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
#42051
Neil LaBute
#42064
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Neil N. LaBute is an American playwright, film director, screenwriter, and actor. He is best known for a play that he wrote and later adapted for film, In the Company of Men , which won awards from the Sundance Film Festival, the Independent Spirit Awards, and the New York Film Critics Circle. He wrote and directed the films Your Friends & Neighbors , Possession , The Shape of Things , The Wicker Man , Some Velvet Morning , and Dirty Weekend . He directed the films Nurse Betty , Lakeview Terrace , and the American adaptation of Death at a Funeral . LaBute created the TV series Billy & Billie, writing and directing all of the episodes.
Go to Profile#42052
Vernon Davis
#42065
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Vernon Davis is an American former professional football player who was a tight end in the National Football League . He played college football for the Maryland Terrapins, and was selected by the San Francisco 49ers with the sixth overall pick of the 2006 NFL Draft. In 2009, Davis co-led the NFL in touchdown receptions and consequently earned his first of two career Pro Bowl selections.
Go to Profile#42053
Paul E. Olsen
#42066
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Paul E. Olsen is an American paleontologist and author and co-author of a large number of technical papers. Biography Growing up as a teenager in Livingston, New Jersey, he was instrumental in Riker Hill Fossil Site being named a National Natural Landmark as a teenager by sending President Richard Nixon a dinosaur footprint cast from the site. He received a M. Phil. and a Ph.D. in Biology at Yale University in 1984. His thesis was on the Newark Supergroup.
Go to Profile#42054
Micky Moody
#42067
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Michael Joseph Moody is an English guitarist, and a former member of the rock bands Juicy Lucy and Whitesnake. He was also a founder-member of Snafu. Together with his former Whitesnake colleague Bernie Marsden he founded the Moody Marsden Band, and later, The Snakes, having previously collaborated with unofficial 5th Status Quo member Bob Young in Young & Moody. Along with Marsden and ex-Whitesnake bassist, Neil Murray, he formed The Company of Snakes and M3 Classic Whitesnake with which they mainly performed early Whitesnake songs. From 2011 to 2015, Moody toured and recorded with Snakechar...
Go to Profile#42055
John Fox
#42068
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Anthony John Fox is a British statistician, who has worked in both the public service and academia. He was born on 25 April 1946, the son of Fred Frank Fox OBE. He was educated at Dauntsey's School, University College London and Imperial College London . He was a statistician at the Employment Medical Advisory Service, 1970-5 and then the Medical Statistics Division of the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys until 1979. In the latter job, he helped to set up the England and Wales Longitudinal Survey, which monitors the health, address changes and fertility of a 1% sample of the popula...
Go to Profile#42056
Stanley S. Bergen Jr.
#42069
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Stanley Silvers Bergen Jr. was an American physician, healthcare educator and administrator, and university president. In 1971, he became the founding president of the incipient College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey which he developed into the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey serving at its helm until his retirement in 1998. While he was president, UMDNJ became the nation's largest public health and science university, home to three medical schools and several allied medical health facilities.
Go to Profile#42057
Shamim Sikder
#42070
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Shamim Sikder was a Bangladeshi sculptor. Sikder served as a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka between 1980–2001. She was awarded the Ekushey Padak in 2000 by the Government of Bangladesh.
Go to Profile#42058
Pilar González i Duarte
#42071
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Pilar González i Duarte is a Spanish chemist. She is a member of the Institute for Catalan Studies . In 2004, she was the recipient of the Jaume Vicens i Vives distinction awarded by the Government of Catalonia.
Go to Profile#42059
Dorothea Blostein
#42072
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Dorothea Blostein is a Canadian computer scientist who works as a professor of computer science at Queen's University. She has published well-cited publications on computer vision, image analysis, and graph rewriting, and is known as one of the authors of the master theorem for divide-and-conquer recurrences. Her research interests also include biomechanics and tensegrity.
Go to Profile#42060
Sam Abrams
#42073
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Sam Abrams is an American poet. He was a Fulbright Professor of American Literature at the University of Athens and is a Professor Emeritus of Language and Literature in the College of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology. He traveled extensively. He resides in Rochester, New York.
Go to Profile#42061
Clive Emsley
#42074
Overall Influence
1944 - 2020 (76 years)
Clive Emsley was a British historian and criminologist. He was a research director and lecturer at the Open University. Biography After his first degree at the University of York, where he was one of the initial intake of 150 undergraduates, he did research at Peterhouse, Cambridge, into the maintenance of public order in England during the French Revolution. At this point he had to make a career decision, having been a prominent member of the National Youth Theatre as an actor during his time at university. He played the part of Enobarbus in a celebrated production of 'Anthony and Cleopatra', with Helen Mirren as Cleopatra, and as a result was offered professional roles.
Go to Profile#42062
Christina Riesselman
#42075
Overall Influence
Christina Riesselman is an American paleoceanographer whose research focus is on Southern Ocean response to changing climate. Early life and education After completing her bachelor's degree at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in Geology and English in 2001, Riesselman spent time at the Joint Oceanographic Institution in Washington DC, then moved to Stanford for her PhD which was completed in 2011.
Go to Profile#42063
Gaston Flosse
#42076
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Gaston Flosse is a French politician who has been President of French Polynesia on five separate occasions. He is currently a member of the Senate of France and has been a French junior minister under Jacques Chirac. He received sentences for corruption, which are under appeal.
Go to Profile#42064
Jan Boldingh
#42077
Overall Influence
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
Jan Boldingh was a noted Dutch chemist. Boldingh studied chemistry at Utrecht University. He received a PhD in 1942 for his thesis 'Synthetische onderzoekingen over het chromofore systeem van lumi-auxonstudies' on auxines in the group of Fritz Kögl. He worked for a short period at the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium in Eindhoven, but moved to Unilever in 1944 . Between 1952 and 1967, Boldingh and H.A. Boekenoogen lead the laboratory together, but after 1967 Boldingh lead the laboratory by himself until his retirement in 1980. From 1964 on, Boldingh served simultaneously as a professor Organ...
Go to Profile#42065
Steve Voake
#42078
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Steve Voake is a successful English children's author from Midsomer Norton, Somerset, whose books have sold all over the world. He started his teaching career at Midsomer Norton County Primary school in the late 80’s. In 2003 he was head teacher of a primary school in Kilmersdon, Somerset, when the BBC reported that he was being hailed as the next J. K. Rowling. A bidding war had broken out amongst publishers and film makers for the rights to his first novel, The Dreamwalker's Child. The publication deal he accepted with Faber and Faber enabled him to give up his teaching job to be a full-time...
Go to Profile#42066
John Naber
#42079
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
John Phillips Naber is an American former competitive swimmer, five-time Olympic medalist and former world record-holder in multiple events. Born in Evanston, Illinois, Naber studied in England and Italy where his father worked as a management consultant. He graduated from Woodside High School in Northern California, then completed his bachelor's degree in psychology in 1977 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. While at USC, he led the Trojans to four consecutive NCAA titles .
Go to Profile#42067
John Taylor
#42080
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Nigel John Taylor is a British musician who is best known as the bass guitarist for new wave band Duran Duran, of which he was a founding member. Duran Duran was one of the most popular bands in the world during the 1980s due in part to their music videos which played in heavy rotation in the early days of MTV. Taylor played with Duran Duran from its founding in 1978 until 1997, when he left to pursue a solo recording and film career. He recorded a dozen solo releases through his private record label B5 Records over the next four years, had a lead role in the movie Sugar Town, and made appearances in a half dozen other film projects.
Go to Profile#42068
Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck
#42081
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck is an American educational professional. Vandyck earned her Ph.D. from Cardinal Stritch University in 2019 with a dissertation on uncommon black names in the classroom. Early life and name Marijuana Pepsi Jackson was born in 1972 to Aaron and Maggie Jackson, who chose her name. She lived in Chicago, Illinois until she was nine years old; then she moved to Beloit, Wisconsin to live with her mother after her parents separated. She has two sisters, Kimberly and Robin. She first realized her name was unusual at age nine.
Go to Profile#42069
Honor Moore
#42082
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Honor Moore is an American writer of poetry, creative nonfiction and plays. She currently teaches at The New School in the MFA program for creative nonfiction, where she is a part-time associate teaching professor.
Go to Profile#42070
Joseph L. Levesque
#42083
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Joseph L. Levesque, C.M. is an American Catholic priest of the Congregation of the Mission, better known as the Vincentian Fathers. He was Niagara University's 25th president, serving from March 2000 until 2013. He was succeeded by the Very Rev. James J. Maher, C.M.
Go to Profile#42071
Julie Bowen
#42084
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Julie Bowen Luetkemeyer is an American actress. She is best known for starring as Claire Dunphy in the ABC sitcom Modern Family , for which she received widespread critical acclaim and won Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, in 2011 and 2012.
Go to Profile#42072
Salva Kiir Mayardit
#42085
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Salva Kiir Mayardit , also known as Salva Kiir, is a South Sudanese politician who has been the President of South Sudan since its independence on 9 July 2011. Prior to independence, he was the President of the Government of Southern Sudan, as well as First Vice President of Sudan, from 2005 to 2011. He was named Commander-in-Chief of the Sudan People's Liberation Army in 2005, following the death of John Garang.
Go to Profile#42073
Jo Grimond
#42086
Overall Influence
1913 - 1993 (80 years)
Joseph Grimond, Baron Grimond, was a British politician, leader of the Liberal Party for eleven years from 1956 to 1967 and again briefly on an interim basis in 1976. Grimond was a long-term supporter of Scottish home rule; and, during his leadership, he successfully advocated for the Liberal Party to support the abolition of Britain's nuclear arsenal.
Go to Profile#42074
Liu Dajun
#42087
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Liu Dajun was a Chinese agronomist, educator and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering . Biography Liu graduated from University of Nanking in 1949, majoring in agronomy. He became a teaching assistant at University of Nanking. He moved to Moscow Timiryazev Agricultural Academy by government study abroad scholarship in 1955 and earned his master's degree in 1959. Liu returned to China and taught at Nanjing Agricultural University. His research area was wheat genetics and breeding. He was the President of Nanjing Agricultural University between 1983 and 1991. He was elected an a...
Go to Profile#42075
Rudolf Hickel
#42088
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Rudolf Hickel is a German economist and author. He transferred to the University of Bremen in 1971, accepting the chair in "Finanzwissenschaft" in 1993. Between 2001 and 2009 he served as director of the university's Institute for Labour and Economics . A long standing critic of developments in western Market Capitalism since the 1980s, he has engaged powerfully in the economic debates emerging during the aftermath of the 2007/2008 Financial crisis.
Go to Profile#42076
Don Baylor
#42089
Overall Influence
1949 - 2017 (68 years)
Don Edward Baylor , nicknamed "Groove," was an American professional baseball player, coach and manager. During his 19 seasons in Major League Baseball , Baylor was a power hitter known for standing very close to home plate and was a first baseman, left fielder, and designated hitter. He played for six different American League teams, primarily the Baltimore Orioles and California Angels, but he also played for the Oakland Athletics, New York Yankees, Minnesota Twins, and Boston Red Sox. In 1979, Baylor was an All-Star and won the AL Most Valuable Player Award. He won three Silver Slugger Aw...
Go to Profile#42077
Benoît Peeters
#42090
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Benoît Peeters is a French comics writer, novelist, and comics studies scholar. Biography After a degree in Philosophy at Université de Paris I, Peeters prepared his Master's at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales under the direction of Roland Barthes. He holds a habilitation à diriger les recherches , i.e. a supplementary PhD enabling him to supervise the work of PhD candidates .
Go to Profile#42078
Dave Concepción
#42091
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
David Ismael Concepción Benitez is a Venezuelan former professional baseball player and manager. He played his entire career in Major League Baseball as a shortstop for the Cincinnati Reds dynasty that won four National League pennants and two World Series championships between and .
Go to Profile#42079
Geoff Collyer
#42092
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Geoff Collyer is a Canadian computer scientist. He is the senior author of C News, a protocol-neutral news transport, and the designer of NOV, the News Overview database used by all modern newsreaderss. He contributed the code that allowed to convert the Bourne Shell from using the non-portable sbrk to a portable malloc based implementation. In the past he worked as a Unix system programmer, but since 1994 he has been living on Plan 9 while working at Bell Laboratories.
Go to Profile#42080
Han Pao-teh
#42093
Overall Influence
1934 - 2014 (80 years)
Han Pao-teh was a Taiwanese architect, educator, scholar, writer, museum curator and calligrapher. Han Pao-teh was born in Shandong, China and moved to Taiwan in 1949. He received his bachelor's degree in architecture from the Tainan Institute of Technology, now known as the National Cheng Kung University. He was awarded a full scholarship to attend Harvard University, where he received a master's degree in architecture in 1965. And in 1967, he received his second master's degree in Art History at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#42081
Elizabeth Harman
#42094
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Harman is an American philosopher and Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. Biography Harman's father is Gilbert Harman, professor of philosophy. Harman's mother was Lucy Harman, a psychotherapist at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#42082
Guy Ourisson
#42095
Overall Influence
1926 - 2006 (80 years)
Guy Henry Ourisson was a French chemist. He was a member of the Academy of Sciences where he was vice president and then became the president. Awarded the Ernest Guenther Award in 1972 and the Heinrich Wieland Prize in 1985.
Go to Profile#42083
William Haggin Perry
#42096
Overall Influence
1910 - 1993 (83 years)
William Haggin Perry was an American owner and breeder of thoroughbred racehorses. Early life Perry was the son of Henry Pierrepont Perry, a Wall Street stockbroker, and Edith Lounsbery, who was the daughter of Richard P. Lounsbery and Edith Hunter Haggin who in turn was the daughter of one of America's most prominent horsemen, James Ben Ali Haggin. The Ben Ali Haggin family were the descendants of Ibrahim Ben Ali, who was one of the first Turkish settlers to the United States.
Go to Profile#42084
Yewande Olubummo
#42097
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Yewande Olubummo is a Nigerian-American mathematician whose research interests include functional analysis and dynamical systems. She is an associate professor of mathematics at Spelman College, where she served as chair of the mathematics department from 2006 to 2010. She is a member of the National Association of Mathematicians, as well as the Mathematical Association of America.
Go to Profile#42085
David Klenerman
#42098
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Sir David Klenerman is a British biophysical chemist and a professor of biophysical chemistry at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#42086
Chuck Dixon
#42099
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Charles Dixon is an American comic book writer, best known for his work on the Marvel Comics character the Punisher and on the DC Comics characters Batman, Nightwing, and Robin in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Go to Profile#42087
Chiara Marletto
#42100
Overall Influence
Chiara Marletto is a theoretical physicist at Wolfson College, Oxford. She is a pioneer in the field of constructor theory, couterfactuals and a generalization of the quantum theory of information. Life Marletto grew up in Turin. She graduated from the Polytechnic University of Torino, and the University of Oxford, where she studied with Artur Ekert.
Go to Profile#42088
Leondra Kruger
#42101
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Leondra Reid Kruger is an American judge who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of California. A native of South Pasadena, California, she graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School. Kruger then clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, and subsequently worked in private practice and as a professor. She served as acting Principal Deputy Solicitor General of the United States from 2010 to 2011, and worked in the Office of Legal Counsel. In 2014, California Governor Jerry Brown nominated Kruger to a seat on the Supreme Court of California. She was confi...
Go to Profile#42089
Claudia Felser
#42102
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Claudia Felser is a German solid state chemist and materials scientist. She is currently a director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids. Felser was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2020 for the prediction and discovery of engineered quantum materials ranging from Heusler compounds to topological insulators.
Go to Profile#42090
Swapan Kumar Pati
#42103
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Swapan Kumar Pati is an Indian quantum chemist, a professor of the department of chemistry at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research and the head of the Quantum Theory Molecules to Materials Group at the institute. He is known for his studies on electronic optical and magnetic phenomena in molecular systems and is an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, India and The World Academy of Sciences. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Sh...
Go to Profile#42091
Marc David Baer
#42104
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Marc David Baer is an historian and professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Life Baer received his PhD from the University of Chicago. He is a scholar of Middle Eastern and European History, who conducts research utilising Arabic, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Ottoman Turkish, Persian and Turkish. He is the author of six books.
Go to Profile#42092
Hugh Borton
#42105
Overall Influence
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
Hugh Borton was an American historian who specialized in the history of Japan, later serving as president of Haverford College. Biography Borton was born on May 14, 1903, to a devout Quaker household in Moorestown Township, New Jersey. His parents sent him to Quaker schools and after graduating from Haverford College in 1927, he and his wife Elizabeth Wilbur, proceeded to find a way of making a living that was in line with their Quaker beliefs. They looked to the American Friends Service Committee, which set up teaching posts for them at a small school in the foothills of the Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains.
Go to Profile#42093
Jack Himelblau
#42106
Overall Influence
Jack J. Himelblau is an author and a professor of Spanish literature at The University of Texas at San Antonio. He received his doctorate in 1965 from the University of Michigan with a thesis on "The aesthetic ideas of Alejandro O. Deustua".
Go to Profile#42094
Ashley Hutchings
#42107
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Ashley Stephen Hutchings , MBE, sometimes known in early years as "Tyger" Hutchings, is an English bassist, songwriter, arranger, band leader, writer and record producer. He was a founding member of three noteworthy English folk-rock bands: Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and The Albion Band. Hutchings has overseen numerous other projects, including records and live theatre, and has collaborated on film and television projects.
Go to Profile#42095
Jean Fox O'Barr
#42108
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Jean Fox O'Barr is an American feminist teacher, scholar, and administrator whose pioneering work helped establish women’s studies as a program of academic study and support for women in higher education.
Go to Profile#42096
Amos Shapira
#42109
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Amos Shapira is an Israeli businessman. He is the former president of El Al Airlines, Cellcom, and the University of Haifa. Biography Shapira is a sixth-generation Israeli. His grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi in the agricultural settlement of Yesud HaMa'ala in the Hula Valley in Northern Israel.
Go to Profile#42097
Graham Turner
#42110
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Graham John Turner is an English former footballer who became a manager. His son Mark was also a professional footballer. He is fourth behind only Alex Ferguson, Neil Warnock and Arsène Wenger in terms of most games managed.
Go to Profile#42098
Leopold Hager
#42111
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Leopold Hager is an Austrian conductor known for his interpretations of works by the Viennese Classics . Hager studied piano, organ, harpsichord, conducting, and composition at the Salzburg Mozarteum . He was appointed assistant conductor at the Stadttheater Mainz and, after conducting the Linz Landestheater , he was appointed first conductor of the Cologne Opera . He then served as Generalmusikdirektor in Freiburg im Breisgau , chief conductor of the Mozarteum Orchestra and of the Landestheater in Salzburg . In October 1976 he debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, conducting Le nozze di Figaro.
Go to Profile#42099
Devesh Kapur
#42112
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Devesh Kapur is the Director of Asia Programs and Starr Foundation Professor of South Asian Studies at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies . Formerly, he was the director at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, Madan Lal Sobti Associate Professor for the Study of Contemporary India, and Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development. He is also a monthly contributor to Business Standard, an Indian business news daily, and an occasional contributor to Project Syndi...
Go to Profile#42100
Prince Asem bin Nayef
#42113
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Prince Asem bin Nayef is the son of Prince Nayef bin Abdullah and Princess Mihrimah Sultan . It is claimed he is the 42nd generation direct descendant of Prophet Muhammad. Education Prince Asem completed his high school education at Millfield School in Somerset, England. He earned his university degree in interior architecture in England of 1972.
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