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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#3951
Bertram Kostant
#3958
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Bertram Kostant was an American mathematician who worked in representation theory, differential geometry, and mathematical physics. Early life and education Kostant grew up in New York City, where he graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1945. He went on to obtain an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Purdue University in 1950. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1954, under the direction of Irving Segal, where he wrote a dissertation on representations of Lie groups.
Go to Profile#3952
Eric von Hippel
#3959
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Eric von Hippel is an American economist and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, specializing in the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. He is best known for his work in developing the concept of user innovation – that end-users, rather than manufacturers, are responsible for a large amount of innovation. In order to describe this phenomenon, in 1986 he introduced the term lead user.
Go to Profile#3953
Floyd Abrams
#3960
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
#3954
Takis Fotopoulos
#3961
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Takis Fotopoulos is a Greek political philosopher, economist and writer who founded the Inclusive Democracy movement, aiming at a synthesis of classical democracy with libertarian socialism and the radical currents in the new social movements. He is an academic, and has written many books and over 900 articles,. He is the editor of The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy and is the author of Towards An Inclusive Democracy in which the foundations of the Inclusive Democracy project were set. His latest book is The New World Order in Action: Volume 1: Globalization, the Brexit Revolution and the "Left"- Towards a Democratic Community of Sovereign Nations .
Go to Profile#3955
Joe Harris
#3962
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Joseph Daniel Harris is a mathematician at Harvard University working in the field of algebraic geometry. After earning an AB from Harvard College, where he took Math 55, he continued at Harvard to study for a PhD under Phillip Griffiths.
Go to Profile#3956
Jean-Pierre Changeux
#3963
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Jean-Pierre Changeux is a French neuroscientist known for his research in several fields of biology, from the structure and function of proteins , to the early development of the nervous system up to cognitive functions. Although being famous in biological sciences for the MWC model, the identification and purification of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor and the theory of epigenesis by synapse selection are also notable scientific achievements. Changeux is known by the non-scientific public for his ideas regarding the connection between mind and physical brain. As put forth in his book, C...
Go to Profile#3957
Antoni Tàpies
#3964
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Antoni Tàpies i Puig, 1st Marquess of Tàpies was a Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist. Life The son of Josep Tàpies i Mestre and Maria Puig i Guerra, Antoni Tàpies Puig was born in Barcelona on 13 December 1923. His father was a lawyer and Catalan nationalist who served briefly with the Republican government. Due to this, Tàpies grew up in an environment where he was very much exposed to a cultural and social experiences of leaders in the Catalan public life and its republicanism. His maternal grandmother also exposed him to this world with her great involvement in civil and politic...
Go to Profile#3958
Rajeev Motwani
#3965
Overall Influence
1962 - 2009 (47 years)
Rajeev Motwani was an Indian American professor of Computer Science at Stanford University whose research focused on theoretical computer science. He was a special advisor to Sequoia Capital. He was a winner of the Gödel Prize in 2001.
Go to Profile#3959
Fatema Mernissi
#3966
Overall Influence
1940 - 2015 (75 years)
Fatema Mernissi was a Moroccan feminist writer and sociologist. Biography Fatema Mernissi was born on 27 September 1940 in Fez, Morocco. She grew up in the harem of her affluent paternal grandmother along with various female kin and servants. She received her primary education in a school established by the nationalist movement, and secondary level education in an all-girls school funded by the French protectorate. In 1957, she studied political science at the Sorbonne in Paris and later at Brandeis University in the US, where she gained her doctorate in 1974.
Go to Profile#3960
Sophie Muller
#3967
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Sophie Luise Elisabeth Muller is a British music video director who has directed over 300 music videos. She won a Grammy Award for Annie Lennox's 1992 Diva video album, and an MTV Video Music Award for Lennox's song "Why" from the same album. In 1993, she received a BRIT Award for "Stay" by Shakespears Sister. She won another MTV Award in 1997 for "Don't Speak" by No Doubt. Muller is a longtime collaborator of Sade, Annie Lennox, Gwen Stefani, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Garbage and Shakespears Sister.
Go to Profile#3961
Dennis Prager
#3968
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Dennis Mark Prager is an American conservative radio talk show host and writer. He is the host of the nationally syndicated radio talk show The Dennis Prager Show. In 2009, he co-founded PragerU, which primarily creates five-minute videos from an American conservative perspective, among other content.
Go to Profile#3962
Peter Kivy
#3969
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Peter Kivy was professor emeritus of musicology and philosophy at Rutgers University. He studied particularly the philosophy of music. Biography Kivy received a B.A. summa cum laude at the University of Michigan in 1956, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He earned an M.A. in philosophy in 1958 also from the University of Michigan, an A.M. in musicology at Yale University in 1960, and a PhD in philosophy from Columbia University in 1966. He first taught at Brooklyn College from 1966–67, He then joined the faculty at Rutgers, first at the Newark campus, where he became full professor in 1976, and then in 1978 moved to the university's main campus, in New Brunswick.
Go to Profile#3963
Richard Brandt
#3970
Overall Influence
1910 - 1997 (87 years)
Richard Booker Brandt was an American philosopher working in the utilitarian tradition in moral philosophy. Education and career Brandt was originally educated at Denison University, a Baptist institution he was shepherded to by his minister father, and graduated in 1930 with majors in philosophy and classical studies. In 1933 he earned another B.A., this time in the philosophy of religion, from Cambridge University. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1936. He taught at Swarthmore College before becoming Chair of the Department of Philosophy the University of Michigan in 1964, where he taught with Charles Stevenson and William K.
Go to Profile#3964
A. E. van Vogt
#3971
Overall Influence
1912 - 2000 (88 years)
Alfred Elton van Vogt was a Canadian-born American science fiction author. His fragmented, bizarre narrative style influenced later science fiction writers, notably Philip K. Dick. He was one of the most popular and influential practitioners of science fiction in the mid-twentieth century, the genre's so-called Golden Age, and one of the most complex. The Science Fiction Writers of America named him their 14th Grand Master in 1995 .
Go to Profile#3965
Eliyahu Rips
#3972
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Eliyahu Rips is an Israeli mathematician of Latvian origin known for his research in geometric group theory. He became known to the general public following his co-authoring a paper on what is popularly known as Bible code, the supposed coded messaging in the Hebrew text of the Torah.
Go to Profile#3966
Ernest Hilgard
#3973
Overall Influence
1904 - 2001 (97 years)
Ernest Ropiequet "Jack" Hilgard was an American psychologist and professor at Stanford University. He became famous in the 1950s for his research on hypnosis, especially with regard to pain control. Along with André Muller Weitzenhoffer, Hilgard developed the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scales. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Hilgard as the 29th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#3967
John J. Gumperz
#3974
Overall Influence
1922 - 2013 (91 years)
John Joseph Gumperz was an American linguist and academic. Gumperz was, for most of his career, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His research on the languages of India, on code-switching in Norway, and on conversational interaction, has benefitted the study of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, and urban anthropology.
Go to Profile#3968
Arnold Rampersad
#3975
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Arnold Rampersad is a biographer, literary critic, and academic, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and moved to the US in 1965. The first volume of his Life of Langston Hughes was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and his Ralph Ellison: A Biography was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award.
Go to Profile#3969
Mark Evanier
#3976
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Mark Stephen Evanier is an American comic book and television writer, known for his work on the animated TV series Garfield and Friends and on the comic book Groo the Wanderer. He is also known for his columns and blog News from ME, and for his work as a historian and biographer of the comics industry, such as his award-winning Jack Kirby biography, Kirby: King of Comics.
Go to Profile#3970
John Ostrom
#3977
Overall Influence
1928 - 2005 (77 years)
John Harold Ostrom was an American paleontologist who revolutionized the modern understanding of dinosaurs. Ostrom's work inspired what his pupil Robert T. Bakker has termed a "dinosaur renaissance".
Go to Profile#3971
Hilary Mantel
#3978
Overall Influence
1952 - 2022 (70 years)
Dame Hilary Mary Mantel was a British writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs and short stories. Her first published novel, Every Day Is Mother's Day, was released in 1985. She went on to write 12 novels, two collections of short stories, a personal memoir, and numerous articles and opinion pieces.
Go to Profile#3972
A. W. F. Edwards
#3979
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Anthony William Fairbank Edwards, FRS is a British statistician, geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He is the son of the surgeon Harold C. Edwards, and brother of medical geneticist John H. Edwards. He has sometimes been called "Fisher's Edwards" to distinguish him from his brother, because he was mentored by Ronald Fisher. Edwards has always had a high regard for Fisher's scientific contributions and has written extensively on them. To mark the Fisher centenary in 1990, Edwards proposed a commemorative Sir Ronald Fisher window be installed in the Dining Hall of Gonville & Caius College. ...
Go to Profile#3973
Reginald Victor Jones
#3980
Overall Influence
1911 - 1997 (86 years)
Reginald Victor Jones , FRSE, LLD was a British physicist and scientific military intelligence expert who played an important role in the defence of Britain in by solving scientific and technical problems, and by the extensive use of deception throughout the war to confuse the Germans.
Go to Profile#3974
Richard Adams
#3981
Overall Influence
1920 - 2016 (96 years)
Richard George Adams was an English novelist and writer of the books Watership Down, Maia, Shardik and The Plague Dogs. He studied modern history at university before serving in the British Army during World War II. Afterwards, he completed his studies, and then joined the British Civil Service. In 1974, two years after Watership Down was published, Adams became a full-time author.
Go to Profile#3975
George Gerbner
#3982
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
George Gerbner was a professor of communication and the founder of cultivation theory. He taught at Temple University, Villanova University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Personal life Early life and education Gerbner was born on August 8, 1919, in Budapest, Hungary.
Go to Profile#3976
Andrew Breitbart
#3983
Overall Influence
1969 - 2012 (43 years)
Andrew James Breitbart was an American conservative journalist and political commentator who was the founder of Breitbart News and a co-founder of HuffPost. After helping in the early stages of HuffPost and the Drudge Report, Breitbart created Breitbart News, a far-right news and opinion website, which has been described as misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist by academics and journalists. He played central roles in the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal, the firing of Shirley Sherrod, and the ACORN 2009 undercover videos controversy. Commenters such as Nick Gillespie and Conor Friedersdorf have ...
Go to Profile#3977
Pranab Bardhan
#3984
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Pranab Bardhan is an Indian economist who has taught and worked in the United States since 1979. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Biography Bardhan received his bachelor's degree at Presidency College, Kolkata in 1958, his master's at University of Calcutta in 1960, and his doctorate at Cambridge University in 1966 with a dissertation entitled Economic Growth and the Pattern of International Trade and Investment: A Study in Pure Theory. He taught at the University of Calcutta , MIT , Indian Statistical Institute , the Delhi School of Economics of the University of Delhi and joined the Berkeley economics department in 1977.
Go to Profile#3978
Vladimir E. Zakharov
#3985
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Vladimir Evgen'evich Zakharov was a Soviet and Russian mathematician and physicist. He was Regents' Professor of mathematics at The University of Arizona, director of the Mathematical Physics Sector at the Lebedev Physical Institute, and was on the committee of the Stefanos Pnevmatikos International Award. Zakharov's research interests covered physical aspects of nonlinear wave theory in plasmas, hydrodynamics, oceanology, geophysics, solid state physics, optics, and general relativity.
Go to Profile#3979
Frank Lampard
#3986
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Frank James Lampard is an English professional football manager and former player who was most recently caretaker manager of Premier League club Chelsea. He is widely regarded as one of Chelsea's greatest players ever, and one of the greatest midfielders of his generation. He has the record of the most goals by a midfielder in the Premier League and of scoring the most goals from outside the box . He ranked highly on a number of statistics for Premier League players for the ten years from 1 December 2000, including most games and most wins.
Go to Profile#3980
Peter Nicholls
#3987
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Peter Douglas Nicholls was an Australian literary scholar and critic. He was the creator and a co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction with John Clute. Early career Born in Australia's state of Victoria in Melbourne, he spent two decades from 1968 to 1988 as an expatriate, first in the USA, and then the UK.
Go to Profile#3981
Robert Runcie
#3988
Overall Influence
1921 - 2000 (79 years)
Robert Alexander Kennedy Runcie, Baron Runcie, was an English Anglican bishop. He was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1980 to 1991, having previously been Bishop of St Albans. He travelled the world widely to spread ecumenicism and worked to foster relations with both Protestant and Catholic churches across Europe. He was a leader of the Liberal Anglo-Catholicism movement. He came under attack for expressing compassion towards bereaved Argentines after the Falklands War of 1982, and generated controversy by supporting women's ordination.
Go to Profile#3982
Lawrence Stone
#3989
Overall Influence
1919 - 1999 (80 years)
Lawrence Stone was an English historian of early modern Britain, after a start to his career as an art historian of English medieval art. He is noted for his work on the English Civil War and the history of marriage, families and the aristocracy.
Go to Profile#3983
Jamie Zawinski
#3990
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Jamie Werner Zawinski , commonly known as jwz, is an American computer programmer, blogger and impresario. He is best known for his role in the creation of Netscape Navigator, Netscape Mail, Lucid Emacs, Mozilla.org, and XScreenSaver. He is also the proprietor of DNA Lounge, a nightclub and live music venue in San Francisco.
Go to Profile#3984
Joan Martinez Alier
#3991
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Joan Martinez Alier is a Catalan economist, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Economic History and researcher at ICTA at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He has made important contributions in ecological economics and political ecology, which he synthesised in his work on environmentalism of the poor.
Go to Profile#3985
Andrew Hodges
#3992
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Andrew Philip Hodges is a British mathematician, author and emeritus senior research fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. Education Hodges was born in London in 1949 and educated at Birkbeck, University of London, where he was awarded his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1975 for research on twistor theory supervised by Roger Penrose.
Go to Profile#3986
David Frum
#3993
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
David Jeffrey Frum is a Canadian-American political commentator and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic as well as an MSNBC contributor. In 2003, Frum authored the first book about Bush's presidency written by a former member of the administration. He has taken credit for the famous phrase "axis of evil" in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address.
Go to Profile#3987
Michael Burawoy
#3994
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
#3988
Howard Georgi
#3995
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Howard Mason Georgi III is an American theoretical physicist and the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Harvard College Professor at Harvard University. He is also director of undergraduate studies in physics. He was co-master and then faculty dean of Leverett House with his wife, Ann Blake Georgi, from 1998 to 2018. His early work was in Grand Unification and gauge coupling unification within SU and SO groups .
Go to Profile#3989
Vasily Mishin
#3996
Overall Influence
1917 - 2001 (84 years)
Vasily Pavlovich Mishin was a Russian engineer in the former Soviet Union, and a prominent rocket pioneer, best remembered for the failures in the Soviet space program that took place under his management.
Go to Profile#3990
Jeh Johnson
#3997
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Jeh Charles Johnson is an American lawyer and former government official. He was United States Secretary of Homeland Security from 2013 to 2017. From 2009 to 2012, Johnson was the general counsel of the Department of Defense during the first years of the Obama administration. Before joining the Obama administration, he was a federal prosecutor, the general counsel of the Department of the Air Force, and an attorney in private practice.
Go to Profile#3991
Robert Tjian
#3998
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Robert Tjian is a Hong Kong-born American biochemist best known for his work on eukaryotic transcription. He is currently professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute . On April 1, 2009, Tjian became the President of HHMI. On August 4, 2015, he announced that he would step down as President at the end of 2016.
Go to Profile#3992
John Mashey
#3999
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John R. Mashey is an American computer scientist, director and entrepreneur. Career Mashey holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Pennsylvania State University, where he developed the ASSIST assembler language teaching software. He worked on the PWB/UNIX operating system at Bell Labs from 1973 to 1983, authoring the PWB shell, also known as the "Mashey Shell". He then moved to Silicon Valley to join Convergent Technologies, ending as director of software. He joined MIPS Computer Systems in early 1985, managing operating systems development, and helping design the MIPS RISC architecture, as well as specific CPUs, systems and software.
Go to Profile#3993
Simon P. Norton
#4000
Overall Influence
1952 - 2019 (67 years)
Simon Phillips Norton was a mathematician in Cambridge, England, who worked on finite simple groups. Education Simon Norton was born into a Sephardi family of Iraqi descent, the youngest of three brothers.
Go to Profile#3994
John Seely Brown
#4001
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
John Seely Brown , also known as "JSB", is an American researcher who specializes in organizational studies with a particular bend towards the organizational implications of computer-supported activities. Brown served as Director of Xerox PARC from 1990 to 2000 and as Chief Scientist at Xerox from 1992 to 2002; during this time the company played a leading role in the development of numerous influential computer technologies. Brown is the co-author of The Social Life of Information, a 2000 book which analyzes the adoption of information technologies.
Go to Profile#3995
William G. Dever
#4002
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
William Gwinn Dever is an American archaeologist, scholar, historian, semiticist, and theologian. He is an active scholar of the Old Testament, and historian, specialized in the history of the Ancient Near East and the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah in biblical times. He was Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson from 1975 to 2002. He is a Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at Lycoming College in Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#3996
Bob Weinstein
#4003
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Robert Weinstein is an American film producer. He is the founder and head of Dimension Films, former co-chairman of Miramax Films and The Weinstein Company , all of which he co-founded with his older brother, Harvey. He has focused on making action and horror films.
Go to Profile#3997
Gary North
#4004
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Gary Kilgore North was an American writer, Austrian School economic historian, and leading figure in the Christian reconstructionist movement. North authored or coauthored over fifty books on topics including Reformed Protestant theology, economics, and history. He was an Associated Scholar of the Mises Institute.
Go to Profile#3998
David Eagleman
#4005
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
David Eagleman is an American neuroscientist, author, and science communicator. He teaches neuroscience at Stanford University and is CEO and co-founder of Neosensory, a company that develops devices for sensory substitution. He also directs the non-profit Center for Science and Law, which seeks to align the legal system with modern neuroscience and is Chief Science Officer and co-founder of BrainCheck, a digital cognitive health platform used in medical practices and health systems. He is known for his work on brain plasticity, time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw.
Go to Profile#3999
Teresa Amabile
#4006
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Teresa M. Amabile is an American academic who is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School. Biography Amabile is primarily known for her research and writing on creativity, dating to the late 1970s. Originally educated as a chemist, Amabile received her doctorate in psychology from Stanford University in 1977. She now studies how everyday life inside organizations can influence people and their performance. Her research encompasses creativity, productivity, innovation, and inner work life – the confluence of em...
Go to Profile#4000
Jeremy Siegel
#4007
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Jeremy James Siegel is the Russell E. Palmer Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Siegel comments extensively on the economy and financial markets. He appears regularly on networks including CNN, CNBC and NPR, and writes regular columns for Kiplinger's Personal Finance and Yahoo! Finance. Siegel's paradox is named after him.
Go to Profile