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
#4751
Gilbert Shelton
#4759
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Gilbert Shelton is an American cartoonist and a key member of the underground comix movement. He is the creator of the iconic underground characters The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fat Freddy's Cat, and Wonder Wart-Hog.
Go to Profile#4752
John Buscema
#4760
Overall Influence
1927 - 2002 (75 years)
John Buscema was an American comic book artist and one of the mainstays of Marvel Comics during its 1960s and 1970s ascendancy into an industry leader and its subsequent expansion to a major pop-culture conglomerate. His younger brother Sal Buscema is also a comic book artist.
Go to Profile#4753
Laura Schlessinger
#4761
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Laura Catherine Schlessinger , commonly known as Dr. Laura, is an American talk radio host and author. The Dr. Laura Program, heard weekdays for three hours on Sirius XM Radio, consists mainly of her responses to callers' requests for personal advice and often features her short monologues on social and political topics. Her website says that her show "preaches, teaches, and nags about morals, values, and ethics." She is an inductee to the National Radio Hall of Fame in Chicago.
Go to Profile#4754
Sylvester Stallone
#4762
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Sylvester Gardenzio Stallone is an American actor and filmmaker. He has received numerous accolades including a Golden Globe Award as well as nominations for three Academy Awards and two BAFTA Awards. Stallone is one of only two actors in history to have starred in a box-office No. 1 film across six consecutive decades.
Go to Profile#4755
Guillermo Calvo
#4763
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Guillermo Antonio Calvo is an Argentine-American economist who is director of Columbia University's mid-career Program in Economic Policy Management in their School of International and Public Affairs .
Go to Profile#4756
Matthew Carter
#4764
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Matthew Carter is a British type designer. A 2005 New Yorker profile described him as 'the most widely read man in the world' by considering the amount of text set in his commonly used fonts. Carter's career began in the early 1960s and has bridged all three major technologies used in type design: physical type, phototypesetting and digital font design, as well as the design of custom lettering.
Go to Profile#4757
Hervé This
#4765
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Hervé This is a French physical chemist who works for the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique at AgroParisTech, in Paris, France. His main area of scientific research is molecular gastronomy, that is the science of culinary phenomena .
Go to Profile#4758
Walter Zinn
#4766
Overall Influence
1906 - 2000 (94 years)
Walter Henry Zinn was a Canadian-born American nuclear physicist who was the first director of the Argonne National Laboratory from 1946 to 1956. He worked at the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory during World War II, and supervised the construction of Chicago Pile-1, the world's first nuclear reactor, which went critical on December 2, 1942, at the University of Chicago. At Argonne he designed and built several new reactors, including Experimental Breeder Reactor I, the first nuclear reactor to produce electric power, which went live on December 20, 1951.
Go to Profile#4759
Ronald Melzack
#4767
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Ronald Melzack was a Canadian psychologist and professor of psychology at McGill University. In 1965, he and Patrick David Wall revolutionized pain research by introducing the gate control theory of pain. In 1968, Melzack published an extension of the gate control theory, in which he asserted that pain is subjective and multidimensional because several parts of the brain contribute to it at the same time. During the mid-1970s, he developed the McGill Pain Questionnaire and became a founding member of the International Association for the Study of Pain. He also became the founding editor of W...
Go to Profile#4760
Jim Harrison
#4768
Overall Influence
1937 - 2016 (79 years)
James Harrison was an American poet, novelist, and essayist. He was a prolific and versatile writer publishing over three dozen books in several genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, children's literature, and memoir. He wrote screenplays, book reviews, literary criticism, and published essays on food, travel, and sport. Harrison indicated that, of all his writing, his poetry meant the most to him.
Go to Profile#4761
Nicholas Maxwell
#4769
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Nicholas Maxwell is a British philosopher. Maxwell taught philosophy of science at University College London, where he is now Emeritus Reader. In 2003 he founded Friends of Wisdom. He has published fifteen books. He has published over eighty papers in scientific and philosophical journals on problems that range from consciousness, free will, value, and art to the rationality of science, simplicity, scientific realism, explanation, time and quantum theory.
Go to Profile#4762
Neil Stubenhaus
#4770
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Neil Stubenhaus is an American bass guitarist. Career He started his musical training playing drums and switched to bass guitar at the age of 12. He studied at the Berklee College of Music where he graduated in 1975. After graduation, he was recommended by Steve Swallow and started teaching while playing in a band with another Berklee student Steve Smith . While at Berklee, Neil met session drummers Vinnie Colaiuta and John Robinson .
Go to Profile#4763
Henry Cisneros
#4771
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Henry Gabriel Cisneros is an American politician and businessman. He served as the mayor of San Antonio, Texas, from 1981 to 1989, the second Latino mayor of a major American city and the city's first since 1842 . A Democrat, Cisneros served as the 10th Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the administration of President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997. As HUD Secretary, Cisneros was credited with initiating the revitalization of many public housing developments and with formulating policies that contributed to achieving the nation's highest ever rate of home ownership. In his role ...
Go to Profile#4764
Marty Makary
#4772
Overall Influence
Martin Adel Makary is a British-American surgeon, professor, author and medical commentator. He practices surgical oncology and gastrointestinal laparoscopic surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, is Mark Ravitch Chair in Gastrointestinal Surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and teaches public health policy as Professor of Surgery and Public Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#4765
Allen Forte
#4773
Overall Influence
1926 - 2014 (88 years)
Allen Forte was an American music theorist and musicologist. He was Battell Professor Emeritus of the Theory of Music at Yale University and specialized in 20th-century atonal music and music analysis.
Go to Profile#4766
George Marsden
#4774
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
George Mish Marsden is an American historian who has written extensively on the interaction between Christianity and American culture, particularly on Christianity in American higher education and on American evangelicalism. He is best known for his award-winning biography of the New England clergyman Jonathan Edwards, a prominent theologian of Colonial America.
Go to Profile#4767
Robert Frager
#4775
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Robert Frager is an American social psychologist responsible for establishing America's first educational institution dedicated to transpersonal psychology. Frager is known for founding the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, now called Sofia University, in Palo Alto, California, where he currently holds the position of director of the low residency Master of Arts in Spiritual Guidance program and professor of psychology. Frager has previously acted as president of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology as well as a consultant, educator and a spiritual teacher in the Sufi tradition.
Go to Profile#4768
Nader El-Bizri
#4776
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Nader El-Bizri is the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Sharjah. He served before as a tenured longstanding full Professor of philosophy and civilization studies at the American University of Beirut, where he also acted as an Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and as the Director of the General Education program. El-Bizri specializes in phenomenology, Islamic science and philosophy, and architectural theory. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Phenomenological Quest between Avicenna and Heidegger .
Go to Profile#4769
Jonathan Bate
#4777
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL , is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, scholar, and occasional novelist, playwright and poet. He specializes in Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is Regents Professor of Literature and Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities in a joint appointment of the College of Liberal Arts, the School of Sustainability and the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College in the University of Oxford, where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature. Bate was Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, from 2011 to 2019.
Go to Profile#4770
Bill Parcells
#4778
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Duane Charles "Bill" Parcells is an American former football coach who served as a head coach in the National Football League for 19 seasons. He rose to prominence as the head coach of the New York Giants from 1983 to 1990, where he won two Super Bowl titles. Parcells was later the head coach of the New England Patriots from 1993 to 1996, the New York Jets from 1997 to 1999, and the Dallas Cowboys from 2003 to 2006. Nicknamed "the Big Tuna", he is the only NFL coach to lead four different franchises to the playoffs and three to a conference championship game.
Go to Profile#4771
Mauricio Tohen
#4779
Overall Influence
Mauricio Tohen is a Mexican American research psychiatrist, Distinguished Professor, and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of New Mexico. Tohen's research has focused on the epidemiology, outcome, and treatment of bipolar and psychotic disorders, and is especially known for innovating the design of clinical trials and the criteria to determine outcome in such diseases. Tohen has edited several books on his specialties. His social awareness has been noted in the promotion of programs to improve mental health care in areas such as substance abuse, b...
Go to Profile#4772
Sara Ahmed
#4780
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Sara Ahmed is a British-Australian writer and scholar whose area of study includes the intersection of feminist theory, lesbian feminism, queer theory, affect theory, critical race theory and postcolonialism. Her seminal work, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, in which she explores the social dimension and circulation of emotions, is recognized as a foundational text in the nascent field of affect theory.
Go to Profile#4773
Michael Houghton
#4781
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
#4774
Mark Juergensmeyer
#4782
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Mark Juergensmeyer is an American sociologist and scholar specialized in global studies and religious studies, and a writer best known for his studies on comparative religion, religious violence, and global religion. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow and Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College.
Go to Profile#4775
Peter Laslett
#4783
Overall Influence
1915 - 2001 (86 years)
Thomas Peter Ruffell Laslett was an English historian. Biography Laslett was the son of a Baptist minister and was born in Bedford on 18 December 1915. Although he spent much of his childhood in Oxford, he was educated at the Watford Grammar School for Boys. He began a degree course in history at St John's College, Cambridge, in 1935 and graduated with a double first in 1938. He stayed in Cambridge for some time, conducting historical research, then in 1940 joined the Fleet Air Arm. After a period working on protection of Arctic convoys, Laslett then learned Japanese at the School of Orienta...
Go to Profile#4776
Jonathan M. Marks
#4784
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Jonathan M. Marks is a professor of biological anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is a significant figure in anthropology, especially on the topic of race. Marks is skeptical of genetic explanations of human behavior, of "race" as a biological category, and of science as a rationalistic endeavor. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Go to Profile#4777
Leo Marx
#4785
Overall Influence
1919 - 2022 (103 years)
Leo Marx was an American historian, literary critic, and educator. He was Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for his works in the field of American studies. Marx studied the relationship between technology and culture in 19th and 20th century America.
Go to Profile#4778
Roger Dingledine
#4786
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Roger Dingledine is an American computer scientist known for having co-founded the Tor Project. A student of mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering, Dingledine is also known by the pseudonym arma. As of December 2016, he continues in a leadership role with the Tor Project, as a project Leader, Director, and Research Director.
Go to Profile#4779
Willy Fischler
#4787
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Willy Fischler is a theoretical physicist. He is the Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is affiliated with the Weinberg theory group. He is also a certified Flight Paramedic and was a Licensed Paramedic with Marble Falls Area EMS and a volunteer EMT with the Westlake Fire Department.
Go to Profile#4780
G. L. S. Shackle
#4788
Overall Influence
1903 - 1992 (89 years)
George Lennox Sharman Shackle was an English economist. He made a practical attempt to challenge classical rational choice theory and has been characterised as a "post-Keynesian", though he is influenced as well by Austrian economics. Much of his work is associated with the Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence.
Go to Profile#4781
Stewart Myers
#4789
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Stewart Clay Myers is the Robert C. Merton Professor of Financial Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is notable for his work on capital structure and innovations in capital budgeting and valuation, and has had a "remarkable influence" on both the theory and practice of corporate finance. Myers, in fact, coined the term "real option". He is the co-author with Richard A. Brealey and Franklin Allen of Principles of Corporate Finance, a widely used and cited business school textbook, now in its 11th edition. He is also the author of dozens of research articles.
Go to Profile#4782
Neal Koblitz
#4790
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Neal I. Koblitz is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington. He is also an adjunct professor with the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research at the University of Waterloo. He is the creator of hyperelliptic curve cryptography and the independent co-creator of elliptic curve cryptography.
Go to Profile#4783
Madsen Pirie
#4791
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Duncan Madsen Pirie is a British researcher and author. He is a co-founder and current President of the Adam Smith Institute, a UK neoliberal think tank which has been in operation since 1977. Early life and education Born in Hull, Pirie is the son of Douglas Pirie and Eva Madsen. As a child he attended the Humberstone Foundation School in Old Clee, Lincolnshire.
Go to Profile#4784
A. N. Wilson
#4792
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Andrew Norman Wilson is an English writer and newspaper columnist known for his critical biographies, novels and works of popular history. He is an occasional columnist for the Daily Mail and a former columnist for the London Evening Standard. He has been an occasional contributor to The Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Spectator and The Observer.
Go to Profile#4785
Lera Boroditsky
#4793
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive scientist and professor in the fields of language and cognition. She is one of the main contributors to the theory of linguistic relativity. She is a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell Scholar, recipient of a National Science Foundation Career award, and an American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientist. She is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. She previously served on the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Stanford.
Go to Profile#4786
Adele Goldberg
#4794
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Adele Goldberg is an American computer scientist. She was one of the co-developers of the programming language Smalltalk-80 and of various concepts related to object-oriented programming while a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center , in the 1970s.
Go to Profile#4787
Eduardo Paolozzi
#4795
Overall Influence
1924 - 2005 (81 years)
Sir Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi was a Scottish artist, known for his sculpture and graphic works. He is widely considered to be one of the pioneers of pop art. Early years Eduardo Paolozzi was born on 7 March 1924, in Leith in north Edinburgh, Scotland, and was the eldest son of Italian immigrants. His family was from Viticuso, in the Lazio region. Paolozzi's parents, Rodolfo and Carmela, ran an ice cream shop. Paolozzi used to spend all his summers at his grandparents place in Monte Cassino and grew up bilingual. In June 1940, when Italy declared war on the United Kingdom, Paolozzi was interned .
Go to Profile#4788
John W. Meyer
#4796
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
John Wilfred Meyer is a sociologist and emeritus professor at Stanford University. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present day, Meyer has contributed fundamental ideas to the field of sociology, especially in the areas of education, organizations, and global and transnational sociology. He is best known for the development of the neo-institutional perspective on globalization, known as world society or World Polity Theory. In 2015, he became the recipient of American Sociological Association's highest honor - W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award.
Go to Profile#4789
James Stewart
#4797
Overall Influence
1908 - 1997 (89 years)
James Maitland "Jimmy" Stewart was an American actor and military officer. Known for his distinctive drawl and everyman screen persona, Stewart's film career spanned 80 films from 1935 to 1991. With the strong morality which he portrayed both on and off the screen, he epitomized the "American ideal" in the mid-twentieth century. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him third on its list of the greatest American male actors. He received numerous honors including the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 1968, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1980, the Kennedy Center Honor in 1...
Go to Profile#4790
Ehud Barak
#4798
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Ehud Barak is an Israeli former general and politician who served as the tenth prime minister from 1999 to 2001. He was leader of the Labor Party from 1997 until 2001 and again from 2007 until 2011.
Go to Profile#4791
Martin Lewis Perl
#4799
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Martin Lewis Perl was an American chemical engineer and physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for his discovery of the tau lepton. Life and career Perl was born in New York City, New York. His parents, Fay , a secretary and bookkeeper, and Oscar Perl, a stationery salesman who founded a printing and advertising company, were Jewish immigrants to the US from the Polish area of Russia.
Go to Profile#4792
Van Jacobson
#4800
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Van Jacobson is an American computer scientist, renowned for his work on TCP/IP network performance and scaling. He is one of the primary contributors to the TCP/IP protocol stack—the technological foundation of today’s Internet. Since 2013, Jacobson is an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles working on Named Data Networking.
Go to Profile#4793
Mulk Raj Anand
#4801
Overall Influence
1905 - 2004 (99 years)
Mulk Raj Anand was an Indian writer in English, recognised for his depiction of the lives of the poorer castes in traditional Indian society. One of the pioneers of Indo-Anglian fiction, he, together with R. K. Narayan, Ahmad Ali and Raja Rao, was one of the first India-based writers in English to gain an International readership. Anand is admired for his novels and short stories, which have acquired the status of classics of modern Indian English literature; they are noted for their perceptive insight into the lives of the oppressed and for their analysis of impoverishment, exploitation and misfortune.
Go to Profile#4794
Samarendra Kumar Mitra
#4802
Overall Influence
1916 - 1998 (82 years)
Samarendra Kumar Mitra was an Indian scientist and mathematician. He designed, developed and constructed, in 1953-54, India's first computer at the Indian Statistical Institute , Calcutta . He began his career as a research physicist at the Palit Laboratory of Physics, Rajabazar Science College . In 1950, he joined the Indian Statistical Institute , Calcutta, an Institute of National importance, where he worked in various capacities such as professor, research professor and director.
Go to Profile#4795
Ralph Kronig
#4803
Overall Influence
1904 - 1995 (91 years)
Ralph Kronig was a German physicist. He is noted for the discovery of particle spin and for his theory of X-ray absorption spectroscopy. His theories include the Kronig–Penney model, the Coster–Kronig transition and the Kramers–Kronig relations.
Go to Profile#4796
Aaron Wildavsky
#4804
Overall Influence
1930 - 1993 (63 years)
Aaron Wildavsky was an American political scientist known for his pioneering work in public policy, government budgeting, and risk management. Early years A native of Brooklyn in New York, Wildavsky was the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. After graduating from Brooklyn College, he served in the U.S. Navy and then won a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Sydney for 1954–55. Wildavsky returned to the U.S. to attend graduate school at Yale University. His PhD dissertation, a study of the politics of the Dixon-Yates atomic energy controversy, was completed in 1958.
Go to Profile#4797
Ian Rankin
#4805
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Sir Ian James Rankin is a Scottish crime writer and philanthropist, best known for his Inspector Rebus novels. Early life Rankin was born in Cardenden, Fife. His father, James, owned a grocery shop, and his mother, Isobel, worked in a school canteen. He was educated at Beath High School, Cowdenbeath. His parents were horrified when he then chose to study literature at university, as they had expected him to study for a trade. Encouraged by his English teacher, he persisted and graduated in 1982 from the University of Edinburgh, where he also worked on a doctorate on Muriel Spark but did not complete it.
Go to Profile#4798
Simon B. Kochen
#4806
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Simon Bernhard Kochen is a Canadian mathematician, working in the fields of model theory, number theory and quantum mechanics. Biography Kochen received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1958 under the direction of Alonzo Church. Since 1967 he has been a member of Princeton's Department of Mathematics. He chaired the department from 1989 to 1992 and became the Henry Burchard Fine Professor in mathematics in 1994. During 1966–1967 and 1978–1979, Kochen was at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Go to Profile#4799
Elmo Zumwalt
#4807
Overall Influence
1920 - 2000 (80 years)
Elmo Russell "Bud" Zumwalt Jr. was a United States Navy officer and the youngest person to serve as Chief of Naval Operations. As an admiral and later the 19th Chief of Naval Operations, Zumwalt played a major role in United States military history, especially during the Vietnam War. A decorated war veteran, Zumwalt reformed United States Navy personnel policies in an effort to improve enlisted life and ease racial tensions. After he retired from a 32-year navy career, he launched an unsuccessful campaign for the United States Senate.
Go to Profile#4800
Richard Steadman
#4808
Overall Influence
1937 - 2023 (86 years)
J. Richard Steadman was an American orthopedic surgeon and founder of The Steadman Clinic and Steadman Philippon Research Institute located in Vail, Colorado. Steadman revolutionized orthopedic surgery. For a time, he was a clinical professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, but was known for his work in the area of microfracture surgery, and for treating injured sports stars from around the world. In January 2014, he announced his retirement from his surgical practice.
Go to Profile