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
#4101
Rita Felski
#4108
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Rita Felski is an academic and critic, who holds the John Stewart Bryan Professorship of English at the University of Virginia and is a former editor of New Literary History. She is also Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark .
Go to Profile#4102
Deirdre English
#4109
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Deirdre English is the former editor of Mother Jones and author of numerous articles for national publications and television documentaries. She has taught at the State University of New York and currently teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is a faculty mentor at the Center for the Study of the Working Family at the Graduate School of Sociology. English is co-author, with Barbara Ehrenreich, of For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice along with a number of pamphlets. She contributed essays to Susan Meiselas's photograph...
Go to Profile#4103
David Weber
#4110
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
David Mark Weber is an American science fiction and fantasy author. He has written several science-fiction and fantasy books series, the best known of which is the Honor Harrington science-fiction series. His first novel, which he worked on with Steve White, sold in 1989 to Baen Books. Baen remains Weber's major publisher.
Go to Profile#4104
Yash Pal
#4111
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Yash Pal was an Indian scientist, educator and educationist. He was known for his contributions to the study of cosmic rays, as well as for being an institution-builder. In his later years, he became one of the leading science communicators of the country.
Go to Profile#4105
Kevin Roche
#4112
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Eamonn Kevin Roche was an Irish-born American Pritzker Prize-winning architect. He was responsible for the design/master planning for over 200 built projects in both the U.S. and abroad. These projects include eight museums, 38 corporate headquarters, seven research facilities, performing arts centers, theaters, and campus buildings for six universities. In 1967 he created the master plan for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and thereafter designed all of the new wings and installation of many collections including the reopened American and Islamic wings.
Go to Profile#4106
Peter Gay
#4113
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Peter Joachim Gay was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers . He received the American Historical Association's Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a two-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider , a bestseller; and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time .
Go to Profile#4107
Henry Rosovsky
#4114
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Henry Rosovsky was an American economist and academic administrator who served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University. Following a career as an economic historian specializing in East Asia, Rosovsky was named Dean in 1973 by Harvard President Derek Bok. He served from 1973 to 1984 and, again, in 1990 to 1991. He also served as Acting President of Harvard in 1984 and 1987. In 1985, Rosovsky became a member of Harvard’s governing body, the Harvard Corporation, until 1997. He was the first Harvard faculty member to do so in a century.
Go to Profile#4108
Mihailo Marković
#4115
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Mihailo Marković was a Serbian philosopher who gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s as a proponent of the Praxis School, a Marxist humanist movement that originated in Yugoslavia. He was a member of the Socialist Party of Serbia, co-author of the SANU Memorandum and a prominent supporter of Slobodan Milošević's politics in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Go to Profile#4109
Dick Stockton
#4116
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Richard Edward Stokvis , known professionally as Dick Stockton, is an American retired sportscaster. Stockton began his career in Philadelphia, then moved to Pittsburgh, where he worked as the sports director for KDKA-TV. In Boston, he called Celtics games for WBZ-TV and Red Sox games for WSBK-TV before transitioning to national broadcasting, which included calling the 1975 World Series for NBC and later, the NBA Finals for CBS. In a career that spanned over five decades, Stockton worked for several different networks, most prominently CBS Sports, Fox Sports, and Turner Sports.
Go to Profile#4110
Ronald J. Williams
#4117
Overall Influence
Ronald J. Williams is professor of computer science at Northeastern University, and one of the pioneers of neural networks. He co-authored a paper on the backpropagation algorithm which triggered a boom in neural network research. He also made fundamental contributions to the fields of recurrent neural networks and reinforcement learning. Together with Wenxu Tong and Mary Jo Ondrechen he developed Partial Order Optimum Likelihood , a machine learning method used in the prediction of active amino acids in protein structures. POOL is a maximum likelihood method with a monotonicity constraint an...
Go to Profile#4111
John Iliopoulos
#4118
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
John Iliopoulos is a Greek physicist. He is the first person to present the Standard Model of particle physics in a single report. He is best known for his prediction of the charm quark with Sheldon Glashow and Luciano Maiani . Iliopoulos is also known for demonstrating the cancellation of anomalies in the Standard model. He is further known for the Fayet-Iliopoulos D-term formula, which was introduced in 1974. He is currently an honorary member of Laboratory of theoretical physics of École Normale Supérieure, Paris.
Go to Profile#4112
Andy Roddick
#4119
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Andrew Stephen Roddick is an American former professional tennis player. He is a major champion, having won the 2003 US Open. Roddick reached four other major finals , losing to rival Roger Federer each time. Roddick was ranked in the year-end top 10 for nine consecutive years , first reaching the world No. 1 spot in 2003, while also winning five Masters titles in that period. He was also a crucial player in the U.S. Davis Cup team's successful run to the title in 2007. Roddick retired from professional tennis following the 2012 US Open to focus on his work at the Andy Roddick Foundation. In retirement, Roddick played for the Austin Aces in World Team Tennis in 2015.
Go to Profile#4113
James F. Crow
#4120
Overall Influence
1916 - 2012 (96 years)
James Franklin Crow was Professor Emeritus of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a prominent population geneticist whose career spanned from the modern synthesis to the genomic era.
Go to Profile#4114
Judith Lewis Herman
#4121
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Judith Lewis Herman is an American psychiatrist, researcher, teacher, and author who has focused on the understanding and treatment of incest and traumatic stress. Herman is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Director of Training at the Victims of Violence Program in the Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a founding member of the Women's Mental Health Collective.
Go to Profile#4115
Neil Smelser
#4122
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Neil Joseph Smelser was an American sociologist who served as professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an active researcher from 1958 to 1994. His research was on collective behavior, sociological theory, economic sociology, sociology of education, social change, and comparative methods. Among many lifetime achievements, Smelser "laid the foundations for economic sociology."
Go to Profile#4116
Bruce Riedel
#4123
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Bruce O. Riedel is an American expert on U.S. security, South Asia, and counter-terrorism. He is currently a senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He also serves as a senior adviser at Albright Stonebridge Group.
Go to Profile#4117
Joe Montana
#4124
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Joseph Clifford Montana Jr. is an American former football quarterback who played in the National Football League for 16 seasons, primarily with the San Francisco 49ers. Nicknamed "Joe Cool" and "the Comeback Kid", Montana is widely regarded as one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time. After winning a national championship at Notre Dame, Montana began his NFL career in 1979 at San Francisco, where he played for the next 14 seasons. With the 49ers, Montana started and won four Super Bowls and was the first player to be named the Super Bowl Most Valuable Player three times. He also holds ...
Go to Profile#4118
Frank Zappa
#4125
Overall Influence
1940 - 1993 (53 years)
Frank Vincent Zappa was an American musician, composer, and bandleader. His work is characterized by nonconformity, free-form improvisation, sound experimentation, musical virtuosity and satire of American culture. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa composed rock, pop, jazz, jazz fusion, orchestral and musique concrète works; he also produced almost all of the 60-plus albums that he released with his band <!--Do not capitalize-->the Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist. Zappa also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed album covers. He is considered one...
Go to Profile#4119
John Komlos
#4126
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
John Komlos is an American economic historian of Hungarian descent and former holder of the chair of economic history at the University of Munich. Personal life Komlos was born in 1944 in Budapest in Hungary during the Holocaust. After becoming refugees during the 1956 revolution, his family fled to the United States where Komlos finally grew up in Chicago.
Go to Profile#4120
David Matas
#4127
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
David Matas is the senior legal counsel of B'nai Brith Canada who currently resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He has maintained a private practice in refugee, immigration, and human rights law since 1979, and has published various books and manuscripts.
Go to Profile#4121
Chia-Chiao Lin
#4128
Overall Influence
1916 - 2013 (97 years)
Chia-Chiao Lin was a Chinese-born American applied mathematician and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lin made major contributions to the theory of hydrodynamic stability, turbulent flow, mathematics, and astrophysics.
Go to Profile#4122
Ravi Zacharias
#4129
Overall Influence
1946 - 2020 (74 years)
Frederick Antony Ravi Kumar Zacharias was an Indian-born Canadian-American Christian evangelical minister and apologist who founded Ravi Zacharias International Ministries . He was involved in Christian apologetics for a period spanning more than forty years, authoring more than thirty books. He also hosted the radio programs Let My People Think and Just Thinking. Zacharias belonged to the Christian and Missionary Alliance , the Keswickian Christian denomination in which he was ordained as a minister.
Go to Profile#4123
Caryn James
#4130
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Caryn James is an American film critic, journalist, university lecturer, and writer. Biography She grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and obtained her doctorate in English literature at Brown University. She began working as a freelance journalist at The New York Times; Newsday; TV Guide; and Vogue. She finally landed a three-week temporary position at The New York Times Book Review and later became a permanent staff member.
Go to Profile#4124
David H. Barlow
#4131
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
David H. Barlow is an American psychologist and Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Psychiatry at Boston University. He is board certified by the American Board of Professional Psychology. Barlow is known for his research and publications on the etiology, nature, and treatment of anxiety disorders. The models and treatment methods that he developed for anxiety and related disorders are widely used in clinical training and practice. Barlow is one of the most frequently cited psychologists in the world.
Go to Profile#4125
James D. Foley
#4132
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
James David Foley is an American computer scientist and computer graphics researcher. He is a Professor Emeritus and held the Stephen Fleming Chair in Telecommunications in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology . He was Interim Dean of Georgia Tech's College of Computing from 2008–2010. He is perhaps best known as the co-author of several widely used textbooks in the field of computer graphics, of which over 400,000 copies are in print and translated in ten languages. Foley most recently conducted research in instructional technologies and distance education...
Go to Profile#4126
Anne Treisman
#4133
Overall Influence
1935 - 2018 (83 years)
Anne Marie Treisman was an English psychologist who specialised in cognitive psychology. Treisman researched visual attention, object perception, and memory. One of her most influential ideas is the feature integration theory of attention, first published with Garry Gelade in 1980. Treisman taught at the University of Oxford, University of British Columbia, University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University. Notable postdoctoral fellows she supervised included Nancy Kanwisher and Nilli Lavie.
Go to Profile#4127
Charles Bukowski
#4134
Overall Influence
1920 - 1994 (74 years)
Henry Charles Bukowski was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his adopted home city of Los Angeles. Bukowski's work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. The FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column Notes of a Dirty Old Man in the LA underground newspaper Open City.
Go to Profile#4128
Douglas H. Ginsburg
#4135
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Douglas Howard Ginsburg is an American lawyer, jurist, and academic who serves as a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was appointed to that court in October 1986 by President Ronald Reagan, and served as its chief judge from 2001 until 2008. In October 1987, Reagan announced his intention to nominate Ginsburg as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. But Ginsburg withdrew his name from consideration before being formally nominated, after news reports that he had smoked marijuana in the past created controversy.
Go to Profile#4129
Jon Bentley
#4136
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jon Louis Bentley is an American computer scientist who is credited with the heuristic-based partitioning algorithm k-d tree. Education and career Bentley received a B.S. in mathematical sciences from Stanford University in 1974, and M.S. and PhD in 1976 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; while a student, he also held internships at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. After receiving his Ph.D., he joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University as an assistant professor of computer science and mathematics. At CMU, his students inclu...
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Hugh Syme
#4137
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Hugh Syme is a Canadian Juno Award-winning graphic artist and member of the Premier Artists Collection who is best known for his artwork and cover concepts for rock and metal bands. He is also a musician and has appeared on some Rush albums as a keyboard player. Syme is notably responsible for all of Rush's album cover art since 1975's Caress of Steel as well as creating Rush's famous Starman logo. In 1983 he told Jeffrey Morgan that he never imagined the band would use it as their main logo. Syme also plays piano on the album Thrilling Women, which Morgan recorded with Dean Motter.
Go to Profile#4131
İhsan Doğramacı
#4138
Overall Influence
1915 - 2010 (95 years)
İhsan Doğramacı was a Turkish paediatrician, entrepreneur, philanthropist, educationalist and college administrator of Iraqi Turkmen descent born in today's Erbil, Kurdistan Region, Iraq then Ottoman Empire.
Go to Profile#4132
Leon Kamin
#4139
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Leon J. Kamin was an American psychologist known for his contributions to learning theory and his critique of estimates of the heritability of IQ. He studied under Richard Solomon at Harvard and contributed several important ideas about conditioning, including the "blocking effect".
Go to Profile#4133
Hans Blumenberg
#4140
Overall Influence
1920 - 1996 (76 years)
Hans Blumenberg was a German philosopher and intellectual historian. He studied philosophy, German studies and the classics and is considered to be one of the most important German philosophers of the century. He died on 28 March 1996 in Altenberge , Germany.
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Augusto Boal
#4141
Overall Influence
1931 - 2009 (78 years)
Augusto Boal was a Brazilian theatre practitioner, drama theorist, and political activist. He was the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, a theatrical form originally used in radical left popular education movements. Boal served one term as a Vereador in Rio de Janeiro from 1993 to 1997, where he developed legislative theatre.
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Julian E. Zelizer
#4142
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Julian Emanuel Zelizer is a professor of political history and an author in the United States at Princeton University. Zelizer has authored or co-authored several books about American political history; his focuses of study are the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century.
Go to Profile#4136
Colin Crouch
#4143
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Colin John Crouch, is an English sociologist and political scientist. He coined the post-democracy concept in 2000 in his book Coping with Post-Democracy. Colin Crouch is currently Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick and an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
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Phil Spector
#4144
Overall Influence
1939 - 2021 (82 years)
Harvey Phillip Spector was an American record producer and songwriter, best known for his innovative recording practices and entrepreneurship in the 1960s, followed, decades later, by his two trials and conviction for murder in the 2000s. Spector developed the Wall of Sound, a production style that is characterized for its diffusion of tone colors and dense orchestral sound, which he described as a "Wagnerian" approach to rock and roll. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in pop music history and one of the most successful producers of the 1960s.
Go to Profile#4138
Irvine Welsh
#4145
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Irvine Welsh is a Scottish novelist and short story writer. His 1993 novel Trainspotting was made into a film of the same name. He has also written plays and screenplays, and directed several short films.
Go to Profile#4139
John Charles Cutler
#4146
Overall Influence
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
John Charles Cutler was a senior surgeon, and the acting chief of the venereal disease program in the United States Public Health Service. After his death, his involvement in several controversial and unethical medical studies of syphilis was revealed, including the Guatemala and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.
Go to Profile#4140
Isabel Perón
#4147
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Isabel Martínez de Perón is an Argentine politician who served as President of Argentina from 1974 to 1976. She was one of the first female republican heads of state in the world, and the first woman to serve as president of a country.
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Ray Birdwhistell
#4148
Overall Influence
1918 - 1994 (76 years)
Ray L. Birdwhistell was an American anthropologist who founded kinesics as a field of inquiry and research. Birdwhistell coined the term kinesics, meaning "facial expression, gestures, posture and gait, and visible arm and body movements". He estimated that "no more than 30 to 35 percent of the social meaning of a conversation or an interaction is carried by the words." Stated more broadly, he argued that "words are not the only containers of social knowledge." He proposed other technical terms, including kineme, and many others less frequently used today. Birdwhistell had at least as much i...
Go to Profile#4142
David Brooks
#4149
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
David Brooks is an American conservative political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times. He has worked as a film critic for The Washington Times, a reporter and later op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard from its inception, a contributing editor at Newsweek, and The Atlantic Monthly, in addition to working as a commentator on NPR and the PBS NewsHour.
Go to Profile#4143
Robert Jordan
#4150
Overall Influence
1948 - 2007 (59 years)
James Oliver Rigney Jr. , better known by his pen name Robert Jordan, was an American author of epic fantasy. He is known best for his series The Wheel of Time which comprises 14 books and a prequel novel. He is one of several writers to have written original Conan the Barbarian novels; his are considered by fans to be some of the best of the non-Robert E. Howard efforts. Jordan also published historical fiction using the pseudonym Reagan O'Neal, a western as Jackson O'Reilly, and dance criticism as Chang Lung. Jordan claimed to have ghostwritten an "international thriller" that is still bel...
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Rodney Needham
#4151
Overall Influence
1923 - 2006 (83 years)
Rodney Needham was an English social anthropologist. Born Rodney Phillip Needham Green, he changed his name in 1947; the following year he married Maud Claudia Brysz. The couple would collaborate on several works, including an English translation of Robert Hertz's Death and the Right Hand.
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Nancy Cartwright
#4152
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Nancy Cartwright, Lady Hampshire, is an American philosopher of science. She is a professor of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego and the University of Durham. Currently, she is the President of the Division for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.
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Laura Tyson
#4153
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Laura D'Andrea Tyson is an American economist and university administrator who is currently a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley and a senior fellow at the Berggruen Institute. She served as the 16th Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1995 and 2nd Director of the National Economic Council from 1995 to 1996 under President Bill Clinton. Tyson was the first woman to hold each of those posts. She remains the only person to have served in both posts.
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Luis E. Miramontes
#4154
Overall Influence
1925 - 2004 (79 years)
Luis Ernesto Miramontes Cárdenas was a Mexican chemist known as co-inventor and the first to synthesize an oral contraceptive, progestin norethisterone. Career Summary Miramontes was born in Tepic, Nayarit. He obtained his first Degree in chemical engineering at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México . He was a founding researcher of the Institute of Chemistry of UNAM, specializing mainly in the area of Organic Chemistry. He was a professor of the Faculty of Chemistry of UNAM, Director and professor of the School of Chemistry at the Universidad Iberoamericana, and deputy director of research at the Mexican Institute of Petroleum .
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Raymond Davis Jr.
#4155
Overall Influence
1914 - 2006 (92 years)
Raymond Davis Jr. was an American chemist and physicist. He is best known as the leader of the Homestake experiment in the 1960s-1980s, which was the first experiment to detect neutrinos emitted from the Sun; for this he shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Robert Garner
#4156
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Robert Garner is a British political scientist, political theorist, and intellectual historian. He is a Professor Emeritus in the politics department at the University of Leicester , where he has worked for much of his career. Before working at Leicester, he worked at the University of Exeter and the University of Buckingham, and studied at the University of Manchester and the University of Salford.
Go to Profile#4150
Tony Hillerman
#4157
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Anthony Grove Hillerman was an American author of detective novels and nonfiction works, best known for his mystery novels featuring Navajo Nation Police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. Several of his works have been adapted as theatrical and television movies.
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