Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

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List of the most influential people

#40301

Judith F. Kroll

#40314

Overall Influence

Judith F. Kroll is a Distinguished Professor of Language Science at University of California, Irvine. She specializes in psycholinguistics, focusing on second language acquisition and bilingual language processing. With Randi Martin and Suparna Rajaram, Kroll co-founded the organization Women in Cognitive Science in 2001. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the American Psychological Association , the Psychonomic Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Association for Psychological Science .

#40302

Sami Timimi

#40315

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Sami Timimi is a British psychiatrist. He is a consultant in child and adolescent psychiatry, Director of medical education at Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, and a visiting professor of child psychiatry at the University of Lincoln.

#40303

Lionel Abel

#40316

Overall Influence

1910 - 2001 (91 years)

Lionel Abel was an eminent Jewish American playwright, essayist and theater critic. He was also a translator, and was an authorized translator of Jean-Paul Sartre, who called Abel the most intelligent man in New York City.

#40304

Christopher Csíkszentmihályi

#40317

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Christopher Csíkszentmihályi is an American artist and technologist. He is an Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell University. Life Csíkszentmihályi was born June 1968 in Chicago, Illinois. His father, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, was a psychologist who coined the concept of psychological flow. After leaving Reed College in 1988, Csíkszentmihályi earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1998.

#40305

David W. Allan

#40318

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

David Wayne Allan is an American atomic clock physicist and author of the Allan variance, also known as the two-sample variance, a measure of frequency stability in clocks, oscillators and other applications. He worked for the National Bureau of Standards in Colorado.

#40306

Karl Prachar

#40319

Overall Influence

1924 - 1994 (70 years)

Karl Prachar was an Austrian mathematician who worked in the area of analytic number theory. He is known for his much acclaimed book on the distribution of the prime numbers, Primzahlverteilung . Prachar received his doctorate in 1947 from the University of Vienna.

#40307

Danny Wuerffel

#40320

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Daniel Carl Wuerffel is an American former professional football player who was a quarterback in the National Football League . Wuerffel attended the University of Florida, where he was a prolific passer for the Florida Gators under head coach Steve Spurrier. Wuerffel led the NCAA in touchdown passes in 1995 and 1996 and set numerous school and conference records during his career. During his senior year in 1996, Wuerffel won the Heisman Trophy while leading the Gators to their first national championship. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2013.

#40308

Bucky Dent

#40321

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Russell Earl "Bucky" Dent is an American former professional baseball player and manager. He played in Major League Baseball for the Chicago White Sox, New York Yankees, Texas Rangers, and Kansas City Royals from 1973 to 1984. He managed the Yankees in 1989 and 1990.

#40309

W. H. McLeod

#40322

Overall Influence

1932 - 2009 (77 years)

William Hewat McLeod was a New Zealand scholar who helped establish Sikh Studies as a distinctive field. Considered to be the most prominent Western historian of Sikhism, his publications had introduced higher criticism to Sikh sources for the first time and influenced generations of scholars. However, his scholarship remains controversial among traditional Khalsa scholars, who accuse him of disrespecting the religion and argue that Sikhism can't be studied using Western methodologies.

#40310

John McDonnell

#40323

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

John Martin McDonnell is a British politician who served as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2015 to 2020. A member of the Labour Party, he has been Member of Parliament for Hayes and Harlington since 1997.

#40311

Eduard Vieta

#40324

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Eduard Vieta Pascual is a Spanish psychiatrist and a leading scientific authority on the neurobiology and treatment of bipolar disorder. Education Eduard Vieta was born in Barcelona, Spain. He studied medicine at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and graduated in 1987. He did his residency training at the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona and became a specialist in Psychiatry in 1991. He subsequently received his PhD with honors at the University of Barcelona in 1994.

#40312

Susan Dynarski

#40325

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Susan Marie Dynarski is an American economist who is currently professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is also a faculty research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

#40313

Joey Wat

#40326

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Joey Chui Yung Wat is a chief executive officer of Yum China Holdings, Inc. . She also served as CEO of KFC China, managing director of A.S. Watson Group UK, and spent seven years in management consulting.

#40314

Richard F. Post

#40327

Overall Influence

1918 - 2015 (97 years)

Richard Freeman Post was an American physicist notable for his work in nuclear fusion, plasma physics, magnetic mirrors, magnetic levitation, magnetic bearing design and direct energy conversion. Post was a winner of the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics and led the controlled thermonuclear research group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for 23 years. He held a total of 34 patents in the fields of nuclear fusion, particle accelerators, and electronic and mechanical energy storage.

#40315

Pier Carlo Bontempi

Pier Carlo Bontempi

#40328

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Pier Carlo Bontempi is an Italian architect. He is a representative of New Urbanism and New Classical Architecture, with a particular emphasis on urban context and the continuity of architectural traditions.

#40316

Willie James Jennings

#40329

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Willie James Jennings is an American theologian, known for his contributions on liberation theologies, cultural identities, and theological anthropology. He is currently an associate professor of systematic theology and Africana studies at Yale University.

#40317

Lajos Portisch

#40330

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Lajos Portisch is a Hungarian chess Grandmaster, whose positional style earned him the nickname, the "Hungarian Botvinnik". One of the strongest non-Soviet players from the early 1960s into the late 1980s, he participated in twelve consecutive Interzonals from 1962 through 1993, qualifying for the World Chess Championship Candidates Cycle a total of eight times . Portisch set several all-time records in Chess Olympiads. In Hungarian Chess Championships, he either shared the title or won it outright a total of eight times . He won many strong international tournaments during his career. In 200...

#40318

Christopher Bliss

#40331

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Christopher John Emile Bliss, FBA is a British economist who was the Nuffield Professor of International Economics at the University of Oxford between 1992 and 2007. Born in 1940, Bliss was educated at King's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1962 and then completing a PhD there in 1966. He was elected to a fellowship at Christ's College, Cambridge in 1965, the same year he was appointed to an assistant lectureship at the University of Cambridge. Promoted to a full lectureship in 1967, he moved to the University of Essex in 1971 to be Professor of Economics, before moving again in 1977, this ...

#40319

Jeff Hanneman

#40332

Overall Influence

1964 - 2013 (49 years)

Jeffrey John Hanneman was an American musician, best known as a founding member and guitarist of the thrash metal band Slayer. Hanneman composed both music and lyrics for every Slayer album until his death in 2013. He had his own signature guitar, the ESP Jeff Hanneman Signature model.

#40320

David Profumo

#40333

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

David John Profumo, FRSL , is an English novelist. Profumo was born in London, the son of former British government minister John Profumo, and his wife, actress Valerie Hobson. The Profumo family is of Italian origin.

#40321

Barry Cooper

#40334

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Barry Cooper is an English musicologist, composer, organistist, Beethoven scholar, and editor of the Beethoven Compendium. Life Born in Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex, Cooper studied piano and composition in his childhood, leading to scholarships to Gordonstoun School and later to University College, Oxford, where he studied organ with John Webster and earned an MA in 1973 and a DPhil in 1974. His musical compositions include an oratorio, The Ascension.

#40322

Patricia Graham

#40335

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Patricia Albjerg Graham is a historian of American education. She began her teaching career in Deep Creek, Virginia, and went on to become a lecturer at Indiana University, professor of history and education at Barnard College and TC, Columbia University, dean of the Radcliffe Institute and of Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was President of the Spencer Foundation from 1991 to 2000. On May 28, 2015, Graham was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws by Harvard University.

#40323

Joyce Ladner

#40336

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Joyce Ann Ladner is an American civil rights activist, author, civil servant, and sociologist. Early life and education Ladner was born in Battles, Wayne County, Mississippi, on October 12, 1943, and grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. She was raised with four brothers and four sisters. Ladner graduated high school in 1960 with her older sister, Dorie Ladner. She earned her B.A. in sociology in 1964 from Tougaloo College, before earning her Ph.D at Washington University in St. Louis in 1968. During college, Ladner and her sister Dorie organized civil rights protests alongside Medgar Evers and other students from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

#40324

John G. Stoessinger

#40337

Overall Influence

1927 - 2017 (90 years)

John George Stoessinger , was an American author who wrote ten leading books on world politics, including The Might of Nations, which received the distinguished Bancroft Prize for History. Stoessinger was also the Acting Director for the Political Affairs Division at the United Nations.

#40325

Kapali Eswaran

#40338

Overall Influence

Kapali Eswaran is one of the founding members of the IBM System R Project, which formed the genesis of relational database technology. Eswaran is a graduate of Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. He was an architect of IBM System R, the precursor to DB2. Eswaran was one of the inventors of SQL language. The Eswaran principle relating to database locking and transactions is a contribution that he made along with Jim Gray and Irv Traiger while working as a scientist at IBM Research. Subsequently, he launched Esvel, Inc. and Kaps Corporation . He is currently the CEO of...

#40326

Jan Lindhardt

#40339

Overall Influence

1938 - 2014 (76 years)

Jan Lindhardt was a Danish theologian and writer. He was the son of professor Dr Poul Georg Lindhardt and Gerda Winding, and the elder brother of the Rev Mogens Lindhardt. His nephew is actor Thure Lindhardt. He was married to Tine Lindhardt, Bishop of Funen from 2012 until his death. He graduated with a doctorate in theology from Copenhagen University in 1962, and served as Bishop of Roskilde Diocese from 1997–2008.

#40327

Jan-Benedict Steenkamp

Jan-Benedict Steenkamp

#40340

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Joannes Evangelista Benedictus Maria "Jan-Benedict" Steenkamp is a marketing professor and author. He is the Knox Massey Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the co-founder and executive director of AiMark, a global center studying key marketing strategy issues. Steenkamp is the author of Time to Lead, Retail Disruptors, Global Brand Strategy, Brand Breakout and Private Label Strategy. He is one of the most cited scholars in business and marketing.

#40328

Rifat Hadžiselimović

#40341

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Academician Rifat Hadžiselimović is a Bosnian geneticist. He was born in Šiprage, Bosnia and Herzegovina on 7 January 1944. In 2013, with over 45 years of service, he was appointed Emeritus. He acts as scientific adviser in Institute for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Sarajevo.

#40329

Christopher Knight

#40342

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Christopher Knight is an American art critic for the Los Angeles Times. He was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, after being a three-time finalist . He received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Art Journalism from the Dorothy and Leo Rabkin Foundation in 2020, and the 1997 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism from the College Art Association, the first journalist to win the award in more than 25 years.

#40330

Agustín Fuentes

#40343

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Agustín Fuentes is an American primatologist and biological anthropologist at Princeton University and formerly the chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. His work focuses largely on human and non-human primate interaction, pathogen transfer, communication, cooperation, and human social evolution.

#40331

Čedomir Čupić

#40344

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Čedomir Čupić is a Serbian political scientist and professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade. He became known to the wider public in 2001, when he became a member, and later president, of the national Anti-Corruption Council.

#40332

Lev Zinder

#40345

Overall Influence

1903 - 1995 (92 years)

Lev Rafailovich Zinder was a Russian linguist in German philology. Biography Lev Zinder was born in 1904 in Kiev. When he was eight, he entered the third gymnasium in Kiev, but finished only six forms and after that studied on his own to get the secondary education. From 1919 till 1923 he worked in Kiev Central Children library. In 1923 he entered Leningrad Institute of Political Education named after N.K. Krupskaya. In 1924 he was sent to study at the LGU at Roman-Germanic department and finished it in 1928. After finishing the university he was offered the job of a lecturer of German language.

#40333

Barbara Low

#40346

Overall Influence

1920 - 2019 (99 years)

Barbara Wharton Low was a biochemist, biophysicist, and a researcher involved in discovering the structure of penicillin and the characteristics of other antibiotics. Her early work at Oxford University with Dorothy Hodgkin used X-ray crystallography to confirm the molecular structure of penicillin, which at the time was the largest molecule whose structure has been determined using that method. Later graduate work saw her study with Linus Pauling and Edwin Cohn before becoming a professor in her own right. Low's laboratory would accomplish the discovery of the pi helix, investigate the struc...

#40334

Robert Loggia

#40347

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Salvatore "Robert" Loggia was an American actor. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Jagged Edge and won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor for Big . In a career spanning over sixty years, Loggia performed in many films, including The Greatest Story Ever Told , three Pink Panther films, An Officer and a Gentleman , Scarface , Prizzi's Honor , Oliver & Company , Innocent Blood , Independence Day , Lost Highway , Return to Me , and Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie . He also appeared on television series including the Walt Disney limited series, The ...

#40335

Shapour Bakhtiar

#40348

Overall Influence

1914 - 1991 (77 years)

Shapour Bakhtiar was an Iranian politician who served as the last Prime Minister of Iran under the Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. In the words of historian Abbas Milani: "more than once in the tone of a jeremiad he reminded the nation of the dangers of clerical despotism, and of how the fascism of the mullahs would be darker than any military junta". In 1991, he and his secretary were murdered in his home in Suresnes, France, by agents of the Islamic Republic.

#40336

Danièle Aron-Rosa

#40349

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Danièle Aron-Rosa is a French-Tunisian ophthalmologist and physician-scientist most known for developing the picosecond, ophthalmic Nd:YAG laser for eye surgeries. She has been called one of the two most respected laser pioneers in ophthalmology, alongside Franz Fankhauser. She is also a painter, using the pseudonym Genskof or Aron Genskof, and has works in the permanent collections of museums in France and the United States.

#40337

Harvey Littleton

Harvey Littleton

#40350

Overall Influence

1922 - 2013 (91 years)

Harvey Littleton was an American glass artist and educator, one of the founders of the studio glass movement; he is often referred to as the "Father of the Studio Glass Movement". Born in Corning, New York, he grew up in the shadow of Corning Glass Works, where his father headed Research and Development during the 1930s. Expected by his father to enter the field of physics, Littleton instead chose a career in art, gaining recognition first as a ceramist and later as a glassblower and sculptor in glass. In the latter capacity he was very influential, organizing the first glassblowing seminar aimed at the studio artist in 1962, on the grounds of the Toledo Museum of Art.

#40338

Rex Pope

#40351

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Rex Pope is a British historian who was formerly head of the school of historical and critical studies at Lancashire Polytechnic. Pope is a specialist in the social and economic history of Britain in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has had two volumes published in the Seminar Studies in History series. Pope's other interests relate to the British hotel industry since 1850 and leisure hotels and tourism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

#40339

Amira Nowaira

#40352

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Amira Nowaira is an Egyptian academic, translator, columnist and author. She gained her doctorate in English literature from Birmingham University. She has served as chair of the English department at Alexandria University, and is currently a professor there. She has published a number scholarly books and journal articles. More recently, she has contributed journalistic pieces to The Guardian. Apart from her own books, Nowaira has also done translations, both from Arabic to English and from English to Arabic .

#40340

Jonathan Richman

Jonathan Richman

#40353

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Jonathan Michael Richman is an American singer, songwriter and guitarist. In 1970, he founded the Modern Lovers, an influential proto-punk band. Since the mid-1970s, Richman has worked either solo or with low-key acoustic and electric backing. He now plays only acoustic to protect his hearing. He is known for his wide-eyed, unaffected, and childlike outlook, and music that, while rooted in rock and roll, is influenced by music from around the world.

#40341

Jeffrey Richards

#40354

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Jeffrey Richards is a British historian. Educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, he is Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster University. A leading cultural historian and film critic, he is the author of over 15 books on British cultural history. His books include The Popes and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages 476–752 , and Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and His World . He is also a Companion of the Guild of St George.

#40342

Włodzimierz Kołos

Włodzimierz Kołos

#40355

Overall Influence

1928 - 1996 (68 years)

Włodzimierz Kołos was a Polish chemist and physicist who was one of the founders of modern quantum chemistry, and pioneered accurate calculations on the electronic structure of molecules. Life and scientific work Kołos was born on September 6, 1928, in Pinsk. He received his M.Sc. in chemistry in 1950 and began his academic career as an organic chemist. However, he was soon attracted to theoretical physics. He began his graduate studies in theoretical physics in 1951 and completed his thesis in only two years. The University of Warsaw and the Polish Chemical Society award the Kołos Medal ever...

#40343

Vladimir Voronin

#40356

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Vladimir Voronin is a Moldovan politician. He was the third president of Moldova from 2001 until 2009 and has been the First Secretary of the Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova since 1994. He was Europe's first democratically elected communist party head of state after the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc.

#40344

Yona Sabar

#40357

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Yona Sabar is a Kurdistani Jewish scholar, linguist and researcher. He is professor emeritus of Hebrew at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a native speaker of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic and has published more than 90 research articles about Jewish Neo-Aramaic and the folklore of the Jews of Kurdistan.

#40345

Jeremy Roenick

#40358

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Jeremy Shaffer Roenick is an American former professional ice hockey player who played the majority of his career in the National Hockey League . He was drafted 8th overall in the 1988 NHL Entry Draft by the Chicago Blackhawks, for whom he played from 1988 to 1996. Roenick subsequently played for the Phoenix Coyotes, Philadelphia Flyers, Los Angeles Kings and San Jose Sharks over the course of his 20 NHL season career. He also represented Team USA in several international tournaments. On November 10, 2007, he became the third American-born player to score 500 goals. He is one of 46 players t...

#40346

Carla Bley

#40359

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Carla Bley was an American jazz composer, pianist, organist, and bandleader. An important figure in the free jazz movement of the 1960s, she was perhaps best known for her jazz opera Escalator over the Hill , as well as a book of compositions that have been performed by many other artists, including Gary Burton, Jimmy Giuffre, George Russell, Art Farmer, Robert Wyatt, John Scofield, and her ex-husband Paul Bley. She was a pioneer in the development of independent artist-owned record labels, and recorded over two dozen albums between 1966 and 2019.

#40347

Kevin C. A. Burke

#40360

Overall Influence

1929 - 2018 (89 years)

Kevin C. A. Burke was a geologist known for his contributions in the theory of plate tectonics. In the course of his life, Burke held multiple professorships, most recent of which was the position of professor of geology and tectonics at the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Science, University of Houston. His studies on plate tectonics, deep mantle processes, sedimentology, erosion, soil formation and other topics extended over several decades and influenced multiple generations of geologists and geophysicists around the world.

#40348

Anwar Ali

#40361

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Anwar Ali , is a Pakistani physicist and a computer programmer, who served as the Chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission from 2006 until 2009. His scientific career is spent at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission as a computational physicist and played a key scientific role his nation's secret nuclear deterrent program.

#40349

Alan H. Goldman

#40362

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Alan Harris Goldman is an American philosopher and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the College of William & Mary. He is known for his works on philosophy and popular culture, literature, morality, love, and beauty.

#40350

Dmitry Maevsky

#40363

Overall Influence

1917 - 1992 (75 years)

Dmitry Ivanovich Maevsky was a Soviet Russian painter, lived and worked in Leningrad, a member of the Leningrad Union of Artists, regarded as one of the representatives of the Leningrad school of painting, most famous for his lyrical landscapes.

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