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
#37951
Leo Zippin
#37963
Overall Influence
1905 - 1995 (90 years)
Leo Zippin was an American mathematician. He is best known for solving Hilbert's Fifth Problem with Deane Montgomery and Andrew M. Gleason in 1952. Biography Leo Zippin was born in 1905 to Bella Salwen and Max Zippin, who had emigrated to New York City from the Ukraine in 1903. He did his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania in 1929. His doctoral adviser was John Robert Kline.
Go to Profile#37952
Kevin Godley
#37964
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Kevin Michael Godley is a British singer, songwriter, musician and music video director. He is known as the singer and drummer of the art rock band 10cc and later as part of collaboration duo Godley & Creme with Lol Creme.
Go to Profile#37953
Maggie Telfer
#37965
Overall Influence
Maggie Telfer was a British health activist who provided pioneering support services to drug users in Bristol, England. She was a co-founder of the Bristol Drugs Project in 1986, and acted as its chief executive until her death.
Go to Profile#37954
Joséphine Guidy Wandja
#37966
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Joséphine Guidy Wandja is an Ivorian mathematician. She is the first African woman with a PhD in mathematics. Early life She moved to France aged 14. She attended the Lycée Jules-Ferry in Paris, and later the Pierre and Marie Curie University. Her master's degree thesis was entitled Sous les courbes fermées convexes du plan et le théorème des quatre sommets . Whilst working in Paris in the late 1960s she was advised by René Thom, Henri Cartan and Paulette Liberman. She studied for a PhD at the University of Abidjan, becoming the first African woman to get a PhD in mathematics.
Go to Profile#37955
Elizabeth Vallance
#37967
Overall Influence
1945 - 2020 (75 years)
Elizabeth Vallance, Baroness Vallance of Tummel, was a British philosopher, magistrate and policy maker. She held non-executive roles on various boards, and was High Sheriff of Greater London in 2009.
Go to Profile#37956
Kevin Youkilis
#37968
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Kevin Edmund Youkilis , nicknamed "Youk" , is an American former professional baseball first baseman and third baseman, who primarily played for the Boston Red Sox. A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, he was drafted by the Red Sox in 2001, after playing college baseball at the University of Cincinnati. He played in Major League Baseball for the Red Sox, the Chicago White Sox, and the New York Yankees. He later served as a special assistant to the Chicago Cubs and former Red Sox GM Theo Epstein.
Go to Profile#37957
Jürgen Aschoff
#37969
Overall Influence
1913 - 1998 (85 years)
Jürgen Walther Ludwig Aschoff was a German physician, biologist and behavioral physiologist. Together with Erwin Bünning and Colin Pittendrigh, he is considered to be a co-founder of the field of chronobiology.
Go to Profile#37958
Bruce Cockburn
#37970
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Bruce Douglas Cockburn is a Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist. His song styles range from folk to folk- and jazz-influenced rock to soundscapes accompanying spoken stories. His lyrics reflect interests in spirituality, human rights, environmental issues, and relationships, and describe his experiences in Central America and Africa.
Go to Profile#37959
Jonathan Mark Kenoyer
#37971
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Jonathan Mark Kenoyer is an American archaeologist and George F. Dales Jr. & Barbara A. Dales Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He earned his Bachelor of Arts, Master's, and Doctorate degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, finishing in 1983. Kenoyer is president of the Society of Bead Researchers.
Go to Profile#37960
Anu Realo
#37972
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Anu Realo is an Estonian personality and cross-cultural psychologist. She is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick, the United Kingdom, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Tartu, Estonia.
Go to Profile#37961
Chris Espinosa
#37973
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Chris Espinosa is a senior employee of Apple Inc., officially employee number 8. Having joined the company at the age of fourteen in 1976 when it was still housed in Steve Jobs's parents' garage, writing software manuals and coding after school, he is the company's current and all-time longest-serving employee.
Go to Profile#37962
Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa
#37974
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Hamad bin Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa is King of Bahrain since 14 February 2002, after ruling as Emir of Bahrain from 6 March 1999. He is the son of Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa, the previous and first emir. The country has been ruled by the Al Khalifa dynasty since 1783.
Go to Profile#37963
Geoff Fox
#37975
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Geoff Fox is an Emmy Award-winning American television broadcast meteorologist, with his career and expertise the industry covering 4 decades. For 27 years of his career he was at the television station WTNH in New Haven, Connecticut, where he started in 1984 and was senior meteorologist until 2011, and later with WTIC-TV in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was the weeknight 5:00 and 11:00 p.m. meteorologist, reported science and technology stories for the 4:00 p.m. newscast and was host for a garden segment titled "Geoff's Garden".
Go to Profile#37964
Tebello Nyokong
#37976
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Tebello Nyokong is a South African chemist and distinguished professor at Rhodes University, and a recipient of South Africa's Order of Mapungubwe. Nyokong's work has been published around 450 times including a patent. She was awarded the South African Chemical Institute Gold Medal in 2012, and named one of the Top 10 Most Influential Women in Science and Technology in Africa by IT News Africa. She is currently researching photo-dynamic therapy, an alternative cancer treatment method to chemotherapy. In 2007, she was one of the top three publishing scientists in South Africa, and in 2013 she...
Go to Profile#37965
John Wood
#37977
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
John Wood, DipAD, ADF, FRSA is Emeritus Professor of Design at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He taught many Young British Artists when he was Deputy Head of the Fine Art Department at Goldsmiths between 1978 and 1988. He has received AHRC and EPSRC funding for research into metadesign.
Go to Profile#37966
Adama Barrow
#37978
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Adama Barrow is a Gambian politician and real estate developer who has served as President of the Gambia since 2017. Born in Mankamang Kunda, a village near Basse Santa Su, he attended Crab Island Secondary School and the Muslim High School, the latter on a scholarship. He then worked for Alhagie Musa Njie & Sons, a Gambian energy company, where he became a sales manager. Moving to London in the early 2000s, Barrow studied for qualifications in real estate and concurrently worked as a security guard for Argos. After returning to the Gambia in 2006, he founded Majum Real Estate and was the CEO until 2016.
Go to Profile#37967
Judy Juanita
#37979
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Judy Juanita is an American poet, novelist and playwright. She is a Lecturer in the College Writing Programs at the University of California, Berkeley. She was formerly a writing teacher at Laney College. In 1968, while attending San Francisco State, Juanita served as editor-in-chief of The Black Panther, the newspaper of the Black Panther Party. In her semi-autobiographical novel, Virgin Soul, , a black teen starts community college in Oakland, struggles to matriculate and then joins the Black Panther Party . The story of the female foot soldier in the black power movement, Virgin Soul expose...
Go to Profile#37968
James Mangold
#37980
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
James Allen Mangold is an American filmmaker. Noted for his versatility in tackling a range of genres, Mangold made his debut as a film director with Heavy , and is best known for the films Cop Land , Girl, Interrupted , Identity , Walk the Line , 3:10 to Yuma , and two Wolverine films in the X-Men franchise with The Wolverine and Logan , the latter of which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He then directed the sports drama film Ford v Ferrari , which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and directed and co-wrote Indiana Jo...
Go to Profile#37969
Dagmar Herzog
#37981
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Herzog has published extensively on the histories of sexuality and gender, psychoanalysis and Freud, theology and religion, disability, eugenics, Jewish-Christian relations and Holocaust memory.
Go to Profile#37970
Reed Farrel Coleman
#37982
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Reed Farrel Coleman is an American writer of crime fiction and a poet. Life and career Reed Farrel Coleman, the youngest of three boys, was born and raised in the Sheepshead Bay, Coney Island, Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. As a teenager, he heard a shot while walking to work, and saw a man lying in the street with a fatal stomach wound. That is when he realized, "People do get hurt." He started writing in high school. He has worked at an ice cream store, in air freight at Kennedy Airport, as a car leasing agent, in baby food sales, cooking at a restaurant, as a cab driver, and delivering home heating oil.
Go to Profile#37971
Don Omar
#37983
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
William Omar Landrón Rivera , known professionally as Don Omar, is a Puerto Rican rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer and actor. He is also known as the "King of Reggaeton" by music critics and fans alike. The artist was recognized by Billboard and Rolling Stone as one Reggaeton legend. He is often cited as an influence by other Hispanic urban performers.
Go to Profile#37972
Nana Patekar
#37984
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Vishwanath Patekar , better known as Nana Patekar, is an Indian actor, screenwriter, film maker, and a former Indian Territorial Army officer, mainly working in Hindi and Marathi cinema. He is regarded as one of the finest and influential actors in Indian Cinema, Patekar is recipient of three National Film Awards, four Filmfare Awards and two Filmfare Awards Marathi for his acting performances. He was bestowed with the Padma Shri award in 2013 for his contribution in cinema and arts.
Go to Profile#37973
Hal Brands
#37985
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Hal Brands is an American political scientist and writer. He is an international relations scholar of U.S. foreign policy. He is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He graduated from Stanford University with a BA in history and political science and earned his MA, MPhil, and PhD in history from Yale University. His father is historian H. W. Brands.
Go to Profile#37974
F. W. Bernstein
#37986
Overall Influence
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
F. W. Bernstein was a German poet, cartoonist, satirist, and academic. He worked for the satirical biweekly pardon. After teaching at schools, he was professor of caricature and comics at the Berlin Academy of the Arts from 1984 to 1999. He was one of the founding members of the Neue Frankfurter Schule, which published the satirical magazine Titanic.
Go to Profile#37975
John Tooke
#37987
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Sir John Edward Tooke, is the Head of the School of Life & Medical Sciences at University College, London. He was formerly worked at the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry where he was the Inaugural Dean, and of the Peninsula Medical School which was its first constituent. He was President of the Academy of Medical Sciences from 2011 to 2015.
Go to Profile#37976
Josip Novakovich
#37988
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Josip Novakovich is a Croatian Canadian writer. Early life and education Josip Novakovich was born in Yugoslavia and grew up in the central Croatian town of Daruvar. Novakovich studied medicine at the University of Novi Sad in Serbia. He left Yugoslavia to avoid service in the Yugoslav People's Army, and moved to the United States at the age of 20. He continued his education at Vassar College , Yale Divinity School , and the University of Texas, Austin .
Go to Profile#37977
Margaret Jennings
#37989
Overall Influence
1904 - 1994 (90 years)
Margaret Augusta Jennings, Baroness Florey , née Margaret Augusta Fremantle, was a British scientist who was part of the group at the University of Oxford under Howard Florey who worked on the clinical application of penicillin.
Go to Profile#37978
Karl Wendlinger
#37990
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Karl Wendlinger is an Austrian professional racing and former Formula One driver. Mercedes Juniors Born in Kufstein, Wendlinger started his career in karting and in Formula Ford before entering the German Formula 3 Championship in 1988. After managing tenth place in that inaugural season, Wendlinger won the crown in 1989, which earned him also a drive in the Mercedes-Benz sportscar team for 1990.
Go to Profile#37979
David Evans
#37991
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
David Evans is an American ethnomusicologist and director of the Ethnomusicology/Regional Studies program at the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music in the University of Memphis, where he has worked since 1978. In 2023 he has been inducted in the Blues Hall of Fame as a non-performer.
Go to Profile#37980
David S. Alberts
#37992
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
David Stephen Alberts is a former American Director of Research for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration . Biography David S. Alberts did his undergraduate work was at City College of New York where he received a bachelor's of arts degree in statistics in 1964. He received a master's degree in 1966 and a doctorate in operations research in 1968 from the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#37981
John C. Crank
#37993
Overall Influence
#37982
David Bradley
#37994
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
David Bradley is a linguist who specializes in the Tibeto-Burman languages of Southeast Asia. Born in the United States, Bradley was educated at the SOAS, University of London. He has spent most of his career in Australia and is currently professor emeritus at La Trobe University. Bradley has been an invited lecturer and keynote speaker many times and throughout the world, in particular the Himalayan Languages Symposium and the International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics.
Go to Profile#37983
Irene Fountas
#37995
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Irene C. Fountas is an American educational whole language theorist. She teaches at Lesley University as the Marie M. Clay Endowed Chair for Early Literacy and Reading Recovery.
Go to Profile#37984
Kim Jong-gil
#37996
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Kim Jong-gil was an early-modern South Korean poet. Life Kim Jong-gil was born on November 5, 1926, in Andong, Gyeongsangbuk-do, Korea. and graduated from Korea University with undergraduate and graduate degrees in English Literature. He also conducted research in English Literature at Sheffield University. Kim has worked as a professor at several universities including Chonggu University, Gyeongbuk University and Korea University. He died on April 1, 2017.
Go to Profile#37985
Fay Wray
#37997
Overall Influence
1907 - 2004 (97 years)
Vina Fay Wray was a Canadian-American actress best known for starring as Ann Darrow in the 1933 film King Kong. Through an acting career that spanned nearly six decades, Wray attained international recognition as an actress in horror films. She has been dubbed one of the early "scream queens".
Go to Profile#37986
Philip Saffman
#37998
Overall Influence
1931 - 2008 (77 years)
Philip Geoffrey Saffman FRS was a mathematician and the Theodore von Kármán Professor of Applied Mathematics and Aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology. Education and early life Saffman was born to a Jewish family in Leeds, England, and educated at Roundhay Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge which he entered aged 15. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1953, studied for Part III of the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos in 1954 and was awarded his PhD in 1956 for research supervised by George Batchelor.
Go to Profile#37987
MC Ren
#37999
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Lorenzo Jerald Patterson , known professionally as MC Ren, is an American rapper, songwriter, and record producer from Compton, California. He is the founder and owner of the record label Villain Entertainment.
Go to Profile#37988
Keith Olive
#38000
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Keith Alison Olive is a theoretical physicist, and director at the William I Fine Theoretical Physics Institute, University of Minnesota, specializing in particle physics and cosmology. His main topics of research are: big bang nucleosynthesis, which is an explanation of the origin of the light element isotopes through 7Li; particle dark matter; big bang baryogenesis, which is an explanation of the matter-antimatter asymmetry observed in nature; and inflation which is a theory constructed to resolve many outstanding problems in standard cosmology.
Go to Profile#37989
Paul Russell
#38001
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Paul Russell is an American novelist, poet and short story writer. He is a two-time winner of the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT fiction, in 2000 for The Coming Storm and in 2012 for The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov. The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov is a fictionalized portrayal of a real person - Sergey Nabokov, the gay younger brother of Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, about whom very little concrete biographical information is known.
Go to Profile#37990
Jaap van Ginneken
#38002
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Jaap van Ginneken is a Dutch psychologist and communication scholar. Education Van Ginneken completed a bachelor's degree at the Radboud University Nijmegen, a master’s at the University of Amsterdam, followed by a brief stint at the École pratique des Hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and finally a Ph. D. with distinction on mass psychology and crowd psychology. He taught at various universities, ultimately as a long-time associate professor at the International School and Communication Science Department of the University of Amsterdam.
Go to Profile#37991
Ali Argon
#38003
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Ali Suphi Argon was a Turkish-American engineer, and the Quentin Berg Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Career Argon, son of M.A. Suphi Argon from a high-ranking Ottoman military and civil service family and Margarethe née Grosche from Berlin, attended school in Turkey. In 1948, he began studying mechanical engineering at Purdue University, gaining a B.S. degree in 1952. This was followed by the S.M. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953. At MIT with Egon Orowan, he turned to materials science and engineering and received his D.Sc. doctorate.
Go to Profile#37992
H. Douglas Brown
#38004
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Henry Douglas Brown is a professor emeritus of English as a Second Language at Yogyakarta State University. He was the president of International TESOL from 1980 to 1981, and in 2001 he received TESOL's James E. Alatis Award for Distinguished Service.
Go to Profile#37993
A. Leo Levin
#38005
Overall Influence
1919 - 2015 (96 years)
A. Leo Levin was the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Biography Levin was born in New York City to Issaachar and Minerva Hilda Levin, and grew up in Trenton, New Jersey. His father was an Orthodox rabbi and Mizrachi leader. He was Jewish. He and his wife Doris had two sons, Allan and Jay.
Go to Profile#37994
Andrew Abel
#38006
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Andrew Bruce Abel is an American economist, a professor in the Department of Finance in The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Biography Abel was born on December 3, 1952. He has been named the Ronald A. Rosenfeld Professor since July 1, 2003 and the Professor of the Department of Finance in The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He received a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and BA, at Princeton University in 1974.
Go to Profile#37995
Lloyd Hartman Elliott
#38007
Overall Influence
1918 - 2013 (95 years)
Lloyd Hartman Elliott was President of the George Washington University from 1965 to 1988. He was born in Crosby, Clay County, West Virginia in 1918. He was also a professor of educational administration at Cornell University and President of the University of Maine.
Go to Profile#37996
Meinrat Andreae
#38008
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Meinrat O. Andreae, born in 1949 in Augsburg, is a German biogeochemist. Since 1987, he has worked as Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz. Biography Meinrat O. Andreae studied chemistry, mineralogy, and geochemistry at the Universities of Karlsruhe and Göttingen. In his diploma thesis, he studied the chemical composition and isotope geochemistry of highly metamorphic rocks of southern Norway. In 1977, he completed his PhD in oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego. In his doctoral thesis, he examined the chemical speciation of arsenic in the ocean.
Go to Profile#37997
Serge Belongie
#38009
Overall Influence
Serge Belongie is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen, where he also serves as the head of the Danish Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence. Previously, he was the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech, where he also served as Associate Dean. He has also been a member of the Visiting Faculty program at Google. He is known for his contributions to the fields of computer vision and machine learning, specifically object recognition and image segmentation, with his scientific research in these areas cited over 50,000 times according to Google Scholar.
Go to Profile#37998
Dorian Haarhoff
#38010
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Dorian Haarhoff is a South African-Namibian writer and poet. Haarhoff was born in 1944 in Kimberley, Northern Cape, then part of the Cape Province. He is a naturalized citizen of Namibia. He wrote his first poem in 1955 and has been published in numerous books. He was also a professor of English at the University of Namibia. As of 2004, he worked in the creative writing department at the University of Cape Town.
Go to Profile#37999
Niall Horan
#38011
Overall Influence
1993 - Present (33 years)
Niall James Horan is an Irish singer-songwriter. He rose to prominence as a member of the boy band One Direction, formed in 2010 on the singing competition The X Factor. The group released five albums and went on to become one of the best-selling boy bands of all time.
Go to Profile#38000
Thomas Enqvist
#38012
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Thomas Karl Johan Enqvist is a Swedish former professional tennis player. He reached the final of the 1999 Australian Open and won a total of 19 singles titles, including three Masters titles. He has a career high ATP world singles ranking of No. 4, achieved on 15 November 1999.
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