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
#4001
Henry N. Cobb
#4008
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Henry Nichols Cobb was an American architect and founding partner with I.M. Pei and Eason H. Leonard of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, an international architectural firm based in New York City. Early life Henry N. Cobb was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Elsie Quincy and Charles Kane Cobb, an investment counselor. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College, and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Go to Profile#4002
Stephen Resnick
#4009
Overall Influence
1938 - 2013 (75 years)
Stephen Alvin Resnick was an American Marxist economist. He was well known for his work on Marxian economics, economic methodology, and class analysis. His work, along with that of Wolff, is especially associated with a post-Althusserian perspective on political economy.
Go to Profile#4003
Hank Aaron
#4010
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Henry Louis Aaron , nicknamed "Hammer" or "Hammerin' Hank", was an American professional baseball right fielder and designated hitter who played 23 seasons in Major League Baseball , from 1954 through 1976. Considered one of the greatest baseball players in history, he spent 21 seasons with the Milwaukee / Atlanta Braves in the National League and two seasons with the Milwaukee Brewers in the American League . At the time of his retirement, Aaron held most of the game's key career power-hitting records. He broke the long-standing MLB record for career home runs held by Babe Ruth and remained the career leader for 33 years.
Go to Profile#4004
Robert Paul Wolff
#4011
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Robert Paul Wolff is an American political philosopher and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Wolff has written widely on topics in political philosophy, including Marxism, tolerance , political justification, and democracy.
Go to Profile#4005
Dylan Evans
#4012
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Dylan Evans is a British former academic and author who has written books on emotion and the placebo effect as well as the theories of Jacques Lacan. Life and career Early life and education Evans was born in Bristol on 29 September 1966 and went to private school at Sevenoaks School and the state-funded West Kent College of Further Education. His father is an aircraft engineer, his mother is a teacher.
Go to Profile#4006
Patricia McKinsey Crittenden
#4013
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Patricia McKinsey Crittenden is an American psychologist known for her work in the development of attachment theory and science, her work in the field of developmental psychopathology, and for creation of the Dynamic-Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation .
Go to Profile#4007
John Sentamu
#4014
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
John Tucker Mugabi Sentamu, Baron Sentamu, is a retired Anglican bishop and life peer. He was Archbishop of York and Primate of England from 2005 to 2020. Born near Kampala in Uganda, Sentamu studied law at Makerere University before gaining employment as an advocate of the Supreme Court of Uganda. Speaking out against the regime of President Idi Amin, he was briefly imprisoned before fleeing in 1974 to the United Kingdom, where he devoted himself to Anglicanism, beginning his study of theology at Selwyn College, Cambridge, in 1976 and eventually gaining a doctorate in 1984. He studied for ordination at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, and was ordained in 1979.
Go to Profile#4008
Roger Tomlinson
#4015
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Roger Frank Tomlinson was an English-Canadian geographer and the primary originator of modern geographic information systems , and has been acknowledged as the "father of GIS." Biography Roger Tomlinson was a native of Newmarket, England, and prior to attending university, he served in the Royal Air Force from 1951–1954 as a pilot and flying officer.
Go to Profile#4009
Julian Symons
#4016
Overall Influence
1912 - 1994 (82 years)
Julian Gustave Symons was a British crime writer and poet. He also wrote social and military history, biography and studies of literature. He was born in Clapham, London, and died in Walmer, Kent. Life and work Julian Symons was born in London to auctioneer Morris Albert Symons , of Russian-Polish Jewish immigrant parentage, and Minnie Louise , née Bull. He was a younger brother, and later the biographer, of writer A. J. A. Symons. Like his brother, due to the family's straitened financial circumstances, he left school at 14, having attended a "school for backward children" owing to his severe stutter.
Go to Profile#4010
Heiner Müller
#4017
Overall Influence
1929 - 1995 (66 years)
Heiner Müller was a German dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. His "enigmatic, fragmentary pieces" are a significant contribution to postmodern drama and postdramatic theatre. Biography Müller was born in Eppendorf, Saxony. He joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1946 which was in the course of the forced merger of the KPD and SPD subsumed into the Socialist Unity Party of Germany . He was soon expelled for lacking enthusiasm and failing to pay dues. In 1954 he became member of the German Writers' Association . Müller became one of the most important dramatist...
Go to Profile#4011
Werner Cohn
#4018
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Werner Cohn was a sociologist who wrote on the sociology of Jews and of Romani people, and political sociology. He was a Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia. Biography Born in Berlin, Germany, Cohn received his BSS in Sociology from City College in 1951. He completed his MA and PhD at the New School for Social Research. He joined the University of British Columbia's Department of Anthropology and Sociology in 1960 and remained there until taking early retirement in 1986. Cohn's research focused on the sociology of Jews and small political movements, and he developed an interest in researching Romani people.
Go to Profile#4012
Colin McGinn
#4019
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Colin McGinn is a British philosopher. He has held teaching posts and professorships at University College London, the University of Oxford, Rutgers University, and the University of Miami. McGinn is best known for his work in philosophy of mind, and in particular for what is known as new mysterianism, the idea that the human mind is not equipped to solve the problem of consciousness. He has written over 20 books on this and other areas of philosophy, including The Character of Mind , The Problem of Consciousness , Consciousness and Its Objects , and The Meaning of Disgust .
Go to Profile#4013
Mick Rock
#4020
Overall Influence
1948 - 2021 (73 years)
Michael David Rock was a British photographer. He photographed rock music acts such as Queen, David Bowie, Waylon Jennings, T. Rex, Syd Barrett, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and The Stooges, The Sex Pistols, Ozzy Osbourne, The Ramones, Joan Jett, Talking Heads, Roxy Music, Thin Lizzy, Geordie, Mötley Crüe, Blondie and Third Eye Blind. Often referred to as "The Man Who Shot the Seventies", he shot most of the memorable photos of Bowie as Ziggy Stardust in his capacity as Bowie's official photographer. Rock's work is held in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Go to Profile#4014
Clyde Tombaugh
#4021
Overall Influence
1906 - 1997 (91 years)
Clyde William Tombaugh was an American astronomer. He discovered Pluto in 1930, the first object to be discovered in what would later be identified as the Kuiper belt. At the time of discovery, Pluto was considered a planet, but was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. Tombaugh also discovered many asteroids, and called for the serious scientific research of unidentified flying objects.
Go to Profile#4015
George Loewenstein
#4022
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
George Loewenstein is an American educator and economist. He is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Economics and Psychology in the Social and Decision Sciences Department at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Center for Behavioral Decision Research. He is a leader in the fields of behavioral economics , neuroeconomics, Judgment and Decision Making.
Go to Profile#4016
Hildegard Peplau
#4023
Overall Influence
1909 - 1999 (90 years)
Hildegard E. Peplau was an American nurse and the first published nursing theorist since Florence Nightingale. She created the middle-range nursing theory of interpersonal relations, which helped to revolutionize the scholarly work of nurses. As a primary contributor to mental health law reform, she led the way towards humane treatment of patients with behavior and personality disorders.
Go to Profile#4017
Louis Ignarro
#4024
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Louis José Ignarro is an American pharmacologist. For demonstrating the signaling properties of nitric oxide, he was co-recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Robert F. Furchgott and Ferid Murad.
Go to Profile#4018
Paolo Borsellino
#4025
Overall Influence
1940 - 1992 (52 years)
Paolo Emanuele Borsellino was an Italian judge and prosecuting magistrate. From his office in the Palace of Justice in Palermo, Sicily, he spent most of his professional life trying to overthrow the power of the Sicilian Mafia. After a long and distinguished career, culminating in the Maxi Trial in 1986–1987, on 19 July 1992, Borsellino was killed by a car bomb in Via D'Amelio, near his mother's house in Palermo.
Go to Profile#4019
John Clive Ward
#4026
Overall Influence
1924 - 2000 (76 years)
John Clive Ward, was a Anglo-Australian physicist who made significant contributions to quantum field theory, condensed-matter physics, and statistical mechanics. Andrei Sakharov called Ward one of the titans of quantum electrodynamics.
Go to Profile#4020
Hugo F. Sonnenschein
#4027
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Hugo Freund Sonnenschein was an American economist and educational administrator. He served as president of the University of Chicago from 1993 to 2000. Early life Sonnenschein was born in New York City on November 14, 1940. He was raised in Brooklyn. He attended Oakwood School in Poughkeepsie, New York, graduating in 1957. He studied at the University of Rochester, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts in 1961. He subsequently undertook postgraduate studies at Purdue University, earning a Master of Science in 1962 and a Doctor of Philosophy two years later.
Go to Profile#4021
Henry Hill
#4028
Overall Influence
1943 - 2012 (69 years)
Henry Hill Jr. was an American mobster who was associated with the Lucchese crime family of New York City from 1955 until 1980, when he was arrested on narcotics charges and became an FBI informant. Hill testified against his former Mafia associates, resulting in 50 convictions, including those of caporegime Paul Vario and fellow associate James Burke on multiple charges. He subsequently entered the Witness Protection Program, but was removed from the program in 1987.
Go to Profile#4022
Andrei Alexandrescu
#4029
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Andrei Alexandrescu is a Romanian-American C++ and D language programmer and author. He is particularly known for his pioneering work on policy-based design implemented via template metaprogramming. These ideas are articulated in his book Modern C++ Design and were first implemented in his programming library, Loki. He also implemented the "move constructors" concept in his MOJO library. He contributed to the C/C++ Users Journal under the byline". Alexandrescu worked as a research scientist at Facebook, before departing the company in August 2015 in order to focus on developing the D programm...
Go to Profile#4023
Jacob Lawrence
#4030
Overall Influence
1917 - 2000 (83 years)
Jacob Armstead Lawrence was an American painter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism," an art form popularized in Europe which drew great inspiration from West African and Meso-American art. For his compositions, Lawrence found inspiration in everyday life in Harlem. He brought the African-American experience to life using blacks and browns juxtaposed with vivid colors. He also taught and spent 16 years as a professor at the University of Washington.
Go to Profile#4024
Carol Ryff
#4031
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Carol Diane Ryff is an American academic and psychologist. She received her doctorate in 1978. She is known for studying psychological well-being and psychological resilience. Ryff is the Hilldale Professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she directs the Institute on Aging. Ryff developed the six-factor model of psychological well-being.
Go to Profile#4025
Lorraine Kelly
#4032
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Lorraine Kelly is a Scottish television presenter, theatrical artist and journalist. She has presented various television shows for ITV, including Good Morning Britain , GMTV , This Morning , Daybreak , The Sun Military Awards , STV Children's Appeal , and her eponymous programme Lorraine .
Go to Profile#4026
Roland Petit
#4033
Overall Influence
1924 - 2011 (87 years)
Roland Petit was a French ballet company director, choreographer and dancer. He trained at the Paris Opera Ballet school, and became well known for his creative ballets. Life and work The son of shoe designer Rose Repetto, Petit was born in Villemomble, near Paris. He trained at the Paris Opéra Ballet school under Gustave Ricaux and Serge Lifar and began to dance with the corps de ballet in 1940. He founded the Ballets des Champs-Élysées in 1945 and the Ballets de Paris in 1948, at Théâtre Marigny, with Zizi Jeanmaire as star dancer.
Go to Profile#4027
Clarence Zener
#4034
Overall Influence
1905 - 1993 (88 years)
Clarence Melvin Zener was the American physicist who first described the property concerning the breakdown of electrical insulators. These findings were later exploited by Bell Labs in the development of the Zener diode, which was duly named after him. Zener was a theoretical physicist with a background in mathematics who conducted research in a wide range of subjects including: superconductivity, metallurgy, ferromagnetism, elasticity, fracture mechanics, diffusion, and geometric programming.
Go to Profile#4028
Adam Gopnik
#4035
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Adam Gopnik is an American writer and essayist. He is best known as a staff writer for The New Yorker, to which he has contributed non-fiction, fiction, memoir, and criticism since 1986. He is the author of nine books, including Paris to the Moon, Through the Children's Gate, The King in the Window, and A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. In 2020, his essay "The Driver's Seat" was cited as the most-assigned piece of contemporary nonfiction in the English-language syllabus.
Go to Profile#4029
Hirotaka Takeuchi
#4036
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
is a professor of management practice in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. He co-authored The New New Product Development Game which influenced the development of the Scrum framework. Biography Takeuchi was born in 1946 and gained a B.A. from International Christian University in Tokyo, and an M.B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. His early non-academic career included work at McCann-Erickson in Tokyo and San Francisco and at McKinsey & Company in Tokyo.
Go to Profile#4030
Alexander Vovin
#4037
Overall Influence
1961 - 2022 (61 years)
Alexander Vladimirovich Vovin was a Soviet-born Russian-American linguist and philologist, and director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, France. He was a world-renowned linguist, well known for his research on East Asian languages.
Go to Profile#4031
Adam Tooze
#4038
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
John Adam Tooze is an English historian who is a professor at Columbia University, Director of the European Institute and nonresident scholar at Carnegie Europe. Previously, he was Reader in Twentieth-Century History at the University of Cambridge and Gurnee Hart Fellow in History at Jesus College, Cambridge. After leaving Cambridge in 2009, he spent six years at Yale University as Professor of Modern German History and Director of International Security Studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, succeeding Paul Kennedy. Through his books and his online newsletter , ...
Go to Profile#4032
Richard S. Sutton
#4039
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Richard S. Sutton is a Canadian computer scientist. He is a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta and a research scientist at Keen Technologies. Sutton is considered one of the founders of modern computational reinforcement learning, having several significant contributions to the field, including temporal difference learning and policy gradient methods.
Go to Profile#4033
Mike Cernovich
#4040
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Mike Cernovich is an influential American author (Gorilla Mindset), filmmaker (Hoaxed), and podcaster with a self described “New Right” political philosophy. His primary influence on culture has been through his very large audience on Twitter where he has cultivated a right-oriented populism. Cernovich hit peak influence during the 2016 election season when he played a large role in Trump’s eventual win, often driving political news cycles, and national narratives. He was one of the earliest people to master the art of Twitter and narrative shaping. Early in the Trump presidency he had sources deep within the Trump presidency.
Go to Profile#4034
Angelo Amato
#4041
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Angelo Amato, S.D.B. is an Italian cardinal of the Catholic Church who served as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints between 2008 and 2018. He served as Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 2002 to 2008 and became a cardinal in 2010.
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E. Donnall Thomas
#4042
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Edward Donnall "Don" Thomas was an American physician, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, and director emeritus of the clinical research division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. In 1990 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Joseph E. Murray for the development of cell and organ transplantation. Thomas and his wife and research partner Dottie Thomas developed bone marrow transplantation as a treatment for leukemia.
Go to Profile#4036
Clifton Fadiman
#4043
Overall Influence
1904 - 1999 (95 years)
Clifton Paul "Kip" Fadiman was an American intellectual, author, editor, and radio and television personality. He began his work in radio, and switched to television later in his career. Background Born in Brooklyn, New York, Fadiman was a nephew of the emigree Ukrainian psychologist Boris Sidis and a first cousin of the child prodigy William James Sidis.
Go to Profile#4037
Pendleton Ward
#4044
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Ward Taylor Pendleton Johnston , known professionally as Pendleton Ward, is an American animator, screenwriter, producer, director, and voice actor who has worked for Cartoon Network Studios, Frederator Studios, and Netflix Animation. He created the series Adventure Time, the Internet series Bravest Warriors, and the adult animated interview series The Midnight Gospel.
Go to Profile#4038
Philip Wadler
#4045
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Philip Lee Wadler is a UK-based American computer scientist known for his contributions to programming language design and type theory. He is the chair of theoretical computer science at the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He has contributed to the theory behind functional programming and the use of monads; and the designs of the purely functional language Haskell and the XQuery declarative query language. In 1984, he created the Orwell language. Wadler was involved in adding generic types to Java 5.0. He is also author of...
Go to Profile#4039
Kenneth French
#4046
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Kenneth Ronald "Ken" French is the Roth Family Distinguished Professor of Finance at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College. He has previously been a faculty member at MIT, the Yale School of Management, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Go to Profile#4040
Geoffrey Samuel
#4047
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Geoffrey Samuel is an emeritus professor of religious studies at Cardiff University. He is known for his ethnographic studies of Tibetan and other Indic religions, investigating topics such as yoga, tantra, and the subtle body.
Go to Profile#4041
Rolf M. Zinkernagel
#4048
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Rolf Martin Zinkernagel AC is a professor of experimental immunology at the University of Zurich. Along with Peter C. Doherty, he shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of how the immune system recognizes virus-infected cells.
Go to Profile#4042
Richard Hamilton
#4049
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Richard William Hamilton CH was an English painter and collage artist. His 1955 exhibition Man, Machine and Motion and his 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, are considered by critics and historians to be among the earliest works of pop art. A major retrospective of his work was at Tate Modern in 2014.
Go to Profile#4043
Haim Harari
#4050
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Haim Harari is an Israeli theoretical physicist who has made contributions in particle physics, science education, and other fields. He was the President of the Weizmann Institute of Science from 1988 to 2001.
Go to Profile#4044
Robert J. Gordon
#4051
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Robert James Gordon is an American economist. He is the Stanley G. Harris Professor of the Social Sciences at Northwestern University. Gordon is one of the world’s leading experts on inflation, unemployment, and long-term economic growth. His recent work asking whether economic growth in the US is “almost over” has been widely cited, and in 2016, he was named one of the 50 most influential people in the world by Bloomberg.
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Richard Laurence Millington Synge
#4052
Overall Influence
1914 - 1994 (80 years)
Richard Laurence Millington Synge FRS FRSE FRIC FRSC MRIA was a British biochemist, and shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of partition chromatography with Archer Martin. Life Richard Laurence Millington Synge was born in West Kirby on 28 October 1914, the son of Lawrence Millington Synge, a Liverpool stock-broker, and his wife, Katherine C. Swan.
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Richard Garwin
#4053
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Richard Lawrence Garwin is an American physicist, best known as the author of the first hydrogen bomb design. In 1978, Garwin was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributing to the application of the latest scientific discoveries to innovative practical engineering applications contributing to national security and economic growth.
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Thomas Buergenthal
#4054
Overall Influence
1934 - 2023 (89 years)
Thomas Buergenthal was a Czechoslovak-born American international lawyer, scholar, law school dean, and judge of the International Court of Justice . He resigned his ICJ post as of 6 September 2010 and returned to his position at The George Washington University Law School where he was the Lobingier Professor Emeritus of Comparative Law and Jurisprudence.
Go to Profile#4048
Michael Fried
#4055
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Michael Martin Fried is a modernist art critic and art historian. He studied at Princeton University and Harvard University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford. He is the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Art History at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States.
Go to Profile#4049
Sue Johnson
#4056
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Sue Johnson is a British clinical psychologist, couples therapist and author living and working in Canada. She is known for her work in the field of psychology on bonding, attachment and adult romantic relationships.
Go to Profile#4050
Richard E. Taylor
#4057
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Richard Edward Taylor, , was a Canadian physicist and Stanford University professor. He shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics with Jerome Friedman and Henry Kendall "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics."
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