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
#4551
Fernando Henrique Cardoso
#4558
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Fernando Henrique Cardoso , also known by his initials FHC , is a Brazilian sociologist, professor, and politician who served as the 34th president of Brazil from 1 January 1995 to 31 December 2002. He was the first Brazilian president to be reelected for a subsequent term. An accomplished scholar of dependency theory noted for his research on slavery and political theory, Cardoso has earned many honors including the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation and the Kluge Prize from the US Library of Congress .
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Richard E. Stearns
#4559
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Richard Edwin Stearns is an American computer scientist who, with Juris Hartmanis, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award "in recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory". In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Go to Profile#4553
Steven Salzberg
#4560
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Steven Lloyd Salzberg is an American computational biologist and computer scientist who is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also Director of the Center for Computational Biology.
Go to Profile#4554
A. Teeuw
#4561
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Andries Teeuw , better known as A. Teeuw in scholarly circles and Hans Teeuw to his friends, was a Dutch critic of Indonesian literature. Biography Teeuw was born in Gorinchem, Netherlands, on 12 August 1921.
Go to Profile#4555
Theodore Roszak
#4562
Overall Influence
1933 - 2011 (78 years)
Theodore Roszak was an American academic and novelist who concluded his academic career as Professor Emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay. He is best known for his 1969 text The Making of a Counter Culture.
Go to Profile#4556
Greta Gaard
#4563
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Greta Gaard is an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker. Gaard's academic work in the realms of ecocriticism and ecocomposition is widely cited by scholars in the disciplines of composition and literary criticism. Her theoretical work extending ecofeminist thought into queer theory, queer ecology, vegetarianism, and animal liberation has been influential within women's studies. A cofounder of the Minnesota Green Party, Gaard documented the transition of the U.S. Green movement into the Green Party of the United States in her book, Ecological Politics. She is currentl...
Go to Profile#4557
Edward Felten
#4564
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Edward William Felten is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where he was also the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy from 2007 to 2015 and from 2017 to 2019. On November 4, 2010, he was named Chief Technologist for the Federal Trade Commission, a position he officially assumed January 3, 2011. On May 11, 2015, he was named the Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer. In 2018, he was nominated to and began a term as Board Member of PCLOB.
Go to Profile#4558
Hein Schreuder
#4565
Overall Influence
1951 - 2023 (72 years)
Hein Schreuder was a Dutch economist and business executive, executive vice-president corporate strategy & acquisitions at DSM and professor at the University of Maastricht, especially known for his work on "Economic approaches to organizations" with Sytse Douma and for his role in the transformation of DSM.
Go to Profile#4559
Lewis Wolpert
#4566
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Lewis Wolpert was a South African-born British developmental biologist, author, and broadcaster. Wolpert was best known for his French flag model of embryonic development, where he used the French flag as a visual aid to explain how embryonic cells interpret genetic code for expressing characteristics of living organisms and explaining how signalling between cells early in morphogenesis could be used to inform cells with the same genetic regulatory network of their position and role.
Go to Profile#4560
Ingrid of Sweden
#4567
Overall Influence
1910 - 2000 (90 years)
Ingrid of Sweden was Queen of Denmark from 1947 until 1972 as the wife of King Frederick IX. Born into the House of Bernadotte, she was the daughter of King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden and his first wife, Princess Margaret of Connaught. In 1935, she married Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark and they had three daughters: Margrethe, the current Queen of Denmark; Benedikte, now a Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg; and Anne-Marie, the former Queen of the Hellenes.
Go to Profile#4561
Matt Reeves
#4568
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Matt Reeves is an American filmmaker who first gained recognition for the WB drama series Felicity , which he co-created with J. J. Abrams. Reeves came to widespread attention for directing the hit monster film Cloverfield . He also directed the romantic vampire drama Let Me In , and the critically acclaimed science fiction sequels Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes . He directed the superhero film The Batman , which stars Robert Pattinson as the title character.
Go to Profile#4562
Michael Scriven
#4569
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Michael John Scriven was a British-born Australian polymath and academic philosopher, best known for his contributions to the theory and practice of evaluation. Biography Scriven was born in the UK and grew up in Melbourne, Australia. He held BSc and MS degrees in mathematics from the University of Melbourne, where he was in residence at Trinity College from 1946, winning an entrance scholarship. He then completed a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford .
Go to Profile#4563
Michael D. Morley
#4570
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Michael Darwin Morley was an American mathematician. At his death in 2020, Morley was professor emeritus at Cornell University. His research was in mathematical logic and model theory, and he is best known for Morley's categoricity theorem, which he proved in his PhD thesis Categoricity in Power in 1962.
Go to Profile#4564
Yves Pigneur
#4571
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Yves Pigneur is a Belgian computer scientist, and Professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Lausanne since 1984, known for his work on the business model canvas with Alexander Osterwalder. He is considered a "mastermind" among business strategics, his canvas have been used by numerous companies such as P&G, Amazon, Lockheed Martin and Tesla.
Go to Profile#4565
Rocky Tuan
#4572
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Rocky Tuan Sung-chi is a Hong Kong medical researcher and bioengineer, currently the vice-chancellor and president of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he served as distinguished visiting professor and director of the Institute for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine prior to taking up the vice-chancellorship. Previously he was on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, where he held a number of roles: Arthur J. Rooney Sr. Professor of Sports Medicine and the executive vice chair of the department of Orthopaedic Surgery, and a professor in the department of bioengineering.
Go to Profile#4566
Herbert Scarf
#4573
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Herbert Eli "Herb" Scarf was an American mathematical economist and Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University. Education and career Scarf was born in Philadelphia, the son of Jewish emigrants from Ukraine and Russia, Lene and Louis Scarf. During his undergraduate work he finished in the top 10 of the 1950 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, the major mathematics competition between universities across the United States and Canada. He received his PhD from Princeton in 1954, supervised by Salomon Bochner.
Go to Profile#4567
Tracy Kidder
#4574
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
John Tracy Kidder is an American writer of nonfiction books. He received the Pulitzer Prize for his The Soul of a New Machine , about the creation of a new computer at Data General Corporation. He has received praise and awards for other works, including his biography of Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist, titled Mountains Beyond Mountains .
Go to Profile#4568
Patti Smith
#4575
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer, songwriter, poet, painter, and author who became an influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses. Called the "punk poet laureate", Smith fused rock and poetry in her work. Her most widely known song, "Because the Night", co-written with Bruce Springsteen, reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978 and number five on the UK Singles Chart. In 2005, Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2007, she was inducted into the R...
Go to Profile#4569
Anthony Grafton
#4576
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
#4570
Chiaki Mukai
#4577
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
is a Japanese physician and JAXA astronaut. She was the first Japanese woman in space, the first Japanese citizen to have two spaceflights, and the first Asian woman in space. Both were Space Shuttle missions; her first was STS-65 aboard Space Shuttle Columbia in July 1994, which was a Spacelab mission. Her second spaceflight was STS-95 aboard Space Shuttle Discovery in 1998. In total she has spent 23 days in space.
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Brad Pitt
#4578
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
William Bradley Pitt is an American actor and film producer. He is the recipient of various accolades, including two Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and a Primetime Emmy Award. As a public figure, Pitt has been cited as one of the most powerful and influential people in the American entertainment industry.
Go to Profile#4572
Roone Arledge
#4579
Overall Influence
1931 - 2002 (71 years)
Roone Pinckney Arledge Jr. was an American sports and news broadcasting executive who was president of ABC Sports from 1968 until 1986 and ABC News from 1977 until 1998, and a key part of the company's rise to competition with the two other main television networks, NBC and CBS, in the 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90s. He created many programs still airing today, such as Monday Night Football, ABC World News Tonight, Nightline and 20/20. John Heard portrayed him in the 2002 TNT movie Monday Night Mayhem.
Go to Profile#4573
Tito Sotto
#4580
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Vicente Castelo Sotto III , professionally known as Tito Sotto, is a Filipino politician, entertainer and athlete who served as Senate President from 2018 to 2022. Before that, he had two stints each as Senate Majority Leader and Senate Minority Leader. He served a total of four terms in the Senate: 1992 to 2004 and 2010 to 2022, tying the record for the longest-serving Senator with Lorenzo Tañada and Franklin Drilon. In between his stints in the Senate, he led the Dangerous Drugs Board for a year. He became the Vice Mayor of Quezon City from 1988 to 1992, and later unsuccessfully ran for vice...
Go to Profile#4574
Eric Betzig
#4581
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Robert Eric Betzig is an American physicist who works as a professor of physics and professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a senior fellow at the Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia.
Go to Profile#4575
Klaus Hildebrand
#4582
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Klaus Hildebrand is a German liberal-conservative historian whose area of expertise is 19th–20th-century German political and military history. Biography Hildebrand is an intentionalist on the origins of the Holocaust question, arguing that the personality and role of Adolf Hitler was a crucial driving force behind the Final Solution. Writing in 1979, Hildebrand stated:
Go to Profile#4576
Joseph Goguen
#4583
Overall Influence
1941 - 2006 (65 years)
Joseph Amadee Goguen was an American computer scientist. He was professor of Computer Science at the University of California and University of Oxford, and held research positions at IBM and SRI International.
Go to Profile#4577
Loren Legarda
#4584
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Lorna Regina "Loren" Bautista Legarda is a Filipina politician, environmentalist, cultural worker, and former journalist who is currently serving as a Senator and the incumbent president pro tempore of the Senate of the Philippines since 2022. This also makes her the first woman to serve as Senate President Pro Tempore in the upper chamber's history. Before entering politics, she began her career as a news reporter until becoming a news anchor. She previously served three terms in the Senate from 1998 to 2004 and from 2007 to 2019. She is the longest-serving female Senator in the history of the Senate, and the only female in the Philippines to top two senatorial elections: 1998 and 2007.
Go to Profile#4578
Laurent Lafforgue
#4585
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Laurent Lafforgue is a French mathematician. He has made outstanding contributions to Langlands' program in the fields of number theory and analysis, and in particular proved the Langlands conjectures for the automorphism group of a function field. The crucial contribution by Lafforgue to solve this question is the construction of compactifications of certain moduli stacks of shtukas. The proof was the result of more than six years of concentrated efforts.
Go to Profile#4579
Richard Neustadt
#4586
Overall Influence
1919 - 2003 (84 years)
Richard Elliott Neustadt was an American political scientist specializing in the United States presidency. He served as adviser to several presidents. His book Presidential Power has been described as "one of the most influential books ever written about political leadership." Thinking In Time: The Uses Of History For Decision Makers won the Grawemeyer Award. His other books include Alliance Politics, Preparing to be President, and, with Harvey V. Fineberg, The Swine Flu Affair: Decision-Making on a Slippery Disease.
Go to Profile#4580
George Ritzer
#4587
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
#4581
Daniel Ortega
#4588
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
José Daniel Ortega Saavedra is a Nicaraguan politician who has been President of Nicaragua since 2007. Previously he was leader of Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990, first as coordinator of the Junta of National Reconstruction, and then as President of Nicaragua . During his first term, he implemented policies to achieve leftist reforms across Nicaragua. In later years, Ortega's left-wing radical politics cooled significantly, leading him to pursue pro-business policies and even rapprochement with the Catholic Church. As a part of this, his government adopted strong anti-abortion policies, and his...
Go to Profile#4582
Martin Fleischmann
#4589
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Martin Fleischmann FRS was a British chemist who worked in electrochemistry. Premature announcement of his cold fusion research with Stanley Pons, regarding excess heat in heavy water, caused a media sensation and elicited skepticism and criticism from many in the scientific community.
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Ronnie Biggs
#4590
Overall Influence
1929 - 2013 (84 years)
Ronald Arthur Biggs was an English criminal who helped plan and carry out the Great Train Robbery of 1963. He subsequently became notorious for his escape from prison in 1965, living as a fugitive for 36 years, and for his various publicity stunts while in exile. In 2001, Biggs returned to the United Kingdom and spent several years in prison, where his health rapidly declined. He was released from prison on compassionate grounds in August 2009 and died in a nursing home in December 2013.
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Lev Kopelev
#4591
Overall Influence
1912 - 1997 (85 years)
Lev Zalmanovich Kopelev was a Soviet author and dissident. Early life Kopelev was born in Kyiv, then Russian Empire, to a middle-class Jewish family. In 1926, his family moved to Kharkiv. While a student at Kharkiv State University's philosophy faculty, Kopelev began writing in Russian and Ukrainian languages; some of his articles were published in the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.
Go to Profile#4585
Myra Hindley
#4592
Overall Influence
1942 - 2002 (60 years)
#4586
Barry Cryer
#4593
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Barry Charles Cryer was an English writer, comedian, and actor. As well as performing on stage, radio and television, Cryer wrote for many performers including Dave Allen, Stanley Baxter, Jack Benny, Rory Bremner, George Burns, Jasper Carrott, Tommy Cooper, Ronnie Corbett, Les Dawson, Dick Emery, Kenny Everett, Bruce Forsyth, David Frost, Bob Hope, Frankie Howerd, Richard Pryor, Spike Milligan, Mike Yarwood, The Two Ronnies and Morecambe and Wise.
Go to Profile#4587
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#4594
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Native American botanist, author, an American Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology; and the director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry .
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Hugh Shelton
#4595
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Henry Hugh Shelton is a former United States Army officer who served as the 14th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1997 to 2001. Early life, family and education Shelton was born in Tarboro, North Carolina and graduated from North Edgecombe High School in 1959. Shelton attended North Carolina State University, and was a member of Pershing Rifles. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in textile engineering in 1963 while earning his Army commission through Reserve Officers' Training Corps training. Shelton's further education includes a Master of Science degree in political science f...
Go to Profile#4589
Heinz Billing
#4596
Overall Influence
1914 - 2017 (103 years)
Heinz Billing was a German physicist and computer scientist, widely considered a pioneer in the construction of computer systems and computer data storage, who built a prototype laser interferometric gravitational wave detector.
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Ray Charles
#4597
Overall Influence
1930 - 2004 (74 years)
Ray Charles Robinson Sr. was an American singer, songwriter and pianist. He is regarded as one of the most iconic and influential singers in history, and was often referred to by contemporaries as "The Genius". Among friends and fellow musicians he preferred being called "Brother Ray". Charles was blinded during childhood, possibly due to glaucoma.
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Shigefumi Mori
#4598
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Shigefumi Mori is a Japanese mathematician, known for his work in algebraic geometry, particularly in relation to the classification of three-folds. Career Mori completed his Ph.D. titled "The Endomorphism Rings of Some Abelian Varieties" under Masayoshi Nagata at Kyoto University in 1978. He was a visiting professor at Harvard University during 1977–1980, the Institute for Advanced Study in 1981–82, Columbia University 1985–87 and the University of Utah for periods during 1987–89 and again during 1991–92. He has been a professor at Kyoto University since 1990.
Go to Profile#4592
Marcus Hutter
#4599
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Marcus Hutter is a professor and artificial intelligence researcher. A Senior Scientist at DeepMind, he is researching the mathematical foundations of artificial general intelligence. He is on leave from his professorship at the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science of the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. Hutter studied physics and computer science at the Technical University of Munich. In 2000 he joined Jürgen Schmidhuber's group at the Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale in Manno, Switzerland. He developed a mathematical theory of artificial general intelligence.
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Amitav Ghosh
#4600
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Amitav Ghosh is an Indian writer. He won the 54th Jnanpith award in 2018, India's highest literary honor. Ghosh's ambitious novels use complex narrative strategies to probe the nature of national and personal identity, particularly of the people of India and South Asia. He has written historical fiction and also written non-fiction works discussing topics such as colonialism and climate change.
Go to Profile#4594
Charles H. Bennett
#4601
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Charles Henry Bennett is a physicist, information theorist and IBM Fellow at IBM Research. Bennett's recent work at IBM has concentrated on a re-examination of the physical basis of information, applying quantum physics to the problems surrounding information exchange. He has played a major role in elucidating the interconnections between physics and information, particularly in the realm of quantum computation, but also in cellular automata and reversible computing. He discovered, with Gilles Brassard, the concept of quantum cryptography and is one of the founding fathers of modern quantum i...
Go to Profile#4595
Fereydoon Abbasi
#4602
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Fereydoon Abbasi-Davani is an Iranian nuclear scientist who was head of the Atomic Energy Organization from 2011 to 2013. He survived an assassination attempt in 2010, but was seriously wounded. He is a conservative and principlist politician.
Go to Profile#4596
Mark Rubinstein
#4603
Overall Influence
1944 - 2019 (75 years)
Mark Edward Rubinstein was a leading financial economist and financial engineer. He was Paul Stephens Professor of Applied Investment Analysis at the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley. He held various other professional offices, directing the American Finance Association, amongst others, and was editor of several first-tier academic journals including both the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Finance. He was the author of numerous papers and four books.
Go to Profile#4597
Shou-Wu Zhang
#4604
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Shou-Wu Zhang is a Chinese-American mathematician known for his work in number theory and arithmetic geometry. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University. Biography Early life Shou-Wu Zhang was born in Hexian, Ma'anshan, Anhui, China on October 9, 1962. Zhang grew up in a poor farming household and could not attend school until eighth grade due to the Cultural Revolution. He spent most of his childhood raising ducks in the countryside and self-studying mathematics textbooks that he acquired from sent-down youth in trades for frogs. By the time he entered junior high s...
Go to Profile#4598
D. B. Weiss
#4605
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Daniel Brett Weiss is an American television writer and producer. Along with his collaborator David Benioff, he is best-known for co-creating Game of Thrones , the HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin's series of books A Song of Ice and Fire.
Go to Profile#4599
Martina Hingis
#4606
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Martina Hingis is a Swiss former professional tennis player. Hingis was the first Swiss player, male or female, to have won a major title and attain the world No. 1 ranking. She spent a total of 209 weeks as the singles world No. 1 and 90 weeks as doubles world No. 1, holding both No. 1 rankings simultaneously for 29 weeks. She won five major singles titles, 13 major women's doubles titles , and seven major mixed doubles titles, for a combined total of 25 major titles. In addition, she won the season-ending WTA Finals two times in singles and three in doubles, an Olympic silver medal in doubl...
Go to Profile#4600
Nicole El Karoui
#4607
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Nicole El Karoui is a French mathematician and pioneer in the development of mathematical finance, born 29 May 1944 in Paris. She is considered one of the pioneers on the French school of mathematical finance and trained many engineers and scientists in this field. She is Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics at Sorbonne University, and held professorship positions at the École Polytechnique and Université du Maine. Her research has contributed to the application of probability and stochastic differential equations to modeling and risk management in financial markets.
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