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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#4401
Pat Hanrahan
#4408
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Patrick M. Hanrahan is an American computer graphics researcher, the Canon USA Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University. His research focuses on rendering algorithms, graphics processing units, as well as scientific illustration and visualization. He has received numerous awards, including the 2019 Turing Award.
Go to Profile#4402
Robert J. White
#4409
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Robert Joseph White was an American neurosurgeon best known for his head transplants on living monkeys. Biography White was raised in Duluth, Minnesota, by his mother and an aunt. His father was killed in combat while serving in the Pacific theater during World War II. White stated in a 2009 Motherboard interview that his interest in the human brain started in high school when his biology teacher admired his dissection of a frog cranium and told White that he should become a brain surgeon.
Go to Profile#4403
Tommaso Toffoli
#4410
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Tommaso Toffoli is an Italian-American professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boston University where he joined the faculty in 1995. He has worked on cellular automata and the theory of artificial life , and is known for the invention of the Toffoli gate.
Go to Profile#4404
Chuck Palahniuk
#4411
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk is an American novelist who describes his work as transgressional fiction. He has published 19 novels, three nonfiction books, two graphic novels, and two adult coloring books, as well as several short stories. His first published novel was Fight Club, which was adapted into a film of the same title.
Go to Profile#4405
David Teece
#4412
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
David John Teece is a New Zealand-born US-based organizational economist and the Professor in Global Business and director of the Tusher Center for the Management of Intellectual Capital at the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#4406
Katsumi Nomizu
#4413
Overall Influence
1924 - 2008 (84 years)
Katsumi Nomizu was a Japanese-American mathematician known for his work in differential geometry. Life and career Nomizu was born in Osaka, Japan on the first day of December, 1924. He studied mathematics at Osaka University, graduating in 1947 with a Master of Science then traveled to the United States on a U.S. Army Fulbright Scholarship. He studied first at Columbia University and then at the University of Chicago where in 1953 he became the first student to earn a Ph.D. under the thesis direction of Shiing-Shen Chern. The subject was affine differential geometry, a topic to which he would return much later in his career.
Go to Profile#4407
Giovanni Arrighi
#4414
Overall Influence
1937 - 2009 (72 years)
Giovanni Arrighi was an Italian economist, sociologist and world-systems analyst, from 1998 a Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His work has been translated into over fifteen languages.
Go to Profile#4408
Amnon Yariv
#4415
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Amnon Yariv is an Israeli-American professor of applied physics and electrical engineering at Caltech, known for innovations in optoelectronics. Yariv obtained his B.S., M.S. and PhD. in electrical engineering from University of California, Berkeley in 1954, 1956 and 1958, respectively.
Go to Profile#4409
Ric Wake
#4416
Overall Influence
Ric Wake is an American record producer who has won two Grammy Awards. During his tenure as staff producer with Sony Music Entertainment he has worked with vocalists such as Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, Lucero, Taylor Dayne, Mariah Carey, Jessica Simpson, Anastacia, Barry Manilow, Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez. He has worked with Greek composer Yanni to help produce Yanni Voices.
Go to Profile#4410
Bobby Charlton
#4417
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Sir Robert Charlton was an English professional footballer who played as a midfielder or centre-forward. Widely considered one of the greatest players of all time, he was a member of the England team that won the 1966 FIFA World Cup, the year he also won the Ballon d'Or. He finished second in the Ballon d'Or voting in 1967 and 1968. He played almost all of his club football at Manchester United, where he became renowned for his attacking instincts, passing abilities from midfield, ferocious long-range shooting from both left and right foot, fitness, and stamina. He was cautioned only twice i...
Go to Profile#4411
Oscar Robertson
#4418
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Oscar Palmer Robertson , nicknamed "the Big O", is an American former professional basketball player who played for the Cincinnati Royals and Milwaukee Bucks in the National Basketball Association . Robertson played point guard and was a 12-time All-Star, 11-time member of the All-NBA Team, and one-time winner of the MVP award in 14 seasons. In 1962, he became the first player in NBA history to average a triple-double for a season . In the 1970–71 NBA season, he was a key player on the team that brought the Bucks their first NBA title. His playing career, especially during high school and col...
Go to Profile#4412
Takeo Doi
#4419
Overall Influence
1920 - 2009 (89 years)
Takeo Doi was a Japanese academic, psychoanalyst and author. Early life Doi was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1920. He was a graduate of the University of Tokyo. Career Doi was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Neuropsychiatry at the University of Tokyo and a medical adviser to St. Luke's International Hospital in Tokyo. He was also Director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Japan. He taught at the University of Tokyo and at International Christian University . He wrote numerous books and articles both in Japanese and in English.
Go to Profile#4413
Stéphane Courtois
#4420
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Stéphane Courtois is a French historian and university professor, a director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research , professor at the Catholic Institute of Higher Studies in La Roche-sur-Yon, and director of a collection specialized in the history of communist movements and communist states.
Go to Profile#4414
Yitzhak Rabin
#4421
Overall Influence
1922 - 1995 (73 years)
Yitzhak Rabin was an Israeli politician, statesman and general. He was the fifth Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms in office, 1974–1977, and from 1992 until his assassination in 1995. Rabin was born in Jerusalem to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and was raised in a Labor Zionist household. He learned agriculture in school and excelled as a student. He led a 27-year career as a soldier and ultimately attained the rank of Rav Aluf. As a teenager he joined the Palmach, the commando force of the Yishuv. He eventually rose through its ranks to become its chief of operations during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
Go to Profile#4415
Nick Kroll
#4422
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Nicholas Kroll is an American actor, voice actor, comedian, writer, and producer. He is known for creating and starring in the Comedy Central series Kroll Show, The Oh, Hello Show, the FX comedy series The League, the Hulu sketch comedy series History of the World, Part II, and starring in and co-creating the animated Netflix series Big Mouth and Human Resources.
Go to Profile#4416
Mohammad Khatami
#4423
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
#4417
Yi-Fu Tuan
#4424
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Yi-Fu Tuan was a Chinese-born American geographer and writer. He was one of the key figures in human geography and arguably the most important originator of humanistic geography. Early life and education Born in 1930 in Tianjin, China to an upper-class family, he was educated in China, Australia, the Philippines and the United Kingdom. He attended University College London, but graduated from the University of Oxford with a B.A. and M.A. in 1951 and 1955 respectively. From there he went to California to continue his geographic education. He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from the University of Ca...
Go to Profile#4418
Winona LaDuke
#4425
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Winona LaDuke is an American economist, environmentalist, writer and industrial hemp grower, known for her work on tribal land claims and preservation, as well as sustainable development. In 1996 and 2000, she ran for Vice President of the United States as the nominee of the Green Party of the United States, on a ticket headed by Ralph Nader. She is the executive director and a co-founder of Honor the Earth, a Native environmental advocacy organization that played an active role in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
Go to Profile#4419
Thomas Huckle Weller
#4426
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Thomas Huckle Weller was an American virologist. He, John Franklin Enders and Frederick Chapman Robbins were awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1954 for showing how to cultivate poliomyelitis viruses in a test tube, using a combination of human embryonic skin and muscle tissue.
Go to Profile#4420
Ed Sheeran
#4427
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (35 years)
Edward Christopher Sheeran is an English singer-songwriter. Born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, and raised in Framlingham, Suffolk, he began writing songs around the age of eleven. In early 2011, Sheeran independently released the extended play No. 5 Collaborations Project. He signed with Asylum Records the same year.
Go to Profile#4421
Asher Peres
#4428
Overall Influence
1934 - 2005 (71 years)
Asher Peres was an Israeli physicist. He is well known for his work relating quantum mechanics and information theory. He helped to develop the Peres–Horodecki criterion for quantum entanglement, as well as the concept of quantum teleportation, and collaborated with others on quantum information and special relativity. He also introduced the Peres metric and researched the Hamilton–Jacobi–Einstein equation in general relativity. With Mario Feingold, he published work in quantum chaos that is known to mathematicians as the Feingold–Peres conjecture and to physicists as the Feingold–Peres theor...
Go to Profile#4422
Mike Scully
#4429
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Michael C. Scully is an American television writer and producer. He is known for his work as executive producer and showrunner of the animated sitcom The Simpsons from 1997 to 2001. Scully grew up in West Springfield, Massachusetts, and long had an interest in writing. He was an underachiever at school and dropped out of college, going on to work in a series of jobs. Eventually, in 1986, he moved to Los Angeles where he worked as a stand-up comic and wrote for Yakov Smirnoff.
Go to Profile#4423
Kurt Aland
#4430
Overall Influence
1915 - 1994 (79 years)
Kurt Aland was a German theologian and biblical scholar who specialized in New Testament textual criticism. He founded the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster and served as its first director from 1959 to 1983. He was one of the principal editors of Nestle–Aland – Novum Testamentum Graece for the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft and The Greek New Testament for the United Bible Societies.
Go to Profile#4424
Richard Lenski
#4431
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Richard Eimer Lenski is an American evolutionary biologist, a Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbial Ecology, Genetics and Evolution, and Evolution of Pathogen Virulence at Michigan State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a MacArthur Fellow. Lenski is best known for his still ongoing -year-old long-term E. coli evolution experiment, which has been instrumental in understanding the core processes of evolution, including mutation rates, clonal interference, antibiotic resistance, the evolution of novel traits, and speciation. He is also well known for h...
Go to Profile#4425
Fritz Fischer
#4432
Overall Influence
1908 - 1999 (91 years)
Fritz Fischer was a German historian best known for his analysis of the causes of World War I. In the early 1960s Fischer advanced the controversial thesis at the time that responsibility for the outbreak of the war rested solely on Imperial Germany. Fischer's anti-revisionist claims shocked the West German government and historical establishment, as it made Germany guilty for both world wars, challenging the national belief in Germany's innocence and converting its recent history into one of conquest and aggression.
Go to Profile#4426
James C. Klotter
#4433
Overall Influence
James C. Klotter is an American historian who has served as the State Historian of Kentucky since 1980. Klotter is also a history professor at Georgetown College and one of the co-authors of Kentucky's staple history book, A New History of Kentucky.
Go to Profile#4427
Bob Mackie
#4434
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Robert Gordon Mackie is an American fashion designer and costumier, best known for his dressing of entertainment icons such as Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Diahann Carroll, Carol Channing, Cher, Bette Midler, Doris Day, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Eden, Lola Falana, Farrah Fawcett, Judy Garland, Mitzi Gaynor, Liza Minnelli, Marilyn Monroe, Marie Osmond, Lynn Anderson, Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, and Barbra Streisand, among others. He was the costume designer for all the performers on The Carol Burnett Show during its entire eleven-year run. For his work, Mackie has received ...
Go to Profile#4428
Susan Fiske
#4435
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
#4429
Arfa Sayeda Zehra
#4436
Overall Influence
Arfa Sayeda Zehra is a Pakistani expert. She is current serving as the Special Advisor to the Prime Minister for Education and National Harmony Affairs. She studied first at Lahore College for Women University, then Government College University, with further degrees from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Zehra is a professor emeritus of history at Forman Christian College and is a former principal of the Lahore College for Women University. She was a chairperson on the National Commission on the Status of Women. Zehra is a former caretaker provincial minister of Punjab. She is recognized fo...
Go to Profile#4430
Barry Bonds
#4437
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Barry Lamar Bonds is an American former professional baseball left fielder who played 22 seasons in Major League Baseball . Bonds was a member of the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1986 to 1992 and the San Francisco Giants from 1993 to 2007. He is considered to be one of the greatest baseball players of all time.
Go to Profile#4431
Sundarar
#4438
Overall Influence
Sundarar , also referred to as Chuntarar, Chuntaramurtti, Nampi Aruran or Tampiran Tolan, was an eighth-century poet-saint of Tamil Shaiva Siddhanta tradition of Hinduism. He is among the Tevaram trio, and one of the most prominent Nayanars, the Shaiva bhakti poets of Tamil Nadu.
Go to Profile#4432
Claudio Naranjo
#4439
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Claudio Benjamín Naranjo Cohen was a Chilean-born psychiatrist who is considered a pioneer in integrating psychotherapy and the spiritual traditions. He was one of the three successors named by Fritz Perls , a principal developer of Enneagram of Personality theories and a founder of the Seekers After Truth Institute. He was also an elder statesman of the US and global human potential movement and the spiritual renaissance of the late 20th century. Naranjo authored several books.
Go to Profile#4433
Lucinda Roy
#4440
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Lucinda Roy is an American-based British novelist, educator and poet. Biography She was born in Battersea, South London, England, to Jamaican writer and artist Namba Roy and Yvonne Roy , an English actor and teacher. Lucinda Roy grew up in England and received her Bachelor of Arts in English from King's College London before moving to the United States, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Arkansas.
Go to Profile#4434
Peter J. Weinberger
#4441
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Peter Jay Weinberger is a computer scientist best known for his early work at Bell Labs. He now works at Google. Weinberger was an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, graduating in 1964. He received his PhD in mathematics in 1969 from the University of California, Berkeley under Derrick Henry Lehmer for a thesis entitled "Proof of a Conjecture of Gauss on Class Number Two". After holding a position in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he continued his work in analytic number theory, he moved to AT&T Bell Labs.
Go to Profile#4435
Gladys West
#4442
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Gladys Mae West is an American mathematician. She is known for her contributions to mathematical modeling of the shape of the Earth, and her work on the development of satellite geodesy models, that were later incorporated into the Global Positioning System . West was inducted into the United States Air Force Hall of Fame in 2018. West was awarded the Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for the development of satellite geodesy models.
Go to Profile#4436
Guion Bluford
#4443
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Guion Stewart Bluford Jr. is an American aerospace engineer, retired United States Air Force officer and fighter pilot, and former NASA astronaut, in which capacity he became the first African American to go to space. While assigned to NASA, he remained a USAF officer rising to the rank of colonel. He participated in four Space Shuttle flights between 1983 and 1992. In 1983, as a member of the crew of the Orbiter Challenger on the mission STS-8, he became the first African American in space as well as the second black person in space, after Cuban cosmonaut Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez.
Go to Profile#4437
Dikran Tahta
#4444
Overall Influence
1928 - 2006 (78 years)
Dikran Tahta was a British mathematician, teacher and author. He was also the maths teacher of Stephen Hawking. Early life Dikran Tahta was a descendant of Istanbul-based Armenian family of cotton merchants. His father, Kevork Tahtabrounian, , settled in Manchester with his wife in 1927, after the First World War and the Armenian genocide, shortening his surname to Tahta. Kevork run a branch of the business which took the name Manchester Textile Exporters and was able to donate £100,000 to the Armenian Community Council, which enabled the community to set up a Trust for the benefit of the Co...
Go to Profile#4438
Richard Borshay Lee
#4445
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Richard Borshay Lee is a Canadian anthropologist. Lee has studied at the University of Toronto and University of California, Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. He holds a position at the University of Toronto as Professor Emeritus of Anthropology. Lee researches issues concerning the indigenous people of Botswana and Namibia, particularly their ecology and history.
Go to Profile#4439
Hobart Muir Smith
#4446
Overall Influence
1912 - 2013 (101 years)
Hobart Muir Smith, born Frederick William Stouffer , was an American herpetologist. He is credited with describing more than 100 new species of American reptiles and amphibians. In addition, he has been honored by having at least six species named after him, including the southwestern blackhead snake , Smith's earth snake , Smith's arboreal alligator lizard , Hobart's anadia , Hobart Smith's anole , and Smith's rose-bellied lizard . At 100 years of age, Smith continued to be an active and productive herpetologist. Although he published on a wide range of herpetological subjects, his main focus...
Go to Profile#4440
Matthias Felleisen
#4447
Overall Influence
Matthias Felleisen is a German-American computer science professor and author. He grew up in Germany and immigrated to the US in his twenties. He received his PhD from Indiana University under the direction of Daniel P. Friedman.
Go to Profile#4441
Sonja Lyubomirsky
#4448
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Sonja Lyubomirsky is a Russian-born American professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside and author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want.
Go to Profile#4442
Stephen S. Roach
#4449
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Stephen Samuel Roach is an American economist. He serves as senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and a senior lecturer at the Yale School of Management. He was formerly chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, and chief economist at Morgan Stanley, the New York City-based investment bank. In 2009, Dirk Bezemer, a Professor of Economics at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, noted that Roach was one of the earliest to have predicted the 2008 global financial crisis.
Go to Profile#4443
Jeffrey Burton Russell
#4450
Overall Influence
1934 - 2023 (89 years)
Jeffrey Burton Russell was an American historian of medieval Europe and religious studies scholar. Early life Russell received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1955 and his PhD in History from Emory University in 1960.
Go to Profile#4444
Barry O'Farrell
#4451
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Barry Robert O'Farrell is an Australian former politician who was Australia's High Commissioner to India and non-resident Ambassador to Bhutan from February 2020 to 30 June 2023. O'Farrell was the 43rd Premier of New South Wales and Minister for Western Sydney from 2011 to 2014. He was the Leader of the New South Wales Liberal Party from 2007 to 2014, and was a Member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly from 1995 to 2015, representing Northcott until 1999 and representing Ku-ring-gai on the Upper North Shore of Sydney from 1999 to 2015. He was President and Independent Board Chair of...
Go to Profile#4445
Sebastian Balfour
#4452
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Sebastian Balfour is an English historian and Professor Emeritus of Contemporary Spanish Studies at the London School of Economics. Works Author BooksChapters in collective worksArticles in academic journals
Go to Profile#4446
Charles Spielberger
#4453
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Charles Donald Spielberger, Ph.D. was a clinical community psychologist well-known for his development of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. In 1972, as incoming president of the Southeastern Psychological Association he appointed the organization's Task Force on the Status of Women, chaired by Ellen Kimmel.
Go to Profile#4447
Nancy Pelosi
#4454
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Nancy Patricia Pelosi is an American politician who served as the 52nd speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 2007 to 2011 and again from 2019 to 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, she was the first woman elected as U.S. House Speaker and the first woman to lead a major political party in either chamber of Congress, leading the House Democrats from 2003 to 2023. A member of the House since 1987, Pelosi currently represents , which includes most of San Francisco.
Go to Profile#4448
Darko Suvin
#4455
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Darko Ronald Suvin is a Canadian academic, writer and critic who became a professor at McGill University in Montreal. He was born in Zagreb, which at the time was in Kingdom of Yugoslavia, now the capital of Croatia. After teaching at the Department for Comparative Literature at the Zagreb University, and writing his first books and poems in his native language , he left Yugoslavia in 1967, and started teaching at McGill University in 1968.
Go to Profile#4449
Scott Sumner
#4456
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Scott B. Sumner is an American economist. He was previously the Director of the Program on Monetary Policy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, and a professor at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. His economics blog, The Money Illusion, popularized the idea of nominal GDP targeting, which says that the Federal Reserve and other central banks should target nominal GDP, real GDP growth plus the rate of inflation, to better "induce the correct level of business investment".
Go to Profile#4450
Robin Williams
#4457
Overall Influence
1951 - 2014 (63 years)
Robin McLaurin Williams was an American actor and comedian. Known for his improvisational skills and the wide variety of characters he created on the spur of the moment and portrayed on film, in dramas and comedies alike, he is regarded as one of the greatest comedians of all time. He received numerous accolades including an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and five Grammy Awards.
Go to Profile