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
#37001
Ann Lauterbach
#37013
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Ann Lauterbach is an American poet, essayist, art critic, and professor. Early life Lauterbach was born and raised in New York City, and earned her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin. She lived in London for eight years, working in publishing and for art institutions, including London's Thames and Hudson art publishing house. On her return to the U.S., she worked in art galleries in New York before she began teaching.
Go to Profile#37002
Chia-Kun Chu
#37014
Overall Influence
Chia-Kun Chu was a Chinese-American applied mathematician who was the Fu Foundation Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics at Columbia University. He had been on Columbia faculty since 1965 and served as the department chairman of applied physics and nuclear engineering three times .
Go to Profile#37003
Paweł Wojciechowski
#37015
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Paweł Wojciechowski is a Polish economist. Life He graduated from the Foreign Trade Faculty of the Main School of Planning and Statistics in 1983. In 1986 he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Economics from John Carroll University, Ohio in the United States.
Go to Profile#37004
Eric Bauza
#37016
Overall Influence
Eric Bauza is a Canadian-born voice actor based in the United States. His most-known roles include Stimpy on Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon", Foop on The Fairly OddParents, Thunderbolt Ross on Iron Man: Armored Adventures, and Fozzie Bear on Muppet Babies. He is the current voice of many characters, including Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, Pepé Le Pew, Marvin the Martian, Dino, Woody Woodpecker, Lego Luke Skywalker, and Chris the Red Goobler on Solar Opposites. As of 2023, Bauza is the voice of Jimmy Pesto in Bob's Burgers, replacing original voice actor Jay Johnston.
Go to Profile#37005
Paul Hart
#37017
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Paul Anthony Hart is an English football manager, coach, and former professional player who made 567 appearances in the Football League as a defender. The son of Johnny Hart, who played for and managed Manchester City, and brother of Nigel, a defender who made more than 300 League appearances, Hart had five-year spells with both Blackpool and Leeds United, and shorter spells with Stockport County, Nottingham Forest and Sheffield Wednesday, among others.
Go to Profile#37006
Tunç Erem
#37018
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Tunç Erem is a Turkish academic in international marketing and international trade and strategic management. Erem was born in Istanbul in 1938. After finishing Robert College High School in Istanbul, he graduated from the college of Business Administration of Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois, U.S. in 1962 with a BS degree. He received his doctorate from the Istanbul Academy of Economic and Commercial Sciences in 1968. Erem was awarded the title of associate professor in 1971, and in 1977 a full professorship at the Istanbul Academy of Economic and Commercial Sciences.
Go to Profile#37007
Richard Bagozzi
#37019
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Richard Bagozzi is an American marketing theorist, consumer psychologist, and the Dwight F. Benton Professor of Behavioral Science in Management at Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. He is one of the most cited scholars in Marketing and among the field's most prominent theorists and empirical researchers. He has been ranked among The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds in 2014 by Thomson Reuters. He is an inaugural fellow of the American Marketing Association.
Go to Profile#37008
Yan Xuetong
#37020
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Yan Xuetong is a Chinese political scientist and serves as a distinguished professor and dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University. Yan is one of the major Chinese figures in the study of international relations . He is the founder of 'moral realism', a neoclassical realist theoretical paradigm in IR theory. His moral realist theory is based on political determinism.
Go to Profile#37009
Inderjit Dhillon
#37021
Overall Influence
Inderjit S. Dhillon is the Gottesman Family Centennial Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also the Director of the ICES Center for Big Data Analytics. His main research interests are in machine learning, data analysis, parallel computing, network analysis, linear algebra and optimization.
Go to Profile#37010
Thomas Gingeras
#37022
Overall Influence
Thomas Raymond Gingeras is an American geneticist and professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is a leader of the National Institutes of Health's ENCODE project. He worked at Affymetrix as Vice President of Biological Sciences before joining CSHL. In 2019, he was listed as an ISI Highly Cited Researcher. His son is the historian Ryan Gingeras.
Go to Profile#37011
Keith Griffin
#37023
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Keith B. Griffin is an economist, whose specialty is the economics of poverty reduction . From 1979 to 1988 he was President of Magdalen College, Oxford, and he remains an honorary fellow there. During his presidency of Magdalen College, he and Senior Bursar R. W. Johnson worked to rescue the finances and buildings of the college, an effort described in Johnson's 2015 book Look Back in Laughter: Oxford's Postwar Golden Age. Griffin was the second American to ever serve as President of an Oxford college, and the youngest since World War II.
Go to Profile#37012
Peter Jüni
#37024
Overall Influence
Peter Jüni is a Swiss physician, general internist, and epidemiologist based in England. He was previously both a member of, and the scientific director of, the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, and also a director of a research centre at St Michael's Hospital in Toronto.
Go to Profile#37013
Dorianne Laux
#37025
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Dorianne Laux is an American poet. Biography Laux worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, and a maid before receiving a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988. Laux taught at the University of Oregon. She is a professor at North Carolina State University’s creative writing program, and the MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University. She is also a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review.
Go to Profile#37014
Phil Scraton
#37026
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Phil Scraton is a critical criminologist, academic and author. He is a social researcher, known particularly for his investigative work into the context, circumstances and aftermath of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. More recently, he was a member of the Hillsborough Independent Panel and headed its research. Currently he is Professor Emeritus, School of Law at Queen's University Belfast, and formerly Director of the Childhood, Transition and Social Justice Initiative.
Go to Profile#37015
Peter Hobson
#37027
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
R. P. Hobson, or Peter Hobson, is a Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at University College London known for his work on autism and experimental child psychology. His research leads him to conclusions concerning the origins of consciousness, summarized in a book for the general reader, The Cradle of Thought.
Go to Profile#37016
Nancy Hingston
#37028
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Nancy Burgess Hingston is a mathematician working in differential geometry. She is a professor emerita of mathematics at The College of New Jersey. Early life and education Nancy Hingston's father William Hingston was superintendent of the Central Bucks School District in Pennsylvania; her mother was a high school mathematics and computer science teacher. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a double major in mathematics and physics. After a year studying physics as a graduate student, she switched to mathematics, and completed her PhD in 1981 from Harvard University under th...
Go to Profile#37017
Taliya Habrieva
#37029
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Taliya Yarullovna Habrieva is a Russian jurist. She was instrumental in preparing the 2020 amendments to the Constitution of Russia that allowed President Vladimir Putin to remain in power after 2024.
Go to Profile#37018
Stephen E. Robinson
#37030
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Stephen Edward Robinson was a religious scholar and apologist, who was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . Biography Stephen E. Robinson was born and raised in Southern California and served a two-year mission for the LDS Church in the Northern States Mission . In 1972, he married Janet Bowen , and they have six children. He has been a member of the faculty at Brigham Young University since 1986, and he was appointed chairman of the Department of Ancient Scripture there in 1990. Robinson received a B.A. in English and Philosophy from the BYU Honors Program in 1971, graduating with "High Honors with Distinction." He received a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#37019
Robert Hess
#37031
Overall Influence
1932 - 1994 (62 years)
Robert Lee Hess was an American scholar of African history, and the sixth President of Brooklyn College. Personal life Hess was born in Asbury Park, New Jersey, to Henry and Ada Hess. He attended Yale University, where he earned his B.A. , M.A. , and Ph.D. degrees, studying African history.
Go to Profile#37020
Tracy Fullerton
#37032
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Tracy Fullerton is an American game designer, educator and writer, best known for Walden, a game . She is a Professor in the USC Interactive Media & Games Division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Game Innovation Lab at USC.
Go to Profile#37021
Bert Blyleven
#37033
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Bert Blyleven is a Dutch-American former professional baseball pitcher who played 22 seasons in Major League Baseball from 1970 to 1992, primarily with the Minnesota Twins. Blyleven recorded 3,701 career strikeouts, the fifth-most in MLB history. He won 287 games, 27th-most all-time, and pitched 4,970 innings, 14th-most all-time. A renowned curveball pitcher, Blyleven was also a two-time All-Star and World Series champion. Although under-appreciated during his playing career, he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2011—his second-to-last year of eligibility.
Go to Profile#37022
Ann Langley
#37034
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Ann Langley is a British-Canadian economist. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Strategic Management Research in a Pluralistic Environment at HEC Montréal. She is a Distinguished Research Environment Professor at Warwick Business School and an adjunct professor at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, the University of Montreal, and the University of Gothenburg. Langley is interested in strategy, health management and research methodology.
Go to Profile#37023
Daniel Gajski
#37035
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Daniel Gajski is a Professor of the School of Information and Computer Science and the School of Engineering at University of California, Irvine, United States. He was previously the Director for the Center for Embedded Computer Systems , now known as the Center for Embedded and Cyber-physical Systems.
Go to Profile#37024
Mikhail Golosov
#37036
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Mikhail Golosov is a Belarusian-American economist currently the Homer J. Livingston Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He previously served as Chemical Bank Chairman's Professor of Economics at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#37025
Alan Yentob
#37037
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Alan Yentob is a retired British television executive and presenter. He has held senior roles at the BBC including head of music and arts, controller of BBC1 and controller of BBC2. He stepped down as the BBC's creative director in December 2015, and was chairman of the board of trustees of the charity Kids Company from 2003 until its collapse in 2015.
Go to Profile#37026
Gong Hwang-cherng
#37038
Overall Influence
1934 - 2010 (76 years)
Gong Hwang-cherng was a Taiwanese linguist who specialized in Sino-Tibetan comparative linguistics and the phonetic reconstruction of Tangut and Old Chinese. He was born on 10 December 1934 at Yunlin County in Taiwan, and graduated from National Taiwan Normal University in 1958 with a degree in English. He earned his PhD in 1975 from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, and was a research fellow and later professor at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. He was elected an honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America in 2001, and an academician of Academia Sinica in 2002. In 2006,...
Go to Profile#37027
Hype Williams
#37039
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Harold "Hype" Williams is an American music video and film director, film producer, and screenwriter. Early life Williams was born in Queens. He is of mixed African-American and Honduran descent. He attended Adelphi University. He first displayed his work by tagging local billboards, storefronts, and playgrounds using HYPE as his graffiti tag. His graffiti style was influenced by artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. His big break came when he began working with Classic Concepts Video Productions. Lionel "Vid Kid" Martin and VJ Ralph McDaniels created Williams' first opportunity...
Go to Profile#37028
Deadmau5
#37040
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Joel Thomas Zimmerman , known professionally as Deadmau5 , is a Canadian electronic music producer and DJ. He mainly produces progressive house and electro house music, though he also produces and DJs other genres of electronic music, including techno under the alias Testpilot. Zimmerman has received six Grammy Award nominations for his work.
Go to Profile#37029
Samuel H. Gruber
#37041
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Samuel H. Gruber was a shark biologist and founder of the American Elasmobranch Society. He was a professor at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School for Marine and Atmospheric Science and the founder of the Bimini Biological Field Station Foundation.
Go to Profile#37030
Kamaljit S. Bawa
#37042
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Kamaljit Singh Bawa, FRS is an evolutionary ecologist, conservation biologist and a distinguished professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is also the founder of Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment . In 2012, Bawa received the first Gunnerus Sustainability Award, the world's major international award for work on sustainability. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.
Go to Profile#37031
David Price
#37043
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
David Taylor Price is an American former professional baseball pitcher. Price was selected first overall in the 2007 Major League Baseball draft by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and made his Major League Baseball debut in September 2008. He also played for the Detroit Tigers, Toronto Blue Jays, Boston Red Sox, and Los Angeles Dodgers.
Go to Profile#37032
Andrew Sherratt
#37044
Overall Influence
1946 - 2006 (60 years)
Andrew George Sherratt was an English archaeologist, one of the most influential of his generation. He was best known for his theory of the secondary products revolution. Early life and education Sherratt was born in Oldham, Lancashire on 8 May 1946. From 1965, he studied archaeology and anthropology at Peterhouse, Cambridge University, completing his degree in 1968. He received his PhD from Cambridge in 1976, writing his thesis on The Beginning of the Bronze Age in south-east Europe.
Go to Profile#37033
R. H. W. Dillard
#37045
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Richard Henry Wilde Dillard was an American poet, author, critic, and translator. Life and career Richard Henry Wilde Dillard was born in Roanoke, Virginia, Dillard was best known as a poet. He is also highly regarded as a writer of fiction and critical essays, as well as one of the screenwriters for the cult classic Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Roanoke College and went on to receive of a Master of Arts and the Ph. D. from the University of Virginia. While at the University of Virginia he was both a Woodrow Wilson and a DuPont Fellow. He...
Go to Profile#37034
Pamela Balch
#37046
Overall Influence
Pamela Balch is the 18th president of West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, West Virginia. Balch is a 1971 graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College, and was the unanimous choice as the eighteenth president of the college by the board of trustees.
Go to Profile#37035
Max Birnstiel
#37047
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Max Luciano Birnstiel was a Swiss molecular biologist who held a number of positions in scientific leadership in Europe, including the chair of the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Zurich from 1972–86, and that of founding director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna from 1986 to 1996. His research focused on gene regulation in eukaryotes. His research group is sometimes cited as the first to purify single genes, the ribosomal RNA genes from Xenopus laevis, three years before the successful isolation of the lac operon. He is also recognized for one of the earliest discoveries of a gene enhancer element.
Go to Profile#37036
Matt Chamberlain
#37048
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Matthew Chamberlain is an American session musician, drummer, producer and songwriter. He has played with various artists, including Pearl Jam, Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, David Bowie, Tori Amos, The Wallflowers, Elton John, Lisa Marie Presley, Brandi Carlile, Garbage, and Macy Gray.
Go to Profile#37037
Caren Kaplan
#37049
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Caren Kaplan is Professor Emerita of American Studies at University of California at Davis, and a figure in the academic discipline of women's studies. Together with Inderpal Grewal, Kaplan has worked as a founder of the field of transnational feminist cultural studies or transnational feminism.
Go to Profile#37038
Reza Zadeh
#37050
Overall Influence
Reza Zadeh is an American-Canadian-Iranian computer scientist and technology executive working on machine learning. He is adjunct professor at Stanford University and CEO of Matroid. He has served on the technical advisory boards of Databricks and Microsoft. His work focuses on machine learning, distributed computing, and discrete applied mathematics.
Go to Profile#37039
Margo McCaffery
#37051
Overall Influence
Margo McCaffery was an American registered nurse and pioneer of the field of pain management nursing. McCaffery's oft-quoted definition of pain as "whatever the experiencing person says it is, existing whenever and wherever the person says it does", stated as early as 1968, has become the prevailing conceptualization of pain for clinicians over the past few decades.
Go to Profile#37040
Joe Armstrong
#37052
Overall Influence
1950 - 2019 (69 years)
Joseph Leslie Armstrong was a computer scientist working in the area of fault-tolerant distributed systems. He is best known as one of the co-designers of the Erlang programming language. Early life and education Armstrong was born in Bournemouth, England in 1950.
Go to Profile#37041
Alexander Merkurjev
#37053
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Aleksandr Sergeyevich Merkurjev is a Russian-American mathematician, who has made major contributions to the field of algebra. Currently Merkurjev is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#37042
William Poser
#37054
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
William J. Poser is a Canadian-American linguist who is known for his extensive work with the historical linguistics of Native American languages, especially those of the Athabascan family. He got his B.A. from Harvard in 1979 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1985, his dissertation being about suprasegmental phenomena in the phonology of Japanese. He then taught at Stanford, and then at the University of Northern British Columbia. He has published extensively about the Carrier language in which he has done ample fieldwork. He is also known as a frequent blogger at the Language Log.
Go to Profile#37043
Ben Cardin
#37055
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Benjamin Louis Cardin is an American lawyer and politician serving as the senior United States senator from Maryland, a seat he has held since 2007. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the U.S. representative for from 1987 to 2007. Cardin served in the Maryland House of Delegates from 1967 to 1987 and as its speaker from 1979 to 1987, the youngest person to ever hold the position. In his half-century career as an elected official, he had never lost an election.
Go to Profile#37044
Syeda Saiyidain Hameed
#37056
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Syeda Saiyidain Hameed is an Indian social and women's rights activist, educationist, writer and a former member of the Planning Commission of India. She chaired the Steering Committee of the Commission on Health which reviewed the National Health Policy of 2002, till the dissolution of the body in 2015, to be replaced by NITI Aayog.
Go to Profile#37045
Kevin Conner
#37057
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Kevin J. Conner was a Pentecostal theologian who was formerly the senior minister of Waverley Christian Fellowship in Melbourne, Australia. Conner is the author of nearly 60 books and has taught nationally and internationally at many churches, conferences and bible colleges.
Go to Profile#37046
Charles W. Blackwell
#37058
Overall Influence
1942 - 2013 (71 years)
Charles W. Blackwell was an American lawyer, educator, activist, and diplomat, who served as the first Ambassador of the Chickasaw Nation to the United States of America, from 1995 until his death in 2013. Blackwell was the first Ambassador of any Native American tribal government to the government of the United States. From 1990 to 1995, he had served as the Chickasaw Nation delegate to the US Congress, while also working on issues of health, education, and economic development for tribal nations.
Go to Profile#37047
Kostya Tszyu
#37059
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Konstantin Borisovich "Kostya" Tszyu is a Russian-Australian former professional boxer who competed from 1992 to 2005. He held multiple light-welterweight world championships, including the undisputed and lineal titles between 2001 and 2005. Tszyu was an exceptional all-around boxer-puncher who relied heavily on accuracy, timing, and carried formidable punching power; he is often regarded as one of the hardest-punching light-welterweights in the division's history.
Go to Profile#37048
Segenet Kelemu
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#37060
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Segenet Kelemu is an Ethiopian scientist, noted for her research as a molecular plant pathologist, and outstanding scientific leadership. For close to three decades, Kelemu and her team's research has contributed to addressing agricultural constraints in Africa, Asia, Latin America and North America.
Go to Profile#37049
Jonathan Katz
#37061
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Jonathan Katz is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland who conducts research on cryptography and cybersecurity. In 2019–2020 he was a faculty member in the Volgenau School of Engineering at George Mason University, where he held the title of Eminent Scholar in Cybersecurity. In 2013–2019 he was director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center at the University of Maryland.
Go to Profile#37050
Julia Hsu
#37062
Overall Influence
Julia Wan-Ping Hsu is an American materials scientist. In her research, she uses scanning probe microscopy to study the nanostructure, optics, and photoelectric properties of thin films and crystal surfaces, with particular application to solar cells, and has used nanotransfer printing to make electrical connections to single-molecule sensing devices. She is a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she holds the Texas Instruments Distinguished Chair in Nanoelectronics.
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