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
#3651
Ralph M. Steinman
#3658
Overall Influence
1943 - 2011 (68 years)
Ralph Marvin Steinman was a Canadian physician and medical researcher at Rockefeller University, who in 1973 discovered and named dendritic cells while working as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Zanvil A. Cohn, also at Rockefeller University. Steinman was one of the recipients of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Go to Profile#3652
Eric Hanushek
#3659
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Eric Alan Hanushek is an economist who has written prolifically on public policy with a special emphasis on the economics of education. Since 2000, he has been a Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an American public policy think tank located at Stanford University in California. He was awarded the Yidan Prize for Education Research in 2021.
Go to Profile#3653
Frances Arnold
#3660
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
#3654
William Chittick
#3661
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
William Clark Chittick is an American philosopher, writer, translator and interpreter of classical Islamic philosophical and mystical texts. He is best known for his work on Rumi and Ibn 'Arabi, and has written extensively on the school of Ibn 'Arabi, Islamic philosophy, and Islamic cosmology. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University.
Go to Profile#3655
Richard Wrangham
#3662
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Richard Walter Wrangham is an English anthropologist and primatologist; he is Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. His research and writing have involved ape behavior, human evolution, violence, and cooking.
Go to Profile#3656
George M. Whitesides
#3663
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
George McClelland Whitesides is an American chemist and professor of chemistry at Harvard University. He is best known for his work in the areas of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, organometallic chemistry, molecular self-assembly, soft lithography, microfabrication, microfluidics, and nanotechnology. A prolific author and patent holder who has received many awards, he received the highest Hirsch index rating of all living chemists in 2011.
Go to Profile#3657
Julian Barnes
#3664
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Julian Patrick Barnes is an English writer. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having been shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George. Barnes has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh . In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories.
Go to Profile#3658
Stephen Toope
#3665
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Stephen John Toope is a Canadian legal scholar, academic administrator and a scholar specializing in human rights, public international law and international relations. In November 2022, he was appointed as the fifth President and CEO of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research . Prior to this, he served for five years as the 346th Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#3659
Iain Hamilton Grant
#3666
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Iain Hamilton Grant is a British philosopher. He is a senior lecturer at the University of the West of England in Bristol, United Kingdom. His research interests include ontology, European philosophy, German Idealism , and both contemporary and historical philosophy of nature. He is often associated with the recent philosophical current known as Speculative Realism.
Go to Profile#3660
James Lipton
#3667
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Louis James Lipton was an American writer, lyricist, actor, and dean emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University in New York City. He was the executive producer, writer, and host of the Bravo cable television series Inside the Actors Studio, which debuted in 1994. He retired from the show in 2018.
Go to Profile#3661
David J. Malan
#3668
Overall Influence
David Jay Malan is an American computer scientist and professor. Malan is a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, and is best known for teaching the course CS50, which is the largest open-learning course at Harvard University and Yale University and the largest Massive Open Online Course at EdX, with lectures being viewed by over a million people on the edX platform up to 2017.
Go to Profile#3662
Bruce Timm
#3669
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Bruce Walter Timm is an American artist, animator, writer, producer, and director. He is best known for contributing to building the modern DC Comics animated franchise, most notably as the head producer behind Batman: The Animated Series , Superman: The Animated Series , The New Batman Adventures , Batman Beyond , Justice League , and Justice League Unlimited .
Go to Profile#3663
Giulio Tononi
#3670
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Giulio Tononi is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist who holds the David P. White Chair in Sleep Medicine, as well as a Distinguished Chair in Consciousness Science, at the University of Wisconsin. He is best known for his Integrated Information Theory , a mathematical theory of consciousness, which he has proposed since 2004.
Go to Profile#3664
Frank Kameny
#3671
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Franklin Edward Kameny was an American gay rights activist. He has been referred to as "one of the most significant figures" in the American gay rights movement. During the Lavender scare, in 1957, Kameny was dismissed from his position as an astronomer in the U.S. Army's Army Map Service in Washington, D.C., because of his homosexuality, leading him to begin "a Herculean struggle with the American establishment" that would "spearhead a new period of militancy in the homosexual rights movement of the early 1960s".
Go to Profile#3665
Alfred Kazin
#3672
Overall Influence
1915 - 1998 (83 years)
Alfred Kazin was an American writer and literary critic. He wrote often about the immigrant experience in early twentieth-century America. Early life Like many other of the New York Intellectuals, Alfred Kazin was the son of Jewish immigrants, born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and a graduate of the City College of New York. However, his politics were more moderate than most of the New York Intellectuals, many of whom were socialists.
Go to Profile#3666
Jens Christian Skou
#3673
Overall Influence
1918 - 2018 (100 years)
Jens Christian Skou was a Danish biochemist and Nobel laureate. Early life Skou was born in Lemvig, Denmark to a wealthy family. His father Magnus Martinus Skou was a timber and coal merchant. His mother Ane-Margrethe Skou took over the company after the death of his father. At the age of 15, Skou entered a boarding school in Haslev, Zealand. He graduated in medicine from the University of Copenhagen in 1944 and received his doctorate in 1954. He began working at the Aarhus University in 1947 and was appointed professor of biophysics in 1977. He retired from the Aarhus University in 1988, but...
Go to Profile#3667
Rosi Braidotti
#3674
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Rosi Braidotti is a contemporary philosopher and feminist theoretician. Born in Italy, she studied in Australia and France and works in the Netherlands. Biography Career Braidotti, who holds Italian and Australian citizenship, was born in Italy and moved to Australia when she was 16, where she received degrees from the Australian National University in Canberra in 1977 and was awarded the University Medal in Philosophy and the University Tillyard prize. Braidotti then moved on to do her doctoral work at the Sorbonne, where she received her degree in philosophy in 1981. She has taught at th...
Go to Profile#3668
Joseph B. Soloveitchik
#3675
Overall Influence
1903 - 1993 (90 years)
Joseph Ber Soloveitchik was a major American Orthodox rabbi, Talmudist, and modern Jewish philosopher. He was a scion of the Lithuanian Jewish Soloveitchik rabbinic dynasty. As a rosh yeshiva of Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva University in New York City, The Rav, as he was known, ordained close to 2,000 rabbis over the course of almost half a century. Rabbinic literature sometimes refers to him as הגרי"ד, short for "The great Rabbi Yosef Dov".
Go to Profile#3669
Barry Scheck
#3676
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Barry Charles Scheck is an American attorney and legal scholar. He received national media attention while serving on O. J. Simpson's defense team, collectively dubbed the "Dream Team", helping to win an acquittal in the highly publicized murder case. Scheck is the director of the Innocence Project and a professor at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City.
Go to Profile#3670
Yurii Nesterov
#3677
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Yurii Nesterov is a Russian mathematician, an internationally recognized expert in convex optimization, especially in the development of efficient algorithms and numerical optimization analysis. He is currently a professor at the University of Louvain .
Go to Profile#3671
Raymond Leo Burke
#3678
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Raymond Leo Burke is an American prelate of the Catholic Church. He is a bishop and a cardinal, and was a patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta from 2014 to 2023. He led the Archdiocese of St. Louis from 2004 to 2008 and the Diocese of La Crosse from 1995 to 2004. From 2008 to 2014, he was the prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura.
Go to Profile#3672
James Brown
#3679
Overall Influence
1933 - 2006 (73 years)
James Joseph Brown was an American singer and musician. The central progenitor of funk music and a major figure of 20th-century music, he is referred to by various honorific nicknames, some of which include "the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business", "Godfather of Soul", "Mr. Dynamite", and "Soul Brother No. 1". In a career that lasted more than 50 years, he influenced the development of several music genres. Brown was one of the first 10 inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural induction in New York on January 23, 1986.
Go to Profile#3673
Svetlana Alliluyeva
#3680
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva , later known as Lana Peters, was the youngest child and only daughter of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva. In 1967, she became an international sensation when she defected to the United States and, in 1978, became a naturalized citizen. From 1984 to 1986, she briefly returned to the Soviet Union and had her Soviet citizenship reinstated. She was Stalin's last surviving child.
Go to Profile#3674
A. Michael Noll
#3681
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
A. Michael Noll is an American engineer, and professor emeritus at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. He served as dean of the Annenberg School from 1992 to 1994. He was a very early pioneer in digital computer art and 3D animation and tactile communication.
Go to Profile#3675
Tony Snow
#3682
Overall Influence
1955 - 2008 (53 years)
Robert Anthony Snow was an American journalist, political commentator, anchor, columnist, musician, and the 25th White House Press Secretary under President George W. Bush, from May 2006 until his resignation in September 2007. Snow also worked for the President George H. W. Bush as chief speechwriter and Deputy Assistant of Media Affairs, from 1991 to 1993. Between his two White House stints, Snow was a broadcaster and newspaper columnist. After years of regular guest-hosting for The Rush Limbaugh Show and providing news commentary for National Public Radio, he launched his own talk radio program, The Tony Snow Show, which went on to become nationally syndicated.
Go to Profile#3676
John R. Allen
#3683
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
John Rutherford Allen is a retired United States Marine Corps four-star general, and former commander of the NATO International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces – Afghanistan . On September 13, 2014, President Barack Obama appointed Allen as special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL . He was succeeded in that role by Brett McGurk on October 23, 2015. He is the co-author of Turning Point: Policymaking in the Era of Artificial Intelligence with Darrell M. West and Future War and the Defence of Europe alongside Lieutenant General Ben Hodges and Professor Julian Lindley French .
Go to Profile#3677
Margaret Weis
#3684
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Margaret Edith Weis is an American fantasy and science fiction author of dozens of novels and short stories. At TSR, Inc., she teamed with Tracy Hickman to create the Dragonlance role-playing game world. She is founding CEO and owner of Sovereign Press, Inc and Margaret Weis Productions, licensing several popular television and movie franchises to make RPG series in addition to their own.
Go to Profile#3678
Paul Muldoon
#3685
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet. He has published more than thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize. At Princeton University he has been both the Howard G. B. Clark '21 University Professor in the Humanities and Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. He held the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004 and has also served as president of the Poetry Society and poetry editor at The New Yorker.
Go to Profile#3679
Ernest Moniz
#3686
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Ernest Jeffrey Moniz, GCIH is an American nuclear physicist and former government official. From May 2013 to January 2017, he served as the 13th United States secretary of energy in the Obama administration. Prior to this, Moniz served as associate director for science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and undersecretary of energy from 1997 to 2001 during the Clinton administration. He is currently the co-chair and CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative , as well as president and CEO of the Energy Futur...
Go to Profile#3680
Martin Lings
#3687
Overall Influence
1909 - 2005 (96 years)
Martin Lings , also known as Abū Bakr Sirāj ad-Dīn, was an English writer, Islamic scholar, and philosopher. A student of the Swiss metaphysician Frithjof Schuon and an authority on the work of William Shakespeare, he is best known as the author of Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, first published in 1983 and still in print.
Go to Profile#3681
Lloyd R. Welch
#3688
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Lloyd Richard Welch is an American information theorist and applied mathematician, and co-inventor of the Baum–Welch algorithm and the Berlekamp–Welch algorithm, also known as the Welch–Berlekamp algorithm.
Go to Profile#3682
Daniel Batson
#3689
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
C. Daniel Batson is an American social psychologist. He has two doctoral degrees, in theology and psychology . Batson obtained his doctorate under John Darley and taught at the University of Kansas. He retired in 2006 and now is an emeritus professor in the psychology department of the University of Tennessee. He is best known for his contributions to the social psychology of altruism, empathic concern, and psychology of religion.
Go to Profile#3683
Arman
#3690
Overall Influence
1928 - 2005 (77 years)
Arman was a French-born American artist. Born Armand Fernandez in Nice, France, Arman was a painter who moved from using objects for the ink or paint traces they leave to using them as the artworks themselves. He is best known for his Accumulations and destruction/recomposition of objects.
Go to Profile#3684
Lev Manovich
#3691
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Lev Manovich is an artist, an author and a theorist of digital culture. He is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Manovich played a key role in creating four new research fields: new media studies , software studies , cultural analytics and AI aesthetics . Manovich's current research focuses on generative media, AI culture, digital art, and media theory.
Go to Profile#3685
Ray Monk
#3692
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Ray Monk is a British biographer who is renowned for his biographies of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. He is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Southampton, where he taught in various capacities from 1992 to 2018.
Go to Profile#3686
Ketanji Brown Jackson
#3693
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson is an American lawyer and jurist who is an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Jackson was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Joe Biden on February 25, 2022, and confirmed by the U.S. Senate and sworn into office that same year. She is the first black woman and the first former federal public defender to serve on the Supreme Court.
Go to Profile#3687
Alice Dreger
#3694
Overall Influence
Alice Domurat Dreger is an American historian, bioethicist, author, and former professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, in Chicago, Illinois.
Go to Profile#3688
Eugene Volokh
#3695
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Eugene Volokh is an American legal scholar known for his scholarship in American constitutional law and libertarianism as well as his prominent legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy. Volokh is regarded as an expert on the First Amendment. He is the Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is an affiliate at the law firm Schaerr Jaffe.
Go to Profile#3689
Alfred G. Gilman
#3696
Overall Influence
1941 - 2015 (74 years)
Alfred Goodman Gilman was an American pharmacologist and biochemist. He and Martin Rodbell shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discovery of G-proteins and the role of these proteins in signal transduction in cells."
Go to Profile#3690
Jozo Tomasevich
#3697
Overall Influence
1908 - 1994 (86 years)
Josip "Jozo" Tomasevich was an American economist and historian who was a leading expert on the economic and social history of the former Yugoslavia, and after his retirement was appointed professor emeritus of economics at San Francisco State University. Tomasevich was born in the Kingdom of Dalmatia, part of Austria-Hungary, and after completing his schooling gained a doctorate in economics at the University of Basel in Switzerland. In the mid-1930s he worked at the National Bank of Yugoslavia in Belgrade and published three well-received books on Yugoslav national debt, fiscal policy, and ...
Go to Profile#3691
Marcus Borg
#3698
Overall Influence
1942 - 2015 (73 years)
Marcus Joel Borg was an American New Testament scholar and theologian. He was among the most widely known and influential voices in Liberal Christianity. Borg was a fellow of the Jesus Seminar and a major figure in historical Jesus scholarship. He retired as Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University in 2007. He died eight years later at the age of 72, of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis at his home in Powell Butte, Oregon.
Go to Profile#3692
Fredrik Barth
#3699
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Thomas Fredrik Weybye Barth was a Norwegian social anthropologist who published several ethnographic books with a clear formalist view. He was a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University, and previously held professorships at the University of Oslo, the University of Bergen , Emory University and Harvard University. He was appointed a government scholar in 1985.
Go to Profile#3693
Roy Kerr
#3700
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Roy Patrick Kerr is a New Zealand mathematician who discovered the Kerr geometry, an exact solution to the Einstein field equation of general relativity. His solution models the gravitational field outside an uncharged rotating massive object, including a rotating black hole. His solution to Einstein's equations predicted spinning black holes before they were discovered.
Go to Profile#3694
Shoshana Felman
#3701
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Shoshana Felman is an American literary critic and current Woodruff Professor of Comparative Literature and French at Emory University. She was on the faculty of Yale University from 1970 to 2004, where in 1986 she was awarded the Thomas E. Donnelly Professorship of French and Comparative Literature. She specializes in 19th and 20th century French literature, psychoanalysis, trauma and testimony, and law and literature. Felman earned her Ph.D. at the University of Grenoble in France in 1970.
Go to Profile#3695
Lopamudra
#3702
Overall Influence
Lopamudra, also known as Kaveri, Kaushitaki and Varaprada, was a philosopher according to ancient Vedic Indian literature. She was the wife of the sage Agastya who is believed to have lived in the Rigveda period as many hymns have been attributed as her contribution to this Veda. She was not only the consort of Agastya but a Rishiki in her own right, as she was the well known Rishiki who visualized the "Hadi Panchadasi" mantra of the Srikul Shakta tradition of Hinduism. She was one of the prominent Brahmavadinis.
Go to Profile#3696
Richard P. Stanley
#3703
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Richard Peter Stanley is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 2000 to 2010, he was the Norman Levinson Professor of Applied Mathematics. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1971 under the supervision of Gian-Carlo Rota. He is an expert in the field of combinatorics and its applications to other mathematical disciplines.
Go to Profile#3697
Luca Cardelli
#3704
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Luca Andrea Cardelli is an Italian computer scientist who is a research professor at the University of Oxford, UK. Cardelli is well known for his research in type theory and operational semantics. Among other contributions, in programming languages, he helped design the language Modula-3, implemented the first compiler for the functional language ML, defined the concept of typeful programming, and helped develop the experimental language Polyphonic C#.
Go to Profile#3698
George Dyson
#3705
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
George Dyson is an American non-fiction author and historian of technology whose publications broadly cover the evolution of technology in relation to the physical environment and the direction of society. He has written on a wide range of topics, including the history of computing, the development of algorithms and intelligence, communications systems, space exploration, and the design of watercraft.
Go to Profile#3699
Christina Maslach
#3706
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Christina Maslach is an American social psychologist and professor emerita of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, known for her research on occupational burnout. She is a co-author of the Maslach Burnout Inventory and Areas of Worklife Survey. Early in her professional career, Maslach was instrumental in stopping the Stanford prison experiment. In 1997, she was awarded the U.S. Professor of the Year.
Go to Profile#3700
Anthony Lewis
#3707
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Joseph Anthony Lewis was an American public intellectual and journalist. He was a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and was a columnist for The New York Times. He is credited with creating the field of legal journalism in the United States.
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