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
#37051
Ian MacPherson
#37063
Overall Influence
1939 - 2013 (74 years)
Ian MacPherson was a Canadian historian, and a supporter of the co-operative movement. MacPherson was born in Toronto, Ontario. Education MacPherson received his B.A. from the University of Windsor in 1960. After working as a high school teacher for four years, he returned to school, earning his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in History from the University of Western Ontario.
Go to Profile#37052
Kari Vilonen
#37064
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Kari Kaleva Vilonen is a Finnish mathematician, specializing in geometric representation theory. He is currently a professor at the University of Melbourne. Education He received in 1983 his Ph.D from Brown University under Robert MacPherson with thesis The Intersection Homology D-module on Hypersurfaces with Isolated Singularities.
Go to Profile#37053
Charles H. Turner
#37065
Overall Influence
1936 - 2018 (82 years)
Charles H. Turner was an American lawyer who served as the United States Attorney for the District of Oregon. Prior to his presidential appointment as U.S. Attorney, Turner worked under his predecessor, Sidney I. Lezak, for 14 years. He was appointed as Lezak's replacement by President Ronald Reagan.
Go to Profile#37054
Henry Wynn
#37066
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Henry Philip Wynn is a British statistician who has been a President of the Royal Statistical Society. He gained a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics from Oxford and a PhD in Mathematical Statistics from Imperial College, London. He was appointed a Lecturer and then Reader at Imperial College before moving to City University London in 1985 as Professor of Mathematical Statistics . At City he co-founded the Engineering Design Centre.
Go to Profile#37055
Mamie Van Doren
#37067
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Mamie Van Doren is an American actress, singer, and sex symbol. She is perhaps best known for the rock 'n' roll, juvenile delinquency exploitation film Untamed Youth . Early life Van Doren was born on February 6, 1931, in Rowena, South Dakota, the daughter of Warner Carl Olander and Lucille Harriet Bennett. She is of three-quarters Swedish ancestry; the remainder is mixed English and German. In 1939, the family moved to Sioux City, Iowa, and then to Los Angeles during May 1942.
Go to Profile#37056
Bryan Trottier
#37068
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Bryan John Trottier is a Canadian former professional ice hockey centre who played 18 seasons in the National Hockey League for the New York Islanders and Pittsburgh Penguins. He won four Stanley Cups with the Islanders, two with the Penguins and one as an assistant coach with the Colorado Avalanche. He shares the NHL record for points in a single period with six in the second period against the Rangers on December 23, 1978. He is also one of only eight NHL players with multiple five-goal games. On August 4, 2014, Trottier was announced as an assistant coach for the Buffalo Sabres. In 2017 ...
Go to Profile#37057
Darryl Dawkins
#37069
Overall Influence
1957 - 2015 (58 years)
Darryl R. Dawkins was an American professional basketball player and coach. He was particularly known for his tenure with the National Basketball Association's Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Nets, although he also played briefly for the Detroit Pistons and Utah Jazz late in his career. His nickname, "Chocolate Thunder", was bestowed upon him by Stevie Wonder. He was known for his powerful dunks, which led to the NBA adopting breakaway rims due to him shattering a backboard on two occasions in 1979.
Go to Profile#37058
Herbert Grötzsch
#37070
Overall Influence
1902 - 1993 (91 years)
Camillo Herbert Grötzsch was a German mathematician. He was born in Döbeln and died in Halle. Grötzsch worked in graph theory. He was the discoverer and eponym of the Grötzsch graph, a triangle-free graph that requires four colors in any graph coloring, and Grötzsch's theorem, the result that every triangle-free planar graph requires at most three colors. A student of Paul Koebe, he made important contributions to the theory of conformal mappings and univalent functions: he was the first to introduce the concept of a quasiconformal mapping.
Go to Profile#37059
Michael H. Birnbaum
#37071
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Michael H. Birnbaum is a professor of Psychology and Director of the Decision Research Center at California State University, Fullerton. He has researched widely in psychology but his major focus has been on individual and social judgment and decision making, and the modelling of behavior. Birnbaum has been president of the Society for Mathematical Psychology, the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and the Society for Computers in Psychology.
Go to Profile#37060
James Brown
#37072
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
James Hemphill Brown is an American biologist and academic. He is an ecologist, and a Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of New Mexico. His work has focused on 3 distinct aspects of ecology: 1
Go to Profile#37061
Joel Garner
#37073
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Joel Garner is a former West Indian cricketer, and a member of the highly regarded late 1970s and early 1980s West Indies cricket teamss. Garner is the highest ranked One Day International bowler according to the ICC best-ever bowling ratings, and is 37th in Tests. Garner was a member of the West Indies team that won their second world title in the 1979 Cricket World Cup.
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Nathalie Tauziat
#37074
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Nathalie Tauziat is a French former professional tennis player. She was the runner-up in women's singles at the 1998 Wimbledon Championships and runner-up in the women's doubles at the 2001 US Open partnering Kimberly Po-Messerli. She reached a career-high ranking of world No. 3 in both singles and doubles.
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Birger Møller-Pedersen
#37075
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Birger Møller-Pedersen is a computer scientist and professor at the University of Oslo, department of informatics. He published numerous works on object-oriented programming and has contributed to the creation of the BETA programming language, which is a descendant of Simula.
Go to Profile#37064
Catherine Waldby
#37076
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Catherine Waldby is an Australian academic, researcher and author. She is the Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University and a visiting professor at King's College London.
Go to Profile#37065
Joey Ramone
#37077
Overall Influence
1951 - 2001 (50 years)
Jeffrey Ross Hyman , known professionally as Joey Ramone, was an American singer, best known as the lead vocalist and a founding member of the punk rock band Ramones. His image, voice, and his tenure with the Ramones made him a countercultural icon. He, along with the guitarist Johnny Ramone, are the only two original members who stayed in the band until the disbandment in 1996.
Go to Profile#37066
Esa-Pekka Salonen
#37078
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Esa-Pekka Salonen is a Finnish conductor and composer. He is the music director of the San Francisco Symphony and conductor laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra in London and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Go to Profile#37067
Patrick Deane
#37079
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Patrick Deane is a Canadian scholar and university administrator, currently serving as the 21st Principal of Queen's University. He was previously the acting president of the University of Winnipeg , the Vice-principal at Queen's University and the 7th President of McMaster University .
Go to Profile#37068
Johnny Clegg
#37080
Overall Influence
1953 - 2019 (66 years)
Jonathan Paul Clegg, was a South African musician, singer-songwriter, dancer, anthropologist and anti-apartheid activist. He first performed as part of a duo - Johnny & Sipho - with Sipho Mchunu which released its first single, Woza Friday in 1976. The two then went on to form the band Juluka which released its debut album in 1979. In 1986, Clegg founded the band Savuka, and also recorded as a solo act, occasionally reuniting with his earlier band partners. Sometimes called Le Zoulou Blanc , he was an important figure in South African popular music and a prominent white figure in the resist...
Go to Profile#37069
Paul D. Thacker
#37081
Overall Influence
Paul D. Thacker is an American journalist who reports on science, medicine, and the environment. He was a lead investigator of the United States Senate Committee on Finance for Senator Chuck Grassley, where he examined financial links between physicians and pharmaceutical companies.
Go to Profile#37070
Klaus Reinhardt
#37082
Overall Influence
1941 - 2021 (80 years)
Klaus Reinhardt was a German Army general. He was the commander of the German Army Forces Command, the NATO Joint Headquarters Center , and KFOR in Kosovo. Reinhardt died on 30 November 2021, at the age of 80. He was the son of Nazi bureaucrat Fritz Reinhardt.
Go to Profile#37071
Milivoj Solar
#37083
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Milivoj Solar is a Croatian literary theorist and literary historian. Solar was born in Koprivnica. At the University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences he earned a degree in philosophy and Yugoslav studies in 1959. At the same faculty he received his PhD in 1964 with a thesis on Fran Galović.
Go to Profile#37072
Mitchell Stephens
#37084
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Mitchell Stephens is an American professor of journalism and mass communications at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is also a respected journalist and historian with several original published works.
Go to Profile#37073
Andy Rourke
#37085
Overall Influence
1964 - 2023 (59 years)
Andrew Michael Rourke was an English musician, best known as the bassist of the 1980s indie rock band the Smiths. Regarded as one of the greatest bassists of his generation, he is known for his melodic and funk inspired approach to bass playing.
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Nick Griffin
#37086
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Nicholas John Griffin is a British politician who represented North West England as a Member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2014. He was chairman and then president of the far-right British National Party from 1999 to 2014, when he was expelled from the party.
Go to Profile#37075
Guy Goodwin
#37087
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Guy Goodwin is a senior research fellow and until recently was the W.A. Handley Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford . A fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Goodwin has served as principal investigator in many clinical trials for the treatment of bipolar disorder. He is also an Emeritus Senior Investigator at the National Institute for Health and Care Research and has been on the advisory boards of numerous research councils. He was President of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology from 2013 to 2016.
Go to Profile#37076
Josef Meixner
#37088
Overall Influence
1908 - 1994 (86 years)
Josef Meixner was a German theoretical physicist, known for his work on the physics of deformable bodies, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, Meixner polynomials, Meixner–Pollaczek polynomials, and spheroidal wave functions.
Go to Profile#37077
Clifford J. Rogers
#37089
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Clifford J. Rogers is a professor of history at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He has also been a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Swansea University, an Olin Fellow in Military and Strategic History at Yale, and a Fulbright Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in London.
Go to Profile#37078
Sam Hunter
#37090
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Sam Hunter was an American historian of modern art. He was emeritus professor of Art History at Princeton University and an Art Historian, Author, Museum Director, Professor and Curator. Life A native of Springfield, Massachusetts, Hunter graduated from Williams College in 1944. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1943–46, rising to the rank of lieutenant junior grade and receiving five battle stars.
Go to Profile#37079
Visvanathan Rudrakumaran
#37091
Overall Influence
Visuvanathan Rudrakumaran is the prime minister of the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam, which aims to realize accountability for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide committed by Sri Lanka against the Tamil minority and to create a separate Tamil state, called Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka. He was the former legal advisor to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam . By profession he is a lawyer in the United States. He is currently a US citizen and lives in New York City.
Go to Profile#37080
Shulamit Reinharz
#37092
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Shulamit Reinharz was the Jacob Potofsky Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University until 2017. During her tenure at Brandeis, she was director of the women's studies program from 1991 to 2001 and launched The Scholars Program, the first graduate program to focus on Jewish women. She was the founding director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute in 1997 and founder and director of the Women's Studies Research Center in 2001.
Go to Profile#37081
William H. Dutton
#37093
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
William H. Dutton is former Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, Professor of Internet Studies, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Balliol College. He also has a chair in Michigan State University's Department of Media and Information, where he is Quello Professor of Media and Information Policy. He was previously a Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, which he joined in 1980, where he was elected President of the Faculty.
Go to Profile#37082
Jonathan Wilson
#37094
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jonathan Wilson is a British-born writer and professor who lives in Newton, Massachusetts. He is the Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate as well as the Director of the Center for Humanities at Tufts University. Within the English Department at Tufts, he teaches courses on Creative Writing and contemporary American Fiction. He lives with his wife, Sharon Kaitz, who is an artist. He has two sons, Adam Wilson, a journalist and writer and Gabriel Wilson, who works in film.
Go to Profile#37083
Eva Bayer-Fluckiger
#37095
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Eva Bayer-Fluckiger is a Hungarian and Swiss mathematician. She is an Emmy Noether Professor Emeritus at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. She has worked on several topics in topology, algebra and number theory, e.g. on the theory of knots, on lattices, on quadratic forms and on Galois cohomology. Along with Raman Parimala, she proved Serre's conjecture II regarding the Galois cohomology of a simply-connected semisimple algebraic group when such a group is of classical type.
Go to Profile#37084
Hà Huy Khoái
#37096
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Hà Huy Khoái is a Vietnamese mathematician working in complex analysis. Career Hà Huy Khoái studied in Vietnam under the "fathers" of Vietnamese mathematics Lê Văn Thiêm and Hoàng Tụy, and in Moscow at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics under Yuri I. Manin. He is currently a professor and the director of the Mathematics Institute of Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology. He is a senior advisor of the Acta Mathematica Vietnamica journal.
Go to Profile#37085
José Froilán González
#37097
Overall Influence
1922 - 2013 (91 years)
José Froilán González was an Argentine racing driver, particularly notable for scoring Ferrari's first win in a Formula One World Championship race at the 1951 British Grand Prix. He made his Formula One debut for Scuderia Achille Varzi in the 1950 Monaco Grand Prix. His last Grand Prix was the 1960 Argentine Grand Prix.
Go to Profile#37086
Rod McKuen
#37098
Overall Influence
1933 - 2015 (82 years)
Rodney Marvin McKuen was an American poet, singer-songwriter, and composer. He was one of the best-selling poets in the United States during the late 1960s. Throughout his career, McKuen produced a wide range of recordings, which included popular music, spoken word poetry, film soundtracks and classical music. He earned two Academy Award nominations for his music compositions. McKuen's translations and adaptations of the songs of Jacques Brel were instrumental in bringing the Belgian songwriter to prominence in the English-speaking world. His poetry deals with themes of love, the natural world and spirituality.
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Teresa del Conde
#37099
Overall Influence
1938 - 2017 (79 years)
Teresa del Conde Pontones was a Mexican art critic and art historian. Early life and education Born in Mexico City in 1938, Conde earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1958. With a grant she furthered her studies in Rome, earning a degree in psychopathology at the University of Milan. In 1974, she was granted a degree in art history; in 1979, a master's degree; and in 1986, she obtained a doctorate.
Go to Profile#37088
Alan Burns
#37100
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Professor Alan Burns FREng FIET FBCS FIEEE CEng is a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of York, England. He has been at the University of York since 1990, and held the post of Head of Department from 1999 until 30 June 2006, when he was succeeded by John McDermid.
Go to Profile#37089
Claude Berri
#37101
Overall Influence
1934 - 2009 (75 years)
Claude Berri was a French film director, writer, producer, actor and distributor. Early life Born Claude Beri Langmann in Paris, Berri was the son of Jewish immigrant parents. His mother, Beila , was from Romania, and his father, Hirsch Langmann, was a furrier from Poland. His sister was the screenwriter and editor Arlette Langmann.
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Deniece Williams
#37102
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
June Deniece Williams is an American singer. She has been described as "one of the great soul voices" by the BBC. She is best known for the songs "Free", "Silly", "It's Gonna Take a Miracle" and two Billboard Hot 100 No.1 singles "Let's Hear It for the Boy" and "Too Much, Too Little, Too Late" . Williams has won four Grammys with twelve nominations altogether. She is also known for recording “Without Us”, the theme song of Family Ties.
Go to Profile#37091
Robert Sokolowski
#37103
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Monsignor Robert Sokolowski is a philosopher and Roman Catholic priest who serves as the Elizabeth Breckenridge Caldwell Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America. Sokolowski's philosophical research is focused primarily on the discipline of phenomenology and interrelated sub-disciplines, though he has also written works from a theological perspective. He is known for his interpretation of Husserl, commonly known as "East-Coast Husserlianism" in academic circles. His Introduction to Phenomenology has been translated into seven other languages.
Go to Profile#37092
Barry B. Hughes
#37104
Overall Influence
Barry B. Hughes is the John Evans Professor at the University of Denver, Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He is a senior scientist, mentor and founder of the Pardee Center for International Futures, a center for long-term, systemic thinking on political, economic, social and environmental issues. Hughes has spent the majority of his career developing the International Futures global integrated assessment model. This model has been used by a wide range of international organizations and governments, including the European Commission, the National Intelligence Council, the United St...
Go to Profile#37093
Morgan Spurlock
#37105
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Morgan Valentine Spurlock is an American documentary filmmaker and television producer. Spurlock's films include Super Size Me , Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? , POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold , Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope , One Direction: This Is Us and Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! . He was the executive producer and star of the reality television series 30 Days . In June 2013, Spurlock became host and producer of the CNN show Morgan Spurlock Inside Man . He is also the co-founder of short-film content marketing company Cinelan, which produced the Focu...
Go to Profile#37094
Lucia Caporaso
#37106
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Lucia Caporaso is an Italian mathematician, holding a professorship in mathematics at Roma Tre University. She was born in Rome, Italy, on May 22,1965. Her research includes work in algebraic geometry, arithmetic geometry, tropical geometry and enumerative geometry.
Go to Profile#37095
Eric Wynalda
#37107
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Eric Boswell Wynalda is an American soccer coach, television commentator, and retired player. He was formerly an analyst and color commentator for soccer coverage on Fox Sports 1 and ESPN. Previously, he served as head coach and technical director of Las Vegas Lights FC in the USL Championship and he was previously the host of WTF: Wynalda Talks Football on SiriusXM FC.
Go to Profile#37096
Vitaly Efimov
#37108
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Vitaly N. Efimov is a Russian theoretical physicist. He proposed the existence of a novel and exotic state of matter now dubbed the Efimov State as a researcher in A. F. Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute, USSR Academy of Sciences, Leningrad, USSR in his 1970 paper "Energy levels arising from resonant two-body forces in a three-body system". It was announced in 2006 that the existence of this state of matter had been confirmed.
Go to Profile#37097
Elaine F. Walker
#37109
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Elaine F. Walker is a psychologist and professor whose research focuses on child and adolescent development, and changes in the brain due to adolescence. Other research interests includes the precursors and neurodevelopment aspects of schizophrenia and other serious mental disorders. She has taken part in writing over 250 articles and six books related to mental health and neuroscience. Walker is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Emory University.
Go to Profile#37098
David A. Eisner
#37110
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
David Alfred Eisner, FRCP , FMedSci, is British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiac Physiology at the University of Manchester and editor-in-chief of The Journal of General Physiology . Education Eisner was born in 1955 in Manchester, the son of the physicist and writer Herbert Eisner. After attending Manchester Grammar School, he received his B.A. in natural sciences at King's College, Cambridge in 1976. In 1979 he obtained a D.Phil. in physiology at Oxford University in the laboratory of Denis Noble for work on the sodium pump in cardiac muscle.
Go to Profile#37099
Eugene Helimski
#37111
Overall Influence
1950 - 2007 (57 years)
Eugene Arnoľdovič Helimski was a Soviet and Russian linguist . He was a Doctor of Philosophy and Professor. Helimski researched Samoyedic and Finno-Ugric languages, problems of Uralic and Nostratic linguistic affinity, language contact, the theory of genetic classification of languages, and the cultural history of Northern Eurasia and of shamanism. He became one of the world's leading specialists in Samoyedic languages.
Go to Profile#37100
Lanny McDonald
#37112
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Lanny King McDonald is a Canadian former professional ice hockey player for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Colorado Rockies and Calgary Flames of the National Hockey League . He played over 1,100 games during a 16-year career in which he scored 500 goals and over 1,000 points. His total of 66 goals in 1982–83 remains the Flames' franchise record for a single season.
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