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
#42001
Mina Urgan
#42014
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
Mina Urgan was a Turkish academic, translator, author and socialist politician. Early life Mina Urgan was born to poet Tahsin Nahit and his wife Şefika in İstanbul on 14 May 1916. To another source, she was born on 1 May 1915. Her father died as she was three years old, and her mother made a second marriage with Falih Rıfkı Atay, a renowned journalist and writer. As the Surname Law was enacted in Turkey in 1934, her stepfather's close friend, the renowned author Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, suggested her the family name Urgan , ironically stating that "it would match her because the socialist-minde...
Go to Profile#42002
Halina Szwarc
#42015
Overall Influence
1923 - 2002 (79 years)
Halina Szwarc de domo Kłąb - was a member of the Polish resistance during the Second World War, working undercover first under the pseudonym Ryszard, then Jacek II. Postwar, she became a professor of medicine in gerontology, and in 1970/1971, the prorector of the Józef Piłsudski University of Physical Education in Warsaw.
Go to Profile#42003
Rob Thomas
#42016
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Robert Kelly Thomas is an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, best known for being the lead singer of the rock band Matchbox Twenty. Thomas also records and performs as a solo artist, with "Lonely No More" released in 2005 becoming his biggest chart success as lead solo artist. Thomas received three Grammy Awards for co-writing and singing on the 1999 hit "Smooth" by Santana, which was also his first song as a featured solo artist.
Go to Profile#42004
Gerald Bernbaum
#42017
Overall Influence
1936 - 2017 (81 years)
Gerald Bernbaum FRSA was an educationist and university administrator. He was Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive of South Bank University , London, England. Bernbaum was Assistant Master at Mitcham County Grammar School for Boys and then Head of Department at Rutherford School . He moved to the University of Leicester and was a lecturer in education , senior lecturer , Professor of Education and Director of the School of Education . He moved into university administration at Leicester and became Pro-Vice-Chancellor followed by Executive Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Registrar . He moved to Sout...
Go to Profile#42005
David Brailer
#42018
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
David J. Brailer is known for founding and investing in leading health IT companies. On May 6, 2004, Brailer was appointed by the administration of President George W. Bush as the nation's first 'Health Information Technology Czar'. Brailer's official title was National Health Information Technology Coordinator. In this role, he developed the nation's strategy for electronic records and transformation of research and public health with the goal of widespread deployment of health information technology within 10 years.
Go to Profile#42006
Rachel Cruze
#42019
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Rachel Cruze is an American author who specializes on the subject of personal finance. Her book Smart Money Smart Kids, co-authored with her father, Dave Ramsey, reached number one on The New York Times Best Seller list in 2014. Her second book Love Your Life, Not Theirs: 7 Money Habits for Living the Life You Want was published in 2016.
Go to Profile#42007
Michèle Morgan
#42020
Overall Influence
1920 - 2016 (96 years)
Michèle Morgan was a French film actress, who was a leading lady for three decades in both French cinema and Hollywood features. She is considered to have been one of the great French actresses of the 20th century. Morgan was the inaugural winner of the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1992, she was given an honorary César Award for her contributions to French cinema.
Go to Profile#42008
Joe Morgenstern
#42021
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Joe Morgenstern is an American writer and retired film critic. He wrote for Newsweek from 1965 to 1983, and then for The Wall Street Journal from 1995 to 2022. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2005. Morgenstern has also written for television.
Go to Profile#42009
Guy Haarscher
#42022
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Guy Haarscher is a professor of legal and political philosophy at the Free University of Brussels . He taught every other year from 1985 to 2008 at Duke University School of Law as an adjunct professor of law. He also taught at the Central European University in Budapest from 1992 to 2008 as a recurrent visiting professor. Guy Haarscher currently teaches at the ULB, as well as at the College of Europe in Bruges.
Go to Profile#42010
Otmar Wiestler
#42023
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Otmar D. Wiestler is a German physician, a professor at the University of Heidelberg and president of the Helmholtz Association. He is not a typical basic scientist, but he successfully entered a number of highly popular fields of clinical research, including cancer research, tumor genetics and, more recently, stem cell research. He focuses on technology transfer of already existing technologies from basic science into clinical use, rather than developing the basic science.
Go to Profile#42011
Hans van Abeelen
#42024
Overall Influence
1936 - 1998 (62 years)
Hans van Abeelen was the first Dutch behaviour geneticist. He obtained his M.Sc from the University of Groningen and his Ph.D. from the Catholic University of Nijmegen in 1965, where he stayed for the rest of his career as "wetenschappelijk hoofdmedewerker". He was a founding member of the Behavior Genetics Association and was a member-at-large of its executive committee from 1984 till 1987. He also served on the editorial board of its journal, Behavior Genetics, from its creation in 1971 to 1992. Van Abeelen took early retirement in 1991, but nevertheless became one of the founding members of the International Behavioural and Neural Genetics Society.
Go to Profile#42012
Marcus Gardley
#42025
Overall Influence
Marcus Gardley is an American poet, playwright and screenwriter from West Oakland, California. He is an ensemble member playwright at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago and an assistant professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Brown University.
Go to Profile#42013
Alison Noble
#42026
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Julia Alison Noble is a British engineer. She has been Technikos Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford and a fellow of St Hilda's College since 2011, and Associate Head of the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division at the university. , she is the chief technology officer of Intelligent Ultrasound Limited, an Oxford spin-off in medical imaging that she cofounded. She was director of the Oxford Institute of Biomedical Engineering from 2012 to 2016.In 2023 she became the Foreign Secretary of The Royal Society .
Go to Profile#42014
Hans Karl Peterlini
#42027
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Hans Karl Peterlini is an author, journalist, Austrian university professor and educational researcher originally from South Tyrol , an autonomous, mostly German speaking province in Northern Italy.
Go to Profile#42015
Kathleen Matthews
#42028
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Kathleen Ann Matthews is the former chief communications and public affairs officer for hotel company Marriott International. Prior to joining Marriott International, she was a reporter for 25 years at WJLA-TV. She was a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives for Maryland's 8th congressional district in the 2016 elections. She is the former chair of the Maryland Democratic Party.
Go to Profile#42016
Jeffrey P. Buzen
#42029
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Jeffrey Peter Buzen is an American computer scientist in system performance analysis best known for his contributions to queueing theory. His PhD dissertation and his 1973 paper Computational algorithms for closed queueing networks with exponential servers have guided the study of queueing network modeling for decades.
Go to Profile#42017
Glenn Diesen
#42030
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Glenn Eric Andre Diesen is a Norwegian political scientist who is known as a regular commentator on Russia Today . Academics as well as Scandinavian media have criticized him for promoting Russian propaganda.
Go to Profile#42018
Guillermo Jaim Etcheverry
#42031
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Guillermo Jaim Etcheverry is an Argentine physician, former rector of the Universidad de Buenos Aires . Jaim Etcheverry obtained his M.D. in 1965 and his Ph.D. in 1972, both at the School of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires. Committed since his graduation to teaching and full-time research in the field of Neurobiology, he was Principal Investigator of the Argentine National Council of Research until 2012 as well as full professor and director of the Department of Cell Biology and Histology of the School of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires until 2008. During 1986-1990 he was Dean of that School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#42019
Richard A. Brualdi
#42032
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Richard Anthony Brualdi is a professor emeritus of combinatorial mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Brualdi received his Ph.D. from Syracuse University in 1964; his advisor was H. J. Ryser. Brualdi is an Editor-in-Chief of the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. He has over 200 publications in several mathematical journals. According to current on-line database of Mathematics Genealogy Project, Richard Brualdi has 37 Ph.D. students and 48 academic descendants. The concept of incidence coloring was introduced in 1993 by Brualdi and Massey.
Go to Profile#42020
Jorge Ángel Livraga Rizzi
#42033
Overall Influence
1930 - 1991 (61 years)
Jorge Ángel Livraga Rizzi was an Argentinian poet, novelist, self-taught philosopher, essayist, educator and lecturer of Italian heritage best known for having founded and directed New Acropolis, an international philosophical educational and cultural organisation.
Go to Profile#42021
Alan Evans
#42034
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Alan Charles Evans PhD FRSC FCAHS is a Welsh-born Canadian neuroscientist who is a James McGill Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Psychiatry and Biomedical Engineering, and holds the Victor Dahdaleh Chair in Neurosciences at McGill University. He is also a researcher at the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre of the Montreal Neurological Institute, Co-Director of the Ludmer Centre for Neuroinformatics and Mental Health, Director of the McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Scientific Director of the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform, Scientific Director of McGill's Healthy Brains, He...
Go to Profile#42022
Phoebe Bridgers
#42035
Overall Influence
1994 - Present (32 years)
Phoebe Lucille Bridgers is an American singer-songwriter. Her indie folk music typically centers around acoustic guitar and electronic production, with melancholic lyrical themes. She has received eleven Grammy Award nominations, including Best New Artist.
Go to Profile#42023
Carlos the Jackal
#42036
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez , also known as Carlos the Jackal or simply Carlos, is a Venezuelan who conducted a series of assassinations and terrorist bombings from 1973 to 1985. A committed Marxist–Leninist, Ramírez Sánchez was one of the most notorious political terrorists of his era, protected and supported by the Stasi and the KGB. After several bungled bombings, Ramírez Sánchez led the 1975 raid on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries headquarters in Vienna, during which three people were killed. He and five others demanded a plane and flew with a number of hostages to Libya...
Go to Profile#42024
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
#42037
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Paco Ignacio Taibo II , also known as Paco Taibo II or informally as PIT is a Spanish-Mexican writer, novelist and political activist based in Mexico City. He is most widely known as the founder of the neopolicial genre of novel in Latin America and is also a prominent member of the international crime writing community. His Spanish language work has won numerous awards including two Latin American Dashiell Hammett Prizes. In 2018, Taibo was appointed as head of the Fondo de Cultura Económica by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Go to Profile#42025
Malvin Ruderman
#42038
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Malvin Avram Ruderman is an American physicist and astrophysicist. Education Mal Ruderman received his A.B. degree from Columbia University in 1945. His MS degree and PhD are from the California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Robert Jay Finkelstein.
Go to Profile#42026
Sofia Samatar
#42039
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Sofia Samatar is an American scholar, novelist and educator from Indiana. Early life Samatar was born in 1971 in northern Indiana, United States. Her father was the Somali scholar, historian and writer Said Sheikh Samatar. Her mother is a Swiss-German Mennonite from North Dakota. Sofia's parents met in 1970 in Mogadishu, Somalia, while her mother was teaching English.
Go to Profile#42027
Stephen Molyneux
#42040
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Stephen Molyneux is a British educational technologist whose work as Microsoft Professor of Advanced Learning Technology and Apple Distinguished Educator has led to him influencing the use of technologies across the British School system.
Go to Profile#42028
John M. Ackerman
#42041
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
John Mill Ackerman Rose is an American-born, naturalized Mexican political activist, TV host, and academic at UNAM. Early life and education He is the son of social liberal thinker Bruce Ackerman and the economist Susan Rose-Ackerman, both professors at Yale Law School.
Go to Profile#42029
Gauss Moutinho Cordeiro
#42042
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Gauss Moutinho Cordeiro is a Brazilian engineer, mathematician and statistician who has made significant contributions to the theory of statistical inference, mainly through asymptotic theory and applied probability.
Go to Profile#42030
Itamar Even-Zohar
#42043
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Itamar Even-Zohar is an Israeli culture researcher and professor at Tel Aviv University. Even-Zohar is a pioneer of polysystem theory and the theory of cultural repertoires. Biography Itamar Even-Zohar was born in Tel Aviv. He earned his degrees from the University of Tel Aviv and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem . He also studied in Oslo, Copenhagen and Stockholm. He has been a guest scholar at universities and research centers in Amsterdam, Paris, Philadelphia, Reykjavík, Quebec City, Louvain, Santiago de Compostela, Santander, St. John's , Barcelona and Santa Cruz, California. He has ...
Go to Profile#42031
Roy Hibbert
#42044
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Roy Denzil Hibbert is a Jamaican-American former professional basketball player. He is a two-time NBA All-Star, and earned NBA All-Defensive Second Team honors in 2014 with the Indiana Pacers. Hibbert was the runner-up for the NBA Defensive Player of the Year Award in the 2013–14 NBA season, placing second behind Joakim Noah.
Go to Profile#42032
Michael Jackson
#42045
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Michael Geoffrey St Aubyn Jackson is a Church of Ireland Anglican bishop. Since 2011, he has served as the Archbishop of Dublin and Bishop of Glendalough in the Church of Ireland. He is also the co-chairman of the Porvoo Communion of Anglican and Lutheran churches.
Go to Profile#42033
Panos M. Pardalos
#42046
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Panos M. Pardalos is a Greek scientist and engineer, currently a Distinguished Professor and the Paul and Heidi Brown Preeminent Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at University of Florida.
Go to Profile#42034
Penny Whetton
#42047
Overall Influence
1958 - 2019 (61 years)
Penelope Whetton was a climatologist and an expert in regional climate change projections due to global warming and in the impacts of those changes. Her primary scientific focus was Australia. Early life Whetton was born in Melbourne, Victoria, on 5 January 1958. She held a Bachelor of Science , majoring in physics, and an honours year in meteorology, from the University of Melbourne. She received a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the same university in 1986.
Go to Profile#42035
Michael P. Lynch
#42048
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Michael Patrick Lynch is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also the director of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. As director of the Humanities Institute, he has headed a Templeton-funded project on humility and conviction in public life.
Go to Profile#42036
Richard Schiff
#42049
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Richard Schiff is an American actor. He is best known for playing Toby Ziegler on The West Wing, a role for which he received an Emmy Award. Schiff made his television directorial debut with The West Wing, directing an episode titled "Talking Points". He is on the National Advisory Board of the Council for a Livable World. He had a recurring role on the HBO series Ballers. Since September 2017 he has had a leading role in ABC's medical drama The Good Doctor, as Dr. Aaron Glassman, president of a fictional teaching hospital in San Jose, California.
Go to Profile#42037
Lawrence Welch
#42050
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Lawrence S. Welch is an Australian organisational theorist, Professor of International Business at the Melbourne Business School, known for his work on internationalization and international business operations.
Go to Profile#42038
Higashifushimi Kunihide
#42051
Overall Influence
1910 - 2014 (104 years)
Count Higashifushimi Kunihide was the titular head of the Higashifushimi-no-miya, an extinct branch of the Imperial House of Japan, and a Buddhist monk. He was the youngest brother of Empress Kōjun and was the maternal uncle of Emperor Emeritus Akihito. If he had kept his imperial status, at the time of his death he would have been the oldest-ever member of the Japanese imperial family. His Dharma name was Jigō.
Go to Profile#42039
Stefan Burr
#42052
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Stefan Andrus Burr is a mathematician and computer scientist. He is a retired professor of Computer Science at The City College of New York. Burr received his Ph.D. in 1969 from Princeton University under the supervision of Bernard Dwork; his thesis research involved the Waring–Goldbach problem in number theory, which concerns the representations of integers as sums of powers of prime numbers.
Go to Profile#42040
Manu Dibango
#42053
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Emmanuel N'Djoké "Manu" Dibango was a Cameroonian musician and songwriter who played saxophone and vibraphone. He developed a musical style fusing jazz, funk, and traditional Cameroonian music. His father was a member of the Yabassi ethnic group, while his mother was a Duala. He was best known for his 1972 single "Soul Makossa". He died from COVID-19 on 24 March 2020.
Go to Profile#42041
William Gilbert Chaloner
#42054
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
William Gilbert Chaloner FRS was a British palaeobotanist. He was Professor of Botany in the Earth Sciences Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Visiting Professor in Earth Sciences at University College, London.
Go to Profile#42042
Chennupati Jagadish
#42055
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Chennupati Jagadish , an Indian-Australian physicist and academic, is the President of the Australian Academy of Science, and a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the Australian National University Research School of Physics. He is head of the Semiconductor Optoelectronics and Nanotechnology Group which he established in 1990. He is also the Convener of the Australian Nanotechnology Network and Director of Australian National Fabrication Facility ACT Node.
Go to Profile#42043
Adam Gazzaley
#42056
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Adam Gazzaley is an American neuroscientist, author, photographer, entrepreneur and inventor. He is the founder and executive director of Neuroscape and the David Dolby Distinguished Professor of Neurology, Physiology, and Psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco . He is co-founder and chief science advisor of Akili Interactive Labs and JAZZ Venture Partners. Gazzaley is the inventor of the first video game approved by the FDA as a medical treatment. He is a board of trustee member, science council member and fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. He has authored over 180 ...
Go to Profile#42044
Bobby Labonte
#42057
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Robert Allen Labonte is an American semi-retired professional stock car racing driver and current analyst for NASCAR on Fox. He also currently competes full-time in the Superstar Racing Experience, driving the No. 18 car. Labonte is the 2000 NASCAR Cup Series champion. He and his older brother, Terry Labonte, are one of only two pairs of brothers to have both won the Cup championships . He is also the uncle of former Xfinity Series race winner Justin Labonte.
Go to Profile#42045
Eugene Daub
#42058
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Eugene Daub is an American contemporary figure sculptor, best known for his portraits and figurative monument sculpture created in the classic heroic style. His sculptures reside in three of the nation's state capitals and in the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol. His work appears in public monuments and permanent collections in the United States and Europe.
Go to Profile#42046
Norman Spector
#42059
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Norman Spector is a Canadian journalist and former diplomat, civil servant, and newspaper publisher. Early life and career Born in Montreal, Quebec, Spector received a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Political Science, from McGill University in 1970. Awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, he received a Master of Philosophy degree in Political Science from Columbia University in 1972 and a Ph.D. in 1977. In 1974, as a Newhouse Fellow, he received a Master of Science degree in Television, Film and Radio from Syracuse University. In 1974–1975, Spector was a lecturer at St. Paul's College of the ...
Go to Profile#42047
The Honky Tonk Man
#42060
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Roy Wayne Farris is a retired American professional wrestler. He is best known for his tenure with the World Wrestling Federation from 1986 to 1991, where he performed under the ring name The Honky Tonk Man. He also performed for World Championship Wrestling in 1994, and for Stampede Wrestling between 1982 and 1986. He was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame as part of the 2019 induction ceremony. A heel for the majority of his active professional wrestling career, he has been described by Bleacher Report as "one of the greatest villains to ever grace a professional wrestling ring".
Go to Profile#42048
Emile Haynie
#42061
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Emile Haynie , often credited simply as Emile, is an American record producer. Born and raised in Buffalo, New York, his range of production includes alternative rock, hip hop, indie and pop music. Haynie has worked with several prominent artists in the music industry including Kanye West, Kid Cudi, Eminem, Lana Del Rey, Bruno Mars, Linkin Park, FKA Twigs, Florence Welch and Camila Cabello, among others. Additionally, Haynie received two Grammy Awards for his work with English singer Adele, namely Album of the Year for the diamond certified 25 as well as Record of the Year for "Hello".
Go to Profile#42049
Xavier Woods
#42062
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Austin Watson is an American professional wrestler. He is currently signed to WWE, where he performs on the Raw brand under the ring name Xavier Woods and is part of The New Day. Watson also makes public appearances outside of wrestling under the name Austin Creed.
Go to Profile#42050
Sergio García
#42063
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Sergio García Fernández is a Spanish professional golfer. He has played on the European Tour, PGA Tour and currently plays in the LIV Golf Invitational Series. García has won 36 international tournaments as a professional, most notably the 2008 Players Championship and the 2017 Masters Tournament. García was also the Chairman of Spanish football team CF Borriol.
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