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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#40851

Mohammed Moussaoui

Mohammed Moussaoui

#40864

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Mohammed Moussaoui is the president of the French Council of Muslim Faith. As of 2008, he is naturalizing as a citizen of France. On August 2, 2011, he gave an interview with French radio station RTL, where he stated that there are nearly 150 new mosques under construction in France, and that there are more practicing Muslims than Roman Catholics in the country. France, home to an estimated six million Muslims, has the largest Muslim population in the European Union.

#40852

James W. Head

#40865

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

James W. Head III is the Louis and Elizabeth Scherck Distinguished Professor of Geological Sciences at Brown University. He studies the roles of volcanism in planetary crusts as well as the geological evolution of Mars, and has served as the investigator on many major international planetary investigation missions.

#40853

Paul Hogan

#40866

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Paul Hogan is an Australian actor and comedian. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for his performance as outback adventurer Michael "Crocodile" Dundee in Crocodile Dundee , the first in the Crocodile Dundee film series.

#40854

David Alan Rosenberg

#40867

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

David Alan Rosenberg is a military historian, and was Admiral Harry W. Hill Chair of Maritime Strategy at the National War College from 1996 to 2003 and held the Class of 1957 Distinguished Chair of Naval Heritage at the United States Naval Academy in 2015–2016.

#40855

Guy Sebastian

#40868

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Guy Theodore Sebastian is an Australian singer-songwriter who rose to fame after winning the first Australian Idol in 2003. Sebastian has since released ten top ten albums, including three number ones. The first seven all gained either platinum or multi-platinum certification. He has also achieved twenty three top twenty singles, with fourteen of them, reaching the top ten, including six number ones. He is the only Australian male artist in Australian chart history to achieve six number one singles, and places third overall for all Australian acts. Ten of his singles have been certified multi-platinum, including the 13× platinum "Battle Scars".

#40856

Lola Akande

#40869

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Lola Akande is a Nigerian academic and fiction writer. She has published three novels and a collection of short stories including the award winning _What It Takes_ and her latest novel, __The Truth about Sadia_ which is endorsed by the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency

#40857

Sarah Lisanby

#40870

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Sarah H. Lisanby is an American psychiatrist who studies the use of neurostimulation devices to treat mental illness. Since 2015 she has directed the division of the National Institute of Mental Health working on translational research.

#40858

Christopher Nolan

#40871

Overall Influence

1965 - 2009 (44 years)

Christopher Nolan was an Irish poet and author. He was born in Mullingar, Ireland, but later moved to Dublin. He was educated at the Central Remedial Clinic School, Mount Temple Comprehensive School and at Trinity College, Dublin. His first book was published when he was fifteen. He won the Whitbread Book Award for his autobiography in 1987. He was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters in the UK, the medal of excellence from the United Nations Society of Writers, and a Person of the Year award in Ireland.

#40859

Katy Gardner

#40872

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Katy Gardner is a British author and anthropologist, best known for her novel Losing Gemma, which was turned into a two-part miniseries for ITV1 in 2006. Gardner is a graduate of Cambridge University who undertook her doctoral research at the London School of Economics. As well as being the author of four novels, she was for some years a Professor of Social Anthropology at Sussex University.

#40860

Robert King

#40873

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Robert Graham King is an American macroeconomist. He is currently professor at the Department of Economics at Boston University, editor of the Journal of Monetary Economics, research consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, and a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

#40861

Francesca Bria

#40874

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Francesca Bria is the President of the Italian National Innovation Fund. She is an Italian innovation economist and information technologist who lectures at various universities and is a consultant to the United Nations and the European Commission.

#40862

I. M. Dharmadasa

#40875

Overall Influence

I.M. Dharmadasa is Professor of Applied Physics and leads the Electronic Materials and Solar Energy Group at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Dharme has worked in semiconductor research since becoming a PhD student at Durham University as a Commonwealth Scholar in 1977, under the supervision of the late Sir Gareth Roberts. His interest in the electrodeposition of thin film solar cells grew when he joined the Apollo Project at BP Solar in 1988. He continued this area of research on joining Sheffield Hallam University in 1990.

#40863

Richard Hamilton

Richard Hamilton

#40876

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Richard Clay "Rip" Hamilton is an American former professional basketball player and current basketball analyst for CBS Sports HQ. Hamilton played 14 seasons in the National Basketball Association and is best known for his nine-year stint with the Detroit Pistons, where he was a three-time All-Star. He helped lead the Pistons to six straight Eastern Conference Finals appearances, back to back NBA Finals appearances, their best record in franchise history and the 2004 NBA championship.

#40864

Richard Branson

Richard Branson

#40877

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson is a British business magnate and commercial astronaut. In the 1970s he founded the Virgin Group, which today controls more than 400 companies in various fields.

#40865

Wolfgang Kermer

#40878

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Wolfgang Kermer is a German art historian, artist, art educator, author, editor, curator of exhibitions, art collector and professor. From 1971 to 1984 he was repeatedly elected Rector of the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart and thus the first scientific and at the same time youngest teacher in this position in the history of the university. Under his rectorate, the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart was reformed in 1975 and 1978 on the base of two new university laws of the State of Baden-Württemberg and thus, for the first time in its history, authorized to set up diplomas for all courses.

#40866

Wulfram Gerstner

#40879

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Wulfram Gerstner is a German and Swiss computational neuroscientist. His research focuses on neural spiking patterns in neural networks, and their connection to learning, spatial representation and navigation. Since 2006 Gerstner has been a full professor of Computer Science and Life Sciences at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne , where he also serves as a Director of the Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience.

#40867

Lisa Jean Moore

#40880

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Lisa Jean Moore is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the State University of New York, Purchase College. She was born in New York State, received a BA from Tufts University, a Masters of Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD from the University of California, San Francisco. After receiving her doctoral degree in 1995, Moore was a fellow in the National Institutes of Mental Health, Traineeship in AIDS Prevention Sciences at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, the largest research center in the world dedicated to social, behavioral and policy science approaches to HIV.

#40868

Belkis Valdman

#40881

Overall Influence

1942 - 2011 (69 years)

Belkis Valdman was a Turkish born naturalised Brazilian researcher, teacher and academic chemical engineer, who worked in the field of instrumentation and process control in chemical engineering. Early life and education Belkis Valdman was born in Turkey on 5 May 1942, the daughter of Moise Dwek and Esterina Duek , one of three children, and became a naturalised Brazilian citizen in 1967.

#40869

Leslie Bricusse

#40882

Overall Influence

1931 - 2021 (90 years)

Leslie Bricusse OBE was a British composer, lyricist, and playwright who worked on theatre musicals and wrote theme music for films. He was best known for writing the music and lyrics for the films Doctor Dolittle, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Scrooge, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Tom and Jerry: The Movie, the songs "Goldfinger", "You Only Live Twice", "Can You Read My Mind " from Superman, and "Le Jazz Hot!" with Henry Mancini from Victor/Victoria.

#40870

Jacob Abraham

#40883

Overall Influence

Jacob A. Abraham is an American computer scientist and engineer who is currently the Cockrell Family Regents Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery.

#40871

Raymond Redheffer

#40884

Overall Influence

1921 - 2005 (84 years)

Raymond Moos Redheffer was an American mathematician. He was the creator of one of the first electronic games, Nim, a knowledge game. Early life He earned his PhD in 1948 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Norman Levinson.

#40872

Karel van der Toorn

#40885

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Karel van der Toorn is a Dutch scholar of ancient religions. From 2006 to 2011 he was chairman of the Board at the University of Amsterdam, where he was a professor since 1998 and until he became the chairman of the Board.

#40873

Guillaume Carlier

#40886

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Guillaume Carlier is a French mathematician. Most of his work lies in the field of calculus of variation and optimization. He is a professor of applied mathematics at Paris Dauphine University and a researcher at Mokaplan, a joint INRIA-CNRS-Université Paris-Dauphine team dedicated to research in the field of optimal transport.

#40874

Colin Campbell

#40887

Overall Influence

1944 - 2022 (78 years)

Sir Colin Murray Campbell was a Scottish academic lawyer who was vice-chancellor of the University of Nottingham from 1988 to 2008. Education and early career Campbell studied law at the University of Aberdeen, graduating with a first-class honours degree. After working at the University of Dundee and the University of Edinburgh, he was appointed professor of jurisprudence at Queen's University of Belfast, where he was dean of the law faculty and a Pro Vice Chancellor.

#40875

Martin Harwit

#40888

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Martin Otto Harwit is a Czech-American astronomer and author known for his scientific work on infrared astronomy as a professor at Cornell University. He was later director of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. from 1987 to 1995.

#40876

Ray Reardon

#40889

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Raymond Reardon is a Welsh retired professional snooker player. He turned professional in 1967 aged 35 and dominated the sport in the 1970s, winning the World Snooker Championship six times and more than a dozen other tournaments. Reardon was World Champion in 1970, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976 and 1978, and runner-up in 1982. He won the inaugural Pot Black tournament in 1969, the 1976 Masters and the 1982 Professional Players Tournament.

#40877

Rupert Hine

#40890

Overall Influence

1947 - 2020 (73 years)

Rupert Neville Hine was an English musician, songwriter and record producer. He produced albums for artists including Rush, Kevin Ayers, Tina Turner, Howard Jones, Saga, the Fixx, Bob Geldof, Thompson Twins, Stevie Nicks, Chris de Burgh, Suzanne Vega, Underworld, Duncan Sheik, Formula and Eleanor McEvoy. Additionally, Hine recorded eleven albums, including those billed under his own name, the pseudo-band name Thinkman, and as a member of the band Quantum Jump; with the latter, he achieved a number 5 hit on the UK Singles Chart in 1979, "The Lone Ranger". Additionally, he composed for film and...

#40878

Kevin Sumlin

#40891

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Kevin Warren Sumlin is an American football coach who is the associate head coach, co-offensive coordinator, and tight ends coach for the University of Maryland. Sumlin served as the head football coach at the University of Houston from 2008 to 2011, Texas A&M University from 2012 to 2017, and at the University of Arizona from 2018 to 2020.

#40879

Henry Scholberg

#40892

Overall Influence

1921 - 2012 (91 years)

Henry Cedric Scholberg was director and librarian of the Ames Library of South Asia at the University of Minnesota. His works include bibliographies on Indian encyclopedias, on manuals and gazetteers of India, and on the Portuguese in India. He also authored other scholarly works, plays and novels, as well as his own memoirs.

#40880

Marc Weissbluth

#40893

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Marc Weissbluth is an American pediatrician who has written several books on infant sleep. He is a sleep disorders specialist at the Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Education and early research Weissbluth was born in Brooklyn, New York and graduated from Palo Alto High School in California. He received his B.A. from Stanford University with Department of Biology Science Honors in 1965. Weissbluth graduated from Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine and was Chief Resident at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

#40881

Linda Mealey

#40894

Overall Influence

1955 - 2002 (47 years)

Linda Jeanne Mealey was an American evolutionary psychologist and professor at the College of Saint Benedict. Biography Mealey was born in San Diego, California on December 17, 1955, and grew up mainly in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in December 1984. She joined the faculty of the College of Saint Benedict in 1985 as an assistant professor, and became an associate professor there in 1991. She was affiliated with the University of Queensland's School of Psychology from 1996 to 1998, and remained an adjunct professor there until her death from ca...

#40882

Tom Chiarella

#40895

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Tom Chiarella is Hampton and Esther Boswell Distinguished University Professor of Creative Writing at DePauw University and writer-at-large and fiction editor of Esquire magazine. Early life and education Chiarella was born in Rochester, New York in 1961, and received a BA in Studio Art/Writing at St. Lawrence University, 1983, and an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Alabama in 1987.

#40883

Chidambara Chandrasekaran

#40896

Overall Influence

1911 - 2000 (89 years)

Chidambara Chandrasekaran was noted Indian demographer and statistician, was educated in India, UK and the US. He graduated from Morris College, Nagpur, with a B.Sc. degree, followed by a M.Sc. degree from the Nagpur University, and a PhD degree in Statistics from University College London in 1938. He was also awarded an MPH degree from Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in 1947. Note that in some publications his name is spelled as "Chandra Sekar". He was related to two Nobel Prize winners: C. V. Raman was his uncle and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was his cousin.

#40884

John Buckley

#40897

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

John Buckley is an English sculptor whose best known work is the sculpture "Untitled 1986", better known as "the Shark House" or "The Headington Shark" in Headington, a suburb of Oxford. Buckley went to sculpture classes in the evenings when studying for his O-levels in a technical college. He went on to Winchester School of Art and Leicester College of Art.

#40885

Yevgen Zakharov

Yevgen Zakharov

#40898

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Yevgen Yukhymovych Zakharov is a Ukrainian human rights activist and member of the Ukrainian PEN. He is a chairman of the board of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, Director of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group. He was an activist in the dissident movement of the 1970s and 1980s.

#40886

Bhanu Pratap Jena

Bhanu Pratap Jena

#40899

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Bhanu Pratap Jena is an American cell biologist and the "George E. Palade University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Physiology" at the Wayne State University School of Medicine, who discovered porosome in mid 1990s & demonstrated it to be the universal secretory machinery in Plasma Membrane.

#40887

John Dingell

#40900

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

John David Dingell Jr. was an American politician from the state of Michigan who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1955 until 2015. A member of the Democratic Party, Dingell holds the record as the longest-serving member of Congress in American history.

#40888

George Joseph

#40901

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

George Joseph is an Indian space scientist, best known for his contributions to the development of remote sensing technology in India, especially in the field of Earth observation sensors. He is a former chairman of the Lunar Mission Study Task Force of the Indian Space Research Organization and an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India, Indian Academy of Sciences and Indian National Academy of Engineering. The Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award, in 1999.

#40889

Emmanuel Pratt

#40902

Overall Influence

Emmanuel Pratt is an American Urban Designer. In 2009 he co-founded the Sweet Water Foundation, which practices "Regenerative Neighborhood Development" on the South Side of Chicago. The foundation is centered around bringing inter-generational members of the community together for education and to work on urban agriculture and reclaiming abandoned properties and transforming them into productive landscapes.

#40890

John Tory

#40903

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

John Howard Tory is a Canadian former politician who served as the 65th mayor of Toronto from 2014 to 2023. He served as leader of the Official Opposition in Ontario from 2005 to 2007 while he was leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party from 2004 to 2009.

#40891

Funso Aiyejina

#40904

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Funso Aiyejina is a Nigerian poet, short story writer, playwright and academic. He is the former Dean of Humanities and Education and current Professor Emeritus at the University of the West Indies. His collection of short fiction, The Legend of the Rockhills and Other Stories, won the 2000 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best First Book .

#40892

Walter Edwin Arnoldi

#40905

Overall Influence

1917 - 1995 (78 years)

Walter Edwin Arnoldi was an American engineer mainly known for the Arnoldi iteration, an eigenvalue algorithm used in numerical linear algebra. His main research interests included modelling vibrations, acoustics, aerodynamics of aircraft propeller, and oxygen reclamation problems of space science. His 1951 paper The principle of minimized iterations in the solution of the eigenvalue problem is one of the most cited papers in numerical linear algebra.

#40893

Andrej Kibrik

#40906

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Andrej Kibrik is a Russian linguist, the director of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences , and professor at the Philological Faculty of the Moscow State University. Member of the Academia Europaea since 2013.

#40894

Harminder Dua

#40907

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Professor Harminder Singh Dua is an Indian-British medical doctor and researcher. He is the chair and professor of ophthalmology at University of Nottingham and is the head of the Division of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences. Prior, he was associate professor at the Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, USA when he was invited to chair in Nottingham in April 1994. He earlier did his Graduation in Medicine from Government Medical College and Hospital, Nagpur.

#40895

Don Williams

#40908

Overall Influence

1939 - 2017 (78 years)

Donald Ray Williams was an American country music singer, songwriter, and 2010 inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He began his solo career in 1971, singing popular ballads and amassing seventeen number one country hits. His straightforward yet smooth bass-baritone voice, soft tones, and imposing build earned him the nickname "The Gentle Giant". In 1975, Williams starred in a movie with Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed called W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings.

#40896

Hermann von der Dunk

Hermann von der Dunk

#40909

Overall Influence

1928 - 2018 (90 years)

Hermann Walther von der Dunk was a Dutch historian of German origin. Life Von der Dunk's family fled from Nazi-Germany to the Netherlands in 1937. As his mother was Jewish, his father could not find any work under National Socialist regime. His father found a position at the school of Kees Boeke in Bilthoven. Later, Hermann von der Dunk visited the nearby University of Utrecht. There, he studied history under professor Pieter Geyl and later studied at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz. In 1966 he finished his dissertation on "Der Deutsche Vormärz und Belgien, 1930-1948" . On...

#40897

Félix Tshisekedi

#40910

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo is a Congolese politician who has been the President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 24 January 2019. He is the leader of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress , the DRC's oldest and largest party, succeeding his late father Étienne Tshisekedi in that role, a three-time Prime Minister of Zaire and opposition leader during the reign of Mobutu Sese Seko. Tshisekedi was the UDPS party's candidate for president in the December 2018 general election, which he was awarded, despite accusations of irregularities from several election monitoring organisations and other opposition parties.

#40898

Matt Holliday

#40911

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Matthew Thomas Holliday is an American former professional baseball left fielder. He played in Major League Baseball from 2004 to 2018 for the Colorado Rockies, Oakland Athletics, St. Louis Cardinals, and New York Yankees. A World Series champion in 2011 with the Cardinals, Holliday played a key role in seven postseasons, including the Rockies' first-ever World Series appearance in 2007 and Cardinals' playoff success in the 2010s. His distinctions include a National League batting championship, the 2007 NL Championship Series Most Valuable Player Award , seven All-Star selections, and four Silver Slugger Awards.

#40899

G. Mike Reed

#40912

Overall Influence

George Michael Reed is an American computer scientist. He has contributed to theoretical computer science in general and CSP in particular. Mike Reed has a doctorate in pure mathematics from Auburn University, United States, and a doctorate in computation from Oxford University, England. He has an interest in mathematical topology.

#40900

Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel

#40913

Overall Influence

Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel is a Turkish-American statistician and professor of the practice at Duke University, and a professional educator at RStudio. She is the author of several open source statistics textbooks and is an instructor for Coursera. She is the chair-elect of the Statistical Education Section of the American Statistical Association. Previously, she was a senior lecturer at University of Edinburgh.

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