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
#38801
David Berthold
#38813
Overall Influence
David Berthold is an Australia theatre director. He has been theatre director of several Australian, London and Berlin theatre companies. He was artistic director of the Brisbane Festival over five festivals from 2015 to 19.
Go to Profile#38802
Ernesto Valverde
#38814
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Ernesto Valverde Tejedor is a Spanish football manager and former player who played as a forward. He is the current manager of La Liga club Athletic Bilbao. Over ten seasons, he amassed La Liga totals of 264 games and 68 goals, adding 55 matches and nine goals in Segunda División. He played for six teams in a 14-year professional career, including Espanyol, Barcelona and Athletic Bilbao.
Go to Profile#38803
Peter Kogge
#38815
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Peter Michael Kogge is an American computer engineer and IBM Fellow. Background Kogge has been at the forefront of several innovations that have shaped the computing industry over the past three decades. While working on his PhD at Stanford in the 1970s, Kogge invented what is still today considered the fastest way of adding numbers in a computer, the Kogge–Stone Adder process, an approach still used in microprocessors by Intel and other companies.
Go to Profile#38804
Xiaoxing Xi
#38816
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Xiaoxing Xi is a Chinese-born American physicist. He is the Laura H. Carnell Professor and former chair at the Physics Department of Temple University in Philadelphia. In May 2015, the United States Department of Justice arrested him on charges of having sent restricted American technology to China. All charges against him were dropped in September 2015.
Go to Profile#38805
Louis R. Caplan
#38817
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Louis R. Caplan is an American physician who is a senior member of the Division of Cerebrovascular Disease at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston. He is a Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, Boston, and the founder of the Harvard Stroke Registry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Caplan is the author or editor of 51 books and more than 700 articles in medical journals.
Go to Profile#38806
Cheryl Hayashi
#38818
Overall Influence
Cheryl Y. Hayashi is a biologist who specializes in the evolution and functional properties of spider silk. She is a curator, professor, and director of comparative biology research at the American Museum of Natural History, while also serving as the director of the Institute for Comparative Genomics and Provost of Science. She was a graduate of Yale University, a professor at University California Riverside, and a 2007 MacArthur Fellow.
Go to Profile#38807
Shunichi Yamashita
#38819
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
is a Japanese medical scientist serving as dean and professor at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Nagasaki University. Personal background Shin'ichi Yamashita was born in Nagasaki City, Nagasaki Prefecture, in 1952. His mother was a hibakusha who survived the atomic bomb dropped in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. He is a descendant of Kakure Kirishitans in Urakami who kept their faith clandestinely more than 200 years under severe persecution from the Tokugawa Shogunate. Yamashita himself is Catholic and belongs to Shiroyama Catholic Church in the Archdiocese of Nagasaki. He is a me...
Go to Profile#38808
Lars Hultman
#38820
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Lars Hultman is a professor of materials science and head of the Division of Thin Film Physics at Linköping University. Since June 2013 Hultman is the CEO of The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research . He received his Ph.D. degree in Materials Science from Linköping University in 1988. He also did postdoctoral work at Northwestern University in 1989-1990 and was a visiting professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2004-2006. In 1994 he became the editor for the journal Vacuum.
Go to Profile#38809
Warren Haynes
#38821
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Warren Haynes is an American musician, singer and songwriter. He is best known for his work as longtime guitarist with the Allman Brothers Band and as founding member of the jam band Gov't Mule. Early in his career he was a guitarist for David Allan Coe and The Dickey Betts Band. Haynes also is known for his associations with the surviving members of the Grateful Dead, including touring with Phil Lesh and Friends and the Dead. In addition, Haynes founded and manages Evil Teen Records.
Go to Profile#38810
Thane Gustafson
#38822
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Thane Gustafson is a professor of political science at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., United States. He specializes in comparative politics and the political history of Russia and the former USSR.
Go to Profile#38811
Larry Birns
#38823
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Larry Birns was the director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a liberal, not-for-profit organization monitoring human rights and political developments in Latin America. Birns grew up in New York City, studied at Bates and graduated from Columbia University, eventually doing postgraduate work in the social sciences at St. Catherine's College, Oxford University. Before founding the Council in 1975, Birns taught at Hamilton College and served with a United Nations mission in Chile during the Salvador Allende government.
Go to Profile#38812
Hatim Zaghloul
#38824
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Hatim Zaghloul Ph.D., M.Sc., B.E.E. is best known for his inventions, together with his long-time friend, Dr. Michel Fattouche of Wideband Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing , and Multi-code Direct-sequence Spread Spectrum . WOFDM is the foundation for the IEEE 802.11a/g/n technologies whereas MCDSSS helped increase the data rates of code division multiple access technologies as in the CDMA2000 standard. Currently, Dr. Zaghloul is the CEO and Chairman of Innovatian Inc., Giza, Egypt, a company specializing in building wireless data networks in unconnected countries through WiFi and blockchain.
Go to Profile#38813
Boris Rankov
#38825
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Nikolas Boris Rankov is a British professor of Roman history at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is a former rower and current umpire. Early life, education and family Rankov was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, the only son of Radoslav and Helga Rankov. He was educated at Bradford Grammar School , then subsequently Corpus Christi College, Oxford .
Go to Profile#38814
Marcus Kasner
#38826
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
#38815
Diane Victor
#38827
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Diane Victor, is a South African artist and print maker, known for her satirical and social commentary of contemporary South African politics. Biography Victor was born in Witbank, South Africa. She received her BA Fine Arts degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1986.
Go to Profile#38816
Dariush Mehrjui
#38828
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Dariush Mehrjui was an Iranian filmmaker and a member of the Iranian Academy of the Arts. Mehrjui was a founding member of the Iranian New Wave movement of the early 1970s, which also included directors Masoud Kimiai and Nasser Taqvai. His second film, The Cow , is considered to be the first film of this movement. Most of his films are inspired by literature and adapted from Iranian and foreign novels and plays.
Go to Profile#38817
Sandra Wolin
#38829
Overall Influence
Sandra Lynn Wolin is an American microbiologist and physician-scientist specialized in biogenesis, function, and turnover of non-coding RNA. She is chief of the RNA Biology Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute.
Go to Profile#38818
Salvatore J. Stolfo
#38830
Overall Influence
Salvatore J. Stolfo is an academic and professor of computer science at Columbia University, specializing in computer security. Early life Born in Brooklyn, New York, Stolfo received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Brooklyn College in 1974. He received his Ph.D. from NYU Courant Institute in 1979 and has been on the faculty of Columbia ever since, where he's taught courses in Artificial Intelligence, Intrusion and Anomaly Detection Systems, Introduction to Programming, Fundamental Algorithms, Data Structures, and Knowledge-Based Expert Systems.
Go to Profile#38819
Michael Quinn Patton
#38831
Overall Influence
#38820
Daniel Weinberger
#38832
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Daniel R. Weinberger is a professor of psychiatry, neurology and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University and Director and CEO of the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, which opened in 2011. Life He is an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and completed two residencies, one in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and another in neurology at George Washington University.
Go to Profile#38821
Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira
#38833
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira is a Brazilian journalist and feminist writer. Biography She was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1944, she graduated in Law from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. In the 1960s, she began her professional career as a journalist at Revista Senhor, Jornal do Brasil, Revista Visão and O Globo.
Go to Profile#38822
Lee Eliot Berk
#38834
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Lee Eliot Berk was an American academic who was President and namesake of the Berklee College of Music from 1979 to 2004. Under the younger Berk’s leadership, the college underwent significant changes. Berklee expanded its curriculum to create new majors, including Film Scoring, Music Production and Engineering, Music Synthesis, Songwriting, Music Business/Management, and Music Therapy. Educational applications of music technology expanded, the college administration was reorganized, more student services were added, and non-music academic offerings increased. In 1992, he established the Ber...
Go to Profile#38823
John Gregory
#38835
Overall Influence
John Gregory was an English railway and naval engineer. He served as engineer aboard HMS Erebus during the 1845 Franklin Expedition, which sought to explore uncharted parts of what is now Nunavut, including the Northwest Passage, and make scientific observations. The ships were outfitted with former railway locomotive engines which served as auxiliary power units, which is why Gregory, who had never been to sea, served on the expedition. All expedition personnel perished in uncertain conditions, mostly on and around King William Island. In 2021, Gregory's remains became the first of the exped...
Go to Profile#38824
Henry B. Hansmann
#38836
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Henry B. Hansmann is an American scholar of law and economics; he is the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School. Hansmann is noted for his scholarship on the economics of organizational ownership and design and is credited with founding the modern study of nonprofit organizations. He is known for his 1980 article "The Role of Nonprofit Enterprise" which has had a "seminal influence on analyses of the law and economics of the nonprofit sector."
Go to Profile#38825
Kikutaro Baba
#38837
Overall Influence
1905 - 2001 (96 years)
Kikutaro Baba was a Japanese malacologist. He was the leading researcher on sea slugs and bubble snails, opisthobranch gastropod mollusks in Japan. Biography 1932–1941 Kyushu University1948–1949 Osaka Kyoiku University1976 – Order of the Rising SunKikutaro Baba was married to Sonoko Baba. He died of pneumonia in hospital in Japan on 30 November 2001.
Go to Profile#38826
Lonnie D. Kliever
#38838
Overall Influence
1932 - 2004 (72 years)
Dr Lonnie D. Kliever was chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the Southern Methodist University . Early life Kliever was born in Corn, Oklahoma, a small town in the southwestern part of the state; but spent most of his boyhood in Fort Worth. He suffered a severe childhood case of rickets brought on by a calcium deficiency. This stunted his growth, he stood well under 5 feet tall.
Go to Profile#38827
Saket Kushwaha
#38839
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Saket Kushwaha is an Indian educationist and agricultural economist. He is the vice chancellor of Rajiv Gandhi University, Arunachal Pradesh and former VC of Lalit Narayan Mithila University, Bihar. He is a professor of agricultural economics at the Banaras Hindu University, on lien.
Go to Profile#38828
Terence Frederick Mitchell
#38840
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
Terence Frederick Mitchell , commonly known as T. F. Mitchell, was a British linguist and Professor of Linguistics and Phonetics at the University of Leeds. Biography Mitchell was born in Devon and educated at Torquay Boys' Grammar School and University College London from which he graduated with a BA in French and Spanish in 1940. He then served with the Royal Artillery of the British Army in India, Burma and the Middle East until discharged as a Major in 1946.
Go to Profile#38829
Willie Wilson
#38841
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Willie Wilson is an English rock drummer, known for his work with Pink Floyd and his long-time association with their guitarist, David Gilmour. Music career In April 1966, Wilson joined Jokers Wild, a Cambridge band that included his friend David Gilmour on guitar, and later, Rick Wills on bass.
Go to Profile#38830
Velimir Neidhardt
#38842
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Velimir Neidhardt is a Croatian architect, president of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts since 2019. Neidhardt is a professor at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Architecture, former president of the Croatian Architects’ Association , and a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts . Since June 2015, he is also a corresponding member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Go to Profile#38831
Fernanda Melchor
#38843
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Fernanda Melchor is a Mexican writer best known for her novel Hurricane Season for which she won the 2019 Anna Seghers Prize and a place on the shortlist for the 2020 International Booker Prize. Life and career Melchor graduated with a degree in Journalism from the Universidad Veracruzana where she was Coordinator of Communication of the Veracruz-Del Río campus.
Go to Profile#38832
John F. X. Knasas
#38844
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
John Francis Xavier Knasas is an American philosopher. He is a leading existential Thomist in the Neo-Thomist movement, best known for engaging such thinkers as Bernard Lonergan, Alasdair MacIntyre and Jeremy Wilkins in disputes over human cognition to affirm a Thomistic epistemology of direct realism and defending the thought of Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson and Fr. Joseph Owens. He holds the Bishop Wendelin J. Nold Endowed Chair as Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and earned his doctorate at the University of Toronto, under the direction of Fr.
Go to Profile#38833
Paul M. Smith
#38845
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Paul March Smith is an American attorney who has argued many important cases, most notably Lawrence v. Texas and has argued 21 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States. In January 2017, he joined the faculty at Georgetown University Law Center, and also the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, D.C., as Vice President of Litigation and Strategy. Until 2017, he was a partner at Jenner & Block's Washington, D.C., office where he served as co-chair of the firm's Election Law and Redistricting practice.
Go to Profile#38834
Stephen Gillers
#38846
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Stephen Gillers is a professor at the New York University School of Law. He is often cited as an expert in legal ethics. Biography After graduating from Brooklyn College with a B.A. in 1964, he received his J.D. in 1968 from the New York University School of Law.
Go to Profile#38835
Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz
#38847
Overall Influence
1943 - 2012 (69 years)
Ada María Isasi-Díaz was a Cuban-American theologian who served as professor emerita of ethics and theology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. As a Hispanic theologian, she was an innovator of Hispanic theology in general and specifically of mujerista theology. She was founder and co-director of the Hispanic Institute of Theology at Drew University until her retirement in 2009.
Go to Profile#38836
Ignacio Burgoa
#38848
Overall Influence
1918 - 2005 (87 years)
Ignacio Burgoa Orihuela was a Mexican lawyer, professor, and writer. He was a federal judge in Mexico City, and a respected lawyer in Mexico. He studied law and obtained his PhD from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he taught for more than 58 years. He was author of the most renowned law books in his field in Mexico since 1943, when, at age 25, he published his first book El Juicio de Amparo that was the first systematic treaty on the subject and has become the most read and referred book by specialists in the constitutional trial of amparo in Mexico. In 1944 he published ...
Go to Profile#38837
Isabel de Madariaga
#38849
Overall Influence
1919 - 2014 (95 years)
Isabel Margaret de Madariaga was a British historian who specialised on Russia in the 18th century and Catherine the Great. She published six books on Russia and is credited for changing the perception of Catherine the Great amongst Russian and Western scholars. Born to a Spanish diplomat and a Scottish economic historian, she was taught at 16 schools during her childhood and earned a first-class honours degree in Russian language and literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies . De Madariaga worked for BBC Monitoring in the Second World War, and was a civil servant at the Ministry of Information and HM Treasury.
Go to Profile#38838
Kirk Goldsberry
#38850
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Kirk Goldsberry is a basketball writer. He was the vice president for strategic research for the San Antonio Spurs, the lead analyst for Team USA Basketball, and a visiting researcher at the Harvard Institute of Quantitative Social Sciences. He is best known for his sports writing and for pioneering the hexagonal shot chart in basketball analytics, and for being one of the leaders of the recent advanced metrics movement in basketball.
Go to Profile#38839
Roger Malina
#38851
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Roger Malina is an American physicist, astronomer, Executive Editor of Leonardo Publications by Leonardo, the International Society of Arts, Sciences and Technology and distinguished professor of arts and technology, and professor of physics at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Go to Profile#38840
Patricia Selinger
#38852
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Patricia G. Selinger is an American computer scientist and IBM Fellow, best known for her work on relational database management systems. Education She received A.B. , S.M. , and Ph.D. degrees in applied mathematics from Harvard University.
Go to Profile#38841
Trezza Azzopardi
#38853
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Trezza Azzopardi is a Welsh writer, who has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won several other literary prizes. Early life Azzopardi was born in Cardiff to a Maltese father and a Welsh mother. She studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia, and currently works as a lecturer there. She also has an MA in Film and Television studies from the University of Derby.
Go to Profile#38842
Sami Haddadin
#38854
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Sami Haddadin is an electrical engineer, computer scientist, and university professor in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence . Since April 2018, he has been the executive director of the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence at the Technical University of Munich and holds the Chair of Robotics and Systems Intelligence.
Go to Profile#38843
Asma El Dareer
#38855
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Asma Abdel Rahim El Dareer is a Sudanese physician known for her research in the 1980s into female genital mutilation. She was one of the first Arab women and feminist doctors to speak out publicly against the practice.
Go to Profile#38844
Paula Allen-Meares
#38856
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Paula G. Allen-Meares is an American academic who served as the chancellor of the University of Illinois Chicago from 2009 to 2015. She has a background in social work. Allen-Meares was raised in Buffalo, New York. She completed her undergraduate education at SUNY Buffalo, and then undertook postgraduate studies in social work at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign . While completing her doctorate, she worked for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. She joined the UIUC faculty in 1975, and in 1990 was made dean of the School of Social Work. In 1993, Allen-Meares joined the University of Michigan as dean of the School of Social Work.
Go to Profile#38845
Jeff Bezos
#38857
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American entrepreneur, media proprietor and investor. He is the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and cloud computing company. With a net worth of about US$170 billion as of November 2023, Bezos is the third-wealthiest person in the world and was the wealthiest from 2017 to 2021, according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes.
Go to Profile#38846
Richard T. Antoun
#38858
Overall Influence
1932 - 2009 (77 years)
Richard T. "Dick" Antoun was a professor of anthropology at Binghamton University who specialized in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies. His work centered on religion and the social organization of tradition in Islamic law and ethics, among other things. He was stabbed to death in his office at Binghamton University in December 2009; a Saudi graduate student pleaded guilty to killing him, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Go to Profile#38847
Amy Wilentz
#38859
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Amy Wilentz is an American journalist and writer. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches Literary Journalism. Wilentz received a 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti, as well as a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction. Wilentz is The New Yorker's former Jerusalem correspondent and is a contributing editor at The Nation.
Go to Profile#38848
Alexander Repenning
#38860
Overall Influence
Alexander Repenning is the Director of the Scalable Game Design project, a computer science professor adjunct, a founder of AgentSheets Inc., and a member of the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Repenning is the inventor of drag and drop blocks programming. His research interests include computer science education, end-user programmable agents, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence.
Go to Profile#38849
Edward Lawrence Wheelwright
#38861
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Edward Lawrence Wheelwright was an Australian economist, radio host and anti-war activist who taught at the University of Sydney from 1952 until 1986. He has written on Australian economic history, often from an institutionalist or Marxian perspective, and his published works have included the analysis of capitalism in Australian history and an analysis of the influence and development of transnational corporations. He authored 11 books independently and 5 with co-editors, and made frequent appearances on ABC Radio's Notes on the News program. He is the namesake of a memorial lecture at the University of Sydney and an annual prize in the university's political economy course.
Go to Profile#38850
Gudrun Krämer
#38862
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Gudrun Krämer is a German scholar of Islamic history and co-editor of the third edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam. She is professor of Islamic studies, Chair of the Institute of Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Her expertise is in topics related to modern Islamic history and in Islam, democracy, and modernity.
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