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
#4051
Keith Reid
#4058
Overall Influence
1946 - 2023 (77 years)
Keith Stuart Brian Reid was an English lyricist and songwriter. He was best known for being the songwriter who wrote the lyrics of every original song released by Procol Harum, with the exception of the songs on their 2017 album, Novum. He co-founded the band with Gary Brooker. Reid was a non-performing member, he did not play any instrument, and did not record with Procol Harum. After the band's break-up in 1977, he began composing songs. Most notably, he co-wrote "You're the Voice", a UK top-10 hit for Australian singer John Farnham.
Go to Profile#4052
Ruth Simmons
#4059
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Ruth Simmons is an American professor and academic administrator. Simmons served as the eighth president of Prairie View A&M University, a HBCU, from 2017 until 2023. From 2001 to 2012, she served as the 18th president of Brown University, where she was the first African American president of an Ivy League institution. Before Brown University, she headed Smith College, one of the Seven Sisters and the largest women's college in the United States, beginning in 1995.
Go to Profile#4053
Zvi Galil
#4060
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Zvi Galil is an Israeli-American computer scientist and mathematician. Galil served as the president of Tel Aviv University from 2007 through 2009. From 2010 to 2019, he was the dean of the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing. His research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms, computational complexity and cryptography. He has been credited with coining the terms stringology and sparsification. He has published over 200 scientific papers and is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.
Go to Profile#4054
Ellen Langer
#4061
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Ellen Jane Langer is an American professor of psychology at Harvard University; in 1981, she became the first woman ever to be tenured in psychology at Harvard. Langer studies the illusion of control, decision-making, aging, and mindfulness theory. Her most influential work is Counterclockwise, published in 2009, which answers questions about aging from her research and interest in the particulars of aging across the nation.
Go to Profile#4055
Ismail Kadare
#4062
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Ismail Kadare is an Albanian novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright. He is a leading international literary figure and intellectual. He focused on poetry until the publication of his first novel, The General of the Dead Army, which made him famous internationally.
Go to Profile#4056
Michael J. Flynn
#4063
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Michael J. Flynn is an American professor emeritus at Stanford University. Early life and education Flynn was born in New York City. Career Flynn proposed Flynn's taxonomy, a method of classifying parallel digital computers, in 1966.
Go to Profile#4057
Frank Press
#4064
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Frank Press was an American geophysicist. He was an advisor to four U.S. presidents, and later served two consecutive terms as president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences . He was the author of 160 scientific papers and co-author of the textbooks Earth and Understanding Earth.
Go to Profile#4058
R. A. Salvatore
#4065
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Robert Anthony Salvatore is an American author best known for The Legend of Drizzt, a series of fantasy novels set in the Forgotten Realms and starring the character Drizzt Do'Urden. He has also written The DemonWars Saga, a series of high fantasy novels; several other Forgotten Realms novels; and Vector Prime, the first novel in the Star Wars: The New Jedi Order series. He has sold more than 15 million copies of his books in the United States alone, and 22 of his titles have been New York Times best-sellers.
Go to Profile#4059
Eckhart Tolle
#4066
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Eckhart Tolle is a German-born spiritual teacher and self-help author. His books include The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment , A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose and the picture book Guardians of Being .
Go to Profile#4060
Dan Ingalls
#4067
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls Jr. is a pioneer of object-oriented computer programming and the principal architect, designer and implementer of five generations of Smalltalk environments. He designed the bytecoded virtual machine that made Smalltalk practical in 1976. He also invented bit blit, the general-purpose graphical operation that underlies most bitmap computer graphics systems today, and pop-up menus. He designed the generalizations of BitBlt to arbitrary color depth, with built-in scaling, rotation, and anti-aliasing. He made major contributions to the Squeak version of Smalltalk, inc...
Go to Profile#4061
Michael Isikoff
#4068
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Michael Isikoff is an American investigative journalist who is currently the Chief Investigative Correspondent at Yahoo! News. He is the co-author with David Corn of the book titled Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, published on March 13, 2018.
Go to Profile#4062
Stephen F. Cohen
#4069
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Stephen Frand Cohen was an American scholar of Russian studies. His academic work concentrated on modern Russian history since the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's relationship with the United States.
Go to Profile#4063
Henri Nouwen
#4070
Overall Influence
1932 - 1996 (64 years)
Henri Jozef Machiel Nouwen was a Dutch Catholic priest, professor, writer and theologian. His interests were rooted primarily in psychology, pastoral ministry, spirituality, social justice and community. Over the course of his life, Nouwen was heavily influenced by the work of Anton Boisen, Thomas Merton, Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh, and Jean Vanier.
Go to Profile#4064
Armistead Maupin
#4071
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Armistead Jones Maupin, Jr. is an American writer notable for Tales of the City, a series of novels set in San Francisco. Early life Maupin was born in Washington, D.C., to Diana Jane and Armistead Jones Maupin. His great-great-grandfather, Congressman Lawrence O'Bryan Branch, was from North Carolina and was a railroad executive and a Confederate general during the American Civil War. His father, Armistead Jones Maupin, founded Maupin, Taylor & Ellis, one of the largest law firms in North Carolina. Maupin was raised in Raleigh.
Go to Profile#4065
Kristen Ghodsee
#4072
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Kristen Rogheh Ghodsee is an American ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is primarily known for her ethnographic work on post-Communist Bulgaria as well as being a contributor to the field of postsocialist gender studies.
Go to Profile#4066
Raymond Moody
#4073
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Raymond A. Moody Jr. is an American philosopher, psychiatrist, physician and author, most widely known for his books about afterlife and near-death experiences , a term that he coined in 1975 in his best-selling book Life After Life. His research explores personal accounts of subjective phenomena encountered in near-death experiences, particularly those of people who have apparently died but been resuscitated. He has widely published his views on what he terms near-death-experience psychology.
Go to Profile#4067
Oliver Selfridge
#4074
Overall Influence
1926 - 2008 (82 years)
Oliver Gordon Selfridge was a pioneer of artificial intelligence. He has been called the "Father of Machine Perception." Biography Selfridge, born in England, was a grandson of Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridges department stores. His father was Harry Gordon Selfridge Jr. and his mother was a clerk at Selfridge's store. His parents had met, fallen in love, married and had children all in secret, and Oliver never met his grandfather, Harry Sr. He was educated at Malvern College, and, upon moving to the US, at Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, before earning an S.B. from MIT in mathematics in 1945.
Go to Profile#4068
Hans Mommsen
#4075
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Hans Mommsen was a German historian, known for his studies in German social history, for his functionalist interpretation of the Third Reich, and especially for arguing that Adolf Hitler was a weak dictator. Descended from Nobel Prizewinning historian Theodor Mommsen, he was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
Go to Profile#4069
Maryam Mirzakhani
#4076
Overall Influence
1977 - 2017 (40 years)
#4070
Spike Lee
#4077
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. His work has continually explored race relations, issues within the black community, the role of media in contemporary life, urban crime and poverty, and other political issues. Lee has won numerous accolades for his work, including an Academy Award, a Student Academy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, a BAFTA Award, and two Peabody Awards. He has also been honored with an Honorary BAFTA Award in 2002, an Honorary César in 2003, the Academy Honorary Award in 2015, and a Gala Tribute from the Film Socie...
Go to Profile#4071
Patrick Leigh Fermor
#4078
Overall Influence
1915 - 2011 (96 years)
Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor was an English writer, scholar, soldier and polyglot. He played a prominent role in the Cretan resistance during the Second World War, and was widely seen as Britain's greatest living travel writer, on the basis of books such as A Time of Gifts . A BBC journalist once termed him "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene".
Go to Profile#4072
Corey Lewandowski
#4079
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Corey R. Lewandowski is an American political operative, lobbyist, political commentator and author who is politically associated with Donald Trump. He was the first campaign manager of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and was fired by Trump during the Republican Primary. He later became a political commentator for One America News Network , Fox News and CNN.
Go to Profile#4073
Elihu Katz
#4080
Overall Influence
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
Elihu Katz was an American-Israeli sociologist and communication scientist whose expertise was uses and gratifications theory. He authored over 20 books and 175 articles and book chapters during his lifetime and is acknowledged as one of "the founding fathers of regular television broadcasts in Israel."
Go to Profile#4074
Ravi Sethi
#4081
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Ravi Sethi is an Indian computer scientist retired from executive roles at Bell Labs and Avaya Labs. He also serves as a member of the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Advisory Committee. He is best known as one of three authors of the classic computer science textbook Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, also known as the Dragon Book.
Go to Profile#4075
János Kornai
#4082
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
János Kornai was a Hungarian economist noted for his analysis and criticism of the command economies of Eastern European communist states. He also covered macroeconomic aspects in countries undergoing post-Soviet transition. He was emeritus professor at both Harvard University and Corvinus University of Budapest. Kornai was known to have coined the term shortage economy to reflect perpetual shortages of goods in the centrally-planned command economies of the Eastern Bloc.
Go to Profile#4076
Robert Bernasconi
#4083
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
#4077
Max Allan Collins
#4084
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Max Allan Collins is an American mystery writer, noted for his graphic novels. His work has been published in several formats and his Road to Perdition series was the basis for a film of the same name. He wrote the Dick Tracy newspaper strip for many years and has produced numerous novels featuring the character as well.
Go to Profile#4078
Judah Folkman
#4085
Overall Influence
1933 - 2008 (75 years)
Moses Judah Folkman was an American biologist and pediatric surgeon best known for his research on tumor angiogenesis, the process by which a tumor attracts blood vessels to nourish itself and sustain its existence. He founded the field of angiogenesis research, which has led to the discovery of a number of therapies based on inhibiting or stimulating neovascularization.
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Carlo Ancelotti
#4086
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Carlo Ancelotti , is an Italian professional football manager and former player who is the manager of Real Madrid. Nicknamed "Don Carlo", he is regarded as one of the greatest managers of all time. Ancelotti is the most decorated manager in UEFA Champions League history, having won the trophy a record four times as coach . He is also the first and only one to have managed teams in five Champions League finals. As a player, he won the European Cup twice with AC Milan in 1989 and 1990, making him one of seven people to have won the European Cup or Champions League as both a player and a manager.
Go to Profile#4080
Louis Dumont
#4087
Overall Influence
1911 - 1998 (87 years)
Louis Charles Jean Dumont was a French anthropologist. Dumont was born in Thessaloniki, in the Salonica Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. He taught at Oxford University during the 1950s, and was then director of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. A specialist on the cultures and societies of India, Dumont also studied western social philosophy and ideologies.
Go to Profile#4081
Edward Soja
#4088
Overall Influence
1940 - 2015 (75 years)
Edward William Soja was an urbanist, a postmodern political geographer and urban theorist. He worked on socio-spatial dialectic and spatial justice. Biography Edward Soja received his Ph.D. degree from Syracuse University. He worked for the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA since 1972, where he was a Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning. He had also been a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.
Go to Profile#4082
George Pake
#4089
Overall Influence
1924 - 2004 (80 years)
George E. Pake was a physicist and research executive primarily known for helping founded Xerox PARC. Early life Pake was raised in Kent, Ohio. His father was an English instructor at Kent State University. His mother was a schoolteacher.
Go to Profile#4083
Charles J. Fillmore
#4090
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Charles J. Fillmore was an American linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan in 1961. Fillmore spent ten years at Ohio State University and a year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University before joining Berkeley's Department of Linguistics in 1971. Fillmore was extremely influential in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics.
Go to Profile#4084
John Stott
#4091
Overall Influence
1921 - 2011 (90 years)
John Robert Walmsley Stott was an English Anglican priest and theologian who was noted as a leader of the worldwide evangelical movement. He was one of the principal authors of the Lausanne Covenant in 1974. In 2005, Time magazine ranked Stott among the 100 most influential people in the world.
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John Cleese
#4092
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
John Marwood Cleese is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, and producer. Emerging from the Cambridge Footlights in the 1960s, he first achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report. In the late 1960s, he cofounded Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus. Along with his Python costars Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Graham Chapman, Cleese starred in Monty Python films, which include Monty Python and the Holy Grail , Life of Brian , and The Meaning of ...
Go to Profile#4086
David Copperfield
#4093
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
David Seth Kotkin , known professionally as David Copperfield, is an American magician, described by Forbes as the most commercially successful magician in history. Copperfield's television specials have been nominated for 38 Emmy Awards, winning 21. Best known for his combination of storytelling and illusion, his career of over 40 years has earned him 11 Guinness World Records, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and a by the French government. He has been named a Living Legend by the US Library of Congress.
Go to Profile#4087
Miguel A. De La Torre
#4094
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Miguel A. De La Torre is a professor of Social Ethics and Latino Studies at Iliff School of Theology, author, and an ordained Southern Baptist minister. Biography Born in Cuba months before the Castro Revolution, De La Torre and his family migrated to the United States as refugees when he was an infant. For a while the U.S. government considered him and his family as "illegal aliens". On 6 June 1960, De La Torre received an order from Immigration and Naturalization Service to "self-deport." He attended Blessed Sacrament, a Catholic elementary school in Queens, New York, and was baptized and confirmed by the Catholic Church.
Go to Profile#4088
Yu Suzuki
#4095
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Yu Suzuki is a Japanese game designer, producer, programmer, and engineer, who headed Sega's AM2 team for 18 years. Considered one of the first auteurs of video games, he has been responsible for a number of Sega's arcade hits, including three-dimensional sprite-scaling games that used "taikan" motion simulator arcade cabinets, such as Hang-On, Space Harrier, Out Run and After Burner, and pioneering polygonal 3D games such as Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter, which are credited with popularizing 3D graphics in video games; as well as the critically acclaimed Shenmue series. As a hardware engi...
Go to Profile#4089
William Irwin Thompson
#4096
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
William Irwin Thompson was an American social philosopher, cultural critic, and poet. He received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He described his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient texts". He was the founder of the Lindisfarne Association, which proposed the study and realization of a new planetary culture.
Go to Profile#4090
Mohsen Kadivar
#4097
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Mohsen Kadivar is a mujtahid, Islamic theologian, philosopher, writer, leading intellectual reformist, and research professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. A political Iranian dissident, Kadivar has been a vocal critic of the doctrine of clerical rule, also known as Velayat-e Faqih , and a strong advocate of democratic and liberal reforms in Iran as well as constructional reform in understanding of shari'a and Shi'a theology. Kadivar has served time in prison in Iran for his political activism and beliefs.
Go to Profile#4091
Yale Patt
#4098
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Yale Nance Patt is an American professor of electrical and computer engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He holds the Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Engineering. In 1965, Patt introduced the WOS module, the first complex logic gate implemented on a single piece of silicon. He is a fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery, and in 2014 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
Go to Profile#4092
Frank Frazetta
#4099
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Frank Frazetta was an American artist known for themes of fantasy and science fiction, noted for comic books, paperback book covers, paintings, posters, LP record album covers, and other media. He is often referred to as the "Godfather of fantasy art", and one of the most renowned illustrators of the 20th century. He was also the subject of a 2003 documentary Painting with Fire.
Go to Profile#4093
Mark Seidenberg
#4100
Overall Influence
Mark Seidenberg is Vilas Research Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories. He is a specialist in psycholinguistics, focusing specifically on the cognitive and neurological bases of language and reading. Seidenberg received his Ph.D. from Columbia University under the mentorship of Thomas Bever and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois. He has held academic positions at McGill University, the University of Southern California, and since 2001 at the University of Wisconsin.
Go to Profile#4094
Eugene Myers
#4101
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Eugene Wimberly "Gene" Myers, Jr. is an American computer scientist and bioinformatician, who is best known for contributing to the early development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis. Education Myers received his Bachelor of Science in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from the University of Colorado.
Go to Profile#4095
Mark S. Wrighton
#4102
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Mark Stephen Wrighton is an American academic and chemist who has been serving as Chancellor Emeritus of Washington University in St. Louis since May 2019 after serving as the 14th Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis from 1995 to 2019. He was also appointed by Washington University in St. Louis as the inaugural holder of the James and Mary Wertsch Distinguished University Professorship in August 2020. From January 2022 to June 2023, Wrighton took a sabbatical leave from WUSTL to serve as the interim president of The George Washington University while GWU conducted a presidential ...
Go to Profile#4096
Joseph Klafter
#4103
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Joseph Klafter is an Israeli chemical physics professor who is the Heineman Chair of Physical Chemistry at Tel Aviv University, and was the eighth President of Tel Aviv University from 2009 to 2019. He won the 2020 Israel Prize in the fields of Chemistry and Physics.
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Anthony Caro
#4104
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Sir Anthony Alfred Caro was an English abstract sculptor whose work is characterised by assemblages of metal using 'found' industrial objects. He began as a member of the modernist school, having worked with Henry Moore early in his career. He was lauded as the greatest British sculptor of his generation.
Go to Profile#4098
Mary Higby Schweitzer
#4105
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Mary Higby Schweitzer is an American paleontologist at North Carolina State University, who led the groups that discovered the remains of blood cells in dinosaur fossils and later discovered soft tissue remains in the Tyrannosaurus rex specimen MOR 1125, as well as evidence that the specimen was a pregnant female when she died.
Go to Profile#4099
Shlomo Sand
#4106
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Shlomo Sand is an Israeli Emeritus Professor of History at Tel Aviv University. Biography Sand was born in Linz, Austria, to Polish Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. His cultural background was grounded in Yiddish culture. His father, having taken an aversion to rabbis, abandoned his Talmudic studies at a yeshiva and dropped attendance at synagogues, after his mother was denied a front seat after her husband's death, and they could not afford the seat price. Both his parents had Communist and anti-imperialist views and refused to accept compensation from Germany for their suffering during the Second World War.
Go to Profile#4100
Austan Goolsbee
#4107
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Austan Dean Goolsbee is an American economist and writer. He is the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Goolsbee formerly served as the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2010 to 2011 and a member of President Barack Obama's cabinet. He served as a member of the Chicago Board of Education from 2018 to 2019.
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