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
#3501
David Baddiel
#3507
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
David Lionel Baddiel is an English comedian, presenter, screenwriter, and author. He is known for his work alongside Rob Newman in The Mary Whitehouse Experience and his comedy partnership with Frank Skinner. He has also written the children's books The Parent Agency, The Person Controller, AniMalcolm, Birthday Boy, Head Kid, and The Taylor TurboChaser.
Go to Profile#3502
Donald Richie
#3508
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Donald Richie was an American-born author who wrote about the Japanese people, the culture of Japan, and especially Japanese cinema. Although he considered himself primarily a film historian, Richie also directed a number of experimental films, the first when he was seventeen.
Go to Profile#3503
Karl Steinbuch
#3509
Overall Influence
1917 - 2005 (88 years)
Karl W. Steinbuch was a German computer scientist, cyberneticist, and electrical engineer. He was an early and influential researcher of German computer science, and was the developer of the Lernmatrix, an early implementation of artificial neural networks. Steinbuch also wrote about the societal implications of modern media.
Go to Profile#3504
Tibor Machan
#3510
Overall Influence
1939 - 2016 (77 years)
Tibor Richard Machan was a Hungarian-American philosopher. A professor emeritus in the department of philosophy at Auburn University, Machan held the R. C. Hoiles Chair of Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at the Argyros School of Business & Economics at Chapman University in Orange, California until 31 December 2014.
Go to Profile#3505
John Gilmore
#3511
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
John Gilmore is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. He created the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and is a major contributor to the GNU Project.
Go to Profile#3506
Gary L. Francione
#3512
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Gary Lawrence Francione is an American academic in the fields of law and philosophy. He is Board of Governors Professor of Law and Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is also a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Lincoln and honorary professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia . He is the author of numerous books and articles on animal ethics.
Go to Profile#3507
Quentin Bryce
#3513
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Dame Quentin Alice Louise Bryce, is an Australian academic who served as the 25th governor-general of Australia from 2008 to 2014. She is the first and to date only woman to have held the position, and was previously the 24th Governor of Queensland from 2003 to 2008.
Go to Profile#3508
Gerard K. O'Neill
#3514
Overall Influence
1927 - 1992 (65 years)
Gerard Kitchen O'Neill was an American physicist and space activist. As a faculty member of Princeton University, he invented a device called the particle storage ring for high-energy physics experiments. Later, he invented a magnetic launcher called the mass driver. In the 1970s, he developed a plan to build human settlements in outer space, including a space habitat design known as the O'Neill cylinder. He founded the Space Studies Institute, an organization devoted to funding research into space manufacturing and colonization.
Go to Profile#3509
Joseph Kruskal
#3515
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Joseph Bernard Kruskal, Jr. was an American mathematician, statistician, computer scientist and psychometrician. Personal life Kruskal was born to a Jewish family in New York City to a successful fur wholesaler, Joseph B. Kruskal, Sr. His mother, Lillian Rose Vorhaus Kruskal Oppenheimer, became a noted promoter of origami during the early era of television.
Go to Profile#3510
Derren Brown
#3516
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Derren Brown is an English entertainer, mentalist, illusionist, and writer. Brown began performing in 1992, making his television debut with Mind Control . He has since starred in several more shows for stage and television, including Something Wicked This Way Comes and Svengali which won him two Laurence Olivier Awards for Best Entertainment, as well as The Experiments which won him a BAFTA for Best Entertainment Programme at the 2012 awards. Brown made his Broadway debut with his 2019 stage show Secret. He has also written books for both magicians and the general public.
Go to Profile#3511
Stanley Cohen
#3517
Overall Influence
1922 - 2020 (98 years)
Stanley Cohen was an American biochemist who, along with Rita Levi-Montalcini, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1986 for the isolation of nerve growth factor and the discovery of epidermal growth factor. He died in February 2020 at the age of 97.
Go to Profile#3512
Cristina Bicchieri
#3518
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Cristina Bicchieri is an Italian–American philosopher. She is the S.J.P. Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics in the Philosophy and Psychology Departments at the University of Pennsylvania, professor of Legal Studies in the Wharton School, and director of the Master in Behavioral Decision Sciences program and the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program. She has worked on problems in the philosophy of social science, rational choice and game theory. More recently, her work has focused on the nature and evolution of social norms, and the design of behavioral experiments to test under which conditions norms will be followed.
Go to Profile#3513
Mary Lefkowitz
#3519
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Mary R. Lefkowitz is an American scholar of Classics. She is the Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she previously worked from 1959 to 2005. She has published ten books over the course of her career.
Go to Profile#3514
David Kazhdan
#3520
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
David Kazhdan , born Dmitry Aleksandrovich Kazhdan , is a Soviet and Israeli mathematician known for work in representation theory. Kazhdan is a 1990 MacArthur Fellow. Biography Kazhdan was born on 20 June 1946 in Moscow, USSR. His father is Alexander Kazhdan. He earned a doctorate under Alexandre Kirillov in 1969 and was a member of Israel Gelfand's school of mathematics. He is Jewish, and emigrated from the Soviet Union to take a position at Harvard University in 1975. He changed his name from Dmitri Aleksandrovich to David and became an Orthodox Jew around that time.
Go to Profile#3515
Walter Alvarez
#3521
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Walter Alvarez is a professor in the Earth and Planetary Science department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most widely known for the theory that dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid impact, developed in collaboration with his father, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez.
Go to Profile#3516
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
#3522
Overall Influence
1928 - 2000 (72 years)
Friedrich Stowasser , better known by his pseudonym Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser , was an Austrian visual artist and architect who also worked in the field of environmental protection.
Go to Profile#3517
Christoph Schönborn
#3523
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Christoph Maria Michael Hugo Damian Peter Adalbert Schönborn, O.P. is a Bohemian-born Austrian Dominican friar and theologian, who is a cardinal of the Catholic Church. He serves as the Archbishop of Vienna and was the Chairman of the Austrian Bishops' Conference from 1998 to 2020. He was elevated to the cardinalate in 1998. He is also Grand Chaplain of the Order of the Golden Fleece , of which he has been a member since 1961. He is a member of the formerly sovereign princely House of Schönborn, several members of which held high offices of the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church as pri...
Go to Profile#3518
Joni Mitchell
#3524
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Roberta Joan "Joni" Mitchell is a Canadian-American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and painter. As one of the most influential singer-songwriters to emerge from the 1960s folk music circuit, Mitchell became known for her starkly personal lyrics and unconventional compositions which grew to incorporate pop and jazz elements. She has received many accolades, including ten Grammy Awards and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. Rolling Stone called her "one of the greatest songwriters ever", and AllMusic has stated, "When the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may stand as t...
Go to Profile#3519
Daniele Archibugi
#3525
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Daniele Archibugi is an Italian economic and political theorist. He works on the economics and policy of innovation and technological change, on the political theory of international relations and on political and technological globalisation.
Go to Profile#3520
Queen Silvia of Sweden
#3526
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Silvia is Queen of Sweden as the wife of King Carl XVI Gustaf. She has held this title since her marriage to Carl Gustaf in 1976. The king and queen have three children: Crown Princess Victoria, Prince Carl Philip, and Princess Madeleine.
Go to Profile#3521
Thomas Noguchi
#3527
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Thomas Tsunetomi Noguchi is the former Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner for the County of Los Angeles. Popularly known as the "coroner to the stars", Noguchi determined the cause of death in many high-profile cases in Hollywood during the 1960s and 1970s. He performed autopsies on Marilyn Monroe, Albert Dekker, Robert F. Kennedy, Sharon Tate, Inger Stevens, Janis Joplin, Gia Scala, David Janssen, Divine, William Holden, and John Belushi.
Go to Profile#3522
Alex Rodriguez
#3528
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Alexander Emmanuel Rodriguez , nicknamed "A-Rod", is an American former professional baseball shortstop and third baseman, businessman and philanthropist. Rodriguez played 22 seasons in Major League Baseball for the Seattle Mariners , Texas Rangers , and New York Yankees . Rodriguez is the chairman and chief executive officer of A-Rod Corp as well as the chairman of Presidente beer. He is part owner of the National Basketball Association's Minnesota Timberwolves. Rodriguez began his professional baseball career as one of the sport's most highly touted prospects, and is considered one of the g...
Go to Profile#3523
Yves Chauvin
#3529
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Yves Chauvin was a French chemist and Nobel Prize laureate. He was honorary research director at the Institut français du pétrole and a member of the French Academy of Science. He was known for his work for deciphering the process of olefin metathesis for which he was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock.
Go to Profile#3524
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
#3530
Overall Influence
1940 - 2007 (67 years)
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was a French philosopher. He was also a literary critic and translator. Lacoue-Labarthe published several influential works with his friend Jean-Luc Nancy. Lacoue-Labarthe was influenced by and wrote extensively on Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, German Romanticism, Paul Celan, and Gérard Granel. He also translated works by Heidegger, Celan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Walter Benjamin into French.
Go to Profile#3525
Jeffrey Loria
#3531
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Jeffrey Harold Loria is an American entrepreneur, author, and the former owner of the Montreal Expos and Miami Marlins of Major League Baseball. Early life Loria was born and raised in a Jewish family in Manhattan, the son of Ruth and Walter J. Loria, a lawyer. Loria took an early interest in baseball, attending his first New York Yankees game in the late 1940s. Loria attended New York City's Stuyvesant High School and Yale University, where he initially took pre-med courses. With a requirement to take a history class, Loria chose art history.
Go to Profile#3526
Linda Gottfredson
#3532
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Linda Susanne Gottfredson is an American psychologist and writer. She is professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and co-director of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. She is best known for writing the 1994 letter "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", which was published in the Wall Street Journal in defense of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's controversial book The Bell Curve .
Go to Profile#3527
Elliott Jaques
#3533
Overall Influence
1917 - 2003 (86 years)
Elliott Jaques was a Canadian psychoanalyst, social scientist and management consultant known as the originator of concepts such as corporate culture, midlife crisis, fair pay, maturation curves, time span of discretion and requisite organization, as a total system of managerial organization.
Go to Profile#3528
PewDiePie
#3535
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg , better known as PewDiePie , is a Swedish YouTuber known for his comedic videos. Kjellberg's popularity on YouTube and extensive media coverage have made him one of the most noted online personalities and content creators. He has been portrayed in the media as a figurehead for YouTube, especially in the genre of gaming.
Go to Profile#3529
Kathleen Antonelli
#3536
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Kathleen Rita Antonelli , known as Kay McNulty, was an Irish computer programmer and one of the six original programmers of the ENIAC, one of the first general-purpose electronic digital computers. The other five ENIAC programmers were Betty Holberton, Ruth Teitelbaum, Frances Spence, Marlyn Meltzer, and Jean Bartik.
Go to Profile#3530
Lech Wałęsa
#3537
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Lech Wałęsa is a Polish statesman, dissident, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who served as the president of Poland between 1990 and 1995. After winning the 1990 election, Wałęsa became the first democratically elected president of Poland since 1926 and the first-ever Polish president elected by popular vote. A shipyard electrician by trade, Wałęsa became the leader of the Solidarity movement, and led a successful pro-democratic effort, which in 1989 ended Communist rule in Poland and ushered in the end of the Cold War.
Go to Profile#3531
Heinz Wolff
#3538
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Heinz Siegfried Wolff, was a German-born British scientist as well as a television and radio presenter. He was best known for the BBC television series The Great Egg Race. Early life Wolff was born in Berlin. His father, Oswald Wolff, was a volunteer in World War I and a publisher specializing in German history. His mother, Margot Wolff died "of an acute heart infection" in 1938. Father and son fled to the Netherlands in August 1939, and then arrived as Jewish refugees in Britain on 3 September 1939, on the same day that World War II was declared by Britain and France; Wolff was 11. He was ...
Go to Profile#3532
Maurice Bardèche
#3539
Overall Influence
1907 - 1998 (91 years)
Maurice Bardèche was a French art critic and journalist, better known as one of the leading exponents of neo-fascism in post–World War II Europe. Bardèche was also the brother-in-law of the collaborationist novelist, poet and journalist Robert Brasillach, executed after the liberation of France in 1945.
Go to Profile#3533
Wilbur Smith
#3540
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Wilbur Addison Smith was a Northern Rhodesian-born British-South African novelist specializing in historical fiction about international involvement in Southern Africa across four centuries. An accountant by training, he gained a film contract with his first published novel When the Lion Feeds. This encouraged him to become a full-time writer, and he developed three long chronicles of the South African experience which all became best-sellers. He acknowledged his publisher Charles Pick's advice to "write about what you know best", and his work takes in much authentic detail of the local hunti...
Go to Profile#3534
Shelby Foote
#3541
Overall Influence
1916 - 2005 (89 years)
Shelby Dade Foote Jr. was an American writer, historian and journalist. Although he primarily viewed himself as a novelist, he is now best known for his authorship of The Civil War: A Narrative, a three-volume history of the American Civil War.
Go to Profile#3535
Colin Powell
#3542
Overall Influence
1937 - 2021 (84 years)
Colin Luther Powell was an American politician, statesman, diplomat, and United States Army officer who was the 65th United States secretary of state from 2001 to 2005. He was the first Black secretary of state. He was the 15th United States national security advisor from 1987 to 1989, and the 12th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993.
Go to Profile#3536
Eric Shinseki
#3543
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Eric Ken Shinseki is a retired United States Army general who served as the seventh United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs and the 34th Chief of Staff of the Army . Shinseki is a veteran of two tours of combat in the Vietnam War, in which he was awarded three Bronze Star Medals for valor and two Purple Hearts. He was the first Asian-American four-star general, and the first Asian-American Secretary of Veterans Affairs.
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Vincent Scully
#3544
Overall Influence
1920 - 2017 (97 years)
Vincent Joseph Scully Jr. was an American art historian who was a Sterling Professor of the History of Art in Architecture at Yale University, and the author of several books on the subject. Architect Philip Johnson once described Scully as "the most influential architectural teacher ever." His lectures at Yale were known to attract casual visitors and packed houses, and regularly received standing ovations. He was also the distinguished visiting professor in architecture at the University of Miami.
Go to Profile#3538
Herbert Seifert
#3545
Overall Influence
1907 - 1996 (89 years)
Herbert Karl Johannes Seifert was a German mathematician known for his work in topology. Biography Seifert was born in Bernstadt auf dem Eigen, but soon moved to Bautzen, where he attended primary school at the Knabenbürgerschule, and secondary school at the Oberrealschule.
Go to Profile#3539
David J. Wineland
#3546
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
David Jeffrey Wineland is an American Nobel-laureate physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology physics laboratory. His work has included advances in optics, specifically laser-cooling trapped ions and using ions for quantum-computing operations. He was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Serge Haroche, for "ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems".
Go to Profile#3540
Peter Winch
#3547
Overall Influence
1926 - 1997 (71 years)
Peter Guy Winch was a British philosopher known for his contributions to the philosophy of social science, Wittgenstein scholarship, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Winch is perhaps most famous for his early book, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy , an attack on positivism in the social sciences, drawing on the work of R. G. Collingwood and Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy.
Go to Profile#3541
Lou Reed
#3548
Overall Influence
1942 - 2013 (71 years)
Lewis Allan Reed was an American musician and songwriter. He was the guitarist, singer, and principal songwriter for the rock band The Velvet Underground and had a solo career that spanned five decades. Although not commercially successful during its existence, the Velvet Underground became regarded as one of the most influential bands in the history of underground and alternative rock music. Reed's distinctive deadpan voice, poetic and transgressive lyrics, and experimental guitar playing were trademarks throughout his long career.
Go to Profile#3542
Jonathan Dancy
#3549
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jonathan Peter Dancy is a British philosopher, who has written on ethics and epistemology. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at University of Texas at Austin and Research Professor at the University of Reading. He taught previously for many years at the University of Keele.
Go to Profile#3543
Halldór Laxness
#3550
Overall Influence
1902 - 1998 (96 years)
Halldór Kiljan Laxness was an Icelandic writer and winner of the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature. He wrote novels, poetry, newspaper articles, essays, plays, travelogues and short stories. Writers who influenced Laxness included August Strindberg, Sigmund Freud, Knut Hamsun, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Bertolt Brecht and Ernest Hemingway.
Go to Profile#3544
Johannes Bronkhorst
#3551
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Johannes Bronkhorst is a Dutch Orientalist and Indologist, specializing in Buddhist studies and early Buddhism. He is emeritus professor at the University of Lausanne. Life After studying Mathematics, Physics, and Astronomy at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam , he moved to India, where he turned to Sanskrit and Pāli, first at the University of Rajasthan , then the University of Pune . In Pune he read with traditional Sanskrit scholars, specializing in Sanskrit grammar and Indian philosophy. Back in the Netherlands, he did a second doctorate at the University of Leiden. Having worked for r...
Go to Profile#3545
John Hope Franklin
#3552
Overall Influence
1915 - 2009 (94 years)
John Hope Franklin was an American historian of the United States and former president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. Franklin is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and continually updated. More than three million copies have been sold. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
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Solomon Kullback
#3553
Overall Influence
1907 - 1994 (87 years)
Solomon Kullback was an American cryptanalyst and mathematician, who was one of the first three employees hired by William F. Friedman at the US Army's Signal Intelligence Service in the 1930s, along with Frank Rowlett and Abraham Sinkov. He went on to a long and distinguished career at SIS and its eventual successor, the National Security Agency . Kullback was the Chief Scientist at the NSA until his retirement in 1962, whereupon he took a position at the George Washington University.
Go to Profile#3547
Thomas H. Cormen
#3554
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Thomas H. Cormen is the co-author of Introduction to Algorithms, along with Charles Leiserson, Ron Rivest, and Cliff Stein. In 2013, he published a new book titled Algorithms Unlocked. He is an emeritus professor of computer science at Dartmouth College and former Chairman of the Dartmouth College Department of Computer Science. Between 2004 and 2008 he directed the Dartmouth College Writing Program. His research interests are algorithm engineering, parallel computing, and speeding up computations with high latency. In 2022, he was elected as a Democratic member of the New Hampshire House of R...
Go to Profile#3548
Arthur Butz
#3555
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Arthur R. Butz is an associate professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University and a Holocaust denier, best known as the author of the pseudohistorical book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. He achieved tenure in 1974 and currently teaches classes in control system theory and digital signal processing.
Go to Profile#3549
Johnnie Cochran
#3556
Overall Influence
1937 - 2005 (68 years)
Johnnie Lee Cochran Jr. was an American attorney best known for his leading role in the defense and criminal acquittal of O.J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. He often defended his client with rhymes such as "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit!" during the Simpson trial.
Go to Profile#3550
Barbara Smith
#3557
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Barbara Smith is an American lesbian feminist and socialist who has played a significant role in Black feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s, she has been active as a scholar, activist, critic, lecturer, author, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities for 25 years. Smith's essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, Conditions and The Nation....
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