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
#34901
Marvin Makinen
#34913
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Marvin William Makinen has been a member of the faculty at the University of Chicago since 1974 and is a founding member of the Human Rights Board at the university. Education Born in Chassell, Michigan, Makinen earned a B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1961, an M.D. at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1968, and a D. Phil. at the University of Oxford in 1976. He is presently professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Chicago, and has served as chairman of the department from 1988 to 1993. His primary research interests i...
Go to Profile#34902
Michael Baye
#34914
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Michael Roy Baye is the "Bert Elwert" Professor of Business Economics in the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Education and profession Baye received his B.S. from Texas A&M University in 1980 and earned a Ph.D. in economics from Purdue University in 1983. Baye has held appointments at Cambridge, Oxford, Erasmus, Tilburg, and the New Economic School in Moscow. He has won many awards for outstanding teaching, and regularly teaches courses in managerial economics and industrial organization at the undergraduate, M.B.A., and Ph.D. level.
Go to Profile#34903
S. Akbar Zaidi
#34915
Overall Influence
Syed Akbar Hussain is a Pakistani political economist, academic and author. He is currently serving as the Executive Director of the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi. Early life and career Zaidi is from a Muhajir Shia family in Karachi. He received his Bachelors in Economics from the University College London in 1977–80. Then, he completed his master's in social planning of developing countries from the London School of Economics in 1981–82. For further studies, he went to the University of Cambridge from where he completed his doctorate degree.
Go to Profile#34904
Wilfried Martens
#34916
Overall Influence
1936 - 2013 (77 years)
Wilfried Achiel Emma Martens was a Belgian politician who served as prime minister of Belgium from 1979 to 1981 and from 1981 to 1992. A member of the Flemish Christian People's Party, during his premiership he oversaw the transformation of Belgium into a federal state. He was one of the founders of the European People's Party.
Go to Profile#34905
Hans-Joachim Schulze
#34917
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Hans-Joachim Schulze is a German musicologist, a Bach scholar who served as the director of the Bach Archive in Leipzig from 1992 to 2000. With Christoph Wolff, he was editor of the Bach-Jahrbuch from 1975 to 2000. He published an introduction to all cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach in 2006.
Go to Profile#34906
Riitta Nikula
#34918
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Riitta Nikula , is a Finnish art historian, author and professor emeritus in art and architecture history at the University of Helsinki. She obtained her PhD from the University of Helsinki in 1981 with a study of the architecture of the Töölö region of Helsinki. She was Professor of Art History at the University of Helsinki from 1994 to 2007. Nikula also acted as Head of Research at the Museum of Finnish Architecture from 1988 to 1994. Nikula is regarded as a generalist historian of Finnish architecture, with her writings covering a time-span from prehistoric times to the present day. But she...
Go to Profile#34907
Adam Budnikowski
#34919
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Adam Budnikowski is a Polish economist. He teaches at the Warsaw School of Economics and served there as a rector from 2005 to 2012. He specialises in international economies, with a focus on globalization, international trade policy and international finance. Further interests include economic transition in Central and Eastern Europe and environmental policy.
Go to Profile#34908
Roger G. Barry
#34920
Overall Influence
1935 - 2018 (83 years)
Roger Graham Barry was a British-born American geographer and climatologist. He earned a doctorate from the University of Southampton in 1965 and began teaching at the University of Colorado three years later. While leading the National Snow and Ice Data Center from 1976 to 2008, Barry received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982, was granted a fellowship of the American Geophysical Union in 1999, and taught at Moscow State University as a Fulbright Scholar in 2001. Before leaving Russia, Barry was named a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. In 2007, Barry was awarded a Founder's Medal from the Royal Geographical Society.
Go to Profile#34909
Darren Hawkins
#34921
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Darren Hawkins is an American professor and the current chair of the department of Political Science at Brigham Young University. Hawkins has studied international conventions and international law. He has written many articles in this field.
Go to Profile#34910
Dov Dori
#34922
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Dov Dori is an Israeli-American computer scientist, and Professor of Information Systems Engineering at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, known for the development of Object Process Methodology . The ideas underlying OPM were published for the first time in 1995.
Go to Profile#34911
Achilles Fang
#34923
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
Achilles Chih-t'ung Fang was a Chinese scholar, translator, and educator, best known for his contributions to Chinese literature and comparative literature. Fang was born in Japanese-occupied Korea, but attended university in mainland China. After completing his undergraduate degree, Fang worked for Monumenta Serica, a prominent scholarly journal of Chinese topics. He then moved to the United States, where he took up residency in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studying and teaching courses at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#34912
Brian Molko
#34924
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Brian Molko is a Belgian-born Scottish-American musician and songwriter. He is the lead vocalist, guitarist, and lyricist of the band Placebo. He is known in particular for his nasal vocals, feminine/androgynous appearance and aggressive guitar style and tunings.
Go to Profile#34913
Mauro Wolf
#34925
Overall Influence
1947 - 1996 (49 years)
Mauro Wolf was an Italian sociologist, professor and essayist. He has developed important works in the field of sociology of communication and the media. His books are now considered classical texts in theoretical research on mass communication.
Go to Profile#34914
Bankole Johnson
#34926
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Bankole A. Johnson, DSc, MD, MPhil, FRCPsych is a licensed physician and board-certified psychiatrist throughout Europe and the United States who served as Alumni Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia. Johnson's primary area of research expertise is the psychopharmacology of medications for treating addictions, and he is well known in the field for his discovery that topiramate, a gamma-aminobutyric acid facilitator and glutamate antagonist, is an effective treatment for alcoholism. Professor Johnson also received na...
Go to Profile#34915
Jean-Luc Martinez
#34927
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Jean-Luc Martinez is the former president of the Louvre. In May 2022 French police charged him with crimes including fraud and money laundering related to antiquities trafficking. Martinez began working at the Louvre in 1997 as a curator. He was the president of the Louvre from 2013 to 2022, and before that, the director of the museum’s Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art departments.
Go to Profile#34916
Patrice Chéreau
#34928
Overall Influence
1944 - 2013 (69 years)
Patrice Chéreau was a French opera and theatre director, filmmaker, actor and producer. In France he is best known for his work for the theatre, internationally for his films La Reine Margot and Intimacy, and for his staging of the Jahrhundertring, the centenary Ring cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in 1976. Winner of almost twenty movie awards, including the Cannes Jury Prize and the Golden Berlin Bear, Chéreau served as president of the jury at the 2003 Cannes festival.
Go to Profile#34917
Dick Hern
#34929
Overall Influence
1921 - 2002 (81 years)
William Richard Hern was an English Thoroughbred racehorse trainer and winner of sixteen British Classic Races between 1962 and 1995, and was Champion Trainer on four occasions. Following his early career in the Army , he became a riding instructor, including a spell as instructor to the Olympic gold medal-winning team in 1952. His first training licence was as private trainer to Major Lionel Holliday in 1958, at La Grange Stables in Newmarket, before moving to West Ilsley at the end of the 1962 season to take over from R. J. "Jack" Colling.
Go to Profile#34918
Marta Kutas
#34930
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Marta Kutas is a Professor and Chair of cognitive science and an adjunct professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego. She also directs the Center for Research in Language at UCSD. Kutas is known for discovering the N400, an event-related potential component typically elicited by unexpected linguistic stimuli, with her colleague Steven Hillyard in one of the first studies in what is now the field of neurolinguistics.
Go to Profile#34919
Charles S. Lieber
#34931
Overall Influence
#34920
Michael Cretu
#34932
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Michael Cretu is a Romanian-born German musician, composer and record producer. He gained worldwide fame as the founder and musician behind the musical project Enigma, which he formed in 1990. Cretu began a music career in 1976 as a solo artist and released numerous studio albums as well as writing and producing albums for his then-wife, German pop singer Sandra. He also worked with artists through the 1980s, including Peter Cornelius, Hubert Kah, and Mike Oldfield. Cretu was sometimes identified as "Curly" or "Curly M.C.", in reference to his curly hair and creț meaning "curly" in Romanian.
Go to Profile#34921
Carlos Gershenson
#34933
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Carlos Gershenson is a Professor at SUNY, Binghamton University. He used to be a tenured professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México . His academic interests include self-organizing systems, complexity, and artificial life.
Go to Profile#34922
Amber Heard
#34934
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Amber Laura Heard is an American actress. She had her first leading role in the horror film All the Boys Love Mandy Lane , and went on to star in films such as The Ward , Drive Angry , and London Fields . She has also had supporting roles in films including Pineapple Express , Never Back Down , The Joneses , The Rum Diary , Paranoia , Machete Kills , Magic Mike XXL , and The Danish Girl . Heard is part of the DC Extended Universe franchise, playing Mera in Justice League and Aquaman . She has also acted in television series such as The CW's teen drama Hidden Palms and the Paramount+'s fanta...
Go to Profile#34923
Luc Robitaille
#34935
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Luc Jean-Marie Robitaille is a Canadian–American professional ice hockey executive and former player. He currently serves as president of the Los Angeles Kings of the National Hockey League . During his 19-season NHL career, Robitaille won the Stanley Cup in 2001–02 with the Detroit Red Wings, and played for the Pittsburgh Penguins and New York Rangers, but is most known for his 14 seasons with the Los Angeles Kings. He served as the Kings' team captain during the 1992–93 season and for the final two games of the 2005–06 season. Robitaille retired after the 2005–06 season as the highest-sco...
Go to Profile#34924
Yochanan Muffs
#34936
Overall Influence
1932 - 2009 (77 years)
Yochanan Muffs was an American professor of the Bible and religion at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. Biography Muffs grew up in a Conservative Jewish home in Flushing, Queens. His parents were Barney and Mary Muffs. Muffs had one sister, Civia, an artist. He did his undergraduate degree in Humanities at Queens College and studied for the rabbinate at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he began teaching in 1954. He pursued his Ph.D. in Near Eastern studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#34925
Gustavo Cerati
#34937
Overall Influence
1959 - 2014 (55 years)
Gustavo Adrián Cerati Clarke was an Argentine musician, singer-songwriter and record producer, who gained international recognition for being the leader, vocalist, composer and guitarist of the rock band Soda Stereo. He is widely considered by critics, specialized press and musicians as one of the most important and influential artists of Latin rock. Rolling Stone magazine ranked Cerati as the 33rd best rock singer of all time.
Go to Profile#34926
Dorothy Hamill
#34938
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Dorothy Stuart Hamill is a retired American figure skater. She is the 1976 Olympic champion and 1976 World champion in ladies' singles. Early life Hamill was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Chalmers and Carol Hamill. Her father was a mechanical engineer. Shortly after her birth, her family moved to the Riverside neighborhood of Greenwich, Connecticut, where Hamill spent the rest of her childhood. She has two older siblings, a brother, Sandy, and a sister, Marcia.
Go to Profile#34927
Michael Echeruo
#34939
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Michael Joseph Chukwudalu Echeruo is a Nigerian academic, professor and literary critic from Umunumo, Ehime-Mbano LGA, Imo State. He is the William Safire Professor of Modern Letters in the English Department at Syracuse University since 1990.
Go to Profile#34928
Annika Mombauer
#34940
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Annika Mombauer is a historian best known for her work on General Helmuth von Moltke the Younger. She is a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History in the History Department at the Open University in Great Britain, and Associate Dean for the Arts Faculty.
Go to Profile#34929
Peabo Bryson
#34941
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Robert Peapo "Peabo" Bryson is an American singer and songwriter. He is known for singing soul ballads including the hit singles "Tonight, I Celebrate My Love" with Roberta Flack, "A Whole New World with Regina BelleBeauty and the Beast with Celine Dion. Bryson has contributed to two Disney animated feature soundtracks. Bryson is a winner of two Grammy Awards.
Go to Profile#34930
Ayelet Shachar
#34942
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Ayelet Shachar is a legal scholar. She is the Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. She previously held the Canada Research Chair in Citizenship and Multiculturalism at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#34931
Jamie Murray
#34943
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Jamie Robert Murray, is a British professional tennis player from Scotland who specialises in doubles. He is a seven-time Grand Slam doubles champion , a Davis Cup winner, and a former doubles world No. 1. Murray is the elder brother of fellow tennis player and former singles world No. 1, Andy Murray.
Go to Profile#34932
Angelo Kinicki
#34944
Overall Influence
Angelo Kinicki is an Arizona State University, Professor Emeritus of management, the recipient of the Weatherup/Overby Chair in Leadership, an author and consultant. After joining the faculty in 1982, receiving his doctorate in business administration from Kent State University, he became one of the Dean's Council of 100 Distinguished Scholars at the W. P. Carey School of Business.
Go to Profile#34933
Norman Lloyd
#34945
Overall Influence
1914 - 2021 (107 years)
Norman Nathan Lloyd was an American actor, producer, director, and centenarian with a career in entertainment spanning nearly a century. He worked in every major facet of the industry, including theatre, radio, television, and film, with a career that started in 1923. Lloyd's final film, Trainwreck, was released in 2015, after he turned 100. Lloyd remains the longest-lived male actor from Classic Hollywood.
Go to Profile#34934
Tomio Fukuoka
#34946
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
is a Japanese educator and Academian. He is the Founder/Chairman of Kobe Denshi and Graduate School of Information Technology . Early life Tomio Fukuoka was born in Kagawa Prefecture, Japan. Professional career Tomio Fukuoka founded KIC in 1958 as a small Electronic school in the city of Kobe, Japan was called Kobe Electronic School, which received the recognition Institute of Advanced Vocational Education from the Japanese Ministry of Education in 1988 for its vital contribution to Japanese computing society. Now KIC is one of the major institutes for professional, vocational, practical orie...
Go to Profile#34935
Michael Nicholson
#34947
Overall Influence
1937 - 2016 (79 years)
Michael Nicholson was an English journalist, specializing in war reporting, and a newscaster. He was ITN's Senior Foreign Correspondent. Early life Nicholson was born in Romford, Essex, on 9 January 1937, the son of a Royal Engineers officer. He spent part of his childhood in West Germany. He studied at Leicester University.
Go to Profile#34936
Emile Boulpaep
#34948
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Emile Louis Boulpaep is a Belgian physiologist and since 1977 President of the Belgian American Educational Foundation. He is a member of the board of the Francqui Foundation. Education He studied medicine at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven , where he received a medical degree in 1962. In 1987 he obtained an honorary M.A. from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Go to Profile#34937
Jim Bolger
#34949
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
James Brendan Bolger is a New Zealand retired politician of the National Party who was the 35th prime minister of New Zealand, serving from 1990 to 1997. Bolger was born to an Irish immigrant family in Ōpunake, Taranaki. Before entering politics, he farmed in Waikato, and was involved in Federated Farmers - a nationwide agricultural association. Bolger won election to Parliament in 1972, and subsequently served in several portfolios in the Third National Government. Following one unsuccessful bid for the party leadership in 1984, Bolger was elected as National Party leader in 1986. He serve...
Go to Profile#34938
Cho Minhaeng
#34950
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Cho Minhaeng is a South Korean scientist in researching physical chemistry, spectroscopy, and microscopy. He was director of the National Creative Research Initiative Center for Coherent Multidimensional Spectroscopy and is founding director of the Center for Molecular Spectroscopy and Dynamics in the Institute for Basic Science , located in Korea University.
Go to Profile#34939
Curt Flood
#34951
Overall Influence
1938 - 1997 (59 years)
Curtis Charles Flood Sr. was an American professional baseball player and activist. He was a center fielder who played 15 seasons in Major League Baseball for the Cincinnati Redlegs, St. Louis Cardinals, and Washington Senators.
Go to Profile#34940
Mohammed Said Nabulsi
#34952
Overall Influence
1928 - 2013 (85 years)
Mohammed Said Nabulsi was a Jordanian banker, economist and politician. He served as Governor of the Central Bank of Jordan two times, first from 1973–1985, and secondly from 1989–1995. Career Nabulsi was born in November 1928 in November 1928 in Jaffa, Mandatory Palestine. He studied law at Damascus University between 1948 and 1952 and received a Ph.D. in Economics from Georgetown University after studying there between 1954 and 1956 and 1959 and 1960. Between 1958 and 1959 he studied at University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#34941
Ahmed Al-Harrasi
#34953
Overall Influence
Ahmed Sulaiman Al-Harrasi is an Omani scientist and a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Nizwa, Nizwa, Sultanate of Oman. Education Ahmed Al-Harrasi completed his Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin in Synthetic Organic Chemistry in 2005. His name has appeared as the alumni Ph.D. Student of the Reissig Research Group at Freie Universität Berlin.
Go to Profile#34942
Ann McKee
#34954
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Ann McKee is a neurologist and neuropathologist and expert in neurodegenerative disease at the VA Boston Veterans Affairs Medical Center and is a Warren Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Pathology at Boston University School of Medicine. She is director of the Boston University Alzheimer's Disease Research Center and Boston University CTE Center. She is particularly known for her work studying Alzheimer's disease and the consequences of repetitive traumatic brain injury. In 2017, she was named "Bostonian of the Year" by The Boston Globe for her leading work in this area, and in 2018, T...
Go to Profile#34943
Jan Twardowski
#34955
Overall Influence
1915 - 2006 (91 years)
Jan Jakub Twardowski was a Polish poet and Catholic priest. He was a chief Polish representative of contemporary religious lyrics. He wrote short, simple poems, humorous, which often included colloquialisms. He joined observations of nature with philosophical reflections.
Go to Profile#34944
Guram Mchedlidze
#34956
Overall Influence
1931 - 2009 (78 years)
Guram I. Mchedlidze was a Georgian Palaeobiologist, Corresponding Member of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences , Doctor of Biological Sciences , Professor. Education and career In 1954 he graduated from the Faculty of Biology of the Tbilisi State University . Since 1973 he was Professor of this Faculty.
Go to Profile#34945
John Kander
#34957
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
John Harold Kander is an American composer, known largely for his work in the musical theater. As part of the songwriting team Kander and Ebb , Kander wrote the scores for 15 musicals, including Cabaret and Chicago , both of which were later adapted into acclaimed films. He and Ebb also wrote the standard "New York, New York" .
Go to Profile#34946
John Garang
#34958
Overall Influence
1946 - 2005 (59 years)
John Garang de Mabior was a Sudanese politician and revolutionary leader. From 1983 to 2005, he led the Sudan People's Liberation Army during the Second Sudanese Civil War. He briefly served as First Vice President of Sudan for three weeks, from the comprehensive peace agreement of 2005 until his death in a helicopter crash on July 30, 2005. A developmental economist by profession, Garang was a major influence on the movement that led to the foundation of South Sudan.
Go to Profile#34947
Zvi Bern
#34959
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Zvi Bern is an American theoretical particle physicist. He is a professor at University of California, Los Angeles . Bern studied physics and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned his doctorate in 1986 in theoretical physics from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Martin Halpern. Bern's dissertation manuscript can currently be found in Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory's archives, examining "possible nonperturbative continuum regularization schemes for quantum field theory which are based upon the Langevin equation of Parisi and Wu."
Go to Profile#34948
Varadaraja V. Raman
#34960
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Varadaraja Venkata Raman is a professor emeritus of physics and humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He has lectured and written on his Indian heritage and culture and has also authored books and articles on the intersection of science and religion. Raman has been a frequent guest on the PBS television series Closer to Truth.
Go to Profile#34949
Terence Coderre
#34961
Overall Influence
Terence J. Coderre is Professor of Medicine and the Harold Griffith Chair in Anaesthesia Research at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He is an investigator at the Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain at McGill University and the McGill University Health Centre Research Institute in Brain Repair and Integrative Neuroscience Program.
Go to Profile#34950
Imants Barušs
#34962
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Imants Barušs is Professor of Psychology at King's University College at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Background He started out in engineering science on a scholarship at the University of Toronto, but then became preoccupied with existential questions, leading him into unconventional areas of study, with the result that he graduated in 1974 with an interdisciplinary BSc. After some years working as a roofer, he enrolled at the University of Calgary and, in 1983, completed an MSc in mathematics with specialization in mathematical foundations, writing his thesis about forcing in topoi.
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