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
#41301
Nick Kaiser
#41314
Overall Influence
1954 - 2023 (69 years)
Nicholas Kaiser was a British cosmologist. Life and career Kaiser received his Bachelor's in physics at Leeds University in 1978, and his Part III in maths at University of Cambridge in 1979. He obtained his PhD in astronomy, also at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Martin Rees.
Go to Profile#41302
Tahir Albakaa
#41315
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Tahir Albakaa is an Iraqi historian who received his Master's degree and Ph.D in Modern History from Baghdad University. Albakaa worked at Al-Mustansiriya University from 1983 to 2003 and is the former President of the University. In June 2004 he was chosen as a Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research for the Iraqi Interim Government. Albakaa was a member of the Iraqi National Assembly in 2005, and a member of the Iraqi Constitution Writing Committee.
Go to Profile#41303
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland
#41316
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland is an American civil rights activist who was active in the 1960s. She was one of the Freedom Riders who was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi in 1961, and was confined for two months in the Maximum Security Unit of the Mississippi State Penitentiary . The following year she was the first white student to enroll at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi and served as the local secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee .
Go to Profile#41304
Brigitte Kronauer
#41317
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
Brigitte Kronauer was a German writer who lived in Hamburg. Her novels, written in the tradition of Jean Paul with artful writing and an ironic undertone, were awarded several prizes, including in 2005 the Georg Büchner Prize, in 2011 the Jean-Paul-Preis and in 2017 the Thomas Mann Prize.
Go to Profile#41305
Nisvan Erkal
#41318
Overall Influence
Nisvan Erkal FASSA is an economist of Turkish-Australian nationality. She is a professor of economics at the University of Melbourne and she is a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Erkal has studied a range of subjects including the effect of policies like China's One Child Policy and how the use of information and traditional methods of choosing leaders can result in discrimination against women.
Go to Profile#41306
Jerelle Joseph
#41319
Overall Influence
Jerelle A. Joseph is a computational chemist and academic from Dominica, who is also an advocate for representation and diversity in science. She is the founder of CariScholar, a network connecting students and academics from Caribbean countries.
Go to Profile#41307
Joseph Stanislaw
#41320
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Joseph Stanislaw is a financial adviser on international markets and politics. He is also the co-founder and former president of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy research consultancy that was acquired in 2004 by IHS Energy.
Go to Profile#41308
G. Marcus Cole
#41321
Overall Influence
G. Marcus Cole is an American academic who serves as the Joseph A. Matson Dean and Professor of Law at the Notre Dame Law School. He is an expert on the law of bankruptcy, corporate reorganization, and venture capital.
Go to Profile#41309
Ali Akdemir
#41322
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Ali Akdemir is a Turkish University Professor for Management and former Rector of the Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University . He is the former Dean of the Biga Faculty Of Economics and Administrative Sciences at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University . His main research area is on management and leadership issues, has some several articles and presentations.
Go to Profile#41310
Nicholas Kaldor
#41323
Overall Influence
#41311
Raoul Kopelman
#41324
Overall Influence
1933 - 2023 (90 years)
Raoul Kopelman was a scientist, inventor, and the Richard Smalley Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry, Physics, Applied Physics, Biophysics, Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Biology at the University of Michigan. Amongst other accomplishments, he was well known for developing the Hoshen-Kopelman algorithm. He was also amongst the first scientists pushing to establish the field of nanotechnology.
Go to Profile#41312
Otto Pöggeler
#41325
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Otto Pöggeler was a German philosopher. He specialized in phenomenology and commenting on Heidegger. In 1963 he authored the acclaimed Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, one of the first rigorous attempts at tracing the development of Heidegger's thought. He also published a study of poetry of Paul Celan, and was director of the Hegel-Archiv at the Ruhr University in Bochum.
Go to Profile#41313
Henrik Sedin
#41326
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Henrik Lars Sedin is a Swedish ice hockey executive and former centre who played his entire 17-season National Hockey League career with the Vancouver Canucks from 2000 to 2018. He additionally served as the Canucks' captain from 2010 until his retirement. Born and raised in Örnsköldsvik, Sweden, Sedin and his identical twin brother Daniel played together throughout their careers; the pair were renowned for their effectiveness as a tandem. Henrik, a skilled passer, was known as a playmaker while Daniel was known as a goal-scorer . Sedin tallied 240 goals and 830 assists, for 1,070 points, i...
Go to Profile#41314
Eugenio Bulygin
#41327
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
Eugenio Bulygin, born Yevgeny Viktorovich Bulygin was a Russian Argentine jurist and legal philosopher. During a career that spanned over 60 years covering the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century, Bulygin established himself as one of the main representatives of legal positivism in the Latin world.
Go to Profile#41315
Kartar Singh Thind
#41328
Overall Influence
1917 - 1991 (74 years)
Kartar Singh Thind was a botanist. He was born in Saidpur, Sultanpur Lodhi tehsil, Kapurthala district, Punjab, India. A scientist and educationist, Thind was M.Sc, Ph. D, F.N.A.Sc. He did his Doctorate in Plant Pathology from the University of Wisconsin, USA.
Go to Profile#41316
Joyce Banda
#41329
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Joyce Hilda Banda is a Malawian politician, who served as President of Malawi, from 7 April 2012 to 31 May 2014. Banda took office as President following the sudden death of President Bingu wa Mutharika. She is the founder and leader of the People's Party, created in 2011. An educator and grassroots women's rights activist, she was the Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2006 to 2009 and the Vice-President of Malawi from May 2009 to April 2012. She has served in various roles as a member of Parliament and as Minister of Gender and Child Welfare before she became the President of the Republic of ...
Go to Profile#41317
John Wijngaards
#41330
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Johannes Nicolaas Maria Wijngaards is a Catholic scripture scholar and a laicized priest. Since 1977 he has been prominent in his public opposition to the teaching of the Catholic Church on the impossibility of ordaining women to the priesthood. In 1998 he resigned from his priestly ministry in protest against Pope John Paul II’s decrees Ordinatio sacerdotalis and Ad Tuendam Fidem which prohibited further discussion of the women priests’ issue in the Catholic Church.
Go to Profile#41318
Bennett McCallum
#41331
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Bennett Tarlton McCallum was an American monetary economist. He was H. J. Heinz Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business. He is known for the McCallum Rule, a monetary policy proposal advocating targeting the growth rate of the monetary base.
Go to Profile#41319
Baruch Hirson
#41332
Overall Influence
1921 - 1999 (78 years)
Baruch Hirson was a South African political activist, academic, author, and historian, who was jailed for nine years in apartheid-era South Africa before moving to England in 1973. He was co-founder of the critical journal Searchlight South Africa, and in 1991, a critic of what he referred to as Stalinist methods used by the African National Congress .
Go to Profile#41320
Rada Mihalcea
#41333
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Rada Mihalcea is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on natural language processing, multimodal processing, and computational social science.
Go to Profile#41321
Martin L. Beck
#41334
Overall Influence
Martin L. Beck was an architect, artist, and professor of architecture. Biography Undergraduate work at Royal Institute of Technology, Budapest, HungaryPratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, 1922–23Graduate College, School of Architecture, Princeton University , as winner of scholarship award in national competition.
Go to Profile#41322
Prajval Shastri
#41335
Overall Influence
Prajval Shastri is an astrophysicist, formerly at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore and specializes in the area of phenomenology of active galaxies driven by supermassive blackholes using multi-wavelength observations ranging from radio to X-ray wavelengths.
Go to Profile#41323
Claude Cossette
#41336
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Claude Cossette is an advertising man and a scholar born in Quebec City, Quebec in 1937. He founded Cossette Communication Group in 1964, which he restructured in 1972 making his five top executives his equal partners. He headed the business as president until he resigned in 1982. At the time, the agency was the biggest communication organization in the Province of Quebec with offices in Quebec City, Montreal and Toronto.
Go to Profile#41324
Danny Green
#41337
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Daniel Richard Green is an American professional basketball player. In a National Basketball Association career that began in 2009, Green has played for six teams. As of 2020, Green is one of just four players in history to have won NBA championships with three different teams; he won titles with the San Antonio Spurs in 2014, the Toronto Raptors in 2019, and the Los Angeles Lakers in 2020. Green last played for the Philadelphia 76ers.
Go to Profile#41325
Arlindo Oliveira
#41338
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Arlindo Manuel Limede de Oliveira is a Portuguese academic, researcher and writer. He is author of more than 150 scientific articles and papers in conferences, and three books: Computer Architecture , The Digital Mind , and Inteligência Artificial .
Go to Profile#41326
Walter Gratzer
#41339
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Walter Bruno Gratzer was a German-born British biophysical chemist. He was professor of biophysical chemistry at King's College London and an author and reviewer of popular science. He was the first Nature news correspondent appointed by editor John Maddox. Oliver Sacks of Nature writes that his reviews have high literary quality and show knowledge of a wide range of topics. He was a friend of James D. Watson, and wrote the introduction and afterword of his A Passion for DNA.
Go to Profile#41327
David Downes
#41340
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
David Downes is a British sociologist and criminologist and is Professor Emeritus of Social Administration at the London School of Economics. Downes was one of the founder members of the National Deviancy Conference.
Go to Profile#41328
Adrian Raftery
#41341
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Adrian E. Raftery is an Irish and American statistician and sociologist. He is the Boeing International Professor of Statistics and Sociology, and founding Director of the Center for Statistics and Social Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, United States.
Go to Profile#41329
Kathleen Nichols
#41342
Overall Influence
Kathleen Nichols is an American computer scientist and computer networking expert. Nichols is the founder and CEO of Pollere, Inc, a network architecture and performance company based in California, US. Before founding Pollere, Nichols was VP of Network Science at Packet Design, where she was part of the founding team. Prior to Packet Design she was director of advanced Internet architectures in the Office of CTO at Cisco Systems.
Go to Profile#41330
Carla Gannis
#41343
Overall Influence
Carla Gannis is an American transmedia artist based in New York and professor at the Pratt Institute in the Department of Digital Arts until 2019 when she joined New York University. Her works combine digital imagery with well-known works of art such as paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. She received widespread attention in 2013 for her emoji version of Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Go to Profile#41331
Gordon Turk
#41344
Overall Influence
Gordon Turk is an American concert organist. He has played throughout the United States, made two concert tours in Japan, and performed frequently in Europe, including Ukraine and Russia, both as solo organist and with orchestra.
Go to Profile#41332
Mike Pinder
#41345
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Michael Thomas Pinder is an English musician. He is a founding member and the original keyboard player of the rock group the Moody Blues. He left the group following the recording of the band's ninth album Octave in 1978. Pinder is especially noted for his technological contribution to music. In 2018, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Moody Blues.
Go to Profile#41333
Karl Svozil
#41346
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Karl Svozil is an Austrian physicist educated at the University of Vienna and Heidelberg University. Visiting scholar at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley, US , the Lebedev Institute of the Moscow State University, and the Ioffe Institute, St. Petersburg . Docent in Theoretical Physics at the Vienna Technical University. Ao. Univ. Professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the Vienna Technical University. External Researcher at the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science of the University of Auckland.
Go to Profile#41334
Esther Dweck
#41347
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Esther Dweck is a Brazilian economist, professor and writer. She is currently a professor at the Institute of Economics of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. In December 2022, she was nominated the Minister of Management and Innovation in Public Services by the president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Go to Profile#41335
Maynard Jackson
#41348
Overall Influence
1938 - 2003 (65 years)
Maynard Holbrook Jackson Jr. was an American attorney and politician who served as the 54th mayor of Atlanta, Georgia from 1974 to 1982, and again as the city's 56th mayor from 1990 to 1994. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first Black mayor of Atlanta and of any major city in the South; his three terms made him the second longest-serving mayor in the city's history, after six-term mayor William B. Hartsfield.
Go to Profile#41336
Michael Stumpf
#41349
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Michael Stumpf is a scholar in the field of systems biology, in particular the inference of mathematical models using statistical inference and machine learning approaches. He has made ample contributions to network science, cell fate decision making processes and population genetics.
Go to Profile#41337
Hans Peter Hahn
#41350
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Hans Peter Hahn is a German ethnologist, member of the board of the and program officer of the 'Franco-German Master of Arts : Ethnology and its German-French perspectives' . Biography From 1984 to 1989 Hans Peter Hahn studied ethnology, archeology and biology at the Goethe University Frankfurt. From 1989 to 1994 he was a research associate in the collaborative research program Culture and Environment in West African savanna . From 1995 to 1996 he studied as a postdoc at the graduate school Intercultural Relations in Africa at the University of Bayreuth where he worked from 1996 to 2006 as a research assistant at the Institute for Ethnology.
Go to Profile#41338
Ralf Hotchkiss
#41351
Overall Influence
Ralf Hotchkiss is an inventor and designer whose company, Whirlwind Wheelchair International, designs wheelchairs for use and manufacture in developing countries, involving wheelchair riders in all of its projects and activities. The organization's mission is "To make it possible for every person in the developing world who needs a wheelchair to obtain one that will lead to maximum personal independence and integration into society."
Go to Profile#41339
Otis Thorpe
#41352
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Otis Henry Thorpe is an American former professional basketball player who played for several teams in the National Basketball Association . He was an NBA All-Star in 1992 and won an NBA championship with the Houston Rockets in 1994.
Go to Profile#41340
Dimitri Mihalas
#41353
Overall Influence
1939 - 2013 (74 years)
Dimitri Manuel Mihalas was a laboratory fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the field of astronomy, astrophysics, and stellar atmospheres. He was born in Los Angeles, California and was of Greek origin.
Go to Profile#41341
Katherine L. Adams
#41354
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
#41342
Mario Wschebor
#41355
Overall Influence
1939 - 2011 (72 years)
Mario Wschebor Wonsever was an Uruguayan mathematician. He earned his degree at the University of the Republic, Uruguay, where he was Dean of the Faculty of Sciences between 1987 and 1997, after actively participating in the process of its creation. Another important contribution from this period was the "Document of the four deans", in which the need to create a national system of tertiary education was laid out.
Go to Profile#41343
Bob Lilly
#41356
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Robert Lewis Lilly , nicknamed "Mr. Cowboy", is an American former professional football player who was a defensive tackle for the Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League for 14 seasons. He played college football for the TCU Horned Frogs. Lilly was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1980 and the College Football Hall of Fame in 1981.
Go to Profile#41344
Mohit Chattopadhyay
#41357
Overall Influence
1934 - 2012 (78 years)
Mohit Chattopadhyaya was a Bengali Indian playwright, screenwriter, dramatist and poet. He was a leading figure in modern Indian drama. Mohit Chottopadhya died on 12 April 2012. He had been suffering from cancer.
Go to Profile#41345
Jeanne Theoharis
#41358
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Jeanne Theoharis is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College. Early life Jeanne Theoharis was born to mother and activist Nancy Artinian, and father and professor Athan Theoharis. She was raised in Fox Point, Wisconsin a village in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin near the campus of Marquette University where her father taught. She has two siblings Liz Theoharis co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, and George Theoharis a professor of education, at Syracuse University.
Go to Profile#41346
Herbert Clemens
#41359
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Charles Herbert Clemens Jr. is an American mathematician specializing in complex algebraic geometry. Biography Clemens received in 1961 his bachelor's degree from College of the Holy Cross and in 1966 his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, under Phillip Griffiths with thesis Picard–Lefschetz Theorem for Families of Algebraic Varieties Acquiring Certain Singularities. In 1970 he became an assistant professor at Columbia University and went on to become an associate professor before leaving in 1975 to become an associate professor at the University of Utah where he became a full professor in 1976 and a Distinguished Professor in 2001.
Go to Profile#41347
Jon Driver
#41360
Overall Influence
1962 - 2011 (49 years)
Jonathon Stevens "Jon Driver" was a psychologist and neuroscientist. He was a leading figure in the study of perception, selective attention and multisensory integration in the normal and damaged human brain.
Go to Profile#41348
Toni Kroos
#41361
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (36 years)
Toni Kroos is a German professional footballer who plays as a midfielder for La Liga club Real Madrid. He plays mainly as a central midfielder, but has also been deployed as a deep-lying playmaker in his career. Regarded as one of the greatest midfielders of all time, he is known for his vision, passing, creativity, crossing and set-piece ability.
Go to Profile#41349
Jean-Louis Loday
#41362
Overall Influence
1946 - 2012 (66 years)
Jean-Louis Loday was a French mathematician who worked on cyclic homology and who introduced Leibniz algebras and Zinbiel algebras. He occasionally used the pseudonym Guillaume William Zinbiel, formed by reversing the last name of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Go to Profile#41350
Ray Hilborn
#41363
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Ray Hilborn is a marine biologist and fisheries scientist, known for his work on conservation and natural resource management in the context of fisheries. He is currently professor of aquatic and fishery science at the University of Washington. He focuses on conservation, natural resource management, fisheries stock assessment and risk analysis, and advises several international fisheries commissions and agencies.
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