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
#40101
Just Blaze
#40114
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Justin Gregory Smith , known professionally as Just Blaze, is an American hip hop producer and DJ. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Blaze attended Rutgers University for three years before dropping out to pursue his musical career. His stage name was inspired by the character Blaze Fielding from the Streets of Rage video game series. Blaze gained recognition as a producer for Roc-A-Fella Records in the early 2000s, utilizing the "chipmunk soul" sampling style that was prominent in the early to mid-2000s hip-hop scene.
Go to Profile#40102
Peter Teichner
#40115
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Peter Teichner is a German mathematician and one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. His main areas of work are topology and geometry. Life In 1988, Peter Teichner graduated from the University of Mainz with a degree in mathematics. After graduating, he worked for one year in Canada, funded by the "Government of Canada Award", at McMaster University in Hamilton . From 1989 to 1990 he was affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics. From 1990 to 1992 he worked at the University of Mainz as a research assistant, and in 1992 he received his doctorate with Matthias Kreck as his advisor.
Go to Profile#40103
Barron H. Lerner
#40116
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Barron H. Lerner is an American member of the faculty at the New York University Langone School of Medicine. He received his M.D. from Columbia in 1986 and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington in 1996. In addition to his research, Lerner practices internal medicine and teaches medical ethics and the history of medicine.
Go to Profile#40104
Ofer Bar-Yosef
#40117
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
Ofer Bar-Yosef was an Israeli archaeologist and anthropologist whose main field of study was the Palaeolithic period. From 1967 Bar-Yosef was Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the institution where he originally studied archaeology at undergraduate and post-graduate levels in the 1960s. In 1988, he moved to the United States of America where he became Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Harvard University as well as Curator of Palaeolithic Archaeology at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He was a professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#40105
Luc-Normand Tellier
#40118
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Luc-Normand Tellier is a Professor Emeritus in spatial economics of the University of Quebec at Montreal. Education and teaching After teaching for two years at the Collège Saint-André of Kigali, Rwanda, as a Canadian Peace Corps volunteer, Tellier studied both economics and city planning. He obtained a bachelor's degree in Economics and a master's degree in City planning from the University of Montreal, as well as a master's degree and a Ph.D. in Regional science from the "Ivy League" University of Pennsylvania. Later, he taught urban economics at the "Institut d’urbanisme" of the Univ...
Go to Profile#40106
Frances Karttunen
#40119
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Frances Esther Karttunen , also known as Frances Ruley Karttunen, is an American academic linguist, historian and author. Education and career She received her BA in 1964 from Harvard and her PhD in 1970 from Indiana University, with a dissertation entitled Problems in Finnish Phonology. Most of her academic career was spent in association with the University of Texas at Austin, where she held researcher and lecturer positions for over 30 years, until her retirement in 2000, as senior university research scientist at the Linguistics Research Center.
Go to Profile#40107
Louis Owens
#40120
Overall Influence
1948 - 2002 (54 years)
Louis Dean Owens was a novelist and scholar who claimed Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish-American descent. He is known for a series of Native-themed mystery novels and for his contributions to the then-fledgling field of Native American Studies. He was also a professor of English and Native American studies, and frequently contributed articles, literary criticism and reviews to periodicals. Owens died by suicide in 2002.
Go to Profile#40108
Steve A. Kay
#40121
Overall Influence
Steve A. Kay is a British-born chronobiologist who mainly works in the United States. Dr. Kay has pioneered methods to monitor daily gene expression in real time and characterized circadian gene expression in plants, flies and mammals. In 2014, Steve Kay celebrated 25 years of successful chronobiology research at the Kaylab 25 Symposium, joined by over one hundred researchers with whom he had collaborated with or mentored. Dr. Kay, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A., briefly served as president of The Scripps Research Institute. and is currently a professor at the University of Southern California.
Go to Profile#40109
Kevin Blackwell
#40122
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Kevin Patrick Blackwell is an English football manager and former professional player. Early career Blackwell was born in Luton and began his football career as an apprentice at Cambridge United, with Ron Atkinson as his manager. After failing to make the grade at the Abbey Stadium, he moved into Non-League football, playing for Bedford Town while working as a bricklayer. He later played in the 1978 FA Vase final for Barton Rovers and for Middlesex Wanderers before being signed by Barnet.
Go to Profile#40110
Lisa Levin
#40123
Overall Influence
Lisa A. Levin is a Distinguished Professor of biological oceanography and marine ecology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She holds the Elizabeth Hamman and Morgan Dene Oliver Chair in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation Science. She studies coastal and deep-sea ecosystems and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Go to Profile#40111
Hifikepunye Pohamba
#40124
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Hifikepunye Lucas Pohamba is a Namibian politician who served as the second president of Namibia from 21 March 2005 to 21 March 2015. He won the 2004 presidential election overwhelmingly as the candidate of SWAPO, and was reelected in 2009. Pohamba was the president of SWAPO from 2007 until his retirement in 2015. He is a recipient of the Ibrahim Prize.
Go to Profile#40112
Josephine Webb
#40125
Overall Influence
1918 - Present (108 years)
Josephine Webb is an American electrical engineer who obtained two patents for oil circuit breaker contact design, known colloquially as "switchgear". She designed an eighteen-inch, full newspaper size fax machine with superior resolution. She co-founded Webb Consulting Company with her husband, also an electrical engineer. She is one of the first female electrical engineers, and considered a pioneer by the Society of Women Engineers. At Purdue University, she was one out of a total of five women engineers. She turned 100 in June 2018.
Go to Profile#40113
Piotr Czauderna
#40126
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Piotr Stefan Czauderna is a member of the National Development Council of Poland. He was appointed to the position by President Andrzej Duda in November 2015. Biography Czauderna was born on 11 August 1962. He is a graduate of the Gdańsk Medical University and the University of Provence. A professor of medical science since 2013, Czauderna is currently the Head of the Surgery and Urology Clinic for Children and Adolescents of the Gdańsk Medical University. He was elected to the Gdańsk City Council in 2014 from the Law and Justice party. Czauderna is the vice chairman of the Gdańsk City Council.
Go to Profile#40114
Ilya Kaminsky
#40127
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Ilya Kaminsky is a USSR-born, Ukrainian-Jewish-American poet, critic, translator and professor. He is best known for his poetry collections Dancing in Odesa and Deaf Republic, which have earned him several awards.
Go to Profile#40115
Daniel Dayan
#40128
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Daniel Dayan is a French social scientist born in 1943. A fellow of the Marcel Mauss Institute at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Levinas European Institute, Dayan has been Director of Research in Sociology at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, professor of Media Theory at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques Paris, and a Hans Speier Visiting Professor at the New school for Social Research.
Go to Profile#40116
Raymond L. White
#40129
Overall Influence
1943 - 2018 (75 years)
Raymond Leslie White was an American geneticist. Biography Born in Orlando, Florida in 1943, White earned a bachelor's degree in microbiology from the University of Oregon and obtained a doctorate, also in microbiology, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971. He taught at the University of Utah School of Medicine and later moved to the University of California, San Francisco as Rudi Schmid Distinguished Professor in Neurology and was a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator from 1980 to 1994.
Go to Profile#40117
David Horowitz
#40130
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
David Charles Horowitz was an American consumer reporter and journalist for KNBC in Los Angeles, whose Emmy-winning TV program Fight Back! would warn viewers about defective products, test advertised claims to see if they were true, and confront corporations about customer complaints. He was on the boards of directors of the National Broadcast Editorial Conference, City of Hope, and the American Cancer Society, and he served on the advisory boards of the FCC and the Los Angeles District Attorney.
Go to Profile#40118
Akkineni Nageswara Rao
#40131
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Akkineni Nageswara Rao , widely known as ANR, was an Indian actor and producer, known for his work majorly in Telugu cinema. He starred in many landmark films in his seventy five-year career, and became one of the most prominent figures of Telugu cinema. Akkineni received seven state Nandi Awards, and five Filmfare Awards South. He is a recipient of the Dada Saheb Phalke Award and Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian award, for his contributions to the fields of Art and Cinema.
Go to Profile#40119
Paul Avrich
#40132
Overall Influence
1931 - 2006 (75 years)
Paul Avrich was an American historian specialising in the 19th and early 20th century anarchist movement in Russia and the United States. He taught at Queens College, City University of New York, for his entire career, from 1961 to his retirement as distinguished professor of history in 1999. He wrote ten books, mostly about anarchism, including topics such as the 1886 Haymarket Riot, 1921 Sacco and Vanzetti case, 1921 Kronstadt naval base rebellion, and an oral history of the movement.
Go to Profile#40120
Hooshang Amirahmadi
#40133
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Hooshang Amirahmadi is an Iranian American academic and political analyst. Amirahmadi is a professor of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, at Rutgers University. He has stepped forward as a candidate for Iranian presidential elections in 2005, 2013 and 2017.
Go to Profile#40121
Iran Darroudi
#40134
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Iran Darroudi was an Iranian contemporary artist. Her art consists of surreal paintings dealing with Iranian themed imagery and strong lighting. She lived between Tehran and Paris for many years. Early life Born in Mashhad, Iran, to a family consisting of traders from Khorasan on her father's side and on her mother's side the family were Caucasian merchants who had settled in Mashhad. Her family moved to Hamburg, Germany, for her father's business, in 1937, and by the early 1940s they were forced to leave because of the beginnings of World War II. By 1945 her family returned to Mashhad.
Go to Profile#40122
Linda G. Mills
#40135
Overall Influence
Linda G. Mills is an American social worker and academic administrator who has served as the 17th president of New York University since July 1, 2023. Education Mills received a B.A. in history and social thought from the University of California, Irvine in 1979. She received a J.D. from the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco in 1983 and an M.S.W. from San Francisco State University in 1986. She earned a Ph.D. in Health Policy in 1994 from Brandeis University, where she was a Pew Scholar. She was admitted to the California Bar in 1983 and first became a Licensed Clinica...
Go to Profile#40123
Christine Beeton
#40136
Overall Influence
Christine Beeton is an immunologist and associate professor at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. She works within the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics. Beeton graduated from the Faculté des Sciences de Luminy within the Université de la Mediterranée in Marseille, France and later as a postdoctoral fellow from the University of California. Her professional interests and areas of expertise include autoimmune diseases , drug development, ions and ion channels in disease, and targeted therapies.
Go to Profile#40124
Harry V. Roberts
#40137
Overall Influence
1923 - 2004 (81 years)
Harry V. Roberts , American statistician, was a distinguished teacher and a pioneer in looking at the applications of Bayesian statistics to business decision making and in Total Quality Management. Roberts began teaching at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business in 1949 as an instructor of statistics. He was promoted to assistant professor in 1951. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1955, and was appointed associate professor. He was made full professor in 1959, and was named Sigmund E. Edelstone Professor of Statistics and Quality Management in 1991. In 1997...
Go to Profile#40125
Gerald Wallace
#40138
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Gerald Jermaine Wallace is an American former professional basketball player. Nicknamed "Crash", he was named an NBA All-Star and voted to the NBA All-Defensive First Team while with the Charlotte Bobcats in 2010. He played college basketball for the Alabama Crimson Tide.
Go to Profile#40126
György Bence
#40139
Overall Influence
1941 - 2006 (65 years)
György Bence was a university professor, philosopher, dissident and political consultant. In 1979 he was among the first Hungarians who criticized together with Andrei Sakharov and others the Soviet crackdown on the Czech Charter 77 signatories.
Go to Profile#40127
Joel Brinkley
#40140
Overall Influence
1952 - 2014 (62 years)
Joel Graham Brinkley was an American syndicated columnist. He taught in the journalism program at Stanford University from 2006 until 2013, after a 23-year career with The New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1980 and was twice a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.
Go to Profile#40128
Stephan W. Koch
#40141
Overall Influence
1953 - 2022 (69 years)
Stephan W. Koch was a German theoretical physicist. He was a professor at the University of Marburg and works on condensed-matter theory, many-body effects, and laser theory. He is best known for his seminal contributions to the optical and electronic properties of semiconductors, semiconductor quantum optics, and semiconductor laser designs. Major portion of his research work has focused on the quantum physics and application potential of semiconductor nanostructures. Besides gaining fundamental insights to the many-body quantum theory, his work has provided new possibilities to develop, e.g., laser technology, based on accurate computer simulations.
Go to Profile#40129
Mitchell Berman
#40142
Overall Influence
Mitchell N. Berman is an American legal scholar. He serves as the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and, in addition, is also a professor of philosophy. He is also the Co-Director of the Institute for Law & Philosophy at the university.
Go to Profile#40130
Philip Grierson
#40143
Overall Influence
1910 - 2006 (96 years)
Philip Grierson was a British historian and numismatist, emeritus professor of numismatics at Cambridge University and a fellow of Gonville and Caius College for over seventy years. During his long and extremely prolific academic career, he built the world's foremost representative collection of medieval coins, wrote very extensively on the subject, brought it to much wider attention in the historical community and filled important curatorial and teaching posts in Cambridge, Brussels and Washington DC.
Go to Profile#40131
Ryūji Miyamoto
#40144
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Ryūji Miyamoto is a Japanese photographer, best known as the “ruins photographer”. Having studied graphic design at Tama Art University in Tokyo, he taught himself photography and began as an architectural journalist for magazines and newspapers. Inspired by the landscapes of post-war Japan that marked his childhood he came to reckon the imagery of destruction when he received a commission from Asahi Graph to document the demolition of the Nakano Prison in Tokyo.
Go to Profile#40132
Thomas Cecil Gray
#40145
Overall Influence
1913 - 2008 (95 years)
Thomas Cecil Gray CBE KCSG was a pioneering English anaesthetist. Early life Gray was born in Liverpool in 1913. The only son of Thomas and Ethel Gray of Thornton, he was educated at Ampleforth College in Yorkshire. At the age of 18, he joined the order of monks at the Benedictine college of Ampleforth, but after two months it became clear that this was not the vocation for him and he returned to Liverpool to pursue medicine, qualifying in 1937.
Go to Profile#40133
Richard Schelp
#40146
Overall Influence
1936 - 2010 (74 years)
Richard H. Schelp was an American mathematician. Schelp received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Central Missouri and his master's degree and doctorate in mathematics from Kansas State University. The adviser from his thesis was Richard Joseph Greechie. He was an associate mathematician and missile scientist at Johns Hopkins University for five years. He then became an instructor of mathematics at Kansas State University for four years. Finally in 1970 he became a professor of mathematics in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Memphis.
Go to Profile#40134
Michal Lipson
#40147
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Michal Lipson is an American physicist known for her work on silicon photonics. A member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2019, Lipson was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow for contributions to silicon photonics especially towards enabling GHz silicon active devices . Until 2014, she was the Given Foundation Professor of Engineering at Cornell University in the school of electrical and computer engineering and a member of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience at Cornell. She is now the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. In 2009 she co-founded the company PicoLuz, which develops and commercializes silicon nanophotonics technologies.
Go to Profile#40135
Paul Rock
#40148
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Paul Rock is British sociologist and criminologist, and is Professor of Social Institutions at the London School of Economics. He was a founder member of the National Deviancy Conference. Paul Rock has contributed to the field of public criminology. He believes that this field should not be looked away in the eyes of criminologist, however, he does state that public criminology does have flaws. Flaws that may not allow it to "rise" up.
Go to Profile#40136
Gauvin Alexander Bailey
#40149
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Gauvin Alexander Bailey is an American-Canadian author and art historian. He is Professor and Alfred and Isabel Bader Chair in Southern Baroque Art at Queen's University. Bailey is a correspondent étranger at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Institut de France and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He held the 2017 Panofsky Professorship at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich.
Go to Profile#40137
Christopher Tindale
#40150
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Christopher William Tindale is a Canadian philosopher specializing in rhetoric, argumentation theory, and ancient Greek philosophy. Tindale is an editor of the journal Informal Logic, and currently serves as the chair of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric. He has published numerous books and articles, translated into several languages, with a focus on argumentation and rhetoric.
Go to Profile#40138
Claire Kremen
#40151
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Claire Kremen is an American conservation biologist. She is a professor of conservation biology at the University of British Columbia, having formerly worked at the University of California, Berkeley, where she remains professor emerita.
Go to Profile#40139
Monica Youn
#40152
Overall Influence
Monica Youngna Youn is an American poet and lawyer. Life Youn was raised in Houston, Texas. She graduated from St. Agnes Academy , Princeton University, Yale Law School with a J.D., and Oxford University with a M. Phil, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.
Go to Profile#40140
Elsie Sunderland
#40153
Overall Influence
Elsie M. Sunderland is a Canadian toxicologist and environmental scientist and the Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Chemistry at Harvard University. She studies processes through which human activities increase and modify pollutants in natural ecosystems and living systems.
Go to Profile#40141
Barry Ulanov
#40154
Overall Influence
1918 - 2000 (82 years)
Baruch "Barry" Ulanov was an American writer, perhaps best known as a jazz critic. Background Barry Ulanov was born in Manhattan, New York City. He received early instruction on the violin from his father Nathan who was concertmaster for Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra. He ceased playing the instrument after a car crash in which he broke both wrists. He studied at Columbia University taking his BA there in 1939. While at Columbia, he joined the Boar's Head Society and wrote about jazz and also attended jazz concerts, including an early performance of "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holida...
Go to Profile#40142
Dale Murphy
#40155
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Dale Bryan Murphy is an American former professional baseball player. During an 18-year career in Major League Baseball from to , he played as an outfielder, catcher, and first baseman for the Atlanta Braves, Philadelphia Phillies, and Colorado Rockies; Murphy is best noted for his many years with the Braves. His entire MLB career was spent in the National League , during which time he won consecutive Most Valuable Player awards , the Silver Slugger Award for four straight years , and the Gold Glove Award for five straight years . Murphy is a member of the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame, Georg...
Go to Profile#40143
Susan Stewart
#40156
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Susan Stewart is an American poet and literary critic. She is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English, emerita, at Princeton University. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Go to Profile#40144
Anne Mills
#40157
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Dame Anne Jane Mills, is a British authority on health economics. She is deputy director and Provost and Professor of Health Economics and Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Go to Profile#40145
Patrick Michel
#40158
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Patrick Michel is a French planetary scientist, Senior Researcher at CNRS , leader of the team TOP of the CNRS and Université Côte d'Azur Lagrange Laboratory at the Côte d'Azur Observatory in Nice , and also a Global Fellow of the University of Tokyo.
Go to Profile#40146
Helen O'Connell
#40159
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Helen E. O'Connell is an Australian professor of urology and a pioneer in the anatomical study of the clitoris. She is a leading researcher in the area of female pelvic anatomy and was the first woman to complete training as a urologist in Australia.
Go to Profile#40147
Anscar Chupungco
#40160
Overall Influence
1939 - 2013 (74 years)
Dom Anscar Chupungco, O.S.B., STD was a Filipino Benedictine monk, who was a noted liturgist, theologian and a mentor to all Filipino liturgists and countless students of the Pontifical Atheneum of St. Anselm in Rome and San Beda University in Manila. He was known for integrating local customs and traditions into the Catholic Mass.
Go to Profile#40148
Raúl Anguiano
#40161
Overall Influence
1923 - 2006 (83 years)
José Raúl Anguiano Valadez was a notable Mexican painter of the 20th century, part of the “second generation” of Mexican muralists which continued the tradition of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros but experimented with it as well. Anguiano was born during the height of the Mexican Revolution, which would inspire a majority of his mural painting. He studied painting in his hometown of Guadalajara before moving to Mexico City to begin his career. His first major exhibition was held at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, at age 20. His works include over 100 individual and collective exhibitions with 50 murals, mostly in Mexico and the United States.
Go to Profile#40149
Yuri Struchkov
#40162
Overall Influence
1926 - 1995 (69 years)
Yuri Timofeevich Struchkov was a Russian and Soviet chemist. He was a prominent scientist in the field X-ray crystallography, a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the vice-president of the International Union of Crystallography . Struchkov was the founder and the first Director of the X-Ray Structural Laboratory of Nesmeyanov Institute of Organoelement Compounds and X-Ray Structural Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences . He made important contributions to the fields of chemistry and crystallography of organic, organoelement and coordination compounds. As an aut...
Go to Profile#40150
David Warner
#40163
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
David Andrew Warner is an Australian international cricketer and a former captain of the Australian national team in limited overs formats and a former Test vice-captain. A left-handed opening batsman, Warner is the first Australian cricketer in 132 years to be selected for the national team in any format without experience in first-class cricket. He is considered one of the best batsmen of this generation, and one of the greatest opening batsmen of all time across all three formats. He plays for New South Wales and Sydney Thunder in domestic cricket. Warner was a prominent member of the vic...
Go to Profile