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
#38751
Adam Habib
#38763
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Adam Mahomed Habib is a South African academic administrator serving as Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London since 1 January 2021. He served as Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa between 1 June 2013, when the term of his predecessor Loyiso Nongxa ended, and 1 January 2021. He is also a former deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Johannesburg.
Go to Profile#38752
Joseph Groia
#38764
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Joseph Groia, is a Canadian lawyer specializing in securities litigation. He has been ranked as one of Canada's 500 Leading Lawyers since 2000 and is consistently rated as one of Canada's top securities litigators by the same publication. He has worked on many of Canada's leading securities cases, including Asbestos Corp., Bre-X Minerals Ltd., Canadian Tire, Cinar Corporation, Hollinger, Torstar/Southam, Philip Services and YBM.
Go to Profile#38753
Roy Starrs
#38765
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Roy Starrs is a British-Canadian scholar of Japanese literature and culture who teaches at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He has written critical studies of the major Japanese writers Yasunari Kawabata, Naoya Shiga, Osamu Dazai, and Yukio Mishima, and edited books on Asian nationalism , globalization, pan-Asianism, Japanese modernism, and cultural responses to disaster in Japan. He has also published essays on Japan-related topics such as the Kojiki, Lafcadio Hearn, and Japanese calligraphy.
Go to Profile#38754
Ramesh Narayan
#38766
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ramesh Narayan is an Indian-American theoretical astrophysicist, currently the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University. Full member of the National Academy of Sciences, Ramesh Narayan is widely known for his contributions on the theory of black hole accretion processes. Recently he is involved in the Event Horizon Telescope project, which led in 2019 to the first image of the event horizon of a black hole.
Go to Profile#38755
Charles Madigan
#38767
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Charles M. Madigan is an American educator who has been an editor, journalist and columnist in Chicago, Illinois. Life Madigan grew up in Altoona, Pennsylvania and attended Pennsylvania State University. He had his first professional newspaper job with the Altoona Mirror in 1966. From 1968 to 1970 he worked as local government reporter for the Harrisburg Patriot in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He worked for United Press International from 1970 to 1979, including two and a half years as correspondent from the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Go to Profile#38756
Jean Chevalier
#38768
Overall Influence
1906 - 1993 (87 years)
Jean Chevalier was a French writer, philosopher, and theologian, best known for his co-authorship of the Dictionnaire des symboles , first printed in 1969 by publisher Éditions Robert Laffont. Dictionary of Symbols is an encyclopedic work of cultural anthropology, co-written with the French poet and Amazonian explorer Alain Gheerbrant, devoted to the symbolism of myths, dreams, habits, gestures, shapes, figures, colors and numbers found in mythology and folklore. It contains over 1,600 articles and has seen nineteen reprints between 1982 and 1997. It has been republished on a worldwide basis ...
Go to Profile#38757
Jonathan Shewchuk
#38769
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jonathan Richard Shewchuk is a Professor in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained his B.S. in Physics and Computing Science from Simon Fraser University in 1990, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, the latter in 1997.
Go to Profile#38758
Shahrokh Razmjou
#38770
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Shahrokh Razmjou is an Iranian archaeologist and historian, specializing in Achaemenid Archaeology and History. He received his PhD in Achaemenid Archaeology at the University of London. He established the Inscriptions Hall and the Centre for Achaemenid Studies at the National Museum of Iran. He was curator of Ancient Iran in the Department of the Middle East, British Museum and during this time, he produced a new updated translation of the text on the Cyrus Cylinder from Babylonian to Persian. He also excavated the ancient man-made caves of Niyasar, Kashan. He is currently teaching at the ...
Go to Profile#38759
Lasith Malinga
#38771
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Separamadu Lasith Malinga is a Sri Lankan former cricketer who is widely regarded as one of the greatest limited overs bowlers of all time. Playing as a right-arm fast bowler, Malinga was commonly used as a specialist death bowler, and captained the Sri Lanka national cricket team to the 2014 T20 World Cup title. He was nicknamed "Slinga Malinga" due to his distinctive round-arm action, sometimes referred to as a sling action. Malinga announced his retirement from all forms of cricket on 14 September 2021 and migrated to Melbourne.
Go to Profile#38760
Herbert Meier
#38772
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Herbert Meier was a Swiss writer and translator. Meier studied literature, history of art and philosophy at the universities of Basel, Vienna, Paris and Fribourg. Since 1955, Meier has been a freelance writer in Zurich. He won the Conrad-Ferdinand-Meyer-Preis in 1964. The main component of his work has been translating classical and modern theatre plays from French into German .
Go to Profile#38761
Dragoslav Mitrinović
#38773
Overall Influence
1908 - 1995 (87 years)
Dragoslav S. Mitrinović was a Serbian mathematician known for his work in differential equations, functional equations, complex analysis. He authored near 300 scientific journal papers and more than twelve books in his area.
Go to Profile#38762
James Tiedje
#38774
Overall Influence
James Michael Tiedje is University Distinguished Professor and the director of the NSF Center for Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University, as well as a Professor of Crop and Soil Sciences and Microbiology. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003 and served as president of the American Society for Microbiology from 2004 to 2005. The Center he directed developed novel methods for microbial community analysis that have greatly expanded knowledge about complex microbial communities in soil, sediments, engineered systems, the oceans and within animals. He also created e...
Go to Profile#38763
Howard Bluestein
#38775
Overall Influence
Howard Bruce Bluestein is a research meteorologist known for his mesoscale meteorology, severe weather, and radar research. He is a major participant in the VORTEX projects. A native of the Boston area, Dr. Bluestein received his Ph.D. in 1976 from MIT. He has been a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma since 1976.
Go to Profile#38764
William G. Hoover
#38776
Overall Influence
William Graham Hoover is an American computational physicist. He is best known for creating the Nose–Hoover method in molecular dynamics. Selected publications External links Personal website
Go to Profile#38765
Max Dale Cooper
#38777
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Max Dale Cooper , is an American immunologist and a professor at the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and the Emory Vaccine Center of Emory University School of Medicine. He is known for characterizing T cells and B cells.
Go to Profile#38766
Daniel Weinreb
#38778
Overall Influence
1959 - 2012 (53 years)
Daniel L. Weinreb was an American computer scientist and programmer, with significant work in the environment of the programming language Lisp. Early life Weinreb was born on January 6, 1959, in Brooklyn, New York, and was raised there by his parents, Herbert and Phyllis Weinreb. He had two brothers, Bill and David, and attended Saint Ann's School.
Go to Profile#38767
Catherine Cornille
#38779
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Catherine Cornille is a professor of comparative theology and specializes in theology of religions and interreligious dialogue. She presently holds the Newton College Alumnae Chair of Western Culture in the department of theology at Boston College.
Go to Profile#38768
Thomas W. Reps
#38780
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Thomas W. Reps is an American computer scientist known for his contributions to automatic program analysis. Dr. Reps is Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which he joined in 1985. Reps is the author or co-author of four books and more than one hundred seventy-five papers describing his research. His work has covered a wide variety of topics, including program slicing, data-flow analysis, pointer analysis, model checking, computer security, instrumentation , language-based program-development environments, the use of progra...
Go to Profile#38769
Anett Kontaveit
#38781
Overall Influence
1995 - Present (31 years)
Anett Kontaveit is an Estonian former professional tennis player. She was ranked as high as world No. 2 by the Women's Tennis Association , which she first achieved on 6 June 2022 to become the highest-ranked Estonian tennis player in history. She also attained a career-high ranking of No. 95 in doubles on 2 March 2020.
Go to Profile#38770
Carlos Checa
#38782
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Carlos Checa Carrera is a Spanish former professional motorcycle road racer and winner of the 2011 Superbike World Championship. After racing in 500 cc and MotoGP for over a decade, mostly on Honda and Yamaha machinery with and without full manufacturer support, he moved to the Superbike World Championship on a Honda for . He has two Grand Prix victories. He has a younger brother, David Checa, also a motorcycle racer who competed in the Superbike World Championship for .
Go to Profile#38771
Franziska Grieder
#38783
Overall Influence
Franziska B. Grieder is a Swiss-American veterinary scientist. She is the director of the Office of Research Infrastructure Programs at the National Institutes of Health. Grieder was a faculty member and researcher at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.
Go to Profile#38772
Maria Bello
#38784
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Maria Elena Bello is an American actress, writer, and producer. Her first major film role was in 1998's Permanent Midnight. She followed this with a range of supporting and leading parts in films such as Payback , Coyote Ugly , The Cooler , Secret Window , Assault on Precinct 13, A History of Violence, Thank You for Smoking , World Trade Center , The Jane Austen Book Club , The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor , Grown Ups , Prisoners , and Lights Out .
Go to Profile#38773
Rudolf Amann
#38785
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Rudolf Amann is a German biochemistriest and microbiologist. He is director of Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen and Professor for Microbial Ecology at the University of Bremen.
Go to Profile#38774
Pat Hughes
#38786
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Vergil Patrick Hughes is an American sportscaster. He has been the radio play-by-play announcer for the Chicago Cubs of Major League Baseball since 1996. The 2022 season marked the 40th consecutive year that Hughes served as an MLB announcer.
Go to Profile#38775
Alan Greenspan
#38787
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Alan Greenspan is an American economist who served as the 13th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. He worked as a private adviser and provided consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC.
Go to Profile#38776
Hartmut Lutz
#38788
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Hartmut Lutz is professor emeritus and former chair of American and Canadian studies: Anglophone literatures and cultures of North America at the University of Greifswald, Germany. He is the founder of the Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, a research centre for Canadian and American literature studies at Greifswald. Beginning in the 1980s, he pioneered the field of Indigenous literary studies by establishing intercultural bridges and trans-Atlantic connections with leading Indigenous authors, scholars, educators, activists and intellectuals from Canada and the United States. He initia...
Go to Profile#38777
Douglas Melamed
#38789
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Arthur Douglas Melamed is an American legal scholar specializing in antitrust law. Since 2014, Melamed has been a professor, first visiting then professor of the practice, at Stanford Law School. He was previously Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Intel Corporation and the chair of the Antitrust and Competition Practice Group at the law firm of WilmerHale.
Go to Profile#38778
Zhang Weiwei
#38790
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Zhang Weiwei is a Chinese academic and the director of the China Institute of Fudan University. Zhang is also an Internet celebrity, spreading his political ideas through online video platforms such as Xigua Video, Bilibili, TikTok and YouTube.
Go to Profile#38779
John Richard Sir Hicks
#38791
Overall Influence
#38780
Joëlle Rollo-Koster
#38792
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Joëlle Rollo-Koster is a Professor of Medieval History in the University of Rhode Island's History Department. On December 6, 2016, she was knighted by the French government with the medal of Chevalier des Palmes académiques. In 2017-2018 she was a EURIAS Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.
Go to Profile#38781
Marvin Bell
#38793
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
Marvin Hartley Bell was an American poet and teacher who was the first Poet Laureate of the state of Iowa. Biography Bell was raised in Center Moriches, Long Island. He served in the U.S. Army from 1964 to 1965 at the rank of First Lieutenant, and he was a licensed amateur radio operator. He earned his bachelor's degree from Alfred University, his master's degree from the University of Chicago, and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Go to Profile#38782
Robert Thompson
#38794
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Robert James Thompson is an American educator and media scholar. He is the Trustee Professor of Television and Popular Culture at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. He is widely quoted in media.
Go to Profile#38783
Gunther Plaut
#38795
Overall Influence
1912 - 2012 (100 years)
Wolf Gunther Plaut, was an American Reform rabbi and writer who was based in Canada. Plaut was the rabbi of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto for several decades and since 1978 was its senior scholar.
Go to Profile#38784
David Dilks
#38796
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
David N. Dilks, FRHistS, FRSL is a British historian and former professor of International History at the University of Leeds. Early life and education Dilks was born in Foleshill, a suburb of Coventry, and attended The Royal Grammar School Worcester before winning a scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford, to read history.
Go to Profile#38785
H. Arnold Barton
#38797
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Hildor Arnold Barton was an American historian and a national authority on Scandinavian history, especially the history of Sweden, and of Swedes and other Scandinavians in North America. Early life Barton was born of Swedish descent in Los Angeles, California, in 1929, the son of Sven Hildor Barton and Marguerite Anna née Lemke . His paternal grandfather was born in Djursdala parish, Kalmar, Småland county, Sweden and emigrated to America in 1867. His paternal grandmother was born in Bollnäs parish, Hälsingland county and emigrated to America in 1889. His mother was a niece of Harry Edward A...
Go to Profile#38786
Luciano Rezzolla
#38798
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Luciano Rezzolla is an Italian professor of relativistic astrophysics and numerical relativity at the Goethe University Frankfurt. His main field of study is the physics and astrophysics of compact objects such as black holes and neutron stars. It was announced in 2019 that he had been appointed honorary Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin .
Go to Profile#38787
Alan L. Schiller
#38799
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Alan L. Schiller, M.D. is an American clinical pathologist and an expert in the effects of space and weightlessness on bone structure. Schiller has served on the Space Science Board of the Committee on Space Biology and Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and as a member of the Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications Advisory Committee of NASA. He currently serves on the board of directors of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute.
Go to Profile#38788
Rheta DeVries
#38800
Overall Influence
1936 - 2012 (76 years)
Rheta Goolsby DeVries was a professor at University of Northern Iowa's Regent's Center For Early Developmental Education, where she also served as director. She co-wrote many books along with Constance Kamii, concerning early childhood education curriculum that both influenced the field of early childhood mathematical instruction and accelerated the proliferation of constructivist-based teaching in the classroom.
Go to Profile#38789
Jens Nielsen
#38801
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Jens Nielsen is the CEO of BioInnovation Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark, and professor of systems biology at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. He is also an adjunct professor at the Technical University of Denmark. Nielsen is the most cited researcher in the field of metabolic engineering, and he is the founding president of the International Metabolic Engineering Society. He has additionally founded several biotech companies.
Go to Profile#38790
Dubravka Stojanović
#38802
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Dubravka Stojanović is a Serbian historian, and professor at University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy. She is a vice-president of the Thessaloniki based History Education Committee organized by the Center for Democracy and Reconciliation in South Eastern Europe as well as a consultant of the United Nations on the issues of misuses of history in education. Her primary fields of interest are processes of modernization in Southeast Europe, democratization in Serbia, history of Belgrade, historical memory and presentations of history in history textbooks. In 2015, Dubravka Stojanović received...
Go to Profile#38791
David Durenberger
#38803
Overall Influence
1934 - 2023 (89 years)
David Ferdinand Durenberger was an American politician and attorney. Durenberger represented Minnesota in the United States Senate as a Republican from 1978 to 1995. He left the Republican Party in 2005 and became a critic of it, endorsing Democratic presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in 2016 and 2020, respectively.
Go to Profile#38792
Doris Roberts
#38804
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
Doris May Roberts was an American actress whose career spanned seven decades of television and film. She received five Emmy Awards and a Screen Actors Guild award during her acting career, which began in 1951.
Go to Profile#38793
Andy Souwer
#38805
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Andy Souwer is a Dutch former kickboxer and mixed martial artist. He is a two-time K-1 World MAX champion and four-time Shootboxing World tournament champion as well as former It's Showtime 70MAX world champion, fighting out of Mejiro Gym in Amsterdam.
Go to Profile#38794
Joëlle Coutaz
#38806
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Joëlle Coutaz is a French computer scientist, specializing in human-computer interaction . Her career includes research in the fields of operating systems and HCI, as well as being a professor at the University of Grenoble. Coutaz is considered a pioneer in HCI in France, and in 2007, she was awarded membership to SIGCHI. She was also involved in organizing CHI conferences and was a member on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.
Go to Profile#38795
Yitzhak Laor
#38807
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Yitzhak Laor is an Israeli poet, author and journalist. Biography Yitzhak Laor was born in Pardes Hanna. Literary and journalism career He is the author of ten volumes of poetry, three novels, three collections of short stories, two collections of essays and one play.
Go to Profile#38796
George Peppard
#38808
Overall Influence
1928 - 1994 (66 years)
George William Peppard was an American actor. He secured a major role as struggling writer Paul Varjak when he starred alongside Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's , and later portrayed a character based on Howard Hughes in The Carpetbaggers . On television, he played the title role of millionaire insurance investigator and sleuth Thomas Banacek in the early-1970s mystery series Banacek. He played Col. John "Hannibal" Smith, the cigar-smoking leader of a renegade commando squad in the 1980s action television series The A-Team.
Go to Profile#38797
Hock Tan
#38809
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Tan Hock Eng is a Malaysian Chinese business executive and philanthropist. He is the CEO of Broadcom Inc. He was the highest earning CEO in the US in 2017, earning US$103.2 million that year. Early life Tan was born in Penang, Malaysia, in . He received a scholarship to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971. In 1975, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and earned a master's degree in the same subject later in the year. Tan also attended Harvard University to earn an MBA a few years later.
Go to Profile#38798
Barry Arthur Cipra
#38810
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Barry Arthur Cipra, an American mathematician and freelance writer, regularly contributes to Science magazine and SIAM News, a monthly publication of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Along with Dana Mackenzie and Paul Zorn he is the author of several of the volumes in the American Mathematical Society series What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences, a collection of articles about recent results in pure and applied mathematics oriented towards the undergraduate mathematics major.
Go to Profile#38799
Eilon Solan
#38811
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Eilon Solan is an Israeli mathematician and professor at the School of Mathematical Sciences of Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on game theory, stochastic processes, and measure theory. Biography Solan obtained a B.Sc. in mathematics and computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1989, and an M.Sc. in mathematics from Tel Aviv University in 1993. He completed his doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1998 under the supervision of Abraham Neyman, with a dissertation on stochastic games.
Go to Profile#38800
Edward M. De Robertis
#38812
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Edward Michael De Robertis is an American embryologist and Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work has contributed to the finding of conserved molecular processes of embryonic inductions that result in tissue differentiations during animal development. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013, worked for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for 26 years, and holds a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2009 Pope Benedict XVI appointed De Robertis to a lifetime position in the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in 2...
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