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
#4451
Dominique Perrault
#4458
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Dominique Perrault is a French architect and urban planner. He became world known for the design of the French National Library, distinguished with the Silver medal for town planning in 1992 and the Mies van der Rohe Prize in 1996. In 2010 he was awarded the gold medal by the French Academy of Architecture for all his work. He was named as the 2015 Praemium Imperiale Laureate for Architecture.
Go to Profile#4452
Ken Saro-Wiwa
#4459
Overall Influence
1941 - 1995 (54 years)
Kenule Beeson "Ken" Saro-Wiwa was a Nigerian writer, television producer, and environmental activist. Ken Saro-Wiwa was a member of the Ogoni people, an ethnic minority in Nigeria whose homeland, Ogoniland, in the Niger Delta, has been targeted for crude oil extraction since the 1950s and has suffered extreme environmental damage from decades of indiscriminate petroleum waste dumping.
Go to Profile#4453
H. R. McMaster
#4460
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Herbert Raymond McMaster is a retired United States Army lieutenant general who served as the 25th United States National Security Advisor from 2017 to 2018. He is also known for his roles in the Gulf War, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Go to Profile#4454
Queen Sonja of Norway
#4461
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Sonja has been Queen of Norway since 17 January 1991 as the wife of King Harald V. Sonja and the then Crown Prince Harald had dated for nine years prior to their marriage in 1968. They had kept their relationship a secret due to the controversy of Sonja's status as a commoner. Harald had told his father, King Olav V, that he would remain unmarried if his father did not grant consent to marry Sonja. Upon their marriage, Sonja became crown princess and later the queen of Norway upon her husband's accession to the throne in 1991, becoming Norway's first queen consort in 52 years. The couple has ...
Go to Profile#4455
Paul Vixie
#4462
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Paul Vixie is an American computer scientist whose technical contributions include Domain Name System protocol design and procedure, mechanisms to achieve operational robustness of DNS implementations, and significant contributions to open source software principles and methodology. He also created and launched the first successful commercial anti-spam service. He authored the standard UNIX system programs SENDS, proxynet, rtty and Vixie cron. At one point he ran his own consulting business, Vixie Enterprises.
Go to Profile#4456
Ross J. Anderson
#4463
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Ross John Anderson is a researcher, author, and industry consultant in security engineering. He is Professor of Security Engineering at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge where he is part of the University's security group.
Go to Profile#4457
Hirosi Ooguri
#4464
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Hirosi Ooguri is a theoretical physicist working on quantum field theory, quantum gravity, superstring theory, and their interfaces with mathematics. He is Fred Kavli Professor of Theoretical Physics and Mathematics and the Founding Director of the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at California Institute of Technology. He is also the director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics at the University of Tokyo and is the chair of the board of trustees of the Aspen Center for Physics in Colorado.
Go to Profile#4458
John Allen Paulos
#4465
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
John Allen Paulos is an American professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has gained fame as a writer and speaker on mathematics and the importance of mathematical literacy. Paulos writes about many subjects, especially of the dangers of mathematical innumeracy; that is, the layperson's misconceptions about numbers, probability, and logic.
Go to Profile#4459
Amin Saikal
#4466
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Professor Amin Saikal , is Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies, and Founding Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies , at the Australian National University. He is also Adjunct Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. Professor Saikal has specialised in the politics, history, political economy and international relations of the Middle East and Central Asia. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton University, Indiana University, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies , Zayed University, and visiting fellow at Cambr...
Go to Profile#4460
Marcus Grönholm
#4467
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Marcus Ulf Johan Grönholm is a Finnish former rally and rallycross driver, being part of a family of the Swedish-speaking population of Finland lineage. His son, Niclas Grönholm, is an upcoming FIA World Rallycross Championship driver. Grönholm's nicknames are either "Bosse" or "Magic Marcus". Grönholm is one of the most successful WRC drivers of all time, ranking third in rally wins , and winning two championships, in 2000 and 2002. After Peugeot withdrew from the World Rally Championship, Grönholm moved to Ford for the 2006 season and placed second in the drivers' world championship, losing out to Sébastien Loeb by one point.
Go to Profile#4461
Allan Schnaiberg
#4468
Overall Influence
1939 - 2009 (70 years)
Allan Schnaiberg was an American sociologist known especially for his contributions to environmental sociology. At the time of his death, Schnaiberg was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Go to Profile#4462
Soledad O'Brien
#4469
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
María de la Soledad Teresa O'Brien is an American broadcast journalist and executive producer. Since 2016, O'Brien has been the host for Matter of Fact with Soledad O'Brien, a nationally syndicated weekly talk show produced by Hearst Television. She is chairwoman of Starfish Media Group, a multiplatform media production company and distributor that she founded in 2013. She is also a member of the Peabody Awards board of directors, which is presented by the University of Georgia's Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Go to Profile#4463
Serge Ricard
#4470
Overall Influence
Serge Ricard, a former Fulbright Scholar, is professor of American Civilization at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. Ricard specializes in both American foreign policy and civilization. He is co-director with Pierre Melandri of OPEA, the Center for the Study of American Foreign Policy at the same university. Ricard also specializes in the foreign policy of 26th US President, Theodore Roosevelt and serves on the international advisory board of the Roosevelt Study Center in the Netherlands. In October, 2007, Ricard was a featured speaker at the Annual Meeting of the Theodore Roosevelt Association in Bos...
Go to Profile#4464
Jack Nicholson
#4471
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
John Joseph Nicholson is an American retired actor and filmmaker. Nicholson is widely regarded as one of the greatest actors of his generation. Throughout his five-decade career, Nicholson appeared in 80 films, for which he received numerous accolades, including three Academy Awards, three BAFTA Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, a Grammy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. He also received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award in 1994 and the Kennedy Center Honor in 2001. In many of his films, he played rebels against the social structure.
Go to Profile#4465
John G. Taylor
#4472
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
John Gerald Taylor was a British physicist and author. He is notable for writing a book critical of paranormal phenomena. Biography Taylor attended King Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford and Mid-Essex Polytechnic, before gaining MA and PhD degrees from Christ's College, Cambridge . He had a wide-ranging academic career in mathematical physics and artificial intelligence. He was an emeritus professor and Director of the centre for Neural Networks at King's College London and guest scientist of the Research Centre at the Institute of Medicine in Jülich, Germany. From 2007 to 2012, Taylor led a unique research program at Commerzbank's Alternative Investment Strategies Group.
Go to Profile#4466
Tom Duff
#4473
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Thomas Douglas Selkirk Duff is a computer programmer. Early life Duff was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and was named for his putative ancestor, the fifth Earl of Selkirk. He grew up in Toronto and Leaside. In 1974 he graduated from the University of Waterloo with a B.Math and, two years later, was awarded an M.Sc. from the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#4467
Bret Stephens
#4474
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Bret Louis Stephens is an American conservative journalist, editor, and columnist. He has been an opinion columnist for The New York Times and a senior contributor to NBC News since 2017. Since 2021, he has been the inaugural editor-in-chief of SAPIR: A Journal of Jewish Conversations.
Go to Profile#4468
Alice Miller
#4475
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Alice Miller , was a Polish-Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher of Jewish origin, who is noted for her books on parental child abuse, translated into several languages. She was also a noted public intellectual.
Go to Profile#4469
Bruce Bagemihl
#4476
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Bruce Bagemihl is a Canadian biologist, linguist, and author of the book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. Life and career He completed his BA at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1981, and served on the faculty of the University of British Columbia, where he taught linguistics and cognitive science. He earned a Ph.D. in linguistics from UBC in 1988, with a dissertation entitled Alternate phonologies and morphologies.
Go to Profile#4470
Elvis Costello
#4477
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Declan Patrick MacManus , better known by his stage name Elvis Costello, is an English songwriter, singer, record producer, author and television presenter. Music critics consider Costello to be one of the most gifted and versatile songwriters of his generation. His first album, My Aim Is True , is widely regarded as one of the best debut albums in popular music history. The album spawned no hit singles, but contains some of Costello's best-known songs, including the ballad "Alison". Costello's next two albums, This Year's Model and Armed Forces , recorded with his backing band the Attractions, helped define the new wave music genre.
Go to Profile#4471
Chris Evert
#4478
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Christine Marie Evert , known as Chris Evert Lloyd from 1979 to 1987, is an American former world No. 1 tennis player. Evert won 18 major singles titles, including a record seven French Open titles and a joint-record six US Open titles . Evert was ranked world No. 1 for 260 weeks, and was the year-end world No. 1 singles player seven times . Alongside Martina Navratilova, her greatest rival, Evert dominated women's tennis for much of the 1970s and 1980s.
Go to Profile#4472
Robert Sedgewick
#4479
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Robert Sedgewick is an American computer scientist. He is the founding chair and the William O. Baker Professor in Computer Science at Princeton University and was a member of the board of directors of Adobe Systems . He previously served on the faculty at Brown University and has held visiting research positions at Xerox PARC, Institute for Defense Analyses, and INRIA. His research expertise is in algorithm science, data structures, and analytic combinatorics. He is also active in developing the college curriculum in computer science and in harnessing technology to make that curriculum avail...
Go to Profile#4473
Jay E. Adams
#4480
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
Jay Edward Adams was an American Presbyterian author who wrote more than 100 books. His books have been translated into 16 languages, and he received his doctorate in preaching. Nouthetic counseling According to an interview by Aaron Blumer, Adams' major influence on counseling was the publication of his book Competent to Counsel in 1970. It is from that book that Adams developed what is known as nouthetic counseling. Over time, Adams has become a popular advocate of "strictly biblical approaches" to counseling, whose "perspectives are influencing evangelical Christianity today."
Go to Profile#4475
Andrew D. Hamilton
#4482
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Andrew David Hamilton is a British American chemist and academic administrator who served as the 16th president of New York University from 2016 to 2023. He previously served as vice chancellor of the University of Oxford from 2009 to 2015 and provost of Yale University from 2004 to 2008.
Go to Profile#4476
Peter Saville
#4483
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Peter Andrew Saville is an English art director and graphic designer. He designed many record sleeves for Factory Records, which he co-founded in 1978 alongside Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus. Early life Peter Saville was born in Manchester, Lancashire, and attended St Ambrose College. He studied graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic from 1975 to 1978.
Go to Profile#4477
Richard Koo
#4484
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Richard C. Koo is a Taiwanese economist living in Japan specializing in balance sheet recessions. He is Chief Economist at the Nomura Research Institute. Early life and education Koo was born in Kobe. His father, Koo Kwang-ming, was an activist in the Taiwan independence movement then living in exile in Japan, and the brother of the prominent Taiwanese businessman Koo Chen-fu. Koo lived in Tokyo for 13 years in his youth, and later attended the University of California, Berkeley where he received a BA degree in Political Science and Government in 1976. He then proceeded to Johns Hopkins Unive...
Go to Profile#4478
Peter Sellars
#4485
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Peter Sellars is an American theatre director, noted for his unique stagings of classical and contemporary operas and plays. Sellars is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles , where he teaches Art as Social Action and Art as Moral Action. He has been described as a key figure of theatre and opera from the last 50 years.
Go to Profile#4479
David Childs
#4486
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
David Magie Childs is an American architect and chairman emeritus of the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He is the architect of the new One World Trade Center in New York City. Early life and education Childs graduated from Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1959 and from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut in 1963. He first majored in zoology before he then turned to architecture at the Yale School of Architecture and earned his master's degree in 1967.
Go to Profile#4480
John Edgar Wideman
#4487
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
John Edgar Wideman is an American novelist, short story writer, memoirist, and essayist. He was the first person to win the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction twice. His writing is known for experimental techniques and a focus on the African-American experience.
Go to Profile#4481
Mike Massimino
#4488
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Michael James Massimino is an American professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University and a former NASA astronaut. He is the senior advisor of space programs at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum.
Go to Profile#4482
Jean Bethke Elshtain
#4489
Overall Influence
1941 - 2013 (72 years)
Jean Paulette Bethke Elshtain was an American ethicist, political philosopher, and public intellectual. She was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the University of Chicago Divinity School with a joint appointment in the department of political science.
Go to Profile#4483
Wilhelm Hanle
#4490
Overall Influence
1901 - 1993 (92 years)
Wilhelm Hanle was a German experimental physicist. He is known for the Hanle effect. During World War II, he made contributions to the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club. From 1941 until emeritus status in 1969, he was an ordinarius professor of experimental physics and held the chair of physics at the University of Giessen.
Go to Profile#4484
E. Allen Emerson
#4491
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Ernest Allen Emerson II , better known as E. Allen Emerson, is an American computer scientist and winner of the 2007 Turing Award. He is Professor and Regents Chair Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, United States.
Go to Profile#4485
Judith Martin
#4492
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Judith Martin , better known by the pen name Miss Manners, is an American columnist, author, and etiquette authority. Early life and career Martin is the daughter of Helen and Jacob Perlman, both Jewish. Her father was born in 1898 in Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire, now in Poland. He immigrated to the United States in 1912. In 1925, he received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, in economics. Jacob married Helen Aronson in 1935, and they moved to Washington, D.C., where Martin was born in 1938.
Go to Profile#4486
Bernard Levin
#4493
Overall Influence
1928 - 2004 (76 years)
Henry Bernard Levin was an English journalist, author and broadcaster, described by The Times as "the most famous journalist of his day". The son of a poor Jewish family in London, he won a scholarship to the independent school Christ's Hospital and went on to the London School of Economics, graduating in 1952. After a short spell in a lowly job at the BBC selecting press cuttings for use in programmes, he secured a post as a junior member of the editorial staff of a weekly periodical, Truth, in 1953.
Go to Profile#4487
Erol Gelenbe
#4494
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Sami Erol Gelenbe , a Turkish and French computer scientist, electronic engineer and applied mathematician, pioneered the field of Computer System and Network Performance. Currently Professor in the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Informatics of the Polish Academy of Sciences , he is also an Associate Researcher in the I3S Laboratory and Abraham de Moivre Laboratory . Fellow of several National Academies, he Chairs the Informatics Section of Academia Europaea since 2023. His previous Professorial Chairs include the University of Liège , University Paris-Saclay , University Paris Descart...
Go to Profile#4488
Stanley Kauffmann
#4495
Overall Influence
1916 - 2013 (97 years)
Stanley Kauffmann was an American writer, editor, and critic of film and theater. Career Kauffmann started with The New Republic in 1958 and contributed film criticism to that magazine for the next 55 years, publishing his last review in 2013. He had one brief break in his New Republic tenure, when he served as the drama critic for the New York Times for eight months in 1966.
Go to Profile#4489
Jessica Mitford
#4496
Overall Influence
1917 - 1996 (79 years)
Jessica Lucy "Decca" Treuhaft was an English author, one of the six aristocratic Mitford sisters noted for their sharply conflicting politics. Jessica married her second cousin Esmond Romilly, who was killed in World War II, and then American civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft, with whom she joined the Communist Party USA and worked closely in the Civil Rights Congress. Both refused to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. They resigned from the party in 1958.
Go to Profile#4490
Stephen C. Meyer
#4497
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Stephen C. Meyer is an American author and former educator. He is an advocate of the pseudoscience of intelligent design and helped found the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute , which is the main organization behind the intelligent design movement. Before joining the DI, Meyer was a professor at Whitworth College. Meyer is a senior fellow of the DI and director of the CSC.
Go to Profile#4491
Edwidge Danticat
#4498
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. As of the fall of 2023, she will be the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#4492
Robert Jervis
#4499
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Robert Jervis was an American political scientist who was the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. Jervis was co-editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, a series published by Cornell University Press.
Go to Profile#4493
Jackie Mason
#4500
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Jackie Mason was an American stand-up comedian and actor. His 1986 one-man show The World According to Me! won a Special Tony Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, an Ace Award, an Emmy Award, and earned a Grammy nomination. Later, his 1988 special Jackie Mason on Broadway won another Emmy Award and another Ace Award, and his 1991 voice-over of Rabbi Hyman Krustofski in The Simpsons episode "Like Father, Like Clown" won Mason a third Emmy Award. He wrote and performed six one-man shows on Broadway.
Go to Profile#4494
Aravind Joshi
#4501
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Aravind Krishna Joshi was the Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science in the computer science department of the University of Pennsylvania. Joshi defined the tree-adjoining grammar formalism which is often used in computational linguistics and natural language processing.
Go to Profile#4495
Hilton Als
#4502
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Hilton Als is an American writer and theater critic. He is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, an associate professor of writing at Columbia University and a staff writer and theater critic for The New Yorker magazine. He is a former staff writer for The Village Voice and former editor-at-large at Vibe magazine.
Go to Profile#4496
Lubert Stryer
#4503
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Lubert Stryer is the Emeritus Mrs. George A. Winzer Professor of Cell Biology, at Stanford University School of Medicine. His research over more than four decades has been centered on the interplay of light and life. In 2007 he received the National Medal of Science from President Bush at a ceremony at the White House for elucidating the biochemical basis of signal amplification in vision, pioneering the development of high density microarrays for genetic analysis, and authoring the standard undergraduate biochemistry textbook, Biochemistry. It is now in its ninth edition and also edited by Jeremy Berg, John L.
Go to Profile#4497
M. Stanley Whittingham
#4504
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Michael Stanley Whittingham is a British-American chemist. He is a professor of chemistry and director of both the Institute for Materials Research and the Materials Science and Engineering program at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He also serves as director of the Northeastern Center for Chemical Energy Storage of the U.S. Department of Energy at Binghamton. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 alongside Akira Yoshino and John B. Goodenough.
Go to Profile#4498
William A. Niskanen
#4505
Overall Influence
1933 - 2011 (78 years)
William Arthur Niskanen was an American economist. He was one of the architects of President Ronald Reagan's economic program and contributed to public choice theory. He was also a long-time chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank.
Go to Profile#4499
William Foote Whyte
#4506
Overall Influence
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
William Foote Whyte was an American sociologist chiefly known for his ethnographic study in urban sociology, Street Corner Society. A pioneer in participant observation, he lived for four years in an Italian community in Boston while a Junior Fellow at Harvard researching social relations of street gangs in Boston's North End.
Go to Profile#4500
Benedict Gross
#4507
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Benedict Hyman Gross is an American mathematician who is a professor at the University of California San Diego, the George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at Harvard University, and former Dean of Harvard College.
Go to Profile