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
#37701
Kevin Schawinski
#37713
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Kevin Schawinski is a Swiss astrophysicist. He was a professor at ETH Zurich in Zürich. Early life Kevin Schawinski grew up in both Switzerland and Germany. His father is Swiss media entrepreneur Roger Schawinski.
Go to Profile#37702
Evelyn O'Callaghan
#37714
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Evelyn O'Callaghan is a Jamaican academic who is a professor of West Indian literature at the University of the West Indies. She was the first Jamaican woman to win a Rhodes Scholarship. Biography O'Callaghan was born in Nigeria to parents of Irish descent. She moved to Jamaica as a small child, and attended Mount Alvernia High School in Montego Bay. O'Callaghan completed her undergraduate education at Ireland's University College Cork, which her father had attended. She was Jamaica's Rhodes Scholar for 1978, the first woman to be selected for the honour, and subsequently completed a Master of Letters degree at Wolfson College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#37703
Eric Carmen
#37715
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Eric Howard Carmen is an American singer, songwriter, guitarist, and keyboardist. He was first known as the lead vocalist of the Raspberries. He had numerous hit songs in the 1970s and 1980s, first as a member of the Raspberries , and then with his solo career, including hits such as "All by Myself", "Never Gonna Fall in Love Again", "She Did It", "Hungry Eyes", and "Make Me Lose Control".
Go to Profile#37704
Edward Timms
#37716
Overall Influence
1937 - 2018 (81 years)
Edward Timms OBE, FBA was Research Professor and a former director of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at University of Sussex. His work mainly focused on Karl Kraus and Freud. Timms was also a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge His two-volume work Karl Kraus – Apocalyptic Satirist is concerned with Kraus's satirical responses to Hapsburg Vienna, his rejection of both the First World War and Nazism. Kraus had been the subject of his PhD.
Go to Profile#37705
Siva Sivananthan
#37717
Overall Influence
Professor Sivalingam Sivananthan is an American academic, scientist, businessman and Director of the Microphysics Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Early life and family Sivananthan was born in Madduvil South near Chavakachcheri in northern Ceylon. His father was a Tamil scholar from Valvettithurai and his mother was teacher of religion and science. He was educated at Saraswathi Maha Vidyalayam, Drieberg College and Jaffna Hindu College . After school he joined the University of Peradeniya's Science Faculty in 1976, graduating in 1980 with a BS degree in physics.
Go to Profile#37706
Richard Krajicek
#37718
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Richard Peter Stanislav Krajicek is a Dutch former professional tennis player. In 1996, he won the men's singles title at Wimbledon, and remains the only Dutch male player to have won a major singles title. In the quarterfinals of that tournament, he delivered Pete Sampras's only defeat at Wimbledon between 1993 and 2000. Krajicek reached a career-high singles ranking of world No. 4 in March 1999. Since 2004, he has been the tournament director of the ABN AMRO World Tennis Tournament in Rotterdam. He is also the author of various sports books.
Go to Profile#37707
Leo P. Ribuffo
#37719
Overall Influence
1945 - 2018 (73 years)
Leo Paul Ribuffo was an American historian. He was Society of the Cincinnati George Washington Distinguished Professor at George Washington University. Life Born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1945, Ribuffo graduated from Rutgers University in 1966 with a B.A. in history and earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1976.
Go to Profile#37708
Herman Waldmann
#37720
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Herman Waldmann FRS FMedSci is a British immunologist known for his work on therapeutic monoclonal antibodies. As of 2013, he is Emeritus Professor of Pathology at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#37709
John W. Dawson Jr.
#37721
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
John W. Dawson Jr. is an American academic who is an emeritus professor of mathematics at Penn State York. Early life and education Born in Wichita, Kansas, Dawson attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a National Merit Scholar before earning a doctorate in mathematical logic from the University of Michigan in 1972.
Go to Profile#37710
Craig Benjamin
#37722
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Craig G. Benjamin is an Australian-American historian who is professor of history in the Frederik J. Meijer Honors College at Grand Valley State University, where he teaches East Asian civilization, big history, ancient Central Asian history, and world history historiography. In 2014 and 2015 he served as president of the World History Association.
Go to Profile#37711
K. Sabeel Rahman
#37723
Overall Influence
K. Sabeel Rahman is an American legal scholar, author, and policy advisor, and currently Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. He formerly lead the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Biden administration from 2021-2023. He joined the Biden Administration from Demos, a liberal think tank he served as president of from 2018 to 2021.
Go to Profile#37712
Gregory E. Maggs
#37724
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Gregory Eaton Maggs is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. He was previously the Arthur Selwyn Miller Research Professor of Law and Co-Director of the National Security & U.S. Foreign Relations Law Program at the George Washington University Law School.
Go to Profile#37713
Mitja Ferenc
#37725
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Mitja Ferenc is a Slovenian historian, educator, and author. Ferenc was born in Ljubljana, the son of renowned historian and partisan Tone Ferenc. He graduated from modern history at the University of Ljubljana in 1985. Since 2000, he has researched the graves of people killed on Slovenian territory by the Yugoslav Communist regime after the end of World War II in the Bleiburg repatriations.
Go to Profile#37714
Donald Templer
#37726
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Donald I. Templer was a retired American psychologist best known for ideas on race and intelligence, and his association with the white nationalist group American Renaissance. He was formerly a professor of psychology at Alliant International University in Fresno, California.
Go to Profile#37715
Marc Bulger
#37727
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Marc Robert Bulger is an American former professional football player who was a quarterback in the National Football League for eleven seasons, primarily with the St. Louis Rams. He was drafted by the New Orleans Saints in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL Draft and was also a member of the Atlanta Falcons and Baltimore Ravens, but played the entirety of his regular season career with the Rams.
Go to Profile#37716
Robert Hunter
#37728
Overall Influence
1941 - 2019 (78 years)
Robert C. Christie Hunter was an American lyricist, singer-songwriter, translator and poet, best known for his work with the Grateful Dead. Born near San Luis Obispo, California, Hunter spent some time during his childhood in foster homes as a result of his father's abandoning his family, and took refuge in reading and writing. He attended the University of Connecticut for a year before returning to Palo Alto, where he became friends with Jerry Garcia. Garcia and Hunter began a collaboration that lasted through the remainder of Garcia's life.
Go to Profile#37717
Sonia Guimarães
#37729
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Sonia Guimarães is a Brazilian Professor of Physics at the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica. She was the first black Brazilian woman to earn a doctorate in physics and has dedicated her career to improving the representation of black Brazilians in academia.
Go to Profile#37718
Ken Hyland
#37730
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ken Hyland is a British linguist. He is currently a professor of applied linguistics in education at the University of East Anglia. Hyland is an applied linguist in the field of academic discourse, second language writing, and English for Academic Purposes, and has published more than 26 books and 200 articles. Google Scholar shows him to be one of the most cited researchers in Applied Linguistics.
Go to Profile#37719
David M. Bunis
#37731
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
David Monson Bunis is a professor in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Languages, Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and heads its program in Judezmo studies. He is also an advisor to the Israel Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino and a member of the Akademia Nasionala del Ladino. He is the editor of Languages and Literatures of Sephardic and Oriental Jews , co-editor of Massorot, a Hebrew-language journal devoted to the study of Jewish language traditions, and author of books and articles on the Judezmo language and its literature.
Go to Profile#37720
Gordon Rugg
#37732
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Gordon Rugg is a British academic, head of the Knowledge Modelling Group at Keele University and a visiting senior research fellow at the Open University, known for his work on the Voynich manuscript.
Go to Profile#37721
Emily A. Holmes
#37733
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Emily A. Holmes is a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist known for her research on mental imagery in relation to psychological treatments for post traumatic stress disorder , bipolar disorder, and depression. Holmes is Professor of Clinical Neuroscience at Karolinska Institute in Sweden. She also holds an appointment as Honorary Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#37722
David Nalin
#37734
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
David R. Nalin is an American physiologist, and Pollin Prize for Pediatric Research and Prince Mahidol Award, a.k.a. Mahidol Medal winner. Nalin had the key insight that oral rehydration therapy would work if the volume of solution patients drank matched the volume of their fluid losses, and that this would drastically reduce or completely replace the only current treatment for cholera, intravenous therapy. Nalin led the trials that first demonstrated ORT works, both in cholera patients, and more significantly, also in other dehydrating diarrhea illnesses. Nalin's discoveries have been e...
Go to Profile#37723
Gary Sheffield
#37735
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Gary D. Sheffield is an English academic and military historian. He publishes on the conduct of British Army operations in World War I, and contributes to print and broadcast media on the subject. Career Sheffield is a proponent of the "revisionist school" of thought with regard to the conduct of military operations on the Western Front by the British Army during the First World War.
Go to Profile#37724
Malcolm Diamond
#37736
Overall Influence
1924 - 1997 (73 years)
Malcolm Luria Diamond was William H. Danforth Professor of Religion, Emeritus, at Princeton University. Career Diamond was born November 6, 1924, in New York City. During World War II, Diamond served in the U.S. Navy and was deployed to the South Pacific. He received a bachelor's degree in metallurgical engineering from Yale University in 1945 and a Ph.D. in philosophy and religion from Columbia University in 1956. He also studied at the Yale Divinity School in 1946-47 and at Trinity College, Cambridge, during 1947-48. He later earned an Ed.S. in family therapy from Seton Hall University in 1...
Go to Profile#37725
Paola Giuliano
#37737
Overall Influence
Paola Giuliano is an economist and currently the Chauncey J. Medberry Chair in Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. Giuliano is a research affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a research fellow at the Institute of Labour Economics and a research associate at the NBER. In 2004, she won the Young Economic Award from the European Economic Association, which has also elected her fellow.
Go to Profile#37726
Maria Teresa Cabré
#37738
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Maria Teresa Cabré i Castellví is a Catalan linguist. She is professor emeritus of Linguistics and Terminology at Pompeu Fabra University . Since 2021, she has been president of the Institute for Catalan Studies. Her areas of expertise are in lexicology, lexicography, terminology, and discourse analysis.
Go to Profile#37727
Claire McLachlan
#37739
Overall Influence
Claire Jane McLachlan is a New Zealand teaching academic. She is currently professor and dean at Federation University Australia. Her speciality is early-childhood literacy. Career McLachlan did a M.A by thesis at Massey entitled 'Experience as a mother of a "crying baby": a single collaborative case study' completed in 1991, and then a PhD 'Emergent literacy in New Zealand kindergartens : an examination of policy and practices' in 1996. Between 2000 and 2006 she worked in Auckland at the University of Auckland and Auckland University of Technology before returning to Massey University, where she rose to full professor in 2013.
Go to Profile#37728
Christine Jones Forman
#37740
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Christine Jones Forman is a senior astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. She is a past president of the American Astronomical Society, and was the director of the Smithsonian Institution's Consortium for Unlocking the Mysteries of the Universe.
Go to Profile#37729
Nilli Lavie
#37741
Overall Influence
Nilli Lavie, FBA, is an academic, psychologist, and neuroscientist with British-Israeli dual nationality. A Professor of Psychology and Brain Sciences and Director of the Attention and Cognitive Control laboratory at the University College London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, she is an elected Fellow of the British Academy, American Psychological Society, Royal Society of Biology, and British Psychological Society.
Go to Profile#37730
Miguel Tejada
#37742
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Miguel Odalis Tejada is a Dominican former professional baseball shortstop who played 16 seasons in Major League Baseball . He played for six teams, most notably the Oakland Athletics and Baltimore Orioles, before short stints with the Houston Astros, San Diego Padres, San Francisco Giants, and Kansas City Royals.
Go to Profile#37731
Deborah A. Miranda
#37743
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Deborah A. Miranda is an American writer, poet, and professor of English at Washington and Lee University. Her father, Alfred Edward Robles Miranda, claims descent from the Esselen and Chumash people, native to the Santa Barbara/Santa Ynez/Monterey, California, area. Her mother, Madgel Eleanor Miranda, was of French and Jewish ancestry. Miranda claims descent from what are known as "Mission Indians," Indigenous peoples of many Southern California tribes who were forcibly removed from their land into several Franciscan missions. She is a member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation.
Go to Profile#37732
P. Parameswaran
#37744
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
P. Parameswaran , often referred to as Parameswarji, was a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh pracharak from Kerala, India who was erstwhile Vice‑President of the Jan Sangh. He was president of Vivekananda Kendra, and has been conferred with Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian award, in 2018. He died on 9 February 2020 due to age-related illnesses
Go to Profile#37733
Frank Davey
#37745
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Frankland Wilmot Davey, FRSC is a Canadian poet and scholar. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, he grew up in the Fraser Valley village of Abbotsford. In 1957 he enrolled at the University of British Columbia where, in 1961, shortly after beginning MA studies, he became one of the founding editors of the influential and contentious poetry newsletter TISH. In the spring of 1962 he won the university's Macmillan Prize for poetry, and published the poetry collection D-Day and After, the first of the Tish group's numerous publications. In 1963 he began teaching at Canadian Services College Royal Roads Military College in Victoria.
Go to Profile#37734
Neil Wiseman
#37746
Overall Influence
1934 - 1995 (61 years)
Neil Ernest Wiseman was a British computer scientist. Wiseman's pioneering research in computer graphics began in 1965, and resulted in a number of inventions and patents. These included a pen-following screen menu, which anticipated the pop-up menu, and one of the first systems for distributed Computer Graphics. His work brought him three patents, over 70 research publications, and more than 40 students who gained PhDs. In 1986 the Computer Laboratory appointed him to a personal Readership in computer graphics.
Go to Profile#37735
Roy Curtiss
#37747
Overall Influence
Roy Curtiss III is a professor of Genomics, Evolution, & Bioinformatics at the University of Florida. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2001. Education Curtiss earned his B.S. degree from Cornell University in 1956 and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1962. At Cornell, he was a member of the Quill and Dagger society.
Go to Profile#37736
Jackie Shroff
#37748
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Jaikishan Kakubhai Saraf , known by his screen name Jackie Shroff, is an Indian actor and former model from Mumbai, Maharashtra; who primarily works in Hindi film industry. In a career spanning over four decades, Shroff has appeared in over 220 films in 13 languages. He has received several accolades including four Filmfare Awards. Shroff established himself as one of the leading actors of Indian cinema of the 1980s and the 1990s.
Go to Profile#37737
Charles Yang
#37749
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Charles Yang is a linguist and cognitive scientist. He is currently Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on language acquisition, variation and change, and is carried out from a broadly Chomskyan perspective.
Go to Profile#37738
Eric Fernie
#37750
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Eric Campbell Fernie is a Scottish art historian. Education Fernie was educated at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of London . Career Fernie has had a long career in the academic and art worlds, occupying a number of important posts. He was Director of the Courtauld Institute from 1995 to 2003 and was President of the Society of Antiquaries of London from 2004 to 2007.
Go to Profile#37739
Pinarayi Vijayan
#37751
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Pinarayi Vijayan is an Indian politician who is the current Chief Minister of Kerala, serving since 25 May 2016. A member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of India , he is the longest-serving secretary of the Kerala State Committee of the CPI . He also served in the government of Kerala as Minister of Electric Power and Co-operatives from 1996 to 1998. Vijayan won a seat in the May 2016 Kerala Legislative Assembly election as the CPI candidate for Dharmadom constituency and was selected as the leader of the Left Democratic Front and became the 12th Chief Minister of Kerala. He is the first chief minister from Kerala to be re-elected after completing a full term in office.
Go to Profile#37740
Ian Wilson
#37752
Overall Influence
Ian Andrew Wilson is the Hansen Professor of Structural Biology and chair of the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, United States.
Go to Profile#37741
Roger M. Enoka
#37753
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Roger Maro Enoka is professor and former chair of the Department of Integrative Physiology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is also the director of the Neurophysiology of Movement Lab. According to Web of Knowledge, Professor Enoka has 232 published items, which have been cited a total of 9,254 times . His most frequently cited paper is titled "Neurobiology of Muscle Fatigue". Professor Enoka has an h-index of 51 as of November 10, 2014.
Go to Profile#37742
Roland Martin
#37754
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Roland Sebastian Martin is an American journalist. He was a commentator for TV One, the host of News One Now, and Washington Watch with Roland Martin. He was also a CNN contributor, appearing on a variety of shows, including The Situation Room, Anderson Cooper's AC360, and many others. In October 2008, he joined the Tom Joyner Morning Show as senior analyst. He currently hosts a web series, Roland Martin Unfiltered on YouTube.
Go to Profile#37743
Umberto Lenzi
#37755
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
Umberto Lenzi was an Italian film director, screenwriter, and novelist. A fan of film since young age, Lenzi studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and made his first film in 1958 which went unreleased, while his official debut happened in 1961 with Queen of the Seas. Lenzi's films of the 1960s followed popular trends of the era, which led to him directing several spy and erotic thriller films. He followed in suit in the 1970s making giallo films, crime films and making the first Italian cannibal film with Man from the Deep River. He continued making films up until the 1990s and...
Go to Profile#37744
Susan Starr Sered
#37756
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Susan Starr Sered is Professor of Sociology at Suffolk University and Senior Researcher at Suffolk University's Center for Women's Health and Human Rights. Previously, she was the director of the "Religion, Health and Healing Initiative" at the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, and a Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Her interests include both research and advocacy/activism.
Go to Profile#37745
Larry Samuelson
#37757
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Larry Samuelson is the A. Douglas Melamed Professor of Economics at Yale University and one of the faculty of the Cowles Foundation of Yale University. Samuelson earned his B.A. in economics/political science from the University of Illinois in 1974. He continued on with the University of Illinois for both his master's degree in 1977 and his PhD in 1978—both in economics.
Go to Profile#37746
Ol' Dirty Bastard
#37758
Overall Influence
1968 - 2004 (36 years)
Russell Tyrone Jones , better known by his stage name Ol' Dirty Bastard , was an American rapper. He was one of the founding members of the Wu-Tang Clan, a rap group primarily from Staten Island, New York City, which rose to mainstream prominence with its 1993 debut album Enter the Wu-Tang .
Go to Profile#37747
Jere Behrman
#37759
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Jere Richard Behrman is an American economist and the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He belongs to the world's most prominent development and education economists and human capital scholars, with a strong focus on Central and South America.
Go to Profile#37748
Nikolai Shakura
#37760
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Nikolai Ivanovich Shakura is a Russian astrophysicist. He is the head of the relativistic astrophysics department at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University. As a well-known specialist in the theory of accretion disks, as well as X-ray binaries, together with Rashid Sunyaev, he is particularly famous as the developer of the standard theory of disk accretion.
Go to Profile#37749
Snježana Kordić
#37761
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Snježana Kordić is a Croatian linguist. In addition to her work in syntax, she has written on sociolinguistics. Kordić is known among non-specialists for numerous articles against the puristic and prescriptive language policy in Croatia. Her 2010 book on language and nationalism popularises the theory of pluricentric languages in the Balkans.
Go to Profile#37750
İbrahim Çobanoğlu Şaziye Bozdağ İsmail Dinçer
#37762
Overall Influence
