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).
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List of the most influential people
#42101
Zina Garrison
#42114
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Zina Lynna Garrison is an American former professional tennis player. Garrison was the runner-up in singles at the 1990 Wimbledon Championships, a three-time major mixed doubles champion, and an Olympic gold and bronze medalist from the women's doubles and singles events, respectively, at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. She reached a career-high singles ranking of world No. 4, on 20 November 1989.
Go to Profile#42102
Timothy Kehoe
#42115
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Timothy Jerome Kehoe is an American economist and professor at the University of Minnesota. His area of specialty is macroeconomics and international economics. He obtained his undergraduate degree from Providence College in 1975 and his Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1979. His Ph.D. supervisor was Herbert Scarf.
Go to Profile#42103
Heike Hennig
#42116
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Heike Hennig is a German dancer, choreographer and director of the opera and dance ensemble "Heike Hennig & Co". Life Heike Hennig had her first dance lessons at the age of 5 years in Leipzig of East Germany, studied modern dance, choreography and Body-Mind Centering in Cologne and at Moving on Center – School for Participatory Arts and Research in Oakland in US with teachers such as Steve Paxton, worked in Brazil and Portugal.
Go to Profile#42104
John Duncan
#42117
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
John Duncan is an American multi-platform artist whose body of work includes performance art, installations, contemporary music, video art and experimental film, often involving the extensive use of recorded sound. His music is composed mainly of recordings from shortwave radio, field recordings and voice. His events and installations are a form of existential research, often confrontational in nature. Duncan currently lives in Bologna, Italy.
Go to Profile#42105
Robert L. Paquette
#42118
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Robert Louis Paquette is an American historian and former Professor of American History at Hamilton College, and co-founder of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. He is particularly known for his work on the history of slavery in Cuba.
Go to Profile#42106
Jimbo Fisher
#42119
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
John James "Jimbo" Fisher Jr. is an American college football coach. He was most recently the head coach of the Texas A&M Aggies from 2018 until 2023. Before that, he was the head coach at Florida State, where his team won the 2014 BCS National Championship Game.
Go to Profile#42107
Jon Cleary
#42120
Overall Influence
1917 - 2010 (93 years)
Jon Stephen Cleary was an Australian writer and novelist. He wrote numerous books, including The Sundowners , a portrait of a rural family in the 1920s as they move from one job to the next, and The High Commissioner , the first of a long series of popular detective fiction works featuring Sydney Police Inspector Scobie Malone. A number of Cleary's works have been the subject of film and television adaptations.
Go to Profile#42108
D. C. Lau
#42121
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
D. C. Lau was a Chinese sinologist and author of the widely read translations of Tao Te Ching, Mencius and The Analects and contributed to the Proper Cantonese pronunciation movement. D. C. Lau studied Chinese under Xu Dishan at the University of Hong Kong, but fled to Mainland China in 1941 just before the Japanese occupied Hong Kong. In 1946, he was offered one of the first scholarships for a British university and studied Western philosophy in Glasgow University . In 1950, Lau would take up a post at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, developing SOAS into a world...
Go to Profile#42109
Craig A. Anderson
#42122
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Craig A. Anderson is an American professor and director at the Department of Psychology, Iowa State University in Ames. He obtained his PhD at Stanford University in 1980. He has carried out influential research regarding the effects of violent video games on children, and reports for parents related to this.
Go to Profile#42110
Ravindra Jadeja
#42123
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Ravindrasinh Anirudhsinh Jadeja is an Indian international cricketer who represents the Indian national cricket team in all formats. He is an all-rounder, who bats left-handed and bowls left-arm orthodox spin. He is regarded as one of the best all-rounders of the last decade, becoming the fifth Indian and fifth-fastest player to score 2,000 runs and take 200 wickets in Test cricket in 2021. Jadeja was the leading wicket-taker in the 2013 ICC Champions Trophy and received the man of the match award as a member of the final-winning team. He represents Saurashtra in first-class cricket and has captained the Chennai Super Kings in the Indian Premier League.
Go to Profile#42111
Ben Langmead
#42124
Overall Influence
Ben Langmead is a computational biologist and associate professor in the Computational Biology & Medicine Group at Johns Hopkins University. Education Langmead gained his Bachelor of Arts degree in computer science from Columbia College, Columbia University in 2003. He gained both his Master of Science and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of Maryland, supervised by Steven Salzberg, in 2009 and 2012, respectively.
Go to Profile#42112
Mick Karn
#42125
Overall Influence
1958 - 2011 (53 years)
Andonis Michaelides , better known as Mick Karn, was an English-Cypriot musician and songwriter who rose to fame as the bassist for the art rock/new wave band Japan. His distinctive fretless bass guitar sound and melodic playing style were a trademark of the band's sound.
Go to Profile#42113
Kerrie Holley
#42126
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Kerrie Lamont Holley is an American software architect, author, researcher, consultant, and inventor. He recently joined Industry Solutions, Google Cloud. Previously he was with UnitedHealth Group / Optum, their first Technical Fellow, where he focused on ideating healthcare assets and solutions using IoT, AI, graph database and more. His main focus centered on advancing AI in healthcare with an emphasis on deep learning and natural language processing. Holley is a retired IBM Fellow. Holley served as vice president and CTO at Cisco responsible for their analytics and automation platform. Ho...
Go to Profile#42114
Paul di Resta
#42127
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Paul di Resta is a British racing driver from Scotland, competing in the FIA World Endurance Championship for Peugeot Sport in their LMH entry. He drove in Formula One for Force India from to , and became a reserve driver for the Williams F1 team in , driving a single race for them as a substitute driver in . A former Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters and Formula 3 Euro Series champion, di Resta did not secure a Formula One seat for 2014, instead rejoining Mercedes to race again in DTM. He is currently a reserve F1 driver for McLaren for the 2022 season, and a former commentator for Sky Sports' ...
Go to Profile#42115
Walter Eric Spear
#42128
Overall Influence
1921 - 2008 (87 years)
Walter Eric Spear FRSE PhD FRS FInstP was a German physicist noted for his pioneering work to help develop large area electronics and thin film displays. He was born in Frankfurt to a Jewish father and a Lutheran mother; by the time he finished his school examinations in 1938 life for Jews and people associated with Jews was becoming difficult. With the support of friends and relatives in Britain, the family were able to move to London, where he arrived in 1938 "with a small suitcase and a large cello".
Go to Profile#42116
Rosemary Hollis
#42129
Overall Influence
1952 - 2020 (68 years)
Rosemary Hollis was a British political scientist. Professor of Middle East Policy Studies at City University London until her retirement in 2018, Hollis was known for her expertise and scholarship on the relations between the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States with the Middle East. She was formerly the Research Director at Chatham House .
Go to Profile#42117
John Willinsky
#42130
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
John Willinsky is a Canadian educator, activist, and author. Willinsky is currently on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Education where he is the Khosla Family Professor. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and directs the Public Knowledge Project.
Go to Profile#42118
Kanstantsin Dzehtsiarou
#42131
Overall Influence
Kanstantsin Dzehtsiarou is a scholar of human rights law who has worked for the University of Liverpool since 2015. Works
Go to Profile#42119
Ross Honsberger
#42132
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Ross Honsberger was a Canadian mathematician and author on recreational mathematics. Life Honsberger studied mathematics at the University of Toronto, with a bachelor's degree, and then worked for ten years as a teacher in Toronto, before continuing his studies at the University of Waterloo . Since 1964 he had been on the faculty of mathematics, where he later became a professor emeritus. He dealt with combinatorics and optimization, especially with mathematics education. He developed education courses, for example, on combinatorial geometry, frequently held lectures for students and math teachers, and was editor of the Ontario Secondary School Mathematics Bulletin.
Go to Profile#42120
Lynn Neary
#42133
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Lynn Neary is an American radio journalist. She is a correspondent on National Public Radio and on National Desk's Arts and Information Unit, covering books and publishing. Early years and education Neary was born and raised in Crestwood, Westchester County, NY. She earned a B.A. in English from Fordham University.
Go to Profile#42121
Bruce E. Stangle
#42134
Overall Influence
Bruce Edward Stangle is an American economist who served as the chief executive officer of Analysis Group from 1981 to 2004. He and Michael F. Koehn co-founded the management consultancy in 1981 in Boston, Massachusetts. After stepping down as chief executive Stangle continued to lead Analysis Group as chairman until 2016. He began his career as a senior economist for Arthur D. Little from 1978 to 1980.
Go to Profile#42122
Ismayil Shykhly
#42135
Overall Influence
1919 - 1995 (76 years)
Ismayil Shykhly , also known by his birth name Ismayil Shikhlinsky Gahraman oglu , was an Azerbaijani writer. Early years Shykhly was born on March 22, 1919, in Ikinji Shykhly village of Qazakh Rayon of Azerbaijan. He studied in Kosalar village. In 1934, he enrolled in Qakhazh Pedagogical School. He was impressed by Samad Vurgun's poem "Yadıma düşdü" during his speech at Alexandr Pushkin's 100th anniversary celebrated in Qazakh.
Go to Profile#42123
Judith Light
#42136
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Judith Ellen Light is an American actress. She made her professional stage debut in 1970, before making her Broadway debut in the 1975 revival of A Doll's House. Her breakthrough role was in the ABC daytime soap opera One Life to Live from 1977 to 1983, where she played the role of Karen Wolek; for this role, she won two consecutive Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. Light starred as Angela Bower in the long-running ABC sitcom Who's the Boss? from 1984 to 1992.
Go to Profile#42124
Benoit Perthame
#42137
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Benoit Perthame is a French mathematician, who deals with non-linear partial differential equations and their applications in biology. He is a professor at Pierre-et-Marie Curie University and at the Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions, which he directs.
Go to Profile#42125
Mietek Jaroniec
#42138
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Mietek Jaroniec is a Polish and American chemist and an author of over 950 scientific papers, which got over 127,964 citations and brings him an h-index of 155. Biography He was born in 1949 in Okrzeja, Poland. He obtained his masters and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry at the Curie-Sklodowska University in 1972 and 1976 respectively. From 1972 to 1991 he worked at the Department of Theoretical Chemistry, Marie Curie-Sklodowska University and since 1991 works at Kent State University as a professor. Prior to it, he also was a research assistant from 1972 to 1977 after which he got promoted to the assistant professor a position that he kept till 1980.
Go to Profile#42126
Elizabeth Ofili
#42139
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Elizabeth Odilile Ofili is a Nigerian-American physician and cardiology researcher. She was the first woman to become president of the Association of Black Cardiologists. Early life and education Ofili was born and raised in Nigeria, and attended Ahmadu Bello University for medical school. She moved to the United States in 1982 and earned a master's of public health from Johns Hopkins University in 1983. She completed her postgraduate education in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Go to Profile#42127
Pierluigi Martini
#42140
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Pierluigi Martini is an Italian former racing driver. He won the 1999 24 Hours of Le Mans and participated in 124 Formula One Grands Prix between 1984 and 1995. Early life Martini's uncle, Giancarlo Martini, raced during the 1970s, including some non-championship races in a Ferrari 312T entered by Scuderia Everest, a team owned by Giancarlo Minardi. Pierluigi's younger brother, Oliver, is also a racing driver.
Go to Profile#42128
Alexander Halliday
#42141
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Sir Alexander Norman Halliday is a British geochemist and academic who is the Founding Dean Emeritus of the Columbia Climate School, and Former Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He joined the Earth Institute in April 2018, after spending more than a decade at the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford, during which time he was dean of science and engineering. He is also a professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#42129
Allen Vigneron
#42142
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Allen Henry Vigneron is an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He is the current archbishop of the Archdiocese of Detroit in Michigan and Ecclesiastical Superior of the Cayman Islands, serving since 2009. Vigneron previously served as bishop of the Diocese of Oakland in California from 2003 to 2009 and as an auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Detroit from 1996 to 2003.
Go to Profile#42130
Kathleen Hanna
#42143
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Kathleen Hanna is an American singer, musician and pioneer of the feminist punk riot grrrl movement, and punk zine writer. In the early-to-mid-1990s she was the lead singer of feminist punk band Bikini Kill, and then fronted Le Tigre in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Since 2010, she has recorded as the Julie Ruin.
Go to Profile#42131
Patricia Kaas
#42144
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Patricia Kaas is a French singer. Her music is a mix of pop, cabaret, jazz, and chanson. Since the appearance of her 1988 debut album Mademoiselle chante..., Kaas has sold over 17 million records worldwide. She had her greatest success in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, Russia, Finland, Ukraine, and South Korea with her third album Je te dis vous. In 2002, Kaas made her film debut in And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen with Jeremy Irons. She represented France in the Eurovision Song Contest 2009 in Moscow and finished in eighth place.
Go to Profile#42132
Charles Scriver
#42145
Overall Influence
1930 - 2023 (93 years)
Charles Robert Scriver was a Canadian pediatrician and biochemical geneticist. His work focused on inborn errors of metabolism and led in establishing a Canada-wide newborn metabolic screening program.
Go to Profile#42133
Tord Ganelius
#42146
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
Tord Hjalmar Ganelius was a Swedish mathematician and professor emeritus. He served as Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and was a board member of the Nobel Foundation from 1981 to 1989. His primary research interests were holomorphic functions and approximation theory.
Go to Profile#42134
Norbert Hornstein
#42147
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Norbert Hornstein is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Maryland. Working within a generative framework, he has worked on the nature of logical form, and has recently proposed that control should, like raising, be analyzed in terms of movement.
Go to Profile#42135
Randy Albelda
#42148
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Randy Pearl Albelda is an American feminist economist, activist, author, and academic who specialises in poverty and gender issues. Background Albelda attended Smith College, where she received a B.A. in Economics in 1977, followed by a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherstin 1983. Her first publication was a study of the determinants of women's wages during the Progressive era.
Go to Profile#42136
Leonid Vaserstein
#42149
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Leonid Nisonovich Vaserstein is a Russian-American mathematician, currently Professor of Mathematics at Penn State University. His research is focused on algebra and dynamical systems. He is well known for providing a simple proof of the Quillen–Suslin theorem, a result in commutative algebra, first conjectured by Jean-Pierre Serre in 1955, and then proved by Daniel Quillen and Andrei Suslin in 1976.
Go to Profile#42137
Kathy Hochul
#42150
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Kathleen Hochul is an American politician serving as the 57th governor of New York since August 24, 2021. A member of the Democratic Party, she is New York's first female governor, as well as the first governor from Upstate New York since Nathan L. Miller became New York's governor in 1920.
Go to Profile#42138
Hilary Cunningham Scharper
#42151
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Hilary Scharper is a Canadian novelist and professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Toronto. Scharper's fiction, teaching and research focus on cultural approaches to nature. She writes historical fiction, multi-species fiction, and, self-coined, "ecoGothic" fiction.
Go to Profile#42139
Judith H. Dobrzynski
#42152
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Judith Helen Dobrzynski is an American journalist and instructor in journalism. She is currently a freelance writer who has contributed articles on culture, the arts, business, philanthropy and other topics to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and several magazines.
Go to Profile#42140
John Rhys-Davies
#42153
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
John Rhys-Davies is a Welsh actor known for portraying Sallah in the Indiana Jones franchise and Gimli in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He has also received three Screen Actors Guild Award nominations with one win, and a Primetime Emmy Award nomination.
Go to Profile#42141
Susan R. Barry
#42154
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Susan R. Barry is a Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences and Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience and Behavior at Mount Holyoke College and the author of two books, Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist's Journey into Seeing in Three Dimensions and Coming to Our Senses: A Boy Who Learned to See, A Girl Who Learned to Hear, and How We All Discover the World. Barry was dubbed Stereo Sue by neurologist and author Oliver Sacks in a 2006 New Yorker article with that name. Barry's first book greatly expands on Sacks' article and discusses the experience of gaining stereovision through optometric vision therapy, after a lifetime of being stereoblind.
Go to Profile#42142
Valentino Rossi
#42155
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Valentino Rossi is an Italian racing driver, former professional motorcycle road racer and nine-time Grand Prix motorcycle racing World Champion. Nicknamed The Doctor, he is widely considered to be one of the greatest motorcycle racers of all time, with some labelling him as the greatest ever. He has nine Grand Prix World Championships to his name, seven of which were in the premier 500cc/MotoGP class. He holds the record for most premier class victories, with 89 to his name. He won premier class World Championships with both Honda and Yamaha. He is also the only road racer to have competed i...
Go to Profile#42143
Maxence Caron
#42156
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Maxence Caron is a French writer, poet, philosopher and musicologist. Biography He is agrégé in Philosophy , Docteur ès lettres Maxence Caron is the author of literary texts and poems and of several works about German thinking and about saint Augustine. Pianist, musicologist, Maxence Caron graduated with honours from the Conservatoire National de Paris in 1990.
Go to Profile#42144
Andrey Baykov
#42157
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Andrey Anatolievich Baykov is a Russian international relations scholar, Vice-Rector of Moscow State University of International Relations , editor-in-chief of the International Trends, Director of the Academic Forum on International Relations.
Go to Profile#42145
Mary Wilson
#42158
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Mary Wilson was an American singer. She gained worldwide recognition as a founding member of The Supremes, the most successful Motown act of the 1960s and the best-charting female group in U.S. chart history, as well as one of the best-selling girl groups of all-time. The trio reached number one on Billboards Hot 100 with 12 of their singles, ten of which feature Wilson on backing vocals.
Go to Profile#42146
Billy Davies
#42159
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
William McIntosh Davies is a Scottish former professional footballer and manager. He won the 2007 Play-offs with Derby County, finished as runners-up in 2005 with Preston North End, and reached the semi-finals in 2006 , 2010 and 2011 .
Go to Profile#42147
Haseena Khan
#42160
Overall Influence
Haseena Khan is a Bangladeshi scientist, professor and fellow of Bangladesh Academy of Sciences. She is known for her lead on decoding Genome of Tenualosa ilisha from the river Padma. She was awarded Independence Day Award, the highest state award given by the government of Bangladesh for her contribution on research and training. Haseena Khan is also known for her contribution to jute genome decoding under Maqsudul Alam's lead.
Go to Profile#42148
Morris Zelditch
#42161
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Morris "Buzz" Zelditch was an American sociologist. He was Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, where he had been a member of the faculty since 1961. He was known for his work on the effects of status characteristics embedded in the stratification of the larger society, legitimacy of structures of authority, and generalizability of the results of sociological experiments.
Go to Profile#42149
S. Lawrence Zipursky
#42162
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
S. Lawrence Zipursky is an American neuroscientist, currently Distinguished Professor of Biological Chemistry at University of California, Los Angeles and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Zipursky studies brain development. His research focuses on how neural circuits are formed during development. His laboratory has provided insights into various aspects of circuit assembly, including the molecular basis of neuronal identity through their work on the Dscam1 locus in Drosophila. Zipursky was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009.
Go to Profile#42150
Serge-Christophe Kolm
#42163
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Serge-Christophe Kolm is a French economist. His work in economics and related social science includes his analyses, concepts and results in Public Economics and Normative Economics focusing on equality, distributive justice, and efficiency of economic measures, and in other fields and problems often applying them.
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