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
#3801
Pierre Soulages
#3808
Overall Influence
1919 - 2022 (103 years)
Pierre Jean Louis Germain Soulages was a French painter, printmaker, and sculptor. In 2014, President François Hollande of France described him as "the world's greatest living artist." His works are held by leading museums of the world, and there is a museum dedicated to his art in his hometown of Rodez.
Go to Profile#3802
Peter Milligan
#3809
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Peter Milligan is a British comic book writer who has written extensively for both British and American comic book industries. In the UK, Milligan has contributed to numerous anthology titles including 2000 AD, Revolver, Eagle and A1, and helped launch the influential magazine Deadline. In the US, he is best known for his frequent contributions to DC Comics' Vertigo imprint, which include the revamped DC properties Shade, the Changing Man and Human Target, a four-year run on the imprint's premier title Hellblazer, and original series Enigma, The Extremist, Egypt and Greek Street, as well as t...
Go to Profile#3803
Michel Houellebecq
#3810
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Michel Houellebecq is a French author of novels, poems and essays, as well as an occasional actor, filmmaker and singer. His first book was a biographical essay on the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Houellebecq published his first novel, Whatever, in 1994. His next novel, Atomised, published in 1998, brought him international fame as well as controversy. Platform followed in 2001. He has published several books of poetry, including The Art of Struggle in 1996.
Go to Profile#3804
Richard Cyert
#3811
Overall Influence
1921 - 1998 (77 years)
Richard Michael Cyert was an American economist, statistician and organizational theorist, who served as the sixth President of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. He is known for his seminal 1959 work "A behavioral theory of the firm," co-authored with James G. March.
Go to Profile#3805
Yemi Osinbajo
#3812
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Oluyemi Oluleke Osinbajo is a Nigerian lawyer, professor, and politician who served as the 14th vice president of Nigeria from 2015 to 2023. A member of the All Progressives Congress , he previously served as Attorney General of Lagos State from 1999 to 2007 and holds the title of Senior Advocate of Nigeria. In April 2022, he announced his intention to run for the APC nomination for President of Nigeria in the 2023 presidential election. He was third in the APC presidential primaries held in June 2022 with a total of 235 votes from the delegates.
Go to Profile#3806
Peter Suber
#3813
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Peter Dain Suber is an American philosopher specializing in the philosophy of law and open access to knowledge. He is a Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project . Suber is known as a leading voice in the open access movement, and as the creator of the game Nomic.
Go to Profile#3807
Rebecca Goldstein
#3814
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an American philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual. She has written ten books, both fiction and non-fiction. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton University, and is sometimes grouped with novelists such as Richard Powers and Alan Lightman, who create fiction that is knowledgeable of, and sympathetic toward, science.
Go to Profile#3808
Kay Redfield Jamison
#3815
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Kay Redfield Jamison is an American clinical psychologist and writer. Her work has centered on bipolar disorder, which she has had since her early adulthood. She holds the post of the Dalio Professor in Mood Disorders and Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and is an Honorary Professor of English at the University of St Andrews.
Go to Profile#3809
Jesús Huerta de Soto
#3816
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jesús Huerta de Soto Ballester is a Spanish economist of the Austrian School. He is a professor in the Department of Applied Economics at King Juan Carlos University of Madrid, Spain and a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute.
Go to Profile#3810
Robert B. Parker
#3817
Overall Influence
1932 - 2010 (78 years)
Robert Brown Parker was an American writer, primarily of fiction within the mystery/detective genre. His most famous works were the 40 novels written about the fictional private detective Spenser. ABC television network developed the television series Spenser: For Hire based on the character in the mid-1980s; a series of TV movies was also produced based on the character. His works incorporate encyclopedic knowledge of the Boston metropolitan area. The Spenser novels have been cited as reviving and changing the detective genre by critics and bestselling authors including Robert Crais, Harlan...
Go to Profile#3811
Norris Bradbury
#3818
Overall Influence
1909 - 1997 (88 years)
Norris Edwin Bradbury , was an American physicist who served as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 25 years from 1945 to 1970. He succeeded Robert Oppenheimer, who personally chose Bradbury for the position of director after working closely with him on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Bradbury was in charge of the final assembly of "the Gadget", detonated in July 1945 for the Trinity test.
Go to Profile#3812
Sally Blount
#3819
Overall Influence
Sally Blount is the Michael L. Nemmers Professor of Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where she is the former dean and alumna. She serves on the boards of directors for Abbott Laboratories, Ulta Beauty, and the Joyce Foundation and on advisory boards for the Aspen Institute, the Chicago Innovation Awards, the Indian School of Business, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the Fundação Dom Cabral. In 2012, she co-chaired the World Economic Forum’s conference on Latin America.
Go to Profile#3813
Edmund M. Clarke
#3820
Overall Influence
1945 - 2020 (75 years)
Edmund Melson Clarke, Jr. was an American computer scientist and academic noted for developing model checking, a method for formally verifying hardware and software designs. He was the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Clarke, along with E. Allen Emerson and Joseph Sifakis, received the 2007 ACM Turing Award.
Go to Profile#3814
George Klir
#3821
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
George Jiří Klir was a Czech-American computer scientist and professor of systems sciences at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York. Biography George Klir was born in 1932 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1957 he received a M.S. degree in electrical engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague. In the early 1960s he taught at the Institute of Computer Research in Prague. In 1964 he received a doctorate in computer science from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#3815
Ian Lustick
#3822
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ian Steven Lustick is an American political scientist and specialist on the modern history and politics of the Middle East. He currently holds the Bess W. Heyman Chair in the department of Political Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#3816
Larry Elder
#3823
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Laurence Allen Elder is an American conservative political commentator and talk radio host. Elder hosts The Larry Elder Show, based in California. The show began as a local program on Los Angeles radio station KABC in 1993 and ran until 2008, followed by a second run on KABC from 2010 to 2014. The show is nationally syndicated, first through ABC Radio Networks from 2002 to 2007 and then Salem Media Group from 2015 to 2022. He maintains ties to The Epoch Times, a far-right newspaper published by the Falun Gong movement.
Go to Profile#3817
J. A. Todd
#3824
Overall Influence
1908 - 1994 (86 years)
John Arthur Todd was an English mathematician who specialised in geometry. Biography He was born in Liverpool, and went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1925. He did research under H.F. Baker, and in 1931 took a position at the University of Manchester. He became a lecturer at Cambridge in 1937. He remained at Cambridge for the rest of his working life.
Go to Profile#3818
Jerzy Łoś
#3825
Overall Influence
1920 - 1998 (78 years)
Jerzy Łoś was a Polish mathematician, logician, economist, and philosopher. He is especially known for his work in model theory, in particular for "Łoś's theorem", which states that any first-order formula is true in an ultraproduct if and only if it is true in "most" factors . In model theory he also proved many preservation theorems, but he gave significant contributions, as well, to foundations of mathematics, Abelian group theory and universal algebra. In the 60's he turned his attention to mathematical economics, focusing mainly on production processes and dynamic decision processes.
Go to Profile#3819
Lee Radziwill
#3826
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Caroline Lee Bouvier , later Canfield, Radziwiłł , and Ross , was an American socialite, public relations executive, and interior decorator. She was the younger sister of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and sister-in-law of President John F. Kennedy. Radziwill was married three times, each marriage ending in divorce.
Go to Profile#3820
Fay Weldon
#3827
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Fay Weldon was an English author, essayist and playwright. Over the course of her 55-year writing career, she published 31 novels, including Puffball , The Cloning of Joanna May , Wicked Women and The Bulgari Connection , but was most well-known as the writer of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil which was televised by the BBC in 1986.
Go to Profile#3821
Michael Bond
#3828
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Thomas Michael Bond was an English author. He is best known for a series of fictional stories for children, featuring the character of Paddington Bear. More than 35 million Paddington books have been sold around the world, and the characters have also appeared in a popular film series and on television. His first book was published in 1958 and his last in 2017, a span of 59 years.
Go to Profile#3822
John Lukacs
#3829
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
John Adalbert Lukacs was a Hungarian-born American historian and author of more than thirty books. Lukacs described himself as a reactionary. Life and career Lukacs was born in Budapest, Hungary, the son of Magdaléna Glück and Pál Lukács , a physician. His parents, Jewish converts to Roman Catholicism, were divorced before World War II. Lukacs attended a classical gymnasium, had an English language tutor, and spent two summers at a private school in England. He studied history at the University of Budapest.
Go to Profile#3823
Arthur Leonard Schawlow
#3830
Overall Influence
1921 - 1999 (78 years)
Arthur Leonard Schawlow was an American physicist and co-inventor of the laser with Charles Townes. His central insight, which Townes overlooked, was the use of two mirrors as the resonant cavity to take maser action from microwaves to visible wavelengths. He shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for his work using lasers to determine atomic energy levels with great precision.
Go to Profile#3824
Larry Laudan
#3831
Overall Influence
1941 - 2022 (81 years)
Larry Laudan was an American philosopher of science and epistemologist. He strongly criticized the traditions of positivism, realism, and relativism, and he defended a view of science as a privileged and progressive institution against popular challenges. Laudan's philosophical view of "research traditions" is seen as an important alternative to Imre Lakatos's "research programs".
Go to Profile#3825
Oktay Sinanoğlu
#3832
Overall Influence
1935 - 2015 (80 years)
Oktay Sinanoğlu was a Turkish physical chemist and molecular biophysicist who made significant contributions to the theory of electron correlation in molecules, quantum chemistry, and the theory of solvation.
Go to Profile#3826
Mario Molina
#3833
Overall Influence
1943 - 2020 (77 years)
Mario José Molina Henríquez was a Mexican physical chemist. He played a pivotal role in the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, and was a co-recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his role in discovering the threat to the Earth's ozone layer from chlorofluorocarbon gases. He was the first Mexican-born scientist to receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the third Mexican-born person to receive a Nobel prize.
Go to Profile#3827
Charles Weissmann
#3834
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Charles Weissmann is a Hungarian-Swiss molecular biologist. Weissmann is particularly known for the first cloning and expression of interferon and his contributions to the unraveling of the molecular genetics of neurogenerative prion diseases such as scrapie, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and "mad cow disease".
Go to Profile#3828
Mark Lilla
#3835
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Mark Lilla is an American political scientist, historian of ideas, journalist, and professor of humanities at Columbia University in New York City. A self-described liberal, he frequently, though not always, presents views from that perspective.
Go to Profile#3829
Andrew Wyeth
#3836
Overall Influence
1917 - 2009 (92 years)
Andrew Newell Wyeth was an American visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He believed he was also an abstractionist, portraying subjects in a new, meaningful way. The son of N. C. Wyeth and father of Jamie Wyeth, he was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century. James H. Duff explores the art and lives of the three men in An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art. Raised with an appreciation of nature, Wyeth took walks that fired his imagination. Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, and King Vidor's The Big Parade inspired him intellectually and artistically.
Go to Profile#3830
Derrick Bell
#3837
Overall Influence
1930 - 2011 (81 years)
Derrick Albert Bell Jr. was an American lawyer, professor, and civil rights activist. Bell worked for first the U.S. Justice Department, then the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he supervised over 300 school desegregation cases in Mississippi.
Go to Profile#3831
Alan Krueger
#3838
Overall Influence
1960 - 2019 (59 years)
Alan Bennett Krueger was an American economist who was the James Madison Professor of Political Economy at Princeton University and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, nominated by President Barack Obama, from May 2009 to October 2010, when he returned to Princeton. He was nominated in 2011 by Obama as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and served in that office from November 2011 to August 2013.
Go to Profile#3832
Jerome Adams
#3839
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Jerome Michael Adams is an American anesthesiologist and a former vice admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps who served as the 20th surgeon general of the United States from September 5, 2017, until January 20, 2021. Prior to becoming Surgeon General, he served as the Indiana state health commissioner, from 2014 to 2017.
Go to Profile#3833
Margaret Archer
#3840
Overall Influence
1943 - 2023 (80 years)
Margaret Scotford Archer was an English sociologist, who spent most of her academic career at the University of Warwick where she was for many years Professor of Sociology. She was also a professor at l'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. She is best known for coining the term elisionism in her 1995 book Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. On 14 April 2014, Archer was named by Pope Francis to succeed former Harvard law professor and US Ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon as President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, and served in this p...
Go to Profile#3834
Daniel J. Boorstin
#3841
Overall Influence
1914 - 2004 (90 years)
Daniel Joseph Boorstin was an American historian at the University of Chicago who wrote on many topics in American and world history. He was appointed the twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress in 1975 and served until 1987. He was instrumental in the creation of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress.
Go to Profile#3835
Horst Ludwig Störmer
#3842
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Horst Ludwig Störmer is a German physicist, Nobel laureate and emeritus professor at Columbia University. He was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Daniel Tsui and Robert Laughlin "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations" . He and Tsui were working at Bell Labs at the time of the experiment cited by the Nobel committee.
Go to Profile#3836
Peter Boettke
#3843
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Peter Joseph Boettke is an American economist of the Austrian School. He is currently a professor of economics and philosophy at George Mason University; the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism, vice president for research, and director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at GMU.
Go to Profile#3837
Bessel van der Kolk
#3844
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Bessel van der Kolk is a psychiatrist, author, researcher and educator based in Boston, United States. Since the 1970s his research has been in the area of post-traumatic stress. He is the author of The New York Times best seller, The Body Keeps the Score.
Go to Profile#3838
William Lipscomb
#3845
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
William Nunn Lipscomb Jr. was a Nobel Prize-winning American inorganic and organic chemist working in nuclear magnetic resonance, theoretical chemistry, boron chemistry, and biochemistry. Biography Overview Lipscomb was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His family moved to Lexington, Kentucky in 1920, and he lived there until he received his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry at the University of Kentucky in 1941. He went on to earn his Doctor of Philosophy degree in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1946.
Go to Profile#3839
John A. List
#3846
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
John August List is an American economist known for establishing field experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis. He works at the University of Chicago, where he serves as Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor; from 2012 until 2018, he served as Chairman of the Department of Economics. Since 2016, he has served as Visiting Robert F. Hartsook Chair in Fundraising at Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. List is noted for his pioneering contributions to field experiments in economics, with Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof and noted law profe...
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Charles Barkley
#3847
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Charles Wade Barkley is an American former professional basketball player who is a television analyst on TNT and CBS Sports. Nicknamed "Sir Charles", "Chuck", and "the Round Mound of Rebound", Barkley played 16 seasons in the National Basketball Association for three teams. Though shorter than the typical power forward, he used his strength and aggressiveness to become one of the NBA's most dominant rebounders. He was a versatile player who had the ability to score, create plays, and defend. Barkley was an 11-time NBA All-Star, an 11-time member of the All-NBA Team, and the 1993 NBA Most Valuable Player .
Go to Profile#3841
Ian Goodfellow
#3848
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Ian J. Goodfellow is an American computer scientist, engineer, and executive, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He was previously employed as a research scientist at Google Brain and director of machine learning at Apple and has made several important contributions to the field of deep learning including the invention of the generative adversarial network . Goodfellow co-wrote, as the first author, the textbook Deep Learning and wrote the chapter on deep learning in the authoritative textbook of the field of artificial intelligence, Artificial Intellige...
Go to Profile#3842
Paul R. Gross
#3849
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Paul R. Gross is a biologist and author, perhaps best known to the general public for Higher Superstition , written with Norman Levitt. Gross is the University Professor of Life Sciences at the University of Virginia; he previously served the university as Provost and vice-president. He has written widely on the intellectual conflicts of the science wars, biology, evolution, and creationism—for example, his book Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design , written with Barbara Forrest.
Go to Profile#3843
Akira Yoshino
#3850
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
#3844
Shawn Levy
#3851
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Shawn Adam Levy is a Canadian film director, film producer, screenwriter, actor, and founder of 21 Laps Entertainment. He has worked across genres and is perhaps best known as the director of the Night at the Museum film franchise and primary producer of the Netflix series Stranger Things.
Go to Profile#3845
Rebekah Brooks
#3852
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Rebekah Mary Brooks is a British media executive and former journalist and newspaper editor. She has been chief executive officer of News UK since 2015. She was previously CEO of News International from 2009 to 2011 and was the youngest editor of a British national newspaper at News of the World, from 2000 to 2003, and the first female editor of The Sun, from 2003 to 2009. Brooks married actor Ross Kemp in 2002. They divorced in 2009 and she married former racehorse trainer and author Charlie Brooks.
Go to Profile#3846
Christopher Partridge
#3853
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Christopher Hugh Partridge is an author, editor, professor at Lancaster University, and founding Co-director of the Centre for the Study of Religion and Popular Culture. According to Gordon Lynch, Partridge is a leading scholar of topics in popular culture.
Go to Profile#3847
Guido Imbens
#3854
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Guido Wilhelmus Imbens is a Dutch-American economist whose research concerns econometrics and statistics. He holds the Applied Econometrics Professorship in Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where he has taught since 2012.
Go to Profile#3848
Peter Morgan
#3855
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Peter Julian Robin Morgan, is a British screenwriter and playwright. He gained acclaim for writing for theatre, films and television often writing about historical events or figures such as Queen Elizabeth II who he has covered extensively in all major mediums. He received numerous accolades including five BAFTA Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards as well as nominations for two Academy Awards, a Tony Award and a Laurence Olivier Award. In February 2017, Morgan was awarded a British Film Institute Fellowship.
Go to Profile#3849
Phil Plait
#3856
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Philip Cary Plait , also known as The Bad Astronomer, is an American astronomer, skeptic, and popular science blogger. Plait has worked as part of the Hubble Space Telescope team, images and spectra of astronomical objects, as well as engaging in public outreach advocacy for NASA missions. He has written three books, Bad Astronomy, Death from the Skies, and Under Alien Skies. He has also appeared in several science documentaries, including How the Universe Works on the Discovery Channel. From August 2008 through 2009, he served as president of the James Randi Educational Foundation. Additional...
Go to Profile#3850
John Gottman
#3857
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
John Mordechai Gottman is an American psychologist, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington. His work focuses on divorce prediction and marital stability through relationship analyses. The lessons derived from this work represent a partial basis for the relationship counseling movement that aims to improve relationship functioning and the avoidance of those behaviors shown by Gottman and other researchers to harm human relationships. His work has also had a major impact on the development of important concepts on social sequence analysis. He and his wife, psychologist...
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