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
#401
Hans Jonas
#401
Overall Influence
1903 - 1993 (90 years)
Hans Jonas was a German-born American Jewish philosopher, from 1955 to 1976 the Alvin Johnson Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Biography Jonas was born in Mönchengladbach, on 10 May 1903. He studied philosophy and theology at the University of Freiburg, the University of Berlin and the University of Heidelberg, and finally earned his Doctorate of Philosophy in 1928 from the University of Marburg with a thesis on Gnosticism entitled Der Begriff der Gnosis and directed by Martin Heidegger. During his study years his academic advisors included Edmund Husserl and Rudolf Bultmann.
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Walter Kohn
#402
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Walter Kohn was an Austrian-American theoretical physicist and theoretical chemist. He was awarded, with John Pople, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998. The award recognized their contributions to the understandings of the electronic properties of materials. In particular, Kohn played the leading role in the development of density functional theory, which made it possible to calculate quantum mechanical electronic structure by equations involving the electronic density . This computational simplification led to more accurate calculations on complex systems as well as many new insights, and ...
Go to Profile#403
Kingsley Amis
#403
Overall Influence
1922 - 1995 (73 years)
Sir Kingsley William Amis was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social and literary criticism. He is best known for satirical comedies such as Lucky Jim , One Fat Englishman , Ending Up , Jake's Thing and The Old Devils .
Go to Profile#404
Toni Morrison
#404
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison , known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved ; she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Go to Profile#405
Mary Ainsworth
#405
Overall Influence
1913 - 1999 (86 years)
Mary Dinsmore Ainsworth was an American-Canadian developmental psychologist known for her work in the development of the attachment theory. She designed the strange situation procedure to observe early emotional attachment between a child and their primary caregiver.
Go to Profile#406
Elton John
#406
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Sir Elton Hercules John is a British singer, pianist and composer. Acclaimed by critics and musicians, particularly for his work during the 1970s and for his lasting impact on the music industry, his music and showmanship have had a significant impact on popular music. His songwriting partnership with lyricist Bernie Taupin is one of the most successful in history.
Go to Profile#407
Fethullah Gülen
#407
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Muhammed Fethullah Gülen is a Turkish Muslim scholar, preacher, and a one-time opinion leader, as de facto leader of the Gülen movement. Gülen is designated an influential neo-Ottomanist, Anatolian panethnicistist, Islamic poet, writer, social critic, and activist–dissident developing a Nursian theological perspective that embraces democratic modernity. Gülen was a local state imam from 1959 to 1981, and he was a citizen of Turkey until his denaturalization by the Turkish government in 2017. Over the years, Gülen became a centrist political figure in Turkey prior to his being there as a fugitive.
Go to Profile#408
Douglas Adams
#408
Overall Influence
1952 - 2001 (49 years)
Douglas Noël Adams was an English author, humorist, and screenwriter, best known for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . Originally a 1978 BBC radio comedy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy developed into a "trilogy" of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime. It was further developed into a television series, several stage plays, comics, a video game, and a 2005 feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#409
Annie Leibovitz
#409
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Anna-Lou Leibovitz is an American portrait photographer best known for her engaging portraits, particularly of celebrities, which often feature subjects in intimate settings and poses. Leibovitz's Polaroid photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, taken five hours before Lennon's murder, is considered one of Rolling Stone magazine's most famous cover photographs. The Library of Congress declared her a Living Legend, and she is the first woman to have a feature exhibition at Washington's National Portrait Gallery.
Go to Profile#410
Glenn T. Seaborg
#410
Overall Influence
1912 - 1999 (87 years)
Glenn Theodore Seaborg was an American chemist whose involvement in the synthesis, discovery and investigation of ten transuranium elements earned him a share of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His work in this area also led to his development of the actinide concept and the arrangement of the actinide series in the periodic table of the elements.
Go to Profile#411
Georges Canguilhem
#411
Overall Influence
1904 - 1995 (91 years)
Georges Canguilhem was a French philosopher and physician who specialized in epistemology and the philosophy of science . Life and work Canguilhem entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1924 as part of a class that included Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron and Paul Nizan. He aggregated in 1927 and then taught in lycées throughout France, taking up the study of medicine while teaching in Toulouse. He took up a post at the Clermont-Ferrand based University of Strasbourg in 1941, and received his medical doctorate in 1943, in the middle of World War II. Using the pseudonym "Lafont" Canguilhem be...
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Mortimer J. Adler
#412
Overall Influence
1902 - 2001 (99 years)
Mortimer Jerome Adler was an American philosopher, educator, encyclopedist, and popular author. As a philosopher he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. He taught at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, served as chairman of the Encyclopædia Britannica board of editors, and founded the Institute for Philosophical Research.
Go to Profile#413
William Rehnquist
#413
Overall Influence
1924 - 2005 (81 years)
William Hubbs Rehnquist was an American attorney and jurist who served on the U.S. Supreme Court for 33 years. Rehnquist was an associate justice from 1972 to 1986 and the 16th chief justice from 1986 until his death in 2005. Considered a staunch conservative, Rehnquist favored a conception of federalism that emphasized the Tenth Amendment's reservation of powers to the states. Under this view of federalism, the Court, for the first time since the 1930s, struck down an act of Congress as exceeding its power under the Commerce Clause.
Go to Profile#414
Muhammad Ali
#414
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Muhammad Ali was an American professional boxer and activist. Nicknamed "the Greatest", he is regarded as one of the most significant sports figures of the 20th century and is often regarded as the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time. He held the Ring magazine heavyweight title from 1964 to 1970. He was the undisputed champion from 1974 to 1978 and the WBA and Ring heavyweight champion from 1978 to 1979. In 1999, he was named Sportsman of the Century by Sports Illustrated and the Sports Personality of the Century by the BBC.
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Wassily Leontief
#415
Overall Influence
1906 - 1999 (93 years)
Wassily Wassilyevich Leontief , was a Soviet-American economist known for his research on input–output analysis and how changes in one economic sector may affect other sectors. Leontief won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1973, and four of his doctoral students have also been awarded the prize .
Go to Profile#416
Barbara McClintock
#416
Overall Influence
1902 - 1992 (90 years)
Barbara McClintock was an American scientist and cytogeneticist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927. There she started her career as the leader of the development of maize cytogenetics, the focus of her research for the rest of her life. From the late 1920s, McClintock studied chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize. She developed the technique for visualizing maize chromosomes and used microscopic analysis to demonstrate many fundamental genetic ideas. One of those ideas was...
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Stephen Breyer
#417
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Stephen Gerald Breyer is an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1994 until his retirement in 2022. He was nominated by President Bill Clinton, and replaced retiring justice Harry Blackmun. Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was nominated by President Joe Biden, was his designated successor. Breyer was generally associated with the liberal wing of the Court. He is now the Byrne Professor of Administrative Law and Process at Harvard Law School.
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Laurent Schwartz
#418
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
Laurent-Moïse Schwartz was a French mathematician. He pioneered the theory of distributions, which gives a well-defined meaning to objects such as the Dirac delta function. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1950 for his work on the theory of distributions. For several years he taught at the École polytechnique.
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Stephen Smale
#419
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Stephen Smale is an American mathematician, known for his research in topology, dynamical systems and mathematical economics. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966 and spent more than three decades on the mathematics faculty of the University of California, Berkeley , where he currently is Professor Emeritus, with research interests in algorithms, numerical analysis and global analysis.
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Max Tegmark
#420
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
#421
Eric Kandel
#421
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Eric Richard Kandel is an Austrian-born American medical doctor who specialized in psychiatry, a neuroscientist and a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. He was a recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. He shared the prize with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard.
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Frank Wilczek
#422
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Frank Wilczek was born in Mineola, New York in 1951. He earned his BSc degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago and proceeded to complete MA and PhD degrees at Princeton in Math and Physics respectively. Wilczek is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is also Founding Director of the T. D. Lee Institute as well as Chief Scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). Further, he is Distinguished Professor at Arizona State University (ASU) and full Professor at Stockholm University.
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Orson Scott Card
#423
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Orson Scott Card is an American writer known best for his science fiction works. He is the first and only person to win a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award in consecutive years, winning both awards for his novel Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead . A feature film adaptation of Ender's Game, which Card co-produced, was released in 2013. Card also wrote the Locus Fantasy Award-winning series The Tales of Alvin Maker .
Go to Profile#424
Reinhard Selten
#424
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Reinhard Justus Reginald Selten was a German economist, who won the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences . He is also well known for his work in bounded rationality and can be considered one of the founding fathers of experimental economics.
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R. M. Hare
#425
Overall Influence
1919 - 2002 (83 years)
Richard Mervyn Hare , usually cited as R. M. Hare, was a British moral philosopher who held the post of White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1966 until 1983. He subsequently taught for a number of years at the University of Florida. His meta-ethical theories were influential during the second half of the twentieth century.
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Bruce Sterling
#426
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author known for his novels and short fiction and editorship of the Mirrorshades anthology. In particular, he is linked to the cyberpunk subgenre.
Go to Profile#427
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#427
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
#428
René Thom
#428
Overall Influence
1923 - 2002 (79 years)
René Frédéric Thom was a French mathematician, who received the Fields Medal in 1958. He made his reputation as a topologist, moving on to aspects of what would be called singularity theory; he became world-famous among the wider academic community and the educated general public for one aspect of this latter interest, his work as founder of catastrophe theory .
Go to Profile#429
Samuel Eilenberg
#429
Overall Influence
1913 - 1998 (85 years)
Samuel Eilenberg was a Polish-American mathematician who co-founded category theory and homological algebra. Early life and education He was born in Warsaw, Kingdom of Poland to a Jewish family. He spent much of his career as a professor at Columbia University.
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Jeffrey Ullman
#430
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
#431
Nicholas Rescher
#431
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
#432
Andrew Wiles
#432
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#433
Simon Reynolds
#433
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Simon Reynolds is an English music journalist and author who began his career at the Melody Maker in the mid-1980s. He subsequently worked as a freelancer and published a number of books on music and popular culture.
Go to Profile#434
William Friedkin
#434
Overall Influence
1935 - 2023 (88 years)
William David Friedkin was an American film, television and opera director, producer, and screenwriter who was closely identified with the "New Hollywood" movement of the 1970s. Beginning his career in documentaries in the early 1960s, he is best known for his crime thriller film The French Connection , which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and the horror film The Exorcist , which earned him another Academy Award nomination for Best Director.
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Pablo Escobar
#435
Overall Influence
1949 - 1993 (44 years)
Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was a Colombian drug lord, narcoterrorist, and politician, who was the founder and sole leader of the Medellín Cartel. Dubbed "the king of cocaine", Escobar was one of the wealthiest criminals in history, having amassed an estimated net worth of US$30 billion by the time of his death—equivalent to $70 billion as of 2022—while his drug cartel monopolized the cocaine trade into the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s.
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Daniel Libeskind
#436
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Daniel Libeskind is a Polish-American architect, artist, professor and set designer. Libeskind founded Studio Daniel Libeskind in 1989 with his wife, Nina, and is its principal design architect. He is known for the design and completion of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany, that opened in 2001. On February 27, 2003, Libeskind received further international attention after he won the competition to be the master plan architect for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan.
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L. Sprague de Camp
#437
Overall Influence
1907 - 2000 (93 years)
Lyon Sprague de Camp was an American writer of science fiction, fantasy and non-fiction. In a career spanning 60 years, he wrote over 100 books, including novels and works of non-fiction, including biographies of other fantasy authors. He was a major figure in science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s.
Go to Profile#438
Stafford Beer
#438
Overall Influence
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Anthony Stafford Beer was a British theorist, consultant and professor at the Manchester Business School. He is best known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics.
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Philip Zimbardo
#439
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
#440
Hussein of Jordan
#440
Overall Influence
1935 - 1999 (64 years)
Hussein bin Talal was King of Jordan from 11 August 1952 until his death in 1999. As a member of the Hashemite dynasty, the royal family of Jordan since 1921, Hussein was a 40th-generation direct descendant of Muhammad.
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Har Gobind Khorana
#441
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Har Gobind Khorana was an Indian-American biochemist. While on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for research that showed the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code of the cell and control the cell's synthesis of proteins. Khorana and Nirenberg were also awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in the same year.
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James Tobin
#442
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
James Tobin was an American economist who served on the Council of Economic Advisers and consulted with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and taught at Harvard and Yale Universities. He contributed to the development of key ideas in the Keynesian economics of his generation and advocated government intervention in particular to stabilize output and avoid recessions. His academic work included pioneering contributions to the study of investment, monetary and fiscal policy and financial markets. He also proposed an econometric model for censored dependent variables, the well...
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Norman Borlaug
#443
Overall Influence
1914 - 2009 (95 years)
Norman Ernest Borlaug was an American agronomist who led initiatives worldwide that contributed to the extensive increases in agricultural production termed the Green Revolution. Borlaug was awarded multiple honors for his work, including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.
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Herman Daly
#444
Overall Influence
1938 - 2022 (84 years)
Herman Edward Daly was an American ecological and Georgist economist and professor at the School of Public Policy of University of Maryland, College Park in the United States, best known for his time as a senior economist at the World Bank from 1988 to 1994. In 1996, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "defining a path of ecological economics that integrates the key elements of ethics, quality of life, environment and community."
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Santiago Calatrava
#445
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Santiago Calatrava Valls is a Spanish architect, structural engineer, sculptor and painter, particularly known for his bridges supported by single leaning pylons, and his railway stations, stadiums, and museums, whose sculptural forms often resemble living organisms. His best-known works include the Olympic Sports Complex of Athens, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Turning Torso tower in Malmö, Sweden, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York City, the Auditorio de Tenerife in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in Dallas, Texas, and his largest project, the City of Arts and Sciences and Opera House in his birthplace, Valencia.
Go to Profile#446
Alexis Petridis
#446
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Alexis Petridis is a British journalist. He is the head rock and pop music critic for The Guardian, and a regular contributor for GQ. In addition to his music journalism for the paper, he has written a weekly column in the fashion section of The Guardian Weekend section, as well as contributing to its Lost in Showbiz column.
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Robert Aumann
#447
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Robert John Aumann is an Israeli-American mathematician, and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He is a professor at the Center for the Study of Rationality in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. He also holds a visiting position at Stony Brook University, and is one of the founding members of the Stony Brook Center for Game Theory.
Go to Profile#448
Brett Kavanaugh
#448
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Brett Michael Kavanaugh is an American lawyer and jurist serving as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President Donald Trump on July 9, 2018, and has served since October 6, 2018. He was previously a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Go to Profile#449
Derek Walcott
#449
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Sir Derek Alton Walcott OM was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros , which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize for h...
Go to Profile#450
Robert Conquest
#450
Overall Influence
1917 - 2015 (98 years)
George Robert Acworth Conquest was a British-American historian and poet. He was briefly a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain but later wrote several books against Communism. A long-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Conquest was most notable for his work on the Soviet Union. His books included The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s ; The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine ; and Stalin: Breaker of Nations . He was also the author of two novels and several collections of poetry.
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