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
#4651
Marcel Danesi
#4658
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Marcel Danesi is Professor of Semiotics and Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Toronto. He is known for his work in language, communications and semiotics and is Director of the program in semiotics and communication theory. He has also held positions at Rutgers University , University of Rome "La Sapienza" , the Catholic University of Milan and the University of Lugano.
Go to Profile#4652
Lou Dobbs
#4659
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Louis Carl Dobbs is an American conservative political commentator, author and former television host who presented Lou Dobbs Tonight from 2003 to 2009 and 2011 to 2021. Since 2021, he hosts The Great America Show on iHeart Radio and loudobbs.com.
Go to Profile#4653
James Dunn
#4660
Overall Influence
1939 - 2020 (81 years)
James Douglas Grant Dunn , also known as Jimmy Dunn, was a British New Testament scholar, who was for many years the Lightfoot Professor of Divinity in the Department of Theology at the University of Durham. He is best known for his work on the New Perspective on Paul, which is also the title of a book he published in 2007.
Go to Profile#4654
Miranda Kerr
#4661
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Miranda May Kerr is an Australian model and businesswoman. Kerr rose to prominence in 2007, as one of the Victoria's Secret Angels. Kerr was the first Australian Victoria's Secret model and also represented the Australian department store chain David Jones. Kerr has launched her own brand of organic skincare products, KORA Organics, and has written a self-help book.
Go to Profile#4655
Joe DiMaggio
#4662
Overall Influence
1914 - 1999 (85 years)
Joseph Paul DiMaggio , nicknamed "Joltin' Joe", "the Yankee Clipper" and "Joe D.", was an American baseball center fielder who played his entire 13-year career in Major League Baseball for the New York Yankees. Born to Italian immigrants in California, he is widely considered one of the greatest baseball players of all time and is best known for setting the record for the longest hitting streak in baseball , which still stands today.
Go to Profile#4656
Christer Fuglesang
#4663
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Arne Christer Fuglesang is a Swedish physicist and an ESA astronaut. He was first launched aboard the STS-116 Space Shuttle mission on 10 December 2006, making him the first Swedish citizen in space.
Go to Profile#4657
Michael Hofmann
#4664
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet, translator, and critic. The Guardian has described him as "arguably the world's most influential translator of German into English". Biography Hofmann was born in Freiburg into a family with a literary tradition. His father was the German novelist Gert Hofmann. His maternal grandfather edited the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie. Hofmann's family first moved to Bristol in 1961, and later to Edinburgh. He was educated at Winchester College, and then studied English Literature and Classics at Magdalene College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in 1979. For the next ...
Go to Profile#4658
Chris Matthews
#4665
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Christopher John Matthews is an American political commentator, retired talk show host, and author. Matthews hosted his weeknight hour-long talk show, Hardball with Chris Matthews, on America's Talking and later on MSNBC, from 1997 until March 2, 2020. He announced on his final episode that he was retiring, following an accusation that he had made inappropriate comments to a Hardball guest four years earlier. On that occasion, he stated: "The younger generation's out there ready to take the reins. We see them in politics, in media, in fighting for their causes. They're improving the workplace...
Go to Profile#4659
Ilan Pappé
#4666
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian and political scientist. He is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university's European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies.
Go to Profile#4660
Yeshayahu Leibowitz
#4667
Overall Influence
1903 - 1994 (91 years)
Yeshayahu Leibowitz was an Israeli Orthodox Jewish public intellectual and polymath. He was a professor of biochemistry, organic chemistry, and neurophysiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as a prolific writer on Jewish thought and western philosophy. He was known for his outspoken views on ethics, religion, and politics. Leibowitz cautioned that the state of Israel and Zionism had become more sacred than Jewish humanist values and controversially went on to describe Israeli conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories as "Judeo-Nazi" in nature while warning of the dehuma...
Go to Profile#4661
Dmitri Ivanenko
#4668
Overall Influence
1904 - 1994 (90 years)
Dmitri Dmitrievich Ivanenko was a Soviet theoretical physicist of Ukrainian origin who made great contributions to the physical science of the twentieth century, especially to nuclear physics, field theory, and gravitation theory. He worked in the Poltava Gravimetric Observatory of the Institute of Geophysics of NAS of Ukraine, was the head of the Theoretical Department Ukrainian Physico-Technical Institute in Kharkiv, Head of the Department of Theoretical Physics of the Kharkiv Institute of Mechanical Engineering. Professor of University of Kharkiv, Professor of Moscow State University .
Go to Profile#4662
Tom Elmhirst
#4669
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Tom Elmhirst is a British mix engineer. He has worked with artists including Adele, Beck, David Bowie, Cage the Elephant, Lady Gaga, Residente, and Amy Winehouse, among many others. Elmhirst has received numerous accolades and nominations. He has won sixteen Grammy Awards, a Latin Grammy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and two Music Producers Guild Awards for Mix Engineer of the Year. Having won six trophies at the 59th Annual Grammy Awards in 2017, he set the record for the most Grammys won by an engineer or mixer in one night.
Go to Profile#4663
Uta Frith
#4670
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Uta Frith is a German-British developmental psychologist and Emeritus Professor in Cognitive Development at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London . She pioneered much of the current research into autism and dyslexia. Her book Autism: Explaining the Enigma introduced the cognitive neuroscience of autism. She is credited with creating the Sally–Anne test along with fellow scientists Alan Leslie and Simon Baron-Cohen. Among students she has mentored are Tony Attwood, Maggie Snowling, Simon Baron-Cohen and Francesca Happé.
Go to Profile#4664
Robert Hass
#4671
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Robert L. Hass is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005. In 2014 he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.
Go to Profile#4665
Karel Appel
#4672
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Christiaan Karel Appel was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement CoBrA in 1948. He was also an avid sculptor and has had works featured in MoMA and other museums worldwide.
Go to Profile#4666
Jacob Appelbaum
#4673
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Jacob Appelbaum is an American independent journalist, computer security researcher, artist, and hacker. Appelbaum studied at the Eindhoven University of Technology and was a core member of the Tor project, a free software network designed to provide online anonymity, until he stepped down from his position over sexual abuse allegations which surfaced in 2016. He was among several people to work with NSA contractor Edward Snowden's top secret documents released in 2013. His journalistic work has been published in Der Spiegel and elsewhere. Appelbaum is also known for representing WikiLeaks. H...
Go to Profile#4667
Jeffrey C. Hall
#4674
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Jeffrey Connor Hall is an American geneticist and chronobiologist. Hall is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Brandeis University and currently resides in Cambridge, Maine. Hall spent his career examining the neurological component of fly courtship and behavioral rhythms. Through his research on the neurology and behavior of Drosophila melanogaster, Hall uncovered essential mechanisms of the circadian clocks and shed light on the foundations for sexual differentiation in the nervous system. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences for his revolutionary work in the field of chronobiology, and nominated for the T.
Go to Profile#4668
René Rémond
#4675
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
René Rémond was a French historian, political scientist and political economist. Born in Lons-le-Saunier, Rémond was the Secretary General of Jeunesses étudiantes Catholiques and a member of the International YCS Center of Documentation and Information in Paris . The author of books on French political, intellectual and religious history, he was elected to the Académie Française in 1998. He was also a founding member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
Go to Profile#4669
Emmanuel Candès
#4676
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Emmanuel Jean Candès is a French statistician. He is a professor of statistics and electrical engineering at Stanford University, where he is also the Barnum-Simons Chair in Mathematics and Statistics. Candès is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow.
Go to Profile#4670
Steve Nash
#4677
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Stephen John Nash is a Canadian professional basketball coach and former player who most recently served as head coach of the Brooklyn Nets of the National Basketball Association . He played 18 seasons in the NBA, where he was an eight-time All-Star and a seven-time All-NBA selection. Nash was a two-time NBA Most Valuable Player while playing for the Phoenix Suns.
Go to Profile#4671
Rodrigo Duterte
#4678
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Rodrigo Roa Duterte , also known as Digong, Rody, and by the initials DU30 and PRRD, is a Filipino lawyer and politician who served as the 16th president of the Philippines from 2016 to 2022. He is the chairperson of PDP–Laban, the ruling political party in the Philippines during his presidency. Duterte is the first president of the Philippines to be from Mindanao, and is the oldest person to assume office, beginning his term at age 71.
Go to Profile#4672
Sergiu Klainerman
#4679
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Sergiu Klainerman is a mathematician known for his contributions to the study of hyperbolic differential equations and general relativity. He is currently the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University, where he has been teaching since 1987.
Go to Profile#4673
Philip Pullman
#4680
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Sir Philip Nicholas Outram Pullman is an English writer. His books include the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, a fictionalised biography of Jesus. In 2008, The Times named Pullman one of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945". In a 2004 BBC poll, he was named the eleventh most influential person in British culture. He was knighted in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to literature.
Go to Profile#4674
Dale T. Mortensen
#4681
Overall Influence
1939 - 2014 (75 years)
Dale Thomas Mortensen was an American economist, a professor at Northwestern University, and a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Early life and education Mortensen was born in Enterprise, Oregon. He received his BA in economics from Willamette University and his PhD in Economics from Carnegie Mellon University.
Go to Profile#4675
Kevin Durant
#4682
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Kevin Wayne Durant , also known by his initials KD, is an American professional basketball player for the Phoenix Suns of the National Basketball Association . He played one season of college basketball for the Texas Longhorns and was selected as the second overall pick by the Seattle SuperSonics in the 2007 NBA draft. He played nine seasons with the franchise, which became the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2008, before signing with the Golden State Warriors in 2016, winning consecutive NBA championships and NBA Finals MVP Awards in 2017 and 2018. After sustaining an Achilles injury in the 2019 finals, he joined the Brooklyn Nets as a free agent that summer.
Go to Profile#4676
Ali Gomaa
#4683
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Ali Gomaa is an Egyptian Islamic scholar, jurist, and public figure who has taken a number of controversial political stances. He specializes in Islamic Legal Theory. He follows the Shafi`i school of Islamic jurisprudence and the Ash'ari school of tenets of faith. Gomaa is a Sufi. Gomaa is also a supporter of the 2013 Military Coup.
Go to Profile#4677
Ibrahim Gambari
#4684
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Ibrahim Agboola Gambari, , is a Nigerian academic and diplomat who served as Chief of Staff to the President of Nigeria from 2020 to 2023. He previously served as permanent representative of Nigeria to the United Nations from 1990 to 1999, and minister of external affairs from 1984 to 1985.
Go to Profile#4678
Osamu Hayaishi
#4685
Overall Influence
1920 - 2015 (95 years)
Osamu Hayaishi MJA, was a Japanese biochemist, physiologist, and military physician. He discovered Oxygenases at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases, National Institutes of Health in 1955.
Go to Profile#4679
William Browder
#4686
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
William Browder is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic topology, differential topology and differential geometry. Browder was one of the pioneers with Sergei Novikov, Dennis Sullivan and C. T. C. Wall of the surgery theory method for classifying high-dimensional manifolds. He served as president of the American Mathematical Society until 1990.
Go to Profile#4680
Chandran Kukathas
#4687
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Chandran Kukathas is a Malaysian-born Australian political theorist and the author of several books. Until 2019 he was Head of the Department of Government at the London School of Economics, where he held a Chair in Political Theory.
Go to Profile#4681
Bienvenido Lumbera
#4688
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Bienvenido L. Lumbera was a Filipino poet, critic and dramatist. Lumbera is known for his nationalist writing and for his leading role in the Filipinization movement in Philippine literature in the 1960s, which resulted in his being one of the many writers and academics jailed during Ferdinand Marcos' Martial Law regime. He received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communications in 1993, and was proclaimed a National Artist of the Philippines for literature in 2006. As an academic, he is recognized for his key role in elevating the field of study which would ...
Go to Profile#4682
David Colquhoun
#4689
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
David Colquhoun is a British pharmacologist at University College London . He has contributed to the general theory of receptor and synaptic mechanisms, and in particular the theory and practice of single ion channel function. He held the A.J. Clark chair of Pharmacology at UCL from 1985 to 2004, and was the Hon. Director of the Wellcome Laboratory for Molecular Pharmacology. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1985 and an honorary fellow of UCL in 2004. Colquhoun runs the website DC's Improbable Science, which is critical of pseudoscience, particularly alternative medicine, a...
Go to Profile#4683
Al Hirschfeld
#4690
Overall Influence
1903 - 2003 (100 years)
Albert Hirschfeld was an American caricaturist best known for his black and white portraits of celebrities and Broadway stars in which he hid the name of his daughter NINA after her birth in 1945. Personal life Al Hirschfeld was born in 1903 in a two-story duplex at 1313 Carr Street in St. Louis, Missouri, and moved with his family to New York City in 1915, where he received his art training at the National Academy of Design.
Go to Profile#4684
Clive Hamilton
#4691
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Clive Charles Hamilton AM FRSA is an Australian public intellectual currently serving as Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics and the Vice-Chancellor's Chair in Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University. He is a member of the Board of the Climate Change Authority of the Australian Government, and is the Founder and former Executive Director of The Australia Institute. He regularly appears in the Australian media and contributes to public policy debates. Hamilton was granted the award of Member of the Order of Australia on 8 June 2009 for "service ...
Go to Profile#4685
Dana Tomlin
#4692
Overall Influence
Charles Dana Tomlin is an author, professor, and originator of Map Algebra, a vocabulary and conceptual framework for classifying ways to combine map data to produce new maps. Tomlin's teaching and research focus on the development and application of geographic information systems . He is currently a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and an adjunct professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, having also taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Ohio State University School of Natural Resources. His coursework in Landscape Archite...
Go to Profile#4686
Kenneth R. Andrews
#4693
Overall Influence
1916 - 2005 (89 years)
Kenneth Richmond Andrews , was an American academic who, along with H. Igor Ansoff and Alfred D. Chandler, was credited with the foundational role in introducing and popularizing the concept of business strategy.
Go to Profile#4687
Ronald Langacker
#4694
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Ronald Wayne Langacker is an American linguist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is best known as one of the founders of the cognitive linguistics movement and the creator of cognitive grammar. He has also made significant contributions to the comparative study of Uto-Aztecan languages, publishing several articles on historical Uto-Aztecan linguistics, as well as editing collections of grammar sketches of under-described Uto-Aztecan languages.
Go to Profile#4688
Vladimir Levenshtein
#4695
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Vladimir Iosifovich Levenshtein was a Russian and Soviet scientist who did research in information theory, error-correcting codes, and combinatorial design. Among other contributions, he is known for the Levenshtein distance and a Levenshtein algorithm, which he developed in 1965.
Go to Profile#4689
Ronald J. Brachman
#4696
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ronald Jay "Ron" Brachman is the director of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. Previously, he was the Chief Scientist of Yahoo! and head of Yahoo! Labs. Prior to that, he was the Associate Head of Yahoo! Labs and Head of Worldwide Labs and Research Operations.
Go to Profile#4690
Ian Watt
#4697
Overall Influence
1917 - 1999 (82 years)
Ian Watt was a literary critic, literary historian and professor of English at Stanford University. Biography Born 9 March 1917, in Windermere, Westmorland, in England, Watt was educated at the Dover County School for Boys and at St John's College, Cambridge, where he earned first-class honours in English.
Go to Profile#4691
Raphael Finkel
#4698
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Raphael Finkel is an American computer scientist and a retired professor at the University of Kentucky. He compiled the first version of the Jargon File. He is the author of An Operating Systems Vade Mecum, a textbook on operating systems, and Advanced Programming Language Design, an introductory book on programming paradigms. Finkel and J.L. Bentley created the data structure called the quadtree.
Go to Profile#4692
Vernon Bogdanor
#4699
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Sir Vernon Bernard Bogdanor is a British political scientist, historian, and research professor at the Institute for Contemporary British History at King's College London. He is also emeritus professor of politics and government at the University of Oxford and an emeritus fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#4693
Michael Kremer
#4700
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
#4694
Sebastian Junger
#4701
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Sebastian Junger is an American journalist, author and filmmaker who has reported in-the-field on dirty, dangerous and demanding occupations and the experience of infantry combat. He is the author of The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea which was adapted into a major motion picture and led to a resurgence in adventure creative nonfiction writing. He covered the War in Afghanistan for more than a decade, often embedded in dangerous and remote military outposts. The book War was drawn from his field reporting for Vanity Fair, that also served as the background for the docum...
Go to Profile#4695
Susan Strange
#4702
Overall Influence
1923 - 1998 (75 years)
Susan Strange was a British scholar who was "almost single-handedly responsible for creating international political economy." Notable publications include Sterling and British Policy , Casino Capitalism , States and Markets , The Retreat of the State , and Mad Money .
Go to Profile#4696
José Ferrater Mora
#4703
Overall Influence
1912 - 1991 (79 years)
José María Ferrater Mora was a Spanish philosopher, essayist and writer. He is considered the most prominent Catalan philosopher of the 20th-century and was the author of over 35 books, including a four-volume Diccionario de filosofía and Being and Death: An Outline of Integrationist Philosophy . Subjects he worked on include ontology, history of philosophy, metaphysics, anthropology, the philosophy of history and culture, epistemology, logic, philosophy of science, and ethics. He also directed several films.
Go to Profile#4697
Dmitry Shirkov
#4704
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Dmitry Vasil'evich Shirkov was a Russian theoretical physicist, known for his contribution to quantum field theory and to the development of the renormalization group method. Biography Dmitry Shirkov graduated from the Faculty of Physics at Moscow State University in 1949. In 1954 he obtained PhD degree in the area of theory of neutron diffusion. In 1958 he defended his doctoral dissertation "Renormalization group method in quantum field theory" and obtained the Doktor nauk degree.
Go to Profile#4698
Jerry Capeci
#4705
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Gerald Capeci is an American journalist and author who specializes in coverage of the Five Mafia crime families of New York City. Capeci has been described by news organizations, such as CNN and BBC, as an expert on the American Mafia.
Go to Profile#4699
James Collins
#4706
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
James Joseph Collins is an American bioengineer who serves as the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Collins conducted research showing that artificial intelligence approaches can be used to discover novel antibiotics, such as halicin and abaucin. He serves as the Director of the Antibiotics-AI Project at MIT, which is supported by The Audacious Project, and is the faculty lead for life sciences at the MIT Jameel Clinic.
Go to Profile#4700
Harvey S. Rosen
#4707
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Harvey Sheldon Rosen is an American economist and academic. Prior to his retirement and subsequent appointment as Emeritus Professor in 2019, Rosen was the John L. Weinberg Professor of Economics and Business Policy at Princeton University, and former chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisers. His research focuses on public finance. Harvard University economist and former Council of Economic Advisers chairman Greg Mankiw credits Rosen as one of four mentors who taught him how to practice economics, along with Alan Blinder, Larry Summers, and Stanley Fischer.
Go to Profile