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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#38401
Francesco Iachello
#38413
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Francesco Iachello is an Italian nuclear engineer and theoretical physicist, who works mainly on nuclear and molecular physics. He and his collaborator Akito Arima are the creators of the "interacting boson model".
Go to Profile#38402
Felix Kandel
#38414
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
#38403
William S. Laughlin
#38415
Overall Influence
1919 - 2001 (82 years)
William S. Laughlin was an American anthropologist who carried on research and wrote about aboriginal peoples in the Aleutians and Greenland. William Sceva Laughlin was born in Canton, Missouri in 1919. He grew up in Salem, Oregon, where his father was a professor at Willamette University. His education included bachelor's and master's degrees in sociology, and master's and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology from Harvard University. His academic career in anthropology included professorships at the University of Oregon , the University of Wisconsin , and the University of Connecticut . His pri...
Go to Profile#38404
Marc Culler
#38416
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Marc Edward Culler is an American mathematician who works in geometric group theory and low-dimensional topology. A native Californian, Culler did his undergraduate work at the University of California at Santa Barbara and his graduate work at Berkeley where he graduated in 1978. He is now at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Culler is the son of Glen Jacob Culler who was an important early innovator in the development of the Internet.
Go to Profile#38405
John Simpson
#38417
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
John Simpson , is a British New Classical architect. Education and career Simpson studied architecture at University College London. Simpson is Principal of John Simpson Architects LLP, Chartered Architects and Urban Designers, London.
Go to Profile#38406
Lyndal Roper
#38418
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Lyndal Anne Roper is a historian. She was born in Melbourne, Australia. She works on German history of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and has written a biography of Martin Luther. Her research centres on gender and the Reformation, witchcraft, and visual culture. In 2011 she was appointed to Regius Chair of History at the University of Oxford, the first woman and first Australian to hold this position.
Go to Profile#38407
Jamie Seymour
#38419
Overall Influence
Jamie Seymour is an Australian toxinologist. He has been a lecturer and researcher at James Cook University since 1996 and gained Professorship in 2019. Professor Seymour started his academic career as a lecturer in the School of Tropical Biology at James Cook University. He is currently a member of the Australian Institute of Tropical Health & Medicine. His research involves examining the biology and ecology of dangerous species found in Australia.
Go to Profile#38408
Darío Botero
#38420
Overall Influence
1938 - 2010 (72 years)
Darío Botero Uribe was a Colombian writer, thinker, professor emeritus and teacher at the National University of Colombia; he received a Doctorate degree from the National University with the title of Master. He studied law, political science and philosophy at the same university, where he held the position of Dean of the Faculty of Law, Political and Social Sciences . He developed an original philosophical project that he called Cosmic Vitalism. He was vitalist and utopian. He contributed to Colombian and Latin American thought.
Go to Profile#38409
Nelson Cruz
#38421
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Nelson Ramón Cruz Martínez Jr. is a Dominican-American former professional baseball designated hitter and right fielder. He played in Major League Baseball for the Milwaukee Brewers, Texas Rangers, Baltimore Orioles, Seattle Mariners, Minnesota Twins, Tampa Bay Rays, Washington Nationals, and San Diego Padres. Cruz is a seven-time MLB All-Star. Known for his power hitting, he has won four Silver Slugger Awards and two Edgar Martínez Awards.
Go to Profile#38410
Yuri Averbakh
#38422
Overall Influence
1922 - 2022 (100 years)
Yuri Lvovich Averbakh was a Russian chess grandmaster and author. He was chairman of the USSR Chess Federation from 1973 to 1978. He was the first centenarian FIDE Grandmaster. Despite his eyesight and hearing having worsened, by his 100th birthday he continued to devote time to chess-related activities.
Go to Profile#38411
Tom Cotton
#38423
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Thomas Bryant Cotton is an American politician, attorney, and former military officer serving as the junior United States senator from Arkansas since 2015. A member of the Republican Party, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2013 to 2015.
Go to Profile#38412
Hilary Greaves
#38424
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Hilary Greaves is a British philosopher, currently serving as professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford. From 2017 to 2022, she was the founding director of the Global Priorities Institute, a research centre for effective altruism at the university supported by the Open Philanthropy Project.
Go to Profile#38413
Bernhard Preim
#38425
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Bernhard Preim is a specialist in human–computer interface design as well as in visual computing for medicine. He is currently professor of visualization at University of Magdeburg, Germany. Preim received the diploma in computer science in 1994 and a PhD in 1998 from the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg . In 1999, he joined the staff of MeVis . In close collaboration with radiologists and surgeons, he directed the work on "computer-aided planning in liver surgery" and initiated several projects funded by the German Research Council in the area of computer-aided surgery. In June 2002, he received the Habilitation degree for computer science from the University of Bremen.
Go to Profile#38414
Jaime Siles
#38426
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Jaime Siles is a Spanish poet, translator and literary critic. He was born in Valencia in 1951, and studied Philosophy and Literature at Salamanca University. He continued his studies at Tubingen University, aided by a scholarship from the Fundación Juan March. He taught at the University of La Laguna, before moving to Vienna in 1983 where he became the director of the Spanish Cultural Institute.
Go to Profile#38415
George Pappas
#38427
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
George Sotiros Pappas is a professor of philosophy at Ohio State University. Pappas specializes in epistemology, the history of early modern philosophy, philosophy of religion and metaphysics. He is of Greek and English origin.
Go to Profile#38416
Nitza Ben-Dov
#38428
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Nitza Ben-Dov is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. Winner of the 2021 Israel Prize Biography Nitza Ben-Dov was born in Tel Aviv to parents who were Holocaust survivors. Her father, Dov Fruchtman, was a teacher of literature and wrote a series of research studies on the oeuvre of S.Y. Agnon. Ben-Dov completed her secondary studies at the New High School in Tel Aviv in 1968. She served in the Israel Defense Forces in the Nahal Brigade, at Nahal Golan.
Go to Profile#38417
Guillermo Cañas
#38429
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Guillermo Ignacio Cañas , often referred to as Willy Cañas, is a retired tennis player from Argentina. Cañas won the Canada Masters in 2002, and reached the quarterfinal stage of the French Open in 2002, 2005 and 2007. His career-high singles ranking was world No. 8, achieved in June 2005. After being suspended in August 2005, Cañas returned to the circuit in September 2006 at ATP Challenger level.
Go to Profile#38418
Jochen Bleicken
#38430
Overall Influence
1926 - 2005 (79 years)
Jochen Bleicken was a German professor of ancient history. Biography The son of a salesman, Bleicken studied from 1948 to 1954 history and classical philology at the universities of Kiel and Frankfurt. He wrote his doctorate at the chair of Alfred Heuß at Kiel in 1954 and after his habilitation in 1962 became a professor of history in Hamburg, Frankfurt and from 1977 in Göttingen. He retired in 1991 but gave lectures until 1999.
Go to Profile#38419
Isabelle M. Germano
#38431
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Isabelle M. Germano is a neurosurgeon and professor of neurosurgery, neurology, and oncology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital. She is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. Germano works with image-guided brain and spine surgery.
Go to Profile#38420
Jack DeJohnette
#38432
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Jack DeJohnette is an American jazz drummer, pianist, and composer. Known for his extensive work as leader and sideman for musicians including Charles Lloyd, Freddie Hubbard, Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans, John Abercrombie, Alice Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Joe Henderson, Michael Brecker, Pat Metheny, Herbie Hancock and John Scofield, DeJohnette was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 2007. He has won two Grammy Awards and been nominated for five others.
Go to Profile#38421
Grant Drumheller
#38433
Overall Influence
Grant Drumheller is an American figurative painter. Biography Drumheller earned his BFA and Master of Fine Arts degrees cum laude from Boston University. He also studied with Philip Guston, James Weeks and Reed Kay. Drumheller has taught at Boston University, the Art Institute of Boston and is currently Professor of Art at the University of New Hampshire. Originally he painted large works alluding to myth and allegory, but now works on smaller pieces.
Go to Profile#38422
André du Pisani
#38434
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
André du Pisani is a Namibian political scientist, author of several books, articles and journals, he has written several conference papers for SADC, the Namibian government and several ministries, he is a professor at the University of Namibia Department of Political Science. Du Pisani has been a professor at the university since 1998.
Go to Profile#38423
Pan Chengdong
#38435
Overall Influence
1934 - 1997 (63 years)
Pan Chengdong was a Chinese mathematician who made numerous contributions to number theory, including progress on Goldbach's conjecture. He was vice president of Shandong University and took the role of president from 1986 to 1997.
Go to Profile#38424
Rich Costey
#38436
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Richard "Rich" Costey is an American music producer, mixer and engineer, known for his innovative and boundary-pushing approach to music production. He has worked with a diverse range of musicians across various genres including hip-hop, rock, pop, indie, and electronica.
Go to Profile#38425
Ali Shilatifard
#38437
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Ali Shilatifard is an American biochemist/molecular biologist, the Robert Francis Furchgott Professor and chairman of the department of biochemistry and molecular genetics, and the director of the Simpson Query Institute for Epigenetics at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He has served as a senior editor for the journal Science, and currently serves as the Editor for Science's open access journal Science Advances. Research in Shilatifard's lab focuses on the cause of childhood leukemia through chromosomal translocations, the role of ELL in this process, and the discover...
Go to Profile#38426
Nikolaos Stampolidis
#38438
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Nikolaos Chr. Stampolidis is a Greek archaeologist who specializes in Geometric and Archaic early Greek history. Early life Stampolidis was born and grew up in Chania, Crete. His parents were refugees from Asia Minor, who emigrated to Greece during the forced population exchange of 1923.
Go to Profile#38427
R. Byron Pipes
#38439
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Robert Byron Pipes is an educator, researcher in polymer sciences and was the seventeenth president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was born on August 14, 1941, in Shreveport, Louisiana. He and his wife Ruth Ellen had two children: Christopher and Mark.
Go to Profile#38428
Michael Cooperson
#38440
Overall Influence
Michael Cooperson is an American scholar and translator of Arabic literature. He is professor of Arabic at UCLA. He has written two books: Classical Arabic Biography: The Heirs of the Prophets in the Age of al-Ma'mun and Al-Mamun . He has translated a number of works from Arabic and French including:Abdelfattah Kilito's The Author and His Doubles: Essays on Classical Arabic CultureKhairy Shalaby's The Time-Travels of the Man Who Sold Pickles and SweetsJurji Zaydan's The Caliph's Heirs — Brothers at War: the Fall of Baghdadal-Hariri's The Maqamat Cooperson has also taught at the Middlebury Scho...
Go to Profile#38429
Richard Q. Twiss
#38441
Overall Influence
1920 - 2005 (85 years)
Richard Quintin Twiss was a British astronomer. He is known for his work on the Hanbury Brown and Twiss effect with Robert Hanbury Brown. It led to the development of the Hanbury Brown-Twiss intensity interferometer in the UK in 1954. Their work appeared to contradict the established beliefs about quantum interference, and he and Brown received the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for it in 1968.
Go to Profile#38430
Noah Comet
#38442
Overall Influence
Noah Comet is a professor of English literature at the United States Naval Academy. He specializes in Nineteenth Century British Literature. He is known for his book called Romantic Hellenism and Women Writers from Macmillan and several scholarly articles, among them essays in The Wordsworth Circle and the Keats-Shelley Journal on poets Letitia Landon and Felicia Hemans, and articles on John Keats and Lord Byron, including a 2016 essay on Byron's influence on early explorations of Yellowstone. He has also written essays on nature and ecotourism for The New York Times, The Denver Post, and T...
Go to Profile#38431
Paul E. Peterson
#38443
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Paul E. Peterson is an American scholar on education reform. His work has largely focused on the importance of parental choice for improving school outcomes. He is Editor-In-Chief of Education Next, an educational policy journal published by the Hoover Institution advocating for K-12 education reform in the United States. He is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Go to Profile#38432
Gustavo Perednik
#38444
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Gustavo Daniel Perednik is an Argentinian-born Israeli author and educator. Perednik graduated from the Universities of Buenos Aires and Jerusalem , has a PhD in education and completed doctoral studies in Philosophy in New York. He took courses at the Sorbonne , San Marcos , and Uppsala . He was distinguished as an outstanding lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he ran the four-year, preparatory, and freshman programs. In Jerusalem, he was also Director of the Institute for Jewish Leaders from Abroad and the Sephardic Educational Centre. He ran the Ai Tian Program for Jewish Understanding in China, and the Program for Education on the Jewish Role in Civilization.
Go to Profile#38433
Keith Jones
#38445
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Keith Jones is a fifteen-time Emmy Award and five-time Edward R. Murrow Award winning News Anchor, Host, and Reporter for WCAU in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania since July 2012. He anchors NBC10 News Today, which airs Monday through Friday from 4 to 7am, and co-hosts The Lineup on Apple TV and Roku. He also files reports for NBC News.
Go to Profile#38434
Sean Kelly
#38446
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
John James 'Sean' Kelly is an Irish former professional road bicycle racer, one of the most successful road cyclists of the 1980s, and one of the finest Classics riders of all time. From becoming a professional in 1977 until his retirement in 1994, he won 193 professional races, including nine Monument Classics, Paris–Nice a record seven years consecutively and the first UCI Road World Cup in 1989. Kelly won one Grand Tour, the 1988 Vuelta a España, and four green jerseys in the Tour de France. He achieved multiple victories in the Giro di Lombardia, Milan–San Remo, Paris–Roubaix and Liège–B...
Go to Profile#38435
Janice Raymond
#38447
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Janice G. Raymond is an American lesbian radical feminist and professor emerita of women's studies and medical ethics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is known for her work against violence, sexual exploitation, and medical abuse of women, and for her controversial work denouncing transsexuality and the transgender rights movement.
Go to Profile#38436
Musimbi Kanyoro
#38448
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Musimbi Kanyoro is a Kenyan human rights advocate who served as the CEO and President of the Global Fund for Women from 2011 until 2019, and currently serves as Chair of the International Board of the United World Colleges. She is a founding member of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, and was elected as the first coordinator of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians at the continental gathering in 1996, a post she held until 2002.
Go to Profile#38437
Ulrich Brand
#38449
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Ulrich Brand is a German political scientist. Since September 2007 he has been a professor of International Politics at the University of Vienna. Biography In 1989, Ulrich Brand graduated from Business Administration Studies with a specialisation in tourism at the Berufsakademie Ravensburg with a diploma. Between 1989 and 1996 he studied political science at the Goethe University Frankfurt/Main and at the Universidad de Belgrano as well as at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, finishing his studies also with a diploma. In 2000, Ulrich Brand completed his PhD in Political Science at Goethe University.
Go to Profile#38438
Rue McClanahan
#38450
Overall Influence
1934 - 2010 (76 years)
Eddi-Rue McClanahan was an American actress and comedian best known for her roles on television sitcoms, including Vivian Harmon on Maude , Aunt Fran Crowley on Mama's Family , and Blanche Devereaux on The Golden Girls , and its spin-off series The Golden Palace .
Go to Profile#38439
Luca Guadagnino
#38451
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Luca Guadagnino is an Italian film director and producer. His films are characterized by their emotional complexity, sensuality, and sumptuous visuals. He is also known for his frequent collaborations with actors Tilda Swinton, Dakota Johnson, Timothée Chalamet and Michael Stuhlbarg, editor Walter Fasano and screenwriter David Kajganich.
Go to Profile#38440
William Seeley
#38452
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
William W. Seeley is an American neurologist. He is a Professor of Neurology and Pathology at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco . He leads the Selective Vulnerability Research Lab at UCSF. He is a 2011 MacArthur Fellow.
Go to Profile#38441
Davido
#38453
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
David Adedeji Adeleke , who is professionally known as Davido, is an American-born Nigerian singer, songwriter and record producer. Davido was born in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. He made his music debut as a member of the group KB International. Davido studied business administration at Oakwood University before dropping out to make beats and record vocal references. He rose to fame after releasing "Dami Duro", the second single from his debut studio album Omo Baba Olowo , from which six additional singles—"Back When", "Ekuro", "Overseas", "All of You", "Gbon Gbon" and "Feel Alright"—were taken.
Go to Profile#38442
James Jerome Gibson
#38454
Overall Influence
#38443
Curtis Huttenhower
#38455
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Curtis Huttenhower is a Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics in the Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Harvard University. Education Huttenhower gained his BS from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 2000, where he majored in computer science, chemistry and mathematics. He then spent two years as a software developer for Microsoft, working on the Microsoft Natural Language Development Platform. Huttenhower gained his MS in computational linguistics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003, where he studied with Dannie Durand and Eric Nyberg. In 2003, H...
Go to Profile#38444
Angela Belcher
#38456
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Angela M. Belcher is a materials scientist, biological engineer, and the James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering and Materials Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. She is director of the Biomolecular Materials Group at MIT, a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and a 2004 MacArthur Fellow. In 2019, she was named head of the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Go to Profile#38445
Nell Jessup Newton
#38457
Overall Influence
As of August 2022, Nell Jessup Newton is the interim dean at the Wake Forest University School of Law in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She served previously as interim dean of the University of Miami School of Law for the 2021-2022 academic year, and prior to that served as professor of law at Notre Dame Law School and Notre Dame Law School's dean from 2009 to 2019. Her academic focus is on federal law relating to Native Americans.
Go to Profile#38446
Laura Chinchilla
#38458
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Laura Chinchilla Miranda is a Costa Rican political scientist and politician who served as President of Costa Rica from 2010 to 2014. She was one of Óscar Arias Sánchez's two Vice-Presidents and his administration's Minister of Justice. She was the governing PLN candidate for president in the 2010 general election, where she won with 46.76% of the vote on 7 February. She was the eighth woman president of a Latin American country and the first woman to become President of Costa Rica. She was sworn in as President of Costa Rica on 8 May 2010.
Go to Profile#38447
Nicky Henderson
#38459
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Nicholas John Henderson is a British racehorse trainer. He has been British jump racing Champion Trainer six times. Background His father was Johnny Henderson who was one of the founders of the Racecourse Holdings Trust as well as earlier in life being Aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Montgomery. In 2005 two years after Johnny Henderson's death Cheltenham renamed one of the races at the Cheltenham Festival in his honour as the Johnny Henderson Grand Annual Chase. In 2006 Nicky Henderson won this race with a horse called Greenhope.
Go to Profile#38448
Arnaldo Rascovsky
#38460
Overall Influence
1907 - 1995 (88 years)
Arnaldo Rascovsky was an Argentine pediatrician and psychoanalyst. He graduated from University of Buenos Aires. Rascovsky was instrumental in establishing Buenos Aires as an important center for psychoanalysis in Latin America and made significant contribution to the analysis of filicide.
Go to Profile#38449
Kevin Lano
#38461
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Kevin C. Lano is a British computer scientist. Life and work Kevin Lano studied at the University of Reading, attaining a first class degree in Mathematics and Computer Science, and the University of Bristol where he completed his doctorate. He was an originator of formal object-oriented techniques , and developed a combination of UML and formal methods in a number of papers and books. He was one of the founders of the Precise UML group, who influenced the definition of UML 2.0. Lano published the book Advanced Systems Design with Java, UML and MDA in 2005. He is also the editor of UML 2 Se...
Go to Profile#38450
Donald West Harward
#38462
Overall Influence
Donald West "Don" Harward is an American philosopher who served as the sixth President of Bates College from March 1989 to November 2002, where he was succeeded by the first female president, Elaine Tuttle Hansen.
Go to Profile