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
#36801
Maurice White
#36813
Overall Influence
1941 - 2016 (75 years)
Maurice White was an American singer, musician, songwriter, bandleader, and record producer. He was best known as the founder, leader, main songwriter and chief producer of the band Earth, Wind & Fire, also serving as the band's co-lead singer with Philip Bailey.
Go to Profile#36802
Patricia Grimshaw
#36814
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Patricia Ann Grimshaw, is a retired Australian academic who specialised in women's and Indigenous peoples' history. One of her most influential works is Women's Suffrage in New Zealand, first published in 1972, which is considered the definitive work on the story of how New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote.
Go to Profile#36803
Laurence Thomas
#36815
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Laurence Thomas is an American philosopher. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Political Science at Syracuse University. Thomas is noted for his work on moral luck, social philosophy and American Blacks and Jews.
Go to Profile#36804
Pavao Pavličić
#36816
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Pavao Pavličić is a Croatian writer, literary historian and translator whose main focus are crime novels. He writes for both adults and children. Pavao Pavličić was born on August 16, 1946, in Vukovar, where he completed elementary school and high school. In 1969, he graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of Zagreb University with a degree in comparative literature and the Italian language, and in 1974 he received his doctorate with a thesis in the field of metrics .
Go to Profile#36805
Frédéric-Yves Jeannet
#36817
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Frédéric-Yves Jeannet is a writer and professor of French origin who emigrated to Mexico in his youth. He was born in Grenoble, France, in 1959 and left it in 1975. Jeannet earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in comparative literature at the University of Grenoble. He then lived in London until 1977 before moving to Mexico. He currently lives in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Go to Profile#36806
Peter Ozsváth
#36818
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Peter Steven Ozsváth is a professor of mathematics at Princeton University. He created, along with Zoltán Szabó, Heegaard Floer homology, a homology theory for 3-manifolds. Education Ozsváth received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1994 under the supervision of John Morgan; his dissertation was entitled On Blowup Formulas For SU Donaldson Polynomials.
Go to Profile#36807
Jeffrey H. Miller
#36819
Overall Influence
#36808
V. C. Wynne-Edwards
#36820
Overall Influence
1906 - 1997 (91 years)
Vero Copner Wynne-Edwards, CBE, FRS, FRSE was an English zoologist. He was best known for his advocacy of group selection, the theory that natural selection acts at the level of the group. Life He was born in Leeds on 4 July 1906 the son of Rev Canon John Rosindale Wynne-Edwards and his wife, Lilian Agnes Streatfield. He attended Rugby School then studied Zoology at Oxford University graduating MA. In 1929 he took a post at McGill University in Canada, lecturing in zoology. This was interrupted by the Second World War during which he served in the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve. After the war A...
Go to Profile#36809
D. Kern Holoman
#36821
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Dallas Kern Holoman is an American musicologist and conductor, particularly known for his scholarship on the life and works of Hector Berlioz. Life and career Holoman was born in Raleigh, North Carolina on September 8, 1947, to W. Kern and Katherine Highsmith Holoman. He attended Duke University as an undergraduate, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in music in 1969. After receiving a Master of Fine Arts from Princeton University in 1971, he received a Fulbright Fellowship and embarked on his doctoral dissertation, Autograph Musical Documents of Hector Berlioz, c. 1818–1840. He joined the facult...
Go to Profile#36810
Jane Hillston
#36822
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Jane Elizabeth Hillston is a British computer scientist who is professor of quantitative modelling and head of school in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Early life and education Hillston received a BA in Mathematics from the University of York in 1985, an MSc in Mathematics from Lehigh University in the United States in 1987 and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh in 1994, where she has spent her subsequent academic career. Her PhD thesis was awarded the BCS/CPHC Distinguished Dissertation Awards in 1995 and has been published by Cambridg...
Go to Profile#36811
Jono Bacon
#36823
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Jonathan Edward James Bacon is a writer and software engineer, originally from the United Kingdom, but now based in California. He works as a consultant on community strategy. History Bacon started his work with the Linux community when he created the Linux UK website. When he left this project he moved on to join the KDE team, where he created the KDE::Enterprise website and KDE Usability Study, before shifting his attention to GNOME
Go to Profile#36812
Shuji Ogino
#36824
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Shuji Ogino is a molecular pathological epidemiologist, pathologist, and epidemiologist. He is currently Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is also Chief of Program in MPE Molecular Pathological Epidemiology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and an associate member of Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He has been known for his work on establishing a new discipline, molecular pathological epidemiology , which represents an interdisciplinary science o...
Go to Profile#36813
Harry Reis
#36825
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Harry Reis is a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. He has been a leading figure in the field of social psychology, credited with helping to launch the study of relationship science and notable for his contribution to theories of intimacy. His research encompasses emotional regulation, the factors that influence social interaction, and consequences of different socializing patterns for health and psychological well-being.
Go to Profile#36814
David R. Mayhew
#36826
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
David R. Mayhew is a political scientist and Sterling Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Yale University. He is widely considered one of the leading scholars on the United States Congress, and the author of nine influential books on American politics, including Congress: The Electoral Connection. In 2017, University of California, Berkeley professor Eric Schickler chronicled Mayhew's lifetime of contributions to the study of Congress in a journal article published in The Forum. Mayhew has been a member of the Yale faculty since 1968, and his students include several leading contempora...
Go to Profile#36815
Jeffrey N. Cox
#36827
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Jeffrey N. Cox is Arts and Sciences Professor of Distinction in English Literature and Humanities and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author or editor of ten books and more than forty scholarly articles. Cox specializes in English and European Romanticism, cultural theory, and cultural studies. He is a leading scholar of late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century drama and theater; of the Cockney School of poets, which included, among others, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and Leigh Hunt; and of the poetry of William Wordsworth.
Go to Profile#36816
Bert Jansch
#36828
Overall Influence
1943 - 2011 (68 years)
Herbert Jansch was a Scottish folk musician and founding member of the band Pentangle. He was born in Glasgow and came to prominence in London in the 1960s as an acoustic guitarist and singer-songwriter. He recorded more than 28 albums and toured extensively from the 1960s to the 21st century.
Go to Profile#36817
Nada Golmie
#36829
Overall Influence
Nada Taleb Golmie is an American computer scientist and engineer. She is chief of the wireless networks division in the Communications Technology Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Go to Profile#36818
Alfredo Romero
#36830
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Alfredo Romero Mendoza is a Venezuelan lawyer, human rights activist and executive director of the non-governmental organization Foro Penal. He received the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2017.
Go to Profile#36819
Jan Hron
#36831
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Jan Hron is a Czech agroscientist, University Professor and former Rector of the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague . Biography Hron was born on September 17, 1941; he is married and has two children. Former Rector of the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague , and three times Dean of the Faculty of Economics & Management
Go to Profile#36820
Mikkel Thorup
#36832
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Mikkel Thorup is a Danish computer scientist working at University of Copenhagen. He completed his undergraduate education at Technical University of Denmark and his doctoral studies at Oxford University in 1993. From 1993 to 1998, he was at University of Copenhagen and from 1998 to 2013 he was at AT&T Labs-Research in New Jersey. Since 2013 he has been at the University of Copenhagen as a Professor and Head of Center for Efficient Algorithms and Data Structures .
Go to Profile#36821
Shigeo Fukuda
#36833
Overall Influence
1932 - 2009 (77 years)
was a sculptor, medallist, graphic artist and poster designer who created optical illusions. His art pieces usually portray deception, such as Lunch With a Helmet On, a sculpture created entirely from forks, knives, and spoons, that casts a detailed shadow of a motorcycle.
Go to Profile#36822
Cicely Berry
#36834
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Cicely Frances Berry was a British theatre director and vocal coach. Berry trained under Elsie Fogerty at the Central School of Speech and Drama, then based at the Royal Albert Hall, London. She was the voice director for the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1969 to 2014, and worked as a voice and text coach as an instructor at London's Central School of Speech and Drama. She conducted workshops all over the globe, including Korea, Russia, and Asia. Her work also extended to prisons, using Shakespeare as a vessel to find confidence in speaking and response to imagery. One of her earliest teachers was Barbara Bunch.
Go to Profile#36823
Jingmai O'Connor
#36835
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Jingmai Kathleen O'Connor is a paleontologist who works as a curator at the Field Museum. Biography O'Connor is from Pasadena, California. Her mother is a geologist. O'Connor says that while she was not a dinosaur enthusiast as a child, being present for her mother's geology fieldwork began her interest in the subject. She explains, "I enjoyed going to the field with her, collecting rocks, minerals, and fossils, and playing in the lab."
Go to Profile#36824
Mike Tomczak
#36836
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Michael John Tomczak is a former American football player. Tomczak played quarterback for several National Football League teams from 1985 through 1999, including the Chicago Bears, Green Bay Packers, Cleveland Browns, and Pittsburgh Steelers. He was the offensive coordinator for the Pittsburgh Power of the Arena Football League until 2014 when they ceased operations. Tomczak is considered to be the most successful NFL quarterback to play most of his college career at Ohio State University.
Go to Profile#36825
Barry Mann
#36837
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Barry Mann is an American songwriter and musician, and was part of a successful songwriting partnership with his wife, Cynthia Weil. He has written or co-written 53 hits in the UK and 98 in the US. Early life Mann was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York City, United States. He was born two days before fellow songwriter Gerry Goffin.
Go to Profile#36826
Peter Diggle
#36838
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Peter John Diggle, is a British statistician. He holds concurrent appointments with the Faculty of Health and Medicine at Lancaster University, and the Institute of Infection and Global Health at the University of Liverpool. From 2004 to 2008 he was an EPSRC Senior Research Fellow. He is one of the founding co-editors of the journal Biostatistics.
Go to Profile#36827
Vidya Balan
#36839
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Vidya Balan is an Indian actress. Known for pioneering a change in the portrayal of women in Hindi cinema with her roles in female-led films, she is the recipient of several awards, including a National Film Award and seven Filmfare Awards. She was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2014.
Go to Profile#36828
Bill Cartwright
#36840
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
James William Cartwright is an American former professional basketball player and a former head coach of the Chicago Bulls of the National Basketball Association . A 7'1" center, he played 16 seasons for the New York Knicks, Chicago Bulls and Seattle SuperSonics, helping the Bulls capture consecutive championships in the 1991, 1992 and 1993 seasons. He attended Elk Grove High School in Elk Grove, California, and played college basketball at the University of San Francisco.
Go to Profile#36829
Bertil Näslund
#36841
Overall Influence
1933 - 2016 (83 years)
Bertil Näslund was a Swedish economist and emeritus professor at Handelshögskolan i Stockholm . Näslund earned his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University where he was awarded the Alexander Henderson Award. His doctoral advisor was William W. Cooper. He was made a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in 1977, of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1990, and was a member of the Committee for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Go to Profile#36830
Joshua Aronson
#36842
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Joshua Michael Aronson is an American social psychologist and Associate Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He is known for his pioneering work on stereotype threat, which he conducted in the 1990s along with Claude Steele and Steven Spencer. This work has shown that female, minority, and low-income children are stereotyped as performing worse on standardized tests, and that when they are taught to overcome these stereotypes, their standardized test scores improve. He also co-authored a study in 2009 in which ...
Go to Profile#36831
Georges Didi-Huberman
#36843
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Georges Didi-Huberman FBA is a French philosopher and art historian. Biography Georges Didi-Huberman was born on 13 June 1953 in Saint-Étienne. He has been a scholar at the French Academy in Rome and resident in the Berenson Foundation of Villa I Tatti in Florence. He teaches at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, where he has been a lecturer since 1990.
Go to Profile#36832
Francesco Moser
#36844
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Francesco Moser , nicknamed "Lo sceriffo" , is an Italian former professional road bicycle racer. He finished on the podium of the Giro d'Italia six times including his win in the 1984 edition. Moser was dominant from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. He turned professional in 1973, showing a cultured pedaling style. But his powerful build meant he was not a gifted climber. He entered one edition of the Tour de France, in 1975, where he won two stages, held the maillot jaune for six days and finished 7th overall. He also won the 1977 world road racing championship in addition to collecting silver medals in 1976 and 1978.
Go to Profile#36833
Jason Campbell
#36845
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Jason S. Campbell is a former American football quarterback and current analyst for Auburn Sports Network who played in the National Football League . He was selected by the Washington Redskins in the first round of the 2005 NFL Draft. He played college football at Auburn. Campbell also played for the Oakland Raiders, Chicago Bears, Cleveland Browns, and Cincinnati Bengals.
Go to Profile#36834
Francis Everitt
#36846
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Charles William Francis Everitt is a US-based English physicist working on experimental testing of general relativity. Everitt was educated at Imperial College London and the University of Pennsylvania in low-temperature physics. He is Professor at the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory of Stanford University and is also an Associate Member of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology .
Go to Profile#36835
Roger Balian
#36847
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Roger Balian is a French-Armenian physicist who has worked on quantum field theory, quantum thermodynamics, and theory of measurement. Balian is a member of French Académie des sciences . His important work includes the Balian-Low theorem. He teaches statistical physics at the École Polytechnique.
Go to Profile#36836
Anthony David
#36848
Overall Influence
Anthony David FMedSci is a British neuropsychiatrist based at University College London. Previously tenured as professor of cognitive neuropsychiatry and Vice Dean at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, since 2018 he has been Director, University College London, Institute of Mental Health. He is the father of Rebecca David, a Senior Campaign Manager at Influencer LTD and Michael David a junior doctor.
Go to Profile#36837
Ian McDonald
#36849
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Ian McDonald is a British science fiction novelist, living in Belfast. His themes include nanotechnology, postcyberpunk settings, and the impact of rapid social and technological change on non-Western societies.
Go to Profile#36838
Valerie Daggett
#36850
Overall Influence
Valerie Daggett is a professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, United States. Education and career Daggett has a B.S. from Reed College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco, advised by Irwin Kuntz and Peter Kollman, and subsequently held a postdoctoral position at Stanford University with Michael Levitt, a co-recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Go to Profile#36839
Bruce Jay Nelson
#36851
Overall Influence
1952 - 1999 (47 years)
Bruce Jay Nelson was an American computer scientist best known as the inventor of the remote procedure call concept for computer network communications. Bruce Nelson graduated from Harvey Mudd College in 1974, and went on to earn a master's in computer science from Stanford University in 1976, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. While pursuing his Ph.D., he worked at Xerox PARC where he developed the concept of remote procedure call . He and his collaborator Andrew Birrell were awarded the 1994 Association for Computing Machinery Software System Award for the work on RPC.
Go to Profile#36840
Alan Dugan
#36852
Overall Influence
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
Alan Dugan was an American poet. His first volume Poems published in 1961 was a chosen by the Yale Series of Younger Poets and went on to win the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His last volume, entitled Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, was published in 2001 by Seven Stories Press in New York City and won Dugan a second National Book Award.
Go to Profile#36841
W. V. Grant
#36853
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Walter Vinson Grant, Jr., who goes by W. V. Grant , is a televangelist whose ministry has been based in the Greater Dallas area. Career Grant began his career in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the mid-1970s with the "Cathedral of Compassion" in the Over-the-Rhine area of Cincinnati before relocating to the suburbs of St Bernard until the early 1980s. The son of minister Walter Vinson Grant, Sr., in 1983 Grant took over Soul's Harbor Church and expanded its ministry, later renaming the church as "Eagles Nest Cathedral". In 1987, Grant purchased in the southwest section of Dallas and built the "Eagle's Nest Family Church", and continued pastoring the 5000-seat church until 1996.
Go to Profile#36842
Carol J. Oja
#36854
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Carol J. Oja is a musicologist and scholar of American Studies. Biography Since 2003, she has held the post of William Powell Mason Professor at Harvard University. She has served as the Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence with the New York Philharmonic. Her previous appointments have been at the College of William and Mary and the City University of New York , where she was professor of music at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, as well as director of the Institute for Studies in American Music . She attended St. Olaf College , the University of Iowa , and the Graduate School of ...
Go to Profile#36843
Shaun Alexander
#36855
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Shaun Edward Alexander is an American former professional football player who was a running back for the Seattle Seahawks and Washington Redskins of the National Football League . He played college football for the Alabama Crimson Tide, and was drafted by the Seattle Seahawks 19th overall in the 2000 NFL Draft. In May 2011, he was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#36844
Munir Nayfeh
#36856
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Munir Hasan Nayfeh is a Palestinian-American particle physicist, renowned for his pioneering work in nanotechnology. Nayfeh was born in December 1945, in the neighborhood of Shweikeh in Tulkarem city, in what was then Mandatory Palestine. Following the 1948 Palestine war and Palestinian exodus, Nayfeh's family was compelled to settle in Jordan, where he received his Thanaweyeh Ammeh . He received his bachelor's degree in 1968, and his master's in physics in 1970 from the American University of Beirut, after which he won a scholarship to pursue his PhD at Stanford University in the US, which he...
Go to Profile#36845
Sung Wan Kim
#36857
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Sung Wan Kim was a South Korean-American academic who worked as a distinguished professor of pharmaceutics and pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of Utah. He is the founder and co-director of the University of Utah's Center for Controlled Chemical Delivery.
Go to Profile#36846
Jay-Jay Okocha
#36858
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Augustine Azuka "Jay-Jay" Okocha is a Nigerian former professional footballer who played as an attacking midfielder. He won 73 caps for the Nigeria national team between 1993 and 2006, scoring 14 goals, and was a member of three FIFA World Cup squads. He is regarded as one of the greatest football players from Africa.
Go to Profile#36847
James B. Twitchell
#36859
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
James B. Twitchell is an American author and former professor of English. He was born in 1943, in Burlington, Vermont. His undergraduate, Masters and PhD were all from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1962, 1966 and 1969.
Go to Profile#36848
Tim Commerford
#36860
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Timothy Commerford is an American musician, best known as the bassist and backing vocalist for rock band Rage Against the Machine, and supergroups Audioslave and Prophets of Rage. Since 2013 and 2015, he has also been the lead singer and bassist of the bands Future User and Wakrat.
Go to Profile#36849
Nicholas J. Wheeler
#36861
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Nicholas J. Wheeler FLSW is professor of international politics at the University of Birmingham and co-editor of the Cambridge Studies in International Relations book series, published by Cambridge University Press and the British International Studies Association. Wheeler specializes in security studies and has focused his research on the security dilemma and humanitarian intervention.
Go to Profile#36850
Merceline Dahl-Regis
#36862
Overall Influence
Merceline Dahl-Regis, CMG OD, is a Bahamian physician and public health expert. She is the former Chief Medical Officer of the Bahamas and has been recognized for her role in advancing public health in the Caribbean and internationally.
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