The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people
#1
John W. Meyer
#4796
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
John Wilfred Meyer is a sociologist and emeritus professor at Stanford University. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present day, Meyer has contributed fundamental ideas to the field of sociology, especially in the areas of education, organizations, and global and transnational sociology. He is best known for the development of the neo-institutional perspective on globalization, known as world society or World Polity Theory. In 2015, he became the recipient of American Sociological Association's highest honor - W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award.
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Owen Gingerich
#5635
Overall Influence
1930 - 2023 (93 years)
Owen Jay Gingerich was an American astronomer who had been professor emeritus of astronomy and of the history of science at Harvard University and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. In addition to his research and teaching, he had written many books on the history of astronomy.
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David Bartel
#9291
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
David P. Bartel is an American molecular biologist best known for his work on microRNAs. Bartel is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Member of the Whitehead Institute, and investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute .
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Byron Good
#13136
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Byron Joseph Good is an American medical anthropologist primarily studying mental illness. He is currently on the faculty of Harvard University, where he is Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology.
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Don Yoder
#13169
Overall Influence
1921 - 2015 (94 years)
Don Yoder was an American folklorist specializing in the study of Pennsylvania Dutch, Quaker, and Amish and other Anabaptist folklife in Pennsylvania who wrote at least 15 books on these subjects. A professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, he specialized in religious folklife and the study of belief. He is known for his teaching, collecting, field trips, recording, lectures, and books. He also co-founded a folk festival in Pennsylvania, which is the USA's oldest continual annual folklife festival, and is credited with "bringing the idea of "folklife" to the United States".
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John Howard Yoder
#17720
Overall Influence
1927 - 1997 (70 years)
John Howard Yoder was an American Mennonite theologian and ethicist best known for his defense of Christian pacifism. His most influential book was The Politics of Jesus, which was first published in 1972. Yoder was a Mennonite and wrote from an Anabaptist perspective. He spent the latter part of his career teaching at the University of Notre Dame.
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Donald Kraybill
#18323
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Donald B. Kraybill is an American author, lecturer, and educator on Anabaptist faiths and culture. Kraybill is widely recognized for his studies on Anabaptist groups and in particular the Amish. He has researched and written extensively on Anabaptist culture. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Elizabethtown College and Senior Fellow Emeritus at Elizabethtown's Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies.
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Howard Zehr
#19754
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Howard J. Zehr is an American criminologist. Zehr is considered to be a pioneer of the modern concept of restorative justice. He is Distinguished Professor of Restorative Justice at Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and Co-director Emeritus of the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice.
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J. Mark Ramseyer
#22842
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
John Mark Ramseyer is the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is the author of over 10 books and 50 articles in scholarly journals. He is co-author of one of the leading corporations casebooks, Klein, Ramseyer & Bainbridge, Business Associations, Cases and Materials on Agency, Partnerships, LLCs, and Corporations, now in its 10th edition. In 2018 he was awarded Japan's Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon in recognition of "his extensive contributions to the development of Japanese studies in the U.S. and the promotion of understanding tow...
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John A. Hostetler
#24363
Overall Influence
1918 - 2001 (83 years)
John A. Hostetler was an American author, educator, and scholar of Amish and Hutterite societies. Some of his works are still in print. Life John Andrew Hostetler was born to an Old Order Amish family in the Kishacoquillas Valley region of Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, the fifth of seven children of Joseph and Nancy Hostetler. At the age of eleven, his parents moved to Iowa. As a youth he supervised his father's turkey operation, took courses on poultry raising, and received a poultry-judging license from the American Poultry Association. He discovered that he enjoyed reading more than raising turkeys and feeding hogs.
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Said Sheikh Samatar
#34249
Overall Influence
1943 - 2015 (72 years)
Said Sheikh Samatar was a prominent Somali scholar and writer. Biography Early years Said was born in 1943 in the Ogaden in Ethiopia to Faduma and Sheikh Samatar. He came from a large family consisting of fourteen people, including his father's second wife. He hailed from Fiqi Ismaciil a subclan of Leelkase Tanade Daarood.
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Sofia Samatar
#42039
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Sofia Samatar is an American scholar, novelist and educator from Indiana. Early life Samatar was born in 1971 in northern Indiana, United States. Her father was the Somali scholar, historian and writer Said Sheikh Samatar. Her mother is a Swiss-German Mennonite from North Dakota. Sofia's parents met in 1970 in Mogadishu, Somalia, while her mother was teaching English.
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Ellah Wakatama Allfrey
#53999
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Ellah Wakatama, OBE, Hon. FRSL , is the Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books, a senior Research Fellow at Manchester University, and Chair of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. She was the founding Publishing Director of the Indigo Press. A London-based editor and critic, she was on the judging panel of the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award and the 2015 Man Booker Prize. In 2016, she was a Visiting Professor & Global Intercultural Scholar at Goshen College, Indiana, and was the Guest Master for the 2016 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation international journalism fellowship in Cartagena, Colombia.
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Philip A. Beachy
#55795
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Philip Arden Beachy is Ernest and Amelia Gallo Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California and an Associate at Stanford's Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.
Go to Profile#15
Nathan Stoltzfus
#56706
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Nathan Stoltzfus is an American historian and Dorothy and Jonathan Rintels Professor of Holocaust Studies in the history department at Florida State University. He has authored or edited many books.
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Alan Kreider
#59268
Overall Influence
1941 - 2017 (76 years)
Alan Kreider was an American Mennonite historian. He was the American Professor Emeritus of Church History and Mission at the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana. His main interests were mission, worship, peace, and ecclesiastical history . Kreider continued to speak, write and publish in these areas of interest until his death in May 2017.
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Stephen Ainlay
#66857
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Stephen Charles Ainlay is a former president of Union College. He became the 18th president of the institution in June 2006, succeeding interim president James Underwood, who succeeded Roger Hull after Hull retired in June 2005. He was succeeded by David R. Harris on July 1, 2018.
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Emma LaRocque
#116743
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Emma LaRocque is a Canadian academic of Cree and Métis descent. She is currently a professor of Native American studies at the University of Manitoba. She is also a published poet, writing brief, imagist poems about her ancestral land and culture. LaRocque's works have critically engaged topics such as Indigenous identities, contemporary Indigenous literature, postcolonial literary criticism, decolonization and resistance, and Indigenous representation in Canadian history, literature, and popular culture.
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John Christian Wenger
#175547
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
John C. Wenger was an American Mennonite theologian and professor. Life He was the eldest of five children born to A. Martin Wenger and his wife, Martha A. Rock . He was born at the Reese H. White farm in Honey Brook, Pennsylvania, which his parents rented. His family moved in 1923 to Telford, where his father had gotten the job of janitor at the Rockhill Mennonite Church. Wenger was baptized on May 11, 1924, at the age of 13. He reported that he was disappointed when he did not feel a sense of "joy" and "Christian assurance" following the practice.
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Guy Hershberger
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Guy F. Hershberger was an American Mennonite theologian, educator, historian, and prolific author particularly in the field of Mennonite ethics. Life Born in Johnson County, Iowa, to Ephraim D. and Dorinda Kempf Hershberger, Hershberger was one of nine children. He was baptized in 1909 at his home congregation of East Union Amish Mennonite Church, where Sanford Calvin Yoder was pastor. He began work as an educator immediately out of high school in 1915 as a teacher in rural schools, where he remained for five years until his marriage to Clara Hooley on 1 August 1920. They had two children who survived into adulthood; Elizabeth , born in 1924, and Paul, born 1934.
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Harold H. Bender
1882 - 1951 (69 years)
Harold Herman Bender was an American philologist who taught for more than forty years at Princeton University, where he served as chair of the Department of Oriental Languages and Literature. He was the chief etymologist for Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition.
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