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 …
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List of the most influential people
#1
Roger Penrose
#26
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
#2
Donald Knuth
#27
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Donald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. Knuth has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms".
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Linus Pauling
#50
Overall Influence
1901 - 1994 (93 years)
Linus Carl Pauling was an American chemist, biochemist, chemical engineer, peace activist, author, and educator. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific topics. New Scientist called him one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time, For his scientific work, Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. For his peace activism, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. He is one of five people to have won more than one Nobel Prize . Of these, he is the only person to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, and one of two peo...
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John McCarthy
#68
Overall Influence
1927 - 2011 (84 years)
John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence. He co-authored the document that coined the term "artificial intelligence" , developed the programming language family Lisp, significantly influenced the design of the language ALGOL, popularized time-sharing, and invented garbage collection.
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Murray Gell-Mann
#94
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Murray Gell-Mann was an American physicist who played a preeminent role in the development of the theory of elementary particles. Gell-Mann introduced the concept of quarks as the fundamental building blocks of the strongly interacting particles, and the renormalization group as a foundational element of quantum field theory and statistical mechanics. He played key roles in developing the concept of chirality in the theory of the weak interactions and spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in the strong interactions, which controls the physics of the light mesons. In the 1970s he was a co...
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Vint Cerf
#103
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Vinton Gray Cerf is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn. He has received honorary degrees and awards that include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Marconi Prize, and membership in the National Academy of Engineering.
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Ivan Sutherland
#162
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Ivan Edward Sutherland is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer graphics. His early work in computer graphics as well as his teaching with David C. Evans in that subject at the University of Utah in the 1970s was pioneering in the field. Sutherland, Evans, and their students from that era developed several foundations of modern computer graphics. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of the Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers.
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Kip Thorne
#163
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
#9
Benoit Mandelbrot
#165
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Benoit B. Mandelbrot was a Polish-born French-American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as "the art of roughness" of physical phenomena and "the uncontrolled element in life". He referred to himself as a "fractalist" and is recognized for his contribution to the field of fractal geometry, which included coining the word "fractal", as well as developing a theory of "roughness and self-similarity" in nature.
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Terence Tao
#176
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
#11
David Baltimore
#213
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Areas of Specialization: Microbiology David Baltimore is director of the Joint Center for Translational Medicine and President Emeritus and Robert Andrews Milliken Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College and a PhD in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also conducted his postdoctoral research on virus replication. His research has produced remarkable contributions to cancer research, biotechnology, recombinant DNA research virology, and immunology. In 1975, he shared the Nobel Prize for P...
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Vernon L. Smith
#244
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Vernon Lomax Smith is an American economist and professor of business economics and law at Chapman University. He was formerly a professor of economics at the University of Arizona, professor of economics and law at George Mason University, and a board member of the Mercatus Center. Along with Daniel Kahneman, Smith shared the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics and his work in the field of experimental economics. He worked to establish 'laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternat...
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David Bohm
#311
Overall Influence
1917 - 1992 (75 years)
David Joseph Bohm was an American–Brazilian–British scientist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind. Among his many contributions to physics is his causal and deterministic interpretation of quantum theory known as De Broglie–Bohm theory.
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Eugenio Calabi
#378
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (101 years)
Eugenio Calabi was an Italian-born American mathematician and the Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in differential geometry, partial differential equations and their applications.
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L. Sprague de Camp
#437
Overall Influence
1907 - 2000 (93 years)
Lyon Sprague de Camp was an American writer of science fiction, fantasy and non-fiction. In a career spanning 60 years, he wrote over 100 books, including novels and works of non-fiction, including biographies of other fantasy authors. He was a major figure in science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s.
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John Hopfield
#581
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
John Joseph Hopfield is an American scientist most widely known for his invention of an associative neural network in 1982. It is now more commonly known as the Hopfield network. Biography Hopfield was born in 1933 to Polish physicist John Joseph Hopfield and physicist Helen Hopfield. Helen was the older Hopfield's second wife. He is the sixth of Hopfield's children and has three children and six grandchildren of his own.
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Robert C. Merton
#691
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Robert Cox Merton is an American economist, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureate, and professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, known for his pioneering contributions to continuous-time finance, especially the first continuous-time option pricing model, the Black–Scholes–Merton model. In 1997 Merton together with Myron Scholes were awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for the method to determine the value of derivatives.
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Serge Lang
#714
Overall Influence
1927 - 2005 (78 years)
Serge Lang was a French-American mathematician and activist who taught at Yale University for most of his career. He is known for his work in number theory and for his mathematics textbooks, including the influential Algebra. He received the Frank Nelson Cole Prize in 1960 and was a member of the Bourbaki group.
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Frank Borman
#801
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Frank Frederick Borman II was an American United States Air Force colonel, aeronautical engineer, NASA astronaut, test pilot, and businessman. He was the commander of Apollo 8, the first mission to fly around the Moon, and together with crewmates Jim Lovell and William Anders, became the first of 24 humans to do so, for which he was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
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Kenneth G. Wilson
#820
Overall Influence
1936 - 2013 (77 years)
Kenneth Geddes "Ken" Wilson was an American theoretical physicist and a pioneer in leveraging computers for studying particle physics. He was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on phase transitions—illuminating the subtle essence of phenomena like melting ice and emerging magnetism. It was embodied in his fundamental work on the renormalization group.
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Yuan T. Lee
#843
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Yuan Tseh Lee is a Taiwanese chemist and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the first Taiwanese Nobel Prize laureate who, along with the Hungarian-Canadian John C. Polanyi and American Dudley R. Herschbach, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986 "for their contributions to the dynamics of chemical elementary processes".
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Lynn Margulis
#883
Overall Influence
1938 - 2011 (73 years)
Lynn Margulis was an American evolutionary biologist, and was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution. Historian Jan Sapp has said that "Lynn Margulis's name is as synonymous with symbiosis as Charles Darwin's is with evolution." In particular, Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei – an event Ernst Mayr called "perhaps the most important and dramatic event in the history of life" – by proposing it to have been the result of symbiotic mergers of bacteria.
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Peter Shor
#886
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Peter Williston Shor is an American professor of applied mathematics at MIT. He is known for his work on quantum computation, in particular for devising Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm for factoring exponentially faster than the best currently-known algorithm running on a classical computer.
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Renato Dulbecco
#888
Overall Influence
1914 - 2012 (98 years)
Renato Dulbecco was an Italian–American virologist who won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on oncoviruses, which are viruses that can cause cancer when they infect animal cells. He studied at the University of Turin under Giuseppe Levi, along with fellow students Salvador Luria and Rita Levi-Montalcini, who also moved to the U.S. with him and won Nobel prizes. He was drafted into the Italian army in World War II, but later joined the resistance.
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Michael O. Rabin
#911
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Michael Oser Rabin is an Israeli mathematician, computer scientist, and recipient of the Turing Award. Biography Early life and education Rabin was born in 1931 in Breslau, Germany , the son of a rabbi. In 1935, he emigrated with his family to Mandate Palestine. As a young boy, he was very interested in mathematics and his father sent him to the best high school in Haifa, where he studied under mathematician Elisha Netanyahu, who was then a high school teacher.
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Robert Tarjan
#914
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Robert Endre Tarjan is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the discoverer of several graph theory algorithms, including his strongly connected components algorithm, and co-inventor of both splay trees and Fibonacci heaps. Tarjan is currently the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University.
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Eric Lander
#937
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Areas of Specialization: Systems Biology, Genetics Eric Lander is founding director of the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Professor of Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. He graduated from Princeton University as valedictorian, with a BS in mathematics. He went on to attend University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he earned his PhD He is a founder of Verastem and a founding advisor of Foundation Medicine. He began his career in mathematics, but soon started looking at mathematical applications in neurobiology.
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Jack W. Szostak
#952
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jack William Szostak is a Canadian American biologist of Polish British descent, Nobel Prize laureate, University Professor at the University of Chicago, former Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and Alexander Rich Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. Szostak has made significant contributions to the field of genetics. His achievement helped scientists to map the location of genes in mammals and to develop techniques for manipulating genes. His research findings in this area are also instrumental to the Human Genome Project. He was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol W.
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William Alfred Fowler
#963
Overall Influence
1911 - 1995 (84 years)
William Alfred Fowler was an American nuclear physicist, later astrophysicist, who, with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is known for his theoretical and experimental research into nuclear reactions within stars and the energy elements produced in the process and was one of the authors of the influential BFH paper.
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Carl David Anderson
#1048
Overall Influence
1905 - 1991 (86 years)
Carl David Anderson was an American physicist. He is best known for his discovery of the positron in 1932, an achievement for which he received the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics, and of the muon in 1936.
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Michael Gazzaniga
#1072
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
#32
Gerhard Ertl
#1120
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Gerhard Ertl is a German physicist and a Professor emeritus at the Department of Physical Chemistry, Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Berlin, Germany. Ertl's research laid the foundation of modern surface chemistry, which has helped explain how fuel cells produce energy without pollution, how catalytic converters clean up car exhausts and even why iron rusts, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
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John Gurdon
#1140
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Sir John Bertrand Gurdon is a British developmental biologist, best known for his pioneering research in nuclear transplantation and cloning. Awarded the Lasker Award in 2009, in 2012, he and Shinya Yamanaka were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that mature cells can be converted to stem cells.
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Fei-Fei Li
#1176
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Fei-Fei Li is an American computer scientist, who was born in China and is known for establishing ImageNet, the dataset that enabled rapid advances in computer vision in the 2010s. She is the Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and former board director at Twitter. Li is a Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and a Co-Director of the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. She served as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2013 to 2018.
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Sean M. Carroll
#1185
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Sean Michael Carroll is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and philosophy of science. Formerly a research professor at the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology department of physics, he is currently an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope and New Scientist.
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Robert Woodrow Wilson
#1198
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Robert Woodrow Wilson is an American astronomer who, along with Arno Allan Penzias, discovered cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964. The pair won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery.
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Donald A. Glaser
#1214
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Donald Arthur Glaser was an American physicist, neurobiologist, and the winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the bubble chamber used in subatomic particle physics. Education Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Glaser completed his Bachelor of Science degree in physics and mathematics from Case School of Applied Science in 1946. He completed his PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1949. Glaser accepted a position as an instructor at the University of Michigan in 1949, and was promoted to professor in 1957. He joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, in 1959, as a professor of physics.
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Edwin McMillan
#1216
Overall Influence
1907 - 1991 (84 years)
Edwin Mattison McMillan was an American physicist credited with being the first to produce a transuranium element, neptunium. For this, he shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Glenn Seaborg.
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Martin Karplus
#1254
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
#40
Edward B. Lewis
#1294
Overall Influence
1918 - 2004 (86 years)
Edward Butts Lewis was an American geneticist, a corecipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He helped to found the field of evolutionary developmental biology. Early life Lewis was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the second son of Laura Mary Lewis and Edward Butts Lewis, a watchmaker-jeweler. His full name was supposed to be Edward Butts Lewis Jr., but his birth certificate was incorrectly filled out with "B." as his middle name.
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Rudolph A. Marcus
#1363
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (101 years)
Rudolph Arthur Marcus is a Canadian-born chemist who received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems". Marcus theory, named after him, provides a thermodynamic and kinetic framework for describing one electron outer-sphere electron transfer. He is a professor at Caltech, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.
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Christof Koch
#1400
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Christof Koch is a German-American neurophysiologist and computational neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural basis of consciousness. He is the president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. From 1986 until 2013, he was a professor at the California Institute of Technology.
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Cleve Moler
#1592
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Cleve Barry Moler is an American mathematician and computer programmer specializing in numerical analysis. In the mid to late 1970s, he was one of the authors of LINPACK and EISPACK, Fortran libraries for numerical computing. He invented MATLAB, a numerical computing package, to give his students at the University of New Mexico easy access to these libraries without writing Fortran. In 1984, he co-founded MathWorks with Jack Little to commercialize this program.
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Winston W. Royce
#1607
Overall Influence
1929 - 1995 (66 years)
Winston Walker Royce was an American computer scientist, director at Lockheed Software Technology Center in Austin, Texas. He was a pioneer in the field of software development, known for his 1970 paper from which the Waterfall model for software development was mistakenly drawn.
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Edward Fredkin
#1618
Overall Influence
1934 - 2023 (89 years)
Edward Fredkin was an American computer scientist, physicist and businessman who was an early pioneer of digital physics. Fredkin's primary contributions included work on reversible computing and cellular automata. While Konrad Zuse's book, Calculating Space , mentioned the importance of reversible computation, the Fredkin gate represented the essential breakthrough. In more recent work, he used the term digital philosophy .
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James Rumbaugh
#1641
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
James E. Rumbaugh is an American computer scientist and object-oriented methodologist who is best known for his work in creating the Object Modeling Technique and the Unified Modeling Language . Biography Born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Rumbaugh received a B.S. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , an M.S. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology , and received a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT under Professor Jack Dennis.
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Franco Rasetti
#1651
Overall Influence
1901 - 2001 (100 years)
Franco Dino Rasetti was an Italian physicist, paleontologist and botanist. Together with Enrico Fermi, he discovered key processes leading to nuclear fission. Rasetti refused to work on the Manhattan Project on moral grounds.
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Fernando J. Corbató
#1770
Overall Influence
1926 - 2019 (93 years)
Fernando José "Corby" Corbató was an American computer scientist, notable as a pioneer in the development of time-sharing operating systems. Career Corbató was born on July 1, 1926, in Oakland, California, to Hermenegildo Corbató, a Spanish literature professor from Villarreal, Spain, and Charlotte Corbató. In 1930 the Corbató family moved to Los Angeles for Hermenegildo's job at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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George Zweig
#1776
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
George Zweig is an American physicist of Jewish origin. He was trained as a particle physicist under Richard Feynman. He introduced, independently of Murray Gell-Mann, the quark model . He later turned his attention to neurobiology. He has worked as a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in the financial services industry.
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Solomon W. Golomb
#1815
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Solomon Wolf Golomb was an American mathematician, engineer, and professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, best known for his works on mathematical games. Most notably, he invented Cheskers in 1948. He also fully described polyominoes and pentominoes in 1953. He specialized in problems of combinatorial analysis, number theory, coding theory, and communications. Pentomino boardgames, based on his work, would go on to inspire Tetris.
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