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).

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List of the most influential people

#1

James Stockdale

#7272

Overall Influence

1923 - 2005 (82 years)

James Bond "Jim" Stockdale was a United States Navy vice admiral and aviator who was awarded the Medal of Honor in the Vietnam War, during which he was a prisoner of war for over seven years. Stockdale was the most senior naval officer held captive in Hanoi, North Vietnam. He led aerial attacks from the carrier during the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. On his next deployment, while commander of Carrier Air Wing Sixteen aboard the carrier , his A-4 Skyhawk jet was shot down in North Vietnam on September 9, 1965. He served as president of the Naval War College from October 1977 until he retired from the navy in 1979.

#2

Steven Pressman

#12514

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Steven Pressman is an American economist. He is a former Professor of Economics and Finance at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. He has taught at the University of New Hampshire and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

#3

David Turnbull

#24317

Overall Influence

1915 - 2007 (92 years)

David Turnbull was an American physical chemist who worked in the interdisciplinary fields of materials science and applied physics. Turnbull made seminal contribution to solidification theory and glass formation. Turnbull was born in Elmira, Elmira Township, Stark County, Illinois. He graduated from high school in 1932 and then received a bachelor's degree in 1936 from Monmouth College , specializing in physical chemistry. He received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry under Thomas Erwin Phipps from the University of Illinois in 1939. He was on the faculty of Case Institute of Technology fro...

#4

Joe Tait

#24590

Overall Influence

1937 - 2021 (84 years)

Joseph Tait was an American sports broadcaster who was the play-by-play announcer on radio for the Cleveland Cavaliers of the National Basketball Association and both TV and radio for the Cleveland Indians of Major League Baseball. With the exception of two seasons in the early 1980s and illness during his final season, he was the Cavaliers' radio announcer from the team's inception in 1970 through the 2010–11 season. He won the Basketball Hall of Fame 2010 Curt Gowdy Media Award.

#5

Harold Arthur Poling

#27721

Overall Influence

1925 - 2012 (87 years)

Harold Arthur "Red" Poling was a U.S. automobile businessman. Early life Harold Arthur Poling was born in Troy, Michigan, but grew up in Fairfax, Virginia. Poling graduated from Monmouth College in 1949. He earned his MBA at Indiana University.

#6

Chad Simpson

#41482

Overall Influence

Chad Simpson is a short and flash fiction author from Monmouth, Illinois. He is the winner of the 2012 John Simmons Short Fiction Award, juried by Jim Shepard. His short story collection, "Tell Everyone I Said Hi," was published by the University of Iowa Press in fall 2012.

#7

William J. Winslade

#42618

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

William J. Winslade is the James Wade Rockwell Professor of Philosophy of Medicine at the Institute for Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and Distinguished Visiting professor of Law and associate director for Graduate Programs, Health Law & Policy Institute at the University of Houston Law Center. He is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution.

#8

Kennedy J. Reed

#68773

Overall Influence

Kennedy J. Reed is an American theoretical atomic physicist in the Theory Group in the Physics & Advanced Technologies Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a founder of the National Physical Science Consortium , a group of about 30 universities that provides physics fellowships for women and minorities.

#9

Karen Bush

#74083

Overall Influence

Karen Bush is an American biochemist. She is a professor of Practice in Biology at Indiana University and the interim director of the Biotechnology program. Bush conducts research focusing on bacterial resistance mechanisms to beta-lactam antibiotics.

#10

Ann Garry

#79388

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Ann Garry is an American feminist philosopher. She is professor of philosophy, emerita, at California State University, Los Angeles . While at CSULA, Garry was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities, and also served several terms as the chair of the Department of Philosophy. She has also held several visiting appointments, including serving as the Humphrey Chair of Feminist Philosophy at the University of Waterloo and Fulbright lectureships at the University of Tokyo and Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Although Garry no longer teaches full-time, she ...

#11

Danielle Nierenberg

Danielle Nierenberg

#85538

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Danielle J. Nierenberg is an American activist, author and journalist. In 2013, Nierenberg co-founded Food Tank: The Think Tank For Food and currently serves as its president. She founded Nourishing the Planet while working at the Worldwatch Institute.

#12

Ellen Diggs

#86120

Overall Influence

1906 - 1998 (92 years)

Ellen Irene Diggs was an American anthropologist. She was the writer of a major contribution to African American history, Black Chronology: From 4,000 B.C. to the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Biography Diggs was born on April 13, 1906, in Monmouth, to parents Charles Henry and Alice Diggs and raised in a "supportive environment" that fostered her academic pursuits and other ambitions

#13

Jane Kurtz

#92501

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jane Kurtz is an American writer of more than thirty picture books, middle-grade novels, nonfiction, ready-to-reads, and books for educators. A member of the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in children's and adult literature, Kurtz is an international advocate for literacy and writing. She was also part of a small group of volunteers who organized the not-for-profit organization, Ethiopia Reads, which has established more than seventy libraries for children, published books, and built four schools in rural Ethiopia.

#14

William Urban

#95733

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

William Urban is an American historian specializing in the Baltic Crusades and Teutonic knights. He is the Lee L. Morgan Professor of History and International studies at Monmouth College. He served as an editor for the Journal of Baltic Studies from 1990 to 1994.

#15

William J. Nellis

#124912

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

William J. Nellis is an American physicist. He is an Associate of the Physics Department of Harvard University. His work has focused on ultra-condensed matter at extreme pressures, densities and temperatures achieved by fast dynamic compression. He is most well-known for the first experimental observation of a metallic phase of dense hydrogen, a material predicted to exist by Eugene Wigner and Hillard Bell Huntington in 1935.

#16

Willard Malcolm Reid

#163659

Overall Influence

#17

Donald R. Kelley

#164708

Overall Influence

#18

Samuel Martin Thompson

1902 - 1983 (81 years)

Samuel Martin Thompson was an American philosopher, frequent contributor to scholarly journals and author of three bestselling textbooks of philosophy. His textbooks were used by many top universities and seminaries in the United States. An expert on the works of philosopher Immanuel Kant, he published analyses of Kant's work. Thompson was also one of the three authors of the Confession of 1967, one of the major statements of faith of the Presbyterian Church .

#19

Ken Loeffler

1902 - 1975 (73 years)

Kenneth D. Loeffler was an American collegiate and professional basketball coach. He was mostly known for guiding the La Salle Explorers men's basketball team to the 1952 National Invitation Tournament and 1954 NCAA basketball tournament titles.

#20

Maurice H. Rees

Maurice H. Rees

1880 - 1945 (65 years)

Maurice Holmes Rees was American medical educator who served as Dean of the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Superintendent of the University of Colorado Hospital from 1920 to 1945. Early life and education Maurice Holmes Rees was born on April 27, 1880, in Newton, Iowa, to Spencer Harris Rees and Margaret Holmes. He attended Newton High School and served in the Iowa National Guard from 1889 to 1901, where he was honorably discharged.

#21

Calvin B. Hoover

Calvin B. Hoover

1897 - 1974 (77 years)

Calvin Bryce Hoover was a noted economist and professor. He spent 1929–1930 in Moscow and wrote The Economic Life of Soviet Russia in 1931. Following his travels to Soviet Russia he also traveled to and researched the economies of Germany, Italy, France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Australia. He is considered the founder of the field of comparative economic systems.

#22

Orange Nash Stoddard

1812 - 1892 (80 years)

Orange Nash Stoddard was a professor of natural science at Miami University and the College of Wooster who served as president pro tem of Miami University in 1854. He was born in Lisle, New York, and received his A.B. degree from Union College 1834. He received an honorary LL.D. degrees at Monmouth College. He joined the Miami faculty in 1845 and among his more prominent students were Benjamin Harrison, David Swing, John Willock Noble and Whitelaw Reid. At Miami, he became a faculty member of Phi Delta Theta and was known affectionately as "Stoddy" and "the Little Wizard" by his students. ...

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