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
Robert Freitas
#2124
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Robert A. Freitas Jr. is an American nanotechnologist. Early life and education Freitas was born in Camden, Maine. His father worked in agriculture and his mother was a homemaker. Freitas married Nancy, his childhood sweetheart in 1974.
Go to Profile#2
John Haugeland
#3386
Overall Influence
1945 - 2010 (65 years)
John Haugeland was a professor of philosophy, specializing in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, phenomenology, and Heidegger. He spent most of his career at the University of Pittsburgh, followed by the University of Chicago from 1999 until his death. He is featured in Tao Ruspoli's film Being in the World.
Go to Profile#3
Donald D. Chamberlin
#3492
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Donald D. Chamberlin is an American computer scientist who is one of the principal designers of the original SQL language specification with Raymond Boyce. He also made significant contributions to the development of XQuery.
Go to Profile#4
Arif Zaman
#3936
Overall Influence
Arif Zaman is a Pakistani mathematician, academic scientist, and a retired professor of Statistics and Mathematics from Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, Lahore University of Management Sciences , Lahore, Pakistan. Before joining LUMS in 1994, he also served in the Statistics Department at Purdue University and at Florida State University.
Go to Profile#5
Sal Restivo
#4528
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Sal Restivo is a sociologist/anthropologist. Work Restivo is a leading contributor to science studies and in particular to the sociology of mathematics. His current work focuses on the sociology of mind and brain, and the sociology of god and religion. He has also done work in the sociology of social and sociable robotics. He helped launch the ethnographic study of science in the 1970s, and is a founding member and former president of the Society for Social Studies of Science. He was a founding member of the Association for Humanist Sociology, and was also involved with Science for the Peo...
Go to Profile#6
Maria Klawe
#6982
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Maria Margaret Klawe is a computer scientist and the fifth president of Harvey Mudd College . Born in Toronto in 1951, she became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2009. She was previously Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. She is known for her advocacy for women in STEM fields.
Go to Profile#7
Arthur T. Benjamin
#8132
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Arthur T. Benjamin is an American mathematician who specializes in combinatorics. Since 1989 he has been a professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, where he is the Smallwood Family Professor of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#8
Nick Pippenger
#12169
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Nicholas John Pippenger is a researcher in computer science. He has produced a number of fundamental results many of which are being widely used in the field of theoretical computer science, database processing and compiler optimization. He has also achieved the rank of IBM Fellow at Almaden IBM Research Center in San Jose, California. He has taught at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and at Princeton University in the US. In the Fall of 2006 Pippenger joined the faculty of Harvey Mudd College.
Go to Profile#9
Nathaniel Davis
#13737
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Nathaniel Davis was a career diplomat who served in the United States Foreign Service for 36 years. His final years were spent teaching at Harvey Mudd College, one of the Claremont Colleges. Early years Davis was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 12, 1925. His father, Harvey Nathaniel Davis, taught at Harvard University and his mother, Alice Rohde Davis, was a research medical doctor. In 1928, the family moved to the campus of Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, New Jersey, upon the appointment of Harvey Davis as the college's president. Nathaniel Davis attended the Stevens Hoboken Academy and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942.
Go to Profile#10
Stanley G. Love
#14492
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Stanley Glen Love is an American scientist and a NASA astronaut from Oregon. Early life Love was born on June 8, 1965, to Glen A. Love and Rhoda M. Love in San Diego, California. However, Love has stated he considers Eugene, Oregon, to be his hometown. Love graduated from Winston Churchill High School in Eugene, Oregon, in 1983. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California , and M.S. and Ph.D degrees from the University of Washington in Astronomy.
Go to Profile#11
Patri Friedman
#15522
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Patri Friedman is an American libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, and theorist of political economy. He founded The Seasteading Institute, a non-profit that explores the creation of sovereign ocean colonies.
Go to Profile#12
David F. Noble
#16032
Overall Influence
1945 - 2010 (65 years)
David Franklin Noble was a historian and critic of technology, science and education, best known for his seminal work on the social history of automation. In his final years he taught in the Division of Social Science and the department of Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, Canada. Noble held positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Smithsonian Institution, and Drexel University, as well as many visiting professorships.
Go to Profile#13
George Nelson
#18808
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
George Driver "Pinky" Nelson is an American physicist, astronomer, science educator, and retired NASA astronaut. Early life and education Nelson was born on July 13, 1950, in Charles City, Iowa, but considers Willmar, Minnesota, to be his hometown. He graduated from Willmar Senior High School, Willmar, Minnesota, in 1968. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from Harvey Mudd College in 1972, and a Master of Science and a Doctor of Philosophy degrees in astronomy from the University of Washington in 1974 and 1978, respectively.
Go to Profile#14
Scott E. Fraser
#20156
Overall Influence
Scott E. Fraser is an American biophysicist and Provost Professor of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California . He is also the Elizabeth Garrett Chair in Convergent Bioscience and Director of Science Initiatives, where he is helping to launch USC’s Initiative in Convergent Bioscience. In addition, he holds joint appointments in the Departments of Physiology and Biophysics, Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Pediatrics, Radiology, and Ophthalmology.
Go to Profile#15
Albert Baez
#21652
Overall Influence
1912 - 2007 (95 years)
Albert Vinicio Báez was a Mexican-American physicist and the father of singers Joan Baez and Mimi Fariña, and an uncle of John C. Baez. He made important contributions to the early development of X-ray microscopes, X-ray optics, and later X-ray telescopes.
Go to Profile#16
F. Michael Christ
#21951
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Francis Michael Christ is an American mathematician and professor at University of California, Berkeley, specializing in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, and several complex variables. He is known for the Christ–Kiselev maximal inequality.
Go to Profile#17
Scott Pace
#22711
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Scott Norman Pace currently serves as Director of the Space Policy Institute, Director of the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy and Director of the MA International Science and Technology Policy program at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. He served as the Executive Secretary of the National Space Council from July 2017 to January 2021, when he resigned. Pace was formerly the Director of the Space Policy Institute at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, where he was also a Professor of th...
Go to Profile#18
Sharon R. Long
#22882
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Sharon Rugel Long is an American plant biologist. She is the Steere-Pfizer Professor of Biological Science in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, and the Principal Investigator of the Long Laboratory at Stanford.
Go to Profile#19
Francis Su
#25354
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Francis Edward Su is an American mathematician. He joined the Harvey Mudd College faculty in 1996, and is currently Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics. Su served as president of the Mathematical Association of America from 2015–2017 and is serving as a Vice President of the American Mathematical Society from 2020-2023. Su has received multiple awards from the MAA, including the Henry L. Alder Award and the Haimo Award, both for distinguished teaching. He was also a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar during the 2019-2020 term.
Go to Profile#20
Joseph Platt
#27351
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Joseph B. Platt was an American physicist and academic administrator who served as founding president of Harvey Mudd College from 1956 to 1976 and as eighth president of Claremont Graduate University from 1976 to 1981.
Go to Profile#21
Heejung Kim
#30731
Overall Influence
Heejung Kim is a South Korean psychologist and a professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on how culture influences humans' thought process. She is co-editor of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review.
Go to Profile#22
Talithia Williams
#31612
Overall Influence
Talithia D. Williams is an American statistician and mathematician at Harvey Mudd College who researches the spatiotemporal structure of data. She was the first black woman to achieve tenure at Harvey Mudd College. Williams is an advocate for engaging more African Americans in engineering and science.
Go to Profile#23
Paul J. Nahin
#31860
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Paul J. Nahin is an American electrical engineer and author who has written 20 books on topics in physics and mathematics, including biographies of Oliver Heaviside, George Boole, and Claude Shannon, books on mathematical concepts such as Euler's formula and the imaginary unit, and a number of books on the physics and philosophical puzzles of time travel.
Go to Profile#24
Karl Mahlburg
#35150
Overall Influence
Karl Mahlburg is an American mathematician whose research interests lie in the areas of modular forms, partitions, combinatorics and number theory. He is the author of over 40 peer-reviewed journal articles. Mahlburg received his PhD in 2006 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Between 2011 and 2021 he was an assistant professor and an associate professor of mathematics at Louisiana State University.
Go to Profile#25
Lisette de Pillis
#35894
Overall Influence
Lisette G. de Pillis is an American mathematician at Harvey Mudd College and holds the Norman F. Sprague, Jr. Professorship of Life Sciences at Harvey Mudd. She chaired the Department of Mathematics in 2008-2009 and again from 2014 to 2019. She directed the Harvey Mudd College Global Clinic program from 2009 to 2014. She is also the co-director of the Harvey Mudd College Center for Quantitative Life Sciences.
Go to Profile#26
Bruce Jay Nelson
#36851
Overall Influence
1952 - 1999 (47 years)
Bruce Jay Nelson was an American computer scientist best known as the inventor of the remote procedure call concept for computer network communications. Bruce Nelson graduated from Harvey Mudd College in 1974, and went on to earn a master's in computer science from Stanford University in 1976, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. While pursuing his Ph.D., he worked at Xerox PARC where he developed the concept of remote procedure call . He and his collaborator Andrew Birrell were awarded the 1994 Association for Computing Machinery Software System Award for the work on RPC.
Go to Profile#27
Weiqing Gu
#39855
Overall Influence
Weiqing Gu is a Chinese-American mathematician who works as the Avery Professor of Mathematics and director of the mathematics clinic at Harvey Mudd College. Her research concerns differential geometry and Grassmann manifolds. She has also worked with Harvey Mudd colleague Lisette de Pillis on the mathematical modeling of cancer.
Go to Profile#28
Henry E. Brady
#42323
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Henry E. Brady is an American political scientist specializing in methodology and its application in a diverse array of political fields. He is Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at University of California, Berkeley and holds the Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy. He was elected President of the American Political Science Association, 2009–2010, giving a presidential address entitled "The Art of Political Science: Spatial Diagrams as Iconic and Revelatory." He has published academic works on diverse topics, co-authoring with colleagues at a variety of institutions and ranks, as well as many solo authored works.
Go to Profile#29
Ned Freed
#43612
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Ned Freed was an IETF participant and Request for Comments author who contributed to a significant number of Internet Protocol standards, mostly related to email. He is best known as the co-inventor of email MIME attachments, with Nathaniel Borenstein.
Go to Profile#30
James Enstrom
#48494
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
James Eugene Enstrom is an American epidemiologist who has worked at the University of California, Los Angeles since 1976, where he is currently a retired researcher. Education Enstrom received his B.S. in physics from Harvey Mudd College, where he graduated co-valedictorian of the Class of 1965; he received his M.S. and Ph.D., also in physics, from Stanford University in 1967 and 1970, respectively. His dissertation advisor was Nobel Laureate Melvin Schwartz and his elementary particle physics dissertation is posted on a Stanford website. During 1971-1973 he conducted postdoctoral research i...
Go to Profile#31
Ratnajeevan Hoole
#48728
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Professor Samuel Ratnajeevan Herbert Hoole is a Sri Lankan Tamil engineer and academic. He was a member of the Election Commission of Sri Lanka. Early life and family Hoole was born on 15 September 1952. He is the son of Rev. Richard Herbert Ratnathurai Hoole and Jeevamany Somasundaram. He was educated at Nallur CMS Practising School and St. John's College, Jaffna. He was offered a position to study at the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya in 1970 but as there were too many Tamil students at Peradeniya he was transferred to the Ceylon College of Technology, graduating from the University of Sri Lanka Katubedda campus in 1975 with a B.Sc degree in electrical engineering.
Go to Profile#32
Gary Smith
#54563
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Gary Nance Smith is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College. His research on financial markets statistical reasoning, and artificial intelligence, often involves stock market anomalies, statistical fallacies, and the misuse of data have been widely cited.
Go to Profile#33
Roger T. Howe
#55392
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Roger Thomas Howe is the William E. Ayer Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He earned a B.S. degree in physics from Harvey Mudd College and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981 and 1984, respectively. He was a faculty member at Carnegie-Mellon University from 1984-1985, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1985-1987, and at UC Berkeley between 1987-2005, where he was the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor. He has been a faculty member of the School of Engineering at Stanford since 2005...
Go to Profile#34
Jon Strauss
#55898
Overall Influence
Jon Calvert Strauss is an American academic administrator who served as a college president at Worcester Polytechnic Institute , Harvey Mudd College , Manhattanville College , acting president of Iona University and most recently as interim president of Paul Smith's College .
Go to Profile#35
Ran Libeskind-Hadas
#58307
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Ran Libeskind-Hadas is the founding chair of the Department of Integrated Sciences at Claremont McKenna College. He was previously a professor of computer science at Harvey Mudd College where he served as chair of that department and associate dean of faculty. His research interests lie in the area of algorithms for computational biology.
Go to Profile#36
Anette Hosoi
#59433
Overall Influence
Anette E. "Peko" Hosoi is an American mechanical engineer, biophysicist, and mathematician, currently the Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering and associate dean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#37
Jack Cuzick
#60693
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Jack Martin Cuzick is an American-born British academic, director of the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine in London and head of the Centre for Cancer Prevention. He is the John Snow Professor of Epidemiology at the Wolfson Institute, Queen Mary University of London.
Go to Profile#38
Clive Dym
#65188
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Clive Dym was a professor emeritus of Engineering Design and also Director of the Center for Design Education at Harvey Mudd College. He served as the chair of the engineering department at Harvey Mudd College from 1999 through 2002. He taught at several universities including at Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, Northwestern University and University of Southern California. He was a member of the Institute for Defense Analyses and National Academy of Engineering. He was awarded the Gordon Prize in 2012. He earned a BS from Cooper Union in 1962, an MS from Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1964 and a PhD from Stanford University in 1967.
Go to Profile#39
Steven Haddock
#67033
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Steven H. D. Haddock is a marine biologist known for his work on bioluminescence of the jellylike animals of the open ocean and the deep sea, and the photoproteins and fluorescent proteins of these animals.
Go to Profile#40
Susan Martonosi
#70560
Overall Influence
Susan Elizabeth Martonosi is an American mathematician who works at Harvey Mudd College as the Joseph B. Platt Professor of Mathematics and as the director of the Global Clinic Program at Harvey Mudd. Her research studies operations research, game theory, social networks, and their applications to counter-terrorism, epidemiology, and sports analytics.
Go to Profile#41
J. Kim Vandiver
#71054
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
J. Kim Vandiver is an American university professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Vandiver is the dean of undergraduate research and a professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering. He is one of the foremost authorities on the dynamics of offshore structures and flow-induced vibration and is a member of the faculty of the MIT-WHOI joint program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering.
Go to Profile#42
Robert Thomas Seeley
#73978
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Robert Thomas Seeley was a mathematician who worked on pseudo differential operators and the heat equation approach to the Atiyah–Singer index theorem. Seeley did his undergraduate studies at Haverford College, and earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959, under the supervision of Alberto Pedro Calderón. He taught at Harvey Mudd College and then in 1962 joined the faculty of Brandeis University. In 1972 he moved to the University of Massachusetts Boston; he retired as an emeritus professor. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#43
Iris Cummings
#75915
Overall Influence
1920 - Present (105 years)
Iris Cummings , also known by her married name Iris Critchell, is an American aviator and former competition swimmer who represented the United States at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany. After an active athletic career in swimming, which included a reign as U.S. national 200-meter breaststroke champion from 1936 to 1939, she was accepted into the University of Southern California's first Civilian Pilot Training Program in 1939. After graduation, she worked as a flight instructor prior to being selected to serve her country during World War II as a member of the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron and Women Airforce Service Pilots .
Go to Profile#44
Steven Pollock
#79862
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Steven J. Pollock is an American professor of physics and a President's Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he has taught since 1993. His specialisations are in physics education research and in nuclear theory. He is the 2013 U.S. Professor of the Year.
Go to Profile#45
Julie Cairney
#86084
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Julie M. Cairney is a professor in the School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering at the University of Sydney and Director of the Australian Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis and CEO of Microscopy Australia, a national user facility funded by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy . She is an expert in microscopy, focusing on the understanding and characterization of materials used for structural applications, renewable energy, medical science and geosciences including the use and development of the atom probe microscope.
Go to Profile#46
Catherine Pilachowski
#89888
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Catherine Anderson Pilachowski is an American astronomer, professor and Kirkwood Chair in astronomy at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and former president of the American Astronomical Society.
Go to Profile#47
Ann McDermott
#91918
Overall Influence
Ann E. McDermott is an American biophysicist who uses nuclear magnetic resonance to study the structure, function, and dynamics of proteins in native-like environments. She is currently the Esther Breslow Professor of Biological Chemistry and Chair of the Educational Policy and Planning Committee of the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University. She has also previously served as Columbia's Associate Vice President for Academic Advising and Science Initiatives in the Arts and Sciences. She is an elected member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences...
Go to Profile#48
Brenda Dingus
#95390
Overall Influence
Brenda Lynn Dingus is an American particle astrophysicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, known for her research on gamma-ray bursts and cosmic rays. Education and career Dingus majored in physics at Harvey Mudd College, graduating in 1982. She completed a Ph.D. in 1988 at the University of Maryland, College Park, specializing in experimental cosmic-ray physics under the supervision of Gaurang Yodh.
Go to Profile#49
Arunas Rudvalis
#96149
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Arunas Rudvalis is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is best known for the Rudvalis group. Rudvalis went to the Harvey Mudd College and received his Ph.D. degree in Dartmouth College under direction of Ernst Snapper.
Go to Profile#50
Mario Roederer
#100511
Overall Influence
