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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#37401
Erik Berglöf
#37413
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Erik Berglöf is a Swedish economist, currently the Chief Economist of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank , the Beijing-based multilateral development bank established in 2016 with a mission to improve social and economic outcomes in Asia. In March 2019 Erik Berglöf was appointed to the European Council's High Level Group of Wise Persons on the European financial architecture for development where Berglöf and eight other economists will suggest changes to the EU's development finance structure. In 2017–2018 Erik Berglöf served on the secretariat of the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global...
Go to Profile#37402
Rajesh P. N. Rao
#37414
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Rajesh P. N. Rao is the Director of the NSF Center for Neurotechnology and the Cherng Jia and Elizabeth Yun Hwang Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Go to Profile#37403
Christoph Klein
#37415
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Christoph Klein is a German Pediatric Hematologist/Oncologist and Director at the Dr. von Hauner Children’s Hospital, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany. Career Christoph Klein completed clinical and scientific training at the Dr. von Hauner Children's Hospital Munich, Hôpital Necker Enfants Malades, Paris, University Children's Hospital Freiburg, and Boston Children's Hospital. He was Chair of the Department of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at Hannover Medical School before being appointed Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at LMU in 2011.
Go to Profile#37404
Leon Birnbaum
#37416
Overall Influence
1918 - 2010 (92 years)
Leon Birnbaum was a Romanian mathematician and philosopher. He was born in Chernovtsy on June 18, 1918 to a family with an intellectual tradition. He studied at the Orthodox High School, then at the Faculty of Mathematics. In 1941 the war reached Chernovtsy and he was deported to Magilev-Podolsk in Transnistria until 1944.
Go to Profile#37405
Sloane Crosley
#37417
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Sloane Crosley is an American writer living in New York City known for her humorous essays, including the collections I Was Told There'd Be Cake, How Did You Get This Number, and Look Alive Out There. She has also worked as a publicist at the Vintage Books division of Random House and as an adjunct professor in Columbia University's Master of Fine Arts program. She graduated from Connecticut College in 2000.
Go to Profile#37406
Robert B. Murrett
#37418
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Robert Brendan Murrett is an American academic, intelligence officer, and retired Vice Admiral in the United States Navy. He was the fourth Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, serving from July 2006 through July 2010. In 2011, Murrett joined the Institute for Security Policy and Law at Syracuse University where he now serves as deputy director. He is also a faculty member at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, and serves on the Institute for Veterans and Military Families advisory board at Syracuse University.
Go to Profile#37407
Lita Ford
#37419
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Lita Rossana Ford is an American guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter. She was the lead guitarist for the all-female rock band the Runaways in the late 1970s, and then embarked on a successful glam metal solo career that hit its peak in the late 1980s. The 1989 single "Close My Eyes Forever", a duet with Ozzy Osbourne, remains Ford's most successful song, reaching No. 8 on the US Billboard Hot 100.
Go to Profile#37408
Wolfgang Schirmacher
#37420
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Wolfgang Schirmacher is a German philosopher, editor and educator in the field of philosophy, art and critical thought. He was the Founding Dean of the Media and Communications division at the European Graduate School, where he now is a full professor and holder of the Arthur Schopenhauer Chair of Philosophy. He has edited several journals and written books, as well as developed curricula in philosophical disciplines at major universities.
Go to Profile#37409
Jejomar Binay
#37421
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Jejomar "Jojo" Cabauatan Binay Sr. is a Filipino lawyer and politician who served as the 13th vice president of the Philippines from 2010 to 2016, under President Benigno Aquino III. A human rights lawyer during the Martial law period under President Ferdinand Marcos, Binay provided free legal services to political prisoners before being arrested and detained at the Ipil Rehabilitation Center. He also helped found the Movement for Brotherhood, Integrity and Nationalism, Inc. along with other human rights lawyers.
Go to Profile#37410
John Gosden
#37422
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
John Harry Martin Gosden is a British racehorse trainer. He has trained over 3,000 winners worldwide, including winners of the Breeders' Cup Classic, the Derby, the Arc, the King George, the Eclipse. He has over 600 winners in the United States.
Go to Profile#37411
Galip Ulsoy
#37423
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ali Galip Ulsoy is an academic at the University of Michigan , Ann Arbor, where he is the C.D. Mote Jr. Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and the William Clay Ford Professor Emeritus of Manufacturing.
Go to Profile#37412
Beatrice Forbes Manz
#37424
Overall Influence
Beatrice Forbes Manz is an American historian of the Middle East and Central Asia who specializes in nomads and the Timurid dynasty. She currently works as a professor of history at Tufts University. Her 1989 book The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane is considered one of the most authoritative accounts of the career of the conqueror Timur.
Go to Profile#37413
Eva Philbin
#37425
Overall Influence
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
Eva Philbin was an Irish chemist who became the first woman president of the Institute of Chemistry of Ireland. Early life and education Born Eva Maria Ryder in Ballina, County Mayo, Ireland, Philbin the elder of two daughters of Kate and George Ryder. She attended the Convent of Mercy in Ballina, and received her B.Sc in 1936 with first class honors and M.Sc from University College Galway. While at University College Galway she worked under Tom Dillon where they worked on identifying carbohydrates in seaweed.
Go to Profile#37414
Martin Bronfenbrenner
#37426
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
Martin Bronfenbrenner was an American economist who served as William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University. His publications, including more than 250 scholarly papers and five books, cover a host of topics, including aggregate economics, income distribution, international economics, and Japan. His scholarship was recognized on several occasions, including his election as Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.
Go to Profile#37415
Iris Bohnet
#37427
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Iris Bohnet is a Swiss behavioral economist, and the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government and the Academic Dean at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Her work focuses primarily on issues of gender, trust, and social preferences.
Go to Profile#37416
Neil Campbell
#37428
Overall Influence
1946 - 2004 (58 years)
Neil Allison Campbell was an American scientist known best for his textbook, Biology, first published in 1987 and repeatedly through many subsequent editions. The title is popular worldwide and has been used by over 700,000 students in both high school and college-level classes.
Go to Profile#37417
Roman Frigg
#37429
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Roman Frigg is a Swiss philosopher, Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and director of its Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science. In 2016 he was awarded the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award.
Go to Profile#37418
Michael Reich
#37430
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Michael Reich is a Polish-born economist who primarily focuses on labor economics and political economy. Currently, Reich is a professor of economics and co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California at Berkeley. He served as director of IRLE from 2004 to 2015. In 1968, he helped found the Union for Radical Political Economics.
Go to Profile#37419
Cornelius Bennett
#37431
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Cornelius O'Landa Bennett is an American former professional football player who was a linebacker in the National Football League . He played for the Buffalo Bills from 1987 to 1995, Atlanta Falcons from 1996 to 1998, and the Indianapolis Colts from 1999 to 2000. Bennett was a five-time Pro Bowler, being elected in 1988, and 1990–1993, and won the AFC Defensive Player of the Year award twice .
Go to Profile#37420
Petra Rudolf
#37432
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Petra Rudolf is a German and Italian solid state physicist. As of 2003, Rudolf has been a professor at the Materials Science Centre , University of Groningen, Netherlands. Biography Born in Munich, Rudolf moved to Italy to complete high school and to receive her MSc degree in physics at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Following, she worked at the National Surface Science Laboratory in Trieste for five years, interrupted two times to work on the newly discovered fullerenes at Bell Labs, USA. In 1995, she received her PhD in physics under the supervision of Roland Caudano at Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, Namur, Belgium.
Go to Profile#37421
Teresa Blankmeyer Burke
#37433
Overall Influence
Teresa Blankmeyer Burke is a Professor of Philosophy at Gallaudet University. She is the first signing deaf woman to receive a PhD in philosophy in the world, as well as the first deaf person to receive a PhD in philosophy at the University of New Mexico.
Go to Profile#37422
David A. Klarner
#37434
Overall Influence
1940 - 1999 (59 years)
David Anthony Klarner was an American mathematician, author, and educator. He is known for his work in combinatorial enumeration, polyominoes, and box-packing. Klarner was a friend and correspondent of mathematics popularizer Martin Gardner and frequently made contributions to Gardner's Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. He edited a book honoring Gardner on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Gardner in turn dedicated his twelfth collection of mathematical games columns to Klarner.
Go to Profile#37423
Percy A. Pierre
#37435
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Percy Anthony Pierre is an American electrical engineer. He was the first African-American Ph.D. in electrical engineering, appointed assistant secretary of the U.S. Army for Research and Development, and appointed acting Secretary of the Army. Pierre was the principal architect of the national minority engineering effort. He currently is vice president emeritus and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University.
Go to Profile#37424
Alice Goffman
#37436
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
#37425
Daoud Hanania
#37437
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Daoud Anastas Hanania is a Jordanian heart surgeon. Hanania is a former Lieutenant General in the Jordanian Armed Forces and former Senator in the Jordanian Parliament. Family background and education Daoud Hanania was born into an Orthodox Christian Palestinian family originally hailed from Jerusalem, Palestine. His father, Anastas Hanania, was a lawyer and politician. The Hananias lived in West Jerusalem until 1948. In the early 1950s they permanently moved to Amman, Jordan, where Hanania's father came to hold several cabinet positions in the Jordanian government, including Foreign Minister, Minister of Justice, Minister for Refugees and Minister of Finance.
Go to Profile#37426
George Hamilton
#37438
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
George Stevens Hamilton is an American actor. His notable films include Home from the Hill , Where the Boys Are , Angel Baby , By Love Possessed , A Thunder of Drums , Light in the Piazza , Two Weeks in Another Town , The Victors , Looking for Love , Your Cheatin' Heart , Viva Maria! , Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding! , Jack of Diamonds , The Power , Evel Knievel , The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing , Once Is Not Enough , Love at First Bite , Zorro, The Gay Blade , The Godfather Part III , Doc Hollywood , Once Upon a Crime , 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag , Hollywood Ending , and The Congressman . For his debut performance in Crime and Punishment U.S.A.
Go to Profile#37427
Chan Ho Park
#37439
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Chan Ho Park is a South Korean former professional baseball pitcher. Park was the first South Korea-born player in MLB history, and the first South Korean player to be named an MLB All-Star. He played for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Texas Rangers, San Diego Padres, New York Mets, Philadelphia Phillies, New York Yankees, and Pittsburgh Pirates of Major League Baseball , the Orix Buffaloes of Nippon Professional Baseball , and the Hanwha Eagles of the KBO League. As of 2023, he has the most career wins of any Asia-born pitcher in history , having passed Hideo Nomo for that distinction in . During...
Go to Profile#37428
Bijoy Jain
#37440
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Bijoy Jain is an Indian architect and Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor at Yale University. Biography Bijoy Jain grew up in Mumbai and studied architecture at Washington University in St Louis until 1990 and worked in Richard Meier office at Los Angeles and London between 1989 and 1995. He returned to India in 1995 and founded his own firm Studio Mumbai. Bijoy Jain was invited by Alejandro Aravena to the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016 and to the ETH Zurich as a guest critic by Raphael Zuber in 2018.
Go to Profile#37429
Lenny Kaye
#37441
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Lenny Kaye is an American guitarist, composer, and writer who is best known as a member of the Patti Smith Group. Early life Kaye was born to Jewish parents in the Washington Heights area of upper Manhattan, New York, along the Hudson River. His father changed the family name from Kusikoff to Kaye when Lenny was 1 year old. Growing up in Queens and Brooklyn, Kaye originally began playing the accordion, but by the end of the 1950s, had dropped the instrument in favor of collecting records. His family moved to North Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1960 where Lenny attended high school, and later, college, graduating from Rutgers University in 1967, majoring in American history.
Go to Profile#37430
Marcel Nicolet
#37442
Overall Influence
1912 - 1996 (84 years)
Marcel Nicolet was a Belgian physicist and meteorologist. Nicolet was born in , Belgium on February 26, 1912. He received a degree in physics in 1934 after writing a dissertation on the spectrum of O and B stars and his Ph.D. in astrophysics from University of Liège in 1937.
Go to Profile#37431
Arthur W. Adamson
#37443
Overall Influence
#37432
Werner Neumann
#37444
Overall Influence
1905 - 1991 (86 years)
Werner Neumann was a German musicologist. He founded the Bach-Archiv Leipzig on 20 November 1950 and was a principal editor of the Neue Bach-Ausgabe, the second edition of the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Go to Profile#37433
Danielle Ofri
#37445
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Danielle Ofri is an American essayist, editor, and practicing internist. She is an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital, and a clinical professor of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. Her writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Lancet.
Go to Profile#37434
Eddie Jones
#37446
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Edward Jones is an Australian rugby union coach and former player. He most recently coached the Australia national team from January until October 2023. He previously coached Australia, Japan and England.
Go to Profile#37435
Willy van Ryckeghem
#37447
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Willy van Ryckeghem is a Belgian economist and statistician who devoted much of his career to Latin America. He studied economics in Ghent, Copenhagen and Paris and taught Business cycles at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Econometrics at Ghent University from 1968 to 1982. He was also visiting Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1963-64 and Visiting Professor at the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang in 1976.
Go to Profile#37436
Aimee Phan
#37448
Overall Influence
Aimee Phan is a Vietnamese-American author. She was born and raised in Orange County, California. She received her BA in English from UCLA and her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she won a Maytag Fellowship. Her first novel, We Should Never Meet, was named a Notable Book by the Kiriyama Prize in fiction and a finalist for the 2005 Asian American Literary Awards. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, USA Today and The Oregonian among other publications. She has received residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center.
Go to Profile#37437
Eric Esrailian
#37449
Overall Influence
Eric Esrailian is an American physician at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles . He is also an Emmy-nominated film producer and is active in charity and community service activities in Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#37438
David Charbonneau
#37450
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
David Brian Charbonneau is a professor of Astronomy at Harvard University. His research focuses on the development of novel techniques for the detection and characterization of exoplanets orbiting nearby, Sun-like stars.
Go to Profile#37439
Mitchell Silver
#37451
Overall Influence
Mitchell J. Silver is the former commissioner for the New York City Parks Department. Appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, he assumed office May 2014, and led the department until his resignation in July 2021. He was president of the American Planning Association between 2011 and 2013, the first African American to hold the title.
Go to Profile#37440
Hiroshi Toda
#37452
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Hiroshi Toda is a Japanese mathematician, who specializes in stable and unstable homotopy theory. He started publishing in 1952. Many of his early papers are concerned with the study of Whitehead products and their behaviour under suspension and more generally with the homotopy groups of spheres. In a 1957 paper he showed the first non-existence result for the Hopf invariant 1 problem. This period of his work culminated in his book Composition methods in homotopy groups of spheres . Here he uses as important tools the Toda bracket and the Toda fibration, among others, to compute the first 20...
Go to Profile#37441
Robert A. Bjork
#37453
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Robert Allen Bjork is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on human learning and memory and on the implications of the science of learning for instruction and training. He is the creator of the directed forgetting paradigm. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Go to Profile#37442
Dietram Scheufele
#37454
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Dietram A. Scheufele is a German-American social scientist and the Taylor-Bascom Chair in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is also a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center. Prior to joining UW, Scheufele was a tenured faculty member in the Department of Communication at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#37443
Moshe Meiselman
#37455
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Moshe Meiselman is an American-born Orthodox rabbi and rosh yeshiva of Yeshiva Toras Moshe in Jerusalem, which he established in 1982. He also founded and served as principal of Yeshiva University of Los Angeles from 1977 to 1982. He is a descendant of the Lithuanian Jewish Soloveitchik rabbinic dynasty.
Go to Profile#37444
Csaba Szabo
#37456
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Csaba Szabo, a physician and pharmacologist, is the Head of the Pharmacology Section of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. The Public Library of Science Magazine, PLOS Biology, recognized Szabo in 2019 as one of the most cited researchers in the world.
Go to Profile#37445
Kauko Pirinen
#37457
Overall Influence
1915 - 1999 (84 years)
Kauko Antero Pirinen , was a Finnish historian, professor in church history at Helsinki University from 1961, and professor in general church history 1963–80. Pirinen was one of the leading 20th-century historians in Finland and one of the country's excellent church historians. His specialty was Finland's medieval history, Savonian and Karelian history, and church law.
Go to Profile#37446
Peggy Orenstein
#37458
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Peggy Orenstein is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Boys & Sex, Girls & Sex, Cinderella Ate My Daughter and Waiting for Daisy, as well as Don’t Call Me Princess, Flux, and the classic Schoolgirls. Her TED talk has been viewed over 5.5 million times.
Go to Profile#37447
Pierpaolo Donati
#37459
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
#37448
Marie-Dominique Philippe
#37460
Overall Influence
1912 - 2006 (94 years)
Marie-Dominique Philippe, OP was a Dominican philosopher and theologian. He was ordained in 1936. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Fribourg from 1945 to 1982 where he held the chair of Metaphysics. Before becoming the subject of sexual allegations, he was considered one of the most important French Catholic theologians after Vatican II. While remaining a Dominican friar, he founded the Community of St. John in 1975. In 2013, the community's prior general, Br. Thomas Joachim, made known the first complaints of sexual abuse against Philippe.
Go to Profile#37449
Chris Vrenna
#37461
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Chris Vrenna is an American musician, producer, engineer, remixer, programmer, and founder of the electronic band Tweaker. Vrenna played drums for the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails from 1989 until 1997, and was the keyboardist and drummer of the American rock band Marilyn Manson from 2004 until late 2011.
Go to Profile#37450
Martha S. Jones
#37462
Overall Influence
Martha S. Jones is an American historian and legal scholar. She is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. She studies the legal and cultural history of the United States, with a particular focus on how Black Americans have shaped the history of American democracy. She has published books on the voting rights of African American women, the debates about women's rights among Black Americans in the early United States, and the development of birthright citizenship in the United States as promoted by African Americans in Baltim...
Go to Profile