Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#38851

Ben Taskar

#38863

Overall Influence

1977 - 2013 (36 years)

Ben Taskar was a professor and researcher in the area of machine learning and applications to computational linguistics and computer vision. He was a Magerman Term Associate Professor for Computer and Information Science at University of Pennsylvania. He co-directed PRiML: Penn Research in Machine Learning, a joint venture between the School of Engineering and Wharton. He was also a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Public Policy. At the University of Washington, he held the Boeing Professorship.

#38852

Feliks Gross

#38864

Overall Influence

1906 - 2006 (100 years)

Feliks Gross was a Polish-American sociologist. Before World War II, he became a lecturer at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. During the war, he escaped to USA, where he would hold many positions in academia, including a professorship at Graduate Centre and Brooklyn College in City University of New York and at the University of Wyoming.

#38853

Richard Maling Barrer

#38865

Overall Influence

#38854

Mandy Chessell

#38866

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Amanda Elizabeth Chessell is a computer scientist and a Distinguished Engineer at IBM. She has been awarded the title of IBM Master Inventor. She is also a Member of the IBM Academy of Technology. Outside IBM, Chessell is the first woman to be awarded the Silver Medal of the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2002 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

#38855

Odell Beckham Jr.

#38867

Overall Influence

1992 - Present (34 years)

Odell Cornelious Beckham Jr. , commonly known by his initials OBJ, is an American football wide receiver for the Baltimore Ravens of the National Football League . Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Beckham played college football at LSU and was selected by the New York Giants in the first round of the 2014 NFL Draft.

#38856

Raymond Wacks

#38868

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Raymond Wacks is Emeritus Professor of Law and Legal Theory at the University of Hong Kong, where he was Head of the Department of Law from 1986 to 1993. He was previously Professor of Public Law and Head of the Department of Public Law at the University of Natal in Durban. He retired at the end of 2001, and now lives in Lincolnshire.

#38857

Allan Houston

#38869

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Allan Wade Houston is an American former professional basketball player who played in the National Basketball Association from 1993 to 2005. A shooting guard, Houston played nine seasons for the New York Knicks; he was a member of the Knicks' 1999 NBA Finals team. Houston made the NBA All-Star Team twice and also won a gold medal as a member of the U.S. men's basketball team at the 2000 Summer Olympics.

#38858

Diana Ross

#38870

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Diana Ross is an American singer and actress. She rose to fame as the lead singer of the vocal group The Supremes, who became Motown's most successful act during the 1960s and one of the world's best-selling girl groups of all time. They remain the best-charting woman group in history, with a total of twelve number-one hit singles on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, including "Where Did Our Love Go", "Baby Love", "Come See About Me", "Stop! In the Name of Love", and "Love Child".

#38859

Rodney Harrison

Rodney Harrison

#38871

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Rodney Scott Harrison is an American former football safety who played in the National Football League for 15 seasons with the San Diego Chargers and New England Patriots. He was selected in the fifth round of the 1994 NFL Draft by the Chargers, where he spent his first nine seasons, and was a member of the Patriots in his following six. Since leaving the NFL in 2009, he has served as a commentator for NBC's Football Night in America.

#38860

Stanley Ellis

#38872

Overall Influence

1926 - 2009 (83 years)

Stanley Ellis was an English linguistics scholar and broadcaster, and an authority on English regional dialects. Born in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, he attended Grange Grammar School and obtained a scholarship to study at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His studies were interrupted by World War II, during which he was a navigator in the RAF. After national service, part of which was spent in India, he read English at Leeds University, with a master's thesis on the Lincolnshire dialect.

#38861

Gil Kane

#38873

Overall Influence

1926 - 2000 (74 years)

Gil Kane was a Latvian-born American comics artist whose career spanned the 1940s to the 1990s and virtually every major comics company and character. Kane co-created the modern-day versions of the superheroes Green Lantern and the Atom for DC Comics, and co-created Iron Fist and Adam Warlock with Roy Thomas for Marvel Comics. He was involved in the anti-drug storyline in The Amazing Spider-Man #96–98, which, at the behest of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, bucked the then-prevalent Comics Code Authority to depict drug abuse, and ultimately spurred an update of the Code.

#38862

Miroslav Komárek

Miroslav Komárek

#38874

Overall Influence

1924 - 2013 (89 years)

Miroslav Komárek was a Czech historical linguist and professor emeritus of the Faculty of Arts at Palacký University in Olomouc. His academic publications focused on the morphology and phonology of the Czech language from the diachronic perspective.

#38863

Mary Henle

#38875

Overall Influence

1913 - 2007 (94 years)

Mary Henle was an American psychologist who's known most notably for her contributions to Gestalt Psychology and for her involvement in the American Psychological Association. Henle also taught at the New School of Social Research in New York; she was involved in the writing of eight book publications and also helped develop the first psychology laboratory manual in 1948 based on the famous works of Kurt Lewin.

#38864

Christine Moffatt

#38876

Overall Influence

Christine Joy Moffatt, CBE, FRCN is a British nurse and educator. Biography Following training at Charing Cross Hospital, Moffatt trained as a district nurse. Following a diploma in leg ulcer care she became involved in research, became a lecturer at Imperial College London. She ran the Centre for Research and Implementation of Clinical Practice independently before entering into an association with Thames Valley University.

#38865

Michael Rectenwald

#38877

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Michael D. Rectenwald is an American scholar and former professor. Although he has written about 19th-century British secularism, he may be most known as a critic of the contemporary social justice movement.

#38866

Alexander D. Wentzell

#38878

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Alexander Dmitrievich Wentzell is a Russian-American mathematician. Wentzell graduated from Moscow State University in 1958 and received in 1964 his Russian candidate degree from the Steklov Institute in Moscow with advisor Eugene Dynkin. He taught from 1961 as a docent at Moscow State University and from 1966 to 1991 as an assistant professor. In 1984 he received his Russian doctorate from Moscow State University. For the academic year 1991–1992 he was a visiting professor at the University of Maryland and for the academic year 1992–93 at the University of Minnesota. Since 1993 he has be...

#38867

David Chandler

#38879

Overall Influence

1944 - 2017 (73 years)

David Chandler was a physical chemist and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and a winner of the Irving Langmuir Award. He published two books and over 300 scientific articles.

#38868

David Sherrington

#38880

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

David Sherrington is a British theoretical physicist and Wykeham Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Oxford. He is known for his work in condensed matter and statistical physics, and particularly for the invention of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model, an exactly solvable mean-field model of a spin glass.

#38869

Rajendra Srivastava

#38881

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Rajendra K. Srivastava is Novartis Professor of Marketing Strategy and Innovation at the Indian School of Business. He has been a tenured professor and an academic administrator and has worked in the United States, Singapore, and India. He has been listed in the Forbes's Tycoons of Tomorrow 2018. He is also a member of the board of directors of Happiest Minds, a publicly listed company in India.

#38870

Neal Wood

#38882

Overall Influence

1922 - 2003 (81 years)

Neal Norman Wood was an American-Canadian Marxist scholar of the history of political thought. He located political ideas within social relations, property forms, and popular struggles, writing on topics as variant as the British Communist Party, John Locke, Aristotle, Edmund Burke, and Augustine of Hippo.

#38871

Greg Jennings

#38883

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Gregory Jennings Jr. is an American former professional league football player who was a wide receiver for 10 seasons in the National Football League , primarily with the Green Bay Packers. He played college football at Western Michigan and was selected by Green Bay in the second round of the 2006 NFL Draft. Jennings was named to two Pro Bowls during his seven seasons with the Packers and was part of the team that won a Super Bowl title in Super Bowl XLV. In his final three seasons, he was a member of the Minnesota Vikings and Miami Dolphins. He was inducted into Green Bay Packers Hall of Fam...

#38872

John Gregory

#38884

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

John Charles Gregory is an English former footballer. He has previously managed: Portsmouth, Plymouth Argyle, Wycombe Wanderers, Aston Villa, Derby County, Queens Park Rangers, Maccabi Ahi Nazareth, F.C. Ashdod, FC Kairat, Crawley Town and Chennaiyin. As a player, he was a versatile midfielder who started his career at Northampton Town and later played for Brighton & Hove Albion, QPR, Derby and Aston Villa. He won six caps for England.

#38873

Donald Kalish

#38885

Overall Influence

1919 - 2000 (81 years)

Donald Kalish was an American logician, educator, and anti-war activist. Biography Born in Chicago, Illinois, Kalish earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in psychology and his doctorate in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. After teaching at Swarthmore College and at UC Berkeley, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles in 1949.

#38874

Douglas Fraser

#38886

Overall Influence

1916 - 2008 (92 years)

Douglas Andrew Fraser was a Scottish–American union leader. He was president of the United Auto Workers from 1977 to 1983 and an adjunct professor of labor relations at Wayne State University for many years.

#38875

Serge Rudaz

#38887

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Serge Rudaz is a Canadian theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of Minnesota. He previously served as the director of undergraduate studies of the University of Minnesota's physics department, and is now the director of undergraduate honors at the University of Minnesota. Rudaz received his Ph.D. in 1979 from Cornell University and his undergraduate degree from McGill University.

#38876

Rolf Furuli

#38888

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Rolf Johan Furuli is a Norwegian linguist who was a lecturer in Semitic languages at the University of Oslo; he retired in 2011. Furuli has taught courses of Akkadian, Aramaic, Ethiopic, Hebrew, Phoenician, Syriac, and Ugaritic at the University of Oslo and at The Norwegian Institute of Paleography and Historical Philology.

#38877

Peter Gumbsch

#38889

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Peter Gumbsch is a German physicist and materials scientist. He is the director of the Fraunhofer-Institut für Werkstoffmechanik IWM, in Freiburg, Germany and professor for mechanics of materials at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology .

#38878

Sarah Leberman

#38890

Overall Influence

Sarah Isabella Leberman is a New Zealand sport management academic, as of 2012 is a full professor at the Massey University. Academic career After a 1999 PhD titled 'The transfer of learning from the classroom to the workplace: a New Zealand case study ' at the Victoria University of Wellington, Leberman moved to the Massey University, rising to full professor.

#38879

Tadao Umesao

#38891

Overall Influence

1920 - 2010 (90 years)

Tadao Umesao was a Japanese anthropologist. A professor for decades at Kyoto University, he was also among the founders and the director-general of National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan. A number of Umesao's theories were influential on anthropologists, and his work was also well known among the general population of Japan.

#38880

David L. Holmes

#38892

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

David L. Holmes was an American church historian. He was Walter G. Mason Professor of Religious Studies at the College of William and Mary. He was the son of David L. Holmes, a university coach and director of athletics revered by his athletes. He was married to Carolyn Coggin Holmes, executive director of James Monroe's Highland from 1975 to 2012. They had two daughters.

#38881

Paul Callaghan

#38893

Overall Influence

1947 - 2012 (65 years)

Sir Paul Terence Callaghan was a New Zealand physicist who, as the founding director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology at Victoria University of Wellington, held the position of Alan MacDiarmid Professor of Physical Sciences and was President of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance.

#38882

Sabatino Moscati

#38894

Overall Influence

1922 - 1997 (75 years)

Sabatino Moscati was an Italian archaeologist and linguist known for his work on Phoenician and Punic civilizations. In 1954 he became Professor of Semitic Philology at the University of Rome where he established the Institute of Studies of the Near East.

#38883

Güzin Dino

#38895

Overall Influence

1910 - 2013 (103 years)

Güzin Dino was a Turkish literary scholar, linguist, translator and writer. She is known for writing from a Marxist perspective. She was married to the painter Abidin Dino . Güzin and Abidin Dino married 1943 in Adana, Turkey. Her husband was a member of the Turkish Communist Party, who was exiled to the southern Turkish city. Subject to political pressure and prosecution, Abidin Dino left Turkey in 1952 to settle in Paris, France. She followed her husband in 1954 to France.

#38884

Daniel E. Koshland Jr.

Daniel E. Koshland Jr.

#38896

Overall Influence

1920 - 2007 (87 years)

Daniel Edward Koshland Jr. was an American biochemist. He reorganized the study of biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and was the editor of the leading U.S. science journal, Science, from 1985 to 1995. He was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

#38885

Ronald Frankenberg

#38897

Overall Influence

1929 - 2015 (86 years)

Ronald Frankenberg was a British anthropologist and sociologist, known for his study of conflict and decision-making in a Welsh village. He also contributed to the development of medical anthropology.

#38886

Marco Pantani

#38898

Overall Influence

1970 - 2004 (34 years)

Marco Pantani was an Italian road racing cyclist, widely regarded as one of the greatest climbing specialists in the history of the sport by measures of his legacy, credits from other riders, and records. He recorded the fastest ever climbs up the Tour's iconic venues of Mont Ventoux and Alpe d'Huez , and other cyclists including Lance Armstrong and Charly Gaul have hailed Pantani's climbing skills. He is the last rider and only one of seven to ever win the Tour de France – Giro d'Italia double, doing so in 1998. He is the sixth of seven Italians, after Ottavio Bottecchia, Gino Bartali, Faus...

#38887

Alison Light

#38899

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Alison Light, is a writer, critic and independent scholar. She is the author of five books to date. In 2020 A Radical Romance, was awarded the Pen Ackerley prize, the only prize for memoir in the UK. Common People: The History of an English Family was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize. She has held a number of academic posts and is currently an Honorary Fellow in History and English at Pembroke College, Oxford. She is also an Honorary Professor in the Department of English, University College, London and an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Department of English, Edinburgh University.

#38888

Svetozar Kurepa

#38900

Overall Influence

1929 - 2010 (81 years)

Svetozar Kurepa was a Yugoslavian and Croatian mathematician whose main contributions were in the areas of functional analysis and operator theory. Kurepa published over 70 articles, 16 books, and numerous scientific reviews. He taught at the University of Zagreb, where he also served as the Dean of the College of Sciences. He taught in North America at the University of Maryland, at Georgetown University, and at the University of Waterloo. In Europe he worked at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark and the University of Milan.

#38889

Carl Bowman

#38901

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Carl Bowman is an American sociologist, who is widely recognized for his studies of Anabaptist religious groups and is perhaps the foremost expert on the social and cultural history of the Church of the Brethren.

#38890

John Tytell

#38902

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

John Tytell is an American writer and academic. He is professor emeritus of modern American literature at Queens College, City University of New York. Tytell's works on literary figures such as Jack Kerouac, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, and William S. Burroughs have made him a leading scholar of the Beat Generation. He has written for the American Scholar, Partisan Review, New York Times, and Vanity Fair.

#38891

Boris Meissner

#38903

Overall Influence

1915 - 2003 (88 years)

Boris Meissner was a German lawyer and social scientist, specializing in Soviet studies, international law and Eastern European history and politics. Life Meissner was the son of Artur Meissner, a judge of Baltic German extraction, and spent his childhood in Pärnu, Estonia. He attended Tartu University, where he received a first degree in economics in 1935. He then studied law in Tartu until he had to leave Estonia during the repatriation of Baltic Germans in 1939.

#38892

Carl Walters

#38904

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Carl Walters is an American-born Canadian biologist known for his work involving fisheries stock assessments, the adaptive management concept, and ecosystem modeling. Walters has been a professor of Zoology and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia since 1969. He is one of the main developers of the ecological modelling software Ecopath. His most recent work focuses on how to adjust human behaviors in environments that are full of uncertainty. He is a recent recipient of the Volvo Environment Prize . In 2019, Dr. Walters became a Member of the Order of British Columbia.

#38893

Ashok Kumar Singhvi

#38905

Overall Influence

Ashok Kumar Singhvi is an Indian geoscientist and former Dean of Physical Research Laboratory. His field of expertise is Geophysics, Quaternary Sciences and Quantitative Geomorphology. Career Singhvi graduated with an MSc from Jodhpur University, Rajasthan. He earned a PhD from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur for studies on hyperfine interaction, Mossbauer spectroscopy and nuclear reactions. He then joined the Geosciences Group at the Physical Research Laboratory , Ahmedabad, India in 1976 as a Postdoctoral Fellow, where he began applying mineral spectroscopy to study paleoclimates. From 1977 to 1978, he worked with Dr.

#38894

Jingguang Chen

#38906

Overall Influence

Jingguang Chen is a Chinese-American chemical engineer. He is the Thayer Lindsley Professor of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University, with a joint appointment as Senior Chemist at the U.S. Department of Energy Brookhaven National Laboratory. Over the course of his career Chen has made significant contributions to the fundamental understanding and use of novel materials for catalytic and electrocatalytic applications. Central to his research efforts have been the development of bimetallic and transition metal carbide catalysts that eliminate or significantly reduce the loading of expensi...

#38895

Mike Mignola

#38907

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Michael Mignola is an American comic book artist and writer best known for creating Hellboy for Dark Horse Comics, part of a shared universe of titles including B.P.R.D., Abe Sapien, Lobster Johnson, and various spin-offss. He has also created other supernatural and paranormal themed titles for Dark Horse including Baltimore, Joe Golem, and The Amazing Screw-On Head.

#38896

Alice S. Whittemore

#38908

Overall Influence

Alice Segers Whittemore is an American epidemiologist and biostatistician who studies the effects of genetics and lifestyle on cancer, after an earlier career as a pure mathematician studying group theory. She works as a professor of health research and policy and of biomedical data science at Stanford University, and has served as president of the International Biometric Society.

#38897

Richard William Timm

Richard William Timm

#38909

Overall Influence

1923 - 2020 (97 years)

Richard William Timm was a Catholic Priest, educator, zoologist, and development worker. He was the Superior of the Congregation of Holy Cross in Dhaka and a member of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Province. He was also one of the founders of Notre Dame College in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He was the 6th principal of Notre Dame College.

#38898

James Alm

#38910

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

James Alm is a professor and the Chair of Economics at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA. Alm's research areas focus on public economics, specifically, tax compliance and tax evasion, the marriage tax, tax and expenditure limitations, tax amnesties, taxpayer responses to tax reforms, enterprise zones, the determinants of state economic growth, and corruption. Alm has also participated in extensive application of his research on fiscal reforms in numerous countries, including Bangladesh, Jamaica, Grenada, Indonesia, Turkey, Hungary, China, Egypt, the Philippines, Russia, Uganda, Nigeria, India, Colombia, Nepal, Ukraine, Pakistan, and South Africa.

#38899

George Shearing

#38911

Overall Influence

1919 - 2011 (92 years)

Sir George Albert Shearing was a British jazz pianist who for many years led a popular jazz group that recorded for Discovery Records, MGM Records and Capitol Records. Shearing was the composer of over 300 songs, including the jazz standards "Lullaby of Birdland" and "Conception", and had multiple albums on the Billboard charts during the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s and 1990s.

#38900

Chazz Palminteri

Chazz Palminteri

#38912

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Calogero Lorenzo "Chazz" Palminteri is an American actor. He is best known for his film roles in A Bronx Tale , based on his play of the same name, Bullets Over Broadway for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and The Usual Suspects , as well as his recurring role as Shorty in Modern Family .

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