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
#38151
Khalil Mack
#38163
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (35 years)
Khalil Delshon Mack is an American football linebacker for the Los Angeles Chargers of the National Football League . He played college football at Buffalo and was selected by the Oakland Raiders with the fifth overall pick in the 2014 NFL Draft.
Go to Profile#38152
Elizabeth Rather
#38164
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Elizabeth "Bess" D. Rather is the co-founder of FORTH, Inc. and is a leading expert in the Forth programming language. She became involved with Forth while she was at the University of Arizona, but working part-time for National Radio Astronomy Observatory . While she initially aimed to rewrite their systems in FORTRAN, her discovery of the power of Forth convinced her to leave the University to work for NRAO and Kitt Peak National Observatory, where she wrote the first Forth manual and started popularizing the language in the scientific community. She co-founded FORTH, Inc. with Charles Moore in 1973.
Go to Profile#38153
Emanuel Azenberg
#38165
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Emanuel "Manny" Azenberg is an American theatre producer and general manager whose professional relationship with playwright Neil Simon spans thirty-three years. Life and career Azenberg was born in The Bronx, the son of Hannah and Charles Joshua Azenberg. He attended the Bronx High School of Science. He became interested in the theatre after seeing his uncle, former Yiddish theatre actor Wolfe Barzell, perform in the 1948 play Skipper Next to God by Jan de Hartog. After studying at New York University and serving time in the United States Army, he became the assistant company manager for The Legend of Lizzie, an ill-fated 1959 play that closed after two performances.
Go to Profile#38154
Schubert M. Ogden
#38166
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Schubert Miles Ogden was an American Protestant theologian who proposed an interpretation of the Christian faith that he believes is both appropriate to the earliest apostolic witness found in the New Testament and also credible in the light of common human experience. He has written eleven books and been awarded many honors including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright research scholarship, as well as honorary degrees from Ohio Wesleyan University, the University of Chicago, and Southern Methodist University. He has been invited to many titled lectureships in universities in ...
Go to Profile#38155
Kenneth E. Bailey
#38167
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Kenneth E. Bailey was an American author, professor of theology, and linguist. Life Bailey was born in Bloomington, Illinois. He spent 40 years teaching in Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and Cyprus. He had a degree in Arabic and literature, systematic theology and wrote his dissertation in the field of New Testament. He was ordained by the Presbyterian Church . Since 1962 he taught for the Near East School of Theology in Beirut , where he founded the Institute for Middle Eastern New Testament Studies. From 1985 to 1995, he taught at the Ecumenical Institute for Theological Research in Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#38156
Lisa Jeffrey
#38168
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Lisa Claire Jeffrey FRSC is a Canadian mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto. In her research, she uses symplectic geometry to provide rigorous proofs of results in quantum field theory.
Go to Profile#38157
Patrick McGoohan
#38169
Overall Influence
1928 - 2009 (81 years)
Patrick Joseph McGoohan was an American-born Irish actor, director, screenwriter, and producer of film, television, and theatre. Born in New York City to Irish parents, he was raised in Ireland and England, and began his career in England during the 1950s and became well known for his role as secret agent John Drake in the ITC espionage programme Danger Man . He then produced and created The Prisoner , a surrealistic television series in which he featured as Number Six, an unnamed British intelligence agent who is abducted and imprisoned in a mysterious coastal village.
Go to Profile#38158
Mike Godwin
#38170
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Michael Wayne Godwin is an American attorney and author. He was the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation , and he created the Internet adage Godwin's law and the notion of an Internet meme. From July 2007 to October 2010, he was general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. In March 2011, he was elected to the Open Source Initiative board. Godwin has served as a contributing editor of Reason magazine since 1994. In April 2019, he was elected to the Internet Society board. From 2015 to 2020, he was general counsel and director of innovation policy at the R Street Institute.
Go to Profile#38159
Imani Sanga
#38171
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Imani Sanga is Professor of Music in the Department of Creative Arts, formerly called Department of Fine and Performing Arts, in the College of Humanities at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He teaches courses in Ethnomusicology, Philosophy of Music, Composition and Choral Music. And he conducts the university choir.
Go to Profile#38160
Janet Pierrehumbert
#38172
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Janet Pierrehumbert is Professor of Language Modelling in the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. She developed an intonational model which includes a grammar of intonation patterns and an explicit algorithm for calculating pitch contours in speech, as well as an account of intonational meaning. It has been widely influential in speech technology, psycholinguistics, and theories of language form and meaning. Pierrehumbert is also affiliated with the New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour at the Universit...
Go to Profile#38161
Lucien Bianco
#38173
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Lucien André Bianco is a French historian and sinologist specializing in the history of the Chinese peasantry in the twentieth century. He is the author of a reference book on the origins of the Chinese revolution and has co-edited the book China in the twentieth century. His Peasants without the Party was awarded the Association for Asian Studies Joseph Levenson Book Prize in 2003.
Go to Profile#38162
Gary Samore
#38174
Overall Influence
Gary Samore is the Crown Family Director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies and Professor of the Practice in Politics at Brandeis University. He formerly served as the Executive Director for Research of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#38163
Eddie Mathews
#38175
Overall Influence
1931 - 2001 (70 years)
Edwin Lee Mathews was an American professional baseball third baseman. He played in Major League Baseball for 17 seasons for the Boston / Milwaukee / Atlanta Braves ; Houston Astros and Detroit Tigers . Inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1978, he is the only player to have represented the Braves in the three cities they have called home. He played 1,944 games for the Braves during their 13-season tenure in Milwaukee—the prime of Mathews' career.
Go to Profile#38164
Corinna Hawkes
#38176
Overall Influence
Corinna Hawkes is a specialist in food systems. She is Director, Division of Food Systems and Food Safety for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations . Between 2016 and 2023 she was Director, Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London. She is also Co-Founder of the Next Generation Leadership Collective.
Go to Profile#38165
Arthur Patrick
#38177
Overall Influence
1934 - 2013 (79 years)
Arthur Nelson Patrick was a Seventh-day Adventist theologian and historian. At the time of death, he was an honorary senior research fellow at Avondale College in New South Wales, Australia. He also worked in pastoral ministry, evangelism, religion teaching, academic administration, and hospital chaplaincy for the Seventh-day Adventist church.
Go to Profile#38166
Erin Pettit
#38178
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Erin Christine Pettit is an American glaciologist focusing on climate change. She is an associate professor of geophysics and glaciology at Oregon State University. Her work focuses on ice-ocean interactions, ice-shelf disintegration, sea-level rise and ocean circulation changes.
Go to Profile#38167
Gavin Bryars
#38179
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Richard Gavin Bryars is an English composer and double bassist. He has worked in jazz, free improvisation, minimalism, historicism, avant-garde, and experimental music. Early life and career Born on 16 January 1943 in Goole, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England, Bryars studied philosophy at Sheffield University but became a jazz bassist during his three years as a philosophy student.
Go to Profile#38168
Laurence A. Rickels
#38180
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Laurence Arthur Rickels is an American literary and media theorist, whose most significant works have been in the tradition of the Frankfurt School's efforts to apply psychoanalytic insights to mass media culture. Some of his best known works include The Case of California, The Vampire Lectures, and the three volume work Nazi Psychoanalysis. After 30 years at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he was appointed successor to Klaus Theweleit in April 2011 to the Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe, where he was professor of Art and Theory for six years. During spring semester 2018 Rickels held the Eberhard Berent Goethe Chair at New York University.
Go to Profile#38169
SZA
#38181
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Solána Imani Rowe , known professionally as SZA , is an American singer-songwriter. She first gained recognition through her self-released extended plays , See.SZA.Run and S , which helped her become the first female artist to sign with Top Dawg Entertainment. Her third EP, Z , was her first project to be released to digital retailers and reached the top-ten on the US Independent Albums chart.
Go to Profile#38170
Ryan Phillippe
#38182
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Matthew Ryan Phillippe is an American actor and producer. After appearing as Billy Douglas on the soap opera One Life to Live and making his feature film debut in Crimson Tide , he came to prominence in the late 1990s with starring roles in I Know What You Did Last Summer , 54 , Playing by Heart , and Cruel Intentions .
Go to Profile#38171
Vinay Lal
#38183
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Vinay Lal is a historian of India. He is Professor of History and Asian American Studies at UCLA. He writes widely on the history and culture of colonial and modern India, popular and public culture in India, cinema, historiography, the politics of world history, the Indian diaspora, global politics, contemporary American politics, the life and thought of Mohandas Gandhi, Hinduism, and the politics of knowledge systems. He is known for his radical political views and for making his history lectures available for free on his YouTube channel.
Go to Profile#38172
David Blatt
#38184
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
David Michael Blatt , is an Israeli-American professional basketball executive. He is also a former coach and player. Blatt played point guard at Princeton University from 1977 to 1981 and played in the Maccabiah Games for the U.S. national team that won a gold medal in 1981. He then played professional basketball in Israel for nine of the next twelve years, before an injury ended his playing career, and he began coaching full-time.
Go to Profile#38173
R. N. Whybray
#38185
Overall Influence
1923 - 1997 (74 years)
Roger Norman Whybray was a biblical scholar and specialist in Hebrew studies. Whybray read French and Theology at Oxford and was ordained as priest in the Church of England. After a number of minor teaching posts, he held the position of Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew at Central Theological College, Tokyo, 1952–1965. He returned to Oxford in 1960–61 to prepare for a DPhil under G. R. Driver, his thesis subsequently being published as Wisdom in Proverbs: The Concept of Wisdom in Proverbs 19. In 1965 he became lecturer in Theology in the University of Hull, becoming Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Studies in 1978.
Go to Profile#38174
Marthe Vogt
#38186
Overall Influence
1903 - 2003 (100 years)
Marthe Louise Vogt was a German scientist recognized as one of the leading neuroscientists of the twentieth century. She is mainly remembered for her important contributions to the understanding of the role of neurotransmitters in the brain, especially epinephrine.
Go to Profile#38175
Susan Lea
#38187
Overall Influence
Professor Susan Lea is a chartered psychologist and academic, and was Vice-Chancellor at the University of Hull from 2017 to 2022. Previously she was Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Greenwich.
Go to Profile#38176
Jefery Levy
#38188
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Jefery Levy is an American film and television director, producer, and writer, based in Beverly Hills, California. Career In 1985, while a graduate student at UCLA, Levy wrote and produced the low-budget hit Ghoulies, a horror-comedy film. He has produced and directed dozens of TV and film projects over a span of three decades, and he is most recently known for the 2015 film ME, which he directed, produced, wrote, and starred.
Go to Profile#38177
Mark M. Davis
#38189
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Mark Morris Davis is an American immunologist. He is the director of and Avery Family Professor of Immunology at the Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection at Stanford University. Education Davis was educated at Johns Hopkins University and the California Institute of Technology where he was awarded a PhD in 1981 for research supervised by Leroy E. Hood.
Go to Profile#38178
Effie Pedaliu
#38190
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Effie G. H. Pedaliu is an international historian, author and Visiting Fellow at LSE IDEAS. She has held posts at LSE, KCL and UWE. She is the author of Britain, Italy and the Origins of the Cold War, , the co-editor of Britain in Global Affairs, Volume II, From Churchill to Blair, and The Foreign Office, Commerce and British Foreign Policy in the 20th Century .
Go to Profile#38179
Jeremiah Farrell
#38191
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
Jeremiah Farrell was an American professor emeritus of mathematics at Butler University in Indiana. He was well known for having constructed Will Shortz's favorite puzzle, the famous 1996 "Election Day" crossword in The New York Times. He also wrote puzzles for many other books and newspapers, such as Scott Kim's puzzle column for Discover magazine.
Go to Profile#38180
Yehouda Shenhav
#38192
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Yehouda Shenhav is an Israeli sociologist and critical theorist. He is known for his contributions in the fields of bureaucracy, management and capitalism, as well as for his research on ethnicity in Israeli society and its relationship with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Go to Profile#38181
Gary Busey
#38193
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Gary Busey is an American actor. He portrayed Buddy Holly in The Buddy Holly Story , for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor and won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actor. His other starring roles include A Star is Born , D.C. Cab , Silver Bullet , Eye of the Tiger , Lethal Weapon , Hider in the House , Predator 2 , Point Break , Under Siege , The Firm , Drop Zone , Black Sheep and Lost Highway .
Go to Profile#38182
Robert Bickers
#38194
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Robert A. Bickers is a British historian of modern China and colonialism. He is currently a professor of history at the University of Bristol. Bickers is the author of six books and editor or co-editor of three more.
Go to Profile#38183
Patricia E. Bauman
#38195
Overall Influence
Patricia E. Bauman is an American mathematician who studies partial differential equations that model the behavior of liquid crystals and superconductors. She is a professor of mathematics at Purdue University.
Go to Profile#38184
Ronald G. Ehrenberg
#38196
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Ronald Gordon Ehrenberg is an American economist. He has primarily worked in the field of labor economics including the economics of higher education. Currently, he is Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell University. He is also the founder-director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute .
Go to Profile#38185
Arvind Narayanan
#38197
Overall Influence
Arvind Narayanan is a computer scientist and a professor at Princeton University. Narayanan is recognized for his research in the de-anonymization of data. Biography Narayanan received technical degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2004. His advisor was C. Pandu Rangan. Narayanan received his PhD in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2009 under Vitaly Shmatikov. He worked briefly as a post-doctoral researcher at Stanford University, working closely with Dan Boneh. Narayanan moved to Princeton University as an assistant professor in September 2012. H...
Go to Profile#38186
William J. McGill
#38198
Overall Influence
1922 - 1997 (75 years)
William James McGill was an American psychologist, author, and academic administrator. He was the 16th president of Columbia University and the 3rd chancellor of the University of California San Diego.
Go to Profile#38187
Vida Johnson
#38199
Overall Influence
Vida B. Johnson is an American criminal defense attorney and associate professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. Johnson works in the Criminal Defense and Prisoner Advocacy Clinic and Criminal Justice Clinic, and supervises attorneys in the E. Barrett Prettyman Post-Graduate Fellowship Program. Johnson regularly writes in the area of criminal law and procedure.
Go to Profile#38188
Dave Van Ronk
#38200
Overall Influence
1936 - 2002 (66 years)
David Kenneth Ritz Van Ronk was an American folk singer. An important figure in the American folk music revival and New York City's Greenwich Village scene in the 1960s, he was nicknamed the "Mayor of MacDougal Street".
Go to Profile#38189
Richard Lapchick
#38201
Overall Influence
Richard E. Lapchick is a human rights activist and writer. Early years Lapchick's life passion was sparked in Germany at the age of 14 while touring the Nazi internment camps of Dachau. He was in Europe during the 1960 Summer Olympic Games and discovered the impact sport has to cross all lines, color, creed and religion and his dream to use sport as a vehicle for social change was born. It reinforced his early experiences witnessing public hostility toward his father Joe Lapchick when, as the coach of the New York Knicks, he signed Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton, the first African-American player signed in the NBA in 1950.
Go to Profile#38190
Carl E. Taylor
#38202
Overall Influence
1916 - 2010 (94 years)
Carl Ernest Taylor, MD, DrPH founder of the academic discipline of international health who dedicated his life to the well-being of the world's marginalized people. He was the founding chair of the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He was a key contributor to the Alma Ata Declaration. At the age of 88, this energetic man assumed the challenging position as Country Director for the nonprofit organization Future Generations Afghanistan where he led innovative field-based activities until age 90. He has worked in over 70 countries and have students from more than 100 countries.
Go to Profile#38191
Robert Wedgeworth
#38203
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Robert Wedgeworth is an American librarian who was the founding President of ProLiteracy Worldwide, an adult literacy organization. He is also a former executive director of the American Library Association, served as president of IFLA, served as Dean of the School of Library Service at Columbia University, and was university librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has also authored and edited several major reference works, and has won many awards over the course of his career. In 2021 the American Library Association awarded him Honorary Membership, its highest award.
Go to Profile#38192
Saule Omarova
#38204
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Saule Tarikhovna Omarova is a Kazakh-American attorney, academic, and public policy advisor. She was the nominee for comptroller of the currency before her nomination was withdrawn at her request on December 7, 2021.
Go to Profile#38193
Michael Worobey
#38205
Overall Influence
Michael Worobey is a Canadian evolutionary biologist, and a professor and department head of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. He has done important work in the study of the evolution of HIV-1, which demonstrated the extensive genetic diversity of the virus by 1960, fully refuting the contaminated polio vaccine theory as the origin of the AIDS pandemic.
Go to Profile#38194
Louis Groarke
#38206
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Louis Groarke is a Canadian philosopher, author, and a professor in the Philosophy Department at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. His work is characterized by his specialization in Western philosophy, especially the thought of Aristotle.
Go to Profile#38195
Clyde Hendrick
#38207
Overall Influence
Clyde Hendrick was a Horn Professor of Psychology at Texas Tech University. He received his doctorate degree from University of Missouri in 1967 in Psychology. His main research interests included close relationships. During the past decade his primary focus was around love and sex attitudes. In collaboration with doctoral students. Hendrick studied various aspects related to love and sex attitudes. These two research areas are connected to close relations, such as relationship satisfaction, communication modalities, personality variables, conflict styles, and self-disclosure. He worked very closely with Susan Hendrick on many of his research studies.
Go to Profile#38196
Nurith Gertz
#38208
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Nurith Gertz is an Israeli Professor Emerita of Hebrew literature and film at The Open University of Israel. She served as head of the theoretical track at the Department of Film and Television, at Tel Aviv University, and heads the Department of Culture and Production at Sapir College.
Go to Profile#38197
Dario Antiseri
#38209
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Dario Antiseri is a Philosophy professor. He holds a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the University of Perugia and for many years he has been Full Professor of Methodology of the Social Sciences at LUISS, in Rome. He taught in Siena, Padova and Rome, where he was also the Dean of the Faculty of Political Science. He retired from academia in 2010. He is an important scholar of Karl R. Popper and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and in many works he tries to show the links between fallibilism and hermeneutics. In 1996, he published a book about Gianni Vattimo's weak thought. With the Italian philosoph...
Go to Profile#38198
Michèle Sebag
#38210
Overall Influence
Martine-Michèle Sebag is a French computer scientist, primarily focused on machine learning. She has over 6,000 citations. Biography Sebag studied mathematics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and later worked in the computer science industry, starting at Thomson Corporation, where she was introduced to artificial intelligence. She then moved into the research field, at the Laboratoire de Mécanique des Solides at Ecole Polytechnique.
Go to Profile#38199
John Mackintosh Howie
#38211
Overall Influence
1936 - 2011 (75 years)
John Mackintosh Howie was a Scottish mathematician and prominent semigroup theorist. Biography Howie was educated at Robert Gordon's College, Aberdeen, the University of Aberdeen and Balliol College, Oxford, where he wrote a Ph.D. thesis under the direction of Graham Higman.
Go to Profile#38200
Selna Kaplan
#38212
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Selna Lucille Kaplan was an American pediatric endocrinologist and a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She led the first American clinical trials of growth hormone treatment.
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