne Mougeotte was a French journalist and media director. During his fifty-year career, he served as Vice-President of TF1 Group and was satellite director of TF1 from 1987 to 2007 alongside Patrick Le Lay. He directed the editorial staff at Le Figaro from 2008 to 2012 and was Director-General of Radio Classique from 2012 to 2018. From 2015 to 2020, he was President of , including the magazine Valeurs actuelles.
Go to Profile#34864
Lynn Pasquerella
#34876
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Lynn C. Pasquerella is an American academic and the 14th president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Before she assumed this position, she was the 17th president of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, serving from 2010 to 2016. She was a professor of philosophy at the University of Rhode Island for 19 years before becoming URI's Associate Dean of the Graduate School. From 2006 to 2008 she was vice provost for research and dean of the graduate school at the University of Rhode Island. She was the Provost of the University of Hartford from 2008-10. She a...
Go to Profile#34865
Matthias Storme
#34877
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Matthias Edward Storme is a Belgian lawyer, academic and conservative philosopher. Family life Storme was born and raised in a Catholic family in the Belgian city of Ghent. His father Marcel Storme used to be a university law professor, lecturing on the topic of Civil Procedure, and a member of the Belgian Senate for the Flemish Christian Democrats. His grandfather August De Schryver held several ministerships in many Belgian governments, including the Belgian Exile Government in London during World War II. He held his seat in the Belgian Chamber of Representatives until the late 1965. His...
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Abdelmalek Sayad
#34878
Overall Influence
1933 - 1998 (65 years)
Abdelmalek Sayad , was a sociologist, first as an assistant to Pierre Bourdieu, then as a research director at the French CNRS and at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. An expert of the North-African community in France, he was central to the introduction of the study of migration issues in French social sciences.
Go to Profile#34867
Flying Lotus
#34879
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Steven D. Bingley-Ellison , known by his stage name Flying Lotus or sometimes FlyLo, is an American record producer, DJ, filmmaker and rapper from Los Angeles. He is also the founder of the record label Brainfeeder.
Go to Profile#34868
Jeffrey A. Lockwood
#34880
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Jeffrey Alan Lockwood is an author, entomologist, and University of Wyoming professor of Natural Sciences and Humanities. He writes both nonfiction science books, as well as meditations. Lockwood is the recipient of both the Pushcart Prize and the John Burroughs Medal. He also serves on the Advisory Council of METI .
Go to Profile#34869
Mikael Åkerfeldt
#34881
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Lars Mikael Åkerfeldt is a Swedish musician. He is the lead vocalist, guitarist, and primary songwriter of progressive metal band Opeth, and the former vocalist of death metal supergroup Bloodbath. He was also guitarist for the "one-off" band Steel, and is part of the collaboration Storm Corrosion with Steven Wilson.
Go to Profile#34870
Pierre Corvol
#34882
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Pierre Corvol is a French doctor and biology researcher. He was director of the Collège de France from 2006 to August 2012. Early life and education Corvol studied at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, France. He served as resident at academic hospitals of Paris , and spent post-doctoral research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, in 1969.
Go to Profile#34871
Allan Fels
#34883
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Allan Herbert Miller Fels is an Australian economist, lawyer and public servant. He was most widely known in his role as chairman of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission from its inception in 1995 until 30 June 2003. Upon his retirement from the ACCC, he became foundation dean of the Australia and New Zealand School of Government until January 2013.
Go to Profile#34872
David Lester
#34884
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
David Lester is a British-American psychologist, suicidologist, and emeritus professor of psychology at Stockton University. Education Lester received his BA from Cambridge University in 1964, and his M.A. from Brandeis University in psychology in 1966. He went on to receive another M.A. from Cambridge University in 1968, and received his first PhD the same year at Brandeis. In 1991, he received his second PhD, this one in social & political science at Cambridge.
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Paul-Henri Mathieu
#34885
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Paul-Henri Mathieu is a French former professional tennis player. He won four singles titles on the ATP Tour. His best singles performance in an ATP World Tour Masters 1000 tournament was reaching the semifinals of the 2005 Canadian Open. He achieved a career-high ATP singles ranking of world No. 12 in April 2008.
Go to Profile#34874
A. Doak Barnett
#34886
Overall Influence
1921 - 1999 (78 years)
Arthur Doak Barnett , known as A. Doak Barnett, was an American journalist, political scientist, and public figure who wrote about the domestic politics and the foreign relations of China and United States-China relations. He published more than 20 academic and public interest books and edited still others. Barnett's parents were missionaries in China, and Barnett used his Chinese language ability while travelling widely in China as a journalist before 1949. He grounded his journalism and his scholarship in exact detail and clear language. Starting in the 1950s, when there were no formal dipl...
Go to Profile#34875
Kenny Lofton
#34887
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Kenneth Lofton is an American former Major League Baseball center fielder. Lofton was a six-time All-Star , four-time Gold Glove Award winner , and at retirement, was ranked 15th among all-time stolen base leaders with 622. During his career, he played for the Houston Astros, Cleveland Indians, Atlanta Braves, Chicago White Sox, San Francisco Giants, Pittsburgh Pirates, Chicago Cubs, New York Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Texas Rangers.
Go to Profile#34876
Beryl Benacerraf
#34888
Overall Influence
Beryl Rice Benacerraf was an American radiologist and professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology and radiology at Harvard Medical School. She was a pioneer in the use of prenatal ultrasound to diagnose fetal abnormalities, including Down syndrome. In 2021, she was recognized as a "Giant in Obstetrics and Gynecology" by the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.
Go to Profile#34877
Dennis Snower
#34889
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Dennis J. Snower is an American-German economist, specialising in macroeconomic theory and policy, labor economics, digital governance, social economics, and the psychology of economic decisions in "caring economics". He is President of the Global Solutions Initiative in Berlin, Professorial Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford University, Fellow at the New Institute in Hamburg, and Non-resident Fellow of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He is former president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. His prominent labor research explores the ro...
Go to Profile#34878
Richard F. Lyon
#34890
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Richard "Dick" Francis Lyon is an American inventor, scientist, and engineer. He is one of the two people who independently invented the first optical mouse devices in 1980. He has worked in signal processing and was a co-founder of Foveon, Inc., a digital camera and image sensor company.
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David Harsent
#34891
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
David Harsent is an English poet who for some time earned his living as a TV scriptwriter and crime novelist. Background During his early career he was part of a circle of poets centred on Ian Hamilton and forming something of a school, promoting conciseness and imagist-like clarity in verse, though his work has changed and developed a good deal since then.
Go to Profile#34880
Richard G. Stern
#34892
Overall Influence
1928 - 2013 (85 years)
Richard Gustave Stern was an American novelist, short story writer, and educator. Stern was born in New York City on February 25, 1928. He attended the University of North Carolina from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude in 1947. After a year working in Indiana, Florida and New York City, he went to Harvard University where he received an MA in English Literature.
Go to Profile#34881
Mike Richter
#34893
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Michael Thomas Richter is an American former professional ice hockey goaltender. He played his entire National Hockey League career, from 1989 to 2002, with the New York Rangers organization, and led the team to the Stanley Cup in 1994. He also represented the United States in international play on several occasions. Richter was named to the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame, alongside his former Rangers and U.S. teammate Brian Leetch, in 2008.
Go to Profile#34882
Doug E. Fresh
#34894
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Douglas Davis, known professionally as Doug E. Fresh, is a Barbados-born American rapper, record producer, and beatboxer, also known as the "Human Beat Box". The pioneer of 20th-century American beatboxing, Fresh is able to accurately imitate drum machines and various special effects using only his mouth, lips, gums, throat, tongue and a microphone.
Go to Profile#34883
Rebecca Richards-Kortum
#34895
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Rebecca Richards-Kortum is an American bioengineer and the Malcolm Gillis University Professor at Rice University. She is a professor in the departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering, and she is the Director of Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health, and the Founder of Beyond Traditional Borders. She is the Director of the Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering, and serves as the advisor to the Provost on health-related research.
Go to Profile#34884
Karine Nahon
#34896
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Karine Nahon is an Israeli information scientist in the area of information, technology, and society. She holds a dual position as an associate professor in The Information School at University of Washington and at Reichman University. In July 2017, Nahon was named #24 on Forbes' list of 50 Most Influential Women in Israel. Her co-authored book "Going Viral" was awarded Best Information Science Book Award by the Association for Information Science and Technology and the 2014 Outstanding Academic Title Award by the American Library Association.
Go to Profile#34885
Brian Heap
#34897
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Sir Robert Brian Heap is a British biological scientist. He was educated at New Mills Grammar School in the Peak District, Derbyshire, and the University of Nottingham . He has an MA and a ScD from the University of Cambridge and Honorary DScs from Nottingham , York and St Andrews .
Go to Profile#34886
Chris Carey
#34898
Overall Influence
Chris Carey, FBA is a British classical scholar, currently Professor Emeritus of Greek at University College London . He held the Professorship of Greek at UCL, from 2003 until his retirement in 2016. In April 2000 The Independent named him one of the "stars of modern classical scholarship".
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Charles Lewis
#34899
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Charles Lewis is an investigative journalist based in Washington D.C. He founded The Center for Public Integrity and several other nonprofit organizations and is currently the executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University School of Communication in D.C.
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Michael Gunter
#34900
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Michael M. Gunter is a professor of political science at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, Tennessee and considered an authority on the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Brendan O’Leary referred to Gunter as, "The doyen of Kurdish political studies in the United States,” while Martin van Bruinessen wrote that Gunter is "probably the most prolific of today’s scholars of Kurdish politics.” Gunter has written or edited more than 15 books on the Kurdish struggle and 2 more criticized for promoting Armenian genocide denial. Two of those books on the Kurds were among the first analyses in English in modern times of the Kurdish unrest in the Middle East.
Go to Profile#34889
Theunis Piersma
#34901
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Theunis Piersma is a Dutch ornithologist, ecologist, and educator. He is among the most influential ornithologists, particularly in the wader bird area, in the world. He specifically looks at waders and correlations between flock size and distribution, climate, food, predators, pathogens, and their historical-genetic background. RTV Drenthe referred to him in 2012 as the "first migratory bird professor in the world."
Go to Profile#34890
William Edgar
#34902
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
William "Bill" Edgar is an American apologist and was professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary. He has been called by Charles Colson "one of evangelicalism's most valued scholars and apologists".
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Marshall R. Urist
#34903
Overall Influence
1914 - 2001 (87 years)
Marshall R. Urist was a United States orthopedic surgeon working at University of California, Los Angeles who made discoveries in treating broken bones. He was best known for his discovery in 1965 of bone morphogenic protein.
Go to Profile#34892
Otis Williams
#34904
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Otis Williams is an American tenor/baritone singer. He is occasionally also a songwriter and a record producer. Williams is the founder and last surviving original member of the Motown vocal group The Temptations, a group in which he continues to perform; he also owns the rights to the Temptations name.
Go to Profile#34893
Leo Corry
#34905
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Leo Corry is an Israeli historian of mathematics. Biography Corry migrated with his Jewish family to Venezuela when he was two years old. He attended primary and secondary school at Colegio Moral y Luces of Caracas and then at the Universidad Simón Bolívar studied mathematics with licentiate's degree in 1977. He attended graduate school at the University of Tel Aviv. There he received in 1983 his master's degree in mathematics with master's thesis Splitting data in cohomology classes, supervised by Shmuel Rosset, and in 1990 his Ph.D. in the history of science with Ph.D. thesis The origins of category theory as a mathematical discipline, supervised by Sabetai Unguru and Shmuel Rosset.
Go to Profile#34894
Mario Ančić
#34906
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Mario Ančić is a Croatian former professional tennis player who currently works as a private equity vice president in New York City. He won three singles titles and five doubles titles. His career-high singles ranking came during the 2006 ATP Tour, when he reached world no. 7. Ančić helped Croatia to win the 2005 Davis Cup and at the Athens Olympic Games in 2004, he and Ivan Ljubičić won a bronze medal in doubles for Croatia.
Go to Profile#34895
Frederic Jevons
#34907
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Frederic Raphael Jevons was a British Professor of biochemistry and later an Australian educator. He was informally known as Fred Jevons and since 1977 lived and worked mostly in Australia. Early life Born in Austria in 1929, Jevons survived the Holocaust by being sponsored by a family in England to attend a boarding school in Norfolk. The young Bettelheim was educated at Norwich High School for Boys, joining the household of his school's headmaster, Mr J. H. W. Jevons, from whom he took his new surname. During the Second World War, the school moved from Norwich to Loddon and changed its name to Langley School.
Go to Profile#34896
Guillermo Martínez
#34908
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Guillermo Martínez is an Argentine novelist and short story writer. Martínez was born in Bahía Blanca, Argentina. He gained a PhD in mathematical logic at the University of Buenos Aires. After his degree in Argentina, he worked for two years in a postdoctoral position at the Mathematical Institute, Oxford. His most successful novel has been Crímenes Imperceptibles , known in English as The Oxford Murders, written in 2003. In the same year, he was awarded the Planeta Prize for this novel, which has been translated into a number of languages. The book has appeared as a film in 2008, directed by...
Go to Profile#34897
Shane MacGowan
#34909
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan was an Irish musician best known as the lead vocalist and songwriter of Celtic punk band the Pogues. MacGowan's songs were influenced by Irish history, Irish nationalism, the Irish diaspora, and London life.
Go to Profile#34898
Amin Abbosh
#34910
Overall Influence
Amin M. Abbosh is an Iraqi electrical engineer. Abbosh earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Mosul, then remained at the institution to complete graduate study in the subject, obtaining his master's degree in 1991 and his doctorate in 1996. He is a professor at the University of Queensland. In 2022, Abbosh was elected a fellow of the IEEE, "for contributions to electromagnetic medical imaging."
Go to Profile#34899
Louis Saha
#34911
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Louis Laurent Saha is a French former professional footballer who played as a striker. Saha was capped 20 times for the France national team and scored four goals. A former scholar at the Clairefontaine football academy, he started his career at Metz before playing on loan at Newcastle United. Before the start of the 2000–01 season, Saha moved to Fulham where he established himself as first-choice striker, helping them to gain promotion to the Premier League in his first season with them.
Go to Profile#34900
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ
#34912
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ is a Kenyan American poet, author, and academic. He is associate professor of literatures in English at Cornell University and co-founder of the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Writing. His father is the author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. His family was deeply impacted by the bloody British suppression of the Mau Mau revolution.
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