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
Peter Smith
#19066
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Peter H. Smith is a professor emeritus at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona, where he holds the inaugural Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair in Integrative Science. He is also the principal investigator for the $420 million robotic explorer Phoenix which landed at the north pole of the planet Mars on May 25, 2008. Peter H. Smith's papers are held at the University of Arizona Special Collections Library.
Go to Profile#452
Elliot Meyerowitz
#19081
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Elliot Meyerowitz is an American biologist. Career Meyerowitz did his undergraduate work at Columbia University , where he worked part-time in the laboratory of Cyrus Levinthal on combined microscopic and computational methods for tracing axons and dendritic trees in the nervous systems of fish. His graduate work was in the Department of Biology at Yale University , where he worked in the laboratory of Douglas Kankel on the interaction of eye and brain development in Drosophila, by use of genetic mosaics. From 1977 to 1979 he was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of David Hogness in the...
Go to Profile#453
Duncan Odom
#19141
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Duncan Odom is a research group leader at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, and the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute at the University of Cambridge. Previously he was as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute from 2011 to 2018.
Go to Profile#454
Kathryn Beers
#19149
Overall Influence
Kathryn L. Beers is an American polymer chemist. Beers is Leader of the Polymers and Complex Fluids group in the Materials Science and Engineering Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Her research interests include microreactors and microfluidics, advances in polymer synthesis and reaction monitoring, macromolecular separations, integrated and high throughput measurements of polymeric materials, degradable and renewable polymeric materials, and sustainable materials.
Go to Profile#455
Kim Nasmyth
#19195
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Kim Ashley Nasmyth is an English geneticist, the Whitley Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, former scientific director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology , and former head of the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford. He is best known for his work on the segregation of chromosomes during cell division.
Go to Profile#456
Norman Zabusky
#19202
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Norman J. Zabusky was an American physicist, who is noted for the discovery of the soliton in the Korteweg–de Vries equation, in work completed with Martin Kruskal. This result early in his career was followed by an extensive body of work in computational fluid dynamics, which led him in the latter years of his career to an examination of the importance of visualization in this field. In fact, he coined the term visiometrics to describe the process of using computer-aided visualization to guide one towards quantitative results.
Go to Profile#457
Marvin Leonard Goldberger
#19218
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Marvin Leonard "Murph" Goldberger was an American theoretical physicist and former president of the California Institute of Technology. Biography Goldberger was born in Chicago, Illinois. He went on to receive his B.S. at the Carnegie Institute of Technology , and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1948. His advisor on thesis, Interaction of High-Energy Neutrons with Heavy Nuclei, was Enrico Fermi. While serving in the Army shortly after graduation, he was assigned to the Manhattan Project, where he worked under renowned physicist Enrico Fermi from 1943–45.
Go to Profile#458
Richard Ellis
#19231
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Richard Salisbury Ellis is Professor of Astrophysics at the University College London. He previously served as the Steele Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology . He was awarded the 2011 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, in 2022 the Royal Medal of the Royal Society and in 2023 the Gruber Prize in Cosmology.
Go to Profile#459
Wilhelmus Luxemburg
#19254
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Wilhelmus Anthonius Josephus Luxemburg was a Dutch American mathematician who was a professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. He received his B.A. from the University of Leiden in 1950; his M.A., in 1953; his Ph.D., from the Delft Institute of Technology, in 1955. He was assistant professor at Caltech during 1958–60; Associate Professor, during 1960–62; Professor, during 1962–2000; Professor Emeritus, from 2000. He was the Executive Officer for Mathematics during 1970–85. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Luxemburg became a correspondin...
Go to Profile#460
John Chambers
#19272
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
John McKinley Chambers is the creator of the S programming language, and core member of the R programming language project. He was awarded the 1998 ACM Software System Award for developing S. Early life Chambers received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto in 1963. He received a Master of Arts in 1965 and a PhD degree in 1966, both in statistics, from Harvard University.
Go to Profile#461
Matilde Marcolli
#19274
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Matilde Marcolli is an Italian and American mathematical physicist. She has conducted research work in areas of mathematics and theoretical physics; obtained the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Preis of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Sofia Kovalevskaya Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Marcolli has authored and edited numerous books in the field. She is currently the Robert F. Christy Professor of Mathematics and Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#462
James M. Bower
#19280
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
James Mason Bower is an American neuroscientist and CEO and chairman of the Board of Numedeon Inc., creator of the Whyville.net educational virtual world. He graduated from McQuaid Jesuit High School in Rochester, New York attending Antioch College and Montana State University as an undergraduate and then received his PhD in neurophysiology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, U.S. in 1982. From 1984 until 2001, he was a professor at the California Institute of Technology and from 2001 until 2013 he was a professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. At pres...
Go to Profile#463
Robert C. James
#19366
Overall Influence
1918 - 2004 (86 years)
Robert Clarke James was an American mathematician who worked in functional analysis. Biography James attended UCLA as an undergraduate, where his father was a professor. As a devout Quaker, he was a conscientious objector during World War II.
Go to Profile#464
Sohrab Rohani
#19379
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Sohrab Rohani is a professor and former chairman of the University of Western Ontario's Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering. His main areas of research are crystallization of pharmaceuticals and process control.
Go to Profile#465
Nariman Mehta
#19493
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
Nariman Bomanshaw Mehta was an Indian-born American organic chemist and pharmacologist who designed, synthesized, and patented the organic compound bupropion, marketed under the name Wellbutrin as an antidepressant and smoking cessation aid.
Go to Profile#466
Zhou Chaochen
#19570
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Zhou Chaochen is a Chinese computer scientist. Zhou was born in Nanhui, Shanghai, China. He studied as an undergraduate at the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics, Peking University and as a postgraduate at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences .
Go to Profile#467
Sean J. Morrison
#19660
Overall Influence
Sean J. Morrison is a Canadian-American stem cell biologist and cancer researcher. Morrison is the director of Children's Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern, a nonprofit research institute established in 2011 as a joint venture between Children’s Health System of Texas and UT Southwestern Medical Center. The CRI was established in 2011 by Morrison with the mission to perform transformative biomedical research at the interface of stem cell biology, cancer, and metabolism to better understand the biological basis of disease. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Go to Profile#468
Garrett Reisman
#19741
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Garrett Erin Reisman is an American engineer and former NASA astronaut. He was a backup crew member for Expedition 15 and joined Expedition 16 aboard the International Space Station for a short time before becoming a member of Expedition 17. He returned to Earth on June 14, 2008 on board STS-124 on Space Shuttle Discovery. He was a member of the STS-132 mission that traveled to the International Space Station aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis from May 14 to 26, 2010. He is a consultant at SpaceX and a Professor of Astronautics Practice at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of...
Go to Profile#469
Richard E. Dickerson
#19809
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
Richard E. Dickerson is an American biochemist. He was the first to carry out a single-crystal structure analysis of B-DNA, with what has become known as the "Dickerson dodecamer": C-G-C-G-A-A-T-T-C-G-C-G. At UCLA he has continued his investigations of the structures of A- and B-DNA, and of complexes between DNA and drugs or proteins. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985. During the academic year 1997-1998, Dickerson was the Newton-Abraham Visiting Professor in Medical, Biological and Chemical Science at Lincoln College and the L...
Go to Profile#470
Lance Taylor
#19812
Overall Influence
1940 - 2022 (82 years)
Lance Jerome Taylor was an American economist who was known for his contributions to structuralist macroeconomics. He was the Arnhold Professor of International Cooperation and Development and director of the Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research
Go to Profile#471
Gary Flandro
#19814
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Gary Arnold Flandro is an American aerospace engineer who is currently the professor for the Boling Chair of Excellence in Space Propulsion at the University of Tennessee Space Institute. He is also the Vice President and Chief Engineer for Gloyer-Taylor Laboratories .
Go to Profile#472
David Schramm
#19863
Overall Influence
1945 - 1997 (52 years)
David Norman Schramm was an American astrophysicist and educator, and one of the world's foremost experts on the Big Bang theory. Schramm was a pioneer in establishing particle astrophysics as a vibrant research field. He was particularly well known for the study of Big Bang nucleosynthesis and its use as a probe of dark matter and of neutrinos. He also made important contributions to the study of cosmic rays, supernova explosions, heavy-element nucleosynthesis, and nuclear astrophysics generally.
Go to Profile#473
Sean Solomon
#20109
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Sean Carl Solomon is the director of the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, where he is also the William B. Ransford Professor of Earth and Planetary Science. Before moving to Columbia in 2012, he was the director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C. His research area is in geophysics, including the fields of planetary geology, seismology, marine geophysics, and geodynamics. Solomon is the principal investigator on the NASA MESSENGER mission to Mercury. He is also a team member on the Gravity Recovery and Interior Labo...
Go to Profile#474
Charles R. Alcock
#20139
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Charles Roger Alcock is a British New Zealander astronomer. He was the director of the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 2004–2022. Career Born in Windsor, Berkshire, England, Alcock attended Westlake Boys High School in the North Shore of Auckland from 1965 to 1968. Alcock earned his PhD in astronomy and physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1977. He began his career as long-term member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey . He was associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
Go to Profile#475
Scott E. Fraser
#20156
Overall Influence
Scott E. Fraser is an American biophysicist and Provost Professor of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California . He is also the Elizabeth Garrett Chair in Convergent Bioscience and Director of Science Initiatives, where he is helping to launch USC’s Initiative in Convergent Bioscience. In addition, he holds joint appointments in the Departments of Physiology and Biophysics, Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Pediatrics, Radiology, and Ophthalmology.
Go to Profile#476
A. Dale Kaiser
#20248
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Armin Dale Kaiser was an American biochemist, molecular geneticist, molecular biologist and developmental biologist. Biography Kaiser received in 1950 his bachelor's degree from Purdue University and in 1955 his PhD from Caltech in biology. At Caltech he was in Max Delbrück's bacteriophage group and received his PhD in biology under Jean Weigle with thesis A genetic analysis of bacteriophage lambda. Kaiser was in 1956 a postdoc at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and afterward became an instructor and then in 1958 an assistant professor in microbiology at Washington University in St. Louis. I...
Go to Profile#477
Mark B. Wise
#20249
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Mark Brian Wise is a Canadian-American theoretical physicist. He has conducted research in elementary particle physics and cosmology. He is best known for his role in the development of heavy quark effective theory , a mathematical formalism that has allowed physicists to make predictions about otherwise intractable problems in the theory of the strong nuclear interactions. He has also published work on mathematical models for finance and risk assessment.
Go to Profile#478
Nasir Ahmed
#20336
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Nasir Ahmed is an Indian-American electrical engineer and computer scientist. He is Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of New Mexico . He is best known for inventing the discrete cosine transform in the early 1970s. The DCT is the most widely used data compression transformation, the basis for most digital media standards and commonly used in digital signal processing. He also described the discrete sine transform , which is related to the DCT.
Go to Profile#479
Lorenzo A. Richards
#20411
Overall Influence
1904 - 1993 (89 years)
Lorenzo Adolph Richards or known as Ren was one of the 20th century's most influential minds in the field of soil physics. Biography Early life Lorenzo A. Richards was born on April 24, 1904, in the town of Fielding, Utah, and received a B.S. and M.A. degree in physics from Utah State University. He was the grandson of early Mormon leader and pioneer Willard Richards. His PhD thesis, completed at Cornell University in 1931 and entitled Capillary conduction of liquids through porous mediums, was arguably one of the best known in the field of soil physics.
Go to Profile#480
Jorge Cham
#20426
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Jorge Gabriel Cham is an engineer-turned cartoonist, writer and producer, who writes the web comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper . Cham was born in Panama and lives in the United States, where he started drawing PhD Comics as a graduate student at Stanford University. He has since been syndicated in several university newspapers and in six published book collections. He was featured on NPR on December 20, 2010. With physicist Daniel Whiteson, he is the coauthor of We Have No Idea , a book about unsolved problems in physics. In September 2018, Cham and Whiteson debuted the podcast Daniel and ...
Go to Profile#481
R. M. Wilson
#20444
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Richard Michael Wilson is a mathematician and a professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology. Wilson and his PhD supervisor Dijen K. Ray-Chaudhuri, solved Kirkman's schoolgirl problem in 1968. Wilson is known for his work in combinatorial mathematics, as well as on historical flutes.
Go to Profile#482
Kamaloddin Jenab
#20466
Overall Influence
1908 - 2006 (98 years)
Kamaloddin Jenab was an Iranian pioneer physicist. He is often credited for founding academic experimental science in Iranian universities. He was the first Iranian to obtain a PhD in nuclear physics, and is often credited for laying the foundations of that science in Iran.
Go to Profile#483
Brian Tucker
#20480
Overall Influence
Brian E. Tucker is an American seismologist specializing in disaster prevention. He is also the founder of GeoHazards International , a non-profit dedicated to ending preventable death and suffering caused by natural disasters in the world’s most vulnerable communities.
Go to Profile#484
Herbert Keller
#20490
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Herbert Bishop Keller was an American applied mathematician and numerical analyst. He was professor of applied mathematics, emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology. Early life and education Keller graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a bachelor's in electrical engineering in 1945; and from New York University, later known as the Courant Institute, with a Ph.D. in 1954.
Go to Profile#485
Werner J. A. Dahm
#20496
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Werner J.A. Dahm is an ASU Foundation Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at Arizona State University. Dahm is the director of the Security & Defense Systems Initiative at ASU. Dahm is Emeritus Professor of Aerospace Engineering at University of Michigan. He is a member of the United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board.
Go to Profile#486
Samuel L. Braunstein
#20629
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Samuel Leon Braunstein is a professor at the University of York, UK. He is a member of a research group in non-standard computation, and has a particular interest in quantum information, quantum computation and black hole thermodynamics.
Go to Profile#487
Richard Crandall
#20684
Overall Influence
1947 - 2012 (65 years)
Richard E. Crandall was an American physicist and computer scientist who made contributions to computational number theory. Background Crandall was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and spent two years at Caltech before transferring to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he graduated in physics and wrote his undergraduate thesis on randomness. He earned his Ph.D in theoretical physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#488
H. Jeff Kimble
#20708
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Harry Jeffrey Kimble , was the William L. Valentine Professor and professor of physics at Caltech. His research is in quantum optics and is noted for groundbreaking experiments in physics including one of the first demonstrations of teleportation of a quantum state , quantum logic gate, and the development of the first single atom laser. According to Elizabeth Rogan, OSA CEO, "Jeff has led a revolution in modern physics through his pioneering research in the coherent control of the interactions of light and matter." Kimble's main research focus is in quantum information science and the qua...
Go to Profile#489
Monica Grady
#20740
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Monica Mary Grady, CBE , is a leading British space scientist, primarily known for her work on meteorites. She is currently Professor of Planetary and Space Science at the Open University and is also the Chancellor of Liverpool Hope University.
Go to Profile#490
Raymond L. Orbach
#20743
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Raymond Lee Orbach is an American physicist and administrator. He served as Under Secretary for Science in the United States Department of Energy from 2006 until 2009, when he was replaced by Steven E. Koonin. Until his resignation in December 2012, Orbach was director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Orbach continues to do research as a tenured professor in the Cockrell Family Dean's Chair for Engineering Excellence at the University of Texas.
Go to Profile#491
Barclay Kamb
#20747
Overall Influence
1931 - 2011 (80 years)
Walter Barclay Kamb was a longtime professor and researcher at the California Institute of Technology . Professor Kamb was one of the first scientists to journey to the Antarctic to study how the glacier sheets move and operate. He is listed as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the Geology department.
Go to Profile#492
Holden Thorp
#20762
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Herbert Holden Thorp is an American chemist, professor and entrepreneur. He is a professor of chemistry at George Washington University. He was the tenth chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, assuming the position on July 1, 2008, succeeding James Moeser, and, at age 43, was noted as being among the youngest leaders of a university in the United States. At the time of his selection as chancellor, Thorp was the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and a Kenan Professor of chemistry at the university. Thorp is a 1986 graduate of UNC; he later earned a Ph.D. in chemi...
Go to Profile#493
Leonard Lerman
#20823
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Leonard Solomon Lerman was an American scientist most noted for his work on DNA. Life and career Lerman was born and raised in Pittsburgh, the son of Freamah and Meyer Lerman, Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. His father was a department store buyer. Lerman began attending the Carnegie Institute of Technology before graduating from high school and received his BS in five semesters. As a graduate student with Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology, Lerman discovered that antibodies have two binding sites. Later, perhaps his most important discovery was that certain molecules bind to DNA by intercalation.
Go to Profile#494
W. David Sincoskie
#20886
Overall Influence
1954 - 2010 (56 years)
Walter David "Dave" Sincoskie was an American computer engineer. Sincoskie installed the first Ethernet local area network at Bellcore, and helped invent voice over IP technology. Sincoskie authored the first local ATM specification. He is also the inventor of the VLAN.
Go to Profile#495
John P. Costas
#20926
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
John Peter Costas was an American electrical engineer. Costas invented, among other things, the Costas loop and Costas arrays. Biography Costas studied at Purdue University as an undergraduate. During World War II, he was involved in radar engineering, serving in the U.S. Navy as a radar officer. He was a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he worked on interference filtering and linear systems coding. While there, he worked with Norbert Wiener, R. M. Fano, J. B. Wiesner and Y. W. Lee. He worked for General Electric from 1951 until the early 1980s, and for Cogent Systems, Inc.
Go to Profile#496
Robert G. Sachs
#20964
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Robert G. Sachs was an American theoretical physicist, a founder and a director of the Argonne National Laboratory. Sachs was also notable for his work in theoretical nuclear physics, terminal ballistics, and nuclear power reactors. Sachs was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, chairman of the Academy's Physics Section, chairman of the Academy's Class I , and director of the Enrico Fermi Institute of the University of Chicago. Sachs was the author of the standard textbook Nuclear Theory .
Go to Profile#497
David Merritt
#20965
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
David Roy Merritt is an American astrophysicist. Education and career He received in 1982 his PhD in Astrophysical Sciences from Princeton University with thesis advisor Jeremiah P. Ostriker and held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto. Merritt's fields of specialization include dynamics and evolution of galaxies, supermassive black holes, and computational astrophysics.
Go to Profile#498
Lily Jan
#20975
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Lily Yeh Jan is a Taiwanese-American neuroscientist. She is the Jack and DeLoris Lange Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, where she collaborates with her husband Yuh Nung Jan as co-PIs of the Jan Lab.
Go to Profile#499
Michael M. Watkins
#20982
Overall Influence
Michael M. Watkins is an American engineer, scientist, and a Professor of Aerospace and Geophysics at the California Institute of Technology . He previously served as the 9th director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and as a vice president of Caltech, which staffs and manages JPL for NASA. His directorial position was effective from July 1, 2016 to August 20, 2021.
Go to Profile#500
Edward Belbruno
#21011
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Edward Belbruno is an artist, mathematician and scientist whose interests are in celestial mechanics, dynamical systems, dynamical astronomy, and aerospace engineering. His artistic media is paintings, and his artwork in the NASA collection, Charles Betlach II collection, and exhibited in Paris, Rome, Los Angeles, Washington DC, New York City, Minneapolis, Shanghai, WeiHai, and Princeton.
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