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
#38251
William F. Pounds
#38263
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
William F. Pounds was Dean and is a professor emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He was chief financial adviser to the Rockefeller family and an executive in many of their holdings. He is an undergraduate alumnus Carnegie Mellon University in Chemical Engineering and a masters and PhD graduate of Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business studying under Herbert Simon.
Go to Profile#38252
Michael Gross
#38264
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Michael Gross is a British science writer based at Oxford and has been awarded an honorary research fellowship at the School of Crystallography, Birkbeck, University of London. Biography Gross studied engineering and chemistry at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and he holds a doctorate in physical biochemistry from Regensburg University, both German institutions. During seven years of post-doctoral research in protein biochemistry at the University of Oxford, he wrote science journalism as a hobby. In 2000, he switched to writing full-time. Occasionally he also acts as a translator, editor, and lecturer.
Go to Profile#38253
Helle Thorning-Schmidt
#38265
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Helle Thorning-Schmidt is a Danish retired politician who served as the 26th Prime Minister of Denmark from 2011 to 2015, and Leader of the Social Democrats from 2005 to 2015. She is the first woman to have held each post. Following defeat in 2015, she announced that she would step down as both Danish Prime Minister and Social Democratic party leader. Ending her political career in April 2016, she was the chief executive of the NGO Save the Children until June 2019.
Go to Profile#38254
Arie Andries Kruithof
#38266
Overall Influence
1909 - 1993 (84 years)
Arie Andries Kruithof was a Dutch professor of applied physics at Eindhoven University of Technology . Kruithof studied physics at Utrecht University, where he obtained a doctor’s degree from Leonard Ornstein in 1934. At Philips, he did research on lighting systems, especially gas-discharge lamps. Later he was appointed professor of applied physics at Eindhoven University of Technology, leading the Atomic Physics group, mainly researching gas discharges and plasmass. The Kruithof curve, describing the influence of colour temperature on visual perception, is named after him.
Go to Profile#38255
Ben Olsen
#38267
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Benjamin Robert Olsen is an American sports executive, soccer coach, and former professional player who was formerly the president of Washington Spirit, a professional women's soccer club in the National Women's Soccer League . He is currently the head coach of Houston Dynamo FC in Major League Soccer. Olsen is best known for his long-term association with D.C. United of Major League Soccer , first as a player then as a coach.
Go to Profile#38256
Juha Hernesniemi
#38268
Overall Influence
1947 - 2023 (76 years)
was a Finnish neurosurgeon and professor emeritus of the neurosurgery department in Helsinki. was born in on 18 October 1947. He had a special interest in cerebrovascular diseases that are surgically amenable, especially aneurysms and AVMs. He published extensively and is widely cited within this particular domain of neurosurgery. died in Helsinki on 25 June 2023, at the age of 75.
Go to Profile#38257
Rob Reich
#38269
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Robert C. Reich is an American political scientist. He is a professor of political science at Stanford University, the director of Stanford's McCoy Center for Ethics in Society, co-director of Stanford's Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society , and associate director of Stanford's institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence . A political theorist, Reich's work focuses primarily on applied ethics, educational inequality and the role of philanthropy in the public sector, along with other topics in liberal democratic theory.
Go to Profile#38258
Rupert Holmes
#38270
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
David Goldstein , better known as Rupert Holmes, is a British-American composer, singer-songwriter, dramatist and author. He is widely known for the hit singles "Escape " and "Him" . He is also known for his musicals The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which earned him two Tony Awards, and Curtains, and for his television series Remember WENN.
Go to Profile#38259
Surayud Chulanont
#38271
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Surayud Chulanont is a Thai politician. He was the Prime Minister of Thailand and head of Thailand's interim government between 2006 and 2008. He is a former supreme commander of the Royal Thai Army and is currently Privy Councilor to King Vajiralongkorn.
Go to Profile#38260
David Yetman
#38272
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
David Albert Yetman is an American academic expert on Sonora, Mexico, and an Emmy Award-winning media presenter on the world's deserts. He is a research social scientist at the University of Arizona.
Go to Profile#38261
Horst Mittelstaedt
#38273
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Horst Mittelstaedt was a German biologist and cybernetician. Together with Erich von Holst he demonstrated the "Reafference Principle" in 1950 concerning how an organism is able to separate reafferent sensory stimuli from exafferent sensory stimuli. This concept largely dealt with interactive processes between the central nervous system and its periphery.
Go to Profile#38262
Richard Lachmann
#38274
Overall Influence
1956 - 2021 (65 years)
Richard Lachmann was an American sociologist and specialist in comparative historical sociology who was a professor at University at Albany, SUNY. Lachmann is best known as the author of the book, "Capitalists in Spite of Themselves", which has been awarded several prizes, including the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award. In this work, Lachmann shows that relations among elites rather than class struggle, or any other set of factors proposed by other historians, primarily determined the creation or non-creation of capitalism in early modern Europe. Later, he used his elite conflict theory to analyze the political crisis in the United States.
Go to Profile#38263
Jacques Schotte
#38275
Overall Influence
1928 - 2007 (79 years)
Jacques Schotte was a Belgian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, co-founder, in 1969, with Antoine Vergote and Alphonse De Waelhens of the Belgian School of Psychoanalysis. Biography Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven since 1964, Jacques Schotte was an atypical psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. In addition to his classes, he gave many conferences throughout Europe, the United States and Latin America .
Go to Profile#38264
Józef Życiński
#38276
Overall Influence
1948 - 2011 (63 years)
Józef Mirosław Życiński was a Polish philosopher, publicist, the Roman Catholic Metropolitan Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Lublin and a Professor of the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Rome, Pontifical University of John Paul II in Cracow and Catholic University of Lublin.
Go to Profile#38265
Dick Jauron
#38277
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Richard Manuel Jauron is an American former professional football player and coach in the National Football League . He played eight seasons in the NFL as a safety, five with the Detroit Lions and three with the Cincinnati Bengals. Jauron served as the head coach the Chicago Bears from 1999 to 2003 and the Buffalo Bills from 2006 until November 2009. He was also the interim head coach for the Lions for the final five games of the 2005 season. Jauron was named the AP Coach of the Year in 2001 after leading the Bears to a 13–3 record.
Go to Profile#38266
C. Randy Gallistel
#38278
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Charles Ransom Gallistel is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University. He is an expert in the cognitive processes of learning and memory, using animal models to carry out research on these topics. Gallistel is married to fellow psychologist Rochel Gelman. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty he held positions at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was chair of the psychology department and Bernard L. & Ida E. Grossman Term Professor, and at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#38267
Max Harris
#38279
Overall Influence
1921 - 1995 (74 years)
Maxwell Henley Harris AO , generally known as Max Harris, was an Australian poet, critic, columnist, commentator, publisher, and bookseller. Early life Harris was born in Adelaide, South Australia, and raised in the city of Mount Gambier, where his father was based as a travelling salesman. His early poetry was published in the children's pages of The Sunday Mail. He continued to write poetry through his secondary schooling after winning a scholarship to St Peter's College, Adelaide. By the time he began attending the University of Adelaide, he was already known as a poet and intellectual. In...
Go to Profile#38268
Mahmood Sariolghalam
#38280
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Mahmood Sariolghalam is a professor of international relations at the School of Economics and Political Science in Shahid Beheshti University since 1987. He was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1959. He received his B.A. degree in political science/management from California State University, Northridge in 1980 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in international relations from the University of Southern California in 1982 and 1987, respectively. Sariolghalam also completed a postdoctorate program at Ohio University in 1997. During the 2009–2010 academic year, he taught at Kuwait University. He is curr...
Go to Profile#38269
Masaharu Kawakatsu
#38281
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Masaharu Kawakatsu is a Japanese zoologist known for his studies on the taxonomy and ecology of planarians. Life Masaharu Kawakatsu was born in 1929 in the Asahi village, Kameoka town, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan, son of Masakazu Kawakatsu, a squire of the village, and Tei Kawakatsu , the daughter of a country medical doctor, Ei'ichi Okajima.
Go to Profile#38270
Vyjayanthimala
#38282
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Vyjayanthimala is a former Indian actress, dancer and parliamentarian. Regarded as one of Indian cinema's finest actresses and dancers, she is the recipient of several accolades, including two BFJA Awards and five Filmfare Awards. She made her screen debut at the age of 16 with the Tamil film Vaazhkai , and followed this with a role in the Telugu film Jeevitham . Her first work in Hindi cinema was the social guidance film Bahar , which she headlined, and achieved her breakthrough with the romantic film Nagin .
Go to Profile#38271
Susan Band Horwitz
#38283
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Susan Band Horwitz is an American biochemist and professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine where she holds the Falkenstein chair in Cancer Research as well as co-chair of the department of Molecular Pharmacology.
Go to Profile#38272
Frank Gore
#38284
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Franklin Gore Sr. is an American former football running back who played in the National Football League for 16 seasons. A member of the San Francisco 49ers during most of his career, he ranks third in NFL career rushing yards. His career was also noted for longevity, a rare trait with his position, and he holds the league record for games played by a running back.
Go to Profile#38273
Thomas F. Siems
#38285
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Thomas F. Siems is senior economist and policy advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. He holds a master's degree and PhD from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, where he also lectures.
Go to Profile#38274
Philippe Naert
#38286
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Philippe Autor Naert is a Belgian organizational theorist, and Executive at several business schools and universities from INSEAD to the Antwerp Management School., known for his work on marketing decision modelling.
Go to Profile#38275
Ismail Haniyeh
#38287
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Ismail Haniyeh is a Palestinian politician who is a senior political leader of Hamas, the current chairman of Hamas’s political bureau; as of 2023, Haniyeh lives in Qatar. Haniyeh was born in the Al-Shati refugee camp in the Gaza Strip in 1962. He studied at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he first became involved with Hamas, and graduated with a bachelor's degree in Arabic literature in 1987. Appointed to head a Hamas office in 1997, he has since grown in the ranks of the organization.
Go to Profile#38276
Victoria F. Nourse
#38288
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Victoria Frances Nourse is a Ralph V. Whitworth Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center and the executive director of the Center on Congressional Studies at Georgetown Law. A nominee for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, pursuant to the rules of the Senate, her nomination was returned to the president on December 17, 2011, after the Senate adjourned for more than 30 days. Her nomination was not resubmitted by the president. From 2014 to 2015, she served as counsel to Vice President Joe Biden.
Go to Profile#38277
Thomas Weinandy
#38289
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Thomas Gerard Weinandy is an American Roman Catholic priest and a leading scholar. He is a prolific writer in both academic and popular works, including articles, books, and study courses. Biography Weinandy entered the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin in 1966, was solemnly professed in 1970, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1972. He earned a BA in philosophy at St. Fidelis College, Herman, Pennsylvania, in 1969, an MA in systematic theology at Washington Theological Union in 1972, and a doctorate in historical theology at King's College London in 1975. He lived in and was an active memb...
Go to Profile#38278
Mohammad Arab-Salehi
#38290
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Mohammad Arab-Salehi is an Iranian philosopher and associate professor of religion at the Research Institute for Islamic Culture and Thought. He is also the head of Hikmat and Religious Studies Faculty of the Institute. Arab-Salehi is known for his works on hermeneutics and historicism and is a recipient of the Iranian Book of the Season Award for his book Historicism and Religion .
Go to Profile#38279
Komei Fukuda
#38291
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Komei Fukuda is a Japanese mathematician known for his contributions to optimization, polyhedral computation and oriented matroid theory. Fukuda is a professor in optimization and computational geometry in the Department of Mathematics and in the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science at ETH Zurich.
Go to Profile#38280
John W. Creswell
#38292
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
John Ward Creswell is an American academic known for his work in mixed methods research. He has written numerous journal articles and 27 books on mixed methods research, research methods, and qualitative research.
Go to Profile#38281
Anna Frebel
#38293
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Anna Frebel is a German astronomer working on discovering the oldest stars in the universe. Career Anna Frebel grew up in Göttingen, Germany. After finishing high school, she began studying physics in Freiburg im Breisgau but did not finish the physics program and did not obtain a physics degree there. Instead she enrolled in an astronomy program in Australia, where she obtained a PhD in Astronomy from the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra. A W. J. McDonald Postdoctoral Fellowship brought her to the University of Texas at Austin in 2006, where she continu...
Go to Profile#38282
Michael Proctor
#38294
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Michael Richard Edward Proctor is a British physicist, mathematician, and academic. He is Professor of Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics at the University of Cambridge and, since his election in 2013, the Provost of King's College, Cambridge and school governor at Eton College.
Go to Profile#38283
Leslie Hogben
#38295
Overall Influence
Leslie Hogben is an American mathematician specializing in graph theory and linear algebra, and known for her mentorship of graduate students in mathematics. She is a professor of mathematics at Iowa State University, where she held the Dio Lewis Holl Chair in Applied Mathematics 2012-2020; she is also professor of electrical and computer engineering at Iowa State, associate dean for graduate studies and faculty development of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State, and associate director for diversity at the American Institute of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#38284
Marjorie Chibnall
#38296
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Marjorie McCallum Chibnall was an English historian, medievalist and Latin translator. She edited the Historia Ecclesiastica by Orderic Vitalis, with whom she shared the same birthplace of Atcham in Shropshire.
Go to Profile#38285
Jay Lemke
#38297
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jay Lemke is an American semiotician and science education scholar with a background in physics. He is professor of education at the University of Michigan. Biography Lemke obtained his B.S. from the University of Chicago in 1966, his M.S. from the University of Chicago in 1968, and his Ph.D. from the *University of Chicago 1973.
Go to Profile#38286
Karl Halvor Teigen
#38298
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Karl Halvor Teigen is a Norwegian psychologist. He was born in Oslo and took the cand.psychol. degree in 1966. He was first a professor of psychology at the University of Tromsø from 1991, then at the University of Oslo from 2001. He is especially known for his book En psykologihistorie on the history of psychology. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Go to Profile#38287
Sarah Pink
#38299
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Sarah Pink is a British-born social scientist, ethnographer and social anthropologist, now based in Australia, known for her work using visual research methods such as photography, images, video and other media for ethnographic research in digital media and new technologies. She has an international reputation for her work in visual ethnography and her book Doing Visual Ethnography, first published in 2001 and now in its 4th edition, is used in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, photographic studies and media studies. She has designed or undertaken ethnographic research in UK, Spain, ...
Go to Profile#38288
Sam Durant
#38300
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Sam Durant is a multimedia artist whose works engage social, political, and cultural issues. Often referencing American history, his work explores culture and politics, engaging subjects such as the civil rights movement, southern rock music, and modernism.
Go to Profile#38289
Samuel Shem
#38301
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Samuel Shem is the pen-name of the American psychiatrist Stephen Joseph Bergman . His main works are The House of God and Mount Misery, both fictional but close-to-real first-hand descriptions of the training of doctors in the United States.
Go to Profile#38290
Yu Xie
#38302
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Yu Xie is a Chinese-American sociologist and a sociology professor at Princeton University. He joined the University of Michigan as an assistant professor in 1989 and served as a professor from 1996 to 2015.
Go to Profile#38291
Dani Shapiro
#38303
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Dani Shapiro is an American writer, the author of six novels including Family History , Black & White and most recently Signal Fires and the best-selling memoirs Slow Motion , Devotion , Hourglass , and Inheritance . She has also written for magazines such as The New Yorker, The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, and Elle. In February 2019, she created an original podcast on iHeart Radio called Family Secrets.
Go to Profile#38292
Warren I. Cohen
#38304
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Warren I. Cohen is an American historian specializing in the diplomatic history of the United States. He is Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Cohen formerly served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1984.
Go to Profile#38293
Peter de Jonge
#38305
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Peter de Jonge is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction. His first novel "Shadows Still Remain" was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year and the three novels he co-authored with James Patterson were #1 New York Times Best Sellers. He has been a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine since 1986, as well as New York magazine, National Geographic, DETAILS, Harper's Bazaar and Manhattan, inc. His non-fiction has been republished in numerous anthologies including Best American Sports Writing in 1996 and 2004. He lives in New York, where his crime novels are set.
Go to Profile#38294
Mazie Hirono
#38306
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Mazie Keiko Hirono is an American lawyer and politician serving as the junior United States senator from Hawaii since 2013. A member of the Democratic Party, Hirono previously served as a member of the United States House of Representatives for Hawaii's 2nd congressional district from 2007 to 2013. Hirono also served as a member of the Hawaii House of Representatives from 1981 to 1995 and as Hawaii's tenth lieutenant governor from 1994 to 2002, under Ben Cayetano. She was the unsuccessful Democratic nominee for governor of Hawaii in 2002, defeated by Republican Linda Lingle in the general ele...
Go to Profile#38295
Michael J. Yaremchuk
#38307
Overall Influence
Michael J. Yaremchuk is a Professor of surgery, Part-Time at Harvard Medical School and Chief of Craniofacial Surgery at its affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. Education Yaremchuk received his B.A. degree from Yale College in 1972, and his M.D. from the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1976. He completed his surgical residency at Harvard Deaconess Hospital , and his plastic surgery residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital .
Go to Profile#38296
Moshe Levy
#38308
Overall Influence
1927 - 2015 (88 years)
Moshe Levy was an Israeli professor of chemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Birth and education Moshe Levy was born on December 8, 1927, in Thessaloniki, Greece. In 1933 his father, Eliyahu, decided to immigrate to Palestine, then under British occupation. He grew up in the southern part of Tel-Aviv and attended the Alliance Elementary School and the Balfour High School. After graduating from high school, he went to work as a laboratory assistant at the Zeiff Institute in Rehovot. There, with the help of Chaim Weizmann he obtained a scholarship to attend the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#38297
Robert Nola
#38309
Overall Influence
1940 - 2022 (82 years)
Robert Nola was a New Zealand philosophy academic, and was an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Auckland. His work focussed on the philosophy and history of science, on epistemology and on metaphysics.
Go to Profile#38298
Peter Schneider
#38310
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Peter Bernd Schneider is a German mathematician, specializing in the p-adic aspects of algebraic number theory, arithmetic algebraic geometry, and representation theory. Education and career Peter Schneider studied mathematics in Karlsruhe and Erlangen. After his Diplom in 1977 from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, he was an assistant from 1977 to 1983 at the University of Regensburg. There he received in 1980 his PhD with advisor Jürgen Neukirch and dissertation -adischer Darstellungen über Zahlkörpern . Schneider habilitated in 1982 at the University of Regensburg. He was a postdoc at ...
Go to Profile#38299
Rosemary Bryant Mariner
#38311
Overall Influence
1953 - 2019 (66 years)
Captain Rosemary Bryant Mariner was an American pilot and one of the first six women to earn their wings as a United States Naval Aviator in 1974. She was the first female military pilot to fly a tactical jet and the first to achieve command of an operational aviation squadron.
Go to Profile#38300
Michael Klare
#38312
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Michael T. Klare is a Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies, whose department is located at Hampshire College , defense correspondent of The Nation magazine and author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency . His 2019 book is, All Hell Breaking Loose: the Pentagon's Perspective on Climate Change . Klare also teaches at Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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