Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people

#41251

Bernard Greenberg

#41264

Overall Influence

Bernard S. Greenberg is a programmer and computer scientist, known for his work on Multics and the Lisp machine. Projects In 1978, Greenberg implemented Multics Emacs using Multics Maclisp. The success of this effort influenced the choice of Lisp as the basis for later versions of Emacs.

#41252

Yoshino Ōishi

#41265

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Yoshino Ōishi is a Japanese photojournalist. Ōishi was born in Suginami-ku, Tokyo on 28 May 1944. Seeing Melanesian art while at Nihon University had a big effect on her, as did a visit to Vietnam and Cambodia in 1966. After graduating in photography, she became a freelance photojournalist, working in west Africa, southeast Asia, and Europe. In 1971 she held an exhibition in the Nikon Salon of photographs of a Ghanaian child growing up in Nagano; she then spent three years photographing New Guinea. She worked on portraiture, and documented the effects of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the effect...

#41253

William O. Farber

#41266

Overall Influence

1910 - 2007 (97 years)

William Ogden "Doc" Farber was an American political scientist, professor emeritus at the University of South Dakota, and founder of the South Dakota Legislative Research Council. Notable protégés that credit his teachings as influences include Tom Brokaw, Al Neuharth, Dennis Daugaard, Dusty Johnson, and Pat O'Brien.

#41254

Hiroshi Yoshikawa

#41267

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Hiroshi Yoshikawa is a Japanese economist and professor of Rissho University. Yoshikawa was born in Tokyo. He won the Nikkei Economic Book Award and the Suntory Award , the Economist Award and the Yomiuri-Yoshino Sakuzo Award .

#41255

Alexandru Dragomir

#41268

Overall Influence

1916 - 2002 (86 years)

Alexandru Dragomir was a Romanian philosopher. He made his doctoral studies under Martin Heidegger's direction, in 1940. Philosophy Dragomir refused to publish any of his writing. He always maintained that publishing was of no importance to him; instead, genuine understanding was all that mattered. Thus he never got involved with the public cultural milieu. Before his death, no one even knew whether he had actually written anything, or not.

#41256

Dennis Hardy

#41269

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Emeritus professor Dennis Hardy is former vice-chancellor of the University of Seychelles . Early life Dennis Hardy was born in June 1941. He received his advanced education at the University of Exeter from where he graduated with bachelor's and master's degrees in Geography.

#41257

Michael Saks

#41270

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Michael Ezra Saks is an American mathematician. He is currently the Department Chair of the Mathematics Department at Rutgers University and from 2006 until 2010 was director of the Mathematics Graduate Program at Rutgers University. Saks received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980 after completing his dissertation titled Duality Properties of Finite Set Systems under his advisor Daniel J. Kleitman.

#41258

Marie-Andrée Bertrand

Marie-Andrée Bertrand

#41271

Overall Influence

1925 - 2011 (86 years)

Marie-Andrée Bertrand was a French-Canadian criminologist, a feminist and anti-prohibitionist. Biography Bertrand was born in Montreal and started her career as a social worker for female offenders, mainly sex workers. In 1963, she received a master's degree from the Université de Montréal. She went on to study criminology at the School of Criminology, University of California, Berkeley, where she got her Ph.D. in 1967. She held a professorship in criminology at the School of Criminology, Université de Montréal. She continued to work, until her death, doing research, teaching and publishing.

#41259

Bob Crewe

#41272

Overall Influence

1931 - 2014 (83 years)

Robert Stanley Crewe was an American songwriter, dancer, singer, manager, and record producer. Crewe co-wrote and produced a string of Top 10 singles with Bob Gaudio for the Four Seasons. As a songwriter, his most successful songs include "Silhouettes" ; "Big Girls Don't Cry", "Walk Like a Man", "Rag Doll", "Silence Is Golden", "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine ", "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" and "Bye, Bye, Baby" ; "Let's Hang On!" ; and "My Eyes Adored You" and "Lady Marmalade" . He also had hit recordings with the Rays, Diane Renay, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Freddy Cannon, Lesley Gore, O...

#41260

Mark Stoyle

#41273

Overall Influence

Mark J. Stoyle is a Tudor and Stuart British historian who specializes in the English Civil War, the nature of magic and witchcraft and the identity of key areas such as Cornwall and Wales during the early modern period. He is Professor at the University of Southampton, and also does much work on the history and landscape of Exeter where he previously lived and taught.

#41261

Eiji Oguma

#41274

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Eiji Oguma is a Japanese historical sociologist, a professor at Keio University, a documentary filmmaker, and a guitarist. Born in Akishima in Tokyo Metropolis in 1962, Oguma received his PhD from Tokyo University in 1998. Since 1997, he has been on the faculty at Keio University, where he was named a full professor in 2007. Oguma has written extensively on postwar social and political history, and issues of Japanese nationalism. Recently, he has turned to documentary filmmaking, directing a documentary on Japanese protests against nuclear power in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake ...

#41262

Edward Gnehm

#41275

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Edward William Gnehm Jr. , also known as Skip Gnehm, is an American diplomat who most recently served as the U.S. ambassador to Jordan. He is now a faculty member at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs.

#41263

Alan E. Gelfand

#41276

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Alan Enoch Gelfand is an American statistician, and is currently the James B. Duke Professor of Statistics and Decision Sciences at Duke University. Gelfand’s research includes substantial contributions to the fields of Bayesian statistics, spatial statistics and hierarchical modeling.

#41264

G. Peter Lepage

#41277

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

G. Peter Lepage is a Canadian American theoretical physicist and an academic administrator. He was the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University from 2003 to 2013.

#41265

Garett Jones

#41278

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Garett Jones is an American economist and author. His research pertains to the fields of macroeconomics, monetary policy, IQ in relation to productivity, short-term business cycles, and economic development. He is an associate professor at George Mason University and the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center.

#41266

Bernard Siegan

#41279

Overall Influence

1924 - 2006 (82 years)

Bernard H. Siegan was a longtime law professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, libertarian legal theorist and a former federal judicial nominee to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The New York Times called Siegan's nomination "one of the most bitterly disputed judicial nominations of the Reagan Era."

#41267

Robert W. Cahn

#41280

Overall Influence

1924 - 2007 (83 years)

Robert Wolfgang Cahn FRS was a British metallurgist whose contributions to physical metallurgy centred on the properties of dislocations. Cahn developed a successful model for the nucleation of recrystallisation, which underpinned research into industrial processes involving high-temperature deformation. He also contributed substantially to the crystallography of uranium. In later life he made a great contribution to scientific editing, editing both scientific textbooks such as the comprehensive Physical Metallurgy, co-edited, with Peter Haasen, a standard reference work in the field.

#41268

Víctor Nee

#41281

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Victor G. Nee is an American sociologist and professor at Cornell University, known for his work in economic sociology, inequality and immigration. He published a book with Richard Alba entitled Remaking the American Mainstream proposing a neo-assimilation theory to explain the assimilation of post-1965 immigrant minorities and the second generation. In 2012, he published Capitalism from Below co-authored with Sonja Opper examining the rise of economic institutions of capitalism in China. Nee is the Frank and Rosa Rhodes Professor, and Director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell University.

#41269

John Riley Holt

#41282

Overall Influence

1918 - 2009 (91 years)

John Riley Holt, FRS was an English experimental physicist who played a part in the development of the atom bomb and later became one of the pioneers of elementary particle physics research. Early life and education Holt was born in Runcorn, Cheshire, England, in 1918, his father being a worker in a boat-building yard, and his mother the owner of a bakery and confectionery shop. He was educated in Runcorn and in 1934 at the age of 16 became an undergraduate in the physics department at the University of Liverpool. The following year James Chadwick was appointed Professor of Physics at the u...

#41270

J. Paul Leonard

#41283

Overall Influence

1901 - 1995 (94 years)

John Paul Leonard was an American educator, and university president. He was the 5th President of San Francisco State University serving from 1945 to 1957; and the 5th President of American University of Beirut serving from 1957 to 1961.

#41271

Ron Lieber

#41284

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

#41272

John Breaux

#41285

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

John Berlinger Breaux is an American lobbyist, attorney, and retired politician who was a member of the United States Senate from Louisiana from 1987 until 2005. He was also a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1972 to 1987. He was considered one of the more conservative national legislators from the Democratic Party. Breaux was a member of the New Democrat Coalition.

#41273

Camille Bacon-Smith

#41286

Overall Influence

Camille Bacon-Smith is an American scholar and novelist. She has a Ph.D. in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. Her books, Enterprising Women and Science Fiction Culture , investigated science fiction fandom, including such aspects as slash fiction, hurt-comfort stories and Mary Sue characterization. Under her own name she has published an urban fantasy series beginning with Eye of the Daemon . Under the pen name Curt Benjamin, she has written fantasy novels with an Asian setting, beginning with The Prince of Shadow . In 2016 she began writing dance reviews for Broad S...

#41274

Charles Clarke

#41287

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Charles Rodway Clarke is a British Labour Party politician who held various Cabinet positions under Prime Minister Tony Blair from 2001 to 2006, lastly as Home Secretary from December 2004 to May 2006. Clarke was the Member of Parliament for Norwich South from 1997 to 2010.

#41275

Jeffrey Brenner

#41288

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Jeffrey Brenner is the CEO of the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services, and a primary care physician. Biography Brenner is the founder of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, and was its executive director from 2006 to 2017. The Camden Coalition provides preventive care to high-risk patients in order to reduce healthcare costs. This practice is known as "hotspotting". The program, which began in Camden, New Jersey, has since expanded to ten cities, including Allentown, Pennsylvania, Aurora, Colorado, Kansas City, Missouri, and San Diego.

#41276

Roy Goodacre

#41289

Overall Influence

Royston "Roy" Goodacre is Chair in Biological Chemistry at the University of Liverpool. With training in both Microbiology and Pyrolysis-Mass Spectrometry, Goodacre runs a multidisciplinary Metabolomics and Raman spectroscopy research group in the Institute of Systems, Molecular and Integrative Biology , and leads ISMIB's Centre for Metabolomics Research and the Laboratory for Bioanalytical Spectroscopy.

#41277

Ottmar Ette

#41290

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Ottmar Ette is Professor of Romance languages and Comparative literature at University of Potsdam. Biographical notes In 1990, Ottmar Ette completed his dissertation at University of Freiburg on the Spanish-American modernist and Cuban national icon José Martí. In 1995, his habilitation on French post-modern theorist Roland Barthes was accepted at Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. In 2001, Ette received the "Hugo Friedrich und Erich Köhler"-award for his work on Roland Barthes from Freiburg University. Twice, he has been granted fellowships in advanced-study institutions. He has lectured and taught in a number of Latin-American and European countries, as well as in the USA.

#41278

Seth Lazar

#41291

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Seth Lazar is an Australian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He leads the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab. Lazar won the Frank Chapman Sharp Prize in 2011 "for the best unpublished monograph on the philosophy of war and peace". He is known for his research on defensive war.

#41279

Madeleine Blais

Madeleine Blais

#41292

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Madeleine Blais is an American journalist, author and professor in the University of Massachusetts Amherst's journalism department. As a reporter for the Miami Herald, Blais earned the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1980 for "Zepp's Last Stand", a story about a self-declared pacifist and subsequently dishonorably discharged World War I veteran. Blais has worked at The Boston Globe , The Trenton Times and the Miami Herald . She has also published articles in The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Northeast Magazine in the Hartford Courant, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, Nieman Reports, the Detroit Free Press and the San Jose Mercury News.

#41280

Monte Cassim

#41293

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Monte Cassim is a Sri Lankan academic. He is the Vice-Chancellor of the Ritsumeikan Trust and from April 2004 until January 2010 was President of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Beppu, Japan where he remains Professor.

#41281

Ivan Kalmar

#41294

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Ivan Kalmar is a Canadian professor. Early life Soon after he was born in Prague, his family moved to Komárno, and later to Bratislava. When he was seventeen, he left what was then Czechoslovakia, and eventually arrived in the United States. Kalmar's family settled down in Philadelphia.

#41282

Carroll O'Connor

Carroll O'Connor

#41295

Overall Influence

1924 - 2001 (77 years)

John Carroll O'Connor was an American actor whose television career spanned over four decades. O'Connor found widespread fame as Archie Bunker , the main character in the CBS television sitcoms All in the Family and its continuation, Archie Bunker's Place . O'Connor later starred in the NBC/CBS television crime drama In the Heat of the Night , where he played the role of police chief William "Bill" Gillespie. In the late 1990s, he played Gus Stemple, the father of Jamie Buchman on Mad About You. In 1996, O'Connor was ranked number 38 on TV Guides 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time. He won fiv...

#41283

Bill Parry

#41296

Overall Influence

1934 - 2006 (72 years)

William Parry FRS was an English mathematician who worked in dynamical systems, and, in particular, ergodic theory. In particular, he studied subshifts of finite type nilflows. Life Bill Parry was born in Coventry in the Warwickshire , England, the sixth of seven children. Although he failed the eleven-plus exam, Parry was persuaded by his mathematics teacher at Coventry Junior Technical School, specialising in metalwork and woodwork, to aim for university. To get appropriate tuition, he had to travel to Birmingham Technical College. He won a place at University College London. Following an ...

#41284

Jay Gan

#41297

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Jay Jianying Gan is an American agricultural and environmental scientist. Gan is current chair of the Department of Environmental Sciences at University of California, Riverside. Biography Gan received his B.Sc. in agronomy in 1982, M.Sc. in pesticides in 1985, and Ph.D. in pesticides in 1988, all from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.

#41285

Charles Ornstein

#41298

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Charles Ornstein is an American journalist. He is currently a senior editor for ProPublica specializing in health care issues, including medical quality, the United States Department of Veterans Affairs and Big Pharma. He is also an adjunct associate professor of journalism at Columbia University.

#41286

Haim Aviv

#41299

Overall Influence

1940 - 2021 (81 years)

Haim Aviv was an Israeli scientist who specialized in the field of molecular biology. Aviv is considered to have a fundamental role in the shaping of the biotechnology industry in Israel, as he was widely involved in this industry since the late 1970s to this day.

#41287

Bernd Becher

#41300

Overall Influence

1931 - 2007 (76 years)

#41288

Stig Stenholm

#41301

Overall Influence

1939 - 2017 (78 years)

Stig Torsten Stenholm was a theoretical physicist who formerly held an Academy of Finland professorship. Education and career Stenholm obtained an engineering degree at the Helsinki University of Technology , and a master of science degree in mathematics at the University of Helsinki, both in 1964. He then earned his Dr. phil. at Oxford in 1967 on the topic of quantum liquids under supervision of Dirk ter Haar.

#41289

Kevin N. Dalby

#41302

Overall Influence

Kevin N. Dalby is an American pharmacist, who is currently the Johnson & Johnson Centennial Professor at University of Texas at Austin. He examines fundamental mechanisms underlying human diseases to develop new treatments while also teaching and motivating students to conduct research.

#41290

Ayub Ommaya

#41303

Overall Influence

1930 - 2008 (78 years)

Ayub Khan Ommaya, MD, ScD , FRCS, FACS was a Pakistani American neurosurgeon and the inventor of the Ommaya reservoir. The reservoir is used to provide chemotherapy directly to the tumor site for brain tumors. Ommaya was also a leading expert in traumatic brain injuries.

#41291

Craig Partridge

#41304

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Craig Partridge is an American computer scientist, known for his contributions to the technical development of the Internet. Partridge graduated in 1979 from Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington D.C. He received his A.B. in history in 1983, and in 1992 received his Ph.D. in computer science, from Harvard University.

#41292

Steve Staunton

#41305

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Stephen Staunton is an Irish football manager, scout and former professional footballer. He played as a defender with two separate spells each with Premier League sides Aston Villa and Liverpool. He also played in the Football League for Bradford City, Crystal Palace, Coventry City and Walsall. He earned 102 capss for the Republic of Ireland national football team, captained his team to the knock-out stage of the 2002 FIFA World Cup and earned his place in the FIFA Century Club.

#41293

Martin Carthy

#41306

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Martin Carthy MBE is an English folk singer and guitarist who has remained one of the most influential figures in British traditional music, inspiring contemporaries such as Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, and later artists such as Richard Thompson, since he emerged as a young musician in the early days of the folk revival in the UK during the 1960s and 1970s.

#41294

Stephen B. Burbank

#41307

Overall Influence

Stephen B. Burbank is the David Berger Professor for the Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Education In 1964, Burbank graduated cum laude from the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he graduated as valedictorian.

#41295

Jenny Sharpe

#41308

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Jenny Sharpe is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA . Her research focuses on issues of postcolonial studies, Caribbean literature, theories of allegory, the novel, rethinking models of memory and the archive, and the effect of the Middle Passage. In 2020, she began serving as the Chair of Graduate Studies in UCLA's English Department.

#41296

Danielle Belgrave

#41309

Overall Influence

Danielle Charlotte Belgrave is a Trinidadian-British computer scientist based at DeepMind, who uses statistics and machine learning to understand the progression of diseases. Early life and education Belgrave grew up in Trinidad and Tobago, where her high school mathematics teacher inspired her to work as a data scientist. She studied statistics and business at the London School of Economics . She was a graduate student at University College London , where she earned a master's degree in statistics. In 2010 Belgrave moved to the University of Manchester, where she earned a PhD for research supervised by Iain Buchan, Christopher Bishop and supported by a Microsoft Research scholarship.

#41297

Ivan Antić

#41310

Overall Influence

1923 - 2005 (82 years)

Ivan Antic was a Serbian architect and academic, considered one of Yugoslavia's best post-World War II architects. He worked on several projects with architect Ivanka Raspopović. Biography He studied in Belgrade from 1945 until graduating in 1950. While studying, he worked for the Ministry of Transportation and from 1950 until 1953 he worked for the "Jugoprojekt Office" where he met people like Stanko Kliska and Vojin Simeonović where he learned the practical skills of his profession. After 1957 he started to design his own projects and after that he joined the University of Belgrade Faculty of Architecture, in first as an assistant and later as a professor.

#41298

Donald Sinden

#41311

Overall Influence

1923 - 2014 (91 years)

Sir Donald Alfred Sinden was a British actor. Sinden featured in the film Mogambo , and achieved early fame as a Rank Organisation film star in the 1950s in films including The Cruel Sea , Doctor in the House , Simba , Eyewitness and Doctor at Large . He then became highly regarded as an award-winning Shakespearean and West End theatre actor and television sitcom star, winning the 1977 Evening Standard Award for Best Actor for King Lear, and starring in the sitcoms Two's Company and Never the Twain .

#41299

Bernard Morin

#41312

Overall Influence

1931 - 2018 (87 years)

Bernard Morin was a French mathematician, specifically a topologist. Early life and education Morin lost his sight at the age of six due to glaucoma, but his blindness did not prevent him from having a successful career in mathematics. He received his Ph.D. in 1972 from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

#41300

Jean-Michel Maulpoix

Jean-Michel Maulpoix

#41313

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Jean-Michel Maulpoix was born on November 11, 1952, in Montbéliard, Doubs. The author of more than twenty volumes of French poetry and of several volumes of essays and criticism, he teaches modern French literature at the University Paris X Nanterre and is the director of the quarterly literary journal Le Nouveau Recueil. He is an alumnus of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud.

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