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
#37901
Jessye Norman
#37913
Overall Influence
1945 - 2019 (74 years)
Jessye Mae Norman was an American opera singer and recitalist. She was able to perform dramatic soprano roles, but did not limit herself to that voice type. A commanding presence on operatic, concert and recital stages, Norman was associated with roles including Beethoven's Leonore, Wagner's Sieglinde and Kundry, Berlioz's Cassandre and Didon, and Bartók's Judith. The New York Times music critic Edward Rothstein described her voice as a "grand mansion of sound", and wrote that "it has enormous dimensions, reaching backward and upward. It opens onto unexpected vistas. It contains sunlit rooms,...
Go to Profile#37902
Vicki Been
#37914
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Vicki L. Been is an American lawyer, public servant, and professor who served as the Deputy Mayor of New York City for Housing and Economic Development from April 2019 to December 2021. She previously served as commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. She is a law professor at the New York University School of Law and has served as director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.
Go to Profile#37903
André Marin
#37915
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
André Marin is a lawyer who served as Ontario ombudsman from 2005 to 2015. Personal Marin is a graduate of Carleton University and University of Ottawa . Career After graduating from law school, Marin became an assistant Crown Attorney in Ottawa, Ontario in 1991 and taught law part-time in Ottawa.
Go to Profile#37904
Nick Price
#37916
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Nicholas Raymond Leige Price is a Zimbabwean retired professional golfer who has won three major championships in his career: the PGA Championship twice and The Open Championship in 1994. In the mid-1990s, Price reached number one in the Official World Golf Ranking. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2003.
Go to Profile#37905
Alasdair Roberts
#37917
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Alasdair S. Roberts is a Canadian professor at the School of Public Policy, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and author of articles and books on public policy issues, especially relating to government secrecy and the exercise of government authority.
Go to Profile#37906
Jeffrey Gibson
#37918
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Jeffrey A. Gibson is an American Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee painter and sculptor. He has lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York; Hudson, New York; and Germantown, New York. In 2024, Gibson will represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, where he will be the first indigenous artist to have a solo exhibition in the American pavilion.
Go to Profile#37907
Ted Sorensen
#37919
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Theodore Chaikin Sorensen was an American lawyer, writer, and presidential adviser. He was a speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy, as well as one of his closest advisers. President Kennedy once called him his "intellectual blood bank". Notably, though it was a collaborative effort with Kennedy, Sorensen was generally regarded as the author of the majority of the final text of Profiles in Courage, and stated in his memoir that he helped write the book. Profiles in Courage won Kennedy the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Sorensen helped draft Kennedy's inaugural address and was also the...
Go to Profile#37908
Laurence Devillers
#37920
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Laurence Devillers , is a professor of artificial intelligence & ethics at Paris-Sorbonne University since 2011 and at Computer science laboratory for mechanics and engineering sciences at the Scientific Research National Center, a head of the team "Affective and social dimension in spoken interaction". Laurence Devillers has taken part in several national and European projects on human-robots social and affective interactions. Laurence Devillers is leading a cluster of robots-human co-evolution at the Institute of Digital Society and "Robotic interactive" at Paris-Saclay.
Go to Profile#37909
Lexing Ying
#37921
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Lexing Ying is a professor of mathematics at Stanford University, where he is also a member of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. He specializes in scientific computing and numerical analysis. In particular, his research concerns the design of numerical algorithms for problems in scientific computing.
Go to Profile#37910
Jenny McCarthy
#37922
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Jennifer Ann McCarthy-Wahlberg is an American actress, model, and television personality. She began her career in 1993 as a nude model for Playboy magazine and was later named their Playmate of the Year. McCarthy then had a television and film acting career, beginning as a co-host on the MTV game show Singled Out and afterwards starring in the eponymous sitcom Jenny , as well as films including BASEketball , Scream 3 , Dirty Love , John Tucker Must Die , and Santa Baby . In 2013, she hosted her own television talk show The Jenny McCarthy Show, and became a co-host of the ABC talk show The View, appearing on the program until 2014.
Go to Profile#37911
Alan E. Willner
#37923
Overall Influence
Alan E. Willner is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California. He was also president of the Optical Society in 2016. Willner is known for his research on optical fiber communications and free-space communications. Willner's doctoral advisor was Richard M. Osgood Jr.
Go to Profile#37912
Erik Pevernagie
#37924
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Erik Pevernagie is a Belgian painter and writer, living in Uccle , who has held exhibitions in Paris, New York City, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Amsterdam, London, Brussels and Antwerp. Life Pevernagie has his background in Brussels, a bilingual city where Latin and Germanic cultures mix. He is the son and pupil of the expressionist painter Louis Pevernagie . From the start, he was interested in the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic cultural heritage and became a Master in Germanic Philology at the Free University of Brussels . He took a postgraduate degree at Cambridge University and became a Professor at Erasmus University.
Go to Profile#37913
Stephen Nissenbaum
#37925
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Stephen Nissenbaum , is an American scholar, a Professor Emeritus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's History Department specializing in early American history through to the nineteenth century. Most notably, he co-authored a book with Paul Boyer in 1974 about the Salem witch trials, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft, called "a landmark in early American studies" by John Putnam Demos.
Go to Profile#37914
Sergei Aleksashenko
#37926
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Sergey Vladimirovich Aleksashenko also transliterated as Alexashenko is a Russian economist and former government official. He was the deputy finance minister and first deputy chairman of the board of the Central Bank of Russia from 1995 to 1998.
Go to Profile#37915
Gregg Barnes
#37927
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Gregg Barnes is an American costume designer for stage and film. Barnes is a three-time winner of the Tony Award for Best Costume Design in a Musical for his work on the Broadway productions of The Drowsy Chaperone , Follies , and Some Like It Hot .
Go to Profile#37916
Michael R. Hayden
#37928
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Michael R. Hayden, is a Killam Professor of Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia, the highest honour UBC can confer on any faculty member. Only four such awards have ever been conferred in the Faculty of Medicine. Dr. Hayden is also Canada Research Chair in Human Genetics and Molecular Medicine. Hayden is best known for his research in Huntington disease .
Go to Profile#37917
Clara D. Bloomfield
#37929
Overall Influence
1942 - 2020 (78 years)
Clara Derber Bloomfield , was an American physician and cancer researcher. Her work focused on the genetic changes that are present in certain types of blood cancers, and how those can be utilized to improve treatment for the affected patients.
Go to Profile#37918
Marie Breen Smyth
#37930
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Marie Breen Smyth is an author, teacher and researcher from Northern Ireland. She has published on topics such as the Northern Ireland conflict, particularly the human impact, trauma, victim politics, children and armed conflict, research ethics and methods, religion and conflict, and issues to do with political violence in Southern Africa, Israel/Palestine and Northern Ireland.
Go to Profile#37919
Oh Yong-Geun
#37931
Overall Influence
Oh Yong-Geun is a mathematician and distinguished professor at the Pohang University of Science and Technology and founding director of the IBS Center for Geometry and Physics located on that campus. His fields of study have been on symplectic topology, Floer homology, Hamiltonian mechanics, and mirror symmetry He was in the inaugural class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society and has been a member of Institute for Advanced Study, Korean Mathematical Society, and National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Korea and is on the editorial boards of Journal of Gokova Geometry and To...
Go to Profile#37920
Janusz Brzozowski
#37932
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
Janusz Antoni Brzozowski was a Polish-Canadian computer scientist and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Waterloo's David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. In 1962, Brzozowski earned his PhD in the field of electrical engineering at Princeton University under Edward J. McCluskey. The topic of the thesis was Regular Expression Techniques for Sequential Circuits. From 1967 to 1996 he was Professor at the University of Waterloo. He is known for his contributions to mathematical logic, circuit theory, and automata theory.
Go to Profile#37921
Mark Power
#37933
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Mark Power is a British photographer. He is a member of Magnum Photos and Professor of Photography in The Faculty of Arts and Architecture at the University of Brighton. Power has been awarded the Terence Donovan Award and an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society.
Go to Profile#37922
M. Christina White
#37934
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
M. Christina White is a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research in the field of organometallic catalysis focuses on developing highly selective carbon–hydrogen bond activation methods to streamline the process of complex molecule synthesis.
Go to Profile#37923
Jonas Coersmeier
#37935
Overall Influence
Jonas Coersmeier is an architect and designer, born in Germany and working in the United States. He is finalist and first runner-up in the World Trade Center Memorial Competition. He was born in Cologne, Germany and studied architecture at Columbia University, M.I.T. and Technische Universität Darmstadt. He teaches at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture, where he coordinates the Architecture and Urban Design program University of Pennsylvania School of Design and University of Kassel School of Architecture, where he was head of the Digital Design Department.
Go to Profile#37924
Louise Merzeau
#37936
Overall Influence
1963 - 2017 (54 years)
Sylvie Merzeau was a French academic, university professor at the Paris Nanterre University and a photographer. Merzeau was a trustee of Wikimedia France between 2015 and 2017. Biography Louise Merzeau was a former student of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud and a qualified teacher of contemporary literature . Her doctoral thesis "From scriptural to index: text, photography, document" in 1993 was written under supervision of Nicole Boulestreau. She passed her habilitation to conduct research in 2011 on the subject of the concept of memory in the age of internet. In 2016, she became a university professor at Paris-Nanterre.
Go to Profile#37925
Richard J. Cole
#37937
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Richard J. Cole is a Silver Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, and works on the Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms. Research His research areas include algorithmic economic market theory and game theory, string and pattern matching, amortization, parallelism, and network and routing problems. His notable research contributions include an optimal parallel algorithm for sorting in the PRAM model, and an optimal analysis of the Boyer–Moore string-search algorithm.
Go to Profile#37926
William G. Hyland
#37938
Overall Influence
1929 - 2008 (79 years)
William George Hyland was Deputy National Security Advisor to President of the United States Gerald Ford and editor of Foreign Affairs magazine. Early life and education William G. Hyland was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1929. He was educated at the Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a member of Tau Kappa Epsilon Fraternity, graduating with a B.A. in History. After college, he spent 1950–53 in the 2nd Armored Division of the United States Army; during this time, he was stationed in West Germany. He did graduate work at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, receiving an M.A.
Go to Profile#37927
FKA Twigs
#37939
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Tahliah Debrett Barnett , known professionally as FKA Twigs , is a British singer, songwriter, and dancer. She was a backup dancer for numerous musicians, and made her musical debut with EP1 . Barnett's debut studio album, LP1 , reached number 16 on the UK Albums Chart and number 30 on the US Billboard 200. It was nominated for that year's Mercury Prize. She released the EP M3LL155X and took a four-year hiatus, after which she released her second studio album, Magdalene . After signing with Atlantic Records, she released the mixtape Caprisongs . Her work has garnered acclaim and has been desc...
Go to Profile#37928
Mario Götze
#37940
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Mario Götze is a German professional footballer who plays for Bundesliga club Eintracht Frankfurt and the Germany national team. Although his favoured position is that of a playmaker, Götze has also played as a false nine or as an emergency striker.
Go to Profile#37929
Marek Jerzy Minakowski
#37941
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Marek Jerzy Minakowski is a Polish historian and genealogist known for creating the Polish genealogy database Wielka Genealogia Minakowskiego. Early life and career Minakowski earned his PhD in classical philosophy at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków. Initially focusing on classical philosophy and logics, he later started publishing about Poland's history and genealogy. In 2001, he founded a genealogy website Wielka Genealogia Minakowskiego and began adding available historical records. By 2020, the site contained genealogy records of around 1 million people.
Go to Profile#37930
George Tindall
#37942
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
George Brown Tindall was an American historian and author. A professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1958 until his retirement, Tindall was "one of the nation's pre-eminent historians of the modern South." He served as president of the Southern Historical Association. He held a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a Fulbright Scholar, a visiting Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In 1969, Tindall's book The Emergence of the New South: 1913-1945 was given the Lillian Smith Book Award.
Go to Profile#37931
Rudolf Kruse
#37943
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Rudolf Kruse is a German computer scientist and mathematician. Education and professional career Rudolf Kruse obtained his diploma degree in 1979 from the TU Braunschweig, Germany, and a PhD in Mathematics in 1980 as well as the venia legendi in Mathematics in 1984 from the same university. Following a short stay at the Fraunhofer Society, in 1986 he joined the University of Braunschweig as a professor of computer science. From 1996–2017 he was a full professor at the Department of Computer Science of the Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg where he has been leading the computational intelligence research group.
Go to Profile#37932
Stephen Poliakoff
#37944
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Stephen Poliakoff is a British playwright, director and screenwriter. In 2006 Gerard Gilbert of The Independent described him as the UK's "pre-eminent TV dramatist" who had "inherited Dennis Potter's crown".
Go to Profile#37933
Gerry Stahl
#37945
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Gerry Stahl is an American computer scientist specializing in computer-supported collaborative learning. He is professor emeritus of computing and informatics at Drexel University, and was the founding editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.
Go to Profile#37934
Carl Ebeling
#37946
Overall Influence
Carl Ebeling is a United States computer scientist and professor. His recent interests include coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures of integrated circuits. Education and career He earned MS from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie-Mellon University . Since 1986 he was with the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, full professor since 1997. In late 2012, he left his academic position for a position at Altera.
Go to Profile#37935
Raymond Hamers
#37947
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Raymond Hamers was a professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Brussels, Belgium. He discovered a special type of antibodies called single-domain antibodies or nanobodies. See also Flanders Institute for Biotechnology Ablynx
Go to Profile#37936
Terry Lyons
#37948
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Terence John Lyons FLSW is a British mathematician, specialising in stochastic analysis. Lyons, previously the Wallis Professor of Mathematics, is a fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford and a Faculty Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. He was the director of the Oxford-Man Institute from 2011 to 2015 and the president of the London Mathematical Society from 2013 to 2015. His mathematical contributions have been to probability, harmonic analysis, the numerical analysis of stochastic differential equations, and quantitative finance. In particular he developed what is now known as the theory of rough paths.
Go to Profile#37937
Stefanie Sun
#37949
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Stefanie Sun Yanzi is a Singaporean singer and songwriter. In 2000, she released her debut album, Yan Zi, which won her a Golden Melody Award for Best New Artist. In 2004, she released her eighth studio album, Stefanie, which won her another Golden Melody Award for Best Mandarin Female Singer. Having sold more than 30 million records, she achieved popularity in Greater China and among the Chinese-speaking world.
Go to Profile#37938
Peter Molnar
#37950
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Peter Molnar was a professor in Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado. His research focused on aspects of how mountain ranges form and continental lithosphere deforms. Molnar was born August 25, 1943, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics from Oberlin College in 1965 and his Ph.D. in seismology from Columbia University in 1970.
Go to Profile#37939
Henri Mitterand
#37951
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Henri Mitterand was a French academic, author, critic, and editor. He was a specialist on the works of Émile Zola, one of the founders of sociological criticism in France. Biography Mitterand graduated from the École normale supérieure with a degree in literature in 1948 and became an associate professor at the school in 1951. He was Pensionary of the from 1952 to 1955 and earned a doctorate in literature in 1959. He was a professor at Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis from 1968 to 1978, at Sorbonne Nouvelle University Paris 3 from 1978 to 1990, and at Columbia University from 1989 to 2004.
Go to Profile#37940
Charles A. Small
#37952
Overall Influence
Charles Asher Small is a Canadian intellectual, the founder and director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy the first international interdisciplinary research center dedicated to studying antisemitism with a contemporary focus.
Go to Profile#37941
Joseph Lykken
#37953
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Joseph David Lykken is an American theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and, from July 1, 2014 to Sept 6, 2022, he was the Deputy Director of Fermilab. He is currently leading the Fermilab Quantum Institute.
Go to Profile#37942
Fernando Flores
#37954
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Carlos Fernando Flores Labra is a Chilean engineer, entrepreneur and politician. He is a former cabinet minister of president Salvador Allende and was senator for the Arica and Parinacota and Tarapacá regions between 2001 and 2009. On March 31, 2010, he was designated President of Chile's National Innovation Council for Competitiveness by President Sebastián Piñera.
Go to Profile#37943
Paul Resnick
#37955
Overall Influence
Paul Resnick is Michael D. Cohen Collegiate Professor of Information and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs at the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Education Paul Resnick was born in New York and attended the University of Michigan for his undergraduate studies. He received a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 in Computer Science. After graduating from MIT, Resnick worked at AT&T Labs and AT&T Bell Labs and was an assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Resnick became an assistant professor at the University of Michi...
Go to Profile#37944
Juliet Stevenson
#37956
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Juliet Anne Virginia Stevenson, is an English actress of stage and screen. She is known for her role in the film Truly, Madly, Deeply , for which she was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Her other film appearances include Emma , Bend It Like Beckham , Mona Lisa Smile , Being Julia and Infamous .
Go to Profile#37945
Fan Gang
#37957
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Fan Gang is one of China's most prominent economists and one of China's most active reform advocates. He is currently based in Beijing, serving as a professor at the Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and at the Peking University HSBC Business School, as well as the director of China's National Economic Research Institute . He is also the Secretary-General of the China Reform Foundation.
Go to Profile#37946
Hasan Eren
#37958
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
Hasan Eren was a Turkish academic etymologist, linguist, Turkologist, and Hungarologist specializing in Turkish language, other Turkic languages, and Hungarian language who served as head of the Turkish Language Association from 1983 to 1993. He is member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1988. Eren was working on etymology of Turkish for decades. He also wrote the Dictionary of Turkish Etymology. Viktor Orbán awarded Hasan Eren by a medal for his contributions to the Hungarian language on 24 June 2000.
Go to Profile#37947
Samantha Fox
#37959
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Samantha Karen Fox is an English pop singer and former glamour model from Mile End in the East End of London. She rose to fame as a Page 3 model in The Sun tabloid newspaper, where she appeared regularly from 1983 until 1986, becoming one of the most photographed British women of the 1980s and a prominent sex symbol of the era.
Go to Profile#37948
Astrid S. Tuminez
#37960
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Mary Astrid Segovia Tuminez is the seventh president of Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, and its first female president. Early life and education Astrid Tuminez was born in a small island village in Iloilo province, the Philippines. Though raised in extreme poverty as the sixth of seven children, she received a scholarship at the age of five to attend a private school run by Catholic nuns, along with her older siblings. She credits much of her success and accomplishments to this pivotal moment in her life, and is passionate in her belief that education enables individuals to fulfill the...
Go to Profile#37949
Ülo Kaevats
#37961
Overall Influence
1947 - 2015 (68 years)
Ülo Kaevats was an Estonian statesman, academic and philosopher. In 1972, he graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Chemistry of the University of Tartu with a qualification from a physicist and a research philosopher. Kaevats obtained a PhD from Vilnius State University in Lithuania. He served for many years as editor-in-chief of the Estonian Encyclopaedia, the main national work of reference; earlier, he worked as a research fellow at the Estonian and the USSR Academies of Sciences, mostly in the History of Science field. Until 2011, when he became emeritus, he was professor and chair of philosophy at Tallinn University of Technology .
Go to Profile#37950
Kjersti Engan
#37962
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Kjersti Engan is a Norwegian researcher in signal and image processing who works as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Stavanger. Engan was born in 1971 in Bergen. She earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1994 from Bergen University College. She then moved to the University of Stavanger for graduate study, completing her doctorate in 2000. At Stavanger, she was promoted to full professor in 2008.
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