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
Nikki Giovanni
#2004
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr. is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world's most well-known African-American poets, her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She has won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She has been nominated for a Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she has been named as one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 "Living Legends".
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John Hope Franklin
#3552
Overall Influence
1915 - 2009 (94 years)
John Hope Franklin was an American historian of the United States and former president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. Franklin is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and continually updated. More than three million copies have been sold. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
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David Levering Lewis
#5688
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
David Levering Lewis is an American historian, a Julius Silver University Professor, and professor emeritus of history at New York University. He is twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, for part one and part two of his biography of W. E. B. Du Bois . He is the first author to win Pulitzer Prizes for biography for two successive volumes on the same subject.
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Evelyn Boyd Granville
#10143
Overall Influence
1924 - 2023 (99 years)
Evelyn Boyd Granville was the second African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from an American university; she earned it in 1949 from Yale University. She graduated from Smith College in 1945. She performed pioneering work in the field of computing.
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John Lewis
#13225
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
John Robert Lewis was an American politician and civil rights activist who served in the United States House of Representatives for from 1987 until his death in 2020. He participated in the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1963 to 1966, and was one of the "Big Six" leaders of groups who organized the 1963 March on Washington. Fulfilling many key roles in the civil rights movement and its actions to end legalized racial segregation in the United States, in 1965 Lewis led the first of three Selma to Montgomery ma...
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Lee Lorch
#14722
Overall Influence
1915 - 2014 (99 years)
Lee Alexander Lorch was an American mathematician, early civil rights activist, and communist. His leadership in the campaign to desegregate Stuyvesant Town, a large housing development on the East Side of Manhattan, helped eventually to make housing discrimination illegal in the United States but also resulted in Lorch losing his own job twice. He and his family then moved to the Southern United States where he and his wife, Grace Lorch, became involved in the civil rights movement there while also teaching at several Black colleges. He encouraged black students to pursue studies in mathemat...
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Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz
#15909
Overall Influence
1921 - 2002 (81 years)
Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz was an American physicist. Biography He was born in Bryan, Texas, and grew up in Oklahoma. His father was an agricultural chemist and named his son after the Italian socialist Giovanni Rossi, who had founded an agricultural commune in Brazil in the 1890s. Lomanitz graduated from high school at age 14 and went on to earn his bachelor of science degree in physics from the University of Oklahoma and his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1951 from Cornell University under Richard Feynman.
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Mary Frances Berry
#16804
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Mary Frances Berry is an American historian, writer, lawyer, activist and professor who focuses on U.S. constitutional and legal, African-American history. Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought where she teaches American legal history at the Department of History, School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the former chairwoman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Previously, Berry was provost of the College of Behavioral and Social Science at University of Maryland, College Park, and was the first African American chancellor...
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Etta Zuber Falconer
#20620
Overall Influence
1933 - 2002 (69 years)
Etta Zuber Falconer was an American educator and mathematician the bulk of whose career was spent at Spelman College, where she eventually served as department head and associate provost. She was one of the earlier African-American women to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics.
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Johnnetta Cole
#20665
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Johnnetta Betsch Cole is an American anthropologist, educator, museum director, and college president. Cole was the first female African-American president of Spelman College, a historically black college, serving from 1987 to 1997. She was president of Bennett College from 2002 to 2007. During 2009–2017 she was Director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art. Cole served as the national chair and 7th president for the National Council of Negro Women from 2018 to 2022.
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Ron Walters
#27304
Overall Influence
1938 - 2010 (72 years)
Ronald W. Walters was an American author, speaker and scholar of African-American politics. He was director of the African American Leadership Institute and Scholar Practitioner Program, Distinguished Leadership Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, and professor in government and politics at the University of Maryland.
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C. Eric Lincoln
#28472
Overall Influence
1924 - 2000 (76 years)
Charles Eric Lincoln was an American scholar. He was the author of several books, including sociological works such as The Black Church Since Frazier and Race, Religion and the Continuing American Dilemma , as well as fiction and poetry.
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Albert N. Whiting
#29323
Overall Influence
1917 - 2020 (103 years)
Albert Nathaniel Whiting was an American academic who was President and Chancellor of North Carolina College from 1966 to 1983. He was born in Navesink, New Jersey in July 1917, and served in the U.S. armed forces during World War II. He received his PhD from the American University in 1952. Whiting served as Dean of the Faculty of Morgan State College before becoming president and Chancellor of North Carolina College. He was married to Lottie Luck, who predeceased him in 2004 at the age of 85.
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Raymond Winbush
#30232
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Raymond Arnold Winbush a.k.a. Tikari Bioko is an American scholar and activist known for his systems-thinking approaches to understanding the impact of racism/white supremacy on the global African community. He is currently Research Professor and Director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Go to Profile#15
Marion Barry
#30728
Overall Influence
1936 - 2014 (78 years)
Marion Shepilov Barry was an American politician who served as mayor of the District of Columbia from 1979 to 1991 and 1995 to 1999. A Democrat, Barry had served three tenures on the Council of the District of Columbia, representing as an at-large member from 1975 to 1979, in Ward 8 from 1993 to 1995, and again from 2005 to 2014.
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Gloria Conyers Hewitt
#31930
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Gloria Conyers Hewitt is an American mathematician. She was the fourth African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. Her main research interests were in group theory and abstract algebra. She is the first African American woman to chair a math department in the United States.
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Hazel R. O'Leary
#40987
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Hazel Reid O'Leary is an American lawyer, politician and university administrator who served as the 7th United States secretary of energy from 1993 to 1997. A member of the Democratic Party, O'Leary was the first woman and first African American to hold that post. She also served as the 14th president of Fisk University from 2004 to 2013, a historically black college and her alma mater. O'Leary's tenure at Fisk came amid financial difficulty for the school, during which time she increased enrollment and contentiously used the school's art collection to raise funds.
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Caroline Randall Williams
#46381
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
Caroline Randall Williams is an American author, poet and academic best known for the 2015 cookbook Soul Food Love, co-written with her mother, author Alice Randall, and published by Random House. In February, 2016, Soul Food Love received the NAACP Image Award in Literature .
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Vivienne Malone-Mayes
#53255
Overall Influence
1932 - 1995 (63 years)
Vivienne Lucille Malone-Mayes was an American mathematician and professor. Malone-Mayes studied properties of functions, as well as methods of teaching mathematics. She was the fifth African-American woman to gain a PhD in mathematics in the United States, and the first African-American member of the faculty of Baylor University.
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Blyden Jackson
#53642
Overall Influence
1910 - 2000 (90 years)
Blyden Jackson was a Black American academic, essayist, and activist. The grandson of slaves, born in the segregated South, Jackson was the first Black American to become a full professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1969, and "the first Black American professor at a traditionally white university in the Southeast."
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Alcee Hastings
#58313
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Alcee Lamar Hastings was an American politician and former judge from the state of Florida. He was notable for having been impeached and removed from office as a judge for bribery and perjury. Hastings was nominated to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida by President Jimmy Carter in August 1979. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on October 31, 1979. In 1981, after an FBI sting operation, Hastings was charged with conspiracy to solicit a bribe. Following a 1983 criminal trial, Hastings was acquitted; however, he was impeached for bribery and perjury...
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Ronald E. Mickens
#59278
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Ronald Elbert Mickens is an American physicist and mathematician who is the Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Physics at Clark Atlanta University. His research focuses on nonlinear dynamics and mathematical modeling, including modeling epidemiology. He also has an interest in the history of science and has written on the history of black scientists. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and served as the historian of the National Society of Black Physicists. He has made significant contributions to the theory of nonlinear oscillations and numerical analysis.
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Bonita H. Valien
#65466
Overall Influence
1912 - 2011 (99 years)
Bonita H. Valien was an African-American sociologist. She was an associate professor of sociology at Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee, and the author of several books about desegregation in the Southern United States.
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Louis W. Roberts
#66874
Overall Influence
1913 - 1995 (82 years)
Louis Wright Roberts was an American microwave physicist. In the 1960s, he was the chief of the Microwave Laboratory at NASA's Electronics Research Center. In the 1970s and 1980s he worked at the United States Department of Transportation's John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, beginning in senior research positions and ultimately becoming the director of the center. His research focused on optics and microwave engineering.
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Frederica Wilson
#70542
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Frederica Smith Wilson is an American politician who has been a member of the United States House of Representatives since 2011, representing . Located in South Florida, Wilson's congressional district, numbered 17th during her first term, covers a large swath of eastern Miami-Dade County and a sliver of southern Broward County. The district contains most of Miami's majority-black precincts, as well as parts of Opa-locka, North Miami, Hollywood, and Miramar. Wilson gained national attention in 2012 for her comments on the death of Trayvon Martin.
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Camille Akeju
#70970
Overall Influence
Camille Giraud Akeju is American curator and educator. She is the former director of the Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, D.C. Biography Camille Akeju grew up in Mount Vernon, New York. She attended college in Jacksonville University, in 1968, and was one of six students to be integrated in the dorms. She ended up leaving Jacksonville and attended Howard University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in art education, a minor in printmaking, and her master's degree in art history. While at Howard, she would intern at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
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Terry Adkins
#74594
Overall Influence
1953 - 2014 (61 years)
Terry Roger Adkins was an American artist. He was Professor of Fine Arts in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Early life Adkins was born in Washington, D.C., on May 9, 1953, into a musical household. His father, Robert H. Adkins, a chemistry and science teacher and Korean War veteran, sang and played the organ; his mother, Doris Jackson, a nurse, was an amateur clarinetist and pianist. Adkins' grandfather was the Rev. Andrew Adkins, pastor of the historic Albert Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia. His aunt Alexandra Alexander was a mathematician and NSA code breaker.
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Tuajuanda C. Jordan
#74799
Overall Influence
Tuajuanda C. Jordan has served as the seventh president of St. Mary’s College of Maryland since July 1, 2014. From 2006 to 2011, Jordan served as director of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science Education Alliance program, where she launched the SEA-PHAGES program. This program has been implemented at more than 100 institutions and resulted in numerous scientific and pedagogical publications. Prior to joining St. Mary’s College, Jordan also held a number of leadership positions in higher education, including dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of chemistry at Lewi...
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Elwood Robinson
#76528
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Elwood L. Robinson is an American academic, university administrator and clinical psychologist currently serving as the 13th Chancellor of Winston-Salem State University. He previously served as Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Cambridge College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Julius Lester
#76591
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Julius Bernard Lester was an American writer of books for children and adults and an academic who taught for 32 years at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Lester was also a civil rights activist, a photographer, and a musician who recorded two albums of folk music and original songs.
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Joan Murrell Owens
#81117
Overall Influence
1933 - 2011 (78 years)
Joan Murrell Owens was an American educator and marine biologist specializing in corals. She received degrees in geology, fine art, and guidance counseling. She described a new genus, Rhombopsammia, and three new species of button corals, R. niphada, R. squiresi, and Letepsammia franki.
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Edward Thomas
#81892
Overall Influence
Edward E. Thomas Jr. is an American plasma physicist and a Professor of Physics at Auburn University. He currently serves as the university's associate dean for research and graduate studies and is also the university's Charles W. Barkley Endowed Professor for diversity and inclusion. He is a fellow of the National Society of Black Physicists , the Alabama Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society .
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Keith Anthony Morrison
#82114
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Keith Anthony Morrison, Commander of Distinction , born May 20, 1942 Morrison has had a significant career as a writer also, having published in many periodicals and museum catalogs. His 1979 article "Art Criticism: A Pan-African Point of View" is widely considered a landmark theory of abstraction by African American artists. Among his many other publications are: "African American visual Aesthetics" ; "Pin-pricked Deities: The Art of Joyce Scott"
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Henry Ponder
#85030
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Henry Ponder is a U.S. educator. Ponder received his undergraduate, masters, and doctorate degree from Langston University, Oklahoma State University, Ohio State University. He went on to serve as the president of Talladega College, Benedict College, and Fisk University.
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James Raymond Lawson
#85642
Overall Influence
1915 - 1996 (81 years)
James Raymond Lawson was an American physicist and university administrator. He was the president of Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1967 to 1975. Early life James Raymond Lawson was born on January 15, 1915, in Louisville, Kentucky. His father, Daniel LaMont Lawson, was a Fisk alumnus, Fisk Jubilee Singer and an academic dean at Simmons College.
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Mandisa
#87012
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Mandisa Lynn Hundley , known professionally as Mandisa, is an American gospel and contemporary Christian recording artist. Her career began as a contestant in the fifth season of American Idol, in which she finished in ninth place. She is the fifth American Idol alumna to win a Grammy Award, for her album Overcomer in the Best Contemporary Christian Music Album category.
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Jewel Freeman Graham
#89544
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Precious Jewel Freeman Graham was an educator, social worker, and attorney. She was professor emeritus of social work and legal studies at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio. She was the second black woman to serve as president of the World YWCA. She was named to the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame in 2008.
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M. Christopher Brown II
#95418
Overall Influence
M. Christopher Brown II is the former president of Kentucky State University in Frankfort, Kentucky. Career Brown previously served as president of the nation's first historically black land-grant institution, Alcorn State University, and was the inaugural Executive Vice President and Provost of the Southern University System and Southern University campus. He held the same position at Fisk University, where he was also a professor. Prior to this appointment, he served as dean of the College of Education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, vice president for Programs and Administration at ...
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Mathew Knowles
#99315
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Mathew Knowles is an American record executive, businessman and university lecturer. He is best known for being the manager of Destiny's Child. He also once managed the solo careers of his daughters Beyoncé and Solange Knowles.
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Natalia Tanner
#101403
Overall Influence
1922 - 2018 (96 years)
Natalia Tanner was an American physician. She was the first female African-American fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics. She is known for her activism promoting women and people of color in medicine and fighting health inequality in the United States.
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Keivan Stassun
#103067
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Keivan Guadalupe Stassun is an American physicist and astronomer in the field of exoplanets. He is a physics professor at Vanderbilt University and an adjunct professor at Fisk University, institutions at which he oversees and co-directs the Fisk-Vanderbilt Masters-to-Ph.D Bridge Program. Stassun has been an activist promoting the integration of underrepresented groups in the fields of STEM, especially math and science through research, outreach and teaching.
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Preston Valien
#105504
Overall Influence
1914 - 1995 (81 years)
Preston Valien was an African-American sociologist. He was a Sociology professor at Fisk University and Brooklyn College, and he worked for the U.S. federal government, including as a cultural attaché in Nigeria. He was the author of several books about school desegregation in the Southern United States
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Rutherford H. Adkins
#108759
Overall Influence
1924 - 1996 (72 years)
Rutherford Hamlet "Lubby" Adkins was an American military aviator and university administrator who served with the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II. He flew fourteen combat missions with the Tuskegee Airmen. He came home to complete his education and earn multiple degrees: he was the first African American to earn a PhD from The Catholic University in Washington D.C. Adkins went on to serve in many positions in higher education including as President of Knoxville College and Fisk University.
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Bobby William Austin
#112152
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Bobby William Austin is an American sociologist, lecturer, and writer. He is a leading scholar on African-American men and boys and was the first person, as a Program Officer with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, to fund major philanthropic initiatives for African-American men and boys. Over the past 30 years, in the fields of education, social policy, youth development, cultural theory, philanthropy and religion, he has created a series of structured venues as pathways for how citizens might live life in communities as individuals and as members of groups where peace, meaning, and innovation are nurtured.
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Diane Nash
#120687
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Diane Judith Nash is an American civil rights activist, and a leader and strategist of the student wing of the Civil Rights Movement. Nash's campaigns were among the most successful of the era. Her efforts included the first successful civil rights campaign to integrate lunch counters ; the Freedom Riders, who desegregated interstate travel; co-founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ; and co-initiating the Alabama Voting Rights Project and working on the Selma Voting Rights Movement. This helped gain Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which authorized the ...
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Lee Limbird
#126271
Overall Influence
Lee Limbird is a pharmacologist, Dean of the School of Natural Science, Mathematics and Business & Professor in the Department of Life and Physical Sciences at Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee.
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Calvin C. Hernton
#134008
Overall Influence
1932 - 2001 (69 years)
Calvin Coolidge Hernton was an American sociologist, poet and author, particularly renowned for his 1965 study Sex and Racism in America, which has been described as "a frank look at the role sexual tensions played in the American racial divide, and it helped set the tone for much African-American social criticism over the following decade."
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Joseph Johnson III
#141497
Overall Influence
1940 - 2017 (77 years)
Joseph Andrew Johnson III was an American physicist and professor at the Florida A&M University. He was a founding member of the National Society of Black Physicists. He was awarded the 1995 American Physical Society Edward Bouchet award and the 2016 Yale University Bouchet Leadership Award Medal.
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Ramona Edelin
#148314
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ramona Hoage Edelin is an American academic, activist and consultant. Edelin is credited with introducing the term "African American" into the general vernacular. She has been named one of the most influential Black Americans by Ebony. Today, she serves as executive director of the DC Association of Charter Schools.
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Gail E. Wyatt
#150945
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Gail Elizabeth Wyatt is a clinical psychologist and board-certified sex therapist known for her research on consensual and abusive sexual relationships and their influence on psychological well-being. She is Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Wyatt was the first African American woman in the state of California to receive a license to practice psychology and first African American woman to be named a Full Professor of the UCLA School of Medicine.
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