Search People Result | Academic Influence

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

#4951

Maurice Obstfeld

Maurice Obstfeld

#4959

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Maurice Moses "Maury" Obstfeld is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley and previously Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

#4952

Walid Khalidi

#4960

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (101 years)

Walid Khalidi is a Palestinian historian who has written extensively on the Palestinian exodus. He is a co-founder of the Institute for Palestine Studies, established in Beirut in December 1963 as an independent research and publishing center focusing on the Palestine problem and the Arab–Israeli conflict, and was its General Secretary until 2016.

#4953

Walter Murch

#4961

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Walter Scott Murch is an American film editor, director, writer and sound designer. With a career stretching back to 1969, including work on THX 1138, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, The Conversation, Ghost and The English Patient, with three Academy Award wins .

#4954

Andres Serrano

#4962

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Andres Serrano is an American photographer and artist. His work, often considered transgressive art, includes photos of corpses and uses feces and bodily fluids. His Piss Christ is a red-tinged photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass container of what was purported to be the artist's own urine. He also created the artwork for the heavy metal band Metallica's Load and Reload albums.

#4955

Wolfgang Mieder

Wolfgang Mieder

#4963

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Wolfgang Mieder is a retired professor of German and folklore who taught for 50 years at the University of Vermont, in Burlington, Vermont, USA. He is a graduate of Olivet College , the University of Michigan , and Michigan State University . He has been a guest speaker at the University of Freiburg in Germany, the country where he was born.

#4956

John Sutherland

#4964

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

John Andrew Sutherland is a British academic, newspaper columnist and author. He is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London. Biography After graduating from the University of Leicester in 1964, Sutherland gained a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, where he began his academic career as an assistant lecturer. He specialises in Victorian fiction, 20th-century literature, and the history of publishing. Among his works of scholarship is the Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction , a comprehensive encyclopaedia of Victorian fiction. A second...

#4957

Willard Boyle

#4965

Overall Influence

1924 - 2011 (87 years)

Willard Sterling Boyle, was a Canadian physicist. He was a pioneer in the field of laser technology and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device. As director of Space Science and Exploratory Studies at Bellcomm he helped select lunar landing sites and provided support for the Apollo space program.

#4958

Richard Bauckham

Richard Bauckham

#4966

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Richard John Bauckham is an English Anglican scholar in theology, historical theology and New Testament studies, specialising in New Testament Christology and the Gospel of John. He is a senior scholar at Ridley Hall, Cambridge.

#4959

Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias

#4967

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Matthew Yglesias is an American blogger and journalist who writes about economics and politics. Yglesias has written columns and articles for publications such as The American Prospect, The Atlantic, and Slate. In November 2020, he left his position as an editor and columnist at the news website Vox, which he co-founded in 2014, to publish the Substack newsletter Slow Boring. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center.

#4960

Roxane Gay

#4968

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Roxane Gay is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist , as well as the short story collection Ayiti , the novel An Untamed State , the short story collection Difficult Women , and the memoir Hunger .

#4961

A. James Gregor

A. James Gregor

#4969

Overall Influence

1929 - 2019 (90 years)

Anthony James Gregor was an American political scientist and eugenicist and professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, known for his research on fascism, Marxism, and national security.

#4962

Allan Cullimore

#4970

Overall Influence

Allan R. Cullimore was an American academic administrator. He was the 3rd President of New Jersey Institute of Technology from 1920 until 1947. Cullimore was a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#4963

Brian Pippard

#4971

Overall Influence

1920 - 2008 (88 years)

Sir Alfred Brian Pippard, FRS , was a British physicist. He was Cavendish Professor of Physics from 1971 until 1982 and an Honorary Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, of which he was the first President.

#4964

Rudolfo Anaya

#4972

Overall Influence

1937 - 2020 (83 years)

Rudolfo Anaya was an American author. Noted for his 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima, Anaya was considered one of the founders of the canon of contemporary Chicano and New Mexican literature. The themes and cultural references of the novel, which were uncommon at the time of its publication, had a lasting impression on fellow Latino writers. It was subsequently adapted into a film and an opera.

#4965

Hope Hicks

#4973

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (38 years)

Hope Charlotte Hicks is an American public relations executive and political advisor who served in President Donald Trump’s administration from 2017 to 2018 and 2020 to 2021. She served as White House director of strategic communications from January to September 2017, as White House communications director from 2017 to 2018, and returned to serve as a counselor to the president from 2020 to 2021.

#4966

Wesley C. Salmon

#4974

Overall Influence

1925 - 2001 (76 years)

Wesley Charles Salmon was an American philosopher of science renowned for his work on the nature of scientific explanation. He also worked on confirmation theory, trying to explicate how probability theory via inductive logic might help confirm and choose hypotheses. Yet most prominently, Salmon was a realist about causality in scientific explanation, although his realist explanation of causality drew ample criticism. Still, his books on scientific explanation itself were landmarks of the 20th century's philosophy of science, and solidified recognition of causality's important roles in sci...

#4967

Ludovic Kennedy

Ludovic Kennedy

#4975

Overall Influence

1919 - 2009 (90 years)

Sir Ludovic Henry Coverley Kennedy was a Scottish journalist, broadcaster, humanist and author. As well as his wartime service in the Royal Navy, he is known for presenting many current affairs programmes and for reexamining cases such as the Lindbergh kidnapping and the murder convictions of Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley. He also campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty in the United Kingdom.

#4968

Didier Eribon

#4976

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Didier Eribon is a French author and philosopher, and a historian of French intellectual life. He lives in Paris. Life Didier Eribon was born in Reims into a working-class family. He was the first in his family to finish secondary education. He credits his mother with helping him achieve this; a factory worker, she had to work overtime to be able to pay for his education.

#4969

Robert Pape

#4977

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Robert Anthony Pape Jr. is an American political scientist who studies national and international security affairs, with a focus on air power, American and international political violence, social media propaganda, and terrorism. He is currently a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and founder and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats .

#4970

Alain Daniélou

#4978

Overall Influence

1907 - 1994 (87 years)

Alain Daniélou was a French historian, Indologist, intellectual, musicologist, translator, writer, and notable Western convert to and expert on the Shaivite branch of Hinduism. In 1991 he was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship, the highest honour conferred by Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's National Academy for Music, Dance and Drama.

#4971

John Bargh

#4979

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

#4972

R. Tyrrell Rockafellar

R. Tyrrell Rockafellar

#4980

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Ralph Tyrrell Rockafellar is an American mathematician and one of the leading scholars in optimization theory and related fields of analysis and combinatorics. He is the author of four major books including the landmark text "Convex Analysis" , which has been cited more than 27,000 times according to Google Scholar and remains the standard reference on the subject, and "Variational Analysis" for which the authors received the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences .

#4973

Simon Sze

#4981

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Simon Min Sze, or Shi Min , was a Taiwanese-American electrical engineer. He is best known for inventing the floating-gate MOSFET with Korean electrical engineer Dawon Kahng in 1967. Early life and education Simon Min Sze was born in Nanjing, Jiangsu, and grew up in Taiwan. After graduating from the National Taiwan University in 1957, he received a master's degree from the University of Washington in 1960 and a doctorate from Stanford University in 1963.

#4974

Joachim Sauer

#4982

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Joachim Sauer is a German quantum chemist and professor emeritus of physical and theoretical chemistry at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He is the husband of the former chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel. He is one of the seven members of the board of trustees of the Friede Springer Foundation, together with former German president Horst Köhler and others.

#4975

Helen Edmundson

#4983

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Helen Edmundson is a British playwright, screenwriter and producer. She has won awards and critical acclaim both for her original writing and for her adaptations of various literary classics for the stage and screen.

#4976

Lara Dutta

#4984

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Lara Dutta Bhupathi is an Indian actress and winner of the Miss Universe 2000 pageant, who primarily work in Hindi films. She has received several accolades including a Filmfare Award, and was a prominent leading lady in the 2000s.

#4977

Sartaj Aziz

#4985

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

Sartaj Aziz is a Pakistani economist and strategist, having previously served as the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission of Pakistan, member of the federal cabinet as the de facto Minister for Foreign Affairs, a Federal Senator as well as the National Security Advisor.

#4978

Richard Schechner

#4986

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Richard Schechner is University Professor Emeritus at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and editor of TDR: The Drama Review. Biography Richard Schechner received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University in 1956, a Master's degree from the University of Iowa two years later, and a PhD from Tulane University in 1962. He edited The Drama Review, formerly the Tulane Drama Review, from 1962 to 1969; and again from 1986 to the present.

#4979

Hugh Hudson

#4987

Overall Influence

1936 - 2023 (87 years)

Hugh Hudson was an English film director. He was among a generation of British directors who would begin their career making documentaries and television commercials before going on to have success in films.

#4980

William Kaye Estes

#4988

Overall Influence

1919 - 2011 (92 years)

William Kaye Estes was an American psychologist. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Estes as the 77th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. In order to develop a statistical explanation for the learning phenomena, William Kaye Estes developed the Stimulus Sampling Theory in 1950 which suggested that a stimulus-response association is learned on a single trial; however, the learning process is continuous and consists of the accumulation of distinct stimulus-response pairings.

#4981

Mehdi Golshani

#4989

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Mehdi Golshani is a contemporary Iranian theoretical physicist, academic, scholar, philosopher and distinguished professor at Sharif University of Technology. He is also member of Iranian Science and Culture Hall of Fame, senior fellow of Academy of Sciences of Iran and a founding fellow of the Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics. He is a former member of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution.

#4982

Cassandra Clare

Cassandra Clare

#4990

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Judith Lewis , better known by her pen name Cassandra Clare, is an American author of young adult fiction, best known for her bestselling series The Mortal Instruments. Personal life Clare was born Judith Rumelt to American parents in Tehran, Iran. She is the daughter of Richard Rumelt, a business school professor and author. Her maternal grandfather was film producer Max Rosenberg. Clare is Jewish and has described her family as "not religious".

#4983

Jay Bybee

#4991

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Jay Scott Bybee is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a senior U.S. circuit judge of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He has published numerous articles in law journals and has taught as a senior fellow in constitutional law at William S. Boyd School of Law. His primary research interests are in constitutional and administrative law.

#4984

Paul Guyer

#4992

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Paul Guyer is an American philosopher and a leading scholar of Immanuel Kant and of aesthetics. Since 2012, he has been Jonathan Nelson Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Brown University. Education and career Guyer grew up on Long Island, New York, and attended public schools there, graduating from Lynbrook High School in 1965. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1969, where he studied in the Departments of Philosophy and German; his Ph.D. in Philosophy was also taken at Harvard University, with a dissertation directed by Stanley Cavell. Guyer joined the University ...

#4985

Gregor Kiczales

Gregor Kiczales

#4993

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Gregor Kiczales is an American computer scientist. He is currently a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is best known for developing the concept of aspect-oriented programming, and the AspectJ extension to the Java programming language, both of which he designed while working at Xerox PARC. He is also one of the co-authors of the specification for the Common Lisp Object System, and is the author of the book The Art of the Metaobject Protocol, along with Jim Des Rivières and Daniel G. Bobrow.

#4986

Stirling Moss

#4994

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

Sir Stirling Craufurd Moss was a British Formula One driver. An inductee into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, he won 212 of the 529 races he entered across several different motorsports competitions and has been described as "the greatest driver never to win the Formula One World Championship". In a seven-year span between 1955 and 1961 Moss finished in second place four times and in third place three times.

#4987

Wolfgang Rindler

Wolfgang Rindler

#4995

Overall Influence

1924 - 2019 (95 years)

Wolfgang Rindler was a physicist working in the field of general relativity where he is known for introducing the term "event horizon", Rindler coordinates, and for the use of spinors in general relativity. An honorary member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and foreign member of the , he was also a prolific textbook author.

#4988

John P. Burgess

#4996

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

John Patton Burgess is an American philosopher. He is John N. Woodhull Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University where he specializes in logic and philosophy of mathematics. Education and career Burgess received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley's Group in Logic and Methodology of Science. His interests include logic, philosophy of mathematics and metaethics. He is the author of numerous articles on logic and philosophy of mathematics. In 2012, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the brother of Barbara Burgess.

#4989

Lou Marinoff

#4997

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Lou Marinoff is a Canadian-born academic, author, and Commonwealth Scholar. He is Professor of Philosophy and Asian Studies at The City College of New York and founding President of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association.

#4990

Stephen Kotkin

#4998

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Stephen Mark Kotkin is an American historian, academic, and author. He is the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. For 33 years, Kotkin taught at Princeton University, where he attained the title of John P. Birkelund '52 Professor in History and International Affairs, and he took emeritus status from Princeton University in 2022. He was the director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the co-director of the certificate program in History and the Practice of Diplomacy.

#4991

Sune Bergström

#4999

Overall Influence

1916 - 2004 (88 years)

Karl Sune Detlof Bergström was a Swedish biochemist. In 1975, he was appointed to the Nobel Foundation Board of Directors in Sweden, and was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University, together with Bengt I. Samuelsson. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane in 1982, for discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related substances.

#4992

Rodolphe Gasché

#5000

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Rodolphe Gasché holds the Eugenio Donato Chair of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Career Gasché obtained his doctorate from the Freie Universität Berlin, where he has also taught. Before going to Buffalo he taught at Johns Hopkins University.

#4993

Werner Israel

#5001

Overall Influence

1931 - 2022 (91 years)

Werner Israel, OC FRSC FRS was a distinguished theoretical physicist best known for his contributions to gravitational theory, and especially to the understanding of black holes. Biography Israel was born in Berlin, Germany in 1931. His family fled Nazi Germany in 1936 and settled in Cape Town, South Africa, where he was raised. He was interested in astronomy and cosmology from a young age. For four years, when his parents were seriously ill, Israel and his brother lived in an orphanage. Israel received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the University of Cape Town, and his Ph.D. from Trinity Co...

#4994

Tony Brooker

#5002

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

Ralph Anthony Brooker , was a British computer scientist known for developing the Mark 1 Autocode. He was educated at Emanuel School and graduated in Mathematics from Imperial College in 1945 and returned there in 1947 as assistant lecturer. His first computer project was the construction of a fast multiplier unit from electro-mechanical relays. This was taken over by Sid Michaelson and K. D. Tocher and incorporated into ICCE, the Imperial College Computing Engine based on the same technology. By then Brooker had moved to the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory to work for Maurice Wilk...

#4995

David Leigh

#5003

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

David Leigh is a British journalist and writer who was the investigations editor of The Guardian and is the author of Investigative Journalism: a survival guide. He officially retired in April 2013, although Leigh continued his association with the newspaper.

#4996

Gail Dines

#5004

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Gail Dines is professor emerita of sociology and women's studies at Wheelock College in Boston, Massachusetts. A radical feminist, Dines specializes in the study of pornography. Described in 2010 as the world's leading anti-pornography campaigner, she is a founding member of Stop Porn Culture and founder of Culture Reframed, created to address pornography as a public-health crisis. Dines is co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality and author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality .

#4997

Juan Cole

#5005

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

John Ricardo Irfan "Juan" Cole is an American academic and commentator on the modern Middle East and South Asia. He is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Since 2002, he has written a weblog, Informed Comment .

#4998

Derek Gregory

#5006

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

#4999

Michael Duff

#5007

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Michael James Duff FRS, FRSA is a British theoretical physicist and pioneering theorist of supergravity who is the Principal of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Abdus Salam Chair of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London.

#5000

Gary Lineker

#5008

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Gary Winston Lineker is an English sports broadcaster and former professional footballer. Lineker is the only player to have been the top goalscorer in England with three clubs: Leicester City, Everton and Tottenham Hotspur. He also played for Barcelona in Spain, and won 80 caps for England. His media career began with the BBC, where he has presented the flagship football programme Match of the Day since the late 1990s, the longest tenure of any MOTD presenter. Lineker is also the BBC's lead presenter for live football matches, including coverage of international tournaments such as the FIFA World Cup.

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