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
#36401
Dennis Potter
#36413
Overall Influence
1935 - 1994 (59 years)
Dennis Christopher George Potter was an English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist. He is best known for his BBC television serials Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective as well as the BBC television plays Blue Remembered Hills and Brimstone and Treacle . His television dramas mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social, and often used themes and images from popular culture. Potter is widely regarded as one of the most influential and innovative dramatists to have worked in British television.
Go to Profile#36402
Robin Blaser
#36414
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
Robin Francis Blaser was an author and poet in both the United States and Canada. Personal background Born in Denver, Colorado, Blaser grew up in Idaho, and came to Berkeley, California, in 1944. There he met Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, becoming a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and early 1960s. He moved to Canada in 1966, joining the faculty of Simon Fraser University; after taking early retirement in the 1980s, he held the position of professor emeritus. He lived in the Kitsilano neighborhood of Vancouver, British Columbia.
Go to Profile#36403
Tina Seelig
#36415
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Tina Lynn Seelig is an American educator, entrepreneur, and author of several books on creativity and innovation. She is a faculty member at Stanford University. Biography In 1985, Seelig earned her PhD in neuroscience from Stanford University School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#36404
Joanne B. Freeman
#36416
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Joanne B. Freeman is a U.S. historian and tenured Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Having researched Alexander Hamilton both independently and collaboratively with mentors and peers for more than forty years, she is regarded as a leading expert on his life and legacy. Freeman has published two books as well as articles and op-eds in newspapers including The New York Times, magazines such as The Atlantic and Slate and numerous academic journals referencing the U.S. Founding Father. In addition to her many public lectures on Hamilton, outside of her regular student ...
Go to Profile#36405
Fabrice Balanche
#36417
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Fabrice Balanche is a geographer and specialist in the political geography of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Middle East in general. Biography In 2000, he defended his thesis The Alaouites, space and power in the Syrian coastal region: an ambiguous national integration, which was taken up and published in 2006 under the title The Alaouite region and the Syrian power.
Go to Profile#36406
Robert J. Kolenkow
#36418
Overall Influence
Robert J. Kolenkow is an American physicist and teacher. He is best known for being the coauthor, along with Daniel Kleppner, of a popular undergraduate physics textbook. Kolenkow did his undergraduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating in 1955. For a time, he was an associate professor of physics at MIT. His departure in 1971 generated some controversy on campus; he was regarded as an excellent teacher by his students, however, the administration was viewed as being more concerned about research than education when making its tenure decisions.
Go to Profile#36407
Bernd Wegner
#36419
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Bernd Wegner is a German historian who specialises in military history and the history of Nazism. Since 1997 he has been professor of modern history at the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, Germany.
Go to Profile#36408
Isaac Malitz
#36420
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Isaac Richard Jay Malitz is a logician who introduced the subject of positive set theory in his 1976 Ph.D. Thesis at UCLA.
Go to Profile#36409
Krzysztof Pomian
#36421
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Krzysztof Pomian , is a Polish philosopher, historian and essayist. He is a professor of history at the Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika in Toruń and, in 2001, was academic director of the Museum of Europe in Brussels.
Go to Profile#36410
Maggie Miller
#36422
Overall Influence
Maggie Miller is a mathematician, Visiting Clay Fellow, and Stanford Science Fellow at Stanford University in the Mathematics Department. Her primary research area is low-dimensional topology. Professional career Miller earned her PhD in mathematics from Princeton University, where she was advised by mathematician David Gabai and wrote her dissertation on extending fibrations of knot complements to ribbon disk complements. Prior to graduate school, she completed her undergraduate studies at University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#36411
June Foray
#36423
Overall Influence
1917 - 2017 (100 years)
June Foray was an American voice actress. She was best known as the voice of such animated characters as Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Natasha Fatale, Nell Fenwick, Lucifer from Disney's Cinderella, Cindy Lou Who, Jokey Smurf, Granny from the Warner Bros. cartoons directed by Friz Freleng, Grammi Gummi from Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears series, and Magica De Spell, among many others.
Go to Profile#36412
Bernie Worrell
#36424
Overall Influence
1944 - 2016 (72 years)
George Bernard Worrell, Jr. was an American keyboardist and record producer best known as a founding member of the Parliament-Funkadelic collective. In later years, he also worked with acts such as Talking Heads, Bill Laswell, and Jack Bruce. He is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted in 1997 with fifteen other members of Parliament-Funkadelic. Worrell was described by journalist Jon Pareles as "the kind of sideman who is as influential as some bandleaders," with his use of synthesizers particularly impactful on funk and hip hop.
Go to Profile#36413
Lindy Elkins-Tanton
#36425
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Lindy Elkins-Tanton is an American planetary scientist and professor whose research concerns terrestrial planetary evolution. She is the Principal Investigator of NASA's Psyche mission to explore the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche, Arizona State University Vice President of the Interplanetary Initiative, and co-founder of Beagle Learning, a tech company training and measuring collaborative problem-solving and critical thinking.
Go to Profile#36414
Bill Wattenburg
#36426
Overall Influence
1936 - 2018 (82 years)
Willard Harvey Wattenburg was an American inventor, engineer, author, and talk radio show host from California. Advertisements for his show often referred to him as "The Smartest Man in the World." Early life Born and raised in Greenville, California, in rural Plumas County, Wattenburg grew up working with his father in the logging business. His scientific talent was discovered by a teacher, who encouraged him to apply to several schools, including the University of California, Berkeley where he completed his first year with honors. After his freshman year, Wattenburg moved back to assist his...
Go to Profile#36415
Ken Armstrong
#36427
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Ken Armstrong is a senior investigative reporter at ProPublica. He has worked at The Marshall Project, the Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, the Newport News Daily Press, and the Anchorage Times. He was a 2001 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and in 2002, was the McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#36416
Leonard P. Guarente
#36428
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Leonard Pershing Guarente is an American biologist best known for his research on life span extension in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, roundworms , and mice. He is a Novartis Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#36417
Patrick Clawson
#36429
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Patrick Lyell Clawson is an American economist and Middle East scholar. He is currently the Director for Research at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and senior editor of Middle East Quarterly.
Go to Profile#36418
Pete Tong
#36430
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Peter Michael Tong is an English disc jockey who works for BBC Radio 1. He is the host of programmes such as Essential Mix and Essential Selection on the radio service, which can be heard through Internet radio streams, for his record label FFRR Records and for his own performances at nightclubs and music festivals. Tong has also worked as a record producer and is regarded as the "global ambassador for electronic music."
Go to Profile#36419
Anderson Sunda-Meya
#36431
Overall Influence
Anderson Sunda-Meya is a Congolese–American physicist and the Norwood Endowed Professor of Physics at Xavier University in New Orleans. He also holds the position of Associate Dean. Sunda-Meya was awarded the 2021 American Physical Society Excellence in Physics Education Award.
Go to Profile#36420
Gary Ridgway
#36432
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Gary Leon Ridgway is an American serial killer known as the Green River Killer. He was initially convicted of 48 separate murders committed between the early 1980s and late 1990s. As part of his plea bargain, another conviction was added, bringing the total number of convictions to 49, making him the second most prolific serial killer in United States history according to confirmed murders.
Go to Profile#36421
Leslye Obiora
#36433
Overall Influence
Leslye Amede Obiora is a Nigerian lawyer and professor. Her written work focuses on culture, gender, human rights, and public international law. Early life and education Leslye Amede Obiora is from Oguta, a riverine Igbo community in Nigeria. She was born on the cusp of the pogrom that triggered the Biafra Secessionist War to Violet Odiso and Samson B. C. Obiora. Her father was a lawyer and her mother earned a diploma in Home Economics, before marrying in 1951. Obiora was one of nine children born to the couple before her father’s death in 1973. Obiora completed her studies earning an LLB fr...
Go to Profile#36422
Craig MacTavish
#36434
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Craig MacTavish is a Canadian professional ice hockey executive and former player, formerly an assistant coaching position with the St. Louis Blues. He played centre for 17 seasons in the National Hockey League with the Boston Bruins, Edmonton Oilers, New York Rangers, Philadelphia Flyers and St. Louis Blues, winning the Stanley Cup four times . He was the last NHL player not to wear a helmet during games.
Go to Profile#36423
Wolf Reik
#36435
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Wolf Reik FRS is a German molecular biologist and a group leader at the Babraham Institute, honorary professor of Epigenetics at the University of Cambridge and associate faculty at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. He was announced as the director of Altos Labs Cambridge Institute when the company launched on 19 January 2022.
Go to Profile#36424
Alfio Quarteroni
#36436
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Alfio Quarteroni is an Italian mathematician. He is Professor of Numerical Analysis at the Politecnico of Milan , since 1989 and has been the director of the Chair of Modelling and Scientific Computing at the EPFL , Lausanne , from 1998 until 2017. He is the founder of MOX at Politecnico of Milan and MATHICSE at EPFL, Lausanne . He is co-founder of MOXOFF, a spin-off company at Politecnico of Milan .
Go to Profile#36425
Michael E. Greenberg
#36437
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Michael Greenberg is an American neuroscientist who specializes in molecular neurobiology. He served as the Chair of the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School from 2008 to 2022. Biography Michael Greenberg grew up in Brooklyn, New York and graduated from Wesleyan University in 1976 with a degree in chemistry. He conducted his Ph.D. research and began his post-doctoral research at Rockefeller University in New York City in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman. He later completed his postdoctoral research with Edward Ziff at New York University Medical Center.
Go to Profile#36426
Larry Craig
#36438
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Lawrence Edwin Craig is an American retired politician from the state of Idaho. A Republican, he served 18 years in the United States Senate , preceded by 10 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Idaho's 1st District . His 28 years in Congress rank as the second-longest in Idaho history, trailing only William Borah, who served over 32 years in the Senate. In addition to serving in Congress, Craig has been a member of the board of directors of the National Rifle Association of America since 1983. Craig was selected for induction into the Idaho Hall of Fame in 2007, but was n...
Go to Profile#36427
Harry J. Holzer
#36439
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Harry Joseph Holzer is an American economist, educator and public policy analyst. Early life Holzer grew up in a rural area near Atlantic City, New Jersey. His parents, Simon and Suzanne , were Holocaust survivors from Poland. His father owned and operated a small chicken farm, while his mother was a seamstress and operated a fabric shop. His only sister, Marilyn, is an occupational therapist in Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#36428
Jessica Stockholder
#36440
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Jessica Stockholder is a Canadian-American artist known for site-specific installation works and sculptures that are often described as "paintings in space." She came to prominence in the early 1990s with monumental works that challenged boundaries between artwork and display environment as well as between pictorial and physical experience. Her art often presents a "barrage" of bold colors, textures and everyday objects, incorporating floors, walls and ceilings and sometimes spilling out of exhibition sites. Critics suggest that her work is informed by diverse artistic traditions, including abstract expressionism, color field painting, minimalism and Pop art.
Go to Profile#36429
Eberhard Voit
#36441
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Eberhard O. Voit is a Professor and David D. Flanagan Chair in Biological Systems at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. He leads the Laboratory for Biological Systems Analysis.
Go to Profile#36430
Tasmin Little
#36442
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Tasmin Elizabeth Little is an English classical violinist. She is a concerto soloist and also performs as a recitalist and chamber musician. She has released numerous albums, winning the Critics Award at the Classic Brit Awards in 2011 for her recording of Elgar's Violin Concerto.
Go to Profile#36431
Hanne Blank
#36443
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Hanne Blank, also known as Hanne Blank Boyd, is an American historian, writer, and editor. Her written works include Virgin: The Untouched History, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, and The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts.
Go to Profile#36432
Ian Crawford
#36444
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Ian Andrew Crawford is a British professor of planetary science and astrobiology at Birkbeck, University of London in the United Kingdom. Education and early life Born in Warrington, Cheshire, Crawford was educated at North Cestrian Grammar School in Greater Manchester from 1972 to 1979. Crawford studied Astronomy at University College London followed by Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Newcastle University . He was awarded a PhD in Astrophysics from University College London in 1988 for research on the interstellar medium.
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John Ensign
#36445
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
John Eric Ensign is an American veterinarian and former politician who served as a United States Senator from Nevada from 2001 until his resignation in 2011 amid a Senate Ethics Committee investigation into his attempts to hide an extramarital affair. A member of the Republican Party, Ensign previously represented Nevada's 1st congressional district in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. Following his resignation from the Senate, Ensign returned to Nevada and resumed his career as a veterinarian.
Go to Profile#36434
Joe Johnson
#36446
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Joe Marcus Johnson is an American former professional basketball player. Nicknamed "Iso Joe", he played high school basketball for Little Rock Central High School and college basketball for the Arkansas Razorbacks. After two years with Arkansas, he declared for the 2001 NBA draft where he was drafted 10th overall by the Boston Celtics.
Go to Profile#36435
Kurt Pätzold
#36447
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Kurt Pätzold was a German Marxist historian. Life In 1945 Kurt Pätzold moved with his family to Thüringen . From 1948 to 1953 he studied History, Philosophy, and Political Science at the University of Jena, where he wrote his dissertation on how the economic crisis affected the Carl Zeiss AG company and received his PhD. He attended HU Berlin University to receive his Doctor of Science and he specialized in "Antisemitism and the persecution of Jews . A study of the political strategies and tactics used by the fascist, German imperialism." After the "turning point" in Germany , he was fired during a settlement lawsuit in 1992.
Go to Profile#36436
Anders Söderholm
#36448
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Anders Söderholm is the current rector of the Mid Sweden University and was a professor in Business administration at Umeå School of Business. Söderholm obtained his PhD from Umeå University in 1991, with his thesis on organization of local industrial policies. On 2005 he became professor of business administration. Söderholm has also been a guest researcher at Stanford University, Royal Institute of Technology and Åbo Akademi University and is the chairman of The Swedish Project Academy. He was the rector of the Umeå School of Business between 2000 and 2003.
Go to Profile#36437
Louis Billera
#36449
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Louis Joseph Billera is a Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University. Career Billera completed his B.S. at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1964. He earned his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1968, under the joint supervision of Moses Richardson and Michel Balinski.
Go to Profile#36438
Brian Weatherson
#36450
Overall Influence
Brian Weatherson is the Marshall Weinberg Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. He specializes in epistemology and philosophy of language. Education and career Born in Australia, Weatherson received his PhD from Monash University in 1998, with a dissertation on formal models for reasoning under uncertainty, titled "On Uncertainty."
Go to Profile#36439
Peter Yarrow
#36451
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Peter Yarrow is an American singer and songwriter who found fame for being in the 1960s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary. Yarrow co-wrote one of the group's best known hits, "Puff, the Magic Dragon". He is also a political activist and has supported causes that range from opposition to the Vietnam War to school anti-bullying programs.
Go to Profile#36440
John C. Oxtoby
#36452
Overall Influence
1910 - 1991 (81 years)
John C. Oxtoby was an American mathematician. In 1936, he graduated with a Master of Science in Mathematics from Harvard University. He was professor of mathematics at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania from 1939 until his retirement in 1979.
Go to Profile#36441
R. Barker Bausell
#36453
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Rufus Barker Bausell, Jr. is an American biostatistician and retired professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, where, from approximately 1999 to 2004, he was the director of their center for studying complementary and alternative medicine. He was also the co-founder of the academic journal Evaluation & the Health Professions, and served as its editor-in-chief for more than three decades. An expert on research methods, he is known for criticizing alternative medicine, saying that alternative medical treatments are little to no more effective than placebos. He is the author of the boo...
Go to Profile#36442
Ronald Heifetz
#36454
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ronald Heifetz is an academic and author. He is the King Hussein bin Talal Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership, Founding Director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University, and co-founder of Cambridge Leadership Associates.
Go to Profile#36443
Thomas C. Holt
#36455
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Thomas Cleveland Holt is an American historian, who is the James Westfall Thompson Professor of American and African American History at the University of Chicago. He has produced a number of works on the people and descendants of the African Diaspora. He served as president of the American Historical Association in 1994.
Go to Profile#36444
Irja Askola
#36456
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Irja Kaarina Askola is the former Bishop of Helsinki. She was the first female Finnish bishop in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. Askola was the Bishop of Helsinki from 2010 to 2017. Early life and career Askola first became involved with the Church as a child after the early death of her father. She started her theological studies at the University of Helsinki 1971 and continued them as an academic research assistant until 1981. In 1982 she was named the editor-in-chief of Vartija magazine together with Simo Knuuttila.
Go to Profile#36445
Julie Shigekuni
#36457
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Julie Shigekuni is an American writer and professor. Her novels include A Bridge Between Us, Invisible Gardens, Unending Nora, and In Plain View, and she has won a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico.
Go to Profile#36446
Patrick A. Lee
#36458
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Patrick A. Lee is a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . After spending ten years with the Theoretical Physics Department at Bell Laboratories, Lee joined MIT in 1982. He has contributed to the field of "mesoscopic physics," or the study of small devices at low temperatures. He has also made important contributions to the theory of disordered electronic systems, among them the concept of universal conductance fluctuations. He was awarded the 2005 Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics as well as the Oliver Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society.
Go to Profile#36447
Martín Espada
#36459
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Martín Espada is a Puerto Rican-American poet, and a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches poetry. Puerto Rico has frequently been featured as a theme in his poems.
Go to Profile#36448
Bradley Whitford
#36460
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Bradley Whitford is an American actor and producer. He is best known for his portrayal of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman in the NBC television political drama The West Wing , for which he was nominated for three consecutive Primetime Emmy Awards from 2001 to 2003, winning in 2001. The role earned him three consecutive Golden Globe Award nominations.
Go to Profile#36449
Salim Tamari
#36461
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Salim Tamari , is a Palestinian sociologist who is the director of the Institute of Palestine Studies and an adjunct professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, has called Tamari "the preeminent Palestinian historical sociologist."
Go to Profile#36450
Peter Funke
#36462
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Peter Funke is a German ancient historian. Life Peter Funke studied history and German studies at the University of Münster from 1969 to 1974. From 1975 to 1978, he held a research assistant position at the ancient history department of the institute for ancient world studies at the University of Cologne. In 1978, he received a doctorate from the University of Cologne, after which he continued to work as a research assistant at Cologne until 1985. Between 1979 and 1981, Funke simultaneously taught the subject of ancient history at the University of Siegen. In 1985 he achieved the habilitation at Cologne for a work entitled, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Struktur des Aitolischen Bundes .
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