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
#41751
Thomas Hofmann
#41764
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Thomas Frank Hofmann is a German food chemist and academic administrator. Since 2019, he has been President of the Technical University of Munich. Education Hofmann passed the Abitur in 1987 at the Meranier-Gymnasium Lichtenfels and studied food chemistry at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg from 1988 to 1992. In 1995, he received his PhD from the Technical University of Munich and habilitated in 1998.
Go to Profile#41752
Demaryius Thomas
#41765
Overall Influence
1987 - 2021 (34 years)
Demaryius Antwon Thomas was an American football wide receiver in the National Football League for ten seasons, primarily with the Denver Broncos. He played college football for the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, and was selected by the Broncos in the first round of the 2010 NFL Draft. With Denver, Thomas made four Pro Bowls and won Super Bowl 50 against the Carolina Panthers. He also played for the Houston Texans, New England Patriots, and New York Jets.
Go to Profile#41753
Robert O. Mendelsohn
#41766
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Robert O. Mendelsohn is an American environmental economist. He is currently the Edwin Weyerhaeuser Davis Professor of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, Professor of Economics in Economics Department at Yale University and Professor in the School of Management at Yale University. Mendelsohn is a major figure in the economics of global warming, being for example a contributor to the first Copenhagen Consensus report. Mendelsohn received a BA in economics from Harvard University in 1973 and obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1978.
Go to Profile#41754
David E. Meyer
#41767
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
David E. Meyer is an American academic in the field of psychology. He is a professor at the University of Michigan and is Chair of the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience area of the Psychology Department. He is director of the university's Brain, Cognition, and Action laboratory.
Go to Profile#41755
Danièle Hervieu-Léger
#41768
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Danièle Hervieu-Léger is a French sociologist specialized in the sociology of religion. Biography A graduate of the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris with a doctorate in sociology, she is also editor of the journal Archives des sciences sociales de la religion.
Go to Profile#41756
Rakesh Bhatnagar
#41769
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Rakesh Bhatnagar is an Indian educationist, scientist, and the current Vice Chancellor of Amity University Rajasthan. Previously he has served as the 27th Vice-Chancellor of Banaras Hindu University.
Go to Profile#41757
Chris Boardman
#41770
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Christopher Miles Boardman, is an English former racing cyclist. A time trial and prologue specialist, Boardman won the inaugural men's World time trial championship in 1994, won the individual pursuit gold medal at the 1992 Summer Olympics, broke the world hour record three times, and won three prologue stages at the Tour de France.
Go to Profile#41758
Ansgar Beckermann
#41771
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Ansgar Beckermann is a German philosopher who deals primarily with philosophy of mind and epistemology. He is professor for philosophy at the University of Bielefeld and was the president of the "Gesellschaft für analytische Philosophie" . Beckermann is known for his arguments for physicalism and his discussion of the concept of emergence.
Go to Profile#41759
Myrtle Bachelder
#41772
Overall Influence
1908 - 1997 (89 years)
Myrtle Claire Bachelder was an American chemist and Women's Army Corps officer, who is noted for her secret work on the Manhattan Project atomic bomb program, and for the development of techniques in the chemistry of metals.
Go to Profile#41760
John Schaar
#41773
Overall Influence
1928 - 2011 (83 years)
John Homer Schaar , also known as Jack Schaar, was an American political theorist. He was a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Schaar was born in Montoursville, Pennsylvania, and raised on a farm in a Lutheran family.
Go to Profile#41761
Terry Branstad
#41774
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Terry Edward Branstad is an American politician and former diplomat. A member of the Republican Party, he served three terms in the Iowa House of Representatives from 1973 to 1979 before serving as governor of Iowa from 1983 to 1999 and again from 2011 to 2017. He is the longest-serving governor in United States history. Branstad served as the United States Ambassador to China from 2017 to 2020 under President Donald Trump.
Go to Profile#41762
David Walker
#41775
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
David Edward Walker is an American retired television news anchor. He and his wife Lois Hart were paired as television news anchors for nearly three decades, starting in 1980 when they were among the original founding anchors on CNN through 2008 on Sacramento, California station KCRA.
Go to Profile#41763
Rob Blokzijl
#41776
Overall Influence
1943 - 2015 (72 years)
Robert "Rob" Blokzijl was a Dutch physicist and computer scientist at the National Institute for Subatomic Physics , and an early internet pioneer. He was founding member and chairman of RIPE, the Réseaux IP Européens , the European Internet Registrar organisation.
Go to Profile#41764
Arcadio Poveda
#41777
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Renán Arcadio Poveda Ricalde was a Mexican prominent astronomer who developed a method to calculate the mass of elliptical galaxies. He received Mexico's National Prize for Arts and Sciences in 1975, chaired its National Astronomical Observatory from 1968 to 1980 and was elected to The National College in 1989.
Go to Profile#41765
Don Melnick
#41778
Overall Influence
1953 - 2019 (66 years)
Don J. Melnick was an environmental biologist and conservationist. He held the position of Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Conservation Biology at Columbia University, where he was also professor of anthropology and biological sciences.
Go to Profile#41766
Sergey Zimov
#41779
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Sergey Aphanasievich Zimov is a Russian geophysicist who specialises in arctic and subarctic ecology. He is the Director of Northeast Scientific Station , a senior research fellow of the Pacific Institute for Geography , and one of the founders of Pleistocene Park . He is best known for his work in advocating the theory that human overhunting of large herbivores during the Pleistocene caused Siberia's grassland-steppe ecosystem to disappear and for raising awareness as to the important roles permafrost and thermokarst lakes play in the global carbon cycle.
Go to Profile#41767
Raphael Sonenshein
#41780
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Raphael J. Sonenshein is Executive Director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles and was previously a professor of political science at California State University, Fullerton, where he also served as chairman of the department. An instructor at California State University, Fullerton from 1982 to 2012, Sonenshein holds a bachelor's degree in public policy from Princeton University and a doctorate in political science from Yale University. His books, Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles and The City at Stake: Secession,...
Go to Profile#41768
Carole Meredith
#41781
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Carole P. Meredith is an American grape geneticist and was a professor at the Department of Viticulture and Enology of University of California, Davis. Career Before she retired in 2003, Meredith and her research group pioneered the use of DNA typing to differentiate Vitis vinifera grape varieties and for elucidating their parentage, which gives insight into the varieties' history and place of origin. In 1996, Meredith and her research established the parentage of Cabernet Sauvignon, which was the first application of such techniques. Later, Chardonnay, Syrah, and Zinfandel followed. The research group showed that the varieties Zinfandel, Primitivo, and Crljenak Kaštelanski are identical.
Go to Profile#41769
Frank Legacki
#41782
Overall Influence
1939 - 2020 (81 years)
Frank Legacki was an American championship swimmer. He won two individual, one relay, and two team NCAA swimming championships between 1959 and 1961 and set American records in the 50-yard freestyle. He was also a two-time National A.A.U. Champion in the 100 Butterfly and set American records in this event, too. He was inducted into the University of Michigan Athletic Hall of Honor in 1994.
Go to Profile#41770
María Teresa Ruiz
#41783
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
María Teresa Ruiz is a Chilean astronomer who was the first woman to receive Chile's National Prize for Exact Sciences, the first female recipient of a doctorate in astrophysics at Princeton University, and the first woman president of the Chilean Academy of Sciences. She is known, too, for the discovery of the brown dwarf Kelu-1.
Go to Profile#41771
Thomas Flanagan
#41784
Overall Influence
1923 - 2002 (79 years)
Thomas Bonner Flanagan was an American university professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a novelist. Biography Flanagan was born in 1923 in Greenwich, Connecticut, to a homemaker mother and a dentist father. All of his grandparents had come to the United States from County Fermanagh, Ireland. He served in the United States Army during World War II. He graduated from Amherst College in 1945. He received his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Columbia University. From 1960 to 1978 he was Professor of English Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, specializing in Irish literature.
Go to Profile#41772
Sergio Focardi
#41785
Overall Influence
1932 - 2013 (81 years)
Sergio Focardi was an Italian physicist and professor emeritus at the University of Bologna. He led the Department of Bologna of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics and the Faculty of Mathematical, Physical and Natural Sciences at the University of Bologna.
Go to Profile#41773
Alicia Elena Pérez Duarte
#41786
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Alicia Elena Pérez Duarte is a Mexican lawyer and researcher who focuses on human rights and women's legal status. She is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores and a co-founder of the Programa Universitario de Estudios de Género at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In addition to her work in private legal practice, she has served as a magistrate for the Superior Tribunal of Mexico City, as technical secretary for the Commission investigating femicides in Ciudad Juárez, and as a special prosecutor for crimes against women.
Go to Profile#41774
Elizabeth Kiss
#41787
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Elizabeth Kiss is an American philosopher and academic administrator, specialising in moral and political philosophy. Since 2018, she has been the Warden of Rhodes House, Oxford University, and CEO of the Rhodes Trust. She is responsible for administering the Rhodes Scholarship, providing pastoral support to existing Rhodes Scholars and coordinating the Rhodes Trust. She is the first woman to hold this role. Previously she served as president of Agnes Scott College.
Go to Profile#41775
Iván Werning
#41788
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Iván Werning is an Argentine economist who has served as the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2014. Born in Argentina, Werning received a BA from the Universidad de San Andrés and an MA from the Universidad Torcuato di Tella, both in Buenos Aires. He received a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 2002, where he studied under Gary Becker, Robert Lucas, Fernando Alvarez, and Pierre-André Chiappori.
Go to Profile#41776
Robley D. Evans
#41789
Overall Influence
1907 - 1995 (88 years)
Robley Dunglison Evans was an American nuclear physicist and pioneer of nuclear medicine. He was the president of the Health Physics Society in 1972–1973. Biography His father Manley Jefferson Evans and mother Alice Jennie Turner married in August 1905 in O'Neill, Nebraska. Manley J. Evans was a professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University. Robley D. Evans was their only child. He is named in honor of Admiral Robley D. Evans, but there is no immediate family connection. In 1912 the family moved to Los Angeles County. Manley J. Evans taught at Hollywood High School for 32 years. At Hollywood High School, Robley D.
Go to Profile#41777
Zdeněk P. Bažant
#41790
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Zdeněk Pavel Bažant is McCormick School Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil Engineering and Materials Science in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University's Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Go to Profile#41778
Adrian Kaehler
#41791
Overall Influence
Adrian Kaehler is an American scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, inventor and author. He is best known for his work on the OpenCV Computer Vision library, as well as two books on that library. Early life Adrian Kaehler was born in 1973. At the age of 14, he enrolled in UC Santa Cruz, studying mathematics, computer science, and Physics, graduating at 18 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics. He received his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1998 under professor Norman Christ for his work in lattice gauge theory and on the QCDSP supercomputer project.
Go to Profile#41779
Fredrik Gustafsson
#41792
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Fredrik Gustafsson is a Swedish professor of sensor informatics at Linköping University. Background Fredrik Gustafsson was born in Aneby, Sweden. In 1988 he obtained a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and in 1992 a doctorate degree in automatic control, both at Linköping University. He was appointed professor of communication systems in 1999 and of sensor informatics in 2005 at Linköping University.
Go to Profile#41780
J. K. Simmons
#41793
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Jonathan Kimble Simmons is an American actor. He is considered one of the most eminent character actors of his generation, having appeared in over 200 films and television roles. He is the recipient of various Supporting Actor accolades for his performance as the music instructor Terence Fletcher in Damien Chazelle's Whiplash , including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Golden Globe Award.
Go to Profile#41781
Robin Weiss
#41794
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Robert Anthony "Robin" Weiss is a British molecular biologist, Professor of Viral Oncology at University College London and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Research His research has focussed on retroviruses, initially as a means of understanding T-cell leukemia and other cancers, which may be caused by retroviruses. A break-through discovery in 1971 was that the retroviral genome in chickens follows the rules of Mendelian inheritance. Later his work moved on to HIV, also a retrovirus, and made several new important discoveries, most notably identifying CD4 on lymphocytes as the...
Go to Profile#41782
Ghislain Deslandes
#41795
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Ghislain Deslandes is a French philosopher born in Angers on the 16th of August 1970. His interdisciplinary discourse spans such topics as Media management, Leadership studies and Postmodern theology.
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Tim Hudson
#41796
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Timothy Adam Hudson , nicknamed "Huddy" is an American former professional baseball pitcher of Major League Baseball . After spending his college years at Chattahoochee Valley Community College and Auburn University, Hudson played in the major leagues for the Oakland Athletics , the Atlanta Braves , and the San Francisco Giants . With the Giants, he won the 2014 World Series over the Kansas City Royals. He is now the varsity head coach for the Lee-Scott Academy baseball team, located in Auburn, AL.
Go to Profile#41784
Da Brat
#41797
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Shawntae Harris-Dupart , better known by her stage name Da Brat, is an American rapper. Born and raised in Chicago, she began her career in 1992, the year she signed with So So Def Records. Her debut album Funkdafied sold one million copies, making her the first-ever female solo rap act to receive a platinum certification, and the second-ever female rap act after Salt-N-Pepa.
Go to Profile#41785
Nicole King
#41798
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Nicole King is an American biologist and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley in molecular and cell biology and integrative biology. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2013.
Go to Profile#41786
Donald B. Ayer
#41799
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Donald Belton Ayer is an American attorney who served as the 24th United States Deputy Attorney General from 1989 to 1990, under President George H. W. Bush. Education and career Ayer graduated from Stanford University with a Bachelor of Arts in History in 1971, with great distinction. In 1973, he graduated from Harvard University with a Master of Arts in American History, and received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1975. He clerked for Judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, followed by a year with Associate Justice William Rehnquist of the U.S.
Go to Profile#41787
Gülru Necipoğlu
#41800
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Gülru Necipoğlu is a Turkish American professor of Islamic Art/Architecture. She has been the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University since 1993, where she started teaching as Assistant Professor in 1987. She received her Harvard Ph.D. in the Department of History of Art and Architecture , her BA in Art History at Wesleyan , her high school degree in Robert College, Istanbul . She is married to the Ottoman historian and Harvard University professor Cemal Kafadar. Her sister is the historian Nevra Necipoğlu.
Go to Profile#41788
Peter K. Machamer
#41801
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Peter K. Machamer was an American philosopher and historian of science. Machamer was Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. His work has been influential in philosophy of science in developing an account of mechanistic explanation which rejects standard deductive models of explanation, such as the deductive-nomological model by understanding scientific practice as the search for mechanisms. His research has also focused on 17th-century history of philosophy and science, on Galileo Galilei and René Descartes in particular, and on values and science. He...
Go to Profile#41789
Jeremy Jackson
#41802
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Jeremy Bradford Cook Jackson is an American ecologist, paleobiologist, and conservationist. He is an emeritus professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, senior scientist emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution, and visiting scientist at the American Museum of Natural History Center for Biodiversity and Conservation. He studies threats and solutions to human impacts on the environment and the ecology and evolution of tropical seas. Jackson has more than 170 scientific publications and 11 books, with nearly 40,000 citations listed on Google Scholar.
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Jeremy O'Brien
#41803
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Jeremy O'Brien is a physicist who researches in quantum optics, optical quantum metrology and quantum information science. He co-founded and serves as CEO of the quantum computing firm PsiQuantum. Formerly, he was Professorial Research Fellow in Physics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Bristol, and director of its Centre for Quantum Photonics.
Go to Profile#41791
Dražen Petrović
#41804
Overall Influence
1964 - 1993 (29 years)
Dražen Petrović was a Yugoslav and Croatian professional basketball player. A shooting guard, he initially achieved success playing professional basketball in Europe in the 1980s with Cibona and Real Madrid, before joining the National Basketball Association in 1989.
Go to Profile#41792
Imad Rahman
#41805
Overall Influence
Imad Rahman is a Pakistani-American fiction writer whose first short story collection was published in 2004. Biography A native of Karachi, Pakistan who immigrated to the United States at age 18 to attend college, Rahman was an assistant professor of English at Kansas State University, and, as of 2008, is an assistant professor of English at Cleveland State University, where he directs the Imagination Writers Conference. He is a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University, and holds a Master of Arts from Ohio University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Florida. He was the James C. McC...
Go to Profile#41793
Chin Wan
#41806
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Horace Chin Wan-kan , better known by his pen name Chin Wan, is a Hong Kong scholar advocating localism, best known for his publications On the Hong Kong City-State series. He is the founder and leader of the Hong Kong Resurgence Order and is the ideological leader of the "Hong Kong Autonomy Movement," dubbed as the "godfather of localism" in Hong Kong. Until mid-2016, Chin was an assistant professor at the Department of Chinese of Lingnan University.
Go to Profile#41794
Mark Colyvan
#41807
Overall Influence
Mark Colyvan is an Australian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He is a former president of the Australasian Association of Philosophy. Colyvan is known for his research on philosophy of mathematics.
Go to Profile#41795
Leena Peltonen-Palotie
#41808
Overall Influence
1952 - 2010 (58 years)
Leena Peltonen-Palotie was a Finnish geneticist who contributed to the identification of 15 genes for Finnish heritage diseases, including arterial hypertension, schizophrenia, lactose intolerance, arthrosis and multiple sclerosis. She was considered one of the world's leading molecular geneticists.
Go to Profile#41796
Patrick Duffy
#41809
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Patrick Duffy is an American actor and director widely known for his role on the CBS primetime soap opera Dallas, where he played Bobby Ewing, the youngest son of Miss Ellie, and the nicest brother of J.R. Ewing from 1978 to 1985 and from 1986 to 1991. Duffy returned to reprise his role as Bobby in a continuation of Dallas, which aired on TNT from 2012 to 2014. He is also well known for his role on the ABC sitcom Step by Step as Frank Lambert from 1991 to 1998, and for his role as Stephen Logan on the CBS daytime soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful . Duffy played the lead character's fathe...
Go to Profile#41797
Karla F.C. Holloway
#41810
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Karla Francesca Holloway is an American academic. She is James B. Duke Professor of English & Professor of Law at Duke University, and holds appointments in the Duke University School of Law as well as the university's Department of English, Department of African & African American Studies, and Program in Women's Studies.
Go to Profile#41798
Dominique Foata
#41811
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Dominique Foata is a mathematician who works in enumerative combinatorics. With Pierre Cartier and Marcel-Paul Schützenberger he pioneered the modern approach to classical combinatorics, that lead, in part, to the current blossoming of algebraic combinatorics. His pioneering work on permutation statistics, and his combinatorial approach to special functions, are especially notable.
Go to Profile#41799
Adam Zachary Newton
#41812
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Adam Zachary Newton is an American academic. He has served as university professor, Stanton Chair in Literature and Humanities, and chair of the Department of English at Yeshiva University. His previous appointment was as Jane and Rowland Blumberg Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught in the English Department, the Committee on Comparative Literature, the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, and the Program in Jewish Studies. More recently, he has held appointments as distinguished visiting professor at Emory University and Agnes Scott College in Atlanta,...
Go to Profile#41800
Aaron Dessner
#41813
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Aaron Brooking Dessner is an American musician, songwriter, and record producer. He is best known as a founding member of the rock band the National, with whom he has recorded nine studio albums; a co-founder of the indie rock duo Big Red Machine, teaming with Bon Iver's Justin Vernon; and a collaborator on Taylor Swift's studio albums Folklore and Evermore, both of which contended for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2021 and 2022, respectively, with the former winning the accolade.
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