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
#41151
Michel Dumontier
#41164
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Michel Justin Dumontier is a Distinguished Professor of Data Science at Maastricht University. His research focuses on methods to represent knowledge on the web with applications for drug discovery and personalized medicine. He was previously an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and an Associate Professor of Bioinformatics at Carleton University. He is best known for his work in biomedical ontologies, linked data and biomedical knowledge discovery. He has taught courses on biochemistry, bioinformatics, computational systems biology, and translational medicine.
Go to Profile#41152
Ashok Kumar
#41165
Overall Influence
1941 - 2014 (73 years)
Ashok Kumar Aggarwal was an Indian cinematographer who worked mainly in the South Indian film industry. In a career that spanned nearly four decades, he worked in over 125 feature films in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Hindi languages. Aggarwal was a member of the Indian Society of Cinematographers .
Go to Profile#41153
Ron Pernick
#41166
Overall Influence
Ron Pernick is an American author and the co-founder and managing director of Clean Edge, a developer and publisher of thematic stock indexes tracking clean energy, transportation, water, and the grid. He is an accomplished market research, publishing, and business development entrepreneur with more than three decades of high-tech experience.
Go to Profile#41154
Algirdas Brazauskas
#41167
Overall Influence
1932 - 2010 (78 years)
Algirdas Mykolas Brazauskas was a Lithuanian politician who served as the fourth president of Lithuania from 1993 to 1998. He also served as the prime minister of Lithuania from 2001 to 2006. Brazauskas was the first democratically elected president of post-Soviet Lithuania.
Go to Profile#41155
Edward J. Balleisen
#41168
Overall Influence
Edward J. Balleisen is an American academic. He is a professor of History at Duke University, and the author or editor of several books. Early life After growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, Edward Balleisen graduated from Princeton University, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1987. He earned an MPhil and a PhD from Yale University, in 1992 and 1995 respectively. From 1995 to 1997, he held a postdoctoral fellowship and teaching post at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Balleisen has taught at Duke University since 1997.
Go to Profile#41156
Oscar H. Gandy Jr.
#41169
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Oscar H. Gandy Jr., retired since 2006, is a scholar of the political economy of information who was the Herbert Schiller Professor of Communication studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His work spans many subjects, including privacy, race, information technology, media framing, media development, and educational subsidy.
Go to Profile#41157
Mohamed Noor
#41170
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Mohamed Noor is the Interim Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and a Professor in the Biology Department at Duke University . His specialties include evolution, genetics and genomics. Noor has a BS from the College of William and Mary in 1992 and a PhD from University of Chicago , together with a postdoctoral residency at Cornell University . He specializes in Drosophila evolution. His team's research approaches have included both classical genetic mapping, as well as analyses of whole genome sequences.
Go to Profile#41158
Felicity Colman
#41171
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Felicity Colman is a Creative Media Arts theorist. She is Professor of Film and Media Arts. She is the Dean of Research and Knowledge Exchange for the London College of Fashion at University of the Arts London
Go to Profile#41159
Gaetano Ciancio
#41172
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Gaetano Ciancio is an Italian American surgeon at the University of Miami who specializes in kidney transplant. He is the chief medical and academic officer of the Miami Transplant Institute and the director of its Kidney & Kidney-Pancreas Programs. His most significant contributions to medicine are related to surgically treating kidney cancer once it has spread to the inferior vena cava and in optimizing the immunosuppression protocol after kidney transplant.
Go to Profile#41160
Catherine Ingraham
#41173
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Catherine Ingraham is a professor of architecture in the graduate architecture program at Pratt Institute in New York City, a program for which she was chair from 1999 to 2005. Biography Ingraham was born to Gordon Ingraham and Elizabeth Wright Ingraham. Ingraham was raised in Colorado and earned her doctorate at Johns Hopkins University. Ingraham has held academic appointments at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Iowa State University and been a visiting professor at Princeton, the GSD, and Columbia University, before joining Pratt as chair in 1999.
Go to Profile#41161
Yeheskel Bar-Ness
#41174
Overall Influence
Yeheskel Bar-Ness is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at New Jersey Institute of Technology . Education Bar-Ness received a bachelor's and a master's degree in electrical engineering from the Technion in Haifa, Israel, and a doctorate from Brown University.
Go to Profile#41162
James H. Bramble
#41175
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
James Henry Bramble was an American mathematician known for his fundamental contributions in the development of the finite element methods, including the Bramble–Hilbert lemma, domain decomposition methods, and multigrid methods. During his career, he taught at Cornell University and Texas A&M University.
Go to Profile#41163
Carl Shoup
#41176
Overall Influence
1902 - 2000 (98 years)
Carl Sumner Shoup was an American economist and public finance expert. He is best known for leading the Shoup Mission of 1949–1950, tasked with revising the fiscal system of post-World War II Japan. He directly contributed to the tax codes of Canada, the United States, Japan, Europe, and South and Central America in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. He retired as professor emeritus at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#41164
Brian Boitano
#41177
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Brian Anthony Boitano is an American figure skater from Sunnyvale, California. He is the 1988 Olympic champion, the 1986 and 1988 World Champion, and the 1985–1988 U.S. National Champion. He turned professional following the 1988 season. Under new rules by the ISU, he returned to competition in 1993 and competed at the 1994 Winter Olympics, where he placed sixth. In 1996, he was inducted into the World Figure Skating Hall of Fame and the United States Figure Skating Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#41165
Rosław Szaybo
#41178
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Rosław Szaybo was a Polish painter, photographer and cover designer. He graduated in 1961 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and was mentored by Wojciech Fangor and Henryk Tomaszewski. In 1966 he moved to United Kingdom where he worked as an independent designer. Between 1968 and 1972 worked as an art director for the advertising company Young & Rubicam.
Go to Profile#41166
Madeleine M. Joullié
#41179
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Madeleine M. Joullié is an American-Brazilian organic chemist. She was the first woman to join the University of Pennsylvania chemistry faculty as well as the first female organic chemist to be appointed to a tenure track position in a major American university. She was one of the first affirmative action officers at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a distinguished record as a teacher of both undergraduate and graduate-level organic chemistry, and as a mentor of students.
Go to Profile#41167
Andrea Sella
#41180
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Andrea Sella is a chemist and broadcaster based at University College London where he is a Professor of Inorganic Chemistry. He studies rare-earth metals and collaborates with several research groups on hydrogen storage, carbonitrides, and nanotube insertion chemistry. He has been involved in numerous television documentaries, including the 2010 BBC documentary Chemistry: A Volatile History, which was nominated for the 2010 British Academy Television Awards in the category Specialist Factual. In 2014 he presented "My Family and other Ibex" and "Urine Trouble: What's in our Water" on BBC Radio 4.
Go to Profile#41168
Road Dogg
#41181
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Brian Girard James is an American professional wrestler currently signed with the WWE, where he serves as the Senior Vice President of Live Events. James was best known for his initial tenure with World Wrestling Federation as The Roadie from 1994 to 1995 and as "Road Dogg" Jesse James from 1996 to 2001. He is also known for his appearances with Total Nonstop Action Wrestling as B.G. James from 2002 to 2009, and has also made appearances for several other promotions such as Smoky Mountain Wrestling, World Championship Wrestling, the United States Wrestling Association, the Catch Wrestling ...
Go to Profile#41169
Jim Capaldi
#41182
Overall Influence
1944 - 2005 (61 years)
Nicola James Capaldi was an English singer-songwriter and drummer. His musical career spanned more than four decades. He co-founded the progressive rock band Traffic in 1967 with Steve Winwood with whom he co-wrote the majority of the band's material. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a part of Traffic's original lineup.
Go to Profile#41170
Krzysztof Olendzki
#41183
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Krzysztof Jan Olendzki is a Polish diplomat; ambassador to Tunisia and Slovenia . Life Olendzki graduated from history at the University of Warsaw . He has been studying also at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 1995, he defended his Ph.D. thesis at the Scuola Superiore di Studi Storici di San Marino.
Go to Profile#41171
Jacques Heurgon
#41184
Overall Influence
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
Jacques Heurgon was a French university, normalian, Etruscan scholar and Latinist, professor of Latin language and literature at the Sorbonne. Married to Anne Heurgon-Desjardins, founder in 1952, of the Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, he was the father of , politician and historian, Catherine Peyrou and Edith Heurgon who continued the "Colloques of Cerisy".
Go to Profile#41172
Alyson Hannigan
#41185
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Allison Lee Hannigan , known professionally as Alyson Hannigan, is an American actress and television presenter. After starting her career at age four with appearances in commercials, she moved to Hollywood at age 11 and soon got an agent.
Go to Profile#41173
Retief Goosen
#41186
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Retief Goosen is a South African professional golfer who plays on the PGA Tour Champions. He has won two U.S. Openss, in 2001 and 2004, headed the European Tour Order of Merit in 2001 and 2002, and was in the top ten of the world rankings for over 250 weeks between 2001 and 2007. He was elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame, class of 2019.
Go to Profile#41174
Mark Brunell
#41187
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Mark Allen Brunell is an American football coach and former quarterback who is the quarterbacks coach for the Detroit Lions of the National Football League . He previously played in the NFL for 19 seasons, most notably with the Jacksonville Jaguars. For his accomplishments in Jacksonville, he was inducted to the Pride of the Jaguars in 2013.
Go to Profile#41175
Alex James
#41188
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Steven Alexander James, FRSA is an English musician, best known as the bassist of the rock band Blur. He has also played with temporary bands Fat Les, Me Me Me, WigWam and Bad Lieutenant. Music career James was born in Boscombe, Bournemouth, and attended the state grammar school Bournemouth School, where he started playing in bands. He credits the Beatles with inspiring him to pursue music: "I was off school with chickenpox when John Lennon was shot in 1980. I spent the week watching a VHS recording of the Beatles film Help!, which was broadcast on TV the day he died. I still watch it once a year.
Go to Profile#41176
Kim Hoon
#41189
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Kim Hoon is a South Korean novelist, journalist and critic. Life Kim was born on May 5, 1948, in Seoul, Korea. After graduating from Whimoon High School, Kim Hoon entered Korea University in 1966. He joined Hankook Ilbo as a journalist in 1973. He made his debut as a novelist at the age of forty-seven with the publication of Memories of Earthenware with Comb Teeth Pattern. His second novel. Song of the Sword , which was awarded the prestigious Dong-in Literature Prize, was a literary sensation and elevated him into one of the most recognized names in Korean literature. Two years later in 2003,...
Go to Profile#41177
Sue Miller
#41190
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Sue Miller is an American novelist and short story writer who has written a number of best-selling novels. She graduated from Radcliffe College. Biography Born in Chicago, Miller was preoccupied with her duties as a single mother, leaving little time to write for many years. As a result, she did not publish her first novel until 1986, after spending almost a decade in various fellowships and teaching positions.
Go to Profile#41178
Robert Gibbs
#41191
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Robert Lane Gibbs is an American communication professional who served as executive vice president and global chief communications officer of McDonald's from 2015 to 2019 and as the 27th White House Press Secretary from 2009 to 2011.
Go to Profile#41179
Chris Umans
#41192
Overall Influence
Christopher Umans is a professor of Computer Science in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for work on algorithms, computational complexity, algebraic complexity, and hardness of approximation.
Go to Profile#41180
Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse
#41193
Overall Influence
1918 - 2019 (101 years)
Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse was a German book-binder, calligrapher and typographer. She also designed several typefaces. She was the 1991 winner of the Frederic W. Goudy Award. To mark her hundredth birthday in January 2018, Monotype released the titling typeface Hesse-Antiqua.
Go to Profile#41181
Clifford Antone
#41194
Overall Influence
1949 - 2006 (57 years)
Clifford Antone was the founder of the eponymous Austin blues club Antone's and independent record label Antone's Records and Tapes, as well as a mentor to Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmie Vaughan, Kim Wilson, Gary Clark, Jr. and numerous other musicians. He is the nephew of Jalal Antone, the founder of the Houston-based Antone's Import Co - known for its po-boy sandwiches.
Go to Profile#41182
Panagiota Daskalopoulos
#41195
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Panagiota Daskalopoulos is a professor of mathematics at Columbia University whose research involves partial differential equations and differential geometry. At Columbia, she also serves as director of undergraduate studies for mathematics.
Go to Profile#41183
Margaret Weitz
#41196
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Margaret Collins Weitz is a professor emeritus at Suffolk University. Weitz is the author of books and many articles on French culture, French women, and the role of women in the French Resistance. Dr. Weitz graduated from St. Ursula’s High School in Toledo, Ohio and went on to obtain her bachelor's degree from Ohio State University in humanities in 1953. She was awarded a Fulbright grant and proceeded to study for the next two years at University of Poitiers. After studying at Poitiers, she became the first Fulbright scholar to lecture at University of Aix-Marseilles. She later returned to the United States and earned her M.A.
Go to Profile#41184
Sam Wyche
#41197
Overall Influence
1945 - 2020 (75 years)
Samuel David Wyche was an American football quarterback and coach. He was a quarterback and head coach for the Cincinnati Bengals and a quarterbacks coach for the San Francisco 49ers. As head coach, he led the Bengals to Super Bowl XXIII, which they lost to the 49ers 20–16, relinquishing the lead on a last-minute touchdown. He was also known for introducing the use of the no-huddle offense as a standard offense .
Go to Profile#41185
Froma Zeitlin
#41198
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Froma I. Zeitlin is an American Classics scholar. She specializes in ancient Greek literature, with particular interests in epic, drama and prose fiction, along with work in gender criticism, and the relationship between art and text in the context of the visual culture of antiquity. Zeitlin's work on establishing new approaches to Greek tragedy has been considered particularly influential.
Go to Profile#41187
Atsuto Suzuki
#41200
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Atsuto Suzuki is an experimental particle physicist known for his observations of neutrinos and anti-neutrinos. Career Suzuki earned his doctorate from Tohoku University in 1974, supervised by Masatoshi Koshiba. In 1982 he was appointed to the faculty of the Tōkyō University. In 1993, he took concurrent positions as professor at the High Energy Physics Laboratory of Tohoku University and professor at the Institute of Cosmic Ray Research of Tōkyō University. Having taken part in the Kamiokande-II and Super-Kamiokande neutrino detection experiments, Suzuki was appointed Director of the Research Center for Neutrino Science in 1998 and led the KamLAND neutrino detection experiments.
Go to Profile#41188
Nicole Letourneau
#41201
Overall Influence
Nicole Lyn Letourneau is a Canadian professor and researcher. She is a Research Chair in Parent and Child Mental Health at the University of Calgary. Formerly she held the Alberta Children's Hospital Chair and Norlien Foundation Chair in Parent-Infant Mental Health and Canada Research Chair in Healthy Child Development . She currently serves as the director of the RESOLVE Alberta and principal investigator for the CHILD Studies Program at Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institute. She has written over 210 peer-reviewed publications; authored the books, Parenting and Child Development: ...
Go to Profile#41189
Sanford Palay
#41202
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
Sanford Louis "Sandy" Palay was an American scientist and educator. Academic Background Palay received his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College. Upon graduation in 1940, he entered the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University to study bacteriology. He changed his mind, and decided to study medicine, later specializing in neuroscience. He applied for a summer fellowship during his first year of medical school and was accepted into the laboratory of Ernst and Berta Scharrer, where Palay carried out his first investigations. Palay's professional and personal association with the S...
Go to Profile#41190
Kavous Seyed-Emami
#41203
Overall Influence
1953 - 2018 (65 years)
Kavous Seyed-Emami was an Iranian-Canadian academic and conservationist. Seyed-Emami ran the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation and was a sociology professor. In February 2018, Iran's judiciary said that he killed himself while in detention in Evin Prison, Tehran, because of the evidence against him in a spying case. This claim, including the alleged suicide, has been rejected by his family.
Go to Profile#41191
Marloes Maathuis
#41204
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Marloes Henriette Maathuis is a Dutch statistician known for her work on causal inference using graphical models, particularly in high-dimensional data from applications in biology and epidemiology. She is a professor of statistics at ETH Zurich in Switzerland.
Go to Profile#41192
Raymond R. Rogers
#41205
Overall Influence
Raymond Robert Rogers is a professor and chair of geology at Macalester College. He earned his B.S. in geology from Northern Arizona University in 1985, his M.S. from the University of Montana in 1989, and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1995 Rogers' specializations are as a sedimentary geologist and taphonomist, with a focus on the study of terrestrial and marginal marine depositional systems, particularly those with abundant fossils. He is one of the editors of the book Bonebeds: Genesis, Analysis, and Paleobiological Significance, from the University of Chicago Press .
Go to Profile#41193
Edward L. Dreyer
#41206
Overall Influence
1940 - 2007 (67 years)
Edward L. Dreyer was an American historian known for his work and expertise on the history of China's Ming dynasty. Early life and education Dreyer was born in 1940 in San Diego. He earned his BA in history from Harvard University in 1961 and his Ph.D. from Harvard with a thesis on "The Emergence of Chu Yuan-chang, 1360–65." His thesis advisors were John Fairbank and Lien-sheng Yang.
Go to Profile#41194
Kendrick Perkins
#41207
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Kendrick Le'Dale Perkins is an American former professional basketball player who is a sports analyst for ESPN. He entered the NBA directly out of high school and played for the Boston Celtics, Oklahoma City Thunder, Cleveland Cavaliers, and New Orleans Pelicans, winning the NBA Championship in 2008 with the Celtics.
Go to Profile#41195
Bryan Fuller
#41208
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Bryan Fuller is an American television writer and producer who has created a number of television series, including Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, Hannibal, American Gods, and Crystal Lake. Fuller worked as writer and executive producer on the Star Trek television series Voyager and Deep Space Nine; he is also the co-creator of Star Trek: Discovery.
Go to Profile#41196
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn
#41209
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn is an American developmental psychologist and professor. She is currently the Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development at Teachers College, Columbia University. Education Brooks-Gunn received her B.A in psychology at Connecticut College in 1969. She went to graduate school at Harvard University where she obtained her Ed.M in Human Learning and Development in 1970. Brooks-Gunn continued her studies the University of Pennsylvania, receiving her Ph.D. in human learning and development under the supervision of Michael Lewis.
Go to Profile#41197
Abdel Wahab El-Messiri
#41210
Overall Influence
1938 - 2008 (70 years)
Abdel-Wahab El-Messiri was an Egyptian scholar, author and general coordinator of the opposition organization Kefaya. Previously, he was a communist as well a member of the Muslim Broterhood. The author of some 50 books and numerous articles, his magnum opus was the eight-volume Encyclopedia of Jews, Judaism and Zionism.
Go to Profile#41198
Jenny Shipley
#41211
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Dame Jennifer Mary Shipley is a New Zealand former politician who served as the 36th prime minister of New Zealand from 1997 to 1999. She was the first female prime minister of New Zealand, and the first woman to have led the National Party.
Go to Profile#41199
Robert Preus
#41212
Overall Influence
1924 - 1995 (71 years)
Robert David Preus was an American Lutheran pastor, professor, author, and seminary president. Biography Robert Preus was born to Minnesota Governor J.A.O. Preus and Idella Haugen Preus. His older brother is J.A.O. Preus II, former president of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod .
Go to Profile#41200
Emmanuel K. Akyeampong
#41213
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong is a professor of history and African and African American studies, and the Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard University Center for African Studies at Harvard University. He is a faculty associate for the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, a previous board member of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, and has also previously held a prestigious Harvard College Professorship.
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