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
#3851
Rhett Lawrence
#3858
Overall Influence
James Everett "Rhett" Lawrence is an American record producer and songwriter. He has produced, mentored, and helped launch the career of 5 artists amongst the top 200 artists to be featured on Billboard magazine's top charts from 1955 to 2012. His work has resulted in over 350,000,000 records sold worldwide. Many of these artists are also in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#3852
Jerry West
#3859
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Jerome Alan West is an American basketball executive and former player. He played professionally for the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association . His nicknames included "the Logo", in reference to his silhouette being the basis for the NBA logo; "Mr. Clutch", for his ability to make a big play in a key situation such as his famous buzzer-beating 60-foot shot that tied Game 3 of the 1970 NBA Finals against the New York Knicks; "Mr. Outside", in reference to his perimeter play with the Los Angeles Lakers and "Zeke from Cabin Creek" for the creek near his birthplace of Chelyan, West Virginia.
Go to Profile#3853
Sean Connery
#3860
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Sir Thomas Sean Connery was a Scottish actor. He was the first actor to portray fictional British secret agent James Bond on film, starring in seven Bond films between 1962 and 1983. Connery originated the role in Dr. No and continued starring as Bond in the Eon Productions From Russia with Love , Goldfinger , Thunderball , You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever . Connery made his final appearance in the franchise in Never Say Never Again , a non-Eon-produced Bond film.
Go to Profile#3854
Quentin Tarantino
#3861
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, and actor. His films are characterized by stylized violence, extended dialogue including a pervasive use of profanity, and references to popular culture.
Go to Profile#3855
Geoffrey Hill
#3862
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Sir Geoffrey William Hill, FRSL was an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University. Hill has been considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation and was called the "greatest living poet in the English language." From 2010 to 2015 he held the position of Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. Following his receiving the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2009 for his Collected Critical Writings, and the publication of Broken Hierarchies , Hill is recogni...
Go to Profile#3856
Robert T. Pennock
#3863
Overall Influence
Robert T. Pennock is a philosopher working on the Avida digital organism project at Michigan State University where he has been full professor since 2000. Pennock was a witness in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, testifying on behalf of the plaintiffs, and described how intelligent design is an updated form of creationism and not science, pointing out that the arguments were essentially the same as traditional creationist arguments with adjustments to the message to eliminate explicit mention of God and the Bible as well as adopting a postmodern deconstructionist language. ...
Go to Profile#3857
Francis Joseph Murray
#3864
Overall Influence
1911 - 1996 (85 years)
Francis Joseph Murray was a mathematician, known for his foundational work on functional analysis, and what subsequently became known as von Neumann algebras. He received his BA from Columbia College in 1932 and PhD from Columbia University in 1936. He taught at Duke University.
Go to Profile#3858
Robert G. Gallager
#3865
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Robert Gray Gallager is an American electrical engineer known for his work on information theory and communications networks. Gallager was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1979 for contributions to coding and communications theory and practice. He was also elected an IEEE Fellow in 1968, a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1992, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999.
Go to Profile#3859
Andrew Schally
#3866
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Andrzej Viktor "Andrew" Schally is an American endocrinologist of Polish ancestry, who was a corecipient, with Roger Guillemin and Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. This award recognized his research in the discovery that the hypothalamus controls hormone production and release by the pituitary gland, which controls the regulation of other hormones in the body. Later in life, Schally utilized his knowledge of hypothalamic hormones to research possible methods for birth control and cancer treatment.
Go to Profile#3860
Stanley Sadie
#3867
Overall Influence
1930 - 2005 (75 years)
Stanley John Sadie was an influential and prolific British musicologist, music critic, and editor. He was editor of the sixth edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , which was published as the first edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Along with Thurston Dart, Nigel Fortune and Oliver Neighbour he was one of Britain's leading musicologists of the post-World War II generation.
Go to Profile#3861
Alain Boublil
#3868
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Alain Boublil is a French musical theatre lyricist and librettist, best known for his collaborations with the composer Claude-Michel Schönberg for musicals on Broadway and London's West End. These include La Révolution Française , Les Misérables , Miss Saigon , Martin Guerre , The Pirate Queen , and Marguerite .
Go to Profile#3862
John Cottingham
#3869
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
#3863
Michael J. Fischer
#3870
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
#3864
Gerhard Lenski
#3871
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Gerhard Emmanuel "Gerry" Lenski, Jr. was an American sociologist known for contributions to the sociology of religion, social inequality, and introducing the ecological-evolutionary theory. He spent much of his career as a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he served as chair of the Department of Sociology, 1969–72, and as chair of the Division of Social Sciences, 1976-78.
Go to Profile#3865
Roger Shepard
#3872
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Roger Newland Shepard was an American cognitive scientist and author of the "universal law of generalization" . He was considered a father of research on spatial relations. He studied mental rotation, and was an inventor of non-metric multidimensional scaling, a method for representing certain kinds of statistical data in a graphical form that can be comprehended by humans. The optical illusion called Shepard tables and the auditory illusion called Shepard tones are named for him.
Go to Profile#3866
Paul Merton
#3873
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Paul James Martin , known by the stage name Paul Merton, is an English comedian. Known for his improvisation skill, Merton's humour is rooted in deadpan, surreal and sometimes dark comedy. He has been ranked by critics, fellow comedians and viewers to be among Britain's greatest comedians. He had regularly appeared as a team captain on the BBC panel game Have I Got News for You. He hosted Room 101 and appeared on the original British version of the improvisational comedy television show Whose Line Is It Anyway?
Go to Profile#3867
Dieter Rams
#3874
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Dieter Rams is a German designer who is most closely associated with the consumer products company Braun, the furniture company Vitsœ, and the functionalist school of industrial design. His unobtrusive approach and belief in "less, but better" design has influenced the practice of design, as well as 20th century aesthetics and culture. He is quoted as stating that "Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design."
Go to Profile#3868
Philip Ball
#3875
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Philip Ball is a British science writer. For over twenty years he has been an editor of the journal Nature, for which he continues to write regularly. He is a regular contributor to Prospect magazine and a columnist for Chemistry World, Nature Materials, and BBC Future.
Go to Profile#3869
Michael Stürmer
#3876
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Michael Stürmer is a conservative German historian best known for his role in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, for his geographical interpretation of German history and for an admiring 2008 biography of the Russian politician Vladimir Putin.
Go to Profile#3870
Glenn Loury
#3877
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Glenn Cartman Loury, is an American economist, academic, and author. He is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University, where he has taught since 2005. At the age of 33, Loury became the first African American professor of economics at Harvard University to gain tenure.
Go to Profile#3871
Neil Robertson
#3878
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
George Neil Robertson is a mathematician working mainly in topological graph theory, currently a distinguished professor emeritus at the Ohio State University. Education Robertson earned his B.Sc. from Brandon College in 1959 and his Ph.D. in 1969 at the University of Waterloo under his doctoral advisor William Tutte.
Go to Profile#3872
Kazuyo Sejima
#3879
Overall Influence
Kazuyo Sejima is a Japanese architect and director of her own firm, Kazuyo Sejima & Associates. In 1995, she co-founded the firm SANAA . In 2010, Sejima was the second woman to receive the Pritzker Prize, which was awarded jointly with Nishizawa.
Go to Profile#3873
Tony Maserati
#3880
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Tony Maserati is an American record producer and audio engineer specializing in mixing. He was involved in the development of the New York R&B and hip-hop scene in the 1990s, working with Mary J. Blige, Notorious B.I.G., Puff Daddy, and Queen Latifah. Since then he has worked on Grammy nominated projects with The Black Eyed Peas, Beyoncé , Jason Mraz, Robin Thicke, and Usher. Maserati won a Latin Grammy in 2006 for his work on Sérgio Mendes’s Timeless. He has been nominated for a total of 10 Grammys, with four for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.
Go to Profile#3874
David D. Burns
#3881
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
David D. Burns is an American psychiatrist and adjunct professor emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is the author of bestselling books such as Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, The Feeling Good Handbook and Feeling Great: The Revolutionary New Treatment for Depression and Anxiety.
Go to Profile#3875
Aswath Damodaran
#3882
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Aswath Damodaran , is a Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University , where he teaches corporate finance and equity valuation. Background Known as the "Dean of Valuation" due to his expertise in that subject, Damodaran is best known as the author of several widely used academic and practitioner texts on Valuation, Corporate Finance and Investment Management as well as provider of comprehensive data for valuation purposes. He is widely quoted on the subject of valuation, with "a great reputation as a teacher and authority". He has written several books on equity valuation, as well as on corporate finance and investments.
Go to Profile#3876
Edward F. Moore
#3883
Overall Influence
1925 - 2003 (78 years)
Edward Forrest Moore was an American professor of mathematics and computer science, the inventor of the Moore finite state machine, and an early pioneer of artificial life. Biography Moore received a B.S. in chemistry from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia in 1947 and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island in June 1950. He worked at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1950 to 1952 and was a visiting professor at MIT and visiting lecturer at Harvard University simultaneously in 1961-1962. He worked at Bell Labs from 1952 to 1966.
Go to Profile#3877
Richard Rashid
#3884
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Richard Farris Rashid is the founder of Microsoft Research, which he created in 1991. Between 1991 and 2013, as its chief research officer and director, he oversaw the worldwide operations for Microsoft Research which grew to encompass more than 850 researchers and a dozen labs around the world.
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Efraim Karsh
#3885
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Efraim Karsh is an Israeli and British historian who is the founding director and emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. Since 2013, he has served as professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University . He is also a principal research fellow and former director of the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank. He is a vocal critic of the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who have questioned the traditional Israeli narrative of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Go to Profile#3879
Diarmaid MacCulloch
#3886
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
#3880
Jean Decety
#3887
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
#3881
Herman Wouk
#3888
Overall Influence
1915 - 2019 (104 years)
Herman Wouk was an American author best known for historical fiction such as The Caine Mutiny for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and centenarian. His other major works include The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, historical novels about World War II, and non-fiction such as This Is My God, an explanation of Judaism from a Modern Orthodox perspective, written for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. His books have been translated into 27 languages.
Go to Profile#3882
Dave Snowden
#3889
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
David John Snowden is a Welsh management consultant and researcher in the field of knowledge management and the application of complexity science. Known for the development of the Cynefin framework, Snowden is the founder and chief scientific officer of The Cynefin Company, a Singapore-based management-consulting firm specializing in complexity and sensemaking.
Go to Profile#3883
Eric Trist
#3890
Overall Influence
1909 - 1993 (84 years)
Eric Lansdown Trist was an English scientist and leading figure in the field of organizational development . He was one of the founders of the Tavistock Institute for Social Research in London. Biography Trist was born in 1909 in Dover, Kent, England of a Cornish father, Frederick Trist, and a Scottish mother, Alexina Trist nee Middleton. He grew up in Dover experiencing dramatic air raids in the first world war. He went to Cambridge University - Pembroke College in 1928, where he read English Literature, graduating with first-class honours. Influenced heavily by his don I. A. Richards he bec...
Go to Profile#3884
Ryan Giggs
#3891
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Ryan Joseph Giggs is a Welsh football coach and former player. Regarded as one of the greatest players of his generation, Giggs played his entire professional career for Manchester United and briefly served as the club's interim manager.
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Marilynne Robinson
#3892
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Go to Profile#3886
Paul Townsend
#3893
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Paul Kingsley Townsend FRS is a British physicist, currently a Professor of Theoretical Physics in Cambridge University's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. He is notable for his work on string theory.
Go to Profile#3887
Markandeya
#3894
Overall Influence
Markandeya is a rishi featured in Hindu literature. He is the son of the sage Mrikanda and his wife, Manasvini. The Markandeya Purana, attributed to the sage, comprises a dialogue between Markandeya and a sage called Jaimini. A number of chapters in the Bhagavata Purana are dedicated to his conversations and prayers. He is also mentioned in the Mahabharata. Markandeya is venerated within all mainstream Hindu traditions.
Go to Profile#3888
Annemarie Schimmel
#3895
Overall Influence
1922 - 2003 (81 years)
Annemarie Schimmel was an influential German Orientalist and scholar who wrote extensively on Islam, especially Sufism. She was a professor at Harvard University from 1967 to 1992. Early life and education Schimmel was born to Protestant and highly cultured middle-class parents in Erfurt, Germany. Her father Paul was a postal worker and her mother Anna belonged to a family with connections to seafaring and international trade. Schimmel remembered her father as "a wonderful playmate, full of fun," and she recalled that her mother made her feel that she was the child of her dreams. She also r...
Go to Profile#3889
Keith Ward
#3896
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Keith Ward is an English philosopher and theologian. He is a fellow of the British Academy and a priest of the Church of England. He was a canon of Christ Church, Oxford, until 2003. Comparative theology and the relationship between science and religion are two of his main topics of interest.
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Matt Zoller Seitz
#3897
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Matt Zoller Seitz is an American film and television critic, author and filmmaker. Career Matt Zoller Seitz is editor-at-large at RogerEbert.com, and the television critic for New York magazine and Vulture.com, as well as a member of the George Foster Peabody Awards board of jurors. He was previously a television critic at Salon.com and The Newark Star Ledger, and a film critic for The New York Times. Prior to this he was a regular media columnist for the Dallas Observer. He founded the film and media criticism blog The House Next Door. Seitz is known as a leader in the creation of video essa...
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Russ Roberts
#3898
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Russell David "Russ" Roberts is an American economist. He is currently a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and president of Shalem College in Jerusalem. He is known for communicating economic ideas in understandable terms as host of the EconTalk podcast.
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Irving S. Reed
#3899
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Irving Stoy Reed was an American mathematician and engineer. He is best known for co-inventing a class of algebraic error-correcting and error-detecting codes known as Reed–Solomon codes in collaboration with Gustave Solomon. He also co-invented the Reed–Muller code.
Go to Profile#3893
Hussein-Ali Montazeri
#3900
Overall Influence
1922 - 2009 (87 years)
Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri was an Iranian Shia Islamic theologian, Islamic democracy advocate, writer and human rights activist. He was one of the leaders of the Iranian Revolution and one of the highest-ranking authorities in Shīʿite Islam. He was once the designated successor to the revolution's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, but they had a falling-out in 1989 over government policies that Montazeri claimed infringed on people's freedom and denied them their rights, especially after the 1988 mass execution of political prisoners. Montazeri spent his later years in Qom and re...
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Denise Levertov
#3901
Overall Influence
1923 - 1997 (74 years)
Priscilla Denise Levertov was a British-born naturalised American poet. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Early life and influences Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex. Her mother, Beatrice Adelaide Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales. Her father, Paul Levertoff, had been a teacher at Leipzig University and as a Russian Hasidic Jew was held under house arrest during the First World War as an "enemy alien" by virtue of his ethnicity. He emigrated to the UK and became an Anglican priest after converting to Christianity. In the mistak...
Go to Profile#3895
Wolfgang Puck
#3902
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Wolfgang Johannes Puck is an Austrian-American chef and restaurateur. Early life and career Puck was born in Sankt Veit an der Glan, Austria. He learned cooking from his mother, who was a pastry chef. He took the surname of his stepfather, Josef Puck, after his mother's remarriage. The marriage produced two younger sisters and a younger brother for Wolfgang. He trained as an apprentice under Raymond Thuilier at L'Oustau de Baumanière in Les Baux-de-Provence, at Hôtel de Paris in Monaco, and at Maxim's Paris before moving to the United States in 1973 at age 24. After two years at La Tour in I...
Go to Profile#3896
Edward Abraham
#3903
Overall Influence
1913 - 1999 (86 years)
Sir Edward Penley Abraham, was an English biochemist instrumental in the development of the first antibiotics penicillin and cephalosporin. Early life and education Abraham was born on 10 June 1913 at 47 South View Road, Shirley, Southampton. From 1924 Abraham attended King Edward VI School, Southampton, before achieving a First in Chemistry at The Queen's College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#3897
Kostas Axelos
#3904
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Kostas Axelos was a Greek-French philosopher. Biography Axelos was born in Athens in 1924 to a doctor and a woman from an old Athenian bourgeois family, and attended high school at the French Institute and the Varvakeio High School. He enrolled in the School of Law of the University of Athens in order to pursue studies in law and economics due to dissatisfaction with the philosophy taught at the School of Philosophy of the University of Athens, but did not attend. With the onset of World War II Axelos got involved in politics. Then during the German and Italian occupation he participated in t...
Go to Profile#3898
Mariana Mazzucato
#3905
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
#3899
Elvin A. Kabat
#3906
Overall Influence
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
Elvin Abraham Kabat was an American biomedical scientist and one of the founding fathers of quantitative immunochemistry. Kabat was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in 1977, National Medal of Science in 1991, and American Association of Immunologists Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995. He is the father of Jon Kabat-Zinn.
Go to Profile#3900
Johnny Cash
#3907
Overall Influence
1932 - 2003 (71 years)
John R. Cash was an American country singer-songwriter. Most of Cash's music contains themes of sorrow, moral tribulation, and redemption, especially songs from the later stages of his career. He was known for his deep, calm bass-baritone voice, the distinctive sound of his Tennessee Three backing band characterized by train-like chugging guitar rhythms, a rebelliousness coupled with an increasingly somber and humble demeanor, free prison concerts, and a trademark all-black stage wardrobe, which earned him the nickname the "Man in Black".
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