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
#4301
Marion Nestle
#4308
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Marion Nestle is an American molecular biologist, nutritionist, and public health advocate. She is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health Emerita at New York University. Her research examines scientific and socioeconomic influences on food choice, obesity, and food safety, emphasizing the role of food marketing.
Go to Profile#4302
Sachin Tendulkar
#4309
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, is an Indian former international cricketer who captained the Indian national team. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest batsmen in the history of cricket. Hailed as the world's most prolific batsman of all time, he is the all-time highest run-scorer in both ODI and Test cricket with more than 18,000 runs and 15,000 runs, respectively. He also holds the record for receiving the most player of the match awards in international cricket. Tendulkar was a Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha by nomination from 2012 to 2018.
Go to Profile#4303
Rubem Alves
#4310
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Rubem Azevedo Alves was a Brazilian theologian, philosopher, educator, writer and psychoanalyst. Alves was one of the founders of Latin American liberation theology. Life Alves was born on 15 September 1933, in Boa Esperança, Minas Gerais, Brazil. He obtained his Bachelor of Theology degree at the Presbyterian Seminary in Campinas, Brazil, in 1957. He went on to obtain a Master of Theology from the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, United States, in 1964. After completing this degree, Alves returned to Brazil amidst a US-sponsored military coup against the democratically elected Brazilian government.
Go to Profile#4304
Raymond Briggs
#4311
Overall Influence
1934 - 2022 (88 years)
Raymond Redvers Briggs was an English illustrator, cartoonist, graphic novelist and author. Achieving critical and popular success among adults and children, he is best known in Britain for his 1978 story The Snowman, a book without words whose cartoon adaptation is televised and whose musical adaptation is staged every Christmas.
Go to Profile#4305
David Brower
#4312
Overall Influence
1912 - 2000 (88 years)
David Ross Brower was a prominent environmentalist and the founder of many environmental organizations, including the John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies , Friends of the Earth , Earth Island Institute , North Cascades Conservation Council, and Fate of the Earth Conferences. From 1952 to 1969, he served as the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club, and served on its board three times: from 1941–1953; 1983–1988; and 1995–2000 as a petition candidate enlisted by reform-activists known as the John Muir Sierrans. As a younger man, he was a prominent mountaineer.
Go to Profile#4306
Herman Chernoff
#4313
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (103 years)
Herman Chernoff is an American applied mathematician, statistician and physicist. He was formerly a professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Stanford, and MIT, currently emeritus at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#4307
Eric F. Wieschaus
#4314
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Eric Francis Wieschaus is an American evolutionary developmental biologist and 1995 Nobel Prize-winner. Early life Born in South Bend, Indiana, he attended John Carroll Catholic High School in Birmingham, Alabama before attending the University of Notre Dame for his undergraduate studies , and Yale University for his graduate work.
Go to Profile#4308
Allan M. Collins
#4315
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Allan M. Collins is an American cognitive scientist, Professor Emeritus of Learning Sciences at Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy. His research is recognized as having broad impact on the fields of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and education.
Go to Profile#4309
Eliseo Verón
#4316
Overall Influence
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Eliseo Verón was an Argentine sociologist, anthropologist and semiotician, and professor of communication sciences at Universidad de San Andrés. His work is known mainly in Spanish and French-speaking countries.
Go to Profile#4310
Eduardo Galeano
#4317
Overall Influence
1940 - 2015 (75 years)
Eduardo Hughes Galeano was an Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist considered, among other things, "a literary giant of the Latin American left" and "global soccer's pre-eminent man of letters".
Go to Profile#4311
Seán Patrick O'Malley
#4318
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Seán Patrick O'Malley is an American cardinal of the Catholic Church serving as archbishop of the Archdiocese of Boston in Massachusetts since 2003. He is a member of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin and was elevated by the Vatican to the rank of cardinal in 2006.
Go to Profile#4312
Helen Pluckrose
#4319
Overall Influence
Helen Pluckrose is a British author and cultural writer known for critiques of critical social justice and promotion of liberal ethics, most notably in the grievance studies affair. Education Pluckrose completed a degree in English literature at the University of East London and a master's degree in early modern studies at Queen Mary University of London, with a particular focus on "the ways in which medieval women negotiated the Christian narrative".
Go to Profile#4313
Hyman Bass
#4320
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Hyman Bass is an American mathematician, known for work in algebra and in mathematics education. From 1959 to 1998 he was Professor in the Mathematics Department at Columbia University. He is currently the Samuel Eilenberg Distinguished University Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#4314
Doug Altman
#4321
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Douglas Graham Altman FMedSci was an English statistician best known for his work on improving the reliability and reporting of medical research and for highly cited papers on statistical methodology. He was professor of statistics in medicine at the University of Oxford, founder and Director of Centre for Statistics in Medicine and Cancer Research UK Medical Statistics Group, and co-founder of the international Equator Network for health research reliability.
Go to Profile#4315
Arend Lijphart
#4322
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Arend d'Angremond Lijphart is a Dutch-American political scientist specializing in comparative politics, elections and voting systems, democratic institutionss, and ethnicity and politics. He is Research Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is influential for his work on consociational democracy and his contribution to the new Institutionalism in political science.
Go to Profile#4316
Karlie Kloss
#4323
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Karlie Elizabeth Kloss is an American fashion model. Vogue Paris declared her one of the "top 30 models of the 2000s" when she was 17. Kloss was a Victoria's Secret Angel from 2013 until 2015; she resigned to study at New York University. Models.com has said that Kloss "represents the gold standard of modeling—a girl with the look, the poise, and the drive to take things to the next level", and she ranks on their "New Supers" and "Money Girl" lists. By 2019, she had appeared on 40 international Vogue covers.
Go to Profile#4317
Shmuel Eisenstadt
#4324
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt was an Israeli sociologist and writer. In 1959 he was appointed to a teaching post in the sociology department of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. From 1990 until his death in September 2010 he was professor emeritus. He held countless guest professorships, at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, the University of Zurich, the University of Vienna, the University of Bern, Stanford and the University of Heidelberg, among others. Eisenstadt received a number of prizes, including the Balzan prize and the Max-Planck research prize. He was also the 2006 winner of the Holberg International Memorial Prize.
Go to Profile#4318
Nandini Sundar
#4325
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Nandini Sundar is an Indian professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics whose research interests include political sociology, law, and inequality. She is a recipient of the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences in 2010. She was also awarded the Ester Boserup Prize for Development Research in 2016 and the Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies in 2017.
Go to Profile#4319
Dedre Gentner
#4326
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Dedre Dariel Gentner is an American cognitive and developmental psychologist. She is the Alice Gabriel Twight Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, and a leading researcher in the study of analogical reasoning.
Go to Profile#4320
Nuel Belnap
#4327
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Nuel Dinsmore Belnap Jr. is an American logician and philosopher who has made contributions to the philosophy of logic, temporal logic, and structural proof theory. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1963 until his retirement in 2011.
Go to Profile#4321
Dudley R. Herschbach
#4328
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Dudley Robert Herschbach is an American chemist at Harvard University. He won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi "for their contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes". Herschbach and Lee specifically worked with molecular beams, performing crossed molecular beam experiments that enabled a detailed molecular-level understanding of many elementary reaction processes. Herschbach is a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Go to Profile#4322
Eudora Welty
#4329
Overall Influence
1909 - 2001 (92 years)
Eudora Alice Welty was an American short story writer, novelist and photographer who wrote about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of the South. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Her house in Jackson, Mississippi has been designated as a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public as a house museum.
Go to Profile#4323
Randolph Quirk
#4330
Overall Influence
1920 - 2017 (97 years)
Charles Randolph Quirk, Baron Quirk, CBE, FBA was a British linguist and life peer. He was the Quain Professor of English language and literature at University College London from 1968 to 1981. He sat as a crossbencher in the House of Lords.
Go to Profile#4324
Paula Caplan
#4331
Overall Influence
1947 - 2021 (74 years)
Paula Joan Caplan was an American psychologist, activist, writer, and artist. Biography Caplan was an associate at Harvard University's DuBois Institute, director of the Voices of Diversity Project, and a past Fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Previously she had been full professor of psychology, assistant professor of psychiatry, and lecturer in Women's Studies at the University of Toronto, as well as head of the Centre for Women's Studies in Education there, and was chosen by the American Psychological Association as an "eminent woman psychologist".
Go to Profile#4325
Daniel Kleitman
#4332
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Daniel J. Kleitman is an American mathematician and professor of applied mathematics at MIT. His research interests include combinatorics, graph theory, genomics, and operations research. Biography Kleitman was born in 1934 in Brooklyn, New York, the younger of Bertha and Milton Kleitman's two sons. His father was a lawyer who after WWII became a commodities trader and investor. In 1942 the family moved to Morristown, New Jersey, and he graduated from Morristown High School in 1950.
Go to Profile#4326
Arnold Wesker
#4333
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Sir Arnold Wesker was an English dramatist. He was the author of 50 plays, four volumes of short stories, two volumes of essays, much journalism and a book on the subject, a children's book, some poetry, and other assorted writings. His plays have been translated into 20 languages, and performed worldwide.
Go to Profile#4327
William McDonough
#4334
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
William Andrews McDonough is an American architect and academic. McDonough is the founding principal of William McDonough + Partners and was the dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. He works in green and sustainable architecture, often incorporating his theory of cradle-to-cradle design.
Go to Profile#4328
Judith Merril
#4335
Overall Influence
1923 - 1997 (74 years)
Judith Josephine Grossman , who took the pen-name Judith Merril around 1945, was an American and then Canadian science fiction writer, editor and political activist, and one of the first women to be widely influential in those roles.
Go to Profile#4329
Jed S. Rakoff
#4336
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Jed Saul Rakoff is a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Early life and education Rakoff was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on August 1, 1943. He grew up in the Germantown section of Philadelphia and attended Central High School of Philadelphia. Rakoff received his Bachelor of Arts in English literature from Swarthmore College, where he was student council president and editor-in-chief of the newspaper. He earned his Master of Philosophy in Indian history from Balliol College at Oxford University, and received a J...
Go to Profile#4330
Dimitri Kitsikis
#4337
Overall Influence
1935 - 2021 (86 years)
Dimitri Kitsikis was a Greek Philosopher, Turkologist and Sinologist, as well as a Professor of International Relations and Geopolitics. He also published poetry in French and Greek. Life Dimitri Kitsikis was a Turkologist and Sinologist Professor of International Relations and Geopolitics at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada since 1970, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; he received his doctoral degree in 1963 from the Sorbonne, Paris, under the supervision of Pierre Renouvin. He has been named one of the "three top geopolitical thinkers worldwide, Karl Haushofer, Halford Mackinder and Dimitri Kitsikis".
Go to Profile#4331
James Hughes
#4338
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
James J. Hughes is an American sociologist and bioethicist. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and is the associate provost for institutional research, assessment, and planning at UMass Boston. He is the author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future and is currently writing a book about moral bioenhancement tentatively titled Cyborg Buddha: Using Neurotechnology to Become Better People.
Go to Profile#4332
Björk
#4339
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Björk Guðmundsdóttir is an Icelandic singer, songwriter, composer, record producer, and actress. Noted for her distinct voice, three-octave vocal range, bold musical choices, and sometimes eccentric public persona, she has developed an eclectic musical style over a career spanning four-decades, drawing on electronic, folk, pop, experimental, trip hop, classical, and avant-garde music.
Go to Profile#4333
Clifford Truesdell
#4340
Overall Influence
1919 - 2000 (81 years)
Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III was an American mathematician, natural philosopher, and historian of science. Life Truesdell was born in Los Angeles, California. After high school, he spent two years in Europe learning French, German, and Italian, and improving his Latin and Greek. His linguistic skills stood him in good stead in his later historical investigations. At Caltech he was deeply influenced by the teaching of Harry Bateman. In particular, a course in partial differential equations "taught me the difference between an ordinary good teacher and a great mathematician, and after that I never cared what grade I got in anything." He obtained a B.Sc.
Go to Profile#4334
Charles Simic
#4341
Overall Influence
1938 - 2023 (85 years)
Dušan Simić , known as Charles Simic, was a Serbian American poet and co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn't End and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems, 1963–1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.
Go to Profile#4335
Masanobu Fukuoka
#4342
Overall Influence
1913 - 2008 (95 years)
Masanobu Fukuoka was a Japanese farmer and philosopher celebrated for his natural farming and re-vegetation of desertified lands. He was a proponent of no-till, herbicide and pesticide free cultivation methods from which he created a particular method of agriculture, commonly referred to as "natural farming" or "do-nothing farming".
Go to Profile#4336
William Lee Miller
#4343
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
William Lee Miller was an American journalist, academic, and historian who taught in the University of Virginia's religious studies department for 17 years, and remained affiliated with the university after his 1999 retirement.
Go to Profile#4337
Brock Long
#4344
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
William Brockmann Long is an American emergency manager who served as the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency . He was appointed to the position by President Donald Trump in April 2017 and confirmed by the United States Senate in June 2017. He served until his resignation in March 2019, following criticism of his handling of the Hurricane Maria and an ethical complaint over using official vehicles.
Go to Profile#4338
Charles Elachi
#4345
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Charles Elachi is a Lebanese-American professor of electrical engineering and planetary science at the California Institute of Technology . From 2001 to 2016 he was the 8th director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and vice president of Caltech.
Go to Profile#4339
Jeremy Bernstein
#4346
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Jeremy Bernstein is an American theoretical physicist and popular science writer. Early life Bernstein's parents, Philip S. Bernstein, a Reform rabbi, and Sophie Rubin Bernstein named him after the biblical Jeremiah, the subject of his father's masters thesis. Philip's parents were immigrants from Lithuania, while Sophie was of Russian-Jewish descent. The family moved from Rochester to New York City during World War II, when his father became head of all the Jewish chaplains in the armed forces.
Go to Profile#4340
Robert Bork
#4347
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Robert Heron Bork was an American legal scholar who served as solicitor general of the United States from 1973 until 1977. A professor by training, he was later acting United States Attorney General and a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1982 to 1988. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the Senate rejected his nomination after a contentious and highly publicized confirmation hearing.
Go to Profile#4341
Andrew Odlyzko
#4348
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Andrew Michael Odlyzko is a Polish-American mathematician and a former head of the University of Minnesota's Digital Technology Center and of the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute. He began his career in 1975 at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he stayed for 26 years before joining the University of Minnesota in 2001.
Go to Profile#4342
John C. Baez
#4349
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
John Carlos Baez is an American mathematical physicist and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Riverside in Riverside, California. He has worked on spin foams in loop quantum gravity, applications of higher categories to physics, and applied category theory. Additionally, Baez is known on the World Wide Web as the author of the crackpot index.
Go to Profile#4343
Robert M. French
#4350
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Robert M. French is a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. He is currently at the University of Burgundy in Dijon. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where he worked with Douglas Hofstadter on the Tabletop computational cognitive model. He specializes in cognitive science and has made an extensive study of the process of analogy-making.
Go to Profile#4344
Nico Frijda
#4351
Overall Influence
1927 - 2015 (88 years)
Nico Henri Frijda was a Dutch psychologist and professor of the University of Amsterdam. Life Frijda was born in Amsterdam. He studied psychology at the Gemeenteuniversiteit Amsterdam, where he received his PhD in 1956 on the thesis title Understanding Facial Expressions with Géza Révész as advisor. In 1965 he was appointed full professor. Frijda retired in 1992 to become emeritus professor. In 2007 he received a laurea honoris causa in psychology from University of Padova.
Go to Profile#4345
Ernst Witt
#4352
Overall Influence
1911 - 1991 (80 years)
Ernst Witt was a German mathematician, one of the leading algebraists of his time. Biography Witt was born on the island of Alsen, then a part of the German Empire. Shortly after his birth, his parents moved the family to China to work as missionaries, and he did not return to Europe until he was nine.
Go to Profile#4346
David Starkey
#4353
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
David Robert Starkey is an English historian, radio and television presenter, with views that he describes as conservative. The only child of Quaker parents, he attended Kendal Grammar School before reading history at Cambridge on a scholarship. There he specialised in Tudor history, writing a thesis on King Henry VIII's household. From Cambridge, he moved to the London School of Economics, where he was a lecturer in history until 1998. He has written several books on the Tudors.
Go to Profile#4347
Norman Shumway
#4354
Overall Influence
1923 - 2006 (83 years)
Norman Edward Shumway was a pioneer of heart surgery at Stanford University. He was the 67th president of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery and the first to perform an adult human to human heart transplantation in the United States.
Go to Profile#4348
John Rockwell
#4355
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
John Sargent Rockwell is an American music critic, dance critic and arts administrator. According to Grove Music Online, "Rockwell brings two signal attributes to his critical work: a genuine admiration for all kinds of music and the arts, and the ability to fit a spirit of inquiry and enthusiasm for newer approaches to music into a reasoned overview of cultural history".
Go to Profile#4349
Bob Hawke
#4356
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Robert James Lee Hawke was an Australian politician and trade unionist who served as the 23rd prime minister of Australia from 1983 to 1991. He held office as the leader of the Australian Labor Party , having previously served as the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions from 1969 to 1980 and president of the Labor Party national executive from 1973 to 1978.
Go to Profile#4350
Paul Mockapetris
#4357
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Paul V. Mockapetris is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, who invented the Internet Domain Name System . Education Mockapetris graduated from the Boston Latin School in 1966, received his bachelor's degrees in physics and electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971 and his doctorate in information and computer science from the University of California at Irvine in 1982.
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