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
#36451
Manfred Berg
#36463
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Manfred Berg is a German historian who serves as the Curt Engelhorn Chair in American History at Heidelberg University. He has also served as Heidelberg University's dean of faculty. He previously taught at the Free University of Berlin and served at the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C.
Go to Profile#36452
Jerzy Skolimowski
#36464
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Jerzy Skolimowski is a Polish film director, screenwriter, dramatist, actor and painter. Beginning as a screenwriter for Andrzej Wajda's Innocent Sorcerers , Skolimowski has made more than twenty films since his directorial debut The Menacing Eye . In 1967 he was awarded the Golden Bear prize for his Belgian film The Departure . Among his other notable films is Deep End , starring Jane Asher and John Moulder Brown.
Go to Profile#36453
Ingo Beyer von Morgenstern
#36465
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Ingo Beyer von Morgenstern is a Director Emeritus of McKinsey & Company and one of the longest-serving foreign professors in China at Tsinghua University. He currently serves as Chairman of both the Harbour.Space University in Barcelona and Qilin Capital Fund and at the advisory council of multiple families in Germany and Asia.
Go to Profile#36454
Farid F. Abraham
#36466
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Farid F. Abraham is an American scientist. He has pioneered new methods of using computer modeling in the fields of fracture mechanics, membrane dynamics and phase transformation behavior of matter. He has written two textbooks and over 200 papers published in international journals. He won the Aneesur Rahman Prize in Computational Physics, which is the highest prize given by the American Physical Society.
Go to Profile#36455
Matthew Stephens
#36467
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Matthew Stephens is a Bayesian statistician and professor in the departments of human genetics and statistics at the University of Chicago. He is known for the Li and Stephens model as an efficient coalescent.
Go to Profile#36456
Susan H. Rodger
#36468
Overall Influence
Susan H. Rodger is an American computer scientist known for work in computer science education including developing the software JFLAP for over twenty years. JFLAP is educational software for visualizing and interacting with formal languages and automata. Rodger is also known for peer-led team learning in computer science and integrating computing into middle schools and high schools with Alice. She is also currently serving on the board of CRA-W and was chair of ACM SIGCSE from 2013 to 2016.
Go to Profile#36457
Kedarnath Singh
#36469
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Kedarnath Singh was an Indian poet who wrote in Hindi. He was also an eminent critic and essayist. He was awarded the Jnanpith Award , Sahitya Akademi Award in Hindi for his poetry collection, Akaal Mein Saras .
Go to Profile#36458
Nigel Rodley
#36470
Overall Influence
1941 - 2017 (76 years)
Sir Nigel Simon Rodley KBE was an international lawyer and professor. Personal life Rodley was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire on 1 December 1941 to Hans Israel Rosenfeld and Rachel . His parents later changed their name to Rodley. His father, who served in the British Army under the name John Peter Rodley, was killed in action in the Netherlands in September 1944. He was educated at Clifton College, where he was a member of Polack's, the Jewish boarding house. He was of Jewish descent.
Go to Profile#36459
Harry Lindgren
#36471
Overall Influence
1912 - 1992 (80 years)
Harry Lindgren was a British-Australian engineer, linguist and amateur mathematician. Early life Lindgren was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England. In 1935 he emigrated to join his family in Perth, Australia. He received a BSc degree from the University of Western Australia and later became a Commonwealth Patent Officer. He married Eve Spokone, whom he had met at university, on 30 May 1941, the couple went on to have one daughter. Lindgren played violin in the Canberra Symphony Orchestra for a number of years.
Go to Profile#36460
William Van Alstyne
#36472
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
William Warner Van Alstyne was an American attorney, law professor, and constitutional law scholar. Prior to retiring in 2012, he held the named position of Lee Professor of Law at William and Mary Law School. He was the Perkins Professor of Law at Duke Law School for more than 30 years. Among many others, he taught at Chicago Law School, Stanford Law School, University of California, Berkeley Law School, University of California, Los Angeles Law School, and Michigan Law School.
Go to Profile#36461
Alfred W. Hales
#36473
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Alfred Washington Hales is an American mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the namesakes of the Hales–Jewett theorem. He was born in Pasadena, California, and is the older brother of R. Stanton Hales.
Go to Profile#36462
Bernard Schweizer
#36474
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Bernard Schweizer is a Professor Emeritus of English at Long Island University, Brooklyn. He has published several books and essay collections on topics in British and European literatures. He is a leading Rebecca West scholar and has edited or co-edited a number of Rebecca West’s previously unpublished and uncollected works. In 2003, he founded the International Rebecca West Society in New York and was the second president of the Society.
Go to Profile#36463
William Newsome
#36475
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
William Thomas Newsome is a neuroscientist at Stanford University who works to "understand the neuronal processes that mediate visual perception and visually guided behavior." He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#36464
Nasser Hussain
#36476
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Nasser Hussain is a British cricket commentator and former cricketer who captained the England cricket team between 1999 and 2003, with his overall international career extending from 1990 to 2004. A pugnacious right-handed batsman, Hussain scored over 30,000 runs from more than 650 matches across all first-class and List-A cricket, including 62 centuries. His highest Test score of 207, scored in the first Test of the 1997 Ashes at Edgbaston, was described by Wisden as "touched by genius". He played 96 Test matches and 88 One Day International games in total. In Tests he scored 5,764 runs, a...
Go to Profile#36465
Henry Johnstone Jr.
#36477
Overall Influence
1920 - 2000 (80 years)
Henry Johnstone Jr. was an American philosopher and rhetorician known especially for his notion of the "rhetorical wedge" and his re-evaluation of the ad hominem fallacy. He was Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University and began studying Classics in the late 1970s. He was the founder and longtime editor of the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric and edited the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.
Go to Profile#36466
Jinchao Xu
#36478
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Jinchao Xu is an American-Chinese mathematician. He is currently the Verne M. Willaman Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park. He is known for his work on multigrid methods, domain decomposition methods, finite element methods, and more recently deep neural networks.
Go to Profile#36467
Fred Lerdahl
#36479
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Alfred Whitford Lerdahl is the Fritz Reiner Professor Emeritus of Musical Composition at Columbia University, and a composer and music theorist best known for his work on musical grammar and cognition, rhythmic theory, pitch space, and cognitive constraints on compositional systems. He has written many orchestral and chamber works, three of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Music: Time after Time in 2001, String Quartet No. 3 in 2010, and Arches in 2011.
Go to Profile#36468
Nadiya Svitlychna
#36480
Overall Influence
1936 - 2006 (70 years)
Nadiya Oleksiyivna Svitlychna was a Ukrainian dissident and human rights activist, and an active member of the Ukrainian Helsinki group. She was a writer and editor and for a time was a political prisoner of the Soviet regime.
Go to Profile#36469
Peter Hoffmann
#36481
Overall Influence
1930 - 2023 (93 years)
Peter C. W. Hoffmann was a German-Canadian historian who was the William Kingsford Professor in the Department of History at McGill University. His principal area of research dealt with the German resistance against Nazism, and in particular, the resistance efforts of Claus von Stauffenberg. Hoffmann lived in Canada and in Germany.
Go to Profile#36470
Jack Hirsh
#36482
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Jack Hirsh is a Canadian clinician and scientist specializing in anticoagulant therapy and thrombosis. Born in Melbourne, Australia, Hirsh is a graduate of the University of Melbourne Medical School. He studied hematology at Washington University in St. Louis, the London Postgraduate Medical School and the University of Toronto. In 1973 he joined the Faculty of Medicine of McMaster University. He is also the Director of the Hamilton Civic Hospital Research Centre.
Go to Profile#36471
James Emanuel
#36483
Overall Influence
1921 - 2013 (92 years)
James Emanuel was a poet and scholar from Alliance, Nebraska. Emanuel, who is ranked by some critics as one of the best and most neglected poets of the 20th century, published more than 300 poems, 13 individual books, an influential anthology of African-American literature, an autobiography, and more. He is also credited with creating a new literary genre, jazz-and-blues haiku, often read with musical accompaniment.
Go to Profile#36472
Richard Buckingham
#36484
Overall Influence
1911 - 1994 (83 years)
Richard Arthur Buckingham FBCS FRSA was an English particle physicist, mathematician and computer scientist long on the staff of the University of London. He was also a Fellow of the British Computer Society and of the Royal Society of Arts and chaired the Technical Committee for Education of the International Federation for Information Processing. He was also the originator of the Buckingham potential formula.
Go to Profile#36473
Vic Damone
#36485
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Vic Damone was an American traditional pop and big band singer and actor. He was best known for his performances of songs such as the number one hit "You're Breaking My Heart", and other hits like "On the Street Where You Live" and "I Have But One Heart".
Go to Profile#36474
Stephen Barber
#36486
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Stephen Barber is a professor at Kingston University and a writer on urban culture, experiment in film and Japanese culture. Barber has been a professor at Kingston University since 2002, and is currently a Research Professor in the Visual and Material Culture Research Centre, Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture. He has previously worked at such institutions as the California Institute of the Arts, University of Tokyo, Berlin University of the Arts, and Sussex University. He has a PhD from the University of London, and has lived in Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles, Vienna and London. He has...
Go to Profile#36475
Mark Mathabane
#36487
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Mark Mathabane is a South African author, lecturer, and a former collegiate tennis player and college professor. Early life in South Africa Mathabane was born in Alexandra, South Africa, an area that is a part of Johannesburg, the capital of the province of Gauteng. He was born to a life of poverty in the apartheid political setting of South Africa. His father was Jackson Mathabane, a Venda labourer who had an income of $10 a month. Mathabane has also stated that his father struggled with alcohol and gambling, and was even abusive. Magdalene Mathabane was Mathabane's mother. She had been sold to Jackson Mathabane as a wife at the age of fifteen by her mother.
Go to Profile#36476
Lee A. Thompson
#36488
Overall Influence
Lee Anne Thompson is an American psychology professor known for her work in behavior genetics and the biological processes involved in intelligence. Career Thompson earned her B.A. from Case Western Reserve University in 1982, then attended University of Colorado at Boulder, earning an M.A. in 1985 and her Ph.D. in 1987. She currently teaches at Case Western and is on the editorial board of Intelligence.
Go to Profile#36477
Ronald C. Arkin
#36489
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ronald Craig Arkin is an American roboticist and roboethicist, and a Regents' Professor in the School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is known for the motor schema technique in robot navigation and for his book Behavior-Based Robotics.
Go to Profile#36478
Rahul Mukerjee
#36490
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Rahul Mukerjee is an Indian academic and statistician. He is a National Science Chair of the Government of India, hosted by the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, after his superannuation from the same institute in 2021 as a professor in the higher academic grade. He is also an emeritus scientist of the Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi.
Go to Profile#36479
Donald William Kerst
#36491
Overall Influence
1911 - 1993 (82 years)
Donald William Kerst was an American physicist who worked on advanced particle accelerator concepts and plasma physics. He is most notable for his development of the betatron, a novel type of particle accelerator used to accelerate electrons.
Go to Profile#36480
Peter Grassberger
#36492
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Peter Grassberger is a retired professor who worked in statistical and particle physics. He made contributions to chaos theory, where he introduced the idea of correlation dimension, a means of measuring a type of fractal dimension of the strange attractor.
Go to Profile#36481
Bruno Coppi
#36493
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Bruno Coppi is an Italian-American physicist specializing in plasma physics. In 1959, Coppi attained an Italian doctoral degree at Polytechnic University of Milan and was subsequently a docent and research scientist at the Polytechnic Institute and the University of Milan. In 1961, he was a scientist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. From 1964 to 1967, he was an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, from 1967 to 1969 at the Institute for Advanced Study, and from 1968 professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the 1980s, Coppi was a member o...
Go to Profile#36482
Darcy Frey
#36494
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Darcy Frey is an American writer and educator from New York. His 1994 book The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams won awards and inspired a movie. Frey has published articles in New England Monthly, Rolling Stone, Harper's, and The New York Times Magazine.
Go to Profile#36483
Debbie Wasserman Schultz
#36495
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Deborah Wasserman Schultz is an American politician serving as the U.S. representative for , first elected to Congress in 2004. A member of the Democratic Party, she is a former chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Go to Profile#36484
Maury Wills
#36496
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
Maurice Morning Wills was an American professional baseball player and manager. He played in Major League Baseball as a shortstop from 1959 to 1972, most prominently as an integral member of the Los Angeles Dodgers teams that won three World Series titles between and . He also played for the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Montreal Expos. Wills is credited with reviving the stolen base as part of baseball strategy.
Go to Profile#36485
Eli Ruckenstein
#36497
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Eli Ruckenstein was an American distinguished professor at the department of chemical and biological engineering, The State University of New York at Buffalo. His main research areas were catalysis, surface science, colloids and emulsions, and bio-compatible surfaces and materials.
Go to Profile#36486
Frederic Parke
#36498
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Frederic Ira Parke is an American computer graphics researcher and academic. He did early work on animated computer renderings of human faces. Parke graduated from the University of Utah with a BS degree in physics in 1965. He was then a graduate student of the University of Utah College of Engineering where he received his MS and PhD in computer science.
Go to Profile#36487
John Vincent
#36499
Overall Influence
1937 - 2021 (84 years)
John Russell Vincent was a British historian and Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. Early life and education Vincent was educated at Bedales School and Christ's College, Cambridge. Academic career Vincent joined the University of Bristol in 1970 as Professor of Modern History, from 1984 Professor of History, until his retirement in 2002 when he became Emeritus Professor. He subsequently became Visiting Professor at the University of East Anglia.
Go to Profile#36488
Richard Feachem
#36500
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Sir Richard George Andrew Feachem, KBE, FREng is professor of global health at both the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Global Health Group at UCSF Global Health Sciences. He is also a visiting professor at the University of London and an honorary professor at the University of Queensland.
Go to Profile#36489
Dan Graur
#36501
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Dan Graur \ˈɡra.ur\ is a Romanian-American scientist working in the field of molecular evolution. He is a Moores Professor at the University of Houston and Professor Emeritus of Zoology at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He is coauthor along with Wen-Hsiung Li of Fundamentals of Molecular Evolution. His Molecular and Genome Evolution was published in 2016.
Go to Profile#36490
Magnus Norman
#36502
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Magnus Norman is a Swedish tennis coach and former professional player. He has been ranked by the Association of Tennis Professionals as high as world No. 2, in June 2000. His career highlights include reaching a major final at the French Open in 2000 , and winning a Masters title at the 2000 Rome Masters .
Go to Profile#36491
Danny Welbeck
#36503
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (36 years)
Daniel Nii Tackie Mensah Welbeck is an English professional footballer who plays as a forward for club Brighton & Hove Albion. Welbeck made his way through the youth teams at Manchester United before making his senior debut in 2008 and scoring in the process. He was with United when they won the 2008–09 League Cup and the 2008 FIFA Club World Cup before being sent on loan spells with Preston North End and Sunderland. From the 2011–12 season, Welbeck was a regular figure in the Manchester United first team. He was transferred to Arsenal in September 2014 for a £16 million fee. In August 2019,...
Go to Profile#36492
Philip Barlow
#36504
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Philip Layton Barlow is a Harvard-trained scholar who specializes in American religious history, religious geography, and Mormonism. In 2019, Barlow was appointed associate director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship . Barlow was the first full-time professor of Mormon studies at a secular university as the inaugural Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University , from 2007 to 2018.
Go to Profile#36493
Paul A. Goble
#36505
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Paul A. Goble is an American analyst, writer and columnist with expertise on Russia. Trained at Miami University and the University of Chicago , he is the editor of four volumes on ethnic issues in the former Soviet Union and has published more than 150 articles on ethnic and nationality questions. Goble served as special adviser on Soviet nationality issues and Baltic affairs to Secretary of State James Baker.
Go to Profile#36494
Murray Levin
#36506
Overall Influence
1927 - 1999 (72 years)
Murray Burton Levin was a political science professor at Boston University from 1955 through his retirement in 1989. A progressive who once had been a member of the Communist Party USA, Levin was an unreconstructed radical throughout his academic career. In addition to teaching a popular core course on political science, Levin specialized in teaching Marxist political theory to both undergraduate and graduate students. Long before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Levin eventually came to the conclusion that Marxist theory was not a science, let alone a viable system of economics, but was a powerful propaganda tool to mobilize the masses against capital.
Go to Profile#36495
Janet Franklin
#36507
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Janet Franklin is an American geographer, botanist, and landscape ecologist. Her work is centered on the use of remote sensing to model and understand vegetated landscapes. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of Biogeography in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at the University of California Riverside.
Go to Profile#36496
Oskar Spate
#36508
Overall Influence
1911 - 2000 (89 years)
Oskar Hermann Khristian Spate was a London-born geographer best known for his role in strengthening geography as a discipline in Australia and the Pacific. Early life Spate was born to a German father and an English mother in the Bloomsbury district of London, England. During the First World War, his father was interned as a German national and Spate fled to Iowa in the United States. He returned to England in 1919, where he developed an early interest in geography and history. He went on to study at St Catharine's College, Cambridge University in the 1930s. It was during this period that man...
Go to Profile#36497
Ken Lunde
#36509
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Ken Roger Lunde is an American specialist in information processing for East Asian languages. Academic Background Ken majored in linguistics at University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1985, where he obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1987, Master of Arts degree in 1988, and graduated with a doctoral thesis on the simplification of Japanese characters in 1994, titled "Prescriptive Kanji Simplification", which was written under the supervision of Professor Andrew Sihler.
Go to Profile#36498
Aisha Abd al-Rahman
#36510
Overall Influence
1913 - 1998 (85 years)
Aisha Abd al-Rahman was an Egyptian author and professor of literature who published under the pen name Bint al-Shaṭiʾ . Life and career She was born on 18 November 1913 in Damietta in the governorate of Domyat, Egypt, where her father taught at the Domyat Religious Institute. When she was ten, her mother, though illiterate, enrolled her in school while her father was traveling. Though her father objected, her mother later sent Aisha to El Mansurah for further education. Later, Aisha studied Arabic at Cairo University earning her undergraduate degree in 1939, and an M.A. degree in 1941.
Go to Profile#36499
N. C. Saxena
#36511
Overall Influence
Naresh Chandra Saxena is an Indian bureaucrat who served as a member of the Planning Commission of India. College After going to Allahabad University for earning his First Masters in Physics while still in his teens, he went on to earn a Doctorate in Forestry from University of Oxford, in 1992. He was awarded honorary Ph.D from the University of East Anglia in 2006.
Go to Profile#36500
Daniel Meltzer
#36512
Overall Influence
1951 - 2015 (64 years)
Daniel Julius Meltzer was an American lawyer and law professor who taught at Harvard Law School. He worked in the Obama Administration as Principal Deputy Counsel from January 2009 through June 1, 2010.
Go to Profile