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
#40151
Mel Ferrer
#40164
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Melchor Gastón Ferrer was an American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter. He achieved prominence on Broadway before scoring notable film hits with Scaramouche, Lili, and Knights of the Round Table. He starred opposite his wife, actress Audrey Hepburn, in War and Peace and produced her film Wait Until Dark. He also acted extensively in European films and appeared in several cult hits, including The Antichrist , The Suspicious Death of a Minor , The Black Corsair , and Nightmare City .
Go to Profile#40152
Julia Gordon
#40165
Overall Influence
Julia Gordon is a mathematician at the University of British Columbia whose research concerns algebraic geometry, including representation theory, -adic groups, motivic integration, and the Langlands program.
Go to Profile#40153
Hebe Vessuri
#40166
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Hebe Vessuri is an Argentine–Venezuelan social anthropologist. In 2017, she was recognized with the John Desmond Bernal Prize Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science. Early life and education Vessuri was born in 1942 in Buenos Aires. She married young and studied at the University of Oxford. While there, she wished to study anthropology but was unable to due to age restrictions. She received permission from the director of the Anthropology Faculty, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, to study under his supervision.
Go to Profile#40154
Abraham Siegel
#40167
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Abraham J. Siegel was Dean , and later Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management Emeritus in the MIT Sloan School of Management. List of Publications Books The Public Interest in National Labor Policy , Committee for Economic Development., New York, 1961.A Work in Progress, The MIT Sloan School of Management 2002: Looking Back, Moving Forward, MIT Sloan School of Management, 2002.
Go to Profile#40155
Jonathan M. Hall
#40168
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jonathan Mark Hall is professor of Greek history at the University of Chicago. He earned a BA from the University of Oxford in 1988 and a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1993 and he is the author of many books, including Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture, A History of the Archaic Greek World, ca. 1200-479 BCE, Artifact and Artifice: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian, and Reclaiming the Past: Argos and its Archaeological Heritage in the Modern Era, as well as various articles and reviews on Archaic and Classical Greece. His focus of research is on Greek history, historiography, and archaeology.
Go to Profile#40156
John Morrison
#40169
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
John Randall Hennigan is an American professional wrestler and actor, better known by the ring name John Morrison. He is best known for his tenures in WWE, Impact Wrestling and Lucha Underground. Hennigan currently makes appearances for All Elite Wrestling as Johnny TV, Lucha Libre AAA Worldwide as Johnny Caballero and Major League Wrestling under his real name. He also makes appearances for the independent circuit under various ring names.
Go to Profile#40157
Raymond Chang
#40170
Overall Influence
1939 - 2017 (78 years)
Raymond Chang was an emeritus professor at Williams College in the Department of Chemistry and a textbook author. His most popular textbook was titled Chemistry, which was published up to the thirteenth edition. He also published a few children's books.
Go to Profile#40158
Mark Cousins
#40171
Overall Influence
1947 - 2020 (73 years)
Mark Cousins was a British cultural critic and architectural theorist. He studied Art History at Merton College, Oxford and was a research student at the Warburg Institute. From 1993 he was the Director of General Studies and Head of the Graduate Programme in Histories and Theories at the Architectural Association. He was also Visiting Professor of Architecture at Columbia University and at Southeast University in Nanjing, China.
Go to Profile#40159
Les Aspin
#40172
Overall Influence
1938 - 1995 (57 years)
Leslie Aspin Jr. was an American Democratic Party politician who served as the U.S. representative for Wisconsin's 1st congressional district from 1971 to 1993 and as the 18th United States Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1994.
Go to Profile#40160
Thomas S. Monson
#40173
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Thomas Spencer Monson was an American religious leader, author, and the 16th president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . As president, he was considered by adherents of the religion to be a prophet, seer, and revelator. Monson's early career was as a manager at the Deseret News, a Utah newspaper owned by the LDS Church. He spent most of his life engaged in various church leadership positions and public service.
Go to Profile#40161
Bates Gill
#40174
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Bates Gill is an expert on Chinese foreign policy and politics and a former Director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute . Gill has a long record of research and publication on both international and regional security issues. These include arms control, non-proliferation, peacekeeping and military-technical development—and all mainly with regard to China and the Asia-Pacific region. His work has also encompassed other contemporary security-related issues including multilateral security organizations, the impact of domestic politics and development on the foreign policies of states, and the nexus of public health and security.
Go to Profile#40162
Daniel Carleton Gajdusek
#40175
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Daniel Carleton Gajdusek was an American physician and medical researcher who was the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for work on the transmissibility of kuru, implying the existence of an infectious agent, which he named an 'unconventional virus'.
Go to Profile#40163
Frédéric Mitterrand
#40176
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Frédéric Mitterrand is a French politician who served as Minister of Culture and Communication of France from 2009 to 2012 under President Nicolas Sarkozy. Throughout his career, he has been an actor, screenwriter, television presenter, writer, producer and director.
Go to Profile#40164
Martin Johnson
#40177
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Martin Osborne Johnson CBE is an English retired rugby union player who represented and captained England and Leicester in a career spanning 16 seasons. He captained England to victory in the 2003 Rugby World Cup, and is regarded as one of the greatest locks ever to have played, and one of England's greatest ever players.
Go to Profile#40165
Lê Quát
#40178
Overall Influence
Lê Quát was a 14th-century Vietnamese Confucian mandarin of the Trần dynasty. He is best known for his proposal in 1370 to have Buddhism in Vietnam, the favoured religion of the Trần dynasty, deemed as heretical. This was the first such attempt, and it failed, although Confucianism came to be the ruling doctrine under the subsequent Lê dynasty.
Go to Profile#40166
Mineke Schipper
#40179
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Mineke Schipper is a Dutch author of non-fiction and fiction. As a scholar she is best known for her work on comparative literature mythologies and intercultural studies. Description of the author Thanks to her critical global perspective, Schipper has given an important impulse to the field of intercultural literary studies. Making her views accessible to both academic and non-academic audiences, she lectures not only at universities and scientific institutes , but also to audiences outside the academy, such as policy makers in The Hague or Brussels.
Go to Profile#40167
Paul Frick
#40180
Overall Influence
Paul Joseph Frick is an American psychologist and the Roy Crumpler Memorial Chair in psychology at Louisiana State University , as well as a professor at the Learning Sciences Institute of Australia at Australian Catholic University. He is known for his research on psychopathy and antisocial behavior in children, which he has been studying for over twenty years.
Go to Profile#40168
Norbert Schmitt
#40181
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Norbert Schmitt is an American applied linguist and Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. He is known for his work on second-language vocabulary acquisition and second-language vocabulary teaching. He has published numerous books and papers on vocabulary acquisition.
Go to Profile#40169
Prakash Panangaden
#40182
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Prakash Panangaden is an American/Canadian computer scientist noted for his research in programming language theory, concurrency theory, Markov processes and duality theory. Earlier he worked on quantum field theory in curved space-time and radiation from black holes. He is the founding Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Logic and Computation .
Go to Profile#40170
Jean-Louis Barrault
#40183
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Jean-Louis Bernard Barrault was a French actor, director and mime artist who worked on both screen and stage. Biography Barrault was born in Le Vésinet in France in 1910. His father was 'a Burgundian pharmacist who died in the First World War.':87 He studied at the Collége Chaptal until 1930, when he began his studies at the École du Louvre.:87
Go to Profile#40171
Sean Williams
#40184
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Sean Llewellyn Williams is an Australian author of science fiction who lives in Adelaide, South Australia. Several of his books have been New York Times best-sellers. Early life and education Williams was born in Whyalla, South Australia on 23 May 1967.
Go to Profile#40172
Bob Herbert
#40185
Overall Influence
1942 - 1999 (57 years)
#40173
Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg
#40186
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Pinelopi "Penny" Koujianou Goldberg is a Greek-American economist who served as chief economist of the World Bank from 2018 until 2020. She holds the named chair of Elihu Professor of Economics at Yale University. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Go to Profile#40174
Carole E. Handler
#40187
Overall Influence
Carole Enid Handler was an American lawyer who specializes in intellectual property litigation in the areas of trademark, copyright and antitrust laws, particularly those related to entertainment and media industry. She is commonly known as the "lawyer who saved Spider-Man."
Go to Profile#40175
John B. Macdonald
#40188
Overall Influence
1918 - 2014 (96 years)
John Barfoot Macdonld was a Canadian academic. Biography Macdonald was born on February 23, 1918, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In 1942, he graduated in Dental Surgery from the University of Toronto. During the Second World War, he served as Dental Corps. He received an M.S. in bacteriology from the University of Illinois in 1948 and a PhD from Columbia University in 1953. In 1949, he started teaching at the University of Toronto, then at Harvard University from 1956, up until 1962, when he became President of the University of British Columbia until 1967.
Go to Profile#40176
Mark Musen
#40189
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Mark Alan Musen is a Professor of Biomedical Informatics and of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University, and Division Director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research. Musen's research focuses on open science, data stewardship, intelligent systems, and biomedical decision support. Since the late 1980s, Musen has led the development of Protégé, which is currently the most "widely used domain-independent, freely available, platform-independent technology for developing and managing terminologies, ontologies, and knowledge bases" in a range of application domains.
Go to Profile#40177
Vivian Carpenter
#40190
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Dr. Vivian Carpenter is an accounting academic and business executive. She focuses her academic research on institutional theory, public sector accounting, and the political effects of adoption of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles by the public sector.
Go to Profile#40178
Colin Sheppard
#40191
Overall Influence
Colin James Richard Sheppard, usually cited as C. J. R. Sheppard, is senior scientist at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, Italy. His areas of research are in optics, microscopy and imaging, including confocal and multiphoton microscopy, diffraction, 3D imaging and reconstruction, superresolution, beam propagation, and pulse propagation.
Go to Profile#40179
David Justice
#40192
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
David Christopher Justice is an American former professional baseball outfielder and designated hitter in Major League Baseball who played for the Atlanta Braves , Cleveland Indians , New York Yankees , and Oakland Athletics . Justice won the National League Rookie of the Year Award in 1990, and was a three-time MLB All-Star.
Go to Profile#40180
Carol Kaye
#40193
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Carol Kaye is an American musician. She is one of the most prolific recorded bass guitarists in rock and pop music, playing on an estimated 10,000 recordings in a career spanning over 65 years. Kaye began playing guitar in her early teens and after some time as a guitar teacher, began to perform regularly on the Los Angeles jazz and big band circuit. She started session work in 1957, and through a connection at Gold Star Studios began working for producers Phil Spector and Brian Wilson. After a bassist failed to turn up to a session in 1963, she switched to that instrument, quickly making a name for herself as one of the most in-demand session players of the 1960s, playing on numerous hits.
Go to Profile#40181
Esau McCaulley
#40194
Overall Influence
Esau McCaulley is an American biblical scholar and assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, Illinois, canon theologian for the Anglican Diocese of Churches for the Sake of Others, as well as a theologian-in-residence at Progressive Baptist Church, a historically black congregation in Chicago.
Go to Profile#40182
Edward I. Solomon
#40195
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Edward I. Solomon is the Monroe E. Spaght Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University. He is an elected member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been profiled in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He has also been a longtime collaborator with many scientists, including Professor Kenneth D. Karlin at Johns Hopkins University.
Go to Profile#40183
Ann Belford Ulanov
#40196
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Ann Belford Ulanov is an American academic and psychotherapist. She is the Christiane Brooks Johnson Memorial Professor of Psychiatry and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and a Jungian analyst in private practice.
Go to Profile#40184
Rolf Gruetter
#40197
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Rolf Gruetter is a Swiss physicist and neurobiologist specialized in magnetic resonance, biomedical imaging and brain metabolism. He is a professor of physics at EPFL and the head of the Laboratory Functional and Metabolic Imaging at the School of Basic Sciences.
Go to Profile#40185
Hazhir Rahmandad
#40198
Overall Influence
Hazhir Rahmandad is an Iranian American Scientist and Engineer. Dr. Rahmandad is a dynamic modeling expert. His research applies dynamic modeling to a broad range of problems in strategy, organizational learning, and public health.
Go to Profile#40186
Christine M. Jolls
#40199
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Christine Jolls is the Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor of Law and Organization at Yale Law School, where she has been since 2006. She is known for her work in the emerging theory of behavioral economics and law. Her areas of research include employment law and contracts.
Go to Profile#40187
Alan Milward
#40200
Overall Influence
1935 - 2010 (75 years)
Alan Steele Milward, was a British economic historian. One of the most influential historians of the second half of the twentieth century, Milward's work was well known in Britain, across Europe and beyond. He derived that reputation not from the writing of popular histories or media appearances but from his abilities as a linguist, economic historian, archival researcher, historical narrator and political scientist. He made an essential contribution to the understanding of modern European history and integration: the elements that went to shape contemporary Europe.
Go to Profile#40188
Mahadeva Subramania Mani
#40201
Overall Influence
1908 - 2003 (95 years)
Mahadeva Subramania Mani aka Dr MS Mani was an Indian entomologist especially famous for his studies on high altitude entomology. Early life and career Early school records and the University of Madras, MA Degree certificate show his name as M. Subramanya. Later on, sometime early during his service career, he recorded his name as Mahadev Subra Mani a.k.a. Mahadeva Subra Mani a.k.a. M. S. Mani.
Go to Profile#40189
Allan Pred
#40202
Overall Influence
1936 - 2007 (71 years)
Allan Richard Pred was an internationally known American geographer and professor at the University of California at Berkeley He wrote more than 20 books and monographs, translated into seven languages, and over 70 articles and book chapters.
Go to Profile#40190
Aerius of Sebaste
#40203
Overall Influence
Aerius of Pontus was a 4th-century presbyter of Sebaste in Pontus. He taught doctrines that were in opposition to 4th-5th century Christian beliefs. His views are known from St Epiphanius's Panarion in which he was accused of being an Arian. For a short period, he had many followers in Sebaste. He failed to make his teachings widely popular and his sect died out soon after his death. Aerius of Sebaste is sometimes seen as an early proto-protestant, along with Jovinian, Helvidius and Vigiliantius.
Go to Profile#40191
Jason Richwine
#40204
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Jason Matthew Richwine is an American political commentator and author. He is best known for his doctoral dissertation titled "IQ and Immigration Policy," and a report he co-authored for The Heritage Foundation on the economic costs of illegal immigration to the United States which concluded that passing the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 would cost taxpayers more than $6 trillion.
Go to Profile#40192
Isaac Bruce
#40205
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Isaac Isidore Bruce is an American former football wide receiver who played in the National Football League . He was drafted by the Los Angeles Rams in the second round of the 1994 NFL Draft after playing college football for the West Los Angeles Wildcats, the Santa Monica Corsairs, and most notably with the Memphis Tigers.
Go to Profile#40193
Karsten Grove
#40206
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Karsten Grove is a Danish-American mathematician working in metric and differential geometry, differential topology and global analysis, mainly in topics related to global Riemannian geometry, Alexandrov geometry, isometric group actionss and manifolds with positive or nonnegative sectional curvature.
Go to Profile#40194
LeGarrette Blount
#40207
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
LeGarrette Montez Blount is an American former football running back who played in the National Football League for nine seasons. He played college football at the University of Oregon after transferring from East Mississippi Community College. Not selected in the 2010 NFL Draft, he began his NFL career as an undrafted free agent.
Go to Profile#40195
Marc Shell
#40208
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Marc Shell, born 1947 in Montreal, is a Canadian literary critic. He has interests in nationalism and kinship. He serves as Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English at Harvard University. Over 5 of his publications have each been cited over 100 times.
Go to Profile#40196
Wendy Davies
#40209
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Wendy Elizabeth Davies is an emeritus professor of history at University College London, England. Her research focuses on rural societies in early medieval Europe, focusing on the regions of Wales, Brittany and Iberia.
Go to Profile#40197
David B. Danbom
#40210
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
David B. Danbom is a historian, author, and was a professor of agricultural history at North Dakota State University, for more than forty years. Danbom spent nine years on the Fargo Historic Preservation Commission. Danbom also served as president of the Agricultural History Society.
Go to Profile#40198
Treat Williams
#40211
Overall Influence
1951 - 2023 (72 years)
Richard Treat Williams was an American actor. He rose to fame with starring roles in two films released in 1979: musical Hair and Steven Spielberg's 1941. His portrayal of Dr. "Andy" Brown on The WB's Everwood earned him nominations for two Screen Actors Guild Awardss. His other accolades included Golden Globe, Primetime Emmy, Satellite, and Independent Spirit Award nominations.
Go to Profile#40199
Michael Peter Davis
#40212
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Michael Peter Davis is an American philosopher and educator. He is a professor of philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College. Early life and education Davis earned his A.B. in Philosophy and Government at Cornell University, where he studied with Allan Bloom. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, where he wrote a dissertation on Plato under the direction of Richard Kennington.
Go to Profile#40200
Abdelhak Serhane
#40213
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Abdelhak Serhane is a Moroccan novelist writing in French. Serhane grew up in the Middle Atlas region of Morocco, in the village Azrou. Early life He studied psychology at the University of Toulouse II and taught at the University Ibn Tofail in Kénitra, Morocco before he went to Canada to escape from the political oppression of the Moroccan government. Since that time he has split his time between Morocco, Canada and the United States where he teaches French literature at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
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