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
#41501
Martin Mull
#41514
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Martin Eugene Mull is an American actor, comedian and musician who has appeared in many television and film roles. He is also a painter and recording artist. As an actor, he first became known in his role on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and its spin-off Fernwood 2 Night. Among his other notable roles are Colonel Mustard in the 1985 film Clue, Leon Carp on Roseanne, Willard Kraft on Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Vlad Masters / Vlad Plasmius on Danny Phantom, and Gene Parmesan on Arrested Development. He had a recurring role on Two and a Half Men as Russell, the drug-using, humorous pharmacist.
Go to Profile#41502
Madhu Bhaskaran
#41515
Overall Influence
Madhu Bhaskaran is an engineer and Professor at RMIT University. She co-leads the Functional Materials and Microsystems Research Group at RMIT University She won the APEC Aspire prize in 2018 for her development of "electronic skin".
Go to Profile#41503
Jay Sean
#41516
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Kamaljit Singh Jhooti , better known by the stage name Jay Sean, is a British singer and songwriter. He debuted in the UK's Asian Underground scene as a member of the Rishi Rich Project with "Dance with You", which reached No. 12 on the UK Singles Chart in 2003. This led to him being signed to Virgin Records and having two UK top 10 hits as a solo artist in 2004: "Eyes on You" at No. 6 and "Stolen" at No. 4. They were included in his critically acclaimed debut album Me Against Myself which, though only moderately successful in the UK, sold more than two million copies across Asia and remains his most successful album to date.
Go to Profile#41504
Sally Clausen
#41517
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Sally Clausen is executive director of the Ingram Center for Public Trusteeship and Governance, an affiliate of the American Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. She earlier, in 2010, retired as Louisiana's commissioner of public higher education, a post she had held for one year relinquishing the presidency of the University of Louisiana System. Previously she served as the first female president of Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond.
Go to Profile#41505
May Murr
#41518
Overall Influence
1929 - 2008 (79 years)
May Murr, sometimes written as Mayy Murr was a Lebanese professor, historian, writer, poet, and political activist. Before taking up writing, May Murr taught several subjects at several universities and institutions in Lebanon such as the Lebanese University and the Lebanese Army Military Academy, in which she taught mathematics, literature, history, history of art and geography.
Go to Profile#41506
Juan Downey
#41519
Overall Influence
1940 - 1993 (53 years)
Juan Downey was a Chilean artist who was a pioneer in the fields of video art and interactive art. Early life and education Downey was born in Santiago, Chile. His father, David Downey V., was a distinguished architect in Chile, and following in his father's footsteps, Juan Downey studied to complete a Bachelor of Architecture in 1964 from the Pontificia Universidad Católica of Chile. In 1961, to further his studies and develop his artistic practice, Downey traveled to Europe. He spent a few months in Barcelona and Madrid, followed by Paris, where he lived for three years studying printmaking at Stanley William Hayter's legendary Atelier 17.
Go to Profile#41507
Irene J. Winter
#41520
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Irene J. Winter is an American art historian who is an influential and pioneering scholar of ancient Near Eastern art. Life BA Barnard College, Anthropology, 1960; MA University of Chicago, Near Eastern Studies, 1967; PhD Columbia University, Art History and Archaeology. She has taught at Queens College, CUNY, 1971-1976, The University of Pennsylvania, 1976-1988, and Harvard University since 1988, chairing the department of Fine Arts from 1993-1996, and served on the Faculty Council, 2006-2009; retired June 2009. Slade Professor, University of Cambridge, 1997. She was elected a member of the...
Go to Profile#41508
Murray Jarvik
#41521
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Murray Elias Jarvik was an American psychopharmacologist and academic who was among the first scientists to study d-lysergic acid, the precursor to LSD, and later became the co-inventor of the nicotine patch. He was a longtime professor emeritus at University of California-Los Angeles, where he taught as a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology for many years.
Go to Profile#41509
Tracy Morgan
#41522
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Tracy Jamel Morgan is an American stand-up comedian and actor. He was a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy television series Saturday Night Live from 1996 to 2003, and played Tracy Jordan in the NBC sitcom 30 Rock from 2006 to 2013, each of which earned him a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. He also starred as Tray Barker in the TBS comedy The Last O.G.
Go to Profile#41510
Rachel Ward
#41523
Overall Influence
Rachel Ward is an American applied mathematician at the University of Texas at Austin. She is known for work on machine learning, optimization, and signal processing. At the University of Texas, she is W. A. "Tex" Moncrief Distinguished Professor in Computational Engineering and Sciences—Data Science, and professor of mathematics.
Go to Profile#41511
G. M. Nijssen
#41524
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Gerardus Maria "Sjir" Nijssen is a Dutch computer scientist, former professor of computer science at the University of Queensland, consultant, and author. Nijssen is considered the founder of verbalization in computer science, and one of the founders of business modeling and information analysis based on natural language.
Go to Profile#41512
Daniel Polsky
#41525
Overall Influence
Daniel Elias Polsky is an American health economist. He is the 40th Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Health Policy and Economics at Johns Hopkins University. Early life and education Polsky grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He earned his Bachelor of Science at the University of Michigan before enrolling at their Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy for his Master's degree. He returned home to Pennsylvania for his PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#41513
Dirk Kreimer
#41526
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Dirk Kreimer is a German physicist who pioneered the Hopf-algebraic approach to perturbative quantum field theory with Alain Connes and other co-authors. He is currently Humboldt professor at the department of mathematics of Humboldt University in Berlin, where he teaches the courses of Quantum Field Theory and Hopf Algebras and the Renormalization Group.
Go to Profile#41514
Sam B. Girgus
#41527
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Sam B. Girgus most recent book is Generations of Jewish Directors and the Struggle for America’s Soul. He is also editor of the Renewing the American Narrative book series for Palgrave Macmillan and the author of 10 books and editor of several other works. He is a retired professor of English and American Studies who taught at the Universities of New Mexico, Alabama, Oregon, the Opportunity Center and Vanderbilt University. His new essay on Serpico will appear in a new book on film and philosophy edited by philosopher Richard Kearney. He has held a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship and other awards.
Go to Profile#41515
Emma Hart
#41528
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Professor Emma Hart, FRSE is an English computer scientist known for her work in artificial immune systems , evolutionary computation and optimisation. She is a professor of computational intelligence at Edinburgh Napier University, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Evolutionary Computation , and D. Coordinator of the Future & Emerging Technologies Proactive Initiative, Fundamentals of Collective Adaptive Systems.
Go to Profile#41516
Helia Bravo Hollis
#41529
Overall Influence
1901 - 2001 (100 years)
Helia Bravo Hollis was a Mexican botanist who did research in the Faculty of Science at UNAM. Background and studies Helia Bravo Hollis was born and raised in Mixcoac, located in present-day Mexico City. Her interest in the study of living beings came from Sunday walks with her parents. She excelled in school from a young age. President Porfirio Diaz gave her recognition for her grades upon her completion of primary school.
Go to Profile#41517
Thomas G. Alexander
#41530
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Thomas Glen Alexander is an American historian and academic who is a professor emeritus at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, where he was also Lemuel Hardison Redd, Jr. Professor of Western History and director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies. After studying at Weber State University and Utah State University , he received a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965. He taught history at BYU from 1964 until 2004, and served in the leadership of various local and historical organizations.
Go to Profile#41518
Nicky Hayden
#41531
Overall Influence
1981 - 2017 (36 years)
Nicholas Patrick Hayden , nicknamed "The Kentucky Kid", was an American professional motorcycle racer who won the MotoGP World Championship in 2006. Hayden began racing motorcycles at a young age. He began his road racing career in the CMRA before progressing to the AMA Supersport Championship and then to the AMA Superbike Championship. He won the AMA title in 2002 and was approached by the Repsol Honda team to race for them in MotoGP in 2003.
Go to Profile#41519
Nikita Petrov
#41532
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Nikita Vasilyevich Petrov is a Russian historian. He works at Memorial, a Russian organization dedicated to studying Soviet political repression. Petrov specializes in Soviet security services. The book about Nikolai Ezhov written by Nikita Petrov and Marc Jansen is based on the archives made accessible after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Petrov's part was tracking original archival documents, while Jansen worked with published sources.
Go to Profile#41520
Vicki Sara
#41533
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Vicki Rubian Sara is an Australian endocrinologist, who specialises in research into growth hormones and foetal brain development. Sara was born in Sydney, and attended Sydney Girls High School. She attended the University of Sydney, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours and a PhD in 1974 for her thesis titled "The action of prenatal trophic hormones on brain growth and behaviour". She worked at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research from 1973 to 1976, then as a research fellow at the International Brain Research Organization . In 1980, she joined the Karolinska Institute in Stoc...
Go to Profile#41521
Roger Gregory
#41534
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Roger Lee Gregory is an American lawyer who serves as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Background Gregory was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania but grew up in Petersburg, Virginia. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree summa cum laude from Virginia State University in 1975 and his Juris Doctor from the University of Michigan Law School in 1978. He worked as an associate for Butzel Long and Hunton & Williams from 1978 until 1982. He co-founded the Richmond, Virginia law firm of Wilder & Gregory in 1982 with L. Douglas Wilder , and became the chair of its litigation section in 1985.
Go to Profile#41522
Øyvind Grøn
#41535
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Øyvind Grøn is a Norwegian physicist. Biography Grøn was born in Oslo, and is a twin. He took the cand. real. degree at the University of Oslo in 1973, majoring in meteorology. He followed up with the PhD degree in 1990 with a thesis on repulsive gravitation. He started his academic career as a research assistant at the University of Oslo, and has also been a lecturer there. He was appointed as a professor at Oslo University College in 1994, having been an associate professor since 1985. He has also been professor II at the University of Oslo since 1994.
Go to Profile#41523
John M. Hayes
#41536
Overall Influence
1940 - 2017 (77 years)
John Michael Hayes was an American oceanographer. He worked at Indiana University Bloomington, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Education Hayes was educated at Iowa State University graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1962. He completed his postgraduate education in analytical chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was awarded a PhD in 1966 for analysis of organic constituents of terrestrial and extraterrestrial samples using mass spectrometry supervised by Klaus Biemann.
Go to Profile#41524
Cynthia Nixon
#41537
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Cynthia Ellen Nixon is an American actress, activist, and theater director. For her portrayal of Miranda Hobbes in the HBO series Sex and the City , she won the 2004 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. She reprised the role in the films Sex and the City and Sex and the City 2 , as well as the television show And Just Like That... . Her other film credits include Amadeus , James White , and playing Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion .
Go to Profile#41525
Wally Lewis
#41538
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Walter James Lewis AM is an Australian former professional rugby league footballer who played in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and coacheded in the 1980s and 1990s. He became a commentator for television coverage of the sport. A highly decorated Australian national captain, Lewis is widely regarded as one of the greatest ever players of rugby league. His time as a player and coach was followed by a career as a sports presenter for the Nine Network.
Go to Profile#41526
Luciana Duranti
#41539
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Luciana Duranti is an archival theorist and professor of archival science and diplomatics at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She is a noted expert on diplomatics and electronic records. Since 1998, she has been the director of the electronic records research project, InterPARES . She has disclosed the concept of the archival bond originally initiated by Italian archivist Giorgio Cencetti in 1937.
Go to Profile#41527
Dave Rowntree
#41540
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
David Alexander De Horne Rowntree is an English musician, politician, solicitor, composer and animator. He is the drummer for the rock band Blur and was a Labour Party councillor for Norfolk County Council from 2017 until 2021.
Go to Profile#41528
Martin A. Uman
#41541
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Martin Allan Uman is an American engineer. He has been acknowledged by the American Geophysical Union as one of the world's leading authorities on lightning. Uman is probably best known for his work in lightning modeling, which is the application of electromagnetic field theory to the description of various lightning processes. This provides a better understanding of lightning in general and has had a number of important practical spinoffs, the most notable has been a lightning locating system and the redefinition of several important lightning characteristics relative to hazard protection. ...
Go to Profile#41529
Robert Higgs
#41542
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Robert Higgs is an American economic historian and economist combining material from Public Choice, the New institutional economics, and the Austrian school of economics; and describes himself as a "libertarian anarchist" in political and legal theory and public policy. His writings in economics and economic history have most often focused on the causes, means, and effects of government power and growth.
Go to Profile#41530
Burkhard Rost
#41543
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Areas of Specialization: Computational Biology, Bioinformatics Burkhard Rost is head of the Department of Computational Biology & Bioinformatics for the Technical University of Munich. He is also the chair of the Study Section Bioinformatics Munich with the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He studied physics at the University of Giessen and physics, history, philosophy, and psychology at the Heidelberg University, where he earned his PhD. Rost has focused on the use of machine learning to predict enzymatic activity, subcellular localization, functional effects of points mutations/SNPs, disordered regions, internal residue-residue contacts, and protein clustering.
Go to Profile#41531
George Casella
#41544
Overall Influence
1951 - 2012 (61 years)
George Casella was a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Florida. He died from multiple myeloma. Academic career Casella completed his undergraduate education at Fordham University and graduate education at Purdue University. He served on the faculty of Rutgers University, Cornell University, and the University of Florida. His contributions focused on the area of statistics including Monte Carlo methods, model selection, and genomic analysis. He was particularly active in Bayesian and empirical Bayes methods, with works connecting with the Stein phenom...
Go to Profile#41532
Nancy H. Rogers
#41545
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Nancy Hardin Rogers is an American lawyer, author, and former Attorney General of Ohio, a former Dean of the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and the former holder of the Michael E. Moritz Chair in Alternative Dispute Resolution at the Moritz College of Law. She is currently a professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#41533
Alice Slotsky
#41546
Overall Influence
Alice Louise Slotsky was an American historian of mathematics and Assyriologist known for her studies of Babylonian mathematics and Babylonian accounting and for her popular courses at Brown University on the Akkadian language.
Go to Profile#41534
Marcus George Singer
#41547
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Marcus George Singer was an American philosopher. His works include Generalization in Ethics – An Essay in the Logic of Ethics, with the Rudiments of a System of Moral Philosophy . Personal life Marcus George Singer was born in 1926 in New York City. His father, David Singer, a lawyer, died when MGS was 9 years old from a rare autoimmune disease. His mother, Esther Kobre Singer, was a concert level pianist and received awards from the City of New York for her service typing books in braille. Her father and uncle, through their small bank, provided loans to many Jews to pay passage to the USA .
Go to Profile#41535
Vadim G. Vizing
#41548
Overall Influence
1937 - 2017 (80 years)
Vadim Georgievich Vizing was a Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician known for his contributions to graph theory, and especially for Vizing's theorem stating that the edges of any simple graph with maximum degree Δ can be colored with at most Δ + 1 colors.
Go to Profile#41536
Jim Thornton
#41549
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Jim Thornton is an American radio and television announcer, news anchor, and voice actor. He is known for his voiceover work in video games, movies and television shows. Since 2011, he is best known for being the announcer of Wheel of Fortune following the death of longtime announcer Charlie O'Donnell.
Go to Profile#41537
Adrian Constantin
#41550
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Adrian Constantin is a Romanian-Austrian mathematician who does research in the field of nonlinear partial differential equations. He is a professor at the University of Vienna and has made groundbreaking contributions to the mathematics of wave propagation. He is listed as an ISI Highly Cited Researcher with more than 160 publications and 11000 citations.
Go to Profile#41538
Patricia Clarkson
#41551
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Patricia Davies Clarkson is an American actress. She has starred in numerous leading and supporting roles in a variety of films ranging from independent film features to major film studio productions. Her accolades include a Golden Globe Award and three Primetime Emmy Awards, in addition to nominations for an Academy Award and a Tony Award.
Go to Profile#41539
Richard Briers
#41552
Overall Influence
1934 - 2013 (79 years)
Richard David Briers was an English actor whose five-decade career encompassed film, radio, stage and television. Briers first came to prominence as George Starling in Marriage Lines , but it was a few years later, when he narrated Roobarb and Noah and Nelly in... SkylArk and played Tom Good in the BBC sitcom The Good Life , that he became a household name. He starred as Martin in Ever Decreasing Circles , and had a leading role as Hector in Monarch of the Glen . From the late 1980s, with Kenneth Branagh as director, he performed Shakespearean roles in Henry V , Much Ado About Nothing , Ha...
Go to Profile#41540
John W. Aldridge
#41553
Overall Influence
1922 - 2007 (85 years)
John W. Aldridge was an American writer, literary critic, teacher and scholar. He was a professor of English at the University of Michigan, director of the Hopwood Program, and USIA Special Ambassador to Germany.
Go to Profile#41541
Jackie DeShannon
#41554
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Jackie DeShannon is an American singer-songwriter and radio broadcaster with a string of hit song credits from the 1960s onwards, as both singer and composer. She was one of the first female singer-songwriters of the rock and roll period. She is best known as the singer of "What the World Needs Now Is Love" and "Put a Little Love in Your Heart", and as the writer of "When You Walk in the Room" and "Bette Davis Eyes", which became hits for The Searchers and Kim Carnes, respectively.
Go to Profile#41542
Mina Aganagić
#41555
Overall Influence
Mina Aganagić is a mathematical physicist who works as a professor in the Center for Theoretical Physics, the Department of Mathematics, the Department of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#41543
Faf du Plessis
#41556
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
François "Faf" du Plessis is a South African professional cricketer and former captain of the South Africa national cricket team. He is considered one of the greatest fielders of all time and among the best all-format batsmen of his era. He is also regarded as one of the most tactically astute and successful captains in all formats of modern cricket. In 2015, du Plessis became the first South African to score centuries in all forms of the game. He was named as the South African Cricketer of the Year in 2019.
Go to Profile#41544
Antanas Mockus
#41557
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Aurelijus Rūtenis Antanas Mockus Šivickas is a Colombian mathematician, philosopher, and politician. He has a master's degree in philosophy from the National University of Colombia, and a Honoris Causa PhD from the University of Paris.
Go to Profile#41545
Suraiya Faroqhi
#41558
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Suraiya N. Faroqhi , is a German scholar, Ottoman historian and a leading authority on Ottoman history. She was elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy for the year 2022, under the "Early Modern History to 1850" category.
Go to Profile#41546
Frank M. Hull
#41559
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Frank Mays Hull is a senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Education Hull received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in 1970. She received her Juris Doctor from Emory University School of Law in 1973. She graduated cum laude, Order of the Coif, and was on the Law Review.
Go to Profile#41547
Leith Dunn
#41560
Overall Influence
Leith Lorraine Dunn is a Jamaican sociologist, writer and academic. She taught at the University of the West Indies where she focused on gender and human rights, as well as acting for a consultant to the United Nations and the Caribbean Community. In 2020, she was presented the Award for Excellence by Jamaica's National Family Planning Board.
Go to Profile#41548
Andrew Adamatzky
#41561
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Andrew Adamatzky is a British computer scientist, who is a Director of the Unconventional Computing Laboratory and Professor in Unconventional Computing at the Department of Computer Science and Creative Technology, University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom.
Go to Profile#41549
Pascal Ory
#41562
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Pascal Ory is a French historian. A student of René Rémond, he specialises in cultural and political history and has written on Fascism ever since his master's dissertation on the Greenshirts of Henri Dorgères. In the 1970s, he contributed to a better definition of cultural history.
Go to Profile#41550
Myriam Benraad
#41563
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Myriam Benraad is a French political scientist. She specializes in the politics of the Arab world. Career Benraad graduated from the Institut d'études politiques in 2002. She then received her PhD in political science from the same institution in 2011.
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