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
#3701
Jim Lehrer
#3708
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
James Charles Lehrer was an American journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. He was the executive editor and a news anchor for the PBS NewsHour on PBS and was known for his role as a debate moderator during U.S. presidential election campaigns, moderating twelve presidential debates between 1988 and 2012. Lehrer authored numerous fiction and non-fiction books that drew upon his experience as a newsman, along with his interests in history and politics.
Go to Profile#3702
Linda Greenhouse
#3709
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Linda Joyce Greenhouse is an American legal journalist who is the Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence and Joseph M. Goldstein Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School. She is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who has covered the United States Supreme Court for nearly three decades for The New York Times. Since 2017, she is the president of the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Senate.
Go to Profile#3703
Pierre Ramond
#3710
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Pierre Ramond is distinguished professor of physics at University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. He initiated the development of superstring theory. Academic career Ramond completed his BSEE from Newark College of Engineering in 1965 and completed his Ph.D. in physics from Syracuse University in 1969. He was a postdoctoral fellow at NAL from 1969 to 1971. He became instructor at Yale University from 1971 to 1973 and assistant professor at Yale University from 1973 to 1976. He moved to Caltech as an R. A. Millikan Senior Fellow in 1976. He became a professor of physics at University of ...
Go to Profile#3704
Peter Atkins
#3711
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Peter William Atkins is an English chemist and a Fellow of Lincoln College at the University of Oxford. He retired in 2007. He is a prolific writer of popular chemistry textbooks, including Physical Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, and Molecular Quantum Mechanics. Atkins is also the author of a number of popular science books, including Atkins' Molecules, Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science and On Being.
Go to Profile#3705
Allen Buchanan
#3712
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Allen Edward Buchanan is a moral, political and legal philosopher. As of 2022, he held multiple academic positions: Laureate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, Distinguished Research Fellow at Oxford University, Visiting Professor of the philosophy of international law at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College, London, and James B. Duke Professor Emeritus at Duke University.
Go to Profile#3706
Alfie Kohn
#3713
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Alfie Kohn is an American author and lecturer in the areas of education, parenting, and human behavior. He is a proponent of progressive education and has offered critiques of many traditional aspects of parenting, managing, and American society more generally, drawing in each case from social science research.
Go to Profile#3707
Ralph Miliband
#3714
Overall Influence
1924 - 1994 (70 years)
Ralph Miliband was a British sociologist. He has been described as "one of the best known academic Marxists of his generation", in this manner being compared with E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson.
Go to Profile#3708
William Stokoe
#3715
Overall Influence
1919 - 2000 (81 years)
William Clarence Stokoe Jr. was an American linguist and a long-time professor at Gallaudet University. His research on American Sign Language revolutionized the understanding of ASL in the United States and sign languages throughout the world. Stokoe's work led to a widespread recognition that sign languages are true languages, exhibiting syntax and morphology, and are not only systems of gesture.
Go to Profile#3709
Robert Kuttner
#3716
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Robert L. Kuttner is an American journalist and writer whose works present a liberal/progressive point of view. Kuttner is the co-founder and current co-editor of The American Prospect, which was created in 1990 as an "authoritative magazine of liberal ideas," according to its mission statement. He was a columnist for Business Week and The Boston Globe for 20 years.
Go to Profile#3710
Brian Skyrms
#3717
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Brian Skyrms is an American philosopher, Distinguished Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and Economics at the University of California, Irvine, and a professor of philosophy at Stanford University. He has worked on problems in the philosophy of science, causation, decision theory, game theory, and the foundations of probability.
Go to Profile#3711
John Avlon
#3718
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
John Phillips Avlon is an American journalist and political commentator. He is a senior political analyst and anchor at CNN and was the editor-in-chief and managing director of The Daily Beast from 2013 to 2018. Avlon was previously a columnist and associate editor for The New York Sun and chief speechwriter for former Mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani.
Go to Profile#3712
Edward L. Deci
#3719
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Edward L. Deci is a professor of Psychology and Gowen Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Rochester, and director of its Human Motivation Program. He is well known in psychology for his theories of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and basic psychological needs which he has been researching for 40 years. With Richard Ryan, he is the co-founder of self-determination theory , an influential contemporary motivational theory.
Go to Profile#3713
Roger McGough
#3720
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Roger Joseph McGough is an English poet, performance poet, broadcaster, children's author and playwright. He presents the BBC Radio 4 programme Poetry Please, as well as performing his own poetry. McGough was one of the leading members of the Liverpool poets, a group of young poets influenced by Beat poetry and the popular music and culture of 1960s Liverpool. He is an honorary fellow of Liverpool John Moores University, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and President of the Poetry Society.
Go to Profile#3714
Henry Taube
#3721
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
Henry Taube, was a Canadian-born American chemist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "his work in the mechanisms of electron-transfer reactions, especially in metal complexes." He was the second Canadian-born chemist to win the Nobel Prize, and remains the only Saskatchewanian-born Nobel laureate. Taube completed his undergraduate and master's degrees at the University of Saskatchewan, and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. After finishing graduate school, Taube worked at Cornell University, the University of Chicago and Stanford University.
Go to Profile#3715
Rina Dechter
#3722
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Rina Dechter is a distinguished professor of computer science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Her research is on automated reasoning in artificial intelligence focusing on probabilistic and constraint-based reasoning. In 2013, she was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Go to Profile#3716
Ban Ki-moon
#3723
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Ban Ki-moon is a South Korean politician and diplomat who served as the eighth secretary-general of the United Nations between 2007 and 2016. Prior to his appointment as secretary-general, Ban was the South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade between 2004 and 2006. Ban was initially considered to be a long shot for the office of Secretary-General of the United Nations; he began to campaign for the office in February 2006. As the foreign minister of South Korea, he was able to travel to all the countries on the United Nations Security Council, a maneuver that subsequently turned him i...
Go to Profile#3717
Paul Collier
#3724
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Sir Paul Collier, is a British development economist who serves as the Professor of Economics and Public Policy in the Blavatnik School of Government and the director of the International Growth Centre.
Go to Profile#3718
Leila Ahmed
#3725
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Leila Ahmed is an Egyptian-American scholar of Islam. In 1992 she published her book Women and Gender in Islam, which is regarded as a pioneering historical analysis of the position of women in Arab Muslim societies. She became the first professor of women's studies in religion at Harvard Divinity School in 1999, and has held the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity chair since 2003. She was later awarded the Victor S. Thomas Research Professor of Divinity in 2020.
Go to Profile#3719
Keith Olbermann
#3726
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Keith Theodore Olbermann is an American sports and political commentator and writer. Olbermann spent the first 20 years of his career in sports journalism. He was a sports correspondent for CNN and for local TV and radio stations in the 1980s, winning the Best Sportscaster award from the California Associated Press three times. He co-hosted ESPN's SportsCenter from 1992 to 1997. From 1998 to 2001, he was a producer and anchor for Fox Sports Net and a host for Fox Sports' coverage of Major League Baseball.
Go to Profile#3720
Roy Bhaskar
#3727
Overall Influence
1944 - 2014 (70 years)
Ram Roy Bhaskar was an English philosopher of science who is best known as the initiator of the philosophical movement of critical realism . Bhaskar argued that the task of science is "the production of the knowledge of those enduring and continually active mechanisms of nature that produce the phenomena of the world", rather than the discovery of quantitative laws, and that experimental science makes sense only if such mechanisms exist and operate outside the lab as well as inside it. He went on to apply that realism about mechanisms and causal powers to the philosophy of social science, and...
Go to Profile#3721
Mark Lewisohn
#3728
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Mark Lewisohn is an English historian and biographer. Since the 1980s, he has written many reference books about the Beatles and has worked for EMI, MPL Communications and Apple Corps. He has been referred to as the world's leading authority on the band due to his meticulous research and integrity. His works include The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions , a history of the group's session dates, and The Beatles: All These Years , a three-volume series intended as the group's most comprehensive biography.
Go to Profile#3722
Walter Laqueur
#3729
Overall Influence
1921 - 2018 (97 years)
Walter Ze'ev Laqueur was a German-born American historian, journalist and political commentator. He was an influential scholar on the subjects of terrorism and political violence. Biography Walter Laqueur was born in Breslau, Lower Silesia, Germany , into a Jewish family. In November 1938 he left Germany, immigrating to the British Mandate of Palestine. His parents, who were unable to leave, were murdered in the Holocaust. After less than a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he left to work as an agricultural laborer and guard. In 1942 he became a member of kibbutz HaZore'a.
Go to Profile#3723
Mark Weiser
#3730
Overall Influence
1952 - 1999 (47 years)
Mark D. Weiser was a computer scientist and chief technology officer at Xerox PARC. Weiser is widely considered to be the father of ubiquitous computing, a term he coined in 1988. Within Silicon Valley, Weiser was broadly viewed as a visionary and computer pioneer, and his ideas have influenced many of the world's leading computer scientists.
Go to Profile#3724
David Lewis
#3731
Overall Influence
1941 - 2001 (60 years)
David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher who is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton University from 1970 until his death. He is closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years.
Go to Profile#3725
Ranajit Guha
#3732
Overall Influence
1923 - 2023 (100 years)
Ranajit Guha was an Indian historian, who was one of the early pioneers of the Subaltern Studies group, a methodology of South Asian Studies focused on post-colonial and post-imperial societies, studying them from the perspective of the underclasses. He was the editor of several of the group's early anthologies and wrote extensively both in English and in Bengali.
Go to Profile#3726
Harold Robbins
#3733
Overall Influence
1916 - 1997 (81 years)
Harold Robbins was an American author of popular novels. One of the best-selling writers of all time, he wrote over 25 best-sellers, selling over 750 million copies in 32 languages. Early life Robbins was born Harold Rubin in New York City in 1916, the son of Frances "Fannie" Smith and Charles Rubin. His parents were well-educated Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire, his father from Odessa and his mother from Neshwies , south of Minsk. Robbins later falsely claimed to be a Jewish orphan who had been raised in a Catholic boys' home. Instead he was raised by his father, a pharmacist, and h...
Go to Profile#3727
John Passmore
#3734
Overall Influence
1914 - 2004 (90 years)
John Passmore AC was an Australian philosopher. Life John Passmore was born on 9 September 1914 in Manly, Sydney, where he grew up. He was educated at Sydney Boys High School. He originally aspired to be a school teacher, but the terms of his employment required him to do coursework in philosophy, a discipline which was to absorb him. He subsequently graduated from the University of Sydney with first-class honours in English literature and philosophy whilst studying with a view to become a secondary-school teacher. In 1934 he accepted the position of assistant lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sydney, continuing teaching there until 1949.
Go to Profile#3728
Steffi Graf
#3735
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Stefanie Maria Graf is a German former professional tennis player. She won 22 major singles titles, the second-most in women's singles won since the start of the Open Era in 1968 and the third-most of all-time. In 1988, Graf became the first tennis player to achieve the Golden Slam by winning all four major singles titles and the Olympic gold medal in the same calendar year. She is the only tennis player, male or female, to have won each major singles tournament at least four times.
Go to Profile#3729
Mendel Rosenblum
#3736
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Mendel Rosenblum is a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and co-founder of VMware. Early life Mendel Rosenblum was born in 1962. He attended the University of Virginia, where he received a degree in mathematics. While at UVA, he was a member of Phi Sigma Kappa.
Go to Profile#3730
Kenkichi Iwasawa
#3737
Overall Influence
1917 - 1998 (81 years)
Kenkichi Iwasawa was a Japanese mathematician who is known for his influence on algebraic number theory. Biography Iwasawa was born in Shinshuku-mura, a town near Kiryū, in Gunma Prefecture. He attended elementary school there, but later moved to Tokyo to attend Musashi High School.
Go to Profile#3731
Glenn Reynolds
#3738
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law, and is known for his American politics blog, Instapundit. Instapundit blog Reynolds' blog got started as a class project in August 2001, when he was teaching a class on Internet law. Much of Instapundit's content consists of links to other sites, often with brief comments.
Go to Profile#3732
Philip N. Howard
#3739
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Philip N. Howard is a sociologist and communication researcher who studies the impact of information technologies on democracy and social inequality. He studies how new information technologies are used in both civic engagement and social control in countries around the world. He is Professor of Internet Studies at the Oxford Internet Institute and Balliol College at the University of Oxford. He was Director of the Oxford Internet Institute from March 2018 to March 26, 2021. He is the author of ten books, including New Media Campaigns and The Managed Citizen, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, and Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up.
Go to Profile#3733
Leland H. Hartwell
#3740
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Leland Harrison Hartwell is former president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Nurse and Tim Hunt, for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division of cells.
Go to Profile#3734
Mark Steyn
#3741
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Mark Steyn is a Canadian author and a radio and television presenter. He has written several books, including The New York Times bestsellers America Alone, After America, and Broadway Babies Say Goodnight. In the US he has guest-hosted the nationally syndicated Rush Limbaugh Show, as well as Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, on which he regularly appeared as a guest and fill-in host. In 2021, Steyn began hosting his own show on British news channel GB News. He left GB News in early February 2023, saying that the channel wanted him to pay fines issued by the UK media regulator Ofcom, which was investigating complaints of COVID-19 vaccination scepticism aired on The Mark Steyn Show.
Go to Profile#3735
Jim Dine
#3742
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Jim Dine is an American artist whose œuvre extends over sixty years. Dine’s work includes painting, drawing, printmaking , sculpture and photography; his early works encompassed assemblage and happenings, while in recent years his poetry output, both in publications and readings, has increased.
Go to Profile#3736
Jack Anderson
#3743
Overall Influence
1922 - 2005 (83 years)
Jack Northman Anderson was an American newspaper columnist, syndicated by United Features Syndicate, considered one of the founders of modern investigative journalism. Anderson won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his investigation on secret U.S. policy decision-making between the United States and Pakistan during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971. In addition to his newspaper career, Anderson also had a national radio show on the Mutual Broadcasting System, acted as Washington bureau chief of Parade magazine, and was a commentator on ABC-TV's Good Morning America for nine year...
Go to Profile#3737
Johanna Nichols
#3744
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Johanna Nichols is an American linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Career She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973 with a dissertation titled, "The Balto-Slavic predicate instrumental: a problem in diachronic syntax."
Go to Profile#3738
Shawn Michaels
#3745
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Michael Shawn Hickenbottom , better known by his ring name Shawn Michaels, is an American retired professional wrestler. He is signed to WWE, where he is the Senior Vice President of Talent Development Creative and oversees the creative aspects of the NXT brand, the promotion's developmental territory. Regarded as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time, he is known by the nicknames "The Heartbreak Kid" , "The Showstopper", and "Mr. WrestleMania".
Go to Profile#3739
Joel Spencer
#3746
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Joel Spencer is an American mathematician. He is a combinatorialist who has worked on probabilistic methods in combinatorics and on Ramsey theory. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1970, under the supervision of Andrew Gleason. He is currently a professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. Spencer's work was heavily influenced by Paul Erdős, with whom he coauthored many papers .
Go to Profile#3740
Dale Hample
#3747
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Dale Hample is an American argumentation and rhetorical scholar, associate professor at the University of Maryland . He has published many peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and written one book and edited another.
Go to Profile#3741
Tracy Hickman
#3748
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Tracy Raye Hickman is an American fantasy author. He wrote the Dragonlance novels with Margaret Weis. He also wrote role playing game material while working for TSR and has cowritten novels with his wife, Laura Hickman. He is the author or co-author of over 60 books.
Go to Profile#3742
Charles Kittel
#3749
Overall Influence
1916 - 2019 (103 years)
Charles Kittel was an American physicist. He was a professor at University of California, Berkeley from 1951 and was professor emeritus from 1978 until his death. Life and work Charles Kittel was born in New York City in 1916. He studied at the University of Cambridge, England, where he obtained his Bachelor of Arts in 1938. He published his thesis, under Gregory Breit, in 1941 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1945 and 1947. During World War II, he joined the Submarine Operations Research Group . He served in the United States Navy as a naval attache.
Go to Profile#3743
Javed Ahmad Ghamidi
#3750
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Javed Ahmad Ghamidi is a Pakistani philosopher, educationist, and a scholar of Islam. He is also the founding President of Al-Mawrid Institute of Islamic Sciences and its sister organisation Danish Sara.
Go to Profile#3744
Ken Arnold
#3751
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Kenneth Cutts Richard Cabot Arnold is an American computer programmer well known as one of the developers of the 1980s dungeon-crawling video game Rogue, for his contributions to the original Berkeley distribution of Unix, for his books and articles about C and C++ , and his high-profile work on the Java platform.
Go to Profile#3745
Geoffrey Burbidge
#3752
Overall Influence
1925 - 2010 (85 years)
Geoffrey Ronald Burbidge was an English astronomy professor and theoretical astrophysicist, most recently at the University of California, San Diego. He was married to astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge and was the second author of the influential B2FH paper which she led.
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Rajiv Gandhi
#3753
Overall Influence
1944 - 1991 (47 years)
Rajiv Ratna Gandhi was an Indian politician who served as the 6th Prime Minister of India from 1984 to 1989. He took office after the assassination of his mother, then–prime minister Indira Gandhi, to become the youngest Indian prime minister at the age of 40. He served until his defeat at the 1989 election, and then became Leader of the Opposition, Lok Sabha, resigning in December 1990, six months before his own assassination.
Go to Profile#3747
Asghar Qadir
#3754
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Asghar Qadir HI, SI, FPAS, is a Pakistani mathematician and a prominent cosmologist, specialised in mathematical physics and physical cosmology. Nowadays, he is widely considered one of the top mathematicians in Pakistan. Asghar has played a prominent role in promoting Relativity in Pakistan. To this day, Qadir has made important and significant contributions to the fields of differential equations, theoretical cosmology and mathematical physics. He is noted for his work in mathematics and mathematical physics, in particular his contributions to general relativity and cosmology.
Go to Profile#3748
Victoria Nuland
#3755
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Victoria Jane Nuland also known as Toria Nuland is an American diplomat currently serving as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs since 2021. A former member of the US Foreign Service, she served as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs from 2013 to 2017 and the 18th U.S. Ambassador to NATO from 2005 to 2008. Since July 2023, Nuland has served as acting Deputy Secretary of State following the retirement of Wendy Sherman.
Go to Profile#3749
Ky Fan
#3756
Overall Influence
1914 - 2010 (96 years)
Ky Fan was a Chinese-born American mathematician. He was a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Biography Fan was born in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province, China. His father, named Fan Qi , served in the district courts of Jinhua and Wenzhou. Ky Fan went to Jinhua with his father when he was eight years old and studied at several middle schools in Zhejiang, including the Jinhua High School , Hangzhou Zongwen High School , and Wenzhou High School. Fan obtained his secondary diploma from the Jinhua High School.
Go to Profile#3750
William Richard Scott
#3757
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
William Richard Scott is an American sociologist, and Emeritus Professor at Stanford University, specialised in institutional theory and organisation science. He is known for his research on the relation between organizations and their institutional environments.
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