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
#41401
Herman Eisen
#41414
Overall Influence
1918 - 2014 (96 years)
Herman Nathaniel Eisen was an American immunologist and cancer researcher. He served on the faculty at New York University School of Medicine in the early 1950s, became the Chief of Dermatology at the Washington University School of Medicine in 1955, and was a founding member of the MIT Center for Cancer Research . Eisen retired and assumed professor emeritus status in 1989, but continued to be active as a researcher; he was working on a manuscript the day he died in 2014.
Go to Profile#41402
Harry L. Van Trees
#41415
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Harry Leslie Van Trees is a scientist specializing in radar, sonar, communications and signal processing. Academic career Van Trees attended West Point, where he graduated first in his class in 1952.
Go to Profile#41403
Theodore Garland Jr.
#41416
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Theodore Garland Jr. is a biologist specializing in evolutionary physiology at the University of California, Riverside. Education Garland earned his B.S in zoology and M.S. in biology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, working with William Glen Bradley, a mammalogist, and his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine under Albert F. Bennett, a comparative physiologist.
Go to Profile#41404
Steven Winter
#41417
Overall Influence
Steven Winter is a law professor. He is the Walter S. Gibbs Professor of Constitutional Law at Wayne State University Law School. In 2017 he was promoted to distinguished professor. Biography Winter attended Yeshiva University and Columbia Law School. From 1986 to 1997 he taught at the University of Miami School of Law, and from 1997 to 2002 he taught at Brooklyn Law School. He began teaching at Wayne State University Law School in 2002 as the Walter S. Gibbs Professor of Constitutional Law. In 2017 he was promoted to distinguished professor.
Go to Profile#41405
Ravi Shankar
#41418
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Dr. Ravi Shankar is an American poet, editor, and former literature professor at Central Connecticut State University and City University of Hong Kong and Chairman of the Asia Pacific Writers & Translators . He is the founding editor of online literary journal Drunken Boat. He has been called "a diaspora icon" by The Hindu and "one of America's finest younger poets" by former Connecticut poet laureate Dick Allen.
Go to Profile#41406
Emory M. Thomas
#41419
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Emory Thomas is a history professor emeritus at the University of Georgia and noted scholar of the American Civil War. He earned a Ph.D. from Rice University in 1966. Selected works The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience Confederate State of Richmond: A Biography of the Capital The American War and Peace, 1860-1877 The Confederate Nation, 1861-1865 Bold Dragoon: The Life of J.E.B. Stuart Travels to Hallowed Ground: A Historian's Journey to the American Civil War Robert E. Lee: A Biography Robert E. Lee: An Album
Go to Profile#41407
Colin Talbot
#41420
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Colin Ronald Talbot is a British political scientist. He was until August 2017 a professor at the University of Manchester and held the Chair of Government in the School of Social Sciences. He is now Professor Emeritus at Manchester and a research associate at the University of Cambridge. He has also been an adviser to UK Parliamentary Committees on HM Treasury and on Public Administration.
Go to Profile#41408
Kevin J. Sharpe
#41421
Overall Influence
1950 - 2008 (58 years)
Kevin James Sharpe was a mathematician, theologian, archaeologist, Anglican priest and professor at Union Institute & University. He is known for his publications on the relationship between religion and science, on the interpretation of quantum physics by David Bohm, as well as for his investigations with Leslie Van Gelder on finger flutings in the Rouffignac cave.
Go to Profile#41409
Edward L. Kessel
#41422
Overall Influence
1904 - 1997 (93 years)
Edward Luther Kessel was an American biologist known for his work as an entomologist and writings to reconcile science and religion. Early life and education Kessel was born on 27 April 1904 in Osborne, Kansas to George Grant Kessel and Hattie Levon Kessel, but the family moved to South Africa in 1908, and later in 1916 to San Joaquin County, California where he grew up in the farming community of Ripon. The elder Kessel was a Free Methodist preacher, sparking Kessel's lifelong interest in the reconciliation of science and religion. Kessel began studies for the ministry at Greenville College in Illinois and Church Divinity School of the Pacific before finishing his B.S.
Go to Profile#41410
Serge Ibaka
#41423
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Serge Jonás Ibaka Ngobila is a Congolese-Spanish professional basketball player for Bayern Munich of the German Basketball Bundesliga and the EuroLeague. Ibaka was drafted by the Seattle SuperSonics with the 24th overall pick in the 2008 NBA draft. Ibaka is a three-time NBA All-Defensive First Team selection and has twice led the league in blocks. Although born in the Republic of the Congo, Ibaka plays for the Spain national team. In 2019, he won his only NBA championship as a key member of the Toronto Raptors.
Go to Profile#41411
Frances Corner
#41424
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Frances Marie Corner, is a British art and design historian and academic, specialising in fashion. Since 2019, she has been Warden of Goldsmiths, University of London. On 23 November 2020, staff announced a vote of no confidence in Prof. Corner, the no-confidence motion being backed by 87% of those who voted. In June 2022, her use of expenses at the school was brought into question when it was revealed that she had spent nearly £20k of College money on taxis over 2 years.
Go to Profile#41412
Michael Rosenak
#41425
Overall Influence
1932 - 2013 (81 years)
Michael Rosenak was an Israeli philosopher of Jewish education. He was the Mandel Professor of Jewish Education at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Biography Michael Rosenak was born in Germany but he grew up in the United States. He graduated Yeshiva University. He emigrated to Israel in 1958. In the 1960s, he taught a popular course at Hebrew University's program for overseas students, "Basic issues in contemporary Jewish life." He held various positions during his academic life, before becoming a full professor at the Melton Centre, and was also noted for his involvement in hands-on ed...
Go to Profile#41413
Keith Sweat
#41426
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Keith Sweat is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, and an early figure in the new jack swing musical movement. He is known for his collection of hits including "I Want Her", "Make It Last Forever", "I'll Give All My Love to You", "Make You Sweat", "Get Up on It", "Twisted" and "Nobody". He has released 13 solo albums and discovered the groups Silk and Kut Klose.
Go to Profile#41414
Richard Earl Block
#41427
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Richard Earl Block is a mathematician at the University of California, Riverside who works on Lie algebras over fieldss of prime characteristic. Block earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1956 under the supervision of Abraham Adrian Albert. He was the first to discover the central extension of the Witt algebra that gives the Virasoro algebra, though his discovery went unnoticed for many years. With Robert Lee Wilson he classified the simple Lie algebras over "well behaved" fields of finite characteristic.
Go to Profile#41415
Dora L. Costa
#41428
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Dora L. Costa is an American economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles where she is the Kenneth L. Sokoloff Professor of Economic History. She is also the department chair of the economics department. In addition to her teaching position, Costa is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research .
Go to Profile#41416
Diane Middlebrook
#41429
Overall Influence
1939 - 2007 (68 years)
Diane Helen Middlebrook was an American biographer, poet, and teacher. She taught feminist studies for many years at Stanford University. She wrote critically acclaimed biographies of poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath , and jazz musician Billy Tipton.
Go to Profile#41417
Geoffrey Broadbent
#41430
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Geoffrey Broadbent is an English architect, academic and professor emeritus, and a prolific author in architectural theory, especially semiotics. He is professor emeritus at the School of Architecture at the University of Portsmouth, England. Among his best known works are the books Design in Architecture: Architecture and the Human Sciences and Emerging Concepts in Urban Space Design . He was born in Huddersfield.
Go to Profile#41418
Albert Feuerwerker
#41431
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Albert Feuerwerker was a historian of modern China specializing in economic history and long time member of the University of Michigan faculty. He was the president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1991.
Go to Profile#41419
John Mohawk
#41432
Overall Influence
1945 - 2006 (61 years)
John Mohawk was an American historian, writer, and social activist. Background He was a Seneca, born into the Turtle clan on the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation, located in western New York State. He graduated from Hartwick College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1967, and later earned a Ph.D. from the University of Buffalo.
Go to Profile#41420
P. P. Vaidyanathan
#41433
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Palghat P. Vaidyanathan is the Kiyo and Eiko Tomiyasu Professor of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA, where he teaches and leads research in the area of signal processing, especially digital signal processing , and its applications. He has authored four books, and authored or coauthored close to six hundred papers in various IEEE journals and conferences. Prof. Vaidyanathan received his B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees from the Institute of Radiophysics and Electronics, Science College campus of University of Kolkata, and a Ph.D. degree ...
Go to Profile#41421
Sunil Kumar Ahuja
#41434
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Sunil Kumar Ahuja is a professor of Medicine, Microbiology, Immunology & Biochemistry at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and an expert on the role of immunogenetics on HIV pathogenesis. Ahuja is also the Director of the Veterans Administration Research Center for AIDS and HIV-1 Infection. His most recent work, first published in the 2005 issue of Science, involves the ethnic group-specific role of CCR5 haplotype and CCL3L1 gene copy number on the progression of HIV to AIDS.
Go to Profile#41422
Bernard Cazeneuve
#41435
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Bernard Guy Georges Cazeneuve is a French politician and lawyer who served as Prime Minister of France from 6 December 2016 to 15 May 2017. A member of the Socialist Party, he represented Manche’s 5th constituency in the National Assembly from 1997 to 2002 and again from 2007 to 2012. On 4 May 2022, following the Socialist Party's electoral coalition agreement with the leftist La France Insoumise, he left the Socialist Party because he felt La France Insoumise did not match the values and morals of the Socialist Party.
Go to Profile#41423
Yadong Luo
#41436
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Yadong Luo is the Emery M. Findley distinguished chair and professor of management at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. Luo is a fellow of the Academy of Management and a fellow of Academy of International Business. He has written over 20 books and over 200 research articles , dealing with topics from global strategy and cooperative alliances to cross-cultural management and emerging market businesses. He has contributed to a long range of business and management issues, including developing such theories as the springboard theory, composition-based view, global co-opetition, and others.
Go to Profile#41424
Edward Stewart Kennedy
#41437
Overall Influence
1912 - 2009 (97 years)
Edward Stewart Kennedy was a historian of science specializing in medieval Islamic astronomical tabless written in Persian and Arabic. Edward S. Kennedy studied electrical engineering at Lafayette College, graduating in 1932. He then traveled to Iran to teach at Alborz College, at that time directed by the American Presbyterian Mission. In the Persian language environment, Kennedy made a study of Persian and became fluent in the language. After four years he returned to Pennsylvania and took up study of series of exponential form related to Lambert series while at Lehigh University. He graduated Ph.D.
Go to Profile#41425
Antoine Prost
#41438
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Antoine Marie François Prost is a French historian who served as Professor Emeritus of History, University of Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne. He specialises in 20th-century French history, in particular the First World War.
Go to Profile#41426
Lou Groza
#41439
Overall Influence
1924 - 2000 (76 years)
Louis Roy Groza , nicknamed "the Toe", was an American professional football offensive tackle and placekicker while playing his entire career for the Cleveland Browns in the All-America Football Conference and National Football League . Groza was professional football's career kicking and points leader when he retired after the 1967 season. He played in 21 seasons for the Browns, helping the team to win eight league championships in that span. Groza's accuracy and strength as a kicker influenced the development of place-kicking as a specialty; he could kick field goals from beyond at a time when attempts from that distance were a rarity.
Go to Profile#41427
Dino Formaggio
#41440
Overall Influence
1914 - 2008 (94 years)
Dino Formaggio was an Italian philosopher, art critic, and academic. He is part of the Italian phenomenological school or the School of Milan and is noted for his development of an organic description of the experiential complexity where art is phenomenologically constituted.
Go to Profile#41428
Jillian Tamaki
#41441
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Jillian Tamaki is a Canadian American illustrator and comic artist known for her work in The New York Times and The New Yorker in addition to the graphic novels Boundless, as well as Skim and This One Summer written by her cousin Mariko Tamaki.
Go to Profile#41429
Richard A. Weinberg
#41442
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Richard A. Weinberg is an American developmental psychologist. Weinberg was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1943. He received his undergraduate education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. For most of his career, Weinberg has taught at the University of Minnesota after earning his Ph.D there in 1968. He is known for his Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study with Sandra Scarr. This study concluded that "rather than the home environment having a cumulative impact across development, its influence wanes from early childhood to adolescence."
Go to Profile#41430
Alesha Dixon
#41443
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Alesha Anjanette Dixon is an English singer, rapper, dancer, television personality, and author. She gained recognition in the early 2000s as a member of the R&B, garage and hip hop group Mis-Teeq, who had seven UK top 10 hits, two top 10 double platinum albums, and sold over 12 million records worldwide. Following the group disbanding in 2005, Dixon pursued a music career as a solo artist, signing a recording contract with Polydor Records. In 2006, she released her debut solo single "Lipstick", followed by her debut solo studio album, Fired Up, after which her popularity as a singer had decl...
Go to Profile#41431
Glyn W. Humphreys
#41444
Overall Influence
1954 - 2016 (62 years)
Glyn W. Humphreys was a British cognitive neuropsychologist and academic. He was the Watts Professor of Experimental Psychology and principal investigator for the CNN Lab at Oxford University. He had previously worked at the University of Birmingham in the School of Psychology, where he held an honorary professorship of Cognitive Psychology. He died on 14 January 2016.
Go to Profile#41432
Benedikt Löwe
#41445
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Benedikt Löwe is a German mathematician and logician working at the universities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Cambridge. He is known for his work on mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics, as well as for initiating the interdisciplinary conference series Foundations of the Formal Sciences and Computability in Europe .
Go to Profile#41433
Anson Chan
#41446
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Anson Maria Elizabeth Chan Fang On-sang, is a retired Hong Kong politician and civil servant who was the first ethnic Chinese and woman to serve as Chief Secretary, the second-highest position in both the British colonial government and the Hong Kong SAR government under the Chinese sovereignty from 1993 until she retired from the government in 2001, sparking speculations of her growing rift with Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa.
Go to Profile#41434
John Doyle
#41447
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
John Comstock Doyle is the John G Braun Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, Electrical Engineering, and BioEngineering at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for his work in control theory and his current research interests are in theoretical foundations for complex networks in engineering, biology, and multiscale physics.
Go to Profile#41435
Woodrow Borah
#41448
Overall Influence
1912 - 1999 (87 years)
Woodrow Wilson Borah was a U.S. historian of colonial Mexico, whose research contributions on demography, economics, and social structure made him a major Latin Americanist. With his 1999 death "disappears the last great figure in the generation that presided over the vast expansion of the Latin American scholarly field in the United States during the years following World War II." With colleagues at University of California, Berkeley who came to be known as the "Berkeley School" of Latin American history, Borah pursued projects to gather data from archives on indigenous populations, colonia...
Go to Profile#41436
Robert Montgomery
#41449
Overall Influence
Robert Montgomery is the director of the Transplant Institute at NYU Langone Health. Early life and education Montgomery was born in January 1960, in Buffalo, New York and spent his early years on Potter Avenue in Orchard Park, New York growing up with his three older brothers and all the kids on the street. The fourth of four male siblings, he decided to pursue a career in medicine after the long illness and death of his father from familial cardiomyopathy at age 52. He received his medical degree from the University of Rochester School of Medicine in 1987. As a Fulbright Scholar, he complete...
Go to Profile#41437
Ekmel Özbay
#41450
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Ekmel Özbay is a Turkish professor of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Physics Departments at Bilkent University and the director of the Nanotechnology Research Center, and Space Technologies Research Center in Ankara.
Go to Profile#41438
Judith Herrin
#41451
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Judith Herrin is an English archaeologist, byzantinist, and historian of Late Antiquity. She was a Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies and Constantine Leventis Senior Research Fellow at King's College London .
Go to Profile#41439
Karthy Govender
#41452
Overall Influence
Karthy Govender is a commissioner for the South African Human Rights Commission. Karthy Govender, along with Commissioner Jody Kollapen are two Commissioners of minority South African Tamil ancestry. Karthy Govender is also an associate professor in the law faculty at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where he teaches Constitutional and Administrative Law. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School. He has widely published in literature on Constitutional law.
Go to Profile#41440
Gurinder Chadha
#41453
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Gurinder Chadha, is a Kenyan-born Indo-British film director of Indian origin. Most of her films explore the lives of Indians living in England. The common theme among her work showcases the trials of Indian women living in the UK and how they must reconcile their converging traditional and modern cultures. Although many of her films seem like simple quirky comedies about Indian women, they actually address many social and emotional issues, especially ones faced by immigrants caught between two worlds.
Go to Profile#41441
Akira Mikazuki
#41454
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
was a former justice minister of Japan and Professor Emeritus at Tokyo University. He was a leading figure in civil procedure scholarship. Career Mikazuki was an attorney and law professor. He was a member of the Arbitration Law Study Group who drafted the arbitration law in 1989.
Go to Profile#41442
Mark Slobin
#41455
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Mark Slobin is an American scholar and ethnomusicologist who has written extensively on the subject of East European Jewish music and klezmer music, as well as the music of Afghanistan, where he conducted research beginning in 1967. He is Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music Emeritus at Wesleyan University, where he taught both music and American Studies from 1971 to 2016.
Go to Profile#41443
Roderick Deane
#41456
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Sir Roderick Sheldon Deane is a New Zealand economist, public sector reformer, and businessman. He served as deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and as CEO and chairman of the country's largest telecommunications company, Telecom New Zealand.
Go to Profile#41444
Oliver McGee
#41457
Overall Influence
1957 - 2020 (63 years)
Oliver George McGee III was an American analyst, strategist, professor of engineering, and author in the United States. He wrote about his switch from being a Democrat to a Republican and about being a Republican in the "age of Obama" in his book Jumping the Aisle. He provided public advocacy on capital, technology, and U.S. competitiveness strategies for several political campaigns including Hillary for President 2008, McCain-Palin 2008, Romney-Ryan 2012, and Trump-Pence 2016 campaigns.
Go to Profile#41445
Jennifer Thomson
#41458
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Jennifer Ann Thomson is a South African microbiologist, author and most notably an expert on and proponent of the agricultural benefit of Genetically modified organisms . Thomson was born in Cape Town, South Africa and she is currently a professor at her alma mater the University of Cape Town.
Go to Profile#41446
Joseph Turow
#41459
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Joseph Turow is the Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His research specialises in marketing, new media and privacy. A 2005 New York Times Magazine article referred to him as “probably the reigning academic expert on media fragmentation." In 2010, the New York Times called Turow “the ranking wise man on some thorny new-media and marketing topics."
Go to Profile#41447
David Lazer
#41460
Overall Influence
David Lazer is a distinguished professor of political science and computer and information science at Northeastern University, as well as the co-director of the NULab of Texts, Maps, and Networks. Life
Go to Profile#41448
Jukka Mönkkönen
#41461
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Jukka Mönkkönen is a Finnish Professor of Biopharmacy and Rector of the University of Eastern Finland. Jukka Mönkkönen served as the Academic Rector of the University of Eastern Finland in 2012–2014, he was then elected Rector for a five-year term in 2015 and re-elected for another five-year period starting on 1 January 2020. The decision was taken unanimously by the board of the University of Eastern Finland on 21 May 2019.
Go to Profile#41449
Sarada K. Sarma
#41462
Overall Influence
Sarada Kanta Sarma is a geotechnical engineer, emeritus reader of engineering seismology and senior research investigator at Imperial College London. He has developed a method of seismic slope stability analysis which is named after him, the Sarma method.
Go to Profile#41450
Jerrold Sadock
#41463
Overall Influence
Jerrold Sadock is Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in Linguistics and the Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago. Inter alia, he founded the grammatical theory of Autolexical Syntax . He is primarily a theoretical linguist, having written a number of influential works on noun incorporation, morphology and pragmatics, but is also an authority on West Greenlandic and Yiddish.
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