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
#36901
Raymond A. Bucko
#36913
Overall Influence
Raymond A. Bucko, S. J., is an American Jesuit priest and anthropologist noted for his work among the Lakota Indians. Bucko received his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1992 from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Raymond D. Fogelson. He specializes in cultural anthropology and published a book on the Lakota sweat lodge in 1998.
Go to Profile#36902
Robby Gordon
#36914
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Robert Wesley Gordon is an American former auto racing driver. He has raced in NASCAR, CART, the IndyCar Series, the Trans-Am Series, IMSA, IROC and the Dakar Rally. While no longer an active stock car racing driver, he is active in top-tier off road motorsports such as BITD, NORRA, and SCORE International.
Go to Profile#36903
Chris Sale
#36915
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Christopher Allen Sale is an American professional baseball pitcher for the Boston Red Sox of Major League Baseball . He previously played in MLB for the Chicago White Sox, with whom he made his major league debut on August 6, 2010. As a power pitcher, Sale excels at achieving high numbers of strikeouts, and has set a number of strikeout-related records. He bats and throws left-handed, stands , and weighs .
Go to Profile#36904
Patricia Cheng
#36916
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Patricia Wenjie Cheng is a Chinese American psychologist. She is a leading researcher in cognitive psychology who works on human reasoning. She is best known for her psychological work on human understanding of causality. Her "power theory of the probabilistic contrast model," or power PC theory posits that people filter observations of events through a basic belief that causes have the power to generate their effects, thereby inferring specific cause-effect relations.
Go to Profile#36905
Donald Revell
#36917
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Donald Revell is an American poet, essayist, translator and professor. Revell has won numerous honors and awards for his work, beginning with his first book, From the Abandoned Cities, which was a National Poetry Series winner. More recently, he won the 2004 Lenore Marshall Award and is a two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in poetry. He has also received the Gertrude Stein Award, two Shestack Prizes, two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. His most recent book is Drought-Adapted Vine .
Go to Profile#36906
Ilaria Ramelli
#36918
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Ilaria L. E. Ramelli is an Italian-born historian, academic author, and university professor who specializes in ancient, late antique, and early mediaeval philosophy and theology. Life Ilaria Ramelli was born in Piacenza in 1973. At the age of 8, she was involved in a serious road accident that left her with serious after-effects, forcing her to lie down. In her youth, she enjoyed painting. One of her paintings appears on the cover of one of her books.
Go to Profile#36907
Shirley Kuo
#36919
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Shirley Kuo is a Taiwanese politician. Kuo earned a doctorate in economics from Kobe University in Japan after receiving bachelor's and master's degrees from National Taiwan University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively. Upon her appointment to the Ministry of Finance, Kuo became the first female cabinet minister in the history of the Republic of China. She led the ministry from 1988 to 1990, before being named the head minister of the Council for Economic Planning and Development, a position she held until 1993.
Go to Profile#36908
Mohammad Etemadi
#36920
Overall Influence
Mohammad Etemadi is an Iranian professor in electrical engineering and a professor at Sharif University of Technology since 1986. He attended Shiraz University, where he received a BS degree. He got his PhD in electrical engineering from University of California, Los Angeles. He served as the chancellor of Sharif University of Technology for a period of two years 1993–1995.
Go to Profile#36909
Gisela Dulko
#36921
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Gisela Dulko is an Argentine former tennis player. Although she enjoyed modest success in singles, reaching a career-high ranking of world No. 26 and winning four WTA titles, her speciality was doubles, where she achieved the world No. 1 ranking and won 17 WTA titles. Partnering with Flavia Pennetta, Dulko won the 2010 WTA Tour Championships and the 2011 Australian Open. She also reached the mixed-doubles final at the 2011 US Open, with Eduardo Schwank. During her career, Dulko upset a number of top players on the tour, including Maria Sharapova in the second round of Wimbledon in 2009, Saman...
Go to Profile#36910
Tim Mitchison
#36922
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Timothy John Mitchison is a cell biologist and systems biologist and Hasib Sabbagh Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School in the United States. He is known for his discovery, with Marc Kirschner, of dynamic instability in microtubules, for studies of the mechanism of cell division, and for contributions to chemical biology.
Go to Profile#36911
Katherine Yelick
#36923
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Katherine "Kathy" Anne Yelick, an American computer scientist, is the vice chancellor for research and the Robert S. Pepper Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she was Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences from 2010-2019.
Go to Profile#36912
William H. Poteat
#36924
Overall Influence
1919 - 2000 (81 years)
William H. Poteat was an American philosopher, scholar, and charismatic professor of philosophy, religion, and culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1947 to 1957 and at Duke University from 1960 to 1987. During that time he did foundational work in the critique of Modern and Postmodern intellectual culture. He was instrumental in introducing scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi and his Post-Critical philosophy to the United States. He was a master of the Socratic Method of teaching and identified himself a "practicing dialectician," skilled through the use of irony...
Go to Profile#36913
George Edward Burch
#36925
Overall Influence
#36914
Samuel Madden
#36926
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Samuel R. Madden is an American computer scientist specializing in database management systems. He is currently a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Career Madden was born and raised in San Diego, California. After completing bachelor's and master's degrees at MIT, he earned a PhD specializing in database management at the University of California Berkeley under Michael Franklin and Joseph M. Hellerstein. Before joining MIT as a tenure-track professor, Madden held a post-doc position at Intel's Berkeley Research center.
Go to Profile#36915
Shannon Sullivan
#36927
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Shannon Sullivan is chair and Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She teaches and writes on feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, American pragmatism, and continental philosophy.
Go to Profile#36916
Francesco Caselli
#36928
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Francesco Caselli is the Norman Sosnow Professor of Economics and the Head of the Department of Economics at the London School of Economics . His work includes contributions to the understanding convergence and cross-country income differentials.
Go to Profile#36917
David Gerrold
#36929
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
David Gerrold is an American science fiction screenwriter and novelist. He wrote the script for the original Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles", created the Sleestak race on the TV series Land of the Lost, and wrote the novelette "The Martian Child", which won both Hugo and Nebula Awards, and was adapted into a 2007 film starring John Cusack.
Go to Profile#36918
Jimmy Rollins
#36930
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
James Calvin Rollins , nicknamed "J-Roll", is an American former professional baseball shortstop, who played in Major League Baseball for the Philadelphia Phillies , Los Angeles Dodgers , and Chicago White Sox .
Go to Profile#36919
Fat Lever
#36931
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Lafayette "Fat" Lever is an American former professional basketball player who played in the National Basketball Association. He later served as the director of player development for the Sacramento Kings of the NBA as well as an analyst for Kings radio broadcasts.
Go to Profile#36920
Carl Folke
#36932
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Carl Folke , is a trans-disciplinary environmental scientist and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He is a specialist in economics, resilience, and social-ecological systems, viewing such systems as intertwined and potentially unexpected in their interactions. As a framework for resource management, this perspective brings important insights to environmental management, urban planning, and climate adaptation. He suggests ways to improve our ability to understand complex social-ecological interactions, deal with change, and build resilience, often working at smaller scales as...
Go to Profile#36921
Anders Björklund
#36933
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Anders Björklund' is a Swedish neuroscientist and pioneer in the study of cell- and gene-based reparative and neuroprotective mechanisms in the brain. He has spent his academic career at Lund University in Sweden, as professor since 1983 and as senior professor at the Wallenberg Neuroscience Center since his formal retirement in 2012.
Go to Profile#36922
Paul H. Cress
#36934
Overall Influence
1939 - 2004 (65 years)
Paul H. Cress was a Canadian computer scientist. He was a young lecturer in computer science at the University of Waterloo when, starting in 1966, he and his colleague Paul Dirksen led a team of programmers developing a fast Fortran programming language compiler called WATFOR , for the IBM System/360 family of computers. The /360 WATFOR project was initiated by Professor J. Wesley Graham, following the successful implementation in 1965 of a WATFOR compiler for the IBM 7040 computer. An enhanced version of the /360 WATFOR compiler was called WATFIV, variously interpreted to mean "WATerloo F...
Go to Profile#36923
Alba Zaluar
#36935
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Alba Maria Zaluar was a Brazilian anthropologist, with emphases in urban anthropology and in anthropology of violence. In 1984, she obtained her PhD in social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Go to Profile#36924
Peggy Weil
#36936
Overall Influence
Peggy Weil is an American artist working in digital media. Early life and education She graduated from Harvard University in 1976, and received a master's degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982.
Go to Profile#36925
Borna Ćorić
#36937
Overall Influence
1996 - Present (30 years)
Borna Ćorić is a Croatian professional tennis player. On 5 November 2018, he reached his best singles ranking of world No. 12. In 2022, Ćorić became the lowest-ranked champion in Masters 1000 history when he won the Cincinnati title. He is currently the No. 1 Croatian player.
Go to Profile#36926
Nilüfer Göle
#36938
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Nilüfer Göle is a Turkish sociologist and a contemporary Turkish academic who specializes in the political movement of today's educated, urbanized, and religious Muslim women. From 1986 to 2001 a professor at the Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, she is currently Directrice d'études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales , Centre d’Analyse et d’Intervention Sociologiques , in Paris. Göle is the author of Interpénétrations: L’Islam et l’Europe and The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling. Through personal interviews, Göle has developed detailed case studies of young Turkish women who are turning to the tenets of fundamental Islamic gender codes.
Go to Profile#36927
Joel S. Birnbaum
#36939
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Joel Samuel Birnbaum is a technology executive who served as senior vice president of Hewlett-Packard. Birnbaum earned a bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell University, and a doctorate in nuclear physics from Yale University in 1966. He worked at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center from 1965 to 1980, eventually becoming director of computer sciences there. From 1980 until his retirement he worked for Hewlett-Packard, where he directed the Computer Research Center of HP Labs. In 1984 he was promoted to vice president at HP and director of HP Labs. He became a senior vice...
Go to Profile#36928
Stephen Vasciannie
#36940
Overall Influence
Stephen Charles Vasciannie is a Jamaican law professor. Formerly Deputy Solicitor-General and principal of the Norman Manley Law School, Vasciannie served as Jamaica's Ambassador Extraordinary Plenipotentiary to the United States from 2012 up to July 17, 2015, when he stepped down to return to academic life.
Go to Profile#36929
Paul McGann
#36941
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Paul John McGann is an English actor. He came to prominence for portraying Percy Toplis in the television serial The Monocled Mutineer , then starred in the dark comedy Withnail and I , which was a critical success and developed a cult following. McGann later became more widely known for portraying the eighth incarnation of the Doctor in the 1996 television film Doctor Who. He is also known for playing Lieutenant William Bush in the TV series Hornblower .
Go to Profile#36930
Bill Frisell
#36942
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
William Richard Frisell is an American jazz guitarist, composer and arranger. Frisell first came to prominence at ECM Records in the 1980s, as both a session player and a leader. He went on to work in a variety of contexts, notably as a participant in the Downtown Scene in New York City, where he formed a long working relationship with composer and saxophonist John Zorn. He was also a longtime member of veteran drummer Paul Motian's groups from the early 1980s until Motian's death in 2011. Since the late 1990s, Frisell's output as a bandleader has also integrated prominent elements of folk, country, rock ‘n’ roll and Americana.
Go to Profile#36931
Abram Ilyich Fet
#36943
Overall Influence
1924 - 2007 (83 years)
Abram Fet was a Russian mathematician, Soviet dissident, philosopher, Samizdat translator and writer. He used various pseudonyms for Samizdat, like N. A. Klenov, A.B. Nazyvayev, D.A. Rassudin, S.T. Karneyev, etc. If published, his translations were usually issued under the name of A.I. Fedorov, which reproduced Fet's own initials and sometimes under the names of real people who agreed to publish Fet's translations under their names.
Go to Profile#36932
Ding-Shinn Chen
#36944
Overall Influence
1943 - 2020 (77 years)
Ding-Shinn Chen was a Taiwanese hepatologist. He was born on 6 July 1943, in what became Yingge District, New Taipei City. Chen's mother became sick when he was a child, and needed surgical intervention. As such, Chen was around medical professionals at a young age, which sparked his interest in the field. Upon high school graduation, Chen was accepted into the National Taiwan University College of Medicine. During his fourth year of medical school, Chen's father died of liver cancer, inspiring him to study hepatology. He completed medical studies in 1968. Chen became a resident at National Taiwan University Hospital and later joined the NTU medical faculty, working closely with .
Go to Profile#36933
Herman Talmadge
#36945
Overall Influence
1913 - 2002 (89 years)
Herman Eugene Talmadge was an American politician who served as governor of Georgia in 1947 and from 1948 to 1955 and as a U.S. senator from Georgia from 1957 to 1981. A Democrat, Talmadge served during a time of political transition, both in Georgia and nationally. He began his career as a staunch segregationist known for his opposition to civil rights, ordering schools to be closed rather than desegregated. But by the later stages of his career, following the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, which gave substance to the Fifteenth Amendment enacted nearly one hundred years before, Talmadge, like many other Southern politicians of that period, had modified his views.
Go to Profile#36934
Kenkichi Sonogashira
#36946
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
is a Japanese chemist and was a professor of chemistry at Osaka University in Japan. He discovered the Sonogashira coupling in 1975. Sonogashira was later a professor at Osaka City University and retired in 2004.
Go to Profile#36935
John Campbell Brown
#36947
Overall Influence
1947 - 2019 (72 years)
John Campbell Brown was a Scottish astronomer who worked primarily in solar physics. He held the posts of Astronomer Royal for Scotland, the Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow, and honorary professorships at both the University of Edinburgh and the University of Aberdeen.
Go to Profile#36936
Olivia Harris
#36948
Overall Influence
1948 - 2009 (61 years)
Olivia Jane Harris was a British social anthropologist whose work focused on the study of the Bolivian highlands. Her writing includes analyses of fertility, gender, money, conceptions of work and of time, the relation between law and custom, as well as the Inca and Spanish colonisation of current-day Bolivia.
Go to Profile#36937
Françoise Thébaud
#36949
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Françoise Thébaud is a French historian, professor emeritus of history, and specialist in the history of women. In 2017, she was awarded the Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. Early life and education Françoise Thébaud was born in 1952.
Go to Profile#36938
Richard Bing
#36950
Overall Influence
1909 - 2010 (101 years)
Richard John Bing was a cardiologist who made significant contributions to his field of study. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995. Early life and education Born in Nuremberg to a hops merchant and a professional singer, he studied at the Conservatory at the Nuremberg Gymnasium but also took an interest in medicine. Trying to determine which path to take, after an indifferent reception from Richard Strauss and being inspired by Arrowsmith, he went into medicine, earning a degree at the University of Munich in 1934. His family—who were Jewish—left Nazi Germany shortly ...
Go to Profile#36939
Frank Darabont
#36951
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Frank Árpád Darabont is a French-born American filmmaker. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards and a Golden Globe Award. In his early career, he was primarily a screenwriter for such horror films as A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors , The Blob and The Fly II . As a director, he is known for his film adaptations of Stephen King novellas and novels, such as The Shawshank Redemption , The Green Mile , and The Mist .
Go to Profile#36940
Colin Pask
#36952
Overall Influence
Colin Pask is a British mathematical physicist and science writer. Life He was born in Great Gonerby, on the outskirts of Grantham in Lincolnshire, where his father was a dairy farmer. He was educated at King's School, Grantham from age 11, and went to Queen Mary College, London for a degree course in theoretical physics and mathematics. He graduated B.Sc. there in 1964.
Go to Profile#36941
John Horlock
#36953
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Sir John Harold Horlock FRS FREng was a British professor of mechanical engineering, and was vice-chancellor of both the Open University and the University of Salford, as well as vice-president of the Royal Society. In 1977, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering
Go to Profile#36942
Keith Reemtsma
#36954
Overall Influence
1925 - 2000 (75 years)
Keith Reemtsma was an American transplant surgeon, best known for the cross-species kidney transplantation operation from chimpanzee to human in 1964. With only the early immunosuppressants and no long-term dialysis, the female recipient survived nine months, long enough to return to work.
Go to Profile#36943
David Nicholl
#36955
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
David Nicholl is a neurologist, human rights activist, fundraiser for Amnesty International, and online columnist from Belfast, Northern Ireland. In March 2006 he initiated a letter in the medical journal The Lancet, signed by more than 250 medical experts, urging the United States to stop force-feeding at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and close down the prison camp. He is also a principal author of a reference work on neurological conditions
Go to Profile#36944
Albert Hammond
#36956
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Albert Louis Hammond OBE is a British-Gibraltarian singer, songwriter and record producer. A prolific songwriter, he also collaborated with other songwriters such as Mike Hazlewood, John Bettis, Hal David, Diane Warren, Holly Knight and Carole Bayer Sager. Hammond's son Albert Hammond Jr. is a guitarist in American rock band the Strokes.
Go to Profile#36945
Mike Bibby
#36957
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Michael Bibby is an American former professional basketball player. He played professionally for 14 seasons in the National Basketball Association . He last served as the head coach for Hillcrest Prep Academy in Phoenix, Arizona.
Go to Profile#36946
Lawrence Kolb
#36958
Overall Influence
1911 - 2006 (95 years)
Lawrence Coleman Kolb was an American psychiatrist who was the New York State Commissioner of Mental Hygiene from 1975 to 1978. Biography He was born in on June 16, 1911, in Baltimore, Maryland. His family moved to Ireland from 1928 to 1931, and he attended Trinity College in Dublin. He returned to the United States to medical school at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Following graduation, he did residency training in psychiatry and neurology, then considered one specialty, at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York. During World War II, he went into the Navy and was stationed...
Go to Profile#36947
David Bronner
#36959
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
David Bronner is an American corporate executive and activist. As the top executive at Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, he has become known for his activism around a range of issues, especially fair trade, sustainable agriculture, animal rights, and drug policy reform.
Go to Profile#36948
Venkatesan Guruswami
#36960
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Venkatesan Guruswami is a senior scientist at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing and Professor of EECS and Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He did his high schooling at Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan in Chennai, India. He completed his undergraduate in Computer Science from IIT Madras and his doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Madhu Sudan in 2001. After receiving his PhD, he spent a year at UC Berkeley as a Miller Fellow, and then was a member of the faculty at the University of Washington from 2002 to 2009. His primary area of research is computer science, and in particular on error-correcting codes.
Go to Profile#36949
Frank Nwachukwu Ndili
#36961
Overall Influence
Frank Nwachukwu Ndili was the 1st Nigerian Nuclear Physicist and the 7th Vice Chancellor of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He served as Vice Chancellor of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka from 1980 until he was succeeded by professor Chimere Ikoku in 1985. He left the office after a long and controversial investigation by the panel of inquiry. However, he is believed to have been forthright even where his predecessor Umaru Shehu threaded carefully. He is credited with being one of the most visionary Vice Chancellors of the University. During Professor Ndili's Vice-Chancellorship, effo...
Go to Profile#36950
Jan Smits
#36962
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Jan M. Smits is a Dutch law professor. He is the dean of the faculty of law at Maastricht University, where he is also professor of European private law and director of the Maastricht European Private Law Institute. Furthermore, he is a visiting professor of comparative legal studies in the University of Helsinki.
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