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
#4201
Eduardo Souto de Moura
#4208
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Eduardo Elísio Machado Souto de Moura , better known as Eduardo Souto de Moura, is a Portuguese architect who was the recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2011 and the Wolf Prize in Arts in 2013. Along with Fernando Távora and Álvaro Siza, he is one of the alumni of the Porto School of Architecture, where he was appointed a Professor.
Go to Profile#4202
Patrick Fitzgerald
#4209
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Patrick J. Fitzgerald is an American lawyer and partner at the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom since October 2012. For more than a decade, until June 30, 2012, Fitzgerald was the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. Prior to his appointment, he served as Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York from 1988 to 2001, and as Chief of the Organized Crime-Terrorism Unit since December 1995, where he participated in the prosecutions of Osama bin Laden, Abdel Rahman, and Ramzi Yousef.
Go to Profile#4203
Alberto Calderón
#4210
Overall Influence
1920 - 1998 (78 years)
Alberto Pedro Calderón was an Argentinian mathematician. His name is associated with the University of Buenos Aires, but first and foremost with the University of Chicago, where Calderón and his mentor, the analyst Antoni Zygmund, developed the theory of singular integral operators. This created the "Chicago School of Analysis" .
Go to Profile#4204
Eric Sevareid
#4211
Overall Influence
1912 - 1992 (80 years)
Arnold Eric Sevareid was an American author and CBS news journalist from 1939 to 1977. He was one of a group of elite war correspondents who were hired by CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow and nicknamed "Murrow's Boys." Sevareid was the first to report the Fall of Paris in 1940, when the city was captured by German forces during World War II.
Go to Profile#4205
Jan Narveson
#4212
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Jan Narveson is professor of philosophy emeritus at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. An anarcho-capitalist and contractarian, Narveson's ideology is deeply influenced by the thought of Robert Nozick and David Gauthier.
Go to Profile#4206
Costas Douzinas
#4213
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Costas Douzinas is a professor of law, a founder of the Birkbeck School of Law and the Department of Law of the University of Cyprus, the founding director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, the President of the Nikos Poulantzas Institute and a former politician.
Go to Profile#4207
Russell Targ
#4214
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Russell Targ is an American physicist, parapsychologist, and author who is best known for his work on remote viewing. Targ joined Stanford Research Institute in 1972 where he and Harold E. Puthoff coined the term "remote viewing" for the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target using parapsychological means. Later, he worked with Puthoff on the US Defence Intelligence Agency's Stargate Project.
Go to Profile#4208
Daniel Goldhagen
#4215
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is an American author, and former associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University. Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust: Hitler's Willing Executioners , and A Moral Reckoning . He is also the author of Worse Than War , which examines the phenomenon of genocide, and The Devil That Never Dies , in which he traces a worldwide rise in virulent antisemitism.
Go to Profile#4209
Thomas Sebeok
#4216
Overall Influence
1920 - 2001 (81 years)
Thomas Albert Sebeok was a Hungarian-born American polymath, semiotician, and linguist. As one of the founders of the biosemiotics field, he studied non-human and cross-species signaling and communication. He is also known for his work in the development of long-time nuclear waste warning messages, in which he worked with the Human Interference Task Force to create methods for keeping the inhabitants of Earth away from buried nuclear waste that will still be hazardous 10,000 or more years in the future.
Go to Profile#4210
Czesław Lejewski
#4217
Overall Influence
1913 - 2001 (88 years)
Czesław Lejewski was a Polish philosopher and logician, and a member of the Lwow-Warsaw School of Logic. He studied under Jan Łukasiewicz and Karl Popper in the London School of Economics, and W. V. O. Quine.
Go to Profile#4211
Stieg Larsson
#4218
Overall Influence
1954 - 2004 (50 years)
Karl Stig-Erland "Stieg" Larsson was a Swedish writer, journalist, and activist. He is best known for writing the Millennium trilogy of crime novels, which were published posthumously, starting in 2005, after he died of a sudden heart attack. The trilogy was adapted as three motion pictures in Sweden, and one in the U.S. . The publisher commissioned David Lagercrantz to expand the trilogy into a longer series, which has six novels . For much of his life, Larsson lived and worked in Stockholm. His journalistic work covered socialist politics and he acted as an independent researcher of right-...
Go to Profile#4212
Harvey Cox
#4219
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Harvey Gallagher Cox Jr. is an American theologian who served as the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, until his retirement in October 2009. Cox's research and teaching focus on theological developments in world Christianity, including liberation theology and the role of Christianity in Latin America.
Go to Profile#4213
Frederic Mishkin
#4220
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Frederic Stanley "Rick" Mishkin is an American economist and Alfred Lerner professor of Banking and Financial Institutions at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. He was a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 2006 to 2008.
Go to Profile#4214
James Surowiecki
#4221
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
James Michael Surowiecki is an American journalist. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he wrote a regular column on business and finance called "The Financial Page". Background Surowiecki was born in Meriden, Connecticut, and spent several childhood years in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, where he received a junior high-school education from Southwestern Educational Society . He is a 1984 graduate of Choate Rosemary Hall and a 1988 alumnus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar. Surowiecki pursued PhD studies in American history on a Mellon Fel...
Go to Profile#4215
James Glimm
#4222
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
James Gilbert Glimm is an American mathematician, former president of the American Mathematical Society, and distinguished professor at Stony Brook University. He has made many contributions in the areas of pure and applied mathematics.
Go to Profile#4216
Thomas Berry
#4223
Overall Influence
1914 - 2009 (95 years)
Thomas Berry, CP was a Catholic priest, cultural historian, and scholar of the world's religions, especially Asian traditions. Later, as he studied Earth history and evolution, he called himself a "geologian".
Go to Profile#4217
Franz König
#4224
Overall Influence
1905 - 2004 (99 years)
Franz König was an Austrian Cardinal of the Catholic Church. He served as archbishop of Vienna from 1956 to 1985, and was elevated to the cardinalate in 1958. The last surviving cardinal elevated by Pope John XXIII, he was the second-oldest and longest-serving cardinal worldwide at the time of his death.
Go to Profile#4218
Terry Farrell
#4225
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Sir Terence Farrell , known as Terry Farrell, is a British architect and urban designer. In 1980, after working for 15 years in partnership with Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Farrell founded his own firm, Farrells. He established his reputation with three completed projects in London in the late 1980s: Embankment Place, 125 London Wall aka Alban Gate and SIS Building aka Vauxhall Cross.
Go to Profile#4219
Daniel Berrigan
#4226
Overall Influence
1921 - 2016 (95 years)
Daniel Joseph Berrigan was an American Jesuit priest, anti-war activist, Christian pacifist, playwright, poet, and author. Berrigan's protests against the Vietnam War earned him both scorn and admiration, especially regarding his association with the Catonsville Nine. He was arrested multiple times, sentenced to prison for three years for destruction of government property, and was listed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's "most wanted list" after flight to avoid imprisonment and was sentenced to prison for destruction of government property.
Go to Profile#4220
Robert M. Schoch
#4227
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Robert Milton Schoch is an American associate professor of Natural Sciences at the College of General Studies, Boston University. Following initial work as a vertebrate paleontologist, Schoch co-authored and expanded the fringe Sphinx water erosion hypothesis since 1990, and is the author of several pseudohistorical and pseudoscientific books.
Go to Profile#4221
Ding Zilin
#4228
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Ding Zilin is a retired professor of philosophy and the leader of the political activist group Tiananmen Mothers. Ding is the mother of Jiang Jielian, one of the first student protestors killed during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and ensuing crackdown.
Go to Profile#4222
John Guttag
#4229
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
John Vogel Guttag is an American computer scientist, professor, and former head of the department of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Education and career John Guttag was raised in Larchmont, New York, the son of Irwin Guttag and Marjorie Vogel Guttag.
Go to Profile#4223
Dick Enberg
#4230
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Richard Alan Enberg was an American sportscaster. Over the course of an approximately 60-year career, he provided play-by-play of various sports for several radio and television networks, including NBC , CBS , and ESPN , as well as for individual teams, such as UCLA Bruins basketball, Los Angeles Rams football, and California Angels and San Diego Padres baseball.
Go to Profile#4224
Shinichi Mochizuki
#4231
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Shinichi Mochizuki is a Japanese mathematician working in number theory and arithmetic geometry. He is one of the main contributors to anabelian geometry. His contributions include his solution of the Grothendieck conjecture in anabelian geometry about hyperbolic curves over number fields. Mochizuki has also worked in Hodge–Arakelov theory and p-adic Teichmüller theory. Mochizuki developed inter-universal Teichmüller theory, which has attracted attention from non-mathematicians due to claims it provides a resolution of the abc conjecture.
Go to Profile#4225
Lee Kuan Yew
#4232
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Lee Kuan Yew , often referred to by his initials LKY, was a Singaporean statesman and lawyer who served as the first Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990, and Secretary-General of the People's Action Party from 1954 to 1992. He was the Member of Parliament for Tanjong Pagar from 1955 until his death in 2015. Lee is widely recognised as the founding father of the modern Singaporean state, and for his leadership in turning the island into a highly developed city state.
Go to Profile#4226
William R. Brody
#4233
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
William Ralph Brody is an American radiologist and academic administrator. He was the President of The Johns Hopkins University, a position which he held from 1996 to 2009 before becoming the President of the Salk Institute from 2009 to 2015.
Go to Profile#4227
Richard Evans Schultes
#4234
Overall Influence
1915 - 2001 (86 years)
Richard Evans Schultes was an American biologist, considered to be the father of modern ethnobotany. He is known for his studies of the uses of plants by indigenous peoples, especially the indigenous peoples of the Americas. He worked on entheogenic or hallucinogenic plants, particularly in Mexico and the Amazon, involving lifelong collaborations with chemists. He had charismatic influence as an educator at Harvard University; several of his students and colleagues went on to write popular books and assume influential positions in museums, botanical gardens, and popular culture.
Go to Profile#4228
Kathleen Carley
#4235
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Kathleen M. Carley is an American computational social scientist specializing in dynamic network analysis. She is a professor in the School of Computer Science in the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University and also holds appointments in the Tepper School of Business, the Heinz College, the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, and the Department of Social and Decision Sciences.
Go to Profile#4229
Martin H. Greenberg
#4236
Overall Influence
1941 - 2011 (70 years)
Martin Harry Greenberg was an American academic and anthologist in many genres, including mysteries and horror, but especially in speculative fiction. In all, he compiled 1,298 anthologies and commissioned over 8,200 original short stories. He founded Tekno Books, a packager of more than 2000 published books. He was also a co-founder of the Sci-Fi Channel. Greenberg was also an expert in terrorism and the Middle East. He was a longtime friend, colleague and business partner of Isaac Asimov.
Go to Profile#4230
Tin Kam Ho
#4237
Overall Influence
Tin Kam Ho is a computer scientist at IBM Research with contributions to machine learning, data mining, and classification. Ho is noted for introducing random decision forests in 1995, and for her pioneering work in ensemble learning and data complexity analysis. She is an IEEE fellow and IAPR fellow.
Go to Profile#4231
Marc Yor
#4238
Overall Influence
1949 - 2014 (65 years)
Marc Yor was a French mathematician well known for his work on stochastic processes, especially properties of semimartingales, Brownian motion and other Lévy processes, the Bessel processes, and their applications to mathematical finance.
Go to Profile#4232
Marc Augé
#4239
Overall Influence
1935 - 2023 (88 years)
Marc Augé was a French anthropologist. In an essay and book of the same title, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity , Augé coined the phrase "non-place" to refer to spaces where concerns of relations, history, and identity are erased. Examples of a non-place would be a motorway, a hotel room, an airport or a supermarket.
Go to Profile#4233
Peter Wright
#4240
Overall Influence
1916 - 1995 (79 years)
Peter Maurice Wright CBE was a principal scientific officer for MI5, the British counter-intelligence agency. His book Spycatcher, written with Paul Greengrass, became an international bestseller with sales of over two million copies. Spycatcher was part memoir, part exposé detailing what Wright claimed were serious institutional failures he investigated within MI5. Wright is said to have been influenced in his counterespionage activity by James Jesus Angleton, counter-intelligence chief of the US Central Intelligence Agency from 1954 to 1975.
Go to Profile#4234
Arthur Erickson
#4241
Overall Influence
1924 - 2009 (85 years)
Arthur Charles Erickson was a Canadian architect and urban planner. He studied Engineering at the University of British Columbia and, in 1950, received his B.Arch. from McGill University. He is known as Canada's most influential architect and was the only Canadian architect to win the American Institute of Architects AIA Gold Medal . When told of Erickson's award, Philip Johnson said, "Arthur Erickson is by far the greatest architect in Canada, and he may be the greatest on this continent."
Go to Profile#4235
Jean-Louis Koszul
#4242
Overall Influence
1921 - 2018 (97 years)
Jean-Louis Koszul was a French mathematician, best known for studying geometry and discovering the Koszul complex. He was a second generation member of Bourbaki. Biography Koszul was educated at the in Strasbourg before studying at the Faculty of Science University of Strasbourg and the Faculty of Science of the University of Paris. His Ph.D. thesis, titled Homologie et cohomologie des algèbres de Lie, was written in 1950 under the direction of Henri Cartan.
Go to Profile#4236
Albert Pierrepoint
#4243
Overall Influence
1905 - 1992 (87 years)
Albert Pierrepoint was an English hangman who executed between 435 and 600 people in a 25-year career that ended in 1956. His father Henry and uncle Thomas were official hangmen before him. Pierrepoint was born in Clayton in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His family struggled financially because of his father's intermittent employment and heavy drinking. Pierrepoint knew from an early age that he wanted to become a hangman, and was taken on as an assistant executioner in September 1932, aged 27. His first execution was in December that year, alongside his uncle Tom. In October 1941 he undertoo...
Go to Profile#4237
Gene Okerlund
#4244
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Eugene Arthur Okerlund was an American professional wrestling interviewer, announcer and television host. He was best known for his work in the World Wrestling Federation and World Championship Wrestling. Okerlund was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2006 by Hulk Hogan. He was signed to a lifetime contract with WWE and later worked for promotional programs. He has been described by some journalists as the best interviewer in the history of professional wrestling.
Go to Profile#4238
Mark Tushnet
#4245
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Mark Victor Tushnet is an American legal scholar. He specializes in constitutional law and theory, including comparative constitutional law, and is currently the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Tushnet is identified with the critical legal studies movement.
Go to Profile#4239
Dave Fridmann
#4246
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
David Lawrence Fridmann is an American record producer and musician. Career From 1990 onwards he co-produced most releases by Mercury Rev and The Flaming Lips. Other bands he has worked with include Weezer, Saxon Shore, Neon Indian, Wolf Gang, Ammonia, Ed Harcourt, Sparklehorse, Creeper Lagoon, Café Tacuba, Creaming Jesus, Elf Power, Mogwai, Thursday, Longwave, Mass of the Fermenting Dregs, The Delgados, Low, Phantom Planet, Gemma Hayes, Ava Luna, Goldrush, Tapes 'n Tapes, and Baroness.
Go to Profile#4240
Makoto Kobayashi
#4247
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
#4241
Jerome Isaac Friedman
#4248
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Jerome Isaac Friedman is an American physicist. He is institute professor and professor of physics, emeritus, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor, "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics.", work which showed an internal structure for protons later known to be quarks. Friedman sits on the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the...
Go to Profile#4242
Samson Abramsky
#4249
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Samson Abramsky is Professor of Computer Science at University College London. He was previously the Christopher Strachey Professor of Computing at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 2000 to 2021. His early work included profound contributions to domain theory and the connections thereof with geometric logic. Since then, his work has covered the lazy lambda calculus, strictness analysis, concurrency theory, interaction categories and geometry of interaction, game semantics and quantum computing. Notably, he co-pioneered categorical quantum mechanics. More recently, he has been applying methods fr...
Go to Profile#4243
Oliver Tambo
#4250
Overall Influence
1917 - 1993 (76 years)
Oliver Reginald Kaizana Tambo was a South African anti-apartheid politician and activist who served as President of the African National Congress from 1967 to 1991. Biography Higher education Oliver Tambo was born on 27 October 1917 in the village of Nkantolo in Bizana; eastern Pondoland in what is now the Eastern Cape. The village Tambo was born in was made up mostly of farmers. His father, Mzimeni Tambo, was the son of a farmer and an assistant salesperson at a local trading store. Mzimeni had four wives and ten children, all of whom were literate. Oliver's mother, Mzimeni's third wife, ...
Go to Profile#4244
Jay Rosen
#4251
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jay Rosen is an associate professor of journalism at New York University. He is a contributor to De Correspondent and a member of the George Foster Peabody Awards Board of Directors. Biography Rosen received his undergraduate degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and M.A. & Ph.D. degrees from the New York University Media Ecology Program . Noted media theorist Neil Postman chaired Rosen's dissertation committee.
Go to Profile#4245
Thomas R. Dye
#4252
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Thomas R. Dye is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Florida State University and was formerly a McKenzie Professor of Government. Dye has described politics as being about who gets scarce governmental resources, where, when, why and how.
Go to Profile#4246
Jan Morris
#4253
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Jan Morris was a Welsh historian, author and travel writer. She was known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy , a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, including Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong and New York City. She published under her birth name, James, until 1972, when she had gender reassignment surgery after transitioning from male to female.
Go to Profile#4247
Hunter Davies
#4254
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Edward Hunter Davies is a British author, journalist and broadcaster. His books include the only authorised biography of the Beatles. Early life Davies was born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, to Scottish parents. For four years his family lived in Dumfries until Davies was aged 11. Davies has quoted his boyhood hero as being football centre-forward, Billy Houliston, of Davies' then local team, Queen of the South.
Go to Profile#4248
Bryan R. Wilson
#4255
Overall Influence
1926 - 2004 (78 years)
Bryan Ronald Wilson , was Reader Emeritus in Sociology at the University of Oxford and President of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion . He became a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford in 1963.
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Frans H. van Eemeren
#4256
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Frans Hendrik van Eemeren is a Dutch scholar, professor in the Department of Speech Communication, Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric at the University of Amsterdam. He is noted for his Pragma-dialectics theory, an argumentation theory which he developed with Rob Grootendorst from the early 1980s onwards. He has published numerous books and papers, including Strategic Maneuvering in Argumentative Discourse.
Go to Profile#4250
Leslie Charteris
#4257
Overall Influence
1907 - 1993 (86 years)
Leslie Charteris , was a British-Chinese author of adventure fiction, as well as a screenwriter. He was best known for his many books chronicling the adventures of his hero Simon Templar, alias "The Saint".
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