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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#3551
Albert Hibbs
#3558
Overall Influence
1924 - 2003 (79 years)
Albert Roach Hibbs was an American mathematician and physicist affiliated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory . He was known as "The Voice of JPL" due to his gift for explaining advanced science in simple terms. He helped establish JPL's Space Science Division in 1960 and later served as its first chief. He was the systems designer for Explorer 1, the USA's first satellite, and helped establish the framework for exploration of the Solar System through the 1960s. Hibbs qualified as an astronaut in 1967 and was slated to be a crew member of Apollo 25, but he ultimately did not go to the Moon du...
Go to Profile#3552
Terry Richardson
#3559
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Terrence Richardson is an American fashion and portrait photographer. He has shot advertising campaigns for Marc Jacobs, Aldo, Supreme, Sisley, Tom Ford, and Yves Saint Laurent among others, and also done work for magazines such as Rolling Stone, GQ, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, i-D, and Vice.
Go to Profile#3553
Julie Bindel
#3560
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Julie Bindel is an English radical feminist writer. She is also co-founder of the law reform group Justice for Women, which has aimed to help women who have been prosecuted for assaulting or killing violent male partners.
Go to Profile#3554
Jean Chrétien
#3561
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien is a Canadian lawyer and politician who served as the 20th prime minister of Canada from 1993 to 2003. Born and raised in Shawinigan Falls, Quebec, Chrétien is a law graduate from Université Laval. A Liberal, he was first elected to the House of Commons in 1963. He served in various cabinet posts under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, most prominently as minister of Indian affairs and northern development, president of the Treasury Board, minister of finance, and minister of justice. He ran unsuccessfully for the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1984, losing to John Turner.
Go to Profile#3555
Jessica Benjamin
#3562
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jessica Benjamin is a psychoanalyst known for her contributions to psychoanalysis and social thought. She is currently a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City where she is on the faculty of the New York University Postdoctoral Psychology Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. Jessica Benjamin is one of the original contributors to the fields of relational psychoanalysis, theories of intersubjectivity, and gender studies and feminism as it relates to psychoanalysis and society. She is known for her ideas about recognition in both...
Go to Profile#3556
Noël Carroll
#3563
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Noël Carroll is an American philosopher considered to be one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy of art. Although Carroll is best known for his work in the philosophy of film , he has also published journalism, works on philosophy of art generally, theory of media, and also philosophy of history. As of 2012, he is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Go to Profile#3557
Ester Boserup
#3564
Overall Influence
1910 - 1999 (89 years)
Ester Boserup was a Danish economist. She studied economic and agricultural development, worked at the United Nations as well as other international organizations, and wrote seminal books on agrarian change and the role of women in development.
Go to Profile#3558
Jürgen Kocka
#3565
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Jürgen Kocka is a German historian. A university professor and former president of the Social Science Research Center Berlin , Kocka is a major figure in the new Social History, especially as represented by the Bielefeld School. He has focused his research on the history of employees in large German and American businesses, and on the history of European bourgeoisie.
Go to Profile#3559
Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer
#3566
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Charles Edward Maurice Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer, , styled Viscount Althorp between 1975 and 1992, is a British peer, author, journalist, and broadcaster. He is the younger brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, and is the maternal uncle of William, Prince of Wales and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex.
Go to Profile#3560
Jo Walton
#3567
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Jo Walton is a Welsh and Canadian fantasy and science fiction writer and poet. She is best known for the fantasy novel Among Others, which won the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 2012, and Tooth and Claw, a Victorian era novel with dragons which won the World Fantasy Award in 2004. Other works by Walton include the Small Change series, in which she blends alternate history with the cozy mystery genre, comprising Farthing, Ha'penny and Half a Crown. Her fantasy novel Lifelode won the 2010 Mythopoeic Award, and her alternate history My Real Children received the 2015 Tiptree Award.
Go to Profile#3561
Chris Berman
#3568
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Christopher James Berman , nicknamed "Boomer", is an American sportscaster. He has been an anchor for SportsCenter on ESPN since 1979, joining a month after its initial launch, and hosted the network's Sunday NFL Countdown program from 1985 to 2016 and NFL Primetime from 1987 to 2005 and since 2019. He has also anchored Monday Night Countdown, U.S. Open golf, the Stanley Cup Finals, and other programming on ESPN and ABC Sports. Berman calls play-by-play of select Major League Baseball games for ESPN, which included the Home Run Derby until 2016.
Go to Profile#3562
Stephen Harper
#3569
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Stephen Joseph Harper is a Canadian politician who was the 22nd prime minister of Canada from 2006 to 2015. Harper is the first and only prime minister to come from the modern-day Conservative Party of Canada, serving as the party's first leader from 2004 to 2015.
Go to Profile#3563
Eugene Koonin
#3570
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Eugene Viktorovich Koonin is a Russian-American biologist and Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information . He is a recognised expert in the field of evolutionary and computational biology.
Go to Profile#3564
Milo Yiannopoulos
#3571
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Milo Yiannopoulos is a British right-wing political commentator. His speeches and writings criticise Islam, feminism, social justice, and political correctness. Yiannopoulos is a former editor of Breitbart News, an American far-right news and opinion website.
Go to Profile#3565
Emanuel Ungaro
#3572
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Emanuel Ungaro was a French fashion designer who founded the fashion house called the House of Emanuel Ungaro in 1965. Early life Ungaro's Italian father fled to France from Francavilla Fontana of Brindisi province because of the fascist dictatorship in Italy. Ungaro's father was a tailor and he gave his son a sewing machine when he was young.
Go to Profile#3566
Michael Vickery
#3573
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
Michael Theodore Vickery was an American historian, lecturer, and author known for his works about the history of Southeast Asia. Life Vickery was born on April 1, 1931, in Billings, Montana. After acquiring a Bachelor of Arts in Russian studies from the University of Washington in 1952, Vickery became a Fulbright scholar in Finland from 1953 to 1955 before joining the United States Army in Germany from 1956 to 1958. He then taught English in Istanbul, Turkey, from 1958 to 1960, in Cambodia from 1960 to 1964, and in Laos from 1964 to 1967.
Go to Profile#3567
Stuart Hampshire
#3574
Overall Influence
1914 - 2004 (90 years)
Sir Stuart Newton Hampshire was an English philosopher, literary critic and university administrator. He was one of the antirationalist Oxford thinkers who gave a new direction to moral and political thought in the post-World War II era.
Go to Profile#3568
Oliver Stone
#3575
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
William Oliver Stone is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. Stone is known as a controversial but acclaimed director, tackling subjects ranging from the Vietnam war, and American politics to musical biopics and crime dramas. He has received numerous accolades including four Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and five Golden Globe Awards.
Go to Profile#3569
Murray Walker
#3576
Overall Influence
1923 - 2021 (98 years)
Graeme Murray Walker was an English motorsport commentator and journalist. He provided television commentary of live Formula One coverage for the BBC between 1976 and 1996, and for ITV between 1997 and 2001.
Go to Profile#3570
Jack Balkin
#3577
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jack M. Balkin is an American legal scholar. He is the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. Balkin is the founder and director of the Yale Information Society Project , a research center whose mission is "to study the implications of the Internet, telecommunications, and the new information technologies for law and society." He also directs the Knight Law and Media Program and the Abrams Institute for Free Expression at Yale Law School.
Go to Profile#3571
Kurt Mehlhorn
#3578
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Kurt Mehlhorn is a German theoretical computer scientist. He has been a vice president of the Max Planck Society and is director of the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science. Education and career Mehlhorn graduated in 1971 from the Technical University of Munich, where he studied computer science and mathematics, and earned his Ph.D. in 1974 from Cornell University under the supervision of Robert Constable. Since 1975 he has been on the faculty of Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, where he was chair of the computer science department from 1976 to 1978 and again from 1987 to 1989.
Go to Profile#3572
Charles P. Kindleberger
#3579
Overall Influence
1910 - 2003 (93 years)
Charles Poor Kindleberger was an American economic historian and author of over 30 books. His 1978 book Manias, Panics, and Crashes, about speculative stock market bubbles, was reprinted in 2000 after the dot-com bubble. He is well known for his role in developing what would become hegemonic stability theory, arguing that a hegemonic power was needed to maintain a stable international monetary system. He has been referred to as "the master of the genre" on financial crisis by The Economist.
Go to Profile#3573
Henry Widdowson
#3580
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Henry George Widdowson is a British linguist and an authority in the field of applied linguistics and language teaching, specifically English language learning and teaching. Career He gained a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh in 1973.
Go to Profile#3574
John McEnroe
#3581
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
John Patrick McEnroe Jr. is an American former professional tennis player. He was known for his shot-making and volleying skills, his rivalries with Björn Borg and Jimmy Connors, and his confrontational on-court behavior, which frequently landed him in trouble with umpires and tennis authorities.
Go to Profile#3575
Queen Rania of Jordan
#3582
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Rania Al Abdullah is Queen of Jordan as the wife of King Abdullah II. Early life Rania Al-Yassin was born on 31 August 1970 in Kuwait, to Palestinian parents. Her father, was from Tulkarm in the West Bank. She also has Turkish roots on her maternal grandfather's side. Rania received a degree in business administration from the American University in Cairo. Upon her graduation, she worked briefly in marketing for Citibank, followed by a job with Apple Inc. in Amman, Jordan.
Go to Profile#3576
Elizabeth Taylor
#3583
Overall Influence
1932 - 2011 (79 years)
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was a British and American actress. She began her career as a child actress in the early 1940s and was one of the most popular stars of classical Hollywood cinema in the 1950s. She then became the world's highest paid movie star in the 1960s, remaining a well-known public figure for the rest of her life. In 1999, the American Film Institute named her the seventh-greatest female screen legend of Classic Hollywood cinema.
Go to Profile#3577
Andrew Donald Booth
#3584
Overall Influence
1918 - 2009 (91 years)
Andrew Donald Booth was a British electrical engineer, physicist and computer scientist, who was an early developer of the magnetic drum memory for computers. He is known for Booth's multiplication algorithm. In his later career in Canada he became president of Lakehead University.
Go to Profile#3578
Gertrude Himmelfarb
#3585
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
#3579
Nigel Warburton
#3586
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Nigel Warburton is a British philosopher. He is best known as a populariser of philosophy, having written a number of books in the genre, but he has also written academic works in aesthetics and applied ethics.
Go to Profile#3580
Yves Meyer
#3587
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Yves F. Meyer is a French mathematician. He is among the progenitors of wavelet theory, having proposed the Meyer wavelet. Meyer was awarded the Abel Prize in 2017. Biography Born in Paris, Yves Meyer studied at the Lycée Carnot in Tunis; he won the French General Student Competition in Mathematics, and was placed first in the entrance examination for the École Normale Supérieure in 1957. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1966, under the supervision of Jean-Pierre Kahane. The Mexican historian Jean Meyer is his cousin.
Go to Profile#3581
William Cronon
#3588
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
William Cronon is an environmental historian and the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was president of the American Historical Association in 2012.
Go to Profile#3582
Enrique Dussel
#3589
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Enrique Domingo Dussel Ambrosini was an Argentine-Mexican academic, philosopher, historian and theologian. He served as the interim rector of the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México from 2013 to 2014.
Go to Profile#3583
Andrew Samuels
#3590
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Andrew Samuels is a British psychotherapist and writer on political and social themes from a psychological viewpoint. He has worked with politicians, political organisations, activist groups and members of the public in Europe, US, Brazil, Israel, Japan, Russia and South Africa as a political and organisational consultant. Clinically, Samuels has developed a blend of Jungian and post-Jungian, relational psychoanalytic and humanistic approaches.
Go to Profile#3584
Nikolas Rose
#3591
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Nikolas Rose is a British sociologist and social theorist. He is Distinguished Honorary Professor at the Research School of Social Sciences, in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University and Honorary Professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London. From January 2012 to until his retirement in April 2021 he was Professor of Sociology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King's College London, having joined King's to found this new Department. He was the Co-Founder and Co-Director of King's ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health.
Go to Profile#3585
Michael Morpurgo
#3592
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Sir Michael Andrew Bridge Morpurgo is an English book author, poet, playwright, and librettist who is known best for children's novels such as War Horse . His work is noted for its "magical storytelling", for recurring themes such as the triumph of an outsider or survival, for characters' relationships with nature, and for vivid settings such as the Cornish coast or World War I. Morpurgo became the third Children's Laureate, from 2003 to 2005, and he is also the current President of BookTrust, the UK's largest children's reading charity.
Go to Profile#3586
Siegfried Flügge
#3593
Overall Influence
1912 - 1997 (85 years)
Siegfried Flügge was a German theoretical physicist who made contributions to nuclear physics and the theoretical basis for nuclear weapons. He worked on the German nuclear energy project. From 1941 onward he was a lecturer at several German universities, and from 1956 to 1984, editor of the 54-volume, prestigious Handbuch der Physik.
Go to Profile#3587
Nils John Nilsson
#3594
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Nils John Nilsson was an American computer scientist. He was one of the founding researchers in the discipline of artificial intelligence. He was the first Kumagai Professor of Engineering in computer science at Stanford University from 1991 until his retirement. He is particularly known for his contributions to search, planning, knowledge representation, and robotics.
Go to Profile#3588
T. Colin Campbell
#3595
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Thomas Colin Campbell is an American biochemist who specializes in the effect of nutrition on long-term health. He is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#3589
Fujio Masuoka
#3596
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
is a Japanese engineer, who has worked for Toshiba and Tohoku University, and is currently chief technical officer of Unisantis Electronics. He is best known as the inventor of flash memory, including the development of both the NOR flash and NAND flash types in the 1980s. He also invented the first gate-all-around MOSFET transistor, an early non-planar 3D transistor, in 1988.
Go to Profile#3590
Billy Joel
#3597
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
William Martin Joel is an American singer, songwriter and pianist. Commonly nicknamed the "Piano Man" after his signature 1973 song of the same name, Joel has had a successful music career as a solo artist since the 1970s.
Go to Profile#3591
Michel Tremblay
#3598
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Michel Tremblay is a French-Canadian novelist and playwright. Tremblay was born in Montreal, Quebec, where he grew up in the French-speaking neighbourhood of Plateau Mont-Royal; at the time of his birth, a neighbourhood with a working-class character and joual dialect - something that would heavily influence his work. Tremblay's first professionally produced play, Les Belles-Sœurs, was written in 1965 and premiered at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert on August 28, 1968. It transformed the old guard of Canadian theatre and introduced joual to the mainstream. It stirred up controversy by portraying ...
Go to Profile#3592
Nic Pizzolatto
#3599
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Nicholas Austin Pizzolatto is an American writer, producer and director. He is best known for creating the HBO crime drama series True Detective. Early life Pizzolatto was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is of Italian descent. Pizzolatto grew up poor in a working-class Roman Catholic family in New Orleans. At age five, he and his family moved to a rural area of Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Go to Profile#3593
Alfred W. McCoy
#3600
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Alfred "Al" William McCoy is an American historian and educator. He is the Fred Harvey Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He specializes in the history of the Philippines, foreign policy of the United States, European colonisation of Southeast Asia, illegal drug trade, and Central Intelligence Agency covert operations.
Go to Profile#3594
Queen Noor of Jordan
#3601
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Noor Al Hussein is an American-born Jordanian philanthropist and activist who is the fourth wife and widow of King Hussein of Jordan. She was Queen of Jordan from their marriage on June 15, 1978, until Hussein's death on February 7, 1999.
Go to Profile#3595
Wendelin Werner
#3602
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Wendelin Werner is a German-born French mathematician working on random processes such as self-avoiding random walks, Brownian motion, Schramm–Loewner evolution, and related theories in probability theory and mathematical physics. In 2006, at the 25th International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, Spain he received the Fields Medal "for his contributions to the development of stochastic Loewner evolution, the geometry of two-dimensional Brownian motion, and conformal field theory". He is currently Rouse Ball professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#3596
John Cairncross
#3603
Overall Influence
1913 - 1995 (82 years)
John Cairncross was a British civil servant who became an intelligence officer and spy during the Second World War. As a Soviet double agent, he passed to the Soviet Union the raw Tunny decryptions that influenced the Battle of Kursk. He was alleged to be the fifth member of the Cambridge Five. He was also notable as a translator, literary scholar and writer of non-fiction.
Go to Profile#3597
Martin Luther King III
#3604
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Martin Luther King III is an American human rights activist, philanthropist and advocate. The oldest son of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, King served as the 4th President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from 1997 to 2004.
Go to Profile#3598
Jonas Åkerlund
#3605
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Hans Uno Jonas Åkerlund is a Swedish film director, screenwriter, music video director, and drummer. His video for Madonna's song "Ray of Light" won a Grammy Award for Best Music Video, Short Form, and a record of five awards at 1998 MTV Video Music Awards, including the Video of the Year.
Go to Profile#3599
Lex Fridman
#3606
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Lex Fridman is a Russian-American computer scientist and podcaster. He hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast. Early life and education Fridman was born in Chkalovsk, Tajikistan and grew up in Moscow. He is of Jewish descent. His father is plasma physicist Alexander Fridman, a professor at Drexel University. His brother is Gregory Fridman, also a researcher in plasma physics.
Go to Profile#3600
Merlin Donald
#3607
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Merlin Wilfred Donald is a Canadian psychologist, neuroanthropologist, and cognitive neuroscientist, at Case Western Reserve University. He is noted for the position that evolutionary processes need to be considered in determining how the mind deals with symbolic information and language. In particular, he suggests that explicit, algorithmic processes may be inadequate to understanding how the mind works.
Go to Profile