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).
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List of the most influential people
#351
Abdul Qadeer Khan
#351
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Abdul Qadeer Khan, , known as A. Q. Khan, was a Pakistani nuclear physicist and metallurgical engineer who is colloquially known as the "father of Pakistan's atomic weapons program". An émigré from India who migrated to Pakistan in 1952, Khan was educated in the metallurgical engineering departments of Western European technical universities where he pioneered studies in phase transitions of metallic alloys, uranium metallurgy, and isotope separation based on gas centrifuges. After learning of India's "Smiling Buddha" nuclear test in 1974, Khan joined his nation's clandestine efforts to deve...
Go to Profile#352
Immanuel Wallerstein
#352
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein was an American sociologist and economic historian. He is perhaps best known for his development of the general approach in sociology which led to the emergence of his world-systems approach. He was a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University from 2000 until his death in 2019, and published bimonthly syndicated commentaries through Agence Global on world affairs from October 1998 to July 2019.
Go to Profile#353
Stuart J. Russell
#353
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
#354
Thomas Schelling
#354
Overall Influence
1921 - 2016 (95 years)
Thomas Crombie Schelling was an American economist and professor of foreign policy, national security, nuclear strategy, and arms control at the School of Public Policy at University of Maryland, College Park. He was also co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He was awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for "having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis."
Go to Profile#355
Stephen Toulmin
#355
Overall Influence
1922 - 2009 (87 years)
Stephen Edelston Toulmin was a British philosopher, author, and educator. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Toulmin devoted his works to the analysis of moral reasoning. Throughout his writings, he sought to develop practical arguments which can be used effectively in evaluating the ethics behind moral issues. His works were later found useful in the field of rhetoric for analyzing rhetorical arguments. The Toulmin model of argumentation, a diagram containing six interrelated components used for analyzing arguments, and published in his 1958 book The Uses of Argument, was considered his most...
Go to Profile#356
Peter Norvig
#356
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Peter Norvig is an American computer scientist and Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He previously served as a director of research and search quality at Google. Norvig is the co-author with Stuart J. Russell of the most popular textbook in the field of AI: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach used in more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries.
Go to Profile#357
Charles Taylor
#357
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
#358
Samuel Alito
#358
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. is an American jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated to the high court by President George W. Bush on October 31, 2005, and has served on it since January 31, 2006. After Antonin Scalia, Alito is the second Italian American justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court; he is also the eleventh Catholic Supreme Court justice in U.S. history.
Go to Profile#359
Garrett Hardin
#359
Overall Influence
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
Garrett James Hardin was an American ecologist. He focused his career on the issue of human overpopulation, and is best known for his exposition of the tragedy of the commons in a 1968 paper of the same title in Science, which called attention to "the damage that innocent actions by individuals can inflict on the environment". He is also known for Hardin's First Law of Human Ecology: "We can never do merely one thing. Any intrusion into nature has numerous effects, many of which are unpredictable." Garrett held hardline anti-immigrant positions as well as positions on eugenics and multiethnicism that have led multiple sources to label him a white nationalist.
Go to Profile#360
Robert Rauschenberg
#360
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Milton Ernest "Robert" Rauschenberg was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines , a group of artworks which incorporated everyday objects as art materials and which blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking and performance.
Go to Profile#361
Walter Gilbert
#361
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Walter Gilbert is an American biochemist, physicist, molecular biology pioneer, and Nobel laureate. Education and early life Walter Gilbert was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 21, 1932, into a Jewish family, the son of Emma , a child psychologist, and Richard V. Gilbert, an economist.
Go to Profile#362
Dana Scott
#362
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Dana Stewart Scott is an American logician who is the emeritus Hillman University Professor of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Mathematical Logic at Carnegie Mellon University; he is now retired and lives in Berkeley, California. His work on automata theory earned him the Turing Award in 1976, while his collaborative work with Christopher Strachey in the 1970s laid the foundations of modern approaches to the semantics of programming languages. He has also worked on modal logic, topology, and category theory.
Go to Profile#363
Jean Dieudonné
#363
Overall Influence
1906 - 1992 (86 years)
Jean Alexandre Eugène Dieudonné was a French mathematician, notable for research in abstract algebra, algebraic geometry, and functional analysis, for close involvement with the Nicolas Bourbaki pseudonymous group and the Éléments de géométrie algébrique project of Alexander Grothendieck, and as a historian of mathematics, particularly in the fields of functional analysis and algebraic topology. His work on the classical groups , and on formal groups, introducing what now are called Dieudonné modules, had a major effect on those fields.
Go to Profile#364
George Tenet
#364
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
George John Tenet is an American intelligence official and academic who served as the Director of Central Intelligence for the United States Central Intelligence Agency, as well as a Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.
Go to Profile#365
Naomi Klein
#365
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Naomi Klein is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses, support of ecofeminism, organized labour, leftism and criticism of corporate globalization, fascism, ecofascism and capitalism. As of 2021 she is Associate Professor, and Professor of Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia, co-directing a Centre for Climate Justice.
Go to Profile#366
Andrew Huxley
#366
Overall Influence
1917 - 2012 (95 years)
Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley was an English physiologist and biophysicist. He was born into the prominent Huxley family. After leaving Westminster School in central London, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge on a scholarship, after which he joined Alan Lloyd Hodgkin to study nerve impulses. Their eventual discovery of the basis for propagation of nerve impulses earned them the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1963. They made their discovery from the giant axon of the Atlantic squid. Soon after the outbreak of the Second World War, Huxley was recruited by the British Anti-Aircraft Command and later transferred to the Admiralty.
Go to Profile#367
Neal Stephenson
#367
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Neal Town Stephenson is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction. His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, and baroque.
Go to Profile#368
Robert Venturi
#368
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
Robert Charles Venturi Jr. was an American architect, founding principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, and one of the major architectural figures of the twentieth century. Together with his wife and partner, Denise Scott Brown, he helped shape the way that architects, planners and students experience and think about architecture and the built environment. Their buildings, planning, theoretical writings, and teaching have also contributed to the expansion of discourse about architecture.
Go to Profile#369
Nelson Mandela
#369
Overall Influence
1918 - 2013 (95 years)
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a South African anti-apartheid activist and politician who served as the first president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. He was the country's first black head of state and the first elected in a fully representative democratic election. His government focused on dismantling the legacy of apartheid by fostering racial reconciliation. Ideologically an African nationalist and socialist, he served as the president of the African National Congress party from 1991 to 1997.
Go to Profile#370
Howard Gardner
#370
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
#371
Joshua Lederberg
#371
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Joshua Lederberg, ForMemRS was an American molecular biologist known for his work in microbial genetics, artificial intelligence, and the United States space program. He was 33 years old when he won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering that bacteria can mate and exchange genes . He shared the prize with Edward Tatum and George Beadle, who won for their work with genetics.
Go to Profile#372
Damien Hirst
#372
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist and art collector. He is one of the Young British Artists who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is reportedly the United Kingdom's richest living artist, with his wealth estimated at US$384 million in the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.
Go to Profile#373
Aaron Klug
#373
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Sir Aaron Klug was a British biophysicist and chemist. He was a winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.
Go to Profile#374
Jonas Salk
#374
Overall Influence
1914 - 1995 (81 years)
Jonas Edward Salk was an American virologist and medical researcher who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. He was born in New York City and attended the City College of New York and New York University School of Medicine.
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Jean-Luc Nancy
#375
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Jean-Luc Nancy was a French philosopher. Nancy's first book, published in 1973, was Le titre de la lettre , a reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Nancy is the author of works on many thinkers, including La remarque spéculative in 1973 on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Le Discours de la syncope and L'Impératif catégorique on Immanuel Kant, Ego sum on René Descartes, and Le Partage des voix on Martin Heidegger.
Go to Profile#376
Jasper Johns
#376
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Jasper Johns is an American painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker. Considered a central figure in the development of American postwar art, he has been variously associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and pop art movements. Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in South Carolina. He graduated as valedictorian from Edmunds High School in 1947 and briefly studied art at the University of South Carolina before moving to New York City and enrolling at Parsons School of Design. His education was interrupted by military service during the Korean War. After returning to New...
Go to Profile#377
John Roberts
#377
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
John Glover Roberts Jr. is an American lawyer and jurist who has served as the 17th chief justice of the United States since 2005. He has been described as having a moderate conservative judicial philosophy, though he is primarily an institutionalist. He has shown a willingness to work with the Supreme Court's liberal bloc, and has been regarded as a swing vote on the Court.
Go to Profile#378
Eugenio Calabi
#378
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (101 years)
Eugenio Calabi was an Italian-born American mathematician and the Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in differential geometry, partial differential equations and their applications.
Go to Profile#379
Leonid Hurwicz
#379
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Leonid Hurwicz was a Polish–American economist and mathematician, known for his work in game theory and mechanism design. He originated the concept of incentive compatibility, and showed how desired outcomes can be achieved by using incentive compatible mechanism design. Hurwicz shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work on mechanism design. Hurwicz was one of the oldest Nobel Laureates, having received the prize at the age of 90.
Go to Profile#380
Christopher Alexander
#380
Overall Influence
1936 - 2022 (86 years)
Christopher Wolfgang John Alexander was an Austrian-born British-American architect and design theorist. He was an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His theories about the nature of human-centered design have affected fields beyond architecture, including urban design, software, and sociology. Alexander designed and personally built over 100 buildings, both as an architect and a general contractor.
Go to Profile#381
Ahmad Shah Massoud
#381
Overall Influence
1953 - 2001 (48 years)
Ahmad Shah Massoud was an Afghan politician and military commander. He was a powerful guerrilla commander during the resistance against the Soviet occupation between 1979 and 1989. In the 1990s, he led the government's military wing against rival militias; after the Taliban takeover, he was the leading opposition commander against their regime until his assassination in 2001.
Go to Profile#382
Richard Hamming
#382
Overall Influence
1915 - 1998 (83 years)
Richard Wesley Hamming was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code , the Hamming window, Hamming numbers, sphere-packing , Hamming graph concepts, and the Hamming distance.
Go to Profile#383
Jane Jacobs
#383
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
Jane Jacobs was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities argued that "urban renewal" and "slum clearance" did not respect the needs of city-dwellers.
Go to Profile#384
David Irving
#384
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
David John Cawdell Irving is an English author who has written on the military and political history of World War II, and especially Nazi Germany, who was declared to be a Holocaust denier in a UK court in 2000 as a result of a failed libel case.
Go to Profile#385
Niall Ferguson
#385
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
#386
Max Perutz
#386
Overall Influence
1914 - 2002 (88 years)
Max Ferdinand Perutz was an Austrian-born British molecular biologist, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with John Kendrew, for their studies of the structures of haemoglobin and myoglobin. He went on to win the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1971 and the Copley Medal in 1979. At Cambridge he founded and chaired The MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology , fourteen of whose scientists have won Nobel Prizes.
Go to Profile#387
Joseph Weizenbaum
#387
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Joseph Weizenbaum was a German American computer scientist and a professor at MIT. The Weizenbaum Award is named after him. Life and career Born in Berlin, Germany to Jewish parents, he escaped Nazi Germany in January 1936, immigrating with his family to the United States. He started studying mathematics in 1941 at Wayne State University, in Detroit, Michigan. In 1942, he interrupted his studies to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps as a meteorologist, having been turned down for cryptology work because of his "enemy alien" status. After the war, in 1946, he returned to Wayne State, obtaining his B.S.
Go to Profile#388
John Gotti
#388
Overall Influence
1940 - 2002 (62 years)
John Joseph Gotti Jr. was an American gangster and boss of the Gambino crime family in New York City. He ordered and helped to orchestrate the murder of Gambino boss Paul Castellano in December 1985 and took over the family shortly thereafter, becoming boss of what was described as America's most powerful crime syndicate.
Go to Profile#389
Albert Hofmann
#389
Overall Influence
1906 - 2008 (102 years)
Albert Hofmann was a Swiss chemist known for being the first to synthesize, ingest, and learn of the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide . Hofmann's team also isolated, named and synthesized the principal psychedelic mushroom compounds psilocybin and psilocin. He authored more than 100 scientific articles and numerous books, including LSD: Mein Sorgenkind . In 2007, he shared first place with Tim Berners-Lee on a list of the 100 greatest living geniuses published by The Daily Telegraph newspaper.
Go to Profile#390
Mamata Banerjee
#390
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Mamata Banerjee is an Indian politician who is serving as the eighth and current chief minister of the Indian state of West Bengal since 20 May 2011, the first woman to hold the office. Having served multiple times as a Union Cabinet Minister, Mamata Banerjee became the Chief Minister of West Bengal for the first time in 2011. She founded the All India Trinamool Congress in 1998 after separating from the Indian National Congress, and became its second chairperson later in 2001. She is often referred to as 'Didi' .
Go to Profile#391
Bernard Williams
#391
Overall Influence
1929 - 2003 (74 years)
Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams, FBA was an English moral philosopher. His publications include Problems of the Self , Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy , Shame and Necessity , and Truth and Truthfulness . He was knighted in 1999.
Go to Profile#392
Stewart Brand
#392
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Stewart Brand is an American project developer and writer, best known as the co-founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He has founded a number of organizations, including the WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.
Go to Profile#393
Salvador Luria
#393
Overall Influence
1912 - 1991 (79 years)
Salvador Edward Luria was an Italian microbiologist, later a naturalized U.S. citizen. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969, with Max Delbrück and Alfred Hershey, for their discoveries on the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses. Salvador Luria also showed that bacterial resistance to viruses is genetically inherited.
Go to Profile#394
Lee Smolin
#394
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#395
Abdullah II of Jordan
#395
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein is King of Jordan, having ascended the throne on 7 February 1999. He is a member of the Hashemite dynasty, who have been the reigning royal family of Jordan since 1921, and is considered a 41st-generation direct descendant of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
Go to Profile#396
Israel Gelfand
#396
Overall Influence
1913 - 2009 (96 years)
Israel Moiseevich Gelfand, also written Israïl Moyseyovich Gel'fand, or Izrail M. Gelfand was a prominent Soviet-American mathematician. He made significant contributions to many branches of mathematics, including group theory, representation theory and functional analysis. The recipient of many awards, including the Order of Lenin and the first Wolf Prize, he was a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society and professor at Moscow State University and, after immigrating to the United States shortly before his 76th birthday, at Rutgers University. Gelfand is also a 1994 MacArthur Fellow.
Go to Profile#397
Pierre Deligne
#397
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Pierre René, Viscount Deligne is a Belgian mathematician. He is best known for work on the Weil conjectures, leading to a complete proof in 1973. He is the winner of the 2013 Abel Prize, 2008 Wolf Prize, 1988 Crafoord Prize, and 1978 Fields Medal.
Go to Profile#398
Dominique Strauss-Kahn
#398
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn , also known as DSK, is a French economist and politician who served as the tenth managing director of the International Monetary Fund , and was a member of the French Socialist Party.
Go to Profile#399
Deepak Chopra
#399
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Deepak Chopra is an Indian-American author and alternative medicine advocate. A prominent figure in the New Age movement, his books and videos have made him one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in alternative medicine. His discussions of quantum healing have been characterised as technobabble – "incoherent babbling strewn with scientific terms" which drives those who actually understand physics "crazy" and as "redefining Wrong".
Go to Profile#400
Vandana Shiva
#400
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Vandana Shiva is an Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, ecofeminist and anti-globalization author. Based in Delhi, Shiva has written more than 20 books. She is often referred to as "Gandhi of grain" for her activism associated with the anti-GMO movement.
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