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).
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List of the most influential people
#4851
Alan Ryan
#4859
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Alan James Ryan is a British philosopher. He was Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford. He was also Warden of New College, Oxford, from 1996 to 2009. He retired as Professor Emeritus in September 2015 and lives in Summertown, Oxford.
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Philippe Bourgois
#4860
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Philippe Bourgois is professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was the founding chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and was the Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania .
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Mark Wallinger
#4861
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Mark Wallinger is an English artist. Having previously been nominated for the Turner Prize in 1995, he won in 2007 for his installation State Britain. His work Ecce Homo was the first piece to occupy the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2001. Labyrinth , a permanent commission for Art on the Underground, was created to celebrate 150 years of the London Underground. In 2018, the permanent work Writ in Water was realized for the National Trust to celebrate the Magna Carta at Runnymede.
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Michael Commons
#4862
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Michael Lamport Commons is a theoretical behavioral scientist and a complex systems scientist. He developed the model of hierarchical complexity. Life and work Michael Lamport Commons was born in 1939 in Los Angeles and grew up in Hollywood. Commons holds two B.A.s from University of California at Los Angeles , one in mathematics, the other in psychology. He earned his M.A., and M.Phil. and in 1973 received his Ph.D., in psychology from Columbia University. Currently, he is Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center , and Director of the Dar...
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Massimo Vignelli
#4863
Overall Influence
1931 - 2014 (83 years)
Massimo Vignelli was an Italian designer who worked in a number of areas including packaging, houseware, furniture, public signage, and showroom design. He was the co-founder of Vignelli Associates, with his wife, Lella. His motto was, "If you can design one thing, you can design everything," which the broad range of his work reflects.
Go to Profile#4856
Michael Caine
#4864
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Sir Michael Caine is an English retired actor. Known for his distinctive Cockney accent, he has appeared in more than 160 films over a career spanning eight decades and is considered a British film icon. He has received numerous awards including two Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. As of 2017, the films in which Caine has appeared have grossed over $7.8 billion worldwide. Caine is one of only five male actors to be nominated for an Academy Award for acting in five different decades. In 2000, he received a BAFTA Fellowship and was knig...
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Frank Fenner
#4865
Overall Influence
1914 - 2010 (96 years)
Frank John Fenner was an Australian scientist with a distinguished career in the field of virology. His two greatest achievements are cited as overseeing the eradication of smallpox, and the attempted control of Australia's rabbit plague through the introduction of Myxoma virus.
Go to Profile#4858
Infante Juan, Count of Barcelona
#4866
Overall Influence
1913 - 1993 (80 years)
Infante Juan, Count of Barcelona , also known as Don Juan, was a claimant to the Spanish throne as Juan III. He was the third son and designated heir of King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg. His father was replaced by the Second Spanish Republic in 1931. Juan's son Juan Carlos I became king when Spain's constitutional monarchy was restored in 1975.
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Joseph Halpern
#4867
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Joseph Yehuda Halpern is an Israeli-American professor of computer science at Cornell University. Most of his research is on reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty. Biography Halpern graduated in 1975 from University of Toronto with a B.S. in mathematics. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1981 under the supervision of Albert R. Meyer and Gerald Sacks. He has written three books, Actual Causality, Reasoning about Uncertainty, and Reasoning About Knowledge and is a winner of the 1997 Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science and the 2009 Dijkstra Prize i...
Go to Profile#4860
Allen J. Bard
#4868
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
#4861
Maria Janion
#4869
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Maria Janion was a Polish scholar, literary theorist and critic, as well as a feminist. She was a professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, specialising in literary Romanticism.
Go to Profile#4862
Hao Wang
#4870
Overall Influence
1921 - 1995 (74 years)
Hao Wang was a Chinese-American logician, philosopher, mathematician, and commentator on Kurt Gödel. Biography Born in Jinan, Shandong, in the Republic of China , Wang received his early education in China. He obtained a BSc degree in mathematics from the National Southwestern Associated University in 1943 and an M.A. in Philosophy from Tsinghua University in 1945, where his teachers included Feng Youlan and Jin Yuelin, after which he moved to the United States for further graduate studies. He studied logic under W.V. Quine at Harvard University, culminating in a Ph.D. in 1948. He was appoint...
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Anne Case
#4871
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Anne Catherine Case, Lady Deaton, is an American economist who is currently the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, emeritus, at Princeton University. Early life and career Case graduated with a BA degree from the State University of New York at Albany in 1980, and subsequently obtained an MPA degree in 1983 and a PhD in economics in 1988, both from Princeton University. After working as an assistant professor in the department of economics at Harvard University from 1988-1991, she has worked in departments of economics at Princeton University and the Woodrow Wil...
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Janet Todd
#4872
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Janet Margaret Todd is a British academic and author. She was educated at Cambridge University and the University of Florida, where she undertook a doctorate on the poet John Clare. Much of her work concerns Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and their circles.
Go to Profile#4865
Herman Hertzberger
#4873
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Herman Hertzberger is a Dutch architect, and a professor emeritus of the Delft University of Technology. In 2012 he received the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Biography Herman Hertzberger was born on 6 July 1932 in Amsterdam.
Go to Profile#4866
Anthony Greenwald
#4874
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
#4867
William Luther Pierce
#4875
Overall Influence
1933 - 2002 (69 years)
William Luther Pierce III was an American neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and far-right political activist. For more than 30 years, he was one of the highest-profile individuals of the white nationalist movement. A physicist by profession, he was author of the novels The Turner Diaries and Hunter under the pen name Andrew Macdonald. The former has inspired multiple hate crimes including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Pierce founded the white nationalist National Alliance, an organization which he led for almost 30 years.
Go to Profile#4868
Annie Proulx
#4876
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Edna Ann Proulx is an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. She has written most frequently as Annie Proulx but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx. She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards. Her second novel, The Shipping News , won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and was adapted as a 2001 film of the same name. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning motion picture released in 2005.
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Jeffrey Pfeffer
#4877
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jeffrey Pfeffer is an American business theorist and the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, and is considered one of today's most influential management thinkers.
Go to Profile#4870
John Maynard Keynes
#4878
Overall Influence
#4871
Demetrios Christodoulou
#4879
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Demetrios Christodoulou is a Greek mathematician and physicist, who first became well known for his proof, together with Sergiu Klainerman, of the nonlinear stability of the Minkowski spacetime of special relativity in the framework of general relativity. Christodoulou is a 1993 MacArthur Fellow.
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K. R. Norman
#4880
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Kenneth Roy Norman was a British philologist at the University of Cambridge and a leading authority on Pali and other Middle Indo-Aryan languages. Life Norman was born on 21 July 1925, and was educated at Taunton School in Somerset and Downing College, Cambridge, receiving his M.A. in 1954.
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Dagfinn Føllesdal
#4881
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Dagfinn Føllesdal is a Norwegian-American philosopher. He is the Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University, and professor emeritus at the University of Oslo. Biography and career Føllesdal was born in Askim. After earning his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Oslo, he attended Harvard University and earned his Ph.D. in 1961 under Willard Van Orman Quine. He taught at Harvard University from 1961 to 1964, and began teaching at Stanford University in 1968.
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Olusegun Obasanjo
#4882
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Chief Olusegun Matthew Okikiola Ogunboye Aremu Obasanjo is a Nigerian retired military officer and statesman who served as Nigeria's head of state from 1976 to 1979 and later as its president from 1999 to 2007. Ideologically a Nigerian nationalist, he was a member of the Peoples Democratic Party from 1998 to 2015, and since 2018.
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Stephen J. Dubner
#4883
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Stephen Joseph Dubner is an American author, journalist, and podcast and radio host. He is co-author of the popular Freakonomics book series: Freakonomics, SuperFreakonomics, Think Like a Freak and When to Rob a Bank. He is the host of Freakonomics Radio.
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Mamoru Mohri
#4884
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
, AM is a Japanese scientist, a former NASDA astronaut, and a veteran of two NASA Space Shuttle missions. He is the first Japanese astronaut who was part of an official Japanese space program. The first Japanese person in space, Toyohiro Akiyama, was a journalist who was trained in the Soviet Union.
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Nancy Lynch
#4885
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
#4878
Robert J. Lang
#4886
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Robert James Lang is an American physicist who is also one of the foremost origami artists and theorists in the world. He is known for his complex and elegant designs, most notably of insects and animals. He has studied the mathematics of origami and used computers to study the theories behind origami. He has made great advances in making real-world applications of origami to engineering problems.
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Ulana Suprun
#4887
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Ulana Nadia Suprun is a Ukrainian-American physician, activist, and philanthropist who served as the acting Minister of Healthcare from 2016 to 2019. Prior to her government career, Suprun served as Director of Humanitarian Initiatives for the Ukrainian World Congress.
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Yuri Gurevich
#4888
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Yuri Gurevich, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, is an American computer scientist and mathematician and the inventor of abstract state machines. Gurevich was born and educated in the Soviet Union. He taught mathematics there and then in Israel before moving to the United States in 1982. The best-known work of his Soviet period is on the classical decision problem. In Israel, Gurevich worked with Saharon Shelah on monadic second-order theories. The Forgetful Determinacy Theorem of Gurevich–Harrington is of that period as well.
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Carl Hiaasen
#4889
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Carl Hiaasen is an American journalist and novelist. He began his career as a newspaper reporter and by the late 1970s had begun writing novels in his spare time, both for adults and for middle grade readers. Two of his novels have been made into feature films.
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John Ellis
#4890
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John Ellis is a theoretical physicist who currently holds the title of Clerk Maxwell Professor of Theoretical Physics at King’s College London. He has also worked with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) since 1978, and held post doctoral positions at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and California Institute of Technology in the early 1970s. Ellis earned his PhD in theoretical particle physics in 1971 from King’s College Cambridge. Ellis’ work has mostly focused on the phenomena of particle physics, with experiments and studies including using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to test theories.
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W. J. T. Mitchell
#4891
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
William John Thomas Mitchell is an American academic. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He was the editor of Critical Inquiry for 42 years, from 1978 to 2020, and also contributes to the journal October.
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Qian Zhongshu
#4892
Overall Influence
1910 - 1998 (88 years)
Qian Zhongshu , also transliterated as Ch'ien Chung-shu or Dzien Tsoong-su, was a renowned 20th century Chinese literary scholar and writer, known for his wit and erudition. He is best known for his satirical novel Fortress Besieged. His works of nonfiction are characterized by large amount of quotations in both Chinese and Western languages such as English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. He also played an important role in digitizing Chinese classics late in his life.
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Scott Westerfeld
#4893
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Scott David Westerfeld is an American writer of young adult fiction, best known as the author of the Uglies and the Leviathan series. Early life Westerfeld was born in Dallas, Texas. As a child he moved to Connecticut for his father Lloyd's job as a computer programmer. He saw his father working with planes, submarines, and the Apollo missions.
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Hakeem Olajuwon
#4894
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Hakeem Abdul Olajuwon , nicknamed "the Dream", is a Nigerian-American former professional basketball player. From 1984 to 2002, he played center in the National Basketball Association for the Houston Rockets and, in his last season, the Toronto Raptors. He led the Rockets to back-to-back NBA championships in 1994 and 1995. Olajuwon was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008 and the FIBA Hall of Fame in 2016. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest centers, as well as one of the greatest basketball players of all time.
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Margaret Gilbert
#4895
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Margaret Gilbert is a British philosopher best known for her founding contributions to the analytic philosophy of social phenomena. She has also made substantial contributions to other philosophical fields including political philosophy, the philosophy of law, and ethics. She is currently a Distinguished Professor and the Abraham I. Melden Chair in Moral Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine.
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Guillermo O'Donnell
#4896
Overall Influence
1936 - 2011 (75 years)
Guillermo Alberto O'Donnell Ure was a prominent Argentine political scientist who specialized in comparative politics and Latin American politics. He spent most of his career working in Argentina and the United States, and who made lasting contributions to theorizing on authoritarianism and democratization, democracy and the state, and the politics of Latin America. His brother is Pacho O'Donnell.
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Adele
#4897
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Adele Laurie Blue Adkins , known mononymously as Adele, is an English singer-songwriter. She is known for her mezzo-soprano vocals and sentimental songwriting. Adele has received numerous accolades including 16 Grammy Awards, 12 Brit Awards , an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Golden Globe Award.
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Bartholomew I of Constantinople
#4898
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Bartholomew is the 270th Archbishop of Constantinople and Ecumenical Patriarch, since 2 November 1991. In accordance with his title, he is regarded as the primus inter pares in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and as the spiritual leader of the Eastern Orthodox Christians worldwide.
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Tim Burton
#4899
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Timothy Walter Burton is an American filmmaker, animator, and artist. Known for pioneering goth culture in the American film industry, Burton is revered for his gothic horror and fantasy films. These include Beetlejuice , Edward Scissorhands , The Nightmare Before Christmas , Ed Wood , Sleepy Hollow , Corpse Bride , Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street , Dark Shadows and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children , as well as the television series Wednesday . Burton also directed the superhero films Batman and Batman Returns , the sci-fi film Planet of the Apes , the fantasy-dram...
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Colin Renfrew
#4900
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Andrew Colin Renfrew, Baron Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, is a British archaeologist, paleolinguist and Conservative peer noted for his work on radiocarbon dating, the prehistory of languages, archaeogenetics, neuroarchaeology, and the prevention of looting at archaeological sites.
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Robert C. Weaver
#4901
Overall Influence
1907 - 1997 (90 years)
Robert Clifton Weaver was an American economist, academic, and political administrator who served as the first United States secretary of housing and urban development from 1966 to 1968, when the department was newly established by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Weaver was the first African American to be appointed to a US cabinet-level position.
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Paul Smith
#4902
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Sir Paul Brierley Smith is a British fashion designer. His reputation is founded on his designs for men's clothing, but his business has expanded into other areas as well. Smith was made a Royal Designer for Industry in 1991.
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Brosl Hasslacher
#4903
Overall Influence
1941 - 2005 (64 years)
Brosl Hasslacher was a theoretical physicist. Brosl Hasslacher was born in New York City in 1941 and obtained a bachelor's in physics from Harvard University in 1962. He did his Ph.D. with D.Z. Freeman and C.N. Yang at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. After having several postdoctoral and research positions at Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Caltech, ENS in Paris, and CERN, he settled for more than twenty years at the Theoretical Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. There he was involved in theoretical, experimental, and numerical work in theo...
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Bruce Graham
#4904
Overall Influence
1925 - 2010 (85 years)
Bruce John Graham was a Colombian-born Peruvian-American architect. Graham built buildings all over the world and was deeply involved with evolving the Burnham Plan of Chicago. Among his most notable buildings are the Inland Steel Building, the Willis Tower , and the John Hancock Center. He was also responsible for planning the Broadgate and Canary Wharf developments in London.
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John Kotter
#4905
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
John Paul Kotter is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at the Harvard Business School, an author, and the founder of Kotter International, a management consulting firm based in Seattle and Boston. He is a thought leader in business, leadership, and change.
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Timothy Zahn
#4906
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Timothy Zahn is an American writer of science fiction and fantasy. He is known best for his prolific collection of Star Wars books, chiefly the Thrawn series, and has published several other series of sci-fi and fantasy novels of his own original creation, in addition to many works of short fiction.
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Mark Solms
#4907
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Mark Solms is a South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist, who is known for his discovery of the brain mechanisms of dreaming and his use of psychoanalytic methods in contemporary neuroscience. He holds the Chair of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital and is the President of the South African Psychoanalytical Association. He is also Research Chair of the International Psychoanalytical Association .
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George Michael
#4908
Overall Influence
1963 - 2016 (53 years)
George Michael was an English singer, songwriter and record producer. He is one of the best-selling musicians of all time, with his sales estimated at between 100 million and 125 million records worldwide. A prominent figure in popular music, Michael was known as a creative force in songwriting, vocal performance, and visual presentation. He achieved 13 number-one songs on the UK Singles Chart and 10 number-one songs on the US Billboard Hot 100. Michael won numerous music awards, including two Grammy Awards, three Brit Awards, twelve Billboard Music Awards, and four MTV Video Music Awards. He...
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