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
Jeffrey C. Hall
#4674
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jeffrey Connor Hall is an American geneticist and chronobiologist. Hall is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Brandeis University and currently resides in Cambridge, Maine. Hall spent his career examining the neurological component of fly courtship and behavioral rhythms. Through his research on the neurology and behavior of Drosophila melanogaster, Hall uncovered essential mechanisms of the circadian clocks and shed light on the foundations for sexual differentiation in the nervous system. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences for his revolutionary work in the field of chronobiology, and nominated for the T.
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Renaud Camus
#6331
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Renaud Camus is a French novelist, conspiracy theorist, and white nationalist writer. He is the inventor of the "Great Replacement", a far-right conspiracy theory that claims that a "global elite" is colluding against the white population of Europe to replace them with non-European peoples.
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Benjamin Schumacher
#13905
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Benjamin "Ben" Schumacher is an American theoretical physicist, working mostly in the field of quantum information theory. He discovered a way of interpreting quantum states as information. He came up with a way of compressing the information in a state, and storing the information in a smaller number of states. This is now known as Schumacher compression. This was the quantum analog of Shannon's noiseless coding theorem, and it helped to start the field known as quantum information theory.
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Steven Ozment
#16188
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Steven Edgar Ozment was an American historian of early modern and modern Germany, the European family, and the Protestant Reformation. From 1990 to 2015, he was the McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History at Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus until his death on December 12, 2019.
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Douglas A. Blackmon
#16372
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Douglas A. Blackmon is an American writer and journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
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Sarah Caldwell
#17332
Overall Influence
1924 - 2006 (82 years)
Sarah Caldwell was an American opera conductor, impresario, and stage director. Early life Caldwell was born in Maryville, Missouri, and grew up in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She was a child prodigy and gave public performances on the violin by the time she was ten years old. She graduated from Fayetteville High School at the age of 14.
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Miller Williams
#17688
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Stanley Miller Williams was an American contemporary poet, as well as a university professor, translator and editor. He produced over 25 books and won several awards for his poetry. His accomplishments were chronicled in Arkansas Biography. Williams was chosen to read a poem at the second inauguration of Bill Clinton. One of his best-known poems is "The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina." He was the father of American singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams.
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Derek Lowe
#21862
Overall Influence
Derek Lowe is a medicinal chemist working on preclinical drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry. Lowe has published a blog about this field, "In the Pipeline", since 2002 and is a columnist for the Royal Society of Chemistry's Chemistry World.
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Robert L. Moore
#22832
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Robert Louis Moore was an American Jungian analyst and consultant in private practice in Chicago, Illinois. He was the Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Spirituality at the Chicago Theological Seminary; a training analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago; and director of research for the Institute for the Science of Psychoanalysis. Author and editor of numerous books in psychology and spirituality, he lectured internationally on his formulation of a Neo-Jungian paradigm for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. He was working on Structural Psychoanalysis and I...
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Jay McDaniel
#24681
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jay B. McDaniel is an American philosopher and theologian. He specializes in Buddhism, Whiteheadian process philosophy and process theology, constructive theology, ecotheology, interfaith dialogue, and spirituality in an age of consumerism. His current interest is "to see how these myriad concerns might unfold in China".
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Trenton Lee Stewart
#25719
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Trenton Lee Stewart is an American author best known for the Mysterious Benedict Society series. Stewart is a graduate of Hendrix College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.
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Wilbur Mills
#27411
Overall Influence
1909 - 1992 (83 years)
Wilbur Daigh Mills was an American Democratic politician who represented in the United States House of Representatives from 1939 until his retirement in 1977. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee from 1958 to 1974, he was often called "the most powerful man in Washington".
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John E. Sanders
#37859
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
John E. Sanders is an American Christian theologian. He currently serves as professor of religious studies at Hendrix College. Sanders is best known for his promotion of open theism but he has also written on cognitive linguistics and religious pluralism .
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P. Allen Smith
#48529
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Paul Allen Smith, Jr. is an American television host, garden designer, conservationist, and lifestyle expert. He is the host of three television programs. P. Allen Smith's Garden Home and P. Allen Smith's Garden to Table are distributed to public television by American Public Television. His 30-minute show Garden Style is syndicated by The Television Syndication Company. Smith is one of America's most recognized gardening and design experts, providing ideas and guidance through multiple media venues. He is the author of the Garden Home series of books published by Clarkson Potter/Random Hous...
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William Tsutsui
#60157
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
William M. Tsutsui is an American academic, author, economic historian, Japanologist and university administrator. He was named President and CEO of Ottawa University, May 3, 2021, and took office July 1, 2021.
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Randy Goodrum
#66306
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Charles Randolph Goodrum is an American songwriter, pianist, and producer. Goodrum has written number one songs in each of the four decades since his first number one hit, 1978's "You Needed Me". Goodrum's songs have appeared on the country, pop, jazz, rock, R&B and adult contemporary charts. An accomplished pianist, his music has been used extensively in film and television.
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John N. Whitaker
#72384
Overall Influence
1940 - 2001 (61 years)
John Nicholas Whitaker was an American neurologist and immunologist dedicated to multiple sclerosis research. He was a pioneer in the field of neuroimmunology and contributed with the identification of myelin basic protein production in urine.
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Mary Steenburgen
#116137
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Mary Nell Steenburgen is an American actress, comedian, singer, and songwriter. After studying at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse in the 1970s, she made her professional acting debut in the 1978 Western comedy film Goin' South. Steenburgen went on to earn critical acclaim for her role in 1979 Time After Time and Jonathan Demme's 1980 comedy-drama film Melvin and Howard, for which she received the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
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James C. Browne
#118754
Overall Influence
1935 - 2018 (83 years)
James Clayton "Jim" Browne was an American computer scientist. Early life and education Born in Conway, Arkansas, he attended Hendrix College, where he studied chemistry. In 1960, he earned a doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Texas and joined the faculty. Between 1963 and 1967, Browne worked at Queen's University Belfast in Ireland, where he helped establish the school's first computational center. He was named a full professor upon his return to the University of Texas in 1968. For a time, Browne was chair of the department of computer science, and held the regents' cha...
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E. Brooks Holifield
#168179
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
E. Brooks Holifield is an American religious historian and the Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus of American Church History at Emory University's Candler School of Theology, where he taught until his retirement in 2011. He has been called "a giant among historians of religion."
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Jo Luck
#176727
Overall Influence
Jo Luck is an American and former CEO of Heifer International. She was recognized with a World Food Prize in 2010. Education Luck attended Hendrix College and earned a degree at David Lipscomb College. She also attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and Harvard Business School's Executive Education Program.
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