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
#39001
James Skillen
#39013
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
James W. Skillen is a Christian political philosopher and author. He was the executive director and then president of the Center for Public Justice from 1981 to 2009, when he retired from the organization. He helped found the organization in 1977. From 1973 to 1982 he taught political theory and international relations at three Christian colleges. Today, Skillen speaks regularly both domestically and internationally and writes primarily in areas of biblical studies and political philosophy and practice. He also mentors a number of advanced students.
Go to Profile#39002
Seth J. Teller
#39014
Overall Influence
1964 - 2014 (50 years)
Seth Jared Teller was an American computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose research interests included computer vision, sensor networks, and robotics. In his Argus and Rover projects of the late 1990s, Teller was an early pioneer in the use of mobile cameras and geolocation to build three-dimensional models of cities.
Go to Profile#39003
Yeh Ming-hsun
#39015
Overall Influence
1913 - 2009 (96 years)
Yeh Ming-hsun , was a Chinese journalist and newspaper editor. A native of Fujian Province on the Chinese mainland, he became president of Chunghwa Daily, a newspaper belonging to the ruling Kuomintang, in 1950. In the late 1950s, Cheng Shewo and Yeh co-founded the Shih Hsin School of Journalism . Yeh served as the school's vice president in 1966 and its chairman from 1991 to 2006.
Go to Profile#39004
Meghan, Duchess of Sussex
#39016
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Meghan, Duchess of Sussex is an American member of the British royal family and former actress. She is married to Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, the younger son of King Charles III. Meghan was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. Her acting career began at Northwestern University. She played the part of Rachel Zane for seven seasons in the American TV legal drama Suits. She also developed a social media presence, which included The Tig , a lifestyle blog. During The Tig period, Meghan became involved in charity work focused primarily on women's issues and social justice. She was marrie...
Go to Profile#39005
Hiroshi Fujita
#39017
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
is a retired Japanese mathematician who worked in partial differential equations. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Tokyo, under the supervision of Tosio Kato. Mathematical contributions His most widely cited paper, published in 1966, studied the partial differential equationand showed that there is a "threshold" value for which implies the existence of nonconstant solutions which exist for all positive and all real values of the variables. By contrast, if is between and then such solutions cannot exist. This paper initiated the study of similar and analogous phenomena for various parabolic and hyperbolic partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#39006
Igor Pak
#39018
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Igor Pak is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, working in combinatorics and discrete probability. He formerly taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Minnesota, and he is best known for his bijective proof of the hook-length formula for the number of Young tableaux, and his work on random walks. He was a keynote speaker alongside George Andrews and Doron Zeilberger at the 2006 Harvey Mudd College Mathematics Conference on Enumerative Combinatorics.
Go to Profile#39007
Roland Pattillo
#39019
Overall Influence
Roland A. Pattillo was an American medical doctor and researcher, who was noted for his involvement with the HeLa line of cells and his connection to the family of Henrietta Lacks, from whom the cells were cultured.
Go to Profile#39008
Emmet Gowin
#39020
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Emmet Gowin is an American photographer. He first gained attention in the 1970s with his intimate portraits of his wife, Edith, and her family. Later he turned his attention to the landscapes of the American West, taking aerial photographs of places that had been changed by humans or nature, including the Hanford Site, Mount St. Helens, and the Nevada Test Site. Gowin taught at Princeton University for more than 35 years.
Go to Profile#39009
Ludwig Güttler
#39021
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Ludwig Güttler is an internationally known German virtuoso on the Baroque trumpet, the piccolo trumpet and the corno da caccia. As a conductor, he founded several ensembles including the chamber orchestra Virtuosi Saxoniae. His name is sometimes written in English as Ludwig Guttler.
Go to Profile#39010
Omar Tyree
#39022
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Omar Rashad Tyree is an African-American novelist. He is known for his best-selling book For the Love of Money and Mayor for Life: The Incredible Story of Marion Barry, Jr. he co-authored with Marion Barry.
Go to Profile#39011
Christine Baranski
#39023
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Christine Jane Baranski is an American actress. She is a 15-time Primetime Emmy Award nominee, winning once in 1995 for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as Maryann Thorpe in the sitcom Cybill . Baranski additionally won a Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance in 1996. Baranski has received further critical acclaim for her performance as Diane Lockhart in the legal drama series The Good Wife and its spin-off series The Good Fight . Baranski is the most nominated performer at the Critics' Choice Television Awards, with 10 nominations.
Go to Profile#39012
Carter Heyward
#39024
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Isabel Carter Heyward is an American feminist theologian and priest in the Episcopal Church, the province of the worldwide Anglican Communion in the United States. In 1974, she was one of the Philadelphia Eleven, eleven women whose ordinations eventually paved the way for the recognition of women as priests in the Episcopal Church in 1976.
Go to Profile#39013
Anne Sjerp Troelstra
#39025
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Anne Sjerp Troelstra was a professor of pure mathematics and foundations of mathematics at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation of the University of Amsterdam. He was a constructivist logician, who was influential in the development of intuitionistic logic With Georg Kreisel, he was a developer of the theory of choice sequences. He wrote one of the first texts on linear logic, and, with Helmut Schwichtenberg, he co-wrote an important book on proof theory.
Go to Profile#39014
Esko Ukkonen
#39026
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Esko Juhani Ukkonen is a Finnish theoretical computer scientist known for his contributions to string algorithms, and particularly for Ukkonen's algorithm for suffix tree construction. He is a professor emeritus of the University of Helsinki.
Go to Profile#39015
Pascal Obispo
#39027
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Pascal Michel Obispo is a French singer-songwriter. Biography Pascal Obispo, son of Max Obispo and Nicole Guérin , was born on 8 January 1965 in Bergerac. After the divorce of his parents in 1978 he was raised by his mother, who decided to settle in Rennes. His father Max gained some notoriety by publishing two books, one on football, and Le Sable d'Ararat in 2010, a novel born from a meeting with the Armenian Minister of Culture Hasmik Boghossian when he discovers the similarities between the Armenian and Basque languages.
Go to Profile#39016
Donald Triplett
#39028
Overall Influence
1933 - 2023 (90 years)
Donald Gray Triplett was an American banker known for being the first person diagnosed as autistic. He was first diagnosed by Leo Kanner in 1943, and was labeled as "Case 1". Triplett was noted for his savant abilities, particularly the ability to name musical notes played on a piano and the ability to perform rapid mental multiplication.
Go to Profile#39017
Alexander Abian
#39029
Overall Influence
1923 - 1999 (76 years)
Alexander Abian was an Iranian-born Armenian-American mathematician who taught for over 25 years at Iowa State University and became notable for his frequent posts to various Usenet newsgroups, and his advocacy for the destruction of the moon.
Go to Profile#39018
Curt Smith
#39030
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Curt Smith is a British singer, songwriter, musician and record producer, who is best known as the co-lead vocalist, bassist and co-founding member of the pop rock band Tears for Fears along with childhood friend Roland Orzabal. Smith has co-written several of the band's songs, and sings lead vocals on the hits "Mad World", "Pale Shelter", "Change", "The Way You Are", "Everybody Wants to Rule the World", and "Advice for the Young at Heart".
Go to Profile#39019
Hung Liu
#39031
Overall Influence
1948 - 2021 (73 years)
Hung Liu was a Chinese-born American contemporary artist. She was predominantly a painter, but also worked with mixed-media and site-specific installation and was also one of the first artists from China to establish a career in the United States.
Go to Profile#39020
Geraldo Alckmin
#39032
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Geraldo José Rodrigues Alckmin Filho is a Brazilian physician and politician who has served as the 26th vice president of Brazil since 1 January 2023. He previously served as the Governor of São Paulo from 2001 to 2006, and then again from 2011 to 2018, the longest term served in that state since the end of the Military dictatorship in Brazil. He was the Brazilian Social Democracy Party presidential nominee for the 2018 Brazilian presidential election, when he finished in fourth place, as well for the 2006 Brazilian presidential election, when he came in second place, losing in the runoff to...
Go to Profile#39021
James C. Conwell
#39033
Overall Influence
James C. Conwell was the president of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana, United States, where he was derogatorily referred to as "safety Jim". He has also served on the faculty at Vanderbilt University, Louisiana State University, and Grove City College.
Go to Profile#39022
Jeļena Ostapenko
#39034
Overall Influence
1997 - Present (29 years)
Jeļena Ostapenko , also known as Aļona Ostapenko, is a Latvian professional tennis player. She has career-high WTA rankings of No. 5 in singles, achieved on 19 March 2018, and No. 7 in doubles, reached on 12 September 2022.
Go to Profile#39023
Joshua Sikhu Okonya
#39035
Overall Influence
Joshua Sikhu Okonya is a Ugandan Author and an International agricultural research scientist. He is an Agronomist and a scholar who has made contributions to the body of knowledge in agriculture and the adaptation of African agricultural systems to climate change.
Go to Profile#39024
Irwin Weil
#39036
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Irwin Weil is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Northwestern University. He is noted for his work in promoting cultural exchange and mutual understanding between the USA and the USSR/Russia, and for attracting large numbers of students to his courses. He recorded a popular series of lectures of Russian Literature for The Teaching Company in 2005.
Go to Profile#39025
Rune Slagstad
#39037
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Rune Slagstad is a Norwegian historian, philosopher, legal theorist, professor and journal editor. In addition to professional work, he has since the late 1960s contributed actively to public debate on a variety of issues from Norway.
Go to Profile#39026
Yasushi Akimoto
#39038
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Yasushi Akimoto is a Japanese record producer, lyricist, and television writer, best known for creating and producing some of Japan's top idol groups, Onyanko Club and the AKB48 franchise. Total sales of the singles he has written exceed 100 million copies, making him the best-selling lyricist in Japan.
Go to Profile#39027
Ulrich Sieber
#39039
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ulrich Sieber is a German jurist, law professor, and since October 2003 a director at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. He is an honorary professor and faculty member at the law faculties of the University of Freiburg and the University of Munich.
Go to Profile#39028
Reed Whittemore
#39040
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Edward Reed Whittemore, Jr. was an American poet, biographer, critic, literary journalist and college professor. He was appointed the sixteenth and later the twenty-eighth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1964, and in 1984.
Go to Profile#39029
Ahmad-Reza Dehpour
#39041
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Ahmad-Reza Dehpour is an Iranian pharmacologist and biomedical scientist, among the top 1% in the world, and the world's highly cited researchers announced by Thomson Reuters ISI. He is currently a distinguished professor of pharmacology at the School of Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences . He is also the director of the Experimental Medicine Research Center and the director of drug discovery and evaluation committee in the National Institute for Medical Research Development.
Go to Profile#39030
Amy Schumer
#39042
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Amy Beth Schumer is an American stand-up comedian, actress, writer, producer, and director. Schumer ventured into comedy in the early 2000s before appearing as a contestant on the fifth season of the NBC reality competition series Last Comic Standing in 2007. From 2013 to 2016, she was the creator, co-producer, co-writer, and star of the Comedy Central sketch comedy series Inside Amy Schumer, for which she received a Peabody Award and was nominated for five Primetime Emmy Awards, winning Outstanding Variety Sketch Series in 2015.
Go to Profile#39031
Ute Deichmann
#39043
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ute Deichmann is an historian of modern life sciences. She is adjunct full professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, where she was the founding director of the Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences in 2007 and continues to be the director. She has also been an associate professor at the University of Cologne, Germany since 2011.
Go to Profile#39032
Walter Selke
#39044
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Walter Selke is a German retired professor for Theoretical Physics at the RWTH Aachen. After having received his doctoral degree at the Leibniz University Hannover, followed by postdoctoral positions at the Saarland University, Cornell University, and Boston University, he became in 1981 a permanent scientific staff member of Forschungszentrum Jülich. He held a similar position at the IBM Research Center in 1985/1986. Since 1996 he is a university professor at the RWTH Aachen, and he is also, since 2008, engaged in the "Jülich Aachen Research Alliance" . In 2012, he retired from his teaching...
Go to Profile#39033
Anne Buist
#39045
Overall Influence
Anne Buist is an Australian researcher and practising psychiatrist specializing in women's mental health, in particular postpartum psychiatric illnesses. She is also a novelist, author of the Natalie King crime fiction series, and co-author, with her husband Graeme Simsion, of the novels Two Steps Forward and Two Steps Onward .
Go to Profile#39034
Dan Wikler
#39046
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Daniel Isaac Wikler is an American public health educator, philosopher, and medical ethicist. He is currently the Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics and Professor of Ethics and Population Health in the Department of Global Health and Population of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. He is Director and a core faculty member in the Harvard Program in Ethics and Health . His current research interests are ethical issues in population and international health, including the allocation of health resources, health research involving human subjects, organ transpl...
Go to Profile#39035
Kane S. Yee
#39047
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Kane Shee-Gong Yee is a Chinese-American electrical engineer and mathematician. He is best known for introducing the finite-difference time-domain method in 1966. His research interests include numerical electromagnetics, fluid dynamics, continuum mechanics and numerical analysis of partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#39036
Ross Taylor
#39048
Overall Influence
1925 - 2021 (96 years)
Stuart Ross Taylor was a New Zealand geochemist and planetary scientist known for his studies of the geology of the Moon through lunar samples, the continental crust, tektites and the evolution of the Solar System. He was an emeritus professor and Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra. He died in Canberra on 23 May 2021 at the age of 95.
Go to Profile#39037
Gretchen Whitmer
#39049
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Gretchen Esther Whitmer is an American lawyer and politician serving as the 49th governor of Michigan since 2019. A member of the Democratic Party, she served in the Michigan House of Representatives from 2001 to 2006 and in the Michigan Senate from 2006 to 2015.
Go to Profile#39038
Matthew Gentzkow
#39050
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Matthew Gentzkow is an American economist and a professor of economics at Stanford University. Previously, he was the Richard O. Ryan Professor of Economics and Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He was awarded the 2014 John Bates Clark Medal. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Go to Profile#39039
László Mérő
#39051
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
László Mérő is a Hungarian research psychologist and popular science author. He has Jewish ancestry. He is a lecturer at the Experimental Psychology Department of Eötvös Loránd University and at the business school Kürt Academy. He is also a founder and leader of a software company producing computer games. One of his projects is a computer game he is developing with Ernő Rubik, the inventor of the Rubik's Cube. He is also the leader of the Hungarian team at the World Puzzle Championship. His son is Csaba Mérő, an 8-time Hungarian go champion. His daughter, Vera Mérő, is a human rights activi...
Go to Profile#39040
Alan Pilkington
#39052
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Alan Pilkington is a British engineer and researcher known for his work in technology management, operations management, Manufacturing strategy and enterprise engineering. He has been a professor at the Copenhagen Business School, Hult International Business School and S P Jain School of Global Management. He is currently Professor of Technology Management at Westminster Business School in London. He is past chair of the IEEE Technology Management Council for the UK and Republic of Ireland joint chapter on engineering management.
Go to Profile#39041
Theodore H. Geballe
#39053
Overall Influence
1920 - 2021 (101 years)
Theodore Henry Geballe was an American physicist who was a professor of applied physics at Stanford University. He was known for his work on the synthesis of novel materials of interest to several areas of physics and many interdisciplinary sciences.
Go to Profile#39042
Wylie W. Vale
#39054
Overall Influence
#39043
Rod Downey
#39055
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Rodney Graham Downey is a New Zealand and Australian mathematician and computer scientist, an emeritus professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He is known for his work in mathematical logic and computational complexity theory, and in particular for founding the field of parameterised complexity together with Michael Fellows.
Go to Profile#39044
Caroline Bruzelius
#39056
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Caroline Astrid Bruzelius is an American art historian and expert in medieval architecture. She is the Anne M. Cogan Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University. In 2020 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Go to Profile#39045
Philip Maini
#39057
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Philip Kumar Maini is a Northern Irish mathematician. Since 1998, he has been the Professor of Mathematical Biology at the University of Oxford and is the director of the Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology in the Mathematical Institute.
Go to Profile#39046
Nicholas Atkin
#39058
Overall Influence
1960 - 2009 (49 years)
Nicholas "Nick" James Atkin was professor of modern European history at the University of Reading. Early life Nicholas James Atkin was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, on 18 September 1960. He was educated at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School.
Go to Profile#39047
Peter Openshaw
#39059
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Sir Charles Peter Lawford Openshaw, DL , styled The Hon. Mr Justice Openshaw, is a retired judge of the High Court, Queen's Bench Division. Early life Openshaw was educated at Harrow School and St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#39048
Jan Roskam
#39060
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Jan Roskam was a Dutch-born American aircraft designer. He was the Deane E. Ackers Distinguished Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Kansas. He was also the author of eleven books on airplane design and flight dynamics and over 160 papers on the topics of aircraft aerodynamics, performance, design and flight controls. He founded the company DARcorporation with Willem Anemaat.
Go to Profile#39049
Mari Ostendorf
#39061
Overall Influence
Mari Ostendorf is a professor of electrical engineering in the area of speech and language technology and the vice provost for research at the University of Washington. Biography She received her doctorate degree from Stanford University in 1984 under Robert Gray and afterwards worked at BBN and as a professor at Boston University before coming to University of Washington in 1999.
Go to Profile#39050
Bruno Soares
#39062
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Bruno Fraga Soares is a Brazilian former professional tennis player who specialises in doubles. A doubles specialist, Soares won six major titles, the Australian Open and US Open in 2016 alongside Jamie Murray, and the 2020 US Open with Mate Pavić in men's doubles. In mixed doubles, Soares won the 2012 US Open partnering Ekaterina Makarova, the 2014 US Open with Sania Mirza, and the 2016 Australian Open with Elena Vesnina. He also finished runner-up at the 2013 US Open and 2020 French Open in men's doubles, and the 2013 Wimbledon Championships in mixed doubles. Soares was the fourth Brazilian...
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