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
#3751
Yoshinori Ohsumi
#3758
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
is a Japanese cell biologist specializing in autophagy, the process that cells use to destroy and recycle cellular components. Ohsumi is a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology's Institute of Innovative Research. He received the Kyoto Prize for Basic Sciences in 2012, the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and the 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy.
Go to Profile#3752
T. Berry Brazelton
#3759
Overall Influence
1918 - 2018 (100 years)
Thomas Berry Brazelton was an American pediatrician, author, and the developer of the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale . Brazelton hosted the cable television program What Every Baby Knows, and wrote a syndicated newspaper column. He wrote more than two hundred scholarly papers and twenty-four books.
Go to Profile#3753
Angelo Scola
#3760
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Angelo Scola is an Italian Cardinal of the Catholic Church, philosopher and theologian. He was Archbishop of Milan from 2011 to 2017. He had served as Patriarch of Venice from 2002 to 2011. He has been a cardinal since 2003 and a bishop since 1991.
Go to Profile#3754
Steven N. S. Cheung
#3761
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Steven Ng-Sheong Cheung is a Hong Kong-born American economist who specializes in the fields of transaction costs and property rights, following the approach of new institutional economics. He achieved his public fame with an economic analysis on China open-door policy after the 1980s. In his studies of economics, he focuses on economic explanation that is based on real world observation . He is also the first to introduce concepts from the Chicago School of Economics, especially price theory, into China. In 2016, Cheung claimed to have written "1,500 articles and 20 books in Chinese" during...
Go to Profile#3755
David R. Henderson
#3762
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
David Richard Henderson is a Canadian-born American economist and author who moved to the United States in 1972 and became a U.S. citizen in 1986, serving on President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers from 1982 to 1984. A research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution since 1990, he took a teaching position with the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California in 1984, and is now an emeritus professor of economics.
Go to Profile#3756
Clayton Christensen
#3763
Overall Influence
1952 - 2020 (68 years)
Clayton Magleby Christensen was an American academic and business consultant who developed the theory of "disruptive innovation", which has been called the most influential business idea of the early 21st century. Christensen introduced "disruption" in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma, and it led The Economist to term him "the most influential management thinker of his time." He served as the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School , and was also a leader and writer in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . He was one of the founders o...
Go to Profile#3757
Thomas Keller
#3764
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Thomas Aloysius Keller is an American chef, restaurateur, and cookbook author. He and his landmark Napa Valley restaurant, The French Laundry in Yountville, California, have won multiple awards from the James Beard Foundation, notably the Best California Chef in 1996, and the Best Chef in America in 1997. The restaurant is a perennial winner in the annual Restaurant Magazine list of the Top 50 Restaurants of the World.
Go to Profile#3758
Victor Pelevin
#3765
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Victor Olegovich Pelevin is a Russian fiction writer. His novels include Omon Ra , The Life of Insects , Chapayev and Void , and Generation P . He is a laureate of multiple literary awards including the Russian Little Booker Prize and the Russian National Bestseller , the former for the short story collection The Blue Lantern . His books are multi-layered postmodernist texts fusing elements of pop culture and esoteric philosophies while carrying conventions of the science fiction genre. Some critics relate his prose to the New Sincerity literary movement.
Go to Profile#3759
Michael E. Mann
#3766
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Michael Evan Mann is an American climatologist and geophysicist. He is the director of the Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. Mann has contributed to the scientific understanding of historic climate change based on the temperature record of the past thousand years. He has pioneered techniques to find patterns in past climate change and to isolate climate signals from noisy data.
Go to Profile#3760
Dave Arneson
#3767
Overall Influence
1947 - 2009 (62 years)
David Lance Arneson was an American game designer best known for co-developing the first published role-playing game , Dungeons & Dragons, with Gary Gygax, in the early 1970s. Arneson's early work was fundamental to the role-playing game genre, pioneering devices now considered to be archetypical, such as cooperative play to develop a storyline instead of individual competitive play to "win" and adventuring in dungeon, town, and wilderness settings as presented by a neutral judge who doubles as the voice and consciousness of all characters aside from the player characters.
Go to Profile#3761
Stephen Kinzer
#3768
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Stephen Kinzer is an American author, journalist, and academic. A former New York Times correspondent, he has published several books and writes for several newspapers and news agencies. Reporting career During the 1980s, Kinzer covered revolutions and social upheaval in Central America and wrote his first book, Bitter Fruit, about military coups and destabilization in Guatemala during the 1950s. In 1990, The New York Times appointed Kinzer to head its Berlin bureau, from which he covered Eastern and Central Europe as they emerged from the Soviet bloc. Kinzer was The New York Times chief in t...
Go to Profile#3762
S. Barry Barnes
#3769
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
S. Barry Barnes was Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter. Barnes worked at the 'Science Studies Unit' at the University of Edinburgh with David Bloor from the 1970s through the early 1990s, where they developed the strong programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. He moved to the sociology department in Exeter in 1992. Barnes is known for his naturalistic approach to science, a view elaborated in his book Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory . He advocated a post-Kuhnian approach to scientific knowledge, and suggested that philosophers, historians and other rese...
Go to Profile#3763
John Henry Schwarz
#3770
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
John Henry Schwarz is an American theoretical physicist. Along with Yoichiro Nambu, Holger Bech Nielsen, Joël Scherk, Gabriele Veneziano, Michael Green, and Leonard Susskind, he is regarded as one of the founders of string theory.
Go to Profile#3764
Stanley Engerman
#3771
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Stanley Lewis Engerman was an American economist and economic historian. He was known for his quantitative historical work along with Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Fogel. His first major book, co-authored with Robert Fogel in 1974, was Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. This significant work, winner of the Bancroft Prize in American history, challenged readers to think critically about the economics of slavery. Engerman has also published over 100 articles and has authored, co-authored or edited 16 book-length studies.
Go to Profile#3765
Robert R. Wilson
#3772
Overall Influence
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
Robert Rathbun Wilson was an American physicist known for his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II, as a sculptor, and as an architect of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory , where he was the first director from 1967 to 1978.
Go to Profile#3766
Jay Barney
#3773
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Jay B. Barney is an American professor in strategic management at the University of Utah. Infancy and education Jay Barney was born in Walnut Creek, California, on October 8, 1954. He spent his formative years in San Bruno, California and graduated from San Carlos High School in San Carlos, California in 1972. He attended Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah where he majored in sociology. He graduated from BYU, summa cum laude, in December 1974 and began the Doctor of Philosophy program in sociology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut in 1976.
Go to Profile#3767
Gerda Lerner
#3774
Overall Influence
1920 - 2013 (93 years)
Gerda Hedwig Lerner was an Austrian-born American historian and woman's history author. In addition to her numerous scholarly publications, she wrote poetry, fiction, theatre pieces, screenplays, and an autobiography. She served as president of the Organization of American Historians from 1980 to 1981. In 1980, she was appointed Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she taught until retiring in 1991.
Go to Profile#3768
Alfred Horn
#3775
Overall Influence
1918 - 2001 (83 years)
Alfred Horn was an American mathematician notable for his work in lattice theory and universal algebra. His 1951 paper "On sentences which are true of direct unions of algebras" described Horn clauses and Horn sentences, which later would form the foundation of logic programming.
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Asko Parpola
#3776
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Asko Parpola is a Finnish Indologist, current professor emeritus of South Asian studies at the University of Helsinki. He specializes in Sindhology, specifically the study of the Indus script. Biography Parpola is a brother of the Akkadian language epigrapher Simo Parpola. He is married to Marjatta Parpola, who has authored a study on the traditions of Kerala's Nambudiri Brahmins.
Go to Profile#3770
Federico Mayor Zaragoza
#3777
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Federico Mayor Zaragoza is a scientist, scholar, politician, diplomat, and poet from Spain. He served as the Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization from 1987 to 1999. After his tenure as Director-General, he continued to participate in various peace-related organizations such as the Foundation for a Culture of Peace and the International Decade for the Promotion of a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World, as a member of their honorary boards. Additionally, he serves as the honorary chairman of the Académie de la Pai...
Go to Profile#3771
Antonio Cassese
#3778
Overall Influence
1937 - 2011 (74 years)
Antonio Cassese was an Italian jurist who specialized in public international law. He was the first President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the first President of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon which he presided over until his resignation on health grounds on 1 October 2011.
Go to Profile#3772
Larry Sabato
#3779
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
#3773
Elaine Pagels
#3780
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Elaine Pagels, née Hiesey , is an American historian of religion. She is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Pagels has conducted extensive research into early Christianity and Gnosticism.
Go to Profile#3774
Tosio Kato
#3781
Overall Influence
1917 - 1999 (82 years)
was a Japanese mathematician who worked with partial differential equations, mathematical physics and functional analysis. Kato studied physics and received his undergraduate degree in 1941 at the Imperial University of Tokyo. After disruption of the Second World War, he received his doctorate in 1951 from the University of Tokyo, where he became a professor in 1958. From 1962, he worked as a professor at the University of California at Berkeley in the United States.
Go to Profile#3775
Harold E. Puthoff
#3782
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Harold E. Puthoff is an American parapsychologist and electrical engineer. In the 2010s, he co-founded the company To the Stars with Tom DeLonge. Biography Puthoff was born in Chicago, Illinois. He received his BA and MSc in electrical engineering from the University of Florida. In 1967, Puthoff earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University with a thesis on the topic of the stimulated Raman effect in lasers. He then worked on tunable lasers and electron beam devices, and co-authored Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics , published in English, French, Russian and Chinese. P...
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Ruzena Bajcsy
#3783
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Ruzena Bajcsy is an American engineer and computer scientist who specializes in robotics. She is professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also director emerita of CITRIS .
Go to Profile#3777
Serge Moscovici
#3784
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Serge Moscovici was a Romanian-born French social psychologist, director of the Laboratoire Européen de Psychologie Sociale , which he co-founded in 1974 at the Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris. He was a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and Officer of the Légion d'honneur, as well as a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Moscovici's son, Pierre Moscovici, was European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs.
Go to Profile#3778
John Baldessari
#3785
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
John Anthony Baldessari was an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lived and worked in Santa Monica and Venice, California. Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography. He created thousands of works which demonstrate—and, in many cases, combine—the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art. His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S.
Go to Profile#3779
Jacob Lurie
#3786
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Jacob Alexander Lurie is an American mathematician who is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. Lurie is a 2014 MacArthur Fellow. Life When he was a student in the Science, Mathematics, and Computer Science Magnet Program at Montgomery Blair High School, Lurie took part in the International Mathematical Olympiad, where he won a gold medal with a perfect score in 1994. In 1996 he took first place in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search and was featured in a front-page story in the Washington Times.
Go to Profile#3780
Stephen Ross
#3787
Overall Influence
1944 - 2017 (73 years)
Stephen Alan "Steve" Ross was the inaugural Franco Modigliani Professor of Financial Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management after a long career as the Sterling Professor of Economics and Finance at the Yale School of Management. He is known for initiating several important theories and models in financial economics. He was a widely published author in finance and economics, and was a coauthor of a best-selling Corporate Finance textbook.
Go to Profile#3781
Barry Wellman
#3788
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Barry Wellman is an American-Canadian sociologist and is the co-director of the Toronto-based international NetLab Network. His areas of research are community sociology, the Internet, human-computer interaction and social structure, as manifested in social networks in communities and organizations. His overarching interest is in the paradigm shift from group-centered relations to networked individualism. He has written or co-authored more than 300 articles, chapters, reports and books. Wellman was a professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto for 46 years, from 1967 to 2013, including a five-year stint as S.D.
Go to Profile#3782
Michael Posner
#3789
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Michael I. Posner is an American psychologist who is a researcher in the field of attention, and the editor of numerous cognitive and neuroscience compilations. He is emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Oregon , and an adjunct professor at the Weill Medical College in New York . A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Posner as the 56th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#3783
Roger Scruton
#3790
Overall Influence
1944 - 2020 (76 years)
Sir Roger Vernon Scruton was an English philosopher, writer, and social critic who specialised in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the furtherance of traditionalist conservative views.
Go to Profile#3784
Habib Nafisi
#3791
Overall Influence
Habib Nafisi was the founder of Tehran Polytechnic . He founded it in 1958 with five engineering departments. He also founded the University of Mazandaran and Iran University of Science and Technology.
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Tim D. White
#3792
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Tim D. White is an American paleoanthropologist and Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for leading the team which discovered Ardi, the type specimen of Ardipithecus ramidus, a 4.4 million-year-old likely human ancestor. Prior to that discovery, his early career was notable for his work on Lucy as Australopithecus afarensis with discoverer Donald Johanson.
Go to Profile#3786
Karl J. Friston
#3793
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Karl John Friston FRS FMedSci FRSB is a British neuroscientist and theoretician at University College London. He is an authority on brain imaging and theoretical neuroscience, especially the use of physics-inspired statistical methods to model neuroimaging data and other random dynamical systems. Friston is a key architect of the free energy principle and active inference. In imaging neuroscience he is best known for statistical parametric mapping and dynamic causal modelling. In October 2022, he joined VERSES Inc, a California-based cognitive computing company focusing on artificial intelli...
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John Etchemendy
#3794
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
John W. Etchemendy is an American logician and philosopher who served as Stanford University's twelfth Provost. He succeeded John L. Hennessy to the post on September 1, 2000 and stepped down on January 31, 2017.
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Nathan Rabin
#3795
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Nathan Rabin is an American film and music critic. Rabin was the first head writer for The A.V. Club, a position he held until he left the Onion organization in 2013. In 2013, Rabin became a staff writer for The Dissolve, a film website operated by Pitchfork Media. Two of his featured columns at The Dissolve were "Forgotbusters" and "Streaming University" .
Go to Profile#3789
Bridget Riley
#3796
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Bridget Louise Riley is an English painter known for her op art paintings. She lives and works in London, Cornwall and the Vaucluse in France. Early life and education Riley was born on 24 April 1931 in Norwood, London. Her father, John Fisher Riley, originally from Yorkshire, had been an Army officer. He was a printer by trade and owned his own business. In 1938, he relocated the printing business, together with his family, to Lincolnshire.
Go to Profile#3790
Michael Dertouzos
#3797
Overall Influence
1936 - 2001 (65 years)
Michael Leonidas Dertouzos was a professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science from 1974 to 2001.
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Harold E. Varmus
#3798
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Harold Eliot Varmus is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center.
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Bertram Brockhouse
#3799
Overall Influence
1918 - 2003 (85 years)
Bertram Neville Brockhouse, was a Canadian physicist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for pioneering contributions to the development of neutron scattering techniques for studies of condensed matter", in particular "for the development of neutron spectroscopy".
Go to Profile#3793
Tony Atkinson
#3800
Overall Influence
1944 - 2017 (73 years)
Sir Anthony Barnes Atkinson was a British economist, Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, and senior research fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. A student of James Meade, Atkinson virtually single-handedly established the modern British field of inequality and poverty studies. He worked on inequality and poverty for over four decades.
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Ken Follett
#3801
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Kenneth Martin Follett, is a Welsh author of thrillerss and historical novels who has sold more than 160 million copies of his works. Many of his books have achieved high ranking on bestseller lists. For example, in the US, many reached the number-one position on the New York Times Best Seller list, including Triple , The Key to Rebecca , Lie Down with Lions , A Dangerous Fortune , World Without End , Fall of Giants , Winter of the World , and Edge of Eternity .
Go to Profile#3795
Mario Perniola
#3802
Overall Influence
1941 - 2018 (77 years)
Mario Perniola was an Italian philosopher, professor of aesthetics and author. Many of his works have been published in English. Biography Mario Perniola was born in Asti, Piedmont. He studied philosophy under Luigi Pareyson at the University of Turin where he graduated in 1965. While he was reading philosophy in Turin, he met Gianni Vattimo and Umberto Eco, who all became prominent scholars of Pareyson's school. From 1966 to 1969 he was connected to the avant-garde Situationist International movement founded by Guy Debord with whom he kept on friendly terms for several years. He became a ful...
Go to Profile#3796
Paul Cornell
#3803
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Paul Douglas Cornell is a British writer best known for his work in television drama as well as Doctor Who fiction, and as the creator of one of the Doctor's spin-off companions, Bernice Summerfield.
Go to Profile#3797
Red Whittaker
#3804
Overall Influence
Red Whittaker is an American roboticist and research professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. He led Tartan Racing to its first-place victory in the DARPA Grand Challenge Urban Challenge and brought Carnegie Mellon University the two million dollar prize. Previously, Whittaker also competed in the DARPA Grand Challenge, placing second and third place simultaneously in the Grand Challenge Races.
Go to Profile#3798
Carole Pateman
#3805
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Carole Pateman FBA FAcSS FLSW is a feminist and political theorist. She is known as a critic of liberal democracy and has been a member of the British Academy since 2007. Biography Pateman was born in Maresfield, Sussex, England. Educated at Lewes County Grammar School for Girls, she left at age 16. She entered Ruskin College, Oxford in 1963 studying economics, politics, history and sociology, achieving a distinction. She won a place at Lady Margaret Hall to read PPE, staying on to earn a DPhil.
Go to Profile#3799
Mark Goodson
#3806
Overall Influence
1915 - 1992 (77 years)
Mark Leo Goodson was an American television producer who specialized in game shows, most frequently with his business partner Bill Todman, with whom he created Goodson-Todman Productions. Early life and early career Goodson was born in Sacramento, California, on January 14, 1915. His parents, Abraham Ellis and Fannie Goodson , emigrated from Russia in the early 1900s. As a child, Goodson acted in amateur theater with the Plaza Stock Company. The family later moved to Hayward, California. Originally intending to become a lawyer, Goodson attended the University of California, Berkeley. He financed his education through scholarships and by working at the Lincoln Fish Market.
Go to Profile#3800
Richard Roll
#3807
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Richard Roll is an American economist and professor of finance at UCLA, best known for his work on portfolio theory and asset pricing, both theoretical and empirical. He earned his bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from Auburn University in 1961, and his M.B.A. in 1963 at the University of Washington while working for Boeing in Seattle, Washington. In 1968, he received his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago in economics, finance, and statistics. His Ph.D. thesis, "The Behavior of Interest Rates: An Application of the Efficient Market Model to U.S.
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