Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#41801

Jeffrey S. Gurock

#41814

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Jeffrey S. Gurock is Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University in New York City. Biography Gurock earned a bachelor's degree from the City College of New York and a master's degree from Columbia University. He served as associate editor to American Jewish History from 1982 to 2002.

#41802

Rudolf Scharping

#41815

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Rudolf Albert Scharping is a German lawyer and politician of the Social Democratic Party . He was from 1991 to 1994 the 6th Minister President of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate and from 1998 to 2002 Federal Minister of Defence in the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. From 1993 to 1995, Scharping was also the national chairman of the SPD. In the Bundestag election in 1994, he was candidate for chancellor. From March 1995 to May 2001, he served as chairman of the Party of European Socialists .

#41803

Mike Bryan

#41816

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Michael Carl Bryan is an American former doubles world No. 1 tennis player. With his twin brother Bob, he was the world's top doubles player for more than nine years, first achieving the top ranking in September 2003. They became the second men's doubles team to complete the career Golden Slam by winning the 2012 London Olympics. Bryan holds the records for the most major men's doubles titles at 18, the most ATP Tour men's doubles titles , and the most weeks ranked as the doubles world No. 1. He won all but five of his doubles titles with his brother; partnering Jack Sock, he won two majors ...

#41804

Alberto Sirlin

#41817

Overall Influence

1930 - 2022 (92 years)

Alberto Sirlin was an Argentine theoretical physicist, specializing in particle physics. Biography Sirlin studied from 1948 to 1952 at the University of Buenos Aires, where he received his doctorate in 1953 under the supervision of Richard Gans. In 1953–1954 Sirlin was a fellow at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas in Rio de Janeiro, where he took several graduate courses, including one taught by Richard Feynman. Sirlin was in 1954–1955 at the University of California at Los Angeles and in 1955–1957 at the Cornell University, where in 1958 he received a doctorate under the supervision of Tōichirō Kinoshita.

#41805

David P. Barash

#41818

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

David P. Barash is professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Washington. He has written, edited or co-authored 40 books, including ones on human aggression, peace studies, and the sexual behavior of animals and people. He received his bachelor's degree in biology from Harpur College, Binghamton University, and a Ph.D. in zoology from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1970. He taught at the State University of New York at Oneonta and then accepted a permanent position at the University of Washington.

#41806

Patty Loveless

#41819

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Patty Loveless is an American country music singer. She began performing in her teenaged years before signing her first recording contract with MCA Records' Nashville division in 1985. While her first few releases were unsuccessful, she broke through by decade's end with a cover of George Jones's "If My Heart Had Windows". Loveless issued five albums on MCA before moving to Epic Records in 1993, where she released nine more albums. Four of her albumsHonky Tonk Angel, Only What I Feel, When Fallen Angels Fly, and The Trouble with the Truthare certified platinum in the United States. Loveless h...

#41807

Ramakrishna Ramaswamy

#41820

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Ram Ramaswamy is an Indian scientist and professor of chemistry at JNU. Education and career He obtained his B.Sc. in chemistry from Loyola College, Chennai, then M.Sc. in chemistry from the IIT, Kanpur, and Ph.D. from Princeton University where he worked under the supervision of Herschel Rabitz. He then moved to California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, where he was between 1978 and 1980, working with Prof. Rudolph A. Marcus.

#41808

Jan Deutsch

#41821

Overall Influence

1935 - 2016 (81 years)

Jan Ginter Deutsch was a Polish-born American philosopher and legal scholar best known for his work on the philosophy of corporate law, jurisprudence, and the cultural underpinnings of capitalist democracy. Deutsch's most recent book, Power and Precedent , is a summation of his work on United States jurisprudence over the past few decades.

#41809

Kerry Wood

#41822

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Kerry Lee Wood is an American former baseball pitcher who played 14 seasons in Major League Baseball for the Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Indians, and New York Yankees. Wood first came to prominence as a 20-year-old rookie, when he recorded 20 strikeouts in a one-hit shutout against the Houston Astros, which some have argued may be the greatest single-game pitching performance in MLB history. The game also made Wood the co-holder of the MLB record for strikeouts in a single game and earned Wood the nickname Kid K. He was later named the 1998 National League Rookie of the Year.

#41810

David Wojahn

#41823

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

David Wojahn is a contemporary American poet who teaches poetry in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and in the low residency MFA in Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has been the director of Virginia Commonwealth University's Creative Writing Program.

#41811

W. Boyd Rayward

#41824

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

W. Boyd Rayward is an Australian librarian and scholar, best known as the biographer of Paul Otlet. Life Warden Boyd Rayward was born in Inverell, New South Wales, Australia in 1939 and studied Library Science at the University of New South Wales, graduating in 1964. He then transferred to the U.S. to continue his studies at the University of Illinois. He later earned a master's degree and doctorate in 1973 from the University of Chicago Graduate Library School. His dissertation was on Paul Otlet.

#41812

William Harmon

#41825

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

William Harmon is James Gordon Hanes Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of five books of poetry and editor of A Handbook to Literature. His most recent poetry has appeared in Blink and Light.

#41813

Natalie Haas

#41826

Overall Influence

Natalie Haas is an American cellist, originally from Menlo Park, California. A graduate of the Juilliard School, she has toured and recorded extensively with Scottish fiddler Alasdair Fraser. Also, she has toured and recorded with Mark O'Connor and his Appalachia Waltz Trio, and with Natalie MacMaster. She has appeared on more than 100 albums.

#41814

Euan Cameron

#41827

Overall Influence

Euan Cameron is Henry Luce III Professor of Reformation Church History at Union Theological Seminary. He has a D.Phil from the University of Oxford. His work focuses on the Reformation and religion in the Late Middle Ages.

#41815

Lennart Bengtsson

#41828

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Lennart Bengtsson is a Swedish meteorologist. His research interests include climate sensitivity, extreme events, climate variability and climate predictability. Career He was head of research at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts from 1975 to 1981 and then director until 1990; then director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. He became a recipient of the Milutin Milankovic Medal in 1996. He is now a senior research fellow at the Environmental Systems Science Centre in the University of Reading.

#41816

Andrew G. Clark

#41829

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Andrew G. Clark is an American population geneticist. He is currently Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Population Genetics in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics and a Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator at Cornell University. He is the current head of the Graduate Computation Biology field. He is also co-director of Cornell's Center for Comparative and Population Genomics and a member of a working group for the National Human Genome Research Institute.

#41817

Cam Cameron

#41830

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Malcolm "Cam" Cameron is an American football coach. He is the former offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach of the LSU Tigers football program. Cameron attended Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana and played quarterback for the school. Cameron began his coaching career in the NCAA with the Michigan Wolverines. After that he switched to the National Football League , where he was offensive coordinator for the Baltimore Ravens and the San Diego Chargers and head coach for the Miami Dolphins, coaching them to a 1–15 record in his only season.

#41818

Debra Fischer

#41831

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Debra Ann Fischer is a professor of astronomy at Yale University researching detection and characterization of exoplanets. She was part of the team to discover the first known multiple-planet system.

#41819

Lev Dobriansky

#41832

Overall Influence

1918 - 2008 (90 years)

Lev Eugene Dobriansky was an American diplomat and professor of economics at Georgetown University. He served as U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, and was also an anti-communist advocate. He is known for his work with the National Captive Nations Committee and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, and formerly served as the chairman emeritus of the latter.

#41820

Anna G. Jónasdóttir

#41833

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Anna Guðrún Jónasdóttir is an Icelandic political scientist and gender studies academic. She is Professor Emerita at the Center for Feminist Social Studies at Örebro University and co-director of the GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, established as a centre of excellence in gender studies in 2006. She is the author and editor of several books. Anna Jónasdóttir is known, i.a., for her theory of "love power." Her book Why Women Are Oppressed was described as a "thorough attempt to revitalize one of the most provocative early themes of America's women's liberation movement" by The New York Times Book Review.

#41821

Todd Bowles

#41834

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Todd Robert Bowles is an American football coach and former player who is the head coach for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the National Football League . He previously served as the head coach of the New York Jets. Bowles has also served as the defensive coordinator of the Arizona Cardinals and Buccaneers and as the secondary coach for the New York Jets, Cleveland Browns, Dallas Cowboys, Miami Dolphins, and Philadelphia Eagles. Bowles played eight seasons in the NFL as a safety, primarily for the Washington Redskins, and started in Super Bowl XXII.

#41822

Robert Whaples

#41835

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Robert M. Whaples is a professor of economics at Wake Forest University. He is also the editor of The Independent Review. Education Whaples graduated from the University of Maryland in 1983 with B.A.'s in economics and history, and received his Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of Pennsylvania. His Ph.D. thesis, "The Shortening of the American Work Week: An Economic and Historical Analysis", won the Allan Nevins Prize from the Economic History Association.

#41823

Elliott Colla

#41836

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Elliott Colla is an American scholar of the Middle East, specializing in Arabic literature and culture. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University.

#41824

Audrey Geisel

#41837

Overall Influence

1921 - 2018 (97 years)

Audrey Grace Florine Stone was the second wife of American children's book author Theodor Geisel , to whom she was married from 1968 until his death in 1991. She founded Dr. Seuss Enterprises in 1993, and was President and CEO of the company until her death in 2018.

#41825

Diana Mutz

#41838

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Prof. Dr. Diana Carole Mutz is the Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also the director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics. She is known for her research in the field of political communication. She formerly served as editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Political Behavior.

#41826

Michael Cox

#41839

Overall Influence

Michael Cox is a British journalist and author who provides football analysis for the UK branch of The Athletic. He created the website Zonal Marking about formations and tactics in association football.

#41827

Pat Sajak

#41840

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Pat Sajak is an American television personality and game show host. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Sajak began his career in broadcasting at a local radio station, later serving as a disc jockey during the Vietnam War for the American Forces Vietnam Network.

#41828

Richard F. Thomas

#41841

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Richard F. Thomas is the George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. His scholarship has focused on various critical approaches, metrics and prose stylistics , genre studies, translation theory and practice, and the reception of Classical literature and culture, particularly with respect to Virgil.

#41829

Troy Glaus

#41842

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Troy Edward Glaus is an American former professional baseball first baseman and third baseman. Glaus played in Major League Baseball with the Anaheim Angels , Arizona Diamondbacks , Toronto Blue Jays , St. Louis Cardinals , and the Atlanta Braves . Glaus lettered in baseball while attending UCLA. He won a bronze medal in baseball at the 1996 Summer Olympics as a member of the U.S. national baseball team. Glaus was a four-time All-Star and won World Series MVP honors in .

#41830

Susan Atkins

#41843

Overall Influence

1948 - 2009 (61 years)

Susan Denise Atkins was an American convicted murderer who was a member of Charles Manson's "Family". Manson's followers committed a series of nine murders at four locations in California over a period of five weeks in the summer of 1969. Known within the Manson family as Sadie Mae Glutz or Sexy Sadie, Atkins was convicted for her participation in eight of these killings, including the most notorious, the Tate murders in 1969. She was sentenced to death, which was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment when the California Supreme Court invalidated all death sentences issued prior to 1972. Atkins was incarcerated until her death in 2009.

#41831

Henry Braun

#41844

Overall Influence

Henry Braun was an American poet, teacher, and peace activist. Biography Henry Braun was born in Olean, New York in 1930. His mother died when he was two years old, and he grew up in an orphanage and foster homes in Buffalo. He was later raised by his father, and attended Hutchinson Central High School.

#41832

John Mattick

#41845

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

John Stanley Mattick is an Australian molecular biologist known for his efforts to assign function to non-coding DNA. Mattick was the executive director of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research from 2012 to 2018. He joined Genomics England in May 2018 as Chief Executive Officer. In October 2019, he joined the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

#41833

Mary S. Hartman

#41846

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Mary S. Hartman joined the Douglass History Department in 1968 and served as director of the Women’s Studies Institute from 1975 to 1977. She was named acting dean in 1981, and named dean in 1982. As dean, she instituted a number of nationally acclaimed programs for women, including the Douglass Project for Rutgers Women in Math, Science, and Engineering; the Center for Women's Global Leadership; the Laurie New Jersey Chair in Women's Studies; and the Institute for Women's Leadership. Further, she gathered the first organization of Faculty Fellows committed to the Douglass College mission within the context of the reorganized University.

#41834

Bobby Petrino

#41847

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Robert Patrick Petrino is an American football coach. He currently serves as the offensive coordinator for the Arkansas Razorbacks. He is the former head coach for the Missouri State Bears. Previously, he served as the head coach of the Louisville Cardinals football team from 2014 until being fired during the 2018 season. He previously held the post from 2003 to 2006. From 2008 to 2011, Petrino was the head football coach at the University of Arkansas. He was dismissed from that position in the spring of 2012 for covering up an extramarital affair with an athletic department staffer. Petrino ...

#41835

Charles Mathias

#41848

Overall Influence

1922 - 2010 (88 years)

Charles McCurdy Mathias Jr. was an American politician and attorney. A Republican, he served as a member of the United States Senate, representing Maryland from 1969 to 1987. He was also a member of the Maryland House of Delegates from 1959 to 1961, and of the United States House of Representatives, representing the of Maryland from 1961 to 1969.

#41836

Steven Dietz

#41849

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Steven Dietz is an American playwright, theatre director, and teacher. Called "the most ubiquitous American playwright whose name you may never have heard", Dietz has long been one of America's most prolific and widely produced playwrights. In 2019, Dietz was again named one of the 20 most-produced playwrights in America.

#41837

Natsuko Toda

#41850

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Natsuko Toda is a Japanese subtitler and film industry interpreter. She has been called "the most famous film translator in Japan [...] unquestionably" and the "Subtitle Queen". She has subtitled more than 1,000 English-language films in Japanese.

#41838

Olga Sedakova

#41851

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Olga Alexandrovna Sedakova is a Russian poet and translator. She has been described as "one of the best confessional Christian poets writing in Russian today". Sedakova is also recognized as a philosopher and humanist.

#41839

Donna Baird

#41852

Overall Influence

Donna Day Baird is an American epidemiologist and evolutionary-population biologist. She is a senior investigator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. She is known for her research in reproductive health through NIEHS.

#41840

Martyn Ware

#41853

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Martyn Ware is an English musician, composer, arranger, record producer, and music programmer. As a founding member of both the Human League and Heaven 17, Ware co-wrote hit songs such as "Being Boiled" and "Temptation".

#41841

Angelo Sodano

#41854

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

Angelo Raffaele Sodano, GCC was an Italian prelate of the Catholic Church and, from 1991 onward, a cardinal. He was the Dean of the College of Cardinals from 2005 to 2019 and Cardinal Secretary of State from 1991 to 2006; Sodano was the first person since 1828 to serve simultaneously as Dean and Secretary of State.

#41842

Neil O'Donnell

#41855

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Neil Kennedy O'Donnell is an American former professional football player who was a quarterback in the National Football League for 14 seasons. He played college football at Maryland and was selected by the Pittsburgh Steelers in the third round of the 1990 NFL Draft. During his six seasons with the Steelers, O'Donnell received Pro Bowl honors and helped lead them to a Super Bowl appearance in Super Bowl XXX. After leaving Pittsburgh, he was a member of the New York Jets for two seasons and the Cincinnati Bengals for one. O'Donnell spent his last five seasons mostly as a backup with the Tenn...

#41843

Tom Shales

#41856

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Thomas William Shales is an American writer and retired critic of television programming and operations. He was a television critic for The Washington Post from 1977 to 2010, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1988. He also writes a column for the television news trade publication NewsPro, published by Crain Communications.

#41844

Jean-François Mayer

#41857

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Jean-Francois Mayer is a religious historian, translator in Switzerland, and Director of the Institute Religioscope. He has a doctorate degree in History at the Jean Moulin University Lyon 3 . From 1991 to 1998, he worked as an analyst on international affairs and policy for the Swiss federal government. In 1999, he founded a firm of strategic researches named JFM Recherches et Analyses, and taught at the University of Freiburg from 1999 to 2007. In 2007, Mayer founded the Institute Religioscope and became the director.

#41845

Shakira

#41858

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll , known mononymously as Shakira, is a Colombian singer and songwriter. Born and raised in Barranquilla, she has been referred to as the "Queen of Latin Music" and has been praised for her musical versatility. She made her recording debut with Sony Music Colombia at the age of 13. Following the commercial failure of her first two albums, Magia and Peligro , she rose to prominence in Hispanic countries with her next albums, Pies Descalzos and Dónde Están los Ladrones? . She entered the English-language market with her fifth album, Laundry Service , which sold over 13 million copies worldwide.

#41846

Michael Russell

Michael Russell

#41859

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Michael Craig Russell is an American former professional tennis player, and tennis coach. He reached a career-high singles ranking of World No. 60 in August 2007. His 23 United States Tennis Association Pro Circuit singles titles were the all-time record, as of November 2013. That month he became the American No. 3.

#41847

Lin Tsung-yi

#41860

Overall Influence

1920 - 2010 (90 years)

Lin Tsung-yi was a Taiwanese academic and educator in psychiatry. Early life and education Lin was born in 1920 in Tainan Prefecture, Japanese Taiwan to Lin Mosei and Chai-Hwang Wang. Like his parents, he studied in Japan, graduating from the School of Medicine at Tokyo Imperial University in 1943. He did postgraduate training at Harvard Medical School and the Institute of Psychiatry at Maudsley Hospital.

#41848

David Dunson

#41861

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

David Brian Dunson is an American statistician who is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Statistical Science, Mathematics and Electrical & Computer Engineering at Duke University. His research focuses on developing statistical methods for complex and high-dimensional data. Particular themes of his work include the use of Bayesian hierarchical models, methods for learning latent structure in complex data, and the development of computationally efficient algorithms for uncertainty quantification. He is currently serving as joint Editor of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, ...

#41849

John Cameron Mitchell

John Cameron Mitchell

#41862

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

John Cameron Mitchell is an American actor, playwright, screenwriter, singer, songwriter, producer and director. He is known as the writer, director and star of the 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which is based on the stage musical of the same name. He also portrayed the role of Joe Exotic in the Peacock limited series Joe vs. Carole in 2022.

#41850

Georgi Parvanov

#41863

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Georgi Sedefchov Parvanov is a Bulgarian historian and politician who was President of Bulgaria from 2002 to 2012. He was elected after defeating incumbent Petar Stoyanov in the second round of the November 2001 presidential election. He took office on 22 January 2002. He was reelected in a landslide victory in 2006, becoming the first Bulgarian president to serve two terms. Parvanov supported Bulgaria's entry into NATO and the European Union.

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