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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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List of the most influential people

#1

Lee Smolin

#394

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

#2

Gary Marcus

#774

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Gary Fred Marcus is an American psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author, known for his research on the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence . Marcus is professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University. In 2014 Marcus founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company later acquired by Uber.

#3

Jon Krakauer

#987

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jon Krakauer is an American writer and mountaineer. He is the author of bestselling non-fiction books—Into the Wild; Into Thin Air; Under the Banner of Heaven; and Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman—as well as numerous magazine articles. He was a member of an ill-fated expedition to summit Mount Everest in 1996, one of the deadliest disasters in the history of climbing Everest.

#4

Alan Edelman

#1328

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Alan Stuart Edelman is an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Principal Investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where he leads a group in applied computing. In 2004, he founded a business called Interactive Supercomputing which was later acquired by Microsoft. Edelman is a fellow of American Mathematical Society , Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics , Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers , and Association for Computing Machine...

#5

James Paul Gee

#5565

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

James Gee is a retired American researcher who has worked in psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, bilingual education, and literacy. Gee most recently held the position as the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University, originally appointed there in the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education. Gee has previously been a faculty affiliate of the Games, Learning, and Society group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is a member of the National Academy of Education.

#6

Leonard Baskin

#8322

Overall Influence

1922 - 2000 (78 years)

Leonard Baskin was an American sculptor, draughtsman and graphic artist, as well as founder of the Gehenna Press . One of America's first fine arts presses, it went on to become "one of the most important and comprehensive art presses of the world", often featuring the work of celebrated poets, such as Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Anthony Hecht, and James Baldwin side by side with Baskin's bold, stark, energetic and often dramatic black-and-white prints. Called a "Sculptor of Stark Memorials" by the New York Times, Baskin is also known for his wood, limestone, bronze, and large-scale woodblock ...

#7

Ken Burns

#10100

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Kenneth Lauren Burns is an American filmmaker known for his documentary films and television series, many of which chronicle American history and culture. His work is often produced in association with WETA-TV and/or the National Endowment for the Humanities and distributed by PBS.

#8

Amélie Rorty

#10796

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Amélie Oksenberg Rorty was a Belgian-born American philosopher known for her work in the philosophy of mind , history of philosophy , and moral philosophy. Career Rorty received her B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1951, M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University in 1954 and 1961 respectively, and an M.A. from Princeton University in anthropology. She began her academic career at Wheaton College , then began teaching at Rutgers in 1962 and taught there through to 1988, by which time she had achieved the rank of distinguished professor. She was also professor in the history of ideas ...

#9

Carrie Mae Weems

#11057

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images and installation video, and is best known for her photography. She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project The Kitchen Table Series. Her photographs, films and videos focus on serious issues facing African Americans today, including racism, sexism, politics and personal identity.

#10

David Shulkin

#11112

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

David Jonathon Shulkin is an American physician and former government official. In 2017, Shulkin became the ninth United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs and served under President Donald Trump. He was the Under Secretary of Veterans Affairs for Health from 2015 until 2017, appointed by President Barack Obama. On March 28, 2018, President Trump dismissed Shulkin from his position by tweet, and announced that Physician to the President Ronny Jackson would be nominated as Shulkin's successor, although Jackson's nomination was withdrawn on April 26, 2018, after allegations surfaced of misconduct and mismanagement while serving in the White House.

#11

Tom Hull

#11674

Overall Influence

Thomas C. Hull is an associate professor of applied mathematics at Franklin & Marshall College and is known for his expertise in the mathematics of paper folding. Career Hull was an undergraduate at Hampshire College. He earned a master's degree and Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Rhode Island. His 1997 dissertation, Some Problems in List Coloring Bipartite Graphs, involved graph coloring, and was supervised by Nancy Eaton.

#12

Naomi Wallace

#11823

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Naomi Wallace is an American playwright, screenwriter and poet from Kentucky. She is widely known for her plays, and has received several distinguished awards for her work. Biography Naomi Wallace was born in Prospect, Kentucky, to Henry F. Wallace, a photo journalist and correspondent for Time and Life magazines, and Sonja de Vries, a Dutch justice and human rights worker.

#13

George Bonanno

#11994

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

George A. Bonanno is a professor of clinical psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University, U.S. He is responsible for introducing the controversial idea of resilience to the study of loss and trauma. He is known as a pioneering researcher in the field of bereavement and trauma. The New York Times on February 15, 2011, stated that the current science of bereavement has been "driven primarily" by Bonanno. Scientific American summarized a main finding of his work, "The ability to rebound remains the norm throughout adult life." In 2019, Bonanno was honored with the James McKeen Cattell aw...

#14

Benjamin Mako Hill

Benjamin Mako Hill

#12455

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Benjamin Mako Hill is a free software activist, hacker, author, and professor. He is a contributor and free software developer as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects as well as the co-author of three technical manuals on the subject, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible, The Official Ubuntu Server Book, and The Official Ubuntu Book.

#15

Norton Juster

#13404

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Norton Juster was an American academic, architect, and writer. He was best known as an author of children's books, notably for The Phantom Tollbooth and The Dot and the Line. Early life Juster was born in Brooklyn on June 2, 1929. Both his parents were Jewish and immigrated to the United States. His father, Samuel Juster, was born in Romania and became an architect through a correspondence course. His mother, Minnie Silberman, was of Polish Jewish descent. His brother, Howard, became an architect as well. Juster studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, obtaining a bachelor's degree in 1952.

#16

Eqbal Ahmad

#16063

Overall Influence

1933 - 1999 (66 years)

Eqbal Ahmad was a Pakistani political scientist, writer and academic known for his anti-war activism, his support for resistance movements globally and academic contributions to the study of the Near East. Born in Bihar, British India, Ahmad migrated to Pakistan as a child and went on to study economics at the Forman Christian College. After graduating, he worked briefly as an army officer and was wounded in the First Kashmir War in 1948. He participated in the Algerian Revolution, then studied the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism, becoming an early opponent of the war upon his return to the U.S.

#17

Walid Raad

#19673

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Walid Raad is a contemporary media artist. The Atlas Group is a fictional collective, the work of which is produced by Walid Raad. He lives and works in New York, where he is currently a professor at the School of Art at the Cooper Union School of Art.

#18

Helaine Selin

#21063

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Helaine Selin is an American librarian, historian of science, author and the editor of several bestselling books. Career Selin attended Binghamton University, where she earned her bachelor's degree. She received her MLS from SUNY Albany. She was a Peace Corps volunteer from the fall of 1967 through the summer of 1969 as a teacher of English and African History in Karonga, Malawi. She retired in 2012 from being the science librarian at Hampshire College.

#19

Ellis Henican

#21638

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Ellis Henican is an American columnist at Newsday and AM New York as well as a political analyst on the Fox News Channel. He hosts a nationally syndicated weekend show on Talk Radio Network and is the voice of "Stormy" on the Cartoon Network series Sealab 2021. He is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller The Party's Over: How the Extreme Right Hijacked the GOP and I Became a Democrat.

#20

Heather Boushey

Heather Boushey

#22153

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Heather Marie Boushey is an American economist. Boushey currently serves as a member of President Joe Biden's Council of Economic Advisers. She also serves as the Chief Economist for the Invest in America Cabinet at the White House. She previously was the president and CEO of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. She has also worked as an economist at the Center for American Progress and the United States Congress Joint Economic Committee.

#21

Gail Hershatter

#22355

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Gail Hershatter is an American historian of Modern China who holds the Distinguished Professor of History chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She previously taught in the history department at Williams College.

#22

Jan Carew

#22357

Overall Influence

1920 - 2012 (92 years)

Jan Rynveld Carew was a Guyana-born novelist, playwright, poet and educator, who lived at various times in The Netherlands, Mexico, England, France, Spain, Ghana, Jamaica, Canada and the United States.

#23

Hasok Chang

#22844

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Hasok Chang is a Korean-born American historian and philosopher of science currently serving as the Hans Rausing Professor at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and a board member of the Philosophy of Science Association. He previously served as president of the British Society for the History of Science from 2012 to 2014.

#24

Andrew Salkey

#23137

Overall Influence

1928 - 1995 (67 years)

Andrew Salkey was a Jamaican novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Panamanian origin. He was born in Panama but was raised in Jamaica, moving to Britain in the 1952 to pursue a job in the literary world, combining a job in a South London comprehensive school teaching English with a job working on the door of a West End night club. The 1960s and 1970s saw Salkey working as a broadcaster for the BBC World Service, Caribbean section.

#25

Edward M. Hundert

Edward M. Hundert

#23359

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Edward M. Hundert is the Dean for Medical Education and the Daniel D. Federman, M.D. Professor in Residence of Global Health and Social Medicine and Medical Education at Harvard Medical School, where he is also Associate Director of the Center for Bioethics at HMS . Hundert is a member of the TIAA Board of Trustees of TIAA-CREF.

#26

Ed Droste

#26144

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Edward Droste is an American singer-songwriter and musician, formerly of the rock band Grizzly Bear. The group began as the solo effort of Droste with the release of 2004's Horn of Plenty, originally released on Kanine Records. All songs were written and performed by Droste. By 2005, the group expanded into a four-piece, with Droste still as a contributing songwriter. He left the group in 2020.

#27

Peter Cole

#26923

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Peter Cole is a MacArthur-winning poet and translator who lives in Jerusalem and New Haven. Cole was born in 1957 in Paterson, New Jersey. He attended Williams College and Hampshire College, and moved to Jerusalem in 1981. He has been called "one of the handful of authentic poets of his own American generation" by the critic Harold Bloom. In a 2015 interview in The Paris Review, he described his work as poet and translator as "at heart, the same activity carried out at different points along a spectrum."

#28

Liev Schreiber

#29863

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Isaac Liev Schreiber is an American actor, director, screenwriter, and producer. He became known during the late 1990s and early 2000s after appearing in several independent films, and later mainstream Hollywood films, including the first three Scream horror films , Ransom , Phantoms , The Hurricane , Kate & Leopold , The Sum of All Fears , The Manchurian Candidate , The Omen , Defiance , X-Men Origins: Wolverine , Taking Woodstock , Salt , Goon , Pawn Sacrifice , Spotlight , The 5th Wave , and The French Dispatch . He has also lent his voice to animated films such as My Little Pony: The Movi...

#29

Jeff Sharlet

#29947

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Jeff Sharlet is an American academic, journalist, and author. Throughout his career, Sharlet's work has focused on religion. Career He is a contributing editor for Harper's, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Rolling Stone. His work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Esquire, Lapham's Quarterly, Oxford American, Bookforum, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, New York, Advocate, Guernica, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia Journalism Review, New Statesman, The Nation, The New Republic, Forward, and The Baffler. He has taught at New York University and is the Frederick Sessions Beebe '35 Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College.

#30

Eula Biss

#32115

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Eula Biss is an American non-fiction writer who is the author of four books. Biss has won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a founding editor of Essay Press and a Guggenheim Fellow.

#31

Lupita Nyong'o

#33593

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Lupita Amondi Nyong'o is a Mexican-Kenyan actress. She is the recipient of several accolades, including an Academy Award, and a Daytime Emmy Award with nominations for a Tony Award and a Golden Globe Award.

#32

Elliott Smith

#33786

Overall Influence

1969 - 2003 (34 years)

Steven Paul Smith , known professionally as Elliott Smith, was an American musician and singer-songwriter. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska, raised primarily in Texas, and lived much of his life in Portland, Oregon, where he gained popularity. Smith's primary instrument was the guitar, though he also played piano, clarinet, bass guitar, drums, and harmonica. He had a distinctive vocal style, characterized by his "whispery, spiderweb-thin delivery", and often used multi-tracking to create vocal layers, textures, and harmonies.

#33

David Callahan

#34124

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

David Callahan is an American writer and editor. He is the founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy, a digital media site, and Blue Tent Daily, which offers in-depth reporting on progressive organizations and the Democratic Party. Previously, he was a senior fellow at Demos, a public policy group based in New York City that he co-founded in 1999. He is also an author and lecturer. He is best known as the author of the books The Givers and The Cheating Culture.

#34

John Roosevelt Boettiger

John Roosevelt Boettiger

#35205

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

John Roosevelt Boettiger is a retired professor of developmental and clinical psychology, and the son of Anna Roosevelt Boettiger and her second husband, Clarence John Boettiger. He is a grandson of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. He lives in northern California.

#35

Jonathan Westphal

#36134

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Jonathan Westphal is an academic philosopher working on the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of science, logic and philosophy of language and aesthetics. More recently he has become interested in issues in the philosophy of time, and in the understanding of human freedom. In the history of philosophy, he has worked mostly on Wittgenstein and Leibniz. He lives in Hamden, Connecticut, and works as a private tutor in philosophy.

#36

Jerome Liebling

#36179

Overall Influence

1924 - 2011 (87 years)

Jerome Liebling was an American photographer, filmmaker, and teacher. The documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, who studied with him at Hampshire College, called Liebling his mentor, and used one of Liebling's photographs on the cover of his 2022 book Our America: A Photographic History.

#37

Lee Jussim

#36729

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Lee J. Jussim is an American social psychologist. He leads the Social Perception Laboratory at Rutgers University. Early life and education When Jussim was 5 years old, his family moved into a Brooklyn-area public housing where they lived until he was 12. When he was 13, his family moved to Levittown, Long Island, and his mother died of cancer shortly after.

#38

Alan H. Goodman

#36742

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Alan H. Goodman is a biological anthropologist and author. He served as president of the American Anthropological Association from 2005 to 2007. With Yolanda Moses, he co-directs the American Anthropological Association's Public Education Project on Race. His teaching, research and writing focuses on understanding how poverty, inequality and racism “get under the skin.” He received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Goodman was a pre-doctoral research fellow in stress physiology at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm and a postdoctoral fellow in international nutrition at th...

#39

Raymond W. Gibbs Jr.

#37212

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. is a former psychology professor and researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests are in the fields of experimental psycholinguistics and cognitive science. His work concerns a range of theoretical issues, ranging from questions about the role of embodied experience in thought and language, to looking at people's use and understanding of figurative language . Raymond Gibbs's research is especially focused on bodily experience and linguistic meaning. Much of his research is motivated by theories of meaning in philosophy, linguistics, and co...

#40

Vanessa Northington Gamble

#37232

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Vanessa Northington Gamble is a physician who chaired the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Legacy Committee in 1996. Early life and education Born in West Philadelphia, Gamble was primarily raised by her maternal grandmother. She attended Philadelphia High School for Girls and graduated in 1970, then studied medical sociology and biology at Hampshire College, graduating with her bachelor's degree in 1974. Gamble then attended medical school and graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, earning her M.D. in 1983 and her Ph.D. in the history and sociology of science in 1987. She completed her gr...

#41

Michael Klare

#38312

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Michael T. Klare is a Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies, whose department is located at Hampshire College , defense correspondent of The Nation magazine and author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency . His 2019 book is, All Hell Breaking Loose: the Pentagon's Perspective on Climate Change . Klare also teaches at Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

#42

Ronnie Dugger

#38564

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Ronnie Dugger is an American progressive journalist. Dugger attended the University of Texas and was editor of The Daily Texan 1950–1951. He was the founding editor of The Texas Observer from 1954 to 1961. Later he served as the Observer's publisher, spending more than 40 years with the political newsmagazine.

#43

Kirin Narayan

#41113

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Kirin Narayan is an Indian-born American anthropologist, folklorist and writer. Early life, education, and career Narayan is the daughter of Narayan Ramji Contractor, a civil engineer from Nashik, and Didi Kinzinger, a German-American "artist, decorator, and builder of sustainable housing". Narayan was born in Bombay, attended school in India and came to the United States in 1976.

#44

Loretta Ross

#44619

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Loretta J. Ross is an American academic, feminist, and activist who advocates for reproductive justice, especially among women of color. As an activist, Ross has written on reproductive justice activism and the history of African American women.

#45

Yusef Lateef

#45614

Overall Influence

1920 - 2013 (93 years)

Yusef Abdul Lateef was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, composer, and prominent figure among the Ahmadiyya Community in America. Although Lateef's main instruments were the tenor saxophone and flute, he also played oboe and bassoon, both rare in jazz, and non-western instruments such as the bamboo flute, shanai, shofar, xun, arghul and koto. He is known for having been an innovator in the blending of jazz with "Eastern" music. Peter Keepnews, in his New York Times obituary of Lateef, wrote that the musician "played world music before world music had a name".

#46

John Krakauer

#45863

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

John Krakauer is an American neurologist and neuroscientist. He is currently the John C. Malone Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, the Director of the Brain, Learning, Animation, and Movement laboratory, co-founder of the KATA project at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Head of Vision for MindMaze. His areas of interest range from motor learning, motor control, and stroke to bioethics. From 2003 until 2010, he was the codirector of the Motor Performance Laboratory at the Neurological Institute of Columbia University. He received his bachelor's degree at Trinity College of Cambridge University.

#47

David Anthony Durham

David Anthony Durham

#50241

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

David Anthony Durham is an American novelist, author of historical fiction and fantasy. Durham's first novel, Gabriel's Story, centered on African American settlers in the American West. Walk Through Darkness followed a runaway slave during the tense times leading up to the American Civil War. Pride of Carthage focused on Hannibal Barca of Ancient Carthage and his war with the Roman Republic. His novels have twice been New York Times Notable Books, won two awards from the American Library Association, and been translated into eight foreign languages. Gabriel's Story, Walk Through Darkness and Acacia: The War with the Mein are all in development as feature films.

#48

Paul Jenkins

#50428

Overall Influence

Paul Jenkins is an American academic. He is Professor of Poetry at Hampshire College. Jenkins received an M.A. and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Washington, Seattle. Before moving to Hampshire, Jenkins taught at Elms College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

#49

Joan Braderman

#51654

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Joan Braderman is an American video artist, director, performer, and writer. Braderman's video works are considered to have created her signature style known as "stand up theory." Via this "performative embodiment," she deconstructs and analyzes popular media by inserting chroma-keyed cut-outs of her own body into appropriated mass media images, where she interrogates the representation of ideology and the transparency of photographic space in U.S. popular culture.

#50

Joseph Amon

#54239

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Joseph Amon is an American epidemiologist and human rights activist and currently director of the Health and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. Prior to working at Human Rights Watch, he worked for more than 15 years conducting research, designing programs, and evaluating interventions related to HIV, hepatitis, malaria and guinea worm eradication, for a wide variety of organizations including: the Peace Corps, the Carter Center, Family Health International, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Joseph Amon is 6’3".

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