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
#39151
Jack Lambert
#39163
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
John Harold Lambert is an American former football linebacker who played his entire 11-year career for Pittsburgh Steelers of the National Football League . Recognized by the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1990 as "the greatest linebacker of his era," Lambert was the starting middle linebacker on four Super Bowl-winning teams with the Steelers. He played college football for the Kent State Golden Flashes.
Go to Profile#39152
John B. Garnett
#39164
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
John Brady Garnett is an American mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, known for his work in harmonic analysis. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 1966, under the supervision of Irving Glicksberg. He received the Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition in 2003 for his book, Bounded Analytic Functions. As of June 2011, he has supervised the dissertations of 25 students including Peter Jones and Jill Pipher.
Go to Profile#39153
Elizabeth C. Traugott
#39165
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Elizabeth Closs Traugott is an American linguist and Professor Emerita of Linguistics and English, Stanford University. She is best known for her work on grammaticalization, subjectification, and constructionalization.
Go to Profile#39154
Erroll Southers
#39166
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Erroll G. Southers is an American expert in transportation security and counterterrorism. He is the author of Homegrown Violent Extremism . Southers is a Professor of the Practice in National & Homeland Security, the Director of Homegrown Violent Extremism Studies and the Director of the Safe Communities Institute at the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy. He is also the research area leader for Countering Violent Extremism at the DHS National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events and managing director, counter-terrorism & infrastructure protection at TAL Global Corporation.
Go to Profile#39155
Thomas H. Bender
#39167
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Thomas H. Bender is an American historian, specializing in urban history and intellectual history. He joined New York University in 1974 and served there as University Professor of the Humanities from 1982 until his retirement in May 2015. He contributes regularly to the press, with articles published in The New York Times, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Newsday, among others.
Go to Profile#39156
Joachim Maier
#39168
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Joachim Maier is Emeritus Director at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart and Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society. Education and career Maier studied chemistry at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, made his Masters and PhD in Physical Chemistry there. He received his habilitation at the University of Tübingen. From 1988 to 1991 he was responsible for the activities on functional ceramics at the MPI for Metals Research in Stuttgart, and from 1988 to 1996 he taught defect chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Notwithstanding other prestigious offers, he decided in favor of the Max Planck Society.
Go to Profile#39157
Judd Hirsch
#39169
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Judd Seymore Hirsch is an American actor. He is known for playing Alex Rieger on the television comedy series Taxi , John Lacey on the NBC series Dear John , and Alan Eppes on the CBS series Numb3rs . He is also well known for his career in theatre and for his roles in films such as Ordinary People , Running on Empty , Independence Day , A Beautiful Mind , Independence Day: Resurgence , Uncut Gems , and The Fabelmans .
Go to Profile#39158
Stephen G. Post
#39170
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Stephen Garrard Post has served on the Board of the John Templeton Foundation , which focuses on virtue and public life. He is a researcher, opinion leader, medical school professor, and best-selling author who has taught at the University of Chicago Medical School, Fordham University-Marymount, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and Stony Brook University School of Medicine . He is widely known for his research on the ways in which giving can enhance the health and happiness of the giver, how empathy and compassionate care contribute to patient outcomes, ethical issues in ca...
Go to Profile#39159
Kevin Boyle
#39171
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Kevin Boyle is an American author and the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University. His 2004 book, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, won the National Book Award.
Go to Profile#39160
Michael Biehn
#39172
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Michael Connell Biehn is an American actor, primarily known for his roles in science fiction films directed by James Cameron; as Sgt. Kyle Reese in The Terminator , Cpl. Dwayne Hicks in Aliens , and Lt. Coffey in The Abyss . His other films include The Fan , Tombstone , and The Rock . On television, he has appeared in Hill Street Blues , The Magnificent Seven , and Adventure Inc. . Biehn received a Best Actor Saturn Award nomination for Aliens.
Go to Profile#39161
Ed Mayo
#39173
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Ed Mayo , is the CEO of the London-based charity Pilotlight. He is the former Secretary General of Co-operatives UK, the UK trade association for co-operatives and former chief executive of the British National Consumer Council and CEO of the NCC's successor, Consumer Focus.
Go to Profile#39162
Judith Merkle Riley
#39174
Overall Influence
1942 - 2010 (68 years)
Judith Merkle Riley was an American writer, teacher and academic who wrote six historical romance novels. Biography Judith Astria Merkle was born in 1942 and grew up in Livermore, California. Her great-uncle was baseball player Fred Merkle. Her father, Theodore Charles Merkle, ran Project Pluto, and her brothers, Ted Merkle DVM is a well respected veterinarian serving Shasta County, Ralph is a pioneer in public key cryptography, and more recently a researcher and speaker on molecular nanotechnology and cryonics. She earned a MA from Harvard University and held a Ph.D. from the University of C...
Go to Profile#39163
Sleepy Floyd
#39175
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Eric Augustus "Sleepy" Floyd is an American former professional basketball player. An NBA All-Star in 1987 as a Warrior, he is perhaps best known for his tenures for Golden State and Houston. Early life, family and education Floyd was born in Gastonia, North Carolina. He received the nickname "Sleepy" playing baseball in the fourth grade, when a spectator yelled "Get that kid out of the game. He’s sleeping."
Go to Profile#39164
Mike Mussina
#39176
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Michael Cole Mussina , nicknamed "Moose", is an American former baseball starting pitcher who played 18 seasons in Major League Baseball for the Baltimore Orioles and the New York Yankees . He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his sixth year of eligibility in 2019.
Go to Profile#39165
Antoine Song
#39177
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Antoine Song is a French mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry. In 2018, he proved Yau's conjecture. He is a Clay Research Fellow . He obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2019 under the supervision of Fernando Codá Marques.
Go to Profile#39166
Katherine MacLean
#39178
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
Katherine Anne MacLean was an American science fiction author best known for her short fiction of the 1950s which examined the impact of technological advances on individuals and society. Profile Damon Knight wrote, "As a science fiction writer she has few peers; her work is not only technically brilliant but has a rare human warmth and richness." Brian Aldiss noted that she could "do the hard stuff magnificently," while Theodore Sturgeon observed that she "generally starts from a base of hard science, or rationalizes psi phenomena with beautifully finished logic."
Go to Profile#39167
Klara Nahrstedt
#39179
Overall Influence
Klara Nahrstedt is the Ralph and Catherine Fisher Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and directs the Coordinated Science Laboratory there. Her research concerns multimedia, quality of service, and middleware.
Go to Profile#39168
Jennifer Carpenter
#39180
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Jennifer N. Carpenter is an American finance academic best known for her pioneering research into executive stock options. Other interests include fund manager compensation, survivorship bias, corporate bonds, and option pricing. She has been published in numerous journals including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Business.
Go to Profile#39169
Rex Reed
#39181
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Rex Taylor Reed is an American film critic, journalist, and media personality. Raised throughout the Southern United States and educated at Louisiana State University, Reed moved to New York City in the early 1960s to begin his career, writing about popular culture, art, and celebrities for a number of newspapers and magazines. He became a public figure in his own right, making regular appearances on television and occasionally acting in films throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Go to Profile#39170
David Breeze
#39182
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
David John Breeze, OBE, FSA, FRSE, HonFSAScot, Hon MIFA is a British archaeologist, teacher and scholar of Hadrian's Wall, the Antonine Wall and the Roman army. He studied under Eric Birley and is a member of the so-called "Durham School" of archaeology. He was a close friend and colleague of the late Dr Brian Dobson.
Go to Profile#39171
Gavin Mudd
#39183
Overall Influence
Gavin M. Mudd is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Engineering at RMIT University, Australia. He was awarded a Ph.D. in environmental engineering in 2001, from the Victoria University of Technology. Mudd's research interests include environmental impacts, management of mine wastes, acid mine drainage, sustainability frameworks, life-cycle assessment modelling and mine rehabilitation.
Go to Profile#39172
David Jacobs
#39184
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
David Arnold Jacobs was an American television writer, producer, and director. He is most well known as the creator of the CBS primetime series Dallas, Knots Landing, and Paradise. Life and career David Jacobs was born on August 12, 1939 in Baltimore, Maryland, the elder of two children to Melvin and Ruth Jacobs. His Jewish parents were of modest means, and Jacobs's father worked as a household appliance salesman. Jacobs was educated at Baltimore City College High School, and received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Soon after graduation, he moved to New York City, where he worked as an illustrator and researcher for Grolier's Encyclopedia.
Go to Profile#39173
Filipe Teles
#39185
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Filipe Teles is a political scientist and associate professor in the Department of Social, Political and Territorial Sciences at the University of Aveiro, Portugal, where he teaches courses in the fields of public policy and political science. He is acting as Prorector for Regional Development and Urban Policies at the University.
Go to Profile#39174
Menahem Golan
#39186
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Menahem Golan was an Israeli film producer, screenwriter, and director. He was best known for co-owning The Cannon Group with his cousin Yoram Globus. Cannon specialized in producing low-to-mid-budget American films, primarily genre films, during the 1980s after Golan and Globus had achieved significant filmmaking success in their native Israel during the 1970s.
Go to Profile#39175
Christophe Galfard
#39187
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Christophe Galfard is a French physicist and writer. Biography After graduating from the École Centrale Paris in 1999 and specializing in theoretical physics, he then obtained a PhD at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Stephen Hawking. He co-published with the latter and Lucy Hawking George and the Secrets of the Universe in 2007.
Go to Profile#39176
Paul Biran
#39188
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Paul Ian Biran is an Israeli mathematician. He holds a chair at ETH Zurich. His research interests include symplectic geometry and algebraic geometry. Education Born in Romania in 1969, Biran's family moved to Israel in 1971. He attended Tel Aviv University, where he earned his Bachelor's degree in 1994 and Ph.D. in 1997 under supervision of Leonid Polterovich .
Go to Profile#39177
Gautham Vasudev Menon
#39189
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Gautham Vasudev Menon is an Indian film director, screenwriter, producer and actor who predominantly works in Tamil film industry. He has also directed Telugu and Hindi films that either simultaneously shot with or remakes of his own Tamil films.
Go to Profile#39178
Carla Fehr
#39190
Overall Influence
Carla Fehr is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Waterloo where she holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy. Education and career Fehr received her bachelor's from the University of Saskatchewan in biology and philosophy, and her doctorate in philosophy from Duke University.
Go to Profile#39179
Greg Duncan
#39191
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Greg J. Duncan is an American economist who is a Distinguished Professor of Education at University of California, Irvine and an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He was the 2013 winner of the Jacobs Research Prize for his research on the long-term effects of childhood poverty, primarily through his 23 years with the Panel Study of Income Dynamics as researcher and director.
Go to Profile#39180
Mark Warburton
#39192
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Mark Warburton is an English professional football manager and former player who was most recently a first-team coach at West Ham United. As a player, Warburton was a right back at non-League level with Enfield and Boreham Wood. He began his coaching career in the academy at Watford, before moving to Brentford in February 2011, serving as a coach and sporting director until being appointed manager in December 2013. He led the club from League One to promotion to the Championship in the 2013–14 season and finished the following season with the club's best second-tier placing for 80 years. He m...
Go to Profile#39181
Stephen Henighan
#39193
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Stephen Patrick Glanvill Henighan is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, journalist, translator and academic. Early life Born in Hamburg, Germany, Henighan arrived in Canada at the age of five and grew up in rural eastern Ontario.
Go to Profile#39182
Serguei Netessine
#39194
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Serguei Netessine is a scientist, educator, academic administrator and startup investor. He is Senior Vice Dean for Innovation and Global Initiatives and Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania. Previously, he was Professor of Global Technology and Innovation at INSEAD and the Research Director of INSEAD-Wharton alliance. He is best known for his work on Business Model Innovation, Operational Excellence and Supply Chain Management.
Go to Profile#39183
Robert Everist Greene
#39195
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Robert Everist Greene is an American mathematician at UCLA. Greene was an undergraduate at Michigan State University and a Putnam Fellow in 1963. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 1969. His doctoral advisor was Hung-Hsi Wu; his doctoral thesis was titled Isometric Embeddings of Riemannian and Pseudo-Riemannian Manifolds.
Go to Profile#39184
Pier Luigi Bersani
#39196
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Pier Luigi Bersani is an Italian politician and was Secretary of the Democratic Party , Italy's leading centre-left party, from 2009 to 2013. Bersani was Minister of Industry, Commerce and Craftmanship from 1996 to 1999, President of Emilia-Romagna from 1993 to 1996, Minister of Transport from 1999 to 2001, and Minister of Economic Development from 2006 to 2008.
Go to Profile#39185
Olga Kharlampovich
#39197
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Olga Kharlampovich is a Russian-Canadian mathematician working in the area of group theory. She is the Mary P. Dolciani Professor of Mathematics at the CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College. Contributions Kharlampovich is known for her example of a finitely presented 3-step solvable group with unsolvable word problem and for the solution together with A. Myasnikov of the Tarski conjecture about equivalence of first-order theories of finitely generated non-abelian free groups and decidability of this common theory.
Go to Profile#39186
Nobuo Ikeda
#39198
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Nobuo Ikeda is a Japanese economist originally from Kyoto Prefecture. He used to be a professor at Jobu University until 2012. His current appointments are a visiting professor at SBI Graduate School in Yokohama, Kanagawa, a lecturer at Aoyama Gakuin University, and the Chief Executive Officer of Agora Institute.
Go to Profile#39187
Paul Mattick Jr.
#39199
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Paul Mattick Jr. is the son of German emigres Paul Mattick Sr. and Ilse Mattick . He was involved in the council communist group Root and Branch, which sporadically published a magazine/pamphlet series, starting in 1969. Other members included Jeremy Brecher, Alice Comack, Martin Comack, Frieda Cyker, Peter St Clair, Elizabeth Long, William Russell, Elizabeth Jones, George Scialabba, and Peter Rachleff. The group also sponsored public meetings; speakers included Ralph Miliband, Christian Wolff, Cornelius Castoriadis, Richard Lewontin, Frank Marquart, Paul Mattick, and others.
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Philip Hazel
#39200
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Philip Hazel is a computer programmer best known for writing the Exim mail transport agent in 1995 and the PCRE regular expression library in 1997. He was employed by the University of Cambridge Computing Service until he retired at the end of September 2007. In 2009 Hazel wrote an autobiographical memoir about his computing career which he updated in 2017.
Go to Profile#39189
John D. Boice Jr.
#39201
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
John Dunning Boice Jr. is an American radiation epidemiologist and health physicist. Life Boice was born in Brooklyn, New York in December 1945. His father, John Dunning Boice Sr., served in the United States Army Air Corps. His mother, Irene, was the daughter of a Pennsylvania coal miner. His father's career necessitated frequent moves for the family during Boice's childhood including three years in France. The family settled in El Paso, Texas when he was fourteen. After graduating from Bel Air High School in the city, he enrolled at Texas Western College graduating in 1967 with a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics.
Go to Profile#39190
John Imbrie
#39202
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
John Imbrie was an American paleoceanographer best known for his work on the theory of ice ages. He was the grandson of William Imbrie, an American missionary to Japan. After serving with the 10th Mountain Division in Italy during World War II, Imbrie earned his bachelor's degree from Princeton University. He then went on to receive a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1951. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1978, and both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1981. That same year, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He was awarded the Maurice Ewing Medal in 1986 by the AGU and the William H.
Go to Profile#39191
Ivan Pavlov
#39203
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Ivan Yuryevich Pavlov is a Russian advocate and open government activist. He participated in the development of Russian federal and regional freedom of information legislation. He specializes in protecting the right to access government information in Russia, and defending citizens from ungrounded accusations of disclosing state secrets, high treason, and espionage. Additionally, he focuses on raising public awareness of the need for modern legislation on state secrets and the use of current legislation as a means of repression.
Go to Profile#39192
Lauren Winner
#39204
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Lauren Frances Winner is an American historian, scholar of religion, and Episcopal priest. She is Associate Professor of Christian Spirituality at Duke Divinity School. Winner writes and lectures on Christian practice, the history of Christianity in America, and Jewish–Christian relations.
Go to Profile#39193
Kevin Willis
#39205
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Kevin Alvin Willis is an American former professional basketball player mostly known for playing with the Atlanta Hawks in the National Basketball Association . He was a 7-foot power forward/center. Excluding players not yet eligible, he holds the record for most games played among those not in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#39194
Michael Denning
#39206
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Michael Denning is an American cultural historian and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American Studies at Yale University. His work has been influential in shaping the field of American Studies by importing and interpreting the work of British Cultural Studies theorists. Although he received his Ph.D. from Yale University and studied with Fredric Jameson, perhaps the greatest influence on his work is the time he spent at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies working with Stuart Hall.
Go to Profile#39195
Giorgio Buccellati
#39207
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Giorgio Buccellati is an Italian archaeologist, best known for having discovered the ancient city of Urkesh , capital of the Hurrians, in Syria. Current position Buccellati is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and the Department of History at UCLA. He was the founding director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. He founded IIMAS – The International Institute for Mesopotamian Area Studies, of which he is currently the Director. He has also been active as a publisher, having founded Undena Publications, of which he is currently the General Editor.
Go to Profile#39196
Lorene Rogers
#39208
Overall Influence
1914 - 2009 (95 years)
Lorene Lane Rogers was an American biochemist and educator who served as the 21st President of the University of Texas at Austin. She has been described as the first woman in the United States to lead a major research university.
Go to Profile#39197
Charles Rosen
#39209
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Charles Welles Rosen was an American pianist and writer on music. He is remembered for his career as a concert pianist, for his recordings, and for his many writings, notable among them the book The Classical Style.
Go to Profile#39198
Arthur M. Wolfe
#39210
Overall Influence
1939 - 2014 (75 years)
Arthur Michael "Art" Wolfe was an American astrophysicist, professor and the former director of the Center for Astrophysics & Space Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Together with Rainer K. Sachs, he authored the paper describing the Sachs-Wolfe effect.
Go to Profile#39199
Nigel R. Franks
#39211
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Nigel R. Franks is an English emeritus professor of Animal Behaviour and Ecology at the University of Bristol. He obtained a BSc and PhD in biology at the University of Leeds. After receiving his BSc in 1977 he began his PhD, during which he spent two years doing field work in Panama on army ants with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He was awarded the Thomas Henry Huxley Award in 1980 from the Zoological Society of London for the best British PhD in Zoology. He then received a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition of 1851 allowing him to undertake postdoctoral work under Edward O.
Go to Profile#39200
Ernest Anthony Lowe
#39212
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Ernest Anthony Lowe was a British economist, and Professor of Accounting and Financial Management at the University of Sheffield, known for his work on management control, and management control systems.
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