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
John Reif
#14281
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
John H. Reif is an American academic, and Professor of Computer Science at Duke University, who has made contributions to large number of fields in computer science: ranging from algorithms and computational complexity theory to robotics. He has also published in many other scientific fields including chemistry , optics , and mathematics
Go to Profile#352
Norman Horowitz
#14379
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
Norman Harold Horowitz was a geneticist at Caltech who achieved national fame as the scientist who devised experiments to determine whether life might exist on Mars. His experiments were carried out by the Viking Lander of 1976, the first U.S. mission to successfully land an unmanned probe on the surface of Mars.
Go to Profile#353
Arthur Pardee
#14524
Overall Influence
1921 - 2019 (98 years)
Arthur Beck Pardee was an American biochemist. One biographical portrait begins "Among the titans of science, Arthur Pardee is especially intriguing." There is hardly a field of molecular biology that is not affected by his work, which has advanced our understanding through theoretical predictions followed by insightful experiments. He is perhaps most famous for his part in the 'PaJaMo experiment' of the late 1950s, which greatly helped in the discovery of messenger RNA. He is also well known as the discoverer of the restriction point, in which a cell commits itself to certain cell cycle events during the G1 cycle.
Go to Profile#354
David Eisenberg
#14586
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
David S. Eisenberg is an American biochemist and biophysicist best known for his contributions to structural biology and computational molecular biology, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles since the early 1970s and director of the UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics & Proteomics since the early 1990s, as well as a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.
Go to Profile#355
Chandrashekhar Khare
#14614
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Chandrashekhar B. Khare is a professor of mathematics at the University of California Los Angeles. In 2005, he made a major advance in the field of Galois representations and number theory by proving the level 1 Serre conjecture, and later a proof of the full conjecture with Jean-Pierre Wintenberger. He has been on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2015, serving as Jury Chair from 2020.
Go to Profile#356
Tomasz Mrowka
#14631
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Tomasz Mrowka is an American mathematician specializing in differential geometry and gauge theory. He is the Singer Professor of Mathematics and former head of the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#357
Keith Glover
#14659
Overall Influence
Keith Glover FRS, FREng, FIEEE is a British electrical engineer. He is an emeritus professor of control engineering at the University of Cambridge. He is notable for his contributions to robust controller design and model order reduction.
Go to Profile#358
Katherine Faber
#14704
Overall Influence
Katherine T. Faber is an American materials scientist and one of the world's foremost experts in continuum mechanics, ceramic engineering, and material strengthening. Faber is the Simon Ramo Professor of Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology . Currently, Faber is the faculty representative for the Materials Science option at Caltech. She is also an adjunct professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University.
Go to Profile#359
Eugene Merle Shoemaker
#14756
Overall Influence
1928 - 1997 (69 years)
Eugene Merle Shoemaker was an American geologist. He co-discovered Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 with his wife Carolyn S. Shoemaker and David H. Levy. This comet hit Jupiter in July 1994: the impact was televised around the world. Shoemaker also studied terrestrial craters, such as Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona, and along with Edward Chao provided the first conclusive evidence of its origin as an impact crater. He was also the first director of the United States Geological Survey's Astrogeology Research Program.
Go to Profile#360
Martin Cline
#14782
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Martin J. Cline is an American geneticist who is the Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles . He did postdoctoral training in hematology-oncology at the University of Utah and was at the University of California, San Francisco before going to UCLA. His research has been in cell biology, molecular biology, and genetics.
Go to Profile#361
James J. Stoker
#14818
Overall Influence
1905 - 1992 (87 years)
James Johnston Stoker was an American applied mathematician and engineer. He was director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and is considered one of the founders of the institute, Courant and Friedrichs being the others. Stoker is known for his work in differential geometry and theory of water waves. He is also the author of the now classic book Water Waves: The Mathematical Theory with Applications.
Go to Profile#362
Peter Goldreich
#14897
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Peter Goldreich is an American astrophysicist whose research focuses on celestial mechanics, planetary rings, helioseismology and neutron stars. He is the Lee DuBridge Professor of Astrophysics and Planetary Physics at California Institute of Technology. Since 2005 he has also been a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Asteroid 3805 Goldreich is named after him.
Go to Profile#363
James F. Bonner
#14917
Overall Influence
1910 - 1996 (86 years)
James Frederick Bonner was an American molecular biologist, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, notable for discoveries in plant biochemistry. Bonner invented a better way to collect natural rubber from trees. As result of his invention Malaysia nearly doubled its production of natural rubber. Bonner was instrumental in the invention of a method of mechanical harvesting of oranges. One of his most notable discoveries was finding how histones control gene activity. Bonner was professor and professor emeritus of biology at the California Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#364
Don L. Anderson
#15005
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Don Lynn Anderson was an American geophysicist who made significant contributions to the understanding of the origin, evolution, structure, and composition of Earth and other planets. An expert in numerous scientific disciplines, Anderson's work combined seismology, solid state physics, geochemistry and petrology to explain how the Earth works. Anderson was best known for his contributions to the understanding of the Earth's deep interior, and more recently, for the plate theory hypothesis that hotspots are the product of plate tectonics rather than narrow plumes emanating from the deep Earth.
Go to Profile#365
Robert Gilman
#15009
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Robert C. Gilman, born 1945, is a thinker on sustainability who, along with his late wife Diane Gilman, has researched and written about ecovillages. The Gilmans’ work was important in giving definition to the ecovillage movement and shaping the direction of the Global Ecovillage Network. In 1991, the Gilmans co-authored Eco-Villages and Sustainable Communities, a seminal study of ecovillages for Gaia Trust.
Go to Profile#366
Roger Blandford
#15058
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Roger David Blandford, FRS, FRAS is a British theoretical astrophysicist, best known for his work on black holes. Early life Blandford was born in Grantham, England and grew up in Birmingham. Career Blandford is famous in the astrophysical community for the Blandford–Znajek process, which is a mechanism for powering relativistic jets by the extraction of rotational energy from a black hole. The Blandford–Znajek mechanism has been invoked by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration to explain the jet power in the first observation of a black hole shadow in the giant elliptical galaxy M87. Bla...
Go to Profile#367
Michael Sheetz
#15112
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Michael Patrick Sheetz is a cell biologist, a pioneer of mechanobiology and biomechanics, and a key contributor to the discovery of kinesin. He serves as the Robert A. Welch Distinguished University Chair in Chemistry at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, the department of biochemistry and molecular biology. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Cell Biology at Columbia University, former distinguished professor and the founding director of the Mechanobiology Institute at the National University of Singapore, and former professor at Washington University in St. ...
Go to Profile#368
Harrison Schmitt
#15247
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Harrison Hagan Schmitt is an American geologist, retired NASA astronaut, university professor, former U.S. senator from New Mexico, and the most recent living person—and only person without a background in military aviation—to have walked on the Moon.
Go to Profile#369
David R. Morrison
#15320
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
David Robert Morrison is an American mathematician and theoretical physicist. He works on string theory and algebraic geometry, especially its relations to theoretical physics. Morrison studied at Princeton University with bachelor's degree in 1976 and at Harvard University with master's degree in 1977 and PhD under Phillip Griffiths in 1980 with thesis Semistable Degenerations of Enriques' and Hyperelliptic Surfaces. From 1980 he was an instructor and from 1982 an assistant professor at Princeton University and in the academic year 1984–1985 a visiting scientist at the University of Kyoto . ...
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Donald G. Saari
#15349
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Donald Gene Saari is an American mathematician, a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Economics and former director of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include the -body problem, the Borda count voting system, and application of mathematics to the social sciences.
Go to Profile#371
William Yeager
#15386
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
William "Bill" Yeager is an American engineer. He is best known for being the inventor of a packet-switched, "Ships in the Night", multiple-protocol router in 1981, during his 20-year tenure at Stanford's Knowledge Systems Laboratory as well as the Stanford University Computer Science department.
Go to Profile#372
Peter Ward
#15489
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Peter Douglas Ward is an American paleontologist and professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and Sprigg Institute of Geobiology at the University of Adelaide. He has written numerous popular science works for a general audience and is also an adviser to the Microbes Mind Forum. In 2000, along with his co-author Donald E. Brownlee, he co-originated the term Rare Earth and developed the Medea hypothesis alleging that multicellular life is ultimately self-destructive.
Go to Profile#373
James C. Fletcher
#15504
Overall Influence
1919 - 1991 (72 years)
James Chipman Fletcher served as the 4th and 7th Administrator of NASA, first from April 27, 1971 to May 1, 1977, under President Richard M. Nixon, and again from May 12, 1986 to April 8, 1989, under President Ronald Reagan. As such, he was responsible for Apollo Moon missions 15, 16, and 17, the early planning of the Space Shuttle program, and later for the shuttle program's recovery and return to flight after the Space Shuttle Challenger accident. Prior to this, he was president of the University of Utah from 1964 to 1971.
Go to Profile#374
Vandi Verma
#15523
Overall Influence
Vandana "Vandi" Verma is a space roboticist and chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, known for driving the Mars rovers, notably Curiosity and Perseverance, using software including PLEXIL programming technology that she co-wrote and developed.
Go to Profile#375
Theodore J. Williams
#15562
Overall Influence
1923 - 2013 (90 years)
Theodore Joseph Williams was an American engineer and Professor of Engineering at Purdue University, known for the development of the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture. Biography Williams received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, and another M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Ohio State University.
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Clair Cameron Patterson
#15574
Overall Influence
1922 - 1995 (73 years)
Clair Cameron Patterson was an American geochemist. Born in Mitchellville, Iowa, Patterson graduated from Grinnell College. He later received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and spent his entire professional career at the California Institute of Technology .
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Arthur Riggs
#15576
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
Arthur Dale Riggs was an American geneticist who worked with Genentech to express the first artificial gene in bacteria. His work was critical to the modern biotechnology industry because it was the first use of molecular techniques in commercial production of drugs and enabled the large-scale manufacturing of protein drugs, including insulin. He was also a major factor in the origin of epigenetics.
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Rafael Sorkin
#15626
Overall Influence
Rafael Dolnick Sorkin is an American physicist. He is professor emeritus of physics at Syracuse University and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is best known as initiator and main proponent of the causal sets approach to quantum gravity.
Go to Profile#379
Chris Adami
#15755
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Christoph Carl Herbert "Chris" Adami is a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, as well as professor of physics and astronomy, at Michigan State University. Education Adami was born in Brussels, Belgium, and graduated from the European School of Brussels I. He obtained a Diplom in physics from the University of Bonn and an MA and a Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics from Stony Brook University in 1991. Adami was a Division Prize Fellow in the lab of Steven E. Koonin at the California Institute of Technology from 1992-1995, and was subsequently on the Caltech faculty as a senior ...
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Herman Carr
#15833
Overall Influence
1924 - 2008 (84 years)
Herman Y. Carr , who published as H. Y. Carr, was an American physicist and pioneer of magnetic resonance imaging. Carr was born in Alliance, Ohio, where he was an Alliance High School graduate in January 1943; he later was inducted into their Hall of Fame. He served in the army as a sergeant in the 12th Weather Squadron Air Corps during World War II in Italy.
Go to Profile#381
John C. Sheehan
#15852
Overall Influence
1915 - 1992 (77 years)
John Clark Sheehan was an American organic chemist whose work on synthetic penicillin led to tailor-made forms of the drug. After nine years of hard work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , he became the first to discover a practical method for synthesizing penicillin V. While achieving total synthesis, Sheehan also produced an intermediate compound, 6-aminopenicillanic acid, which turned out to be the foundation of hundreds of kinds of synthetic penicillin. Dr. Sheehan's research on synthetic penicillin paved the way for the development of customized forms of the lifesaving antibiotic that target specific bacteria.
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Michael S. Turner
#15859
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Michael S. Turner is an American theoretical cosmologist who coined the term dark energy in 1998. He is the Rauner Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Chicago, having previously served as the Bruce V. & Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor, and as the assistant director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences for the US National Science Foundation.
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Jane S. Richardson
#15912
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Jane Shelby Richardson is an American biophysicist best known for developing the Richardson diagram, or ribbon diagram, a method of representing the 3D structure of proteins. Ribbon diagrams have become a standard representation of protein structures that has facilitated further investigation of protein structure and function globally. With interests in astronomy, math, physics, botany, and philosophy, Richardson took an unconventional route to establishing a science career. Today Richardson is a professor in biochemistry at Duke University.
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Matthew O. Jackson
#15947
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Matthew Owen Jackson is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute, and a fellow of CIFAR. Jackson's research concerns game theory, microeconomic theory, and the study of social and economic networks. Jackson was one of the founders of the study of networks in economics. His work has analyzed the formation of networks and the sources and effects of homophily in social relationships. He has also made important contributions to the study of how networks mediate access to jobs and information as well as the contagion ...
Go to Profile#385
Andrew E. Lange
#16047
Overall Influence
1957 - 2010 (53 years)
Andrew E. Lange was an astrophysicist and Goldberger Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. Lange came to Caltech in 1993 and was most recently the chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy. Caltech's president Jean-Lou Chameau called him "a truly great physicist and astronomer who had made seminal discoveries in observational cosmology".
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Eberhardt Rechtin
#16137
Overall Influence
1926 - 2006 (80 years)
Eberhardt Rechtin was an American systems engineer and respected authority in aerospace systems and systems architecture. Biography Eberhardt Rechtin was born in East Orange, New Jersey on January 16, 1926. He served in the U.S. Navy on active duty from 1943 to 1946 and continued as a reserve officer until 1958. He completed his undergraduate work at the California Institute of Technology during his Navy service. He received his doctorate in electrical engineering, also from Caltech, in 1950. He was a founding father of systems architecture as a distinct discipline.
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Jay Bailey
#16169
Overall Influence
1944 - 2001 (57 years)
James Edward Bailey , generally known as Jay Bailey, was an American pioneer of biochemical engineering, particularly metabolic engineering. He was said to be "the most influential biochemical engineer of modern times". In a special issue of a journal dedicated to his work, the editor said "Jay was one of biochemical engineering's most creative thinkers and spirited advocates, a true innovator who played an enormous role in establishing biochemical engineering as the dynamic discipline it is today". His numerous contributions in biotechnology and metabolic engineering have led to multiple aw...
Go to Profile#388
Keiiti Aki
#16189
Overall Influence
1930 - 2005 (75 years)
Keiiti Aki was a Japanese-American professor of Geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and then at the University of Southern California , seismologist, author and mentor. He and Paul G. Richards coauthored "Quantitative Seismology: theory and methods".
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Walter M. Elsasser
#16196
Overall Influence
1904 - 1991 (87 years)
Walter Maurice Elsasser was a German-born American physicist, a developer of the presently accepted dynamo theory as an explanation of the Earth's magnetism. He proposed that this magnetic field resulted from electric currents induced in the fluid outer core of the Earth. He revealed the history of the Earth's magnetic field by the study of the magnetic orientation of minerals in rocks. He was also the first to suggest that the wave-like nature of matter might be investigated by electron scattering experiments using crystalline solids.
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Anatole Katok
#16242
Overall Influence
1944 - 2018 (74 years)
Anatoly Borisovich Katok was an American mathematician with Russian-Jewish origins. Katok was the director of the Center for Dynamics and Geometry at the Pennsylvania State University. His field of research was the theory of dynamical systems.
Go to Profile#391
Igor Rivin
#16299
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Igor Rivin is a Russian-Canadian mathematician, working in various fields of pure and applied mathematics, computer science, and materials science. He was the Regius Professor of Mathematics at the University of St. Andrews from 2015 to 2017, and was the chief research officer at Cryptos Fund until 2019. He is doing research for Edgestream LP, in addition to his academic work.
Go to Profile#392
Yadin Dudai
#16336
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Yadin Dudai is a neuroscientist, Professor of Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and the Albert and Blanche Willner Family Global Distinguished Professor of Neural Science at New York University .
Go to Profile#393
L. Gary Leal
#16387
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Leslie Gary Leal is the Warren & Katharine Schlinger Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is known for his research work in the dynamics of complex fluids.
Go to Profile#394
Bruce C. Murray
#16394
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Bruce Churchill Murray was an American planetary scientist. He was a director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and co-founder of The Planetary Society. Education and early life Murray received his Ph.D. in geology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and joined Standard Oil of California as a geologist. He served in the United States Air Force as a geophysicist, and the U.S. Civil Service before joining California Institute of Technology in 1960.
Go to Profile#395
Konstantin Batygin
#16504
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (39 years)
Konstantin Batygin is an American astronomer and Professor of Planetary Sciences at Caltech. Early life Konstantin Batygin was born in Moscow, Soviet Union. His father, Yuri Konstantinovich Batygin, worked as an accelerator physicist in the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute until 1994, when he moved along with his wife Galina and their family to Wakō, Japan, and began working at the particle accelerator facility in RIKEN. There, Konstantin graduated from a public Japanese elementary school, later attending a Russian embassy-based school and studying the martial art Gōjū-ryū.
Go to Profile#396
Anton Kapustin
#16584
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Anton Nikolayevich Kapustin is a Russian-American theoretical physicist and the Earle C. Anthony Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. His interests lie in quantum field theory and string theory, and their applications to particle physics and condensed matter theory. He is the son of the pianist-composer Nikolai Kapustin.
Go to Profile#397
Robert Boyd
#16602
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Sir Robert Lewis Fullarton Boyd was a pioneer of British space science and founding director of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory . Robert Boyd was born in Saltcoats, Ayrshire as one of two twin boys. He was a pupil at Whitgift School and studied at Imperial College and University College London .
Go to Profile#398
Michael Aschbacher
#16686
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Michael George Aschbacher is an American mathematician best known for his work on finite groups. He was a leading figure in the completion of the classification of finite simple groups in the 1970s and 1980s. It later turned out that the classification was incomplete, because the case of quasithin groups had not been finished. This gap was fixed by Aschbacher and Stephen D. Smith in 2004, in a pair of books comprising about 1300 pages. Aschbacher is currently the Shaler Arthur Hanisch Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#399
John Dabiri
#16907
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (45 years)
#400
Chad Trujillo
#16946
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Chadwick A. Trujillo is an American astronomer, discoverer of minor planets and the co-discoverer of Eris, the most massive dwarf planet known in the Solar System. Trujillo works with computer software and has examined the orbits of the numerous trans-Neptunian objects , which is the outer area of the Solar System that he specialized in. In late August 2005, it was announced that Trujillo, along with Michael Brown and David Rabinowitz, had discovered Eris in 2003. As a result of the discovery of the satellite Dysnomia, Eris was the first TNO known to be more massive than Pluto.
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