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
Stirling Colgate
#15783
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Stirling Auchincloss Colgate was an American nuclear physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and a professor emeritus of physics at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology from 1965 to 1974, of which he also served its president.
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Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz
#15909
Overall Influence
1921 - 2002 (81 years)
Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz was an American physicist. Biography He was born in Bryan, Texas, and grew up in Oklahoma. His father was an agricultural chemist and named his son after the Italian socialist Giovanni Rossi, who had founded an agricultural commune in Brazil in the 1890s. Lomanitz graduated from high school at age 14 and went on to earn his bachelor of science degree in physics from the University of Oklahoma and his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1951 from Cornell University under Richard Feynman.
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Victor Vacquier
#19035
Overall Influence
1907 - 2009 (102 years)
Victor Vacquier, Sr. was a professor of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Vacquier was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1920, Vacquier escaped the Russian Civil War with his family, taking a horse-drawn sleigh across the ice of the Gulf of Finland to Helsinki, then moving to France and to the United States. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1927 from the University of Wisconsin, and a master's degree in physics in 1929, but never earned a Ph.D. He worked for Gulf Research Laboratories, the research arm of Gulf Oi...
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Axel Scherer
#27129
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Axel Scherer is the Bernard Neches Professor of Electrical Engineering, Physics, and Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He is also a distinguished visiting professor at Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. He is known for fabricating the world's first semiconducting vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser at Bell Labs. In 2006, Scherer was named the director of the Kavli Nanoscience Institute. He graduated from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in 1985. At Caltech he teaches a very popular freshman lab course on semiconductor device fabrica...
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Jeffrey A. Lockwood
#34880
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Jeffrey Alan Lockwood is an author, entomologist, and University of Wyoming professor of Natural Sciences and Humanities. He writes both nonfiction science books, as well as meditations. Lockwood is the recipient of both the Pushcart Prize and the John Burroughs Medal. He also serves on the Advisory Council of METI .
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Terry Wallace
#50926
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Terry C. Wallace Jr. is an American geophysicist. He was the 11th director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and the president of Los Alamos National Security, LLC. He became director on January 1, 2018, succeeding Charles F. McMillan.
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Penelope Boston
#53319
Overall Influence
Penelope J. Boston is a speleologist. She was associate director of the National Cave and Karst Research Institute in Carlsbad, New Mexico, along with founding and directing the Cave and Karst Studies Program at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro. Among her research interests are geomicrobiology of caves and mines, extraterrestrial speleogenesis, and space exploration and astrobiology generally.
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Valerie Aurora
#54372
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Valerie Anita Aurora is an American software engineer and feminist activist. She was the co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization that sought to increase women's participation in the free culture movement, open source technology, and open source culture. Aurora is also known within the Linux community for advocating new developments in filesystems in Linux, including ChunkFS and the Union file system. Her birth name was Val Henson, but she changed it shortly before 2009, choosing her middle name after the computer scientist Anita Borg. In 2012, Aurora, and Ada Initiative c...
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Tim Callahan
#66304
Overall Influence
Timothy J. Callahan is an associate professor of geology and environmental geosciences at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. He is director of the college's Master of Environmental Studies program and has interests in hydrogeology, wetlands and water resources.
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Charles B. Moore
#67217
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Charles Bachman Moore Jr. was an American physicist, engineer and meteorologist, known for his research on atmospheric physics and his work with gas balloons. He was born in Maryville, Tennessee. Career Moore attended college at Georgia Institute of Technology in 1940. During World War II, he served as a weather equipment officer for the U.S. Army Air Corps in the China-Burma-India theater, and later in occupied China. Moore returned to Georgia Tech after the war, and received a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in 1947.
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Larry Soderblom
#67646
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Laurence A. Soderblom is a geophysicist with the Astrogeology Science center at the United States Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has served as Chief of the Branch of Astrogeology. Soderblom is best known for his work in imaging science.
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Alexander Prusin
#73288
Overall Influence
1955 - 2016 (61 years)
Alexander Victor Prusin Works The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870-1992 Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920 Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation Justice Behind the Iron Curtain: Nazis on Trial in Communist Poland
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C. Bradley Moore
#74785
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Charles Bradley Moore is an American chemist and research administrator. His research focused on the application of lasers to understand the behavior and reaction dynamics of energized molecules and energy transfer between molecules. He is currently professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had a long career as a faculty member actively engaged in research . While at UC Berkeley, Moore also served in several administrative roles, including chair of the department of chemistry , dean of the college of chemistry , and director of the chemical sciences division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory .
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Kent Condie
#80581
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Kent Condie is an American geologist and Professor Emeritus of Geochemistry at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. He specializes in the origin and evolution of plate tectonics and the continental crust and pioneered work on 'big data' geochemistry.
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Lawrence E. Murr
#81938
Overall Influence
#16
Franklin Orr
#87741
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Franklin M. Orr, Jr. is an American chemical engineer and former Under Secretary for Science and Energy of the U.S. Department of Energy from 2014 to 2017. Prior to his government service, he was a professor of engineering at the Stanford Department of Energy Resources Engineering. He was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2000 for contributions to understanding of complex multicomponent flows in porous media and its applications to the design of enhanced oil recovery processes; and for superb academic leadership. He is married to Susan Packard Orr.
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Rebecca W. Keller
#97096
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Rebecca W. Keller, Ph.D., incorporated Gravitas Publications Inc in 2003 to develop and publish core sciences curriculum under the Real Science-4-Kids imprint. She has authored and published Real Science-4-Kids student texts, teacher manuals, and student laboratory workbooks in chemistry, biology and physics to serve kindergarten through ninth grade, available through mainstream and home school book distributors.
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Alan Cheetham
#99066
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Alan H. Cheetham is a paleobiologist and retired senior scientist and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. Born in El Paso, Texas, January 30, 1928, Cheetham grew up in Taos, New Mexico, received B.S. and M.S. degrees in geology, and, under the guidance of Norman D. Newell, obtained his Ph.D. in paleontology from Columbia University in 1959. Until joining the Smithsonian in 1966, Cheetham was a member of the geology faculty at Louisiana State University; during his tenure there, he was also a visiting postdoctoral fellow at...
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Paul D. Calvert
#118546
Overall Influence
#20
Witold F. Krajewski
#126817
Overall Influence
#21
Lynn Gelhar
#127079
Overall Influence
Lynn Walter Gelhar is an American civil engineer focusing in hydrology and is currently Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is recognized for pioneering research in stochastic subsurface hydrology, has leading research in the area of field-scale contaminant transport experiments, and has extensive experience on the hydrologic aspects of nuclear waste disposal.
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Richard Aster
#127292
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Richard C. Aster is an American seismologist and is Professor of Geophysics and Department Head of Geosciences at Colorado State University. Aster's research includes seismic imaging, volcano seismology, microseismicity, seismic noise, seismic instrumentation, crustal and mantle seismology, fluvial seismology and cryoseismology. Dr. Aster served as president of the Seismological Society of America from 2009-2010. and as an elected board member of the society from 2008-2014. In 1997 Aster founded the New Mexico Tech IRIS PASSCAL Instrument Center , which supports seismological studies around t...
Go to Profile#23
Krishan Kumar Chawla
#146572
Overall Influence
#24
Enrique Vivoni
#148367
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Enrique R. Vivoni is a Puerto Rican scientist and engineer specializing in hydrology who studies the interactions of water throughout the atmosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere. His research is focused on the southwestern United States and Mexico for the purpose of improving water management in urban and rural settings.
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Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloom
#149990
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Sayyid Dr. Muhammad-Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloom is an Iraqi politician, academician, and petroleum expert. He has served twice as the Iraqi Minister of Oil. He first took the ministerial role as part of the cabinet appointed by the Interim Iraq Governing Council in September 2003 until June 2004. Bahraluloom went on to serve a second term as the minister in 2005 where he then submitted his resignation in protest against a governmental decision to increase the price of oil products by five folds.
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Baojun Bai
#150054
Overall Influence
#27
Toshiyuki Sueyoshi
#151917
Overall Influence
#28
Fred M. Phillips
#159389
Overall Influence
#29
Fred Baker
#175300
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Frederick J. Baker , is an American engineer, specializing in developing computer network protocols for the Internet. Biography Baker attended the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology from 1970 to 1973. He developed computer network technology starting in 1978 at Control Data Corporation , Vitalink Communications Corporation, and Advanced Computer Communications.
Go to Profile#30
Thomas L. Kieft
#176124
Overall Influence
Dr. Thomas L. Kieft is an environmental microbiologist who investigates the ecology and biogeochemistry of microbes in extreme environments. He is a professor of Biology at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
Go to Profile#31
Christina Lochman-Balk
#181771
Overall Influence
1907 - 2006 (99 years)
Christina Lochman-Balk was an American geologist who specialized in the study of Paleozoic era fossils, formerly known as Cambrian Paleontology. Lochman specifically dealt with Cambrian trilobites and invertebrates. During her career, it was not very common for women to pursue degrees or careers in geology, which was studied mostly by men. Along with her research, she also served as a lecturer and professor at the universities Mount Holyoke, University of Chicago and the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. She received two degrees from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts in Geology, and her doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in 1933.
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Lukas Lundin
#184336
Overall Influence
1958 - 2022 (64 years)
Lukas Henrik Lundin was a Swedish-Canadian businessman, based in Geneva, Switzerland. He was the chairman of Lundin Mining, Denison Mines, Lucara Diamond, NGEx Resources Inc, Lundin Gold Inc, the Lundin Foundation, and Vostok Gas. He was also the owner of a $100 million superyacht, Savannah.
Go to Profile#33
Tao Xie
#188081
Overall Influence
#34
Conrad Hilton
1887 - 1979 (92 years)
Conrad Nicholson Hilton was an American businessman who founded the Hilton Hotels chain. From 1912 to 1916, Hilton was a Republican representative in the first New Mexico Legislature, but became disillusioned with the "inside deals" of politics. In 1919, he purchased his first hotel, the Mobley Hotel in Cisco, Texas, for $40,000, and subsequently capitalized on the oil boom. The rooms were rented out in 8 hour shifts. He continued to buy and sell hotels, and eventually established the world's first international hotel chain. When he died in 1979, he left the bulk of his estate to the Conrad N.
Go to Profile#35
Mahdi S. Hantush
1921 - 1984 (63 years)
Mahdi S. Hantush was a prominent Iraqi-born American hydrologist known for his analytical work on leaky aquifers and well hydraulics. He was the founder of the New Mexico Tech Hydrology Program. His granddaughter is Yasmin Younis, the 2018 Student Commencement Speaker at Boston University’s 185th Commencement, which went viral all over the Middle East. His Son, Mohamed Hantush, is a Civil Engineer for the Environmental Protection Agency and resides in Cincinnati Ohio
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