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
#451
Urie Bronfenbrenner
#451
Overall Influence
1917 - 2005 (88 years)
Urie Bronfenbrenner was a Russian-born American psychologist best known for using a contextual framework to better understand human development. This framework, broadly referred to as 'ecological systems theory', was formalized in an article published in American Psychologist, articulated in a series of propositions and hypotheses in his most cited book, The Ecology of Human Development and further developed in The Bioecological Model of Human Development and later writings. He argued that natural experiments and applied developmental interventions provide valuable scientific opportunities. These beliefs were exemplified in his involvement in developing the US Head Start program in 1965.
Go to Profile#452
Tom Regan
#452
Overall Influence
1938 - 2017 (79 years)
Tom Regan was an American philosopher who specialized in animal rights theory. He was professor emeritus of philosophy at North Carolina State University, where he had taught from 1967 until his retirement in 2001.
Go to Profile#453
Simon Donaldson
#453
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
#454
Christopher Tolkien
#454
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Christopher John Reuel Tolkien was an English and naturalised French academic editor. The son of author and academic J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien edited much of his father's posthumously published work, including The Silmarillion and the 12-volume series The History of Middle-Earth. Tolkien also drew the original maps for his father's The Lord of the Rings.
Go to Profile#455
Bobby Seale
#455
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Robert George Seale is an American political activist and author. Seale is widely known for co-founding the Black Panther Party with fellow activist Huey P. Newton. Founded as the "Black Panther Party for Self-Defense", the Party's main practice was monitoring police activities and challenging police brutality in Black communities, first in Oakland, California, and later in cities throughout the United States.
Go to Profile#456
Sonia Sotomayor
#456
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Sonia Maria Sotomayor is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009, and has served since August 8, 2009. She is the third woman, first woman of color, the first Hispanic, and first Latina to serve on the Supreme Court.
Go to Profile#457
John Henry Holland
#457
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
John Henry Holland was an American scientist and professor of psychology and electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was a pioneer in what became known as genetic algorithms.
Go to Profile#458
Edward Albee
#458
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Edward Franklin Albee III was an American playwright known for works such as The Zoo Story , The Sandbox , Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , A Delicate Balance , and Three Tall Women . Some critics have argued that some of his work constitutes an American variant of what Martin Esslin identified and named the Theater of the Absurd. Three of his plays won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and two of his other works won the Tony Award for Best Play.
Go to Profile#459
Jimmy Fallon
#459
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
James Thomas Fallon is an American comedian, television host and actor. Best known for his work in television, Fallon's breakthrough came during his tenure as a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 1998 to 2004. He was the host of the late-night talk show Late Night with Jimmy Fallon from 2009 to 2014, and became the anchor of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon following his departure from Late Night.
Go to Profile#460
Klaus Schwab
#460
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Klaus Martin Schwab is a German engineer, economist, and founder of the World Economic Forum . He has acted as the WEF's chairman since founding the organisation in 1971. Early life and education Klaus Martin Schwab was born on March 30, 1938, to Eugen Wilhelm Schwab and Erika Epprecht in Ravensburg. His parents had moved from Switzerland to Germany during the Third Reich in order for his father to assume the role of director at Escher Wyss AG, an industrial company and contractor for the Nazi regime. Schwab's family was monitored by the Gestapo, which in 1944 also interrogated his mother for speaking with a Swiss accent in public.
Go to Profile#461
William Gibson
#461
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" , and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer .
Go to Profile#462
Michael Chertoff
#462
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Michael Chertoff is an American attorney who was the second United States Secretary of Homeland Security to serve under President George W. Bush. Chertoff also served for one additional day under President Barack Obama. He was the co-author of the USA PATRIOT Act. Chertoff previously served as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, as a federal prosecutor, and as Assistant U.S. Attorney General. He succeeded Tom Ridge as U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security on February 15, 2005.
Go to Profile#463
Paul Berg
#463
Overall Influence
1926 - 2023 (97 years)
Paul Berg was an American biochemist and professor at Stanford University. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980, along with Walter Gilbert and Frederick Sanger. The award recognized their contributions to basic research involving nucleic acids, especially recombinant DNA.
Go to Profile#464
Robert D. Putnam
#464
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robert David Putnam is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government. Putnam developed the influential two-level game theory that assumes international agreements will only be successfully brokered if they also result in domestic benefits. His most famous work, Bowling Alone, argues that the United States has undergone an unprecedented collapse in civic, social, associational, and political life since the 1960s, with serious negative consequences.
Go to Profile#465
E. P. Thompson
#465
Overall Influence
1924 - 1993 (69 years)
Edward Palmer Thompson was an English historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is best known today for his historical work on the radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class .
Go to Profile#466
James Randi
#466
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
James Randi was a Canadian-American stage magician, author and scientific skeptic who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. He was the co-founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry , and founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation . Randi began his career as a magician under the stage name The Amazing Randi and later chose to devote most of his time to investigating paranormal, occult, and supernatural claims. Randi retired from practicing magic at age 60, and from his foundation at 87.
Go to Profile#467
Peter Eisenman
#467
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Peter David Eisenman is an American architect, writer, and professor. Considered one of the New York Five, Eisenman is known for his high modernist and deconstructive designs, as well as for his authorship of several architectural books. His work has won him several awards, including the Wolf Prize in Arts.
Go to Profile#468
Morris Halle
#468
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Morris Halle, Pinkowitz , was a Latvian-born American linguist who was an Institute Professor, and later professor emeritus, of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The father of "modern phonology", he was best known for his pioneering work in generative phonology, having written "On Accent and Juncture in English" in 1956 with Noam Chomsky and Fred Lukoff and The Sound Pattern of English in 1968 with Chomsky. He also co-authored the earliest theory of generative metrics.
Go to Profile#469
Rodney King
#469
Overall Influence
1969 - 2012 (43 years)
Rodney Glen King was an African American man who was a victim of police brutality. On March 3, 1991, he was severely beaten by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department during his arrest after a high speed pursuit for driving while intoxicated on the I-210. An uninvolved resident, George Holliday, saw and filmed the incident from his nearby balcony and sent the footage, which showed the unarmed King on the ground being beaten after initially evading arrest, to local news station KTLA. The incident was covered by news media around the world and caused a public uproar.
Go to Profile#470
Edzard Ernst
#470
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Edzard Ernst is a retired British-German academic physician and researcher specializing in the study of complementary and alternative medicine. He was Professor of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter, the world's first such academic position in complementary and alternative medicine.
Go to Profile#471
Robert Rubin
#471
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Robert Edward Rubin is an American retired banking executive, lawyer, and former government official. He served as the 70th United States Secretary of the Treasury during the Clinton administration. Before his government service, he spent 26 years at Goldman Sachs, eventually serving as a member of the board and co-chairman from 1990 to 1992.
Go to Profile#472
Klaus Barbie
#472
Overall Influence
1913 - 1991 (78 years)
Nikolaus Barbie was a German officer of the SS and SD who worked in Vichy France during World War II. He became known as the "Butcher of Lyon" for having personally tortured prisoners—primarily Jews and members of the French Resistance—as the head of the Gestapo in Lyon. After the war, United States intelligence services employed him for his anti-communist efforts and aided his escape to Bolivia, where he advised the dictatorial regime on how to repress opposition through torture. In 1983, the United States apologised to France for the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps helping him escape to Boli...
Go to Profile#473
G. E. M. Anscombe
#473
Overall Influence
1919 - 2001 (82 years)
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe , usually cited as G. E. M. Anscombe or Elizabeth Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher. She wrote on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and ethics. She was a prominent figure of analytical Thomism, a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and a professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#474
Adi Shamir
#474
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
#475
Jerry Pournelle
#475
Overall Influence
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
Jerry Eugene Pournelle was an American scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research, a science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers. In the 1960s and early 1970s, he worked in the aerospace industry, but eventually focused on his writing career. In an obituary in Gizmodo, he is described as "a tireless ambassador for the future."
Go to Profile#476
Oliver E. Williamson
#476
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Oliver Eaton Williamson was an American economist, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which he shared with Elinor Ostrom.
Go to Profile#477
Rush Limbaugh
#477
Overall Influence
1951 - 2021 (70 years)
Rush Hudson Limbaugh III was an American conservative political commentator who was the host of The Rush Limbaugh Show, which first aired in 1984 and was nationally syndicated on AM and FM radio stations from 1988 until his death in 2021.
Go to Profile#478
George Monbiot
#478
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
George Joshua Richard Monbiot is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism. He writes a regular column for The Guardian and is the author of a number of books. Monbiot grew up in Oxfordshire and studied zoology at the University of Oxford. He then began a career in investigative journalism, publishing his first book Poisoned Arrows in 1989 about human rights issues in West Papua. In later years, he has been involved in activism and advocacy related to various issues, such as climate change, British politics and loneliness. In Feral , he discussed and endorsed expansion of rewilding.
Go to Profile#479
Jean Nouvel
#479
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jean Nouvel is a French architect. Nouvel studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was a founding member of Mars 1976 and Syndicat de l'Architecture, France’s first labor union for architects. He has obtained a number of prestigious distinctions over the course of his career, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture , the Wolf Prize in Arts in 2005 and the Pritzker Prize in 2008. A number of museums and architectural centres have presented retrospectives of his work.
Go to Profile#480
Mike Harris
#480
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Michael Deane Harris is a Canadian retired politician who served as the 22nd premier of Ontario from 1995 to 2002 and leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario from 1990 to 2002. During his time as party leader, he heavily nudged the Ontario PC Party to Blue Toryism, advocating for the "Common Sense Revolution", his government's program of deficit reduction in combination with lower taxes and budget cuts.
Go to Profile#481
Leszek Kołakowski
#481
Overall Influence
1927 - 2009 (82 years)
Leszek Kołakowski was a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. He is best known for his critical analyses of Marxist thought, such as in his three-volume history of Marxist philosophy Main Currents of Marxism . In his later work, Kołakowski increasingly focused on religious questions. In his 1986 Jefferson Lecture, he asserted that "we learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are".
Go to Profile#482
Julia Child
#482
Overall Influence
1912 - 2004 (92 years)
Julia Carolyn Child was an American chef, author, and television personality. She is recognized for bringing French cuisine to the American public with her debut cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her subsequent television programs, the most notable of which was The French Chef, which premiered in 1963.
Go to Profile#483
Juan Ponce Enrile
#483
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
Juan Valentin Furagganan Ponce Enrile Sr., , also referred to by his initials JPE, is a Filipino politician and lawyer known for his role in the administration of Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos; his role in the failed coup that helped hasten the 1986 People Power Revolution and the ouster of Marcos; and his tenure in the Philippine legislature in the years after the revolution. Enrile has served four terms in the Senate, in a total of twenty-three years, he holds the third longest-tenure in the history of the upper chamber. In 2022, at the age of 98, he returned to government office as...
Go to Profile#484
Derek Parfit
#484
Overall Influence
1942 - 2017 (75 years)
Derek Antony Parfit was a British philosopher who specialised in personal identity, rationality, and ethics. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Go to Profile#485
Kevin Warwick
#485
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Kevin Warwick is an English engineer and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Coventry University. He is known for his studies on direct interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system, and has also done research concerning robotics.
Go to Profile#486
Juan Guaidó
#486
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Juan Gerardo Guaidó Márquez is a Venezuelan opposition politician. He belonged to the social-democratic party Popular Will, and was a federal deputy to the National Assembly representing the state of Vargas. On 23 January 2019, Guaidó and the National Assembly declared that he was acting president of Venezuela , starting the Venezuelan presidential crisis by challenging Nicolás Maduro's presidency. In December 2022, opposition parties voted to dismiss Guaidó as interim president, choosing Dinorah Figuera as a successor on 5 January 2023 and ending Guaidó's presidential claim.
Go to Profile#487
Luc Montagnier
#487
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
Luc Montagnier was a French virologist and joint recipient, with and , of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus . He worked as a researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and as a full-time professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.
Go to Profile#488
Elizabeth Blackburn
#488
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Elizabeth Blackburn is a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco, studying the impacts of stress on telomerase and telomeres. She is the former president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the first Australian woman to win a Nobel prize. She earned a bachelor of science and a master of science from the University of Melbourne. She went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. She is best known for her co-discovery of the telomerase, which is the enzyme that replenishes telomere. She and colleagues Carol W. Greider and Jack Szostak were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for this work.
Go to Profile#489
Tom Shippey
#489
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Thomas Alan Shippey is a British medievalist, a retired scholar of Middle and Old English literature as well as of modern fantasy and science fiction. He is considered one of the world's leading academic experts on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien about whom he has written several books and many scholarly papers. His book The Road to Middle-Earth has been called "the single best thing written on Tolkien".
Go to Profile#490
Leo Esaki
#490
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Reona Esaki , also known as Leo Esaki, is a Japanese physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Ivar Giaever and Brian David Josephson for his work in electron tunneling in semiconductor materials which finally led to his invention of the Esaki diode, which exploited that phenomenon. This research was done when he was with Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo . He has also contributed in being a pioneer of the semiconductor superlattices.
Go to Profile#491
Friedrich Hirzebruch
#491
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Friedrich Ernst Peter Hirzebruch ForMemRS was a German mathematician, working in the fields of topology, complex manifolds and algebraic geometry, and a leading figure in his generation. He has been described as "the most important mathematician in Germany of the postwar period."
Go to Profile#492
Alastair Campbell
#492
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Alastair John Campbell is a British journalist, author, strategist, broadcaster and activist, known for his political roles during Tony Blair's leadership of the Labour Party. Campbell worked as Blair's spokesman and campaign director in opposition , then as Downing Street Press Secretary, and as the Prime Minister's Official Spokesperson . He then became Downing Street director of communications and spokesman for the Labour Party . He returned as campaign director for the 2005 general election in Blair's third win.
Go to Profile#493
Terry Winograd
#493
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Terry Allen Winograd is an American professor of computer science at Stanford University, and co-director of the Stanford Human–Computer Interaction Group. He is known within the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence fields for his work on natural language using the SHRDLU program.
Go to Profile#494
Hillary Clinton
#494
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is an American politician and diplomat who served as the 67th United States secretary of state in the administration of Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, as a U.S. senator representing New York from 2001 to 2009, and as the first lady of the U.S. to president Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001. A member of the Democratic Party, she was the party's nominee in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, becoming the first woman to win a presidential nomination by a major U.S. political party.
Go to Profile#495
Rudolf Peierls
#495
Overall Influence
1907 - 1995 (88 years)
Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, was a German-born British physicist who played a major role in Tube Alloys, Britain's nuclear weapon programme, as well as the subsequent Manhattan Project, the combined Allied nuclear bomb programme. His 1996 obituary in Physics Today described him as "a major player in the drama of the eruption of nuclear physics into world affairs".
Go to Profile#496
Anderson Cooper
#496
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Anderson Hays Cooper is an American broadcast journalist and political commentator currently anchoring the CNN news broadcast show Anderson Cooper 360°. In addition to his duties at CNN, Cooper serves as a correspondent for 60 Minutes on CBS News. After graduating from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1989, he began traveling the world, shooting footage of war-torn regions for Channel One News. Cooper was hired by ABC News as a correspondent in 1995, but he soon took more jobs throughout the network, working for a short time as a co-anchor, reality game show host, and fill-in mornin...
Go to Profile#497
Daniel Bell
#497
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
Daniel Bell was an American sociologist, writer, editor, and professor at Harvard University, best known for his contributions to the study of post-industrialism. He has been described as "one of the leading American intellectuals of the postwar era". His three best known works are The End of Ideology, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.
Go to Profile#498
Douglas McIlroy
#498
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Malcolm Douglas McIlroy is a mathematician, engineer, and programmer. As of 2019 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. McIlroy is best known for having originally proposed Unix pipelines and developed several Unix tools, such as spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, and tr. He was also one of the pioneering researchers of macro processorss and programming language extensibility. He participated in the design of multiple influential programming languages, particularly PL/I, SNOBOL, ALTRAN, TMG and C++.
Go to Profile#499
Stuart Hall
#499
Overall Influence
1932 - 2014 (82 years)
Stuart Henry McPhail Hall was a Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist, cultural theorist, and political activist. Hall — along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams — was one of the founding figures of the school of thought known as British Cultural Studies or the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.
Go to Profile#500
Richard S. Hamilton
#500
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Richard Streit Hamilton is an American mathematician who serves as the Davies Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University. He is known for contributions to geometric analysis and partial differential equations. Hamilton is best known for foundational contributions to the theory of the Ricci flow and the development of a corresponding program of techniques and ideas for resolving the Poincaré conjecture and geometrization conjecture in the field of geometric topology. Grigori Perelman built upon Hamilton's results to prove the conjectures, and was awarded a Millennium Prize for his work. H...
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