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
#37751
Charles Shaar Murray
#37763
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Charles Shaar Murray is an English music journalist and broadcaster. He has worked on the New Musical Express and many other magazines and newspapers, and has been interviewed for a number of television documentaries and reports on music.
Go to Profile#37752
Władysław Markiewicz
#37764
Overall Influence
1920 - 2017 (97 years)
Władysław Markiewicz was a Polish sociologist; professor of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań since 1966, and Warsaw University since 1972, director of the Western Institute in Poznań in years 1966–1973, member of Polish Academy of Sciences since 1972. He was the Polish-side Chairman of German-Polish Textbook Commission from 1972 to 1984.
Go to Profile#37753
Bradley Schaefer
#37765
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Bradley Elliott Schaefer is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Louisiana State University. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983. Early life In addition to his academic pursuits, Schaefer is remembered at MIT as the founder of the annual MIT Mystery Hunt in 1981 during his graduate studies there. The tradition of the hunt continues today.
Go to Profile#37754
J. Brandon Dixon
#37766
Overall Influence
J. Brandon Dixon is a professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He heads the Laboratory of Lymphatic Biology and Bioengineering . Among his most recent publications, Dr. Dixon developed a tissue engineered in vitro model to recapitulate lipid uptake by intestinal lymphatics.
Go to Profile#37755
Nicholas Meyer
#37767
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Nicholas Meyer is an American screenwriter, director and author known for his best-selling novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, and for directing the films Time After Time, two of the Star Trek feature films, the 1983 television film The Day After, and the 1999 HBO original film Vendetta.
Go to Profile#37756
James Iha
#37768
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
James Yoshinobu Iha is an American rock musician. He is best known as a guitarist and co-founder of the alternative rock band the Smashing Pumpkins. He was a member until the initial breakup in 2000, and performed on the band's first six albums until rejoining the Smashing Pumpkins in 2018, and performing on the band's three most recent albums since then. Among his musical projects of recent years, Iha has been a permanent fixture of A Perfect Circle. He was most recently a member of Tinted Windows, a 1960s/1970s inspired group with members of Cheap Trick, Fountains of Wayne, and Hanson.
Go to Profile#37757
James Higginbotham
#37769
Overall Influence
1941 - 2014 (73 years)
James Higginbotham FBA was a distinguished professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He taught previously at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, and at the University of Oxford as a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#37758
Allan Moffat
#37770
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Allan George Moffat OBE is a Canadian-Australian racing driver known for his four championships in the Australian Touring Car Championship, six wins in the Sandown 500 and his four wins in the Bathurst 500/1000. Moffat was inducted into the V8 Supercars Hall of Fame in 1999.
Go to Profile#37759
Paul J. J. Welfens
#37771
Overall Influence
1957 - 2022 (65 years)
Paul J.J. Welfens was a German economist. He was born in Düren, West Germany and studied economics in Wuppertal, Duisburg and Paris. He obtained his PhD in 1985 and his full professorship in 1989, after which he became professor at the Wilhelms University of Münster and the University of Potsdam.
Go to Profile#37760
Marta Lamas
#37772
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Marta Lamas Encabo is a Mexican anthropologist and political science professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico , and lecturer at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México . She is one of Mexico's leading feminists and has written many books aimed at reducing discrimination by opening public discourse on feminism, gender, prostitution and abortion. Since 1990, Lamas has edited one of Latin America's most important feminist journals, Debate Feminista . In 2005, she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Go to Profile#37761
N. J. Higham
#37773
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Nicholas John Higham, is a British archaeologist, historian, and academic. He was Professor of Early Medieval and Landscape History at the University of Manchester, and is now an emeritus professor.
Go to Profile#37762
Christopher Hawkes
#37774
Overall Influence
1905 - 1992 (87 years)
Charles Francis Christopher Hawkes, FBA, FSA was an English archaeologist specialising in European prehistory. He was Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford from 1946 to 1972.
Go to Profile#37763
Guyford Stever
#37775
Overall Influence
1916 - 2010 (94 years)
Horton Guyford Stever was an American administrator, physicist, educator, and engineer. He was a director of the National Science Foundation . Biography Stever was raised in Corning, New York, principally by his maternal grandmother. He played football in high school. He graduated from Colgate University with an undergraduate degree in physics and then from California Institute of Technology in 1941 with a PhD in physics. He joined the staff of the radiation lab at MIT. In 1942 he began serving the military as a civilian scientific liaison officer based in London, England until the end of World War II.
Go to Profile#37764
James A. Berlin
#37776
Overall Influence
1942 - 1994 (52 years)
James A. Berlin was an American scholar, professor, writer, and theorist in the field of composition studies, renowned for his contributions to the history of rhetoric and composition theory. Born in Hamtramck, Michigan, Berlin attended St. Florian High School. He earned his BA from Central Michigan University and completed his Ph.D. in Victorian literature at the University of Michigan in 1975. Throughout his career, he held positions as a professor of English at Wichita State University, the University of Cincinnati, where he directed first-year English from 1981 to 1985, and Purdue University from 1987 to 1994.
Go to Profile#37765
Michael Uhlmann
#37777
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Michael Martin Uhlmann was an American political scientist and high-ranking government official. He was Professor of Government in the Department of Politics and Government at Claremont Graduate University and Claremont McKenna College. Prior to teaching at Claremont, Uhlmann was a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Vice President for Public Policy Research at the Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and taught at the Antonin Scalia Law School.
Go to Profile#37766
Syed Saad Andaleeb
#37778
Overall Influence
Syed Saad Andaleeb is a Bangladeshi-American academic who served as the 3rd Vice-chancellor of BRAC University. Education and career Andaleeb obtained his bachelor's in chemical engineering in 1976 and master's in business administration in 1977 from University of New Hampshire. He then earned his Ph.D. in business administration from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989.
Go to Profile#37767
John Meaney
#37779
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
John Meaney is a British science fiction author. Biography Meaney grew up in London and Slough, England with his brother Colm . He has studied martial arts since childhood and has a black belt in shotokan karate. Meaney originally studied at Birmingham University and holds a combined degree in Physics and Computer Science from the Open University. He has done postgraduate work at Oxford University and is a part-time IT consultant.
Go to Profile#37768
Mohammad Mahmoud Ghali
#37780
Overall Influence
1920 - 2016 (96 years)
Mohammad Mahmoud Ghali was the Professor of Linguistics and Islamic Studies, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt. Ghali has spent 20 years interpreting the meanings of the Quran into English. He is the author of an English translation of the Quran, Towards Understanding the Ever-Glorious Quran. Ghali got his PhD in Phonetics from the University of Michigan. He also studied phonetics at the University of Exeter in the UK. Ghali authored 16 books in Islamic studies, in Arabic as well as in English. The English books include Prophet Muhammad and the First Muslim State, Moral Freedom in Islam, Islam and Universal Peace, Synonyms in the Ever-Glorious Quran.
Go to Profile#37769
Germain Marc'hadour
#37781
Overall Influence
1921 - 2022 (101 years)
Germain Marc'hadour was a French Catholic priest and a professor of English at the Université Catholique de l'Ouest in Angers. He was an internationally recognized authority on the life and work of Saint Sir Thomas More and the founder of the journal Moreana.
Go to Profile#37770
Peter Jambrek
#37782
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Peter Jambrek is a Slovenian sociologist, jurist, politician and intellectual. He is considered among the fathers of the current Slovenian Constitution and among the most influential public intellectuals in Slovenia.
Go to Profile#37771
Kunio Tsuji
#37783
Overall Influence
1925 - 1999 (74 years)
Kunio Tsuji was a Japanese author, novelist, and scholar of French literature. Tsuji was born in Tokyo, attended Matsumoto High School with Kita Morio, and studied French literature at the University of Tokyo. After graduation, he became an instructor at Gakushūin University and a literary critic. He spent the years 1957-1960 in France, which strongly influenced his development as a novelist. In 1963 he published his first mature work, Kairō nite , which was awarded the Prize for Modern Literature. Some of his more celebrated later novels include Azuchi ōkanki , winner of a Ministry of Educati...
Go to Profile#37772
Don Poldermans
#37784
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Don Poldermans is a Dutch former cardiovascular medicine researcher who was fired for scientific misconduct and ethics concerns over informed consent. He was employed by Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands, where he was the head of the perioperative cardiac care unit. In addition, he was a member of the European Society of Cardiology Committee for Practice Guidelines and he acted as the Chairperson of the Task Force for the European Society of Cardiology.
Go to Profile#37773
Brendan Nelson
#37785
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Brendan John Nelson is an Australian business leader and former politician. He served as the federal Leader of the Opposition from 2007 to 2008, going on to serve as Australia's senior diplomat to the European Union and NATO. He now has a global leadership role with Boeing, an aerospace company.
Go to Profile#37774
Melissa Cristina Márquez
#37786
Overall Influence
Melissa Cristina Márquez is a Puerto Rican marine biologist and science communicator. She studies chondrichthyan fishes, including great white sharks. Early life and education Márquez was inspired to study sharks when she first saw a great white shark on the Discovery Channel program Shark Week when she moved from Mexico to the United States. She completed her undergraduate degree at the New College of Florida in Sarasota, Florida, and a master's degree from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
Go to Profile#37775
David L. Wagner
#37787
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
David L. Wagner is an entomologist and a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Caterpillars of Eastern North America, widely regarded as one of the most authoritative field guides on caterpillars. He also serves as an advisor for the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection.
Go to Profile#37776
John Anderson
#37788
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
John Anderson is an American sports commentator who has served as host of the ESPN TV program SportsCenter since June 1999. Early life and education Anderson grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, graduating from Green Bay Southwest High School. He holds a journalism degree from the University of Missouri. He is active within the MU Alumni Association and can often be seen at Missouri Tigers sporting events, and served as the grand marshal at Missouri's 2002 homecoming football game.
Go to Profile#37777
Xin Lu
#37789
Overall Influence
Xin Lu is a Professor of Cancer Biology and Director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at the University of Oxford. She is known for her discovery of and research on the ASPP family of proteins.
Go to Profile#37778
Malcolm Skilbeck
#37790
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
Malcolm Preston Skilbeck was an Australian educator who worked in educational policy analysis, curriculum, tertiary and secondary education, the teaching profession and educational innovation. Some of this work was done with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization .
Go to Profile#37779
Liao Shijun
#37791
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Liao Shijun is a fluid mechanics and applied mathematics expert working in homotopy analysis method , nonlinear wavess, nonlinear dynamics, and applied mathematics. He was born in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. Liao is a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Go to Profile#37780
David Nolan
#37792
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
David Nolan is an American author, civil rights activist, and historian. Biography Nolan was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1946, the son of journalist Joseph T. Nolan and his artist wife Virginia.
Go to Profile#37781
Robert D. Stephens
#37793
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Robert D. Stephens is an American amateur astronomer and a prolific photometrist of minor planets at the Center for Solar System Studies , Rancho Cucamonga in California, United States. Career By profession, Stephens is a Certified Public Accountant in California since 1978, and has co-founded the accounting firm Fox & Stephens Inc. in 1988.
Go to Profile#37782
David Bakan
#37794
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
David Bakan was an American psychologist. Career David Bakan was a major influence in how the field of psychology implemented the use of statistics in research, particularly the statistical test of significance. Bakan was one of the earliest psychologists to promote the use of Bayesian statistics as an alternative to conventional statistical approaches, first publishing on the topic in 1953. He was one of the founders of the American Psychological Association's Division 26, the History of Psychology, and served as the president of the division in 1970–71.
Go to Profile#37783
Ricardo Krebs
#37795
Overall Influence
1918 - 2011 (93 years)
Ricardo Krebs Wilckens was a Chilean historian of German descent. In 1943, Krebs joined the newly founded Pedagogy School of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, where he was in charge of the universal history course. Krebs, as a native of Valparaíso, had until then spent a career in Germany and so he was rather isolated with few contacts in Santiago.
Go to Profile#37784
Garret A. FitzGerald
#37796
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Garret Adare FitzGerald is an Irish physician. He is professor of in translational medicine and Therapeutics and chair of the department of pharmacology at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. He researches aspects of cardiology, pharmacology, translational medicine, and chronobiology.
Go to Profile#37785
Lee Corso
#37797
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Lee Richard Corso is an American sports broadcaster and football analyst for ESPN and a former coach. He has been a featured analyst on ESPN's College GameDay program since its inception in 1987. Corso served as the head football coach at the University of Louisville from 1969 to 1972, at Indiana University Bloomington from 1973 to 1982, and at Northern Illinois University in 1984, compiling a career college football coaching record of 73–85–6. He was the head coach for the Orlando Renegades of the United States Football League in 1985, tallying a mark of 5–13.
Go to Profile#37786
Henryk Hiż
#37798
Overall Influence
1917 - 2006 (89 years)
Henryk Hiż was a Polish analytical philosopher specializing in linguistics, philosophy of language, logic, mathematics and ethics, active for most of his life in the United States, one of the youngest representatives of the Lwów–Warsaw school.
Go to Profile#37787
Cate Marvin
#37799
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Cate Marvin is an American poet. Life She graduated from Marlboro College, University of Houston, University of Iowa, and University of Cincinnati with a Ph.D. She has taught at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York and Columbia University. She teaches in the English Department of Colby College.
Go to Profile#37788
Mark M. Phillips
#37800
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Mark M. Phillips is an American astronomer who works on the observational studies of all classes of supernovae. He has worked on SN 1986G, SN 1987A, the Calán/Tololo Supernova Survey, the High-Z Supernova Search Team, and the Phillips relationship. This relationship has allowed the use of Type Ia supernovae as standard candles, leading to the precise measurements of the Hubble constant H0 and the deceleration parameter q0, the latter implying the existence of dark energy or a cosmological constant in the Universe.
Go to Profile#37789
Thomas W. Parks
#37801
Overall Influence
1939 - 2020 (81 years)
Thomas W. Parks was an American electrical engineer and Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. He is best known for his contributions to digital signal processing, especially digital filter design and computation of the fast Fourier transform. His last work before retirement was in the area of demosaicing.
Go to Profile#37790
Yayoi Kusama
#37802
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, and is also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, the world's top-selling female artist, and the world's most successful living artist. Her work influenced ...
Go to Profile#37791
Hou Hsiao-hsien
#37803
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Hou Hsiao-hsien is a retired Mainland Chinese-born Taiwanese film director, screenwriter, producer and actor. He is a leading figure in world cinema and in Taiwan's New Wave cinema movement. He won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1989 for his film A City of Sadness , and the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 for The Assassin . Other highly regarded works of his include The Puppetmaster and Flowers of Shanghai .
Go to Profile#37792
Neil Astley
#37804
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Neil Astley, Hon. FRSL is an English publisher, editor and writer. He is best known as the founder of the poetry publishing house Bloodaxe Books. Life and work Astley was born in Portchester, Hampshire, and grew up in nearby Fareham. He was educated at Price's School, Fareham , the Alliance Française, Paris , and Newcastle University . From 1972 to 1975 he worked in Leicester, Colchester, London, Paris and Australia, as a journalist, in publishing , and as a press officer for Warner Brothers’ magazine division and for Lyons Maid ice cream. In his essay "The Story of Bloodaxe", he recounts two...
Go to Profile#37793
Oscar Buneman
#37805
Overall Influence
1913 - 1993 (80 years)
Oscar Buneman made advances in science, engineering, and mathematics. Buneman was a pioneer of computational plasma physics and plasma simulation. Career In 1940 upon completion of his PhD with Douglas Hartree, Buneman joined Hartree's magnetron research group assisting the development of radar during World War II. They discovered the Buneman–Hartree criterion for the voltage threshold of a magnetron operation. After the war, Buneman developed theories and simulations of collision-less dissipation of currents called the Buneman instability. This is an example of anomalous resistivity or absorption.
Go to Profile#37794
Ben Simmons
#37806
Overall Influence
1996 - Present (30 years)
Benjamin David Simmons is an Australian professional basketball player for the Brooklyn Nets of the National Basketball Association . He played college basketball for one season with the LSU Tigers, after which he was named a consensus first-team All-American and the USBWA National Freshman of the Year. Simmons was selected with the first overall pick in the 2016 NBA draft by the Philadelphia 76ers. After sitting out a year due to an injured right foot, he was named the NBA Rookie of the Year in 2018 and was selected three times to the NBA All-Star Game. As the result of a holdout from the 76...
Go to Profile#37795
Jack Smith
#37807
Overall Influence
1916 - 1996 (80 years)
Jack Clifford Smith was a Los Angeles journalist, author, and newspaper columnist. His daily column, which ran in the Los Angeles Times for 37 years, expressed "keen observations of the life he loved in ever-surprising Southern California" and was described by former Los Angeles Times Editor Shelby Coffey III as "one of the abiding highlights of the Los Angeles Times." Smith was the author of 10 books, many of them based on his columns, and won the Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists' Distinguished Journalist award in 1981.
Go to Profile#37796
Alberto Buela
#37808
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Alberto Buela Lamas is an Argentine philosopher. Buela is professor at the National Technological University and the University of Barcelona and works as a researcher in the University of Barcelona. He is best known for his philosophical works on metapolitics, Aristotle and Peronism.
Go to Profile#37797
Pablo Cuevas
#37809
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Pablo Gabriel Cuevas Urroz is an inactive Uruguayan professional tennis player. Cuevas won the 2008 French Open men's doubles title with Luis Horna. He has won six singles titles and has a career-high singles ranking of World No. 19 achieved in August 2016. Cuevas' career-high doubles ranking is World No. 14, which he achieved in April 2009.
Go to Profile#37798
Stathis Kalyvas
#37810
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Stathis N. Kalyvas is a Greek political scientist who is the Gladstone Professor of Government, at the University of Oxford and a University Academic Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He has held professorial positions at Yale University , as well as the University of Chicago, New York University, and Ohio State University. He has also conducted research at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Kalyvas has written extensively on civil wars, ethnicity, and political violence. He wrote The Logic of Violence in Civil War.
Go to Profile#37799
Carme Riera
#37811
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Carme Riera Guilera is a novelist and essayist. She has also written short stories, scripts for radio and television and literary criticism. She holds a doctorate in Hispanic Philology and is a professor of Spanish literature at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Go to Profile#37800
Gabriele Sadowski
#37812
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Gabriele Sadowski is a German chemist. Early life and education Sadowski studied Chemistry at the Technical University Leuna-Merseburg from 1982 to 1987. She finished her doctorate in 1991 at the Technical University Leuna-Merseburg. She completed her dissertation at the Technical University of Berlin in 2000.
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