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
#41351
David Tua
#41364
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Faumuina To'aletai Mafaufau David Tua , best known as David Tua, is a Samoan-New Zealand former professional boxer who competed from 1992 to 2013. A highly ranked heavyweight contender for most of his career, Tua was known for his formidable punching power, especially in his devastating left hook. He scored sixteen wins by knockout in the first round, which included knockouts of world heavyweight champions John Ruiz and Michael Moorer within thirty seconds of the first round, as well as late stoppages of world champions Oleg Maskaev and Hasim Rahman. He was ranked by BoxRec in the world's top 10 heavyweights from 1996 to 2003, reaching his highest ranking of No.3 in 1998.
Go to Profile#41352
Irfan Siddiqi
#41365
Overall Influence
Irfan Siddiqi is an American physicist and currently a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . He currently is the director of the Quantum Nanoelectronics Laboratory at UC Berkeley and the Advanced Quantum Testbed at LBNL. Siddiqi is known for groundbreaking contributions to the field of superconducting quantum circuits, including dispersive single-shot readout of superconducting quantum bits, quantum feedback, observation of single quantum trajectories, and near-quantum limited microwave frequency amplification.
Go to Profile#41353
Michael Gira
#41366
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Michael Rolfe Gira is an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, author and artist. Now based in New Mexico, he founded the band Swans, in which he sings and plays guitar, in New York City in the 1980s at the height of the no wave movement. He is also the founder of Young God Records and previously fronted Angels of Light.
Go to Profile#41354
Philippe Ardant
#41367
Overall Influence
1929 - 2007 (78 years)
Philippe Ardant was a French jurist, former president of the Constitutional Court of the principality of Andorra, former president of the Arab World Institute and former president of Panthéon-Assas University. He had been a professor at the universities of Poitiers, Beirut and Panthéon-Assas. He had co-founded Pouvoirs, a journal of constitutional law and political science.
Go to Profile#41355
Christopher Meloni
#41368
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Christopher Peter Meloni is an American actor. He is best known for playing NYPD Detective Elliot Stabler on the NBC legal drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and its spin-off Law & Order: Organized Crime , for which he was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in 2006. He also played inmate Chris Keller on the HBO prison drama Oz and starred in and executive produced the Syfy series Happy! .
Go to Profile#41356
Paul Magrs
#41369
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Paul Magrs is an English writer and lecturer. He was born in Jarrow, England, and now lives in Manchester with his partner, author and lecturer Jeremy Hoad. Early life Magrs was born in Jarrow, Tyne & Wear, on 12 November 1969. In 1975 he moved with his family to Newton Aycliffe, County Durham; his parents divorced shortly after the move. At the age of 17, Magrs was queer-bashed, and his father was the police officer who took the report on the incident; it was the last time Paul Magrs saw his father.
Go to Profile#41357
Lyudmila Zhuravleva
#41370
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Lyudmila Vasilyevna Zhuravleva is a Soviet, Russian and Ukrainian astronomer, who worked at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in Nauchnij, where she discovered 213 minor planets. She also serves as president of the Crimean branch of the "Prince Clarissimus Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov Foundation" .
Go to Profile#41358
Jim Belushi
#41371
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
James Adam Belushi is an American actor. His television roles include the title role in According to Jim , Saturday Night Live , and Twin Peaks . Belushi appeared in films such as Thief , Salvador , About Last Night , Red Heat , K-9 , Jingle All the Way , Hoodwinked! , The Wild , Underdog and Sollers Point .
Go to Profile#41359
Orazio Attanasio
#41372
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Orazio Attanasio is an Italian economist and the Cowles Professor of Economics at Yale University. He was the Jeremy Bentham Chair of Economics at University College London. He graduated from the University of Bologna in 1982 and London School of Economics in 1988. He then went to teach at Stanford and was a National Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and a visiting professor at the University of Chicago before arriving at University College London. Currently he is also a research director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London, co-director of the Centre for the Evaluation of De...
Go to Profile#41360
Daniel Ricciardo
#41373
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Daniel Joseph Ricciardo is an Australian and Italian racing driver currently competing in Formula One for Scuderia AlphaTauri under the Australian flag. He has achieved 8 Grand Prix victories and 32 podiums in Formula One.
Go to Profile#41361
Heinz Fischer
#41374
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Heinz Fischer GColIH, OMRI, RSerafO, GCollSE is a former Austrian politician. He took office as President of Austria on 8 July 2004 and was re-elected for a second and last term on 25 April 2010, leaving office on 8 July 2016. Fischer previously served as minister of science from 1983 to 1987 and as president of the National Council of Austria from 1990 to 2002. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Austria until 2004, he suspended his party membership as he became president.
Go to Profile#41362
Dick Groat
#41375
Overall Influence
1930 - 2023 (93 years)
Richard Morrow Groat was an American professional baseball and basketball player who was an eight-time All-Star shortstop and two-time World Series champion in Major League Baseball. He rates as one of the most accomplished two-sport athletes in American sports history, a college All-America in baseball and basketball as well as one of only 13 to play both at the professional level.
Go to Profile#41363
Martin Biddle
#41376
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Martin Biddle, is a British archaeologist and academic. He is an emeritus fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. His work was important in the development of medieval and post-medieval archaeology in Great Britain.
Go to Profile#41364
Sergio Jaramillo Caro
#41377
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Sergio Jaramillo Caro is a Colombian politician. He recently was the High Commissioner of Peace under President Juan Manuel Santos leading with Humberto de la Calle the Colombian Peace process between Colombia and the FARC guerrillas between 2012 and 2016. He was previously in government as vice minister of defence and also held the position of national security advisor between 2010 and 2012.
Go to Profile#41365
John Haltiwanger
#41378
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
John Couch Haltiwanger is the Dudley and Louisa Dillard Professor of Economics and Distinguished University Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is best known for his work developing and studying longitudinal firm-level microdata, which formed the foundation of his influential work on the determinants of firm-level job creation, job destruction, and economic performance.
Go to Profile#41366
Hugh Osborn
#41379
Overall Influence
Hugh Osborn is a British theoretical high-energy physicist and a professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. He is known for his work on Conformal Field Theory and Quantum Field Theory.
Go to Profile#41367
Hayagreeva Rao
#41380
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Hayagreeva "Huggy" Rao is an American academic. He is the Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resources at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Early life Rao was born in India. Rao graduated from the Andhra University in 1978 and earned Post-Graduate Diploma in Personnel Management and Industrial Relations from XLRI, Jamshedpur in 1980. He then earned a PhD in 1989 from Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University.
Go to Profile#41368
Masahiro Yamada
#41381
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Masahiro Yamada is a Japanese sociologist known for coining popular sociological terms like parasite singles and gap-widening society. A graduate of University of Tokyo, he now teaches at Tokyo Gakugei University as professor.
Go to Profile#41369
Alejandro Morales
#41382
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Alejandro Morales is a Mexican-American writer of fiction and poetry. He is an Emeritus Professor of Chicano and Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He has published seven novels, three novellas, and one collection of poetry.
Go to Profile#41370
Edmund Harriss
#41383
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Edmund Orme Harriss is a British mathematician, writer and artist. Since 2010 he has been at the Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences at The University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas where he is an Assistant Professor of Arts & Sciences and Mathematical Sciences . He does research in the Geometry of Tilings and Patterns, a branch of Convex and Discrete Geometry. He is the discoverer of the spiral that bears his name.
Go to Profile#41371
Baruch Awerbuch
#41384
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Baruch Awerbuch is an Israeli-American computer scientist and a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University. He is known for his research on distributed computing. Academic biography Awerbuch was educated at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, earning a bachelor's degree in 1978, a master's degree in 1982, and a Ph.D. in 1984 under the supervision of Shimon Even. He worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral researcher, faculty member in applied mathematics, and research associate in computer science from 1984 until 1994, when he joined the Johns Hopkins fa...
Go to Profile#41372
Muhammad Sharif
#41385
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Muhammad Sharif , TI, FPAS, is a Pakistani professor, specialised in mathematical physics and cosmology. He worked as the chairman of the department of Mathematics, University of the Punjab , Lahore for six years, i.e., from 2013 to 2019. Now, Sharif has been appointed as Dean, Faculty of Science at University of the Punjab. He is a Higher Education Commission Distinguished National Professor. He has been awarded with the Izaz-Fazeelat and Tamgha-i-Imtiaz by the government of Pakistan.
Go to Profile#41373
Sedat Alp
#41386
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
Prof. Ord. Sedat Alp was the first Turkish archaeologist, historian and academic with a specialization in Hittitology, and was among the foremost names in the field. He was the president of the Turkish Historical Association from 1982 to 1983.
Go to Profile#41374
William DuVall
#41387
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
William Bradley DuVall is an American musician best known as the current co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist for the rock band Alice in Chains. He joined Alice in Chains in 2006, replacing the band's original lead singer, Layne Staley, who died in 2002, and shares vocal duties with guitarist/vocalist Jerry Cantrell. DuVall has recorded three albums with the band: 2009's Black Gives Way to Blue, 2013's The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here, and 2018's Rainier Fog. DuVall won an ASCAP Pop Music Award for co-writing the song "I Know" for Dionne Farris in 1996 and has earned three Grammy Award nominatio...
Go to Profile#41375
Ignatius Mattingly
#41388
Overall Influence
1927 - 2004 (77 years)
Ignatius G. Mattingly was a prominent American linguist and speech scientist. Prior to his academic career, he was an analyst for the National Security Agency from 1955 to 1966. He was a Lecturer and then Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut from 1966 to 1996 and a researcher at Haskins Laboratories from 1966 until his death in 2004. He is best known for his pioneering work on speech synthesis and reading and for his theoretical work on the motor theory of speech perception in conjunction with Alvin Liberman . He received his B.A. in English from Yale University in 1947, his M.A.
Go to Profile#41376
Josh Klinghoffer
#41389
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Josh Adam Klinghoffer is an American musician best known for being the guitarist for the rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers from 2009 to 2019, with whom he recorded two studio albums, I'm with You and The Getaway , and the b-sides compilation I'm Beside You . Klinghoffer took the place of his friend and frequent collaborator John Frusciante in 2009, after a period as a touring member. At age 32, Klinghoffer was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 2012, making him the youngest at the time, and currently second youngest inductee ever, as of 2023.
Go to Profile#41377
Stephen Duckett
#41390
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Stephen John Duckett is a health economist and think-tanker who has occupied many leadership roles in health services in both Australia and Canada, including as Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing. He is current health program director at the Grattan Institute, an Australian public policy think tank, Emeritus Professor of Health Policy at La Trobe University, and Chairperson of South Australia's Health Performance Council.
Go to Profile#41378
Lionel Bender
#41391
Overall Influence
1934 - 2008 (74 years)
Marvin Lionel Bender was an American linguist. Life Bender was born August 18, 1934, in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He travelled throughout the world, particularly in Northeast Africa, and was an accomplished chess player.
Go to Profile#41379
Don Rosa
#41392
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Keno Don Hugo Rosa , known as Don Rosa , is an American comic book writer and illustrator known for his Disney comics stories about Scrooge McDuck, Donald Duck, and other characters which Carl Barks created for Disney-licensed comic books, first published in America by Dell Comics. Many of his stories are built on characters and locations created by Barks; among these was his first Duck story, "The Son of the Sun" , which was nominated for a Harvey Award in the "Best Story of the Year" category.
Go to Profile#41380
Asim Ijaz Khwaja
#41393
Overall Influence
Asim Ijaz Khwaja is a Pakistani-American economist who serves as Sumitomo-FASID Professor of International Finance and Development at Harvard Kennedy School, and director of Center for International Development at Harvard University since July 1, 2019. He is co-founder of the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan and also serves as co-Director of Harvard Evidence for Policy Design. He is the first Pakistani hired by Harvard as professor.
Go to Profile#41381
Veronika Koller
#41394
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Veronika Koller is an Austrian-British linguist. She is Professor of Discourse Studies at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, United Kingdom. Her research focuses on critical discourse analysis.
Go to Profile#41382
Abu Bakarr Kanu
#41395
Overall Influence
Abu Bakarr Kanu is a Sierra Leonean analytical chemist who is a professor at Winston-Salem State University. His research considers separation-type instrumentation for the rapid analysis of chemical and biological compounds. Kanu is also involved with education and outreach programmes, and works to bring hands-on chemistry lessons to young people in Sierra Leone.
Go to Profile#41383
Mijanur Rahman
#41396
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Mijanur Rahman is a Bangladeshi academician. He served as the 5th vice-chancellor of Jagannath University during 2013–2021. Early life and career Mijanur Rahman was born in Comilla in 1958. He received his bachelor's degree in 1978 and master's degree in 1979 in marketing from the University of Dhaka, followed by a Ph.D. degree in business administration from Aligarh Muslim University in 1994.
Go to Profile#41384
Steve Tsang
#41397
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Steve Tsang is a Hong Kong-born political scientist and historian whose expertise includes politics and governance in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the foreign and security policies of China and Taiwan, and peace and security in East Asia. He is the current Director of the SOAS China Institute at the SOAS University of London.
Go to Profile#41385
Janelle Shane
#41398
Overall Influence
Janelle Shane is an optics research scientist and artificial intelligence researcher, writer and public speaker. She keeps a popular science blog called AI Weirdness, where she documents various machine learning algorithms, both ones submitted by readers and ones she personally creates. Shane's first book You Look Like A Thing And I Love You: How AI Works And Why It's Making The World A Weirder Place was published in November 2019 covering many of the topics from her AI Weirdness blog for a general audience.
Go to Profile#41386
Henry J. Eyring
#41399
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Henry Johnson Eyring is an American academic administrator who served as the 17th president of Brigham Young University–Idaho from 2017 to 2023. From 2019 to 2023, he also served as an area seventy in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . He previously served as both the academic and the advancement vice president at BYU-Idaho, as well as director of the Marriott School of Business MBA program at Brigham Young University .
Go to Profile#41387
Ian McFarlane
#41400
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ian McFarlane is an Australian music journalist, music historian and author, whose best known publication is the Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop , which was updated for a second edition in 2017.
Go to Profile#41388
Nandita Das
#41401
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Nandita Das is an Indian actress and film maker. She has acted in over 40 feature films in ten different languages. Das appeared in the films Fire , Earth , Bawandar , Kannathil Muthamittal , Azhagi , Kamli , and Before The Rains . Her directorial debut Firaaq , premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and travelled to more than 50 festivals, winning more than 20 awards. Her second film as a director was Manto . Based on the life of 20th Century Indo-Pakistani short story writer Sadat Hasan Manto, the film was screened at Cannes Film Festival in the "Un Certain Regard" section. In September 2019, Das produced a two-minute Public Service Announcement music video India's Got Colour.
Go to Profile#41389
Chris Osgood
#41402
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Christopher John Osgood is a Canadian former professional ice hockey goaltender who is currently a Detroit Red Wings studio analyst and part-time color commentator for Bally Sports Detroit. He won three Stanley Cup championships in his career, all with the Red Wings, with two of them coming while he was starting goaltender. He is ranked 13th in wins in NHL regular season history with 401.
Go to Profile#41390
Serhy Yekelchyk
#41403
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Serhy Yekelchyk is a Ukrainian Canadian historian, who has published widely on modern Ukrainian and Russian history and Russian-Ukrainian relations. Education and career Yekelchyk received his B.A. from the University of Kyiv and his M.A. from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He conducted research in Australia in the early 1990s, then moved to Edmonton to complete his Ph.D. at the University of Alberta in 2000. He was a postdoctoral fellow and visiting assistant professor at the University of Michigan the following year. Since 2001, he has taught at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
Go to Profile#41391
Sarah Treem
#41404
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Sarah Treem is an American TV writer-producer and playwright. She is the co-creator and showrunner of the Showtime drama The Affair, which won the Golden Globe Award for Outstanding Drama Series, and was a writer and co-executive producer on the inaugural season of House of Cards, which was nominated for nine Golden Globes, including Outstanding Drama Series. She also wrote on all three seasons of the HBO series In Treatment.
Go to Profile#41392
Stefano Arduini
#41405
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Stefano Arduini is a scholar of linguistics, rhetoric, semiotics and translation. He is Full Professor of Linguistics at the University of Rome Link Campus where he is the director the Publishing Professionals Master's degree. He teaches Theory of Translation at the University of Urbino, and is the president of San Pellegrino Unicampus Foundation in Misano Adriatico .
Go to Profile#41393
Alexandru Șafran
#41406
Overall Influence
1910 - 2006 (96 years)
Alexandru Şafran was a Romanian and, after 1948, Swiss rabbi. As chief rabbi of Romania , he intervened with authorities in the fascist government of Ion Antonescu in an unusually successful attempt to save Jews during the Holocaust.
Go to Profile#41394
Yaakov Katz
#41407
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Yaakov Katz is an American-born Israeli journalist and author who served as the Editor-in-Chief of The Jerusalem Post. Career Katz completed a law degree from Bar Ilan University in 2007, and in 2013, was selected as an outstanding alumnus.
Go to Profile#41395
Carlos Gracie Jr.
#41408
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Carlos "Carlinhos" Gracie Jr. is a Brazilian 8th-degree coral belt Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner and coach. A member of the Gracie family, he is the son of Carlos Gracie, one of the founders of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
Go to Profile#41396
Dan Hirschberg
#41409
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Daniel S. Hirschberg is a full professor in Computer Science at University of California, Irvine. His research interests are in the theory of design and analysis of algorithms. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University in 1975. He supervised the PhD dissertation of Lawrence L. Larmore.
Go to Profile#41397
Rosemary Crompton
#41410
Overall Influence
1942 - 2011 (69 years)
Rosemary Crompton, was a British sociologist and academic, specialising in gender and social class. She was Professor of Sociology at City University from 1999 to 2008: she was then appointed professor emeritus. She had previously been a research assistant at the University of Cambridge, a lecturer at the University of East Anglia and at the University of Kent, and held a chair at the University of Leicester.
Go to Profile#41398
Fred Ward
#41411
Overall Influence
1942 - 2022 (80 years)
Freddie Joe Ward was an American actor. Starting with a role in an Italian television movie in 1973, he appeared in such diverse films as Escape from Alcatraz, Southern Comfort, The Right Stuff, Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, Tremors and Tremors 2: Aftershocks, Henry & June, The Player, Swing Shift, Short Cuts, and 30 Minutes or Less.
Go to Profile#41399
Gavin Brown
#41412
Overall Influence
1942 - 2010 (68 years)
Gavin Brown AO FAA CorrFRSE was a Scottish-born mathematician and long-serving Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Sydney between 1996 and 2008. Early career After attending secondary school at Madras College in St Andrews, Brown graduated with a Master of Arts degree from the University of St Andrews , and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne . His academic career began at the University of Liverpool, where he became a senior lecturer in mathematics.
Go to Profile#41400
Bill Rauch
#41413
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Bill Rauch is an American theatre director. He was named the inaugural artistic director of the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center in 2018. Currently in development, the Perelman is the final piece of the plan to revitalize the World Trade Center site and will create work which inspires hope.
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