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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#41451
Emilio Quaia
#41464
Overall Influence
Emilio Quaia is an Italian radiologist, academic, and author. He is a professor of Radiology and the Director of the Radiology Department at the University of Padova. Quaia is the editor of the book Contrast Media in Ultrasonography: Basic Principles and Clinical Applications , Radiological Imaging of the Kidney , and Imaging of the Liver and Intra-hepatic Biliary Tract . His research is focused in the field of Radiology, with a particular focus on contrast-enhanced ultrasound and liver, kidney and chest imaging.
Go to Profile#41452
David Milch
#41465
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
David Sanford Milch is an American writer and producer of television series. He has created several television shows, including ABC's NYPD Blue , co-created with Steven Bochco, and HBO's Deadwood . Early life and education Milch graduated with a B.A. summa cum laude from Yale University, where he won the Tinker Prize in English, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter, along with future US President George W. Bush. Milch earned a Master of Fine Arts with distinction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
Go to Profile#41453
Sergey Zuev
#41466
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Sergey Eduardovich Zuev is a Russian economist, specialist in cultural management, candidate of art history , professor, since 2011 Rector of the Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences , Director of the Institute of Social Sciences of RANEPA.
Go to Profile#41454
Jörg-Rüdiger Sack
#41467
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Jörg-Rüdiger Wolfgang Sack is a professor of computer science at Carleton University, where he is Chancellor's Professor. </ref> Sack received a master's degree from the University of Bonn in 1979 and a Ph.D. in 1984 from McGill University, under the supervision of Godfried Toussaint. He is co-editor-in-chief and executive editor of the journal Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications, co-editor of the Handbook of Computational Geometry , and co-editor of the proceedings of the biennial Algorithms and Data Structures Symposium . He was a co-founding editor-in-chief of the open access Journal of Spatial Information Science but is no longer an editor there.
Go to Profile#41455
Denise Kirschner
#41468
Overall Influence
Denise Ellen Kirschner is an American mathematical biologist and immunologist whose research topics include granulomas, HIV, tuberculosis, and the mechanisms by which disease pathogens interact with and persist in their hosts. She is a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Michigan, co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, and former president of the Society for Mathematical Biology.
Go to Profile#41456
Diana Ferrus
#41469
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Diana Ferrus is a South African writer and storyteller of mixed Khoisan and slave ancestry. Her work is published in Afrikaans and English. Ferrus leads writing workshops in Cape Town while working as an administrator at the University of the Western Cape.
Go to Profile#41457
James F. Scott
#41470
Overall Influence
1942 - 2020 (78 years)
James Floyd Scott was an American physicist and research director at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He is considered one of the pioneers of ferroelectric memory devices. He was elected to the Royal Society in 2008.
Go to Profile#41458
Francesco Lacquaniti
#41471
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Francesco Lacquaniti is an Italian neurologist and neuroscientist. He received his medical education and completed his Neurology residency at the University of Turin. He is Professor of Physiology at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, and the Director of the Laboratory of Neuromotor Physiology at Santa Lucia Foundation IRCCS, Rome. His research focuses on the laws of movement control in humans and other animals and their development in children and alteration after neurological lesions . He also studied the neural representation of spatial information in the brain , the neural representation of gravity effects on the body , and how the brain adapts to weightlessness .
Go to Profile#41459
Michela Massimi
#41472
Overall Influence
Michela Massimi is an Italian and British philosopher of science, a professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and the president-elect of the Philosophy of Science Association. Her research has involved scientific perspectivism and perspectival realism, the Pauli exclusion principle, and the work of Immanuel Kant.
Go to Profile#41460
Livia S. Eberlin
#41473
Overall Influence
Livia Schiavinato Eberlin is a Brazilian analytical chemist who won a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship for her research on the use of mass spectrometry to detect cancerous tissue. Education and career Eberlin is the daughter of Marcos Nogueira Eberlin, a Brazilian chemist at the University of Campinas. She was born in Campinas, and she earned her bachelor's degree in 2007 from the University of Campinas. During her undergraduate studies, she did summer research in mass spectrometry at Purdue University, where her father also had research ties. She later enrolled at Purdue for her doctorate, which she completed in 2012.
Go to Profile#41461
Mary P. Sinclair
#41474
Overall Influence
1918 - 2011 (93 years)
Mary P. Sinclair was an American environmental activist and "one of the nation’s foremost lay authorities on nuclear energy and its impact on the natural and human environment". Early life She was born Mary Jean Palcich, raised in Chisholm, Minnesota where she was high school valedictorian, then graduated from the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota. Subsequently, she was a teacher and editor for Chemical Industries magazine. She worked as a librarian at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where she met and married William Sinclair in 1945. After his graduation from Georgetown University Law Center, the couple moved to his previous home town of Midland, Michigan.
Go to Profile#41462
Danny Lohner
#41475
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Daniel Patrick Lohner, frequently known as Renholdër, is an American musician and record producer best known for his work with Nine Inch Nails and A Perfect Circle. In 2020, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Nine Inch Nails.
Go to Profile#41463
Duane Eddy
#41476
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Duane Eddy is an American rock and roll guitarist. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he had a string of hit records produced by Lee Hazlewood, which were noted for their characteristically "twangy" sound, including "Rebel-'Rouser", "Peter Gunn", and "Because They're Young". He had sold 12 million records by 1963.
Go to Profile#41464
Bruce Dobkin
#41477
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Bruce H. Dobkin is an American Professor of Neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, medical director of the UCLA Neurologic Rehabilitation and Research Program, and Co-Director of the UCLA Stroke Center. He serves as editor-in-chief of Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair.
Go to Profile#41465
Mary Grey
#41478
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Mary Cecilia Grey is a Roman Catholic ecofeminist liberation theologian in the United Kingdom. She edited the journal Ecotheology for 10 years. She has previously been a professor teaching pastoral theology at the University of Wales, Lampeter; contemporary theology at the University of Southampton, La Sainte Union, and St Mary's University, Twickenham; and feminism and Christianity at the Catholic University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
Go to Profile#41466
Albrecht Beutelspacher
#41479
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Albrecht Beutelspacher is a German mathematician and founder of the Mathematikum. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Giessen, where he held the chair for geometry and discrete mathematics from 1988 to 2018.
Go to Profile#41467
Alasdair Cochrane
#41480
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Alasdair Cochrane is a British political theorist and ethicist who is currently Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. He is known for his work on animal rights from the perspective of political theory, which is the subject of his two books: An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory and Animal Rights Without Liberation . His third book, Sentientist Politics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. He is a founding member of the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, a UK-based think tank focused on furthering the social and political status of nonhuman animals.
Go to Profile#41468
Sean Smith
#41481
Overall Influence
1978 - 2012 (34 years)
Sean Patrick Smith was an American diplomat and information management officer with the United States Foreign Service who was killed during the September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Go to Profile#41469
Chad Simpson
#41482
Overall Influence
Chad Simpson is a short and flash fiction author from Monmouth, Illinois. He is the winner of the 2012 John Simmons Short Fiction Award, juried by Jim Shepard. His short story collection, "Tell Everyone I Said Hi," was published by the University of Iowa Press in fall 2012.
Go to Profile#41470
Mahendra P. Lama
#41483
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Mahendra P. Lama is an Indian professor and a development economist who was the pro-vice chancellor of IGNOU and the founding vice chancellor of Sikkim University in India. At the age of 45, he became the youngest vice chancellor of a National Central University in India. He is presently a senior Professor in the School of International Studies , Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Chief Economic Adviser in the Government of Sikkim and Member of the Eminent Persons Group on Nepal-India Relations appointed by the Prime Ministers of India and Nepal.
Go to Profile#41471
Louise Shelley
#41484
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Louise Isobel Shelley is a university professor and Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Endowed Chair at the Schar School of Policy and International Affairs at George Mason University in Virginia. She is also founder and executive director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center .
Go to Profile#41472
John E. Baldwin
#41485
Overall Influence
1931 - 2010 (79 years)
John Evan Baldwin FRS was a British astronomer who worked at the Cavendish Astrophysics Group from 1954. He played a role in the development of interferometry in Radio Astronomy, and later astronomical optical interferometry and lucky imaging. He made the first maps of the radio emission from the Andromeda Galaxy and the Perseus Cluster, and measured the properties of many active galaxies. In 1985 he performed the first Aperture Masking Interferometry observations, and then led the construction and operation of the Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope, and helped develop the lucky imaging method.
Go to Profile#41473
Graham Collingridge
#41486
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Graham Leon Collingridge is a British neuroscientist and professor at the University of Toronto and at the University of Bristol. He is also a senior investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.
Go to Profile#41474
Iván Gutman
#41487
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Iván Gutman is a Serbian chemist and mathematician. Life and work Gutman was born in Sombor, Yugoslavia in a Bunjevac family. In 1970 he graduated chemistry from the University of Belgrade where he worked a short time as an assistant at the chemistry department. From 1971 until 1976 he worked as research assistant and senior research assistant at Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb, department of physical chemistry. In 1973 he received M.Sc. degree from the University of Zagreb, in the area of theoretical organic chemistry. In the same year he received a doctorate degree in chemistry from the University of Zagreb.
Go to Profile#41475
Michael Somare
#41488
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Sir Michael Thomas Somare was a Papua New Guinean politician. Widely called the "father of the nation" , he was the first Prime Minister after independence. At the time of his death, Somare was also the longest-serving prime minister, having been in office for 17 years over three separate terms: from 1975 to 1980; from 1982 to 1985; and from 2002 to 2011. His political career spanned from 1968 until his retirement in 2017. Besides serving as PM, he was minister of foreign affairs, leader of the opposition and governor of East Sepik Province.
Go to Profile#41476
Zenon J. Pudlowski
#41489
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Zenon Jan Pudlowski is an engineer and educator. He is currently director of the World Institute for Engineering and Technology Education based in Melbourne, Australia. He is also a visiting professor at Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Bratislava, Slovakia.
Go to Profile#41477
Thomas Charles-Edwards
#41490
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Thomas Mowbray Charles-Edwards is an emeritus academic at the University of Oxford. He formerly held the post of Jesus Professor of Celtic and is a Professorial Fellow at Jesus College. Biography He was educated at Ampleforth College before reading History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he studied for a doctorate after taking the Diploma in Celtic Studies under Sir Idris Foster. He studied at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies from 1967 to 1969. He then was a junior research fellow and then a fellow in history at Corpus Christi College before being appointed to the chair of ...
Go to Profile#41478
Kenneth J. Meier
#41491
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Kenneth J. Meier is a distinguished scholar in residence at American University and holds faculty appointments at the Cardiff School of Business and Leiden University . He is known for his studies on public management and public administration, as well as his extensive and widely referenced journal articles.
Go to Profile#41479
Luigi Di Biagio
#41492
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Luigi Di Biagio is an Italian professional football manager and former player. A former defensive midfielder, Di Biagio last played for Ascoli in 2007, and previously also played for several other Italian clubs throughout his career, including Roma and Internazionale, in particular. At international level, he also played 31 times for the Italy national side between 1998 and 2002, scoring two goals, representing his country at the 1998 and 2002 World Cups, as well as at Euro 2000, where Italy reached the final.
Go to Profile#41480
Alon Orlitsky
#41493
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Alon Orlitsky is an information theorist and the Qualcomm Professor for Information Theory and its Applications at University of California, San Diego. He received a BSc in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from Ben Gurion University in 1981, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1986. He was a member of Bell Labs from 1986 to 1996, and worked for D. E. Shaw from 1996 to 1997. He joined UCSD in 1997.
Go to Profile#41481
Richard Grimsdale
#41494
Overall Influence
1929 - 2005 (76 years)
Richard Lawrence Grimsdale was a British electrical engineer and computer pioneer who helped to design the world's first transistorised computer. Early life and education Richard Lawrence Grimsdale was born on 18 September 1929 in Australia, where his father, an English engineer, was working on construction of the suburban railway system for the Metropolitan-Vickers company. The family returned to England, where he was educated at Manchester Grammar School, and then studied electrical engineering at the University of Manchester, where he earned his Bachelor of Science, his Master of Science i...
Go to Profile#41482
Giulio Maria Pasinetti
#41495
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Giulio Maria Pasinetti is the Program Director of the Center on Molecular Integrative Neuroresilience and is the Saunders Family Chair in Neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Pasinetti is a Professor of Neurology, Psychiatry, Neuroscience, and Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at ISMMS.
Go to Profile#41483
Celia Brayfield
#41496
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Celia Brayfield is an English author, academic and cultural commentator. Biography Brayfield was born in the north London suburb of Wembley Park. She won a place at St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, West London, and spent a year as a foreign student in France, at the Universitaire de Grenoble, studying French language and literature.
Go to Profile#41484
Yaacov Shavit
#41497
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Yaacov Shavit is an emeritus professor at the Department of Jewish History, Tel Aviv University. His main fields of study are the history of modern Israel and modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history. Shavit has also written about the Afrocentrism movement in the African American community. He is married to Zohar Shavit.
Go to Profile#41485
Kevin McDonald
#41498
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Kevin John Patrick McDonald KC*HS is the Archbishop Emeritus of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Southwark, England. Life Born in Stoke-on-Trent, from 1958 to 1965 McDonald attended the Christian Brothers' Grammar School there, St. Joseph's College, Stoke-on-Trent. He read Latin at Birmingham University from 1965 to 1968.
Go to Profile#41486
Mohammad Javad Abdolmohammadi
#41499
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Mohammad Javad Abdolmohammadi is the John E. Rhodes Professor of Accounting at Bentley University, having held the position since 1988. In 2007, he was inducted into the Northeast Region of the American Accounting Association Hall of Fame . He has contributed to more than 100 publications, including many articless and books on internal auditing. He has been the recipient of funding from various granting agencies, including four from The Institute of Internal Auditors Research Foundation CBOK 2010, CBOK 2006, a monograph on "Continuous Internal Auditing" in 2005, and another monograph on "CAE...
Go to Profile#41487
Alan Colquhoun
#41500
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Alan Harold Colquhoun was an English architect, historian, critic and teacher. Biography Colquhoun was born in Eton, Buckinghamshire on 27 June 1921 and attended Bradfield School. He went on to study architecture at the Edinburgh College of Art and the Architectural Association in London. In the Second World War Colquhoun was a captain in the Bengal Sappers and Miners, at Roorkee, India, where he first met future friend and architectural colleague Robert Maxwell. Colquhoun started his career as an architect at London County Council , and then in the practice of Lyons Israel Ellis where he des...
Go to Profile#41488
Eiður Guðjohnsen
#41501
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Eiður Smári Guðjohnsen is an Icelandic professional football coach and former player who played as a forward. Eiður saw his greatest success in England and Spain with Chelsea and Barcelona respectively, where he won the UEFA Champions League and La Liga with the latter and the League Cup and Premiership twice with the former. Along with two spells at Bolton Wanderers fourteen years apart, he also played in Iceland, the Netherlands, France, Greece, Belgium, China, Norway and India in a club career lasting 23 years. He is regarded by many to be the greatest Icelandic footballer of all time.
Go to Profile#41489
James Hong
#41502
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
James Hong is an American actor, producer and director. He has worked in numerous productions in U.S. media since the 1950s, portraying a variety of roles. He is known as one of the most prolific character actors of all time. In 2022, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to the American film and television industries.
Go to Profile#41490
Diane Davis
#41503
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Diane Davis is a post-structuralist rhetorician and professor of Rhetoric and Writing, English, and Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She was the Director of the Digital Writing and Research Lab at UT from 2009 to 2017, and is now the chair of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing. She holds the Kenneth Burke Chair of Rhetoric and Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where she teaches intensive summer seminars on Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas.
Go to Profile#41491
Martin Roček
#41504
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Martin Roček is a professor of theoretical physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a member of the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics. He received A.B. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University in 1975 and 1979. He did post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge and Caltech before becoming a professor at Stony Brook University.
Go to Profile#41492
Anita Silvers
#41505
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
Anita Silvers was an American philosopher, focusing on medical ethics, bioethics, feminism, disability studies, philosophy of law, and social and political philosophy. She "was a leading voice in the interpretation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, arguing that disability rights should be viewed the same as other civil rights and not as an accommodation or as a social safety net issue".
Go to Profile#41493
Luc Ciompi
#41506
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Luciano "Luc" Ciompi is a Swiss psychiatrist. He was professor of psychiatry, medical director of the University Social Psychiatric Clinic and co-director of the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Berne/Switzerland from 1977 to 1994. He is the founder of the concept of Affect-logics, an interdisciplinary theory of the rules of interaction between emotion and cognition, and the founder of Soteria Berne, He also proposed a conceptual framework towards an integrative, psycho-socio-biological understanding of mental illnesses, and promoted community-based halfway institutions for cri...
Go to Profile#41494
Amy Gutmann
#41507
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Amy Gutmann is an American academic and diplomat who has served as the United States Ambassador to Germany since 2022. She was previously the president of the University of Pennsylvania from 2004 to 2022, the longest-serving president in the history of the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#41495
Kevin O'Neill
#41508
Overall Influence
1953 - 2022 (69 years)
Kevin O'Neill was an English comic book illustrator who was the co-creator of Nemesis the Warlock, Marshal Law , and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen . Career Early career O'Neill began working for the publishing company IPC at the age of 16 as an office boy for Buster, which was a children's humour title. In 1975 he started publishing, as a personal side project, the fanzine Just Imagine: The Journal of Film and Television Special Effects which lasted five regular issues and one special issue through 1978. By 1976 he was working as a colourist on Disney comics reprints and British chil...
Go to Profile#41496
Mike Oliver
#41509
Overall Influence
1945 - 2019 (74 years)
Michael James Hoiles Oliver was a British sociologist, author, and disability rights activist. He was the first Professor of Disability Studies in the world, and key advocate of the social model of disability.
Go to Profile#41497
Ionel Haiduc
#41510
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Ionel Haiduc is a Romanian chemist who was elected to the Romanian Academy and Academy of Sciences of Moldova. He was the President of the Romanian Academy between 2006 and 2014. Honours National honours Romanian Royal Family: Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the Crown Romanian Royal Family: Knight of the Royal Decoration of the Cross of the Romanian Royal House Romanian Republic: Grand Cross of the Order of the Star of Romania
Go to Profile#41498
Robert Helliwell
#41511
Overall Influence
1920 - 2011 (91 years)
Robert A. Helliwell was an electrical engineer and professor at Stanford University. He was one of the pioneering scientists in the study of whistlers and related ionospheric phenomena. Early life Helliwell was born in Red Wing, Minnesota, on September 2, 1920. He and his mother moved to Palo Alto, California after his father died. Helliwell and his wife, whom he knew in high school, were both undergraduates at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#41499
Lech Trzeciakowski
#41512
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
Lech Trzeciakowski was a Polish historian who served as director of the Western Institute in Poznań from 1974 to 1978. Born in Poznań, he also died there in 2017. Selected publications Lech Trzeciakowski, Kulturkampf w zaborze pruskim, Poznań 1970Lech Trzeciakowski, Pod pruskim zaborem 1850-1914, Warszawa 1973Lech Trzeciakowski, Walka o polskość miast Poznańskiego na przełomie XIX i XX wieku, Poznań 1964Lech Trzeciakowski, W dziewiętnastowiecznym Poznaniu, Poznań 1987
Go to Profile#41500
Varun Sahni
#41513
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Varun Bhisham Sahni is an Indian theoretical physicist, astrophysicist and a Distinguished Professor at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics. Known for his research on cosmology, Sahni is an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies viz. Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and National Academy of Sciences, India. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest India...
Go to Profile