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
Dave Cutler
#1529
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
David Neil Cutler Sr. is an American software engineer. He developed several computer operating systems, namely Microsoft's Windows NT, and Digital Equipment Corporation's RSX-11M, VAXELN, and VMS. Personal history Cutler was born in Lansing, Michigan and grew up in DeWitt, Michigan. After graduating from Olivet College, Michigan, in 1965, he went to work for DuPont.
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Wolfgang Mieder
#4963
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Wolfgang Mieder is a retired professor of German and folklore who taught for 50 years at the University of Vermont, in Burlington, Vermont, USA. He is a graduate of Olivet College , the University of Michigan , and Michigan State University . He has been a guest speaker at the University of Freiburg in Germany, the country where he was born.
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Golo Mann
#5077
Overall Influence
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Golo Mann was a popular German historian and essayist. Having completed a doctorate in philosophy under Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg, in 1933 he fled Hitler's Germany. He followed his father, the writer Thomas Mann and other members of his family in emigrating to France, Switzerland and the United States. From the late 1950s he re-established himself in Switzerland and West Germany as a literary historian.
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Robie Macauley
#16335
Overall Influence
1919 - 1995 (76 years)
Robie Mayhew Macauley was an American editor, novelist and critic whose literary career spanned more than 50 years. Biography Early life Robie Mayhew Macauley was born on May 31, 1919, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was the older brother of the noted photographer and movie producer C. Cameron Macauley. His uncle owned and published the Hudsonville newspaper, The Ottawa Times , and Macauley used the printing press to publish his first books of fiction and poetry. At age 18 he printed and bound a limited edition of Solomon's Cat, a previously unpublished poem by Walter Duranty, setting the type...
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Joseph S. Murphy
#27820
Overall Influence
1933 - 1998 (65 years)
Joseph Samson Murphy was an American political scientist and university administrator, who was President of Queens College, President of Bennington College, and Chancellor of the City University of New York.
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Liz Walker
#34110
Overall Influence
Liz Walker is an American pastor and retired journalist. She was the first black woman to co-anchor a newscast in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. She became the Pastor of the Roxbury Presbyterian Church in 2014.
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Kiyoko Takeda
#50210
Overall Influence
1917 - 2018 (101 years)
Cho Kiyoko , better known as Takeda Kiyoko , was a Japanese scholar of the history of ideas. In the 1950s, she contributed to the diplomacy that was hurt by World War II, aimed at restoring relations and understanding among Asian people, including Chinese, Filipino, Indian, and people of other Asian countries. She was the founder of the Social Studies Institute at the International Christian University in Tokyo. Takeda Kiyoko was a professor emerita at ICU with a PhD in Literature from the University of Tokyo in 1961.
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Adeola Fayehun
#51229
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Adeola Eunice Oladele Fayehun is a Nigerian journalist who specializes in discussing current geopolitical, social and economic issues that affect the daily lives of Africans living on the continent. She is well known for a controversial 2015 on-street interview where she and fellow Sahara TV journalist Omoyele Sowore asked Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe about when he would be stepping down from office. In 2013, she interviewed former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan on the streets of New York, asking him what he was doing about the then on-going Boko Haram insurgency.
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Claressa Shields
#85595
Overall Influence
1995 - Present (29 years)
Claressa Maria Shields is an American professional boxer and mixed martial artist. She has held multiple world championships in three weight classes, including the undisputed female light middleweight title since March 2021; the undisputed female middleweight title from 2019 to 2020; and the unified WBC and IBF female super middleweight titles from 2017 to 2018. Shields currently holds the record for becoming a two and three-weight world champion in the fewest professional fights. As of October 2022, she is ranked as the world's best active female middleweight by BoxRec, as well as the best a...
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Mark Inghram
#96443
Overall Influence
1919 - 2003 (84 years)
Mark Gordon Inghram was an American physicist. Inghram was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Life Inghram was born in Livingston, Montana. He did undergraduate work at Olivet College, receiving a B.A. in 1939. He worked in the Manhattan Project during World War II and at Argonne National Laboratories from 1945 to 1947. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1947. He began teaching at the University of Chicago as an instructor in 1947 and remained there until his retirement in 1985. He died at his home in Holland, Michigan in 2003.
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Sugar Chile Robinson
#128496
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Frank Isaac Robinson , known in his early musical career as Sugar Chile Robinson, is an American jazz pianist and singer. A Detroit native, Robinson became famous as a child prodigy in the mid-1940s.
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William P. Blair
#172964
Overall Influence
#13
Richard J. Miller
#174276
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Richard J. "Dick" Miller was an American sculptor, printmaker, and painter. Education Miller was graduated A.B. from Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan, and earned an A.M. degree from Michigan State University. He was the student of sculptor Milton Horn.
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Gene G. Chandler
#178838
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Gene G. Chandler is a Republican politician in the U.S. state of New Hampshire. Residing in Bartlett, Chandler represented Carroll County District 1 in the New Hampshire House of Representatives for decades until his defeat in 2018.
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Betsy L. Cooper
#179799
Overall Influence
#16
Charles McKenny
1860 - 1933 (73 years)
Charles McKenny was president of Central State Normal School , Milwaukee State Normal School and Michigan State Normal College . McKenny was born in Dimondale, Michigan. He received his bachelor's degree in 1881 from Michigan State Agricultural College and masters from both Olivet College and the University of Wisconsin.
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Seth Neddermeyer
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
Seth Henry Neddermeyer was an American physicist who co-discovered the muon, and later championed the implosion-type nuclear weapon while working on the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.
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Cornelius Golightly
1917 - 1976 (59 years)
Cornelius Lacy Golightly was the first black president of the Detroit Board of Education. He was a teacher, civil rights activist, public intellectual, and educational administrator. Early life Cornelius L. Golightly was born on March 23, 1917, in Waterford, Mississippi. His father, Reverend Richmond Mack Golightly, was from Livingston, Alabama. His mother, Margaret Fullilove was from Honey Island, Mississippi. Golightly was one of ten children.
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Mayo D. Hersey
1886 - 1978 (92 years)
Mayo Dyer Hersey was an American engineer, physicist at the National Bureau of Standards and other government agencies, and Professor of Engineering at Brown University. He received the 1957 ASME Medal, and the first Mayo D. Hersey award in 1965.
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John Haskell Hewitt
1835 - 1920 (85 years)
John Haskell Hewitt was an American classical scholar and educator, notable for serving as acting president of Williams College from 1901 to 1902. Born in Preston, Connecticut, to Charles Hewitt and Eunice , Hewitt entered Yale University in 1855, initially intending to study law. While at Yale he befriended Franklin Carter, a relationship that would prove beneficial in later years. After graduating with an A.B. in 1859, Hewitt then earned an advanced degree from the Yale Divinity School in 1863. He served as a librarian at Yale's Brothers in Unity Library until 1865, until he accepted a position teaching Latin and Greek at Olivet College.
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