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
#4901
Bengt I. Samuelsson
#4909
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson is a Swedish biochemist. He shared with Sune K. Bergström and John R. Vane the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related substances.
Go to Profile#4902
Wael Hallaq
#4910
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Wael B. Hallaq is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he has been teaching ethics, law, and political thought since 2009. He is considered a leading scholar in the field of Islamic legal studies, and has been described as one of the world's leading authorities on Islamic law.
Go to Profile#4903
Victor Raskin
#4911
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Victor Raskin is a distinguished professor of linguistics at Purdue University. He is the author of Semantic Mechanisms of Humor and Ontological Semantics and founding editor of Humor, the journal for the International Society for Humor Studies.
Go to Profile#4904
John Milbank
#4912
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Alasdair John Milbank is an English Anglo-Catholic theologian and is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham, where he is President of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy. Milbank previously taught at the University of Virginia and before that at the University of Cambridge and the University of Lancaster. He is also chairman of the trustees of the think tank ResPublica.
Go to Profile#4905
Paul Rozin
#4913
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Paul Rozin is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches two Benjamin Franklin Scholars honors courses and graduate level seminars. He is also a faculty member in the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program started by Martin Seligman. He is described as the world's leading expert on disgust. His work focuses on the psychological, cultural, and biological determinants of human food choice.
Go to Profile#4906
Sam Keen
#4914
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Sam Keen is an American author, professor, and philosopher who is best known for his exploration of questions regarding love, life, wonder, religion, and being a male in contemporary society. He co-produced Faces of the Enemy, an award-winning PBS documentary; was the subject of a Bill Moyers' television special in the early 1990s; and for 20 years served as a contributing editor at Psychology Today magazine. He is also featured in the 2003 documentary Flight from Death.
Go to Profile#4907
Maria Sharapova
#4915
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Maria Yuryevna Sharapova is a Russian former tennis player. She competed on the WTA Tour from 2001 to 2020 and was ranked world number 1 in singles by the Women's Tennis Association for 21 weeks. She is one of ten women, and the only Russian, to achieve the career Grand Slam. She is also an Olympic medalist, having won silver in women's singles at the 2012 London Olympics. She has been considered as one of the best tennis competitors of her generation.
Go to Profile#4908
Tariq Rahman
#4916
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Tariq Rahman is a Pakistani academic scholar, newspaper columnist, researcher, and a writer. Currently based in Lahore, he is author of many books and other publications, mainly in the field of linguistics. He has been awarded several national and international awards to recognise his research and scholarly work.
Go to Profile#4909
Harold Kelley
#4917
Overall Influence
1921 - 2003 (82 years)
Harold Kelley was an American social psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His major contributions have been the development of interdependence theory , the early work of attribution theory, and a lifelong interest in understanding close relationships processes. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Kelley as the 43rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#4910
Henry Petroski
#4918
Overall Influence
1942 - 2023 (81 years)
Henry Petroski was an American engineer specializing in failure analysis. A professor both of civil engineering and history at Duke University, he was also a prolific author. Petroski has written over a dozen books – beginning with To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design and including a number of titles detailing the industrial design history of common, everyday objects, such as pencils, paper clips, toothpicks, and silverware. His first book was made into the film When Engineering Fails. He was a frequent lecturer and a columnist for the magazines American Scientist a...
Go to Profile#4911
Peter A. Sturrock
#4919
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (102 years)
Peter Andrew Sturrock is a British scientist. An emeritus professor of applied physics at Stanford University, much of Sturrock's career has been devoted to astrophysics, plasma physics, and solar physics, but Sturrock is interested in other fields, including ufology, scientific inference, the history of science, and the philosophy of science. Sturrock has been awarded many prizes and honors, and has written or co-authored many scientific papers and textbooks.
Go to Profile#4912
Harold McGee
#4920
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Harold James McGee is an American author who writes about the chemistry and history of food science and cooking. He is best known for his seminal book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen first published in 1984 and revised in 2004.
Go to Profile#4913
Anne McCaffrey
#4921
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Anne Inez McCaffrey was an Irish writer known for the Dragonriders of Pern science fiction series. She was the first woman to win a Hugo Award for fiction and the first to win a Nebula Award . Her 1978 novel The White Dragon became one of the first science-fiction books to appear on the New York Times Best Seller list.
Go to Profile#4914
Thomas Heatherwick
#4922
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Thomas Alexander Heatherwick, is an English designer and the founder of London-based design practice Heatherwick Studio. He works with a team of more than 200 architects, designers and artisans from a studio and workshop in King's Cross, London.
Go to Profile#4915
Elhanan Helpman
#4923
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Elhanan Helpman is an Israeli economist who is currently the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade at Harvard University. He is also a Professor Emeritus at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv University. Helpman is among the thirty most cited economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc.
Go to Profile#4916
Mildred Dresselhaus
#4924
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Mildred Dresselhaus , known as the "Queen of Carbon Science", was an American physicist, materials scientist, and nanotechnologist. She was an institute professor and professor of both physics and electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also served as the president of the American Physical Society, the chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as the director of science in the US Department of Energy under the Bill Clinton Government. Dresselhaus won numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal ...
Go to Profile#4917
Carl Adam Petri
#4925
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Carl Adam Petri was a German mathematician and computer scientist. Life and work Petri created his major scientific contribution, the concept of the Petri net, in 1939 at the age of 13, for the purpose of describing chemical processes. In 1941, his father told him about Konrad Zuse's work on computing machines and Carl Adam started building his own analog computer.
Go to Profile#4918
Francesco Giavazzi
#4926
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Francesco Giavazzi is an Italian economist. He is Professor of Economics at Bocconi University and a regular visiting professor at MIT. Biography Giavazzi graduated in electrical engineering from the Politecnico di Milano university in 1972 and obtained a PhD in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 under the supervision of Rudi Dornbusch.
Go to Profile#4919
Sławomir Mrożek
#4927
Overall Influence
1930 - 2013 (83 years)
Sławomir Mrożek was a Polish dramatist, writer and cartoonist. Mrożek joined the Polish United Workers' Party during the reign of Stalinism in the People's Republic of Poland, and made a living as a political journalist. He began writing plays in the late 1950s. His theatrical works belong to the genre of absurdist fiction, intended to shock the audience with non-realistic elements, political and historic references, distortion, and parody.
Go to Profile#4920
Lenore Blum
#4928
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
#4921
Gregory Maguire
#4929
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Gregory Maguire is an American novelist. He is the author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and several dozen other novels for adults and children. Many of Maguire's adult novels are inspired by classic children's stories. Maguire published his first novel, The Lightning Time, in 1978. Wicked, published in 1995, was his first novel for adults. Though unsuccessful at first, it was adapted into a popular Broadway musical in 2003.
Go to Profile#4922
William E. Moerner
#4930
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
William Esco Moerner, also known as W. E. Moerner, is an American physical chemist and chemical physicist with current work in the biophysics and imaging of single molecules. He is credited with achieving the first optical detection and spectroscopy of a single molecule in condensed phases, along with his postdoc, Lothar Kador. Optical study of single molecules has subsequently become a widely used single-molecule experiment in chemistry, physics and biology. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Go to Profile#4923
Mark Liberman
#4931
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Mark Yoffe Liberman is an American linguist. He has a dual appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, as Trustee Professor of Phonetics in the Department of Linguistics, and as a professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. He is the founder and director of the Linguistic Data Consortium. Liberman is the Faculty Director of Ware College House at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#4924
Terry Waite
#4932
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Sir Terence Hardy Waite is an English humanitarian and author. Waite was the Assistant for Anglican Communion Affairs for the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, in the 1980s. As an envoy for the Church of England, he travelled to Lebanon to try to secure the release of four hostages, including the journalist John McCarthy. He was himself kidnapped and held captive from 1987 to 1991.
Go to Profile#4925
Mark Geragos
#4933
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Mark John Geragos is an American criminal defense lawyer and the managing partner of Geragos & Geragos, in Los Angeles. Early life and education Geragos was born in Los Angeles, California, where he attended Flintridge Preparatory School in La Cañada, graduating with honors. He earned his bachelor's degree from Haverford College, in 1979, double-majoring in anthropology and sociology, then his Juris Doctor from Loyola Law School at the Loyola Marymount University in 1982. He was admitted to the State Bar of California in 1983.
Go to Profile#4926
Kai Siegbahn
#4934
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
Kai Manne Börje Siegbahn was a Swedish physicist who shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics. Biography Siegbahn was born in Lund, Sweden, son of Manne Siegbahn the 1924 physics Nobel Prize winner. Siegbahn earned his doctorate at the University of Stockholm in 1944. He was professor at the Royal Institute of Technology 1951–1954, and then professor of experimental physics at Uppsala University 1954–1984, which was the same chair his father had held. He shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Arthur Schawlow. Siegbahn received half the prize "for his contribution t...
Go to Profile#4927
Israel Scheffler
#4935
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Israel Scheffler was an American philosopher of science and of education. Career Scheffler held B.A. and M.A. degrees in psychology from Brooklyn College, an M.H.L. and a D.H.L. from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He defended his doctoral thesis, On Quotation, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1952, where he studied with Nelson Goodman and began teaching that year at Harvard University, where he spent his career. He retired in 1992. His main interests lay in the philosophical interpretation of language, symbolism, science and education. He was a Fellow of the American Academy ...
Go to Profile#4928
Martin Duberman
#4936
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Martin Bauml Duberman is an American historian, biographer, playwright, and gay rights activist. Duberman is Professor of History Emeritus at Herbert Lehman College in the Bronx, New York City. Early life Duberman was born into a Jewish family. His father, born in Ukraine, was initially a manual laborer but later founded a successful clothing business that sold uniforms to the government during World War II. His family used the money to move to Mount Vernon, New York, and send Martin to the Horace Mann School, an elite private prep school. He would later graduate from Yale College and Harvar...
Go to Profile#4929
Colm Tóibín
#4937
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet. His first novel, The South, was published in 1990. The Blackwater Lightship was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Master was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the 2006 International Dublin Literary Award, securing for Toíbín a bounty of thousands of euro as it is one of the richest literary awards in the world. Nora Webster won the Hawthornden Prize, whilst The Magician won the Folio Prize. His fellow artists elected him to Aosdána and he won the "UK and Ireland Nobel" ...
Go to Profile#4930
Frederick Mosteller
#4938
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
Charles Frederick Mosteller was an American mathematician, considered one of the most eminent statisticians of the 20th century. He was the founding chairman of Harvard's statistics department from 1957 to 1971, and served as the president of several professional bodies including the Psychometric Society, the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the International Statistical Institute.
Go to Profile#4931
Eric Allman
#4939
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Eric Paul Allman is an American computer programmer who developed sendmail and its precursor delivermail in the late 1970s and early 1980s at UC Berkeley. In 1998, Allman and Greg Olson co-founded the company Sendmail, Inc.
Go to Profile#4932
C. Kumar N. Patel
#4940
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Chandra Kumar Naranbhai Patel is an electrical engineer. He developed the carbon dioxide laser in 1963; it is now widely used in industry for cutting and engraving a wide range of materials like plastic and wood. Because the atmosphere is quite transparent to infrared light, CO2 lasers are also used for military rangefinding using LIDAR techniques.
Go to Profile#4933
Fabiola Gianotti
#4941
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Fabiola Gianotti is an Italian experimental particle physicist who is the current and first woman Director-General at CERN in Switzerland. Her first mandate began on 1 January 2016 and ran for a period of five years. At its 195th Session in 2019, the CERN Council selected Gianotti for a second term as Director-General. Her second five-year term began on 1 January 2021 and goes on until 2025. This is the first time in CERN's history that a Director-General has been appointed for a full second term.
Go to Profile#4934
Alan Davis
#4942
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Alan Davis is an English artist and writer of comic books, known for his work on titles such as Captain Britain, The Uncanny X-Men, ClanDestine, Detective Comics, Excalibur, JLA: The Nail and JLA: Another Nail.
Go to Profile#4935
John Hunt, Baron Hunt
#4943
Overall Influence
1910 - 1998 (88 years)
Henry Cecil John Hunt, Baron Hunt, was a British Army officer who is best known as the leader of the successful 1953 British expedition to Mount Everest. Early life and military career Hunt was born in Simla, British India on 22 June 1910, the son of Captain Cecil Edwin Hunt of the Indian Army, and a great-great-nephew of the explorer Sir Richard Burton. His father was killed in action during the First World War. Hunt, from the age of 10, spent much holiday time in the Alps, learning some of the mountaineering skills he would later hone while taking part in several expeditions in the Himalayas while serving in India.
Go to Profile#4936
Ellen Fetter
#4944
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Ellen Cole Fetter Gille is an American computer scientist. She worked with Edward Norton Lorenz on chaos theory. Early life and education Fetter was born to Frank Whitson Fetter and Elizabeth Garrett Pollard. Her mother created an endowment for chamber music at Swarthmore College, which has been supported by successive generations of her family. Fetter attended the Ecole Préalpina in Chexbres, Switzerland and New Trier High School, from which she graduated in 1957. She studied mathematics at Mount Holyoke College and graduated in 1961.
Go to Profile#4937
Georg Baselitz
#4945
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Georg Baselitz is a German painter, sculptor and graphic artist. In the 1960s he became well known for his figurative, expressive paintings. In 1969 he began painting his subjects upside down in an effort to overcome the representational, content-driven character of his earlier work and stress the artifice of painting. Drawing from myriad influences, including art of Soviet era illustration art, the Mannerist period and African sculptures, he developed his own, distinct artistic language.
Go to Profile#4938
Karl Sims
#4946
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Karl Sims is a computer graphics artist and researcher, who is best known for using particle systems and artificial life in computer animation. Biography Sims received a B.S. from MIT in 1984, and a M.S. from the MIT Media Lab in 1987. He has worked for supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence company Thinking Machines as an artist-in-residence, for Whitney/Demos Productions as a researcher, and co-founded Optomystic. Sims was the founder and CEO of GenArts, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company that developed special effects plugins used in film and video production. In 2008 he m...
Go to Profile#4939
Scott Ambler
#4947
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Scott W. Ambler is a Canadian software engineer, consultant and author. He is an author of books about the Disciplined Agile Delivery toolkit, the Unified process, Agile software development, the Unified Modeling Language, and Capability Maturity Model development.
Go to Profile#4940
David Romer
#4948
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
David Hibbard Romer is an American economist, the Herman Royer Professor of Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a standard textbook in graduate macroeconomics as well as many influential economic papers, particularly in the area of New Keynesian economics. He is also the husband and close collaborator of Council of Economic Advisers former Chairwoman Christina Romer.
Go to Profile#4941
David Ferrer
#4949
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
David Ferrer Ern is a Spanish former professional tennis player. A three-time Davis Cup champion with Spain, Ferrer won tournaments at all levels on the ATP Tour except at a major, and currently has the ninth highest career prize money earnings of all time among male tennis players . Ferrer also holds the distinction of winning the most matches on the ATP Tour without having won a major.
Go to Profile#4942
David E. Goldberg
#4950
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
David Edward Goldberg is an American computer scientist, civil engineer, and former professor. Until 2010, he was a professor in the department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was noted for his work in the field of genetic algorithms. He was the director of the Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory and the co-founder & chief scientist of Nextumi, which later changed its name to ShareThis. He is the author of Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization and Machine Learning, one of the most cited books in computer scienc...
Go to Profile#4943
Jiawei Han
#4951
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Jiawei Han is a Chinese-American computer scientist and writer. He currently holds the position of Michael Aiken Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on data mining, text mining, database systems, information networks, data mining from spatiotemporal data, Web data, and social/information network data.
Go to Profile#4944
Gilles Quispel
#4952
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
Gilles Quispel was a Dutch theologian and historian of Christianity and Gnosticism. He was professor of early Christian history at Utrecht University. Born in Rotterdam, after finishing secondary school in Dordrecht, Quispel studied classical philology from 1934 to 1941 at the Leiden University. At Leiden he also began to study theology, which he continued at the University of Groningen. Quispel completed his doctoral work in 1943 at Utrecht University with a dissertation examining the sources utilized in Tertullian's Adversus Marcionem. He devoted study to several Gnostic systems, particularly Valentinianism.
Go to Profile#4945
Vera Rubin
#4953
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Vera Florence Cooper Rubin was an American astronomer who pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates. She uncovered the discrepancy between the predicted and observed angular motion of galaxies by studying galactic rotation curves. By identifying the galaxy rotation problem, her work provided evidence for the existence of dark matter. These results were later confirmed over subsequent decades.
Go to Profile#4946
William Steig
#4954
Overall Influence
1907 - 2003 (96 years)
William Steig was an American cartoonist, illustrator and writer of children's books, best known for the picture book Shrek!, which inspired the film series of the same name, as well as others that included Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Abel's Island, and Doctor De Soto. He was the U.S. nominee for both of the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Awards, as a children's book illustrator in 1982 and a writer in 1988.
Go to Profile#4947
Paul Levinson
#4955
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Paul Levinson is an American author, singer-songwriter, and professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University in New York City. His novels, short fiction, and non-fiction works have been translated into sixteen languages. He is frequently quoted in news articles and appears as a guest commentator on major news outlets.
Go to Profile#4948
Hazel Barnes
#4956
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Hazel Estella Barnes was an American philosopher, author, and translator. Best known for her popularization of existentialism in America, Barnes translated the works of Jean-Paul Sartre as well as writing original works on the subject. After earning her Ph.D. in Classics from Yale in 1941, she spent much of her career at the University of Colorado. In 1979, Barnes became the first woman to be named Distinguished Professor at CU-Boulder. In recognition of her long tenure and service to the University, in 1991 CU established the Hazel Barnes Prize for faculty who best embody "the enriching int...
Go to Profile#4949
Christopher Charles Benninger
#4957
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Christopher Charles Benninger is an Indian architect and urban planner. Born in the US, he permanently migrated to India in 1971. Benninger is an important figure in Indian architecture and planning and is noted for his contributions to the evolution of critical regionalism and sustainable planning in India.
Go to Profile#4950
William E. Connolly
#4958
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
William Eugene Connolly is an American political theorist known for his work on democracy, pluralism, capitalism and climate change. He is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His 1974 work The Terms of Political Discourse won the 1999 Benjamin Lippincott Award.
Go to Profile