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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#1

Paul Halmos

#211

Overall Influence

1916 - 2006 (90 years)

Paul Richard Halmos was a Hungarian-born American mathematician and statistician who made fundamental advances in the areas of mathematical logic, probability theory, statistics, operator theory, ergodic theory, and functional analysis . He was also recognized as a great mathematical expositor. He has been described as one of The Martians.

#2

Gary Snyder

#240

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Gary Snyder is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poetry has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance and he has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology". Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. He has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. For many years, Snyder was an academic at the University of California, Davis, and for a time ser...

#3

Dell Hymes

#521

Overall Influence

1927 - 2009 (82 years)

Dell Hathaway Hymes was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist who established disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic study of language use. His research focused upon the languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics". The terminological shift draws attention to the field's grounding in anthropology rather than in what, by that time, had already become an autonomous discipline . In 1972 Hymes founded the journal Language in Society ...

#4

Eleanor Rosch

#549

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

#5

Raymond Smullyan

Raymond Smullyan

#876

Overall Influence

1919 - 2017 (98 years)

Raymond Merrill Smullyan was an American mathematician, magician, concert pianist, logician, Taoist, and philosopher. Born in Far Rockaway, New York, his first career was stage magic. He earned a BSc from the University of Chicago in 1955 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1959. He is one of many logicians to have studied with Alonzo Church.

#6

Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold

#1629

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Howard Rheingold is an American critic, writer, and teacher, known for his specialties on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities.

#7

John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto

#1754

Overall Influence

1935 - 2018 (83 years)

John Taylor Gatto was an American author and school teacher. After teaching for nearly 30 years he authored several books on modern education, criticizing its ideology, history, and consequences. He is best known for his books Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, and The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling.

#8

Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich

#1785

Overall Influence

1941 - 2022 (81 years)

Barbara Ehrenreich was an American author and political activist. During the 1980s and early 1990s, she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She was a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist and the author of 21 books. Ehrenreich was best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On Getting By in America, a memoir of her three-month experiment surviving on a series of minimum-wage jobs. She was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award.

#9

Richard Wolin

#1896

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Richard Wolin is an American intellectual historian who writes on 20th Century European philosophy, particularly German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the group of thinkers known collectively as the Frankfurt School.

#10

Robert Morris

#2987

Overall Influence

1931 - 2018 (87 years)

Robert Morris was an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer. He was regarded as having been one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism along with Donald Judd, but also made important contributions to the development of performance art, land art, the Process Art movement, and installation art. Morris lived and worked in New York. In 2013 as part of the October Files, MIT Press published a volume on Morris, examining his work and influence, edited by Julia Bryan-Wilson.

#11

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.

#12

Wolfgang Smith

#4748

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Wolfgang Smith is a mathematician, physicist, philosopher of science, metaphysician, Roman Catholic and member of the Traditionalist School. He has written extensively in the field of differential geometry, as a critic of scientism and as a proponent of a new interpretation of quantum mechanics that draws heavily from premodern ontology and realism.

#13

Robert Frager

#4775

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Robert Frager is an American social psychologist responsible for establishing America's first educational institution dedicated to transpersonal psychology. Frager is known for founding the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, now called Sofia University, in Palo Alto, California, where he currently holds the position of director of the low residency Master of Arts in Spiritual Guidance program and professor of psychology. Frager has previously acted as president of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology as well as a consultant, educator and a spiritual teacher in the Sufi tradition.

#14

Philippe Bourgois

#4860

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Philippe Bourgois is professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was the founding chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and was the Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania .

#15

Michael Rothschild

#5408

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Michael Rothschild is an American economist; he is visiting professor at the Department of Economics of the University of California in Los Angeles and a former dean at Princeton. Education Rothschild holds a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology from Reed College , and a Master of Arts in international relations from Yale University . He earned his Doctor of Philosophy in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .

#16

Diane Ravitch

#5449

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Diane Silvers Ravitch is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education. In 2010, she became "an activist on behalf of public schools". Her blog at DianeRavitch.net has received more than 36 million page views since she began blogging in 2012. Ravitch writes for the New York Review of Books.

#17

Allen W. Wood

#5723

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Allen William Wood is an American philosopher specializing in the work of Immanuel Kant and German Idealism, with particular interests in ethics and social philosophy. One of the world’s foremost Kant scholars, he is the Ruth Norman Halls professor of philosophy at Indiana University, Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor, Emeritus, at Stanford University, and has held professorships and visiting appointments at numerous universities in the United States and Europe. In addition to popularising and clarifying the ethical thought of Kant, Wood has also mounted arguments against the validity ...

#18

Mike Davis

#6008

Overall Influence

1946 - 2022 (76 years)

Michael Ryan Davis was an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian based in Southern California. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in works such as City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts. His last two non-fiction books are Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener, and The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism .

#19

Richard Danzig

#6029

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Richard Jeffrey Danzig is an American politician and lawyer who served as the 71st Secretary of the Navy under President Bill Clinton. He served as an advisor of the President Barack Obama during his presidential campaign and was later the chairman of the national security think-tank, the Center for a New American Security.

#20

Steven Shapin

#6327

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Steven Shapin is an American historian and sociologist of science. He is the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is considered one of the earliest scholars on the sociology of scientific knowledge, and is credited with creating new approaches. He has won many awards, including the 2014 George Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society for career contributions to the field.

#21

Keith Packard

#6348

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Keith Packard is a software developer, best known for his work on the X Window System. Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X. He has been heavily involved in the development of X since the late 1980s as a member of the MIT X Consortium, XFree86 and the X.Org Foundation.

#22

Mason Gaffney

#6818

Overall Influence

1923 - 2020 (97 years)

Merrill Mason Gaffney was an American economist and a major critic of Neoclassical economics from a Georgist point of view. Gaffney first read Henry George's masterwork Progress and Poverty as a high school junior. This interest led him to Harvard University in 1941 but, unimpressed with their approach to economics he left in 1942 to join the war effort. After serving in the southwest Pacific during World War II he earned his B.A. in 1948 from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. In 1956 he gained a Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. There he addressed his teachers' sk...

#23

Dale W. Jorgenson

Dale W. Jorgenson

#7603

Overall Influence

1933 - 2022 (89 years)

Dale Weldeau Jorgenson was the Samuel W. Morris University Professor at Harvard University, teaching in the department of economics and John F. Kennedy School of Government. He served as chairman of the department of economics from 1994 to 1997.

#24

Michael W. Doyle

#7645

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Michael W. Doyle is an American international relations scholar who is a theorist of the liberal "democratic peace" and author of Liberalism and World Politics. He has also written on the comparative history of empires and the evaluation of UN peace-keeping. He is a University professor of International Affairs, Law and Political Science at Columbia University - School of International and Public Affairs. He is the former director of Columbia Global Policy Initiative. He co-directs the Center on Global Governance at Columbia Law School.

#25

Ted Robert Gurr

#7702

Overall Influence

1936 - 2017 (81 years)

Ted Robert Gurr was an American author and professor of political science who most notably wrote about political conflict and instability. His widely translated book Why Men Rebel emphasized the importance of social psychological factors and ideology as root sources of political violence. He was Distinguished University Professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and consulted on projects he established there. He died in November 2017.

#26

Norman Packard

#7777

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Norman Harry Packard is a chaos theory physicist and one of the founders of the Prediction Company and ProtoLife. He is an alumnus of Reed College and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Packard is known for his contributions to chaos theory, complex systems, and artificial life. He coined the phrase "the edge of chaos".

#27

Mark Ptashne

#7941

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Mark Ptashne is a molecular biologist. He is the Ludwig Chair of Molecular Biology at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Ptashne grew up in Chicago. He earned his undergraduate degree at Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1961 and his PhD from Harvard in 1968, after which he joined the faculty of Harvard. He was made professor there in 1971 and became chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1980. In 1993 he was awarded an endowed chair, and in 1997 he left Harvard for MSK.

#28

David J. Griffiths

David J. Griffiths

#8328

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

David Jeffrey Griffiths is an American physicist and educator. He was on the faculty of Reed College from 1978 through 2009, becoming the Howard Vollum Professor of Science before his retirement. He wrote three highly regarded textbooks for undergraduate physics students.

#29

David Tyack

#8404

Overall Influence

1930 - 2016 (86 years)

David B. Tyack was the Vida Jacks Professor of Education and Professor of History, Emeritus at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Tyack is known for his wide-ranging studies and interpretations of the history of American education.

#30

Sydney Shoemaker

#8903

Overall Influence

1931 - 2022 (91 years)

Sydney Sharpless Shoemaker was an American philosopher. He was the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University and is well known for his contributions to philosophy of mind and metaphysics.

#31

Abigail Thernstrom

#8983

Overall Influence

1936 - 2020 (84 years)

Abigail Thernstrom was an American political scientist and a leading conservative scholar on race relations, voting rights and education. She was an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and vice chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 1975. According to the New York Times, she and her husband Harvard Professor Stephan Thernstrom, "are much in demand on the conservative talk-show circuit,...

#32

Sally Haslanger

Sally Haslanger

#9576

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

#33

Nicolaus Tideman

#9734

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Thorwald Nicolaus Tideman is a Georgist economist and professor at Virginia Tech. He received his Bachelor of Arts in economics and mathematics from Reed College in 1965 and his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1969. Tideman was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard University from 1969 to 1973, during which time from 1970 to 1971 he was a Senior Staff Economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisors. Since 1973, he has been at Virginia Tech, with various visiting positions at Harvard Kennedy School , University of Buckingham , and the American Institute f...

#34

Jonathan Grudin

Jonathan Grudin

#9789

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Jonathan Grudin was a researcher at Microsoft from 1998 to 2022 and is affiliate professor at the University of Washington Information School working in the fields of human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. Grudin is a pioneer of the field of computer-supported cooperative work and one of its most prolific contributors. His collaboration distance to other researchers of human-computer interactions has been described by the "Grudin number". Grudin is also well known for the "Grudin Paradox" or "Grudin Problem", which states basically with respect to the design of co...

#35

Norman Solomon

#10427

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Norman Solomon is an American journalist, media critic, activist, and former U.S. congressional candidate. Solomon is a longtime associate of the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting . In 1997 he founded the Institute for Public Accuracy, which works to provide alternative sources for journalists, and serves as its executive director.

#36

Adam Penenberg

#10774

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Adam L. Penenberg is an American journalist and educator, currently associate professor of journalism at New York University and director of undergraduate studies. He had previously served as editor of PandoDaily, wrote for Forbes, Fast Company, The New York Times, Wired News, and Playboy. While at Forbes, Penenberg gained national attention in 1998 for helping reveal The New Republic reporter Stephen Glass had been fabricating his stories.

#37

Guy Sircello

#12990

Overall Influence

1936 - 1992 (56 years)

Guy Sircello was an American philosopher best known for his analytic approach to philosophical aesthetics. Biography Guy Sircello was born in Tacoma, Washington, and attended Lincoln High School. His parents were Pete and Teresa Sircello, and he had a younger sister, Teresa. Upon high school graduation, he was awarded the prestigious George Baker full four-year scholarship to Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, and graduated in 1958 with a double major in philosophy and history. In 1960, he married Sharon Chapin, a fellow Reed graduate, and shortly after, they left New York for Hamburg, where ...

#38

Walter Berns

#13065

Overall Influence

1919 - 2015 (96 years)

Walter Berns was an American constitutional law and political philosophy professor. He was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor emeritus at Georgetown University. Early life and career Berns was raised in Chicago, where, as late as 1926, he was impressed by "Union soldiers in the [Memorial Day] parade feebly carrying the standard." He attended Reed College and the General Course at the London School of Economics and Political Science, "where [he] learned little, other than to love London," and received his bachelor's degree from the University of Iowa. World...

#39

Allen Bergin

#13094

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Allen Eric Bergin is a clinical psychologist known for his research on psychotherapy outcomes and on integrating psychotherapy and religion. His 1980 article on theistic values was groundbreaking in the field and elicited over 1,000 responses and requests for reprints, and including those from Carl Rogers and Albert Bandura. Bergin is also noted for his interchanges with probabilistic atheist Albert Ellis.

#40

Janet Fitch

#13710

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Janet Fitch is an American author. She wrote the novel White Oleander, which became a film in 2002. She is a graduate of Reed College. Fitch was born in Los Angeles, a third-generation native, and grew up in a family of voracious readers. As an undergraduate at Reed College, Fitch had decided to become a historian, attracted to its powerful narratives, the scope of events, the colossal personalities, and the potency and breadth of its themes. But when she won a student exchange to Keele University in England, where her passion for Russian history led her, she awoke in the middle of the night ...

#41

Robert Brenner

#13999

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Robert Paul Brenner is an American economic historian. He is a professor emeritus of history and director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA, editor of the socialist journal Against the Current, and editorial committee member of New Left Review. His research interests are early modern European history, economic, social and religious history, agrarian history, social theory/Marxism, and Tudor–Stuart England.

#42

David Eddings

#14148

Overall Influence

1931 - 2009 (78 years)

David Carroll Eddings was an American fantasy writer. With his wife Leigh, he authored several best-selling epic fantasy novel series, including The Belgariad , The Malloreon , The Elenium , The Tamuli , and The Dreamers .

#43

Kris Holmes

#14376

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Kris Holmes is an American typeface designer, calligrapher, type design educator and animator. She, with Charles Bigelow, is the co-creator of the Lucida and Wingdings font families, among many other typeface designs. She is President of Bigelow & Holmes Inc., a typeface design studio.

#44

Pamela Ronald

#14832

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Pamela Christine Ronald is an American plant pathologist and geneticist. She is a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis and a member of the Innovative Genomics Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. She also serves as Director of Grass Genetics at the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, California. In 2018 she served as a visiting professor at Stanford University in the Center on Food Security and the Environment.

#45

Louis S. Goodman

Louis S. Goodman

#14927

Overall Influence

1906 - 2000 (94 years)

Louis Sanford Goodman was an American pharmacologist. He is best known for his collaborations with Alfred Gilman, Sr., with whom he authored the popular textbook The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics in 1941 and pioneered the first chemotherapy trials using nitrogen mustard.

#46

Lisa Nakamura

#14980

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Lisa Nakamura is an American professor of media and cinema studies, Asian American studies, and gender and women’s studies. She teaches at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is also the Coordinator of Digital Studies and the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Cultures.

#47

John Alexander Simpson

John Alexander Simpson

#15018

Overall Influence

1916 - 2000 (84 years)

John Alexander Simpson was an American physicist and science educator. He was deeply committed to educating the public and political leaders about science and its implications, most notably as a principal founder of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and a long-time member of the organizations Board of Sponsors.

#48

M. Brewster Smith

#15238

Overall Influence

1919 - 2012 (93 years)

Mahlon Brewster Smith was an American psychologist and past president of the American Psychological Association. His career included faculty appointments at Vassar College, New York University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago and University of California, Santa Cruz. Smith had been briefly involved with the Young Communist League as a student at Reed College in the 1930s, which resulted in a subpoena by the U.S. Senate in the 1950s. That activity caused him to be blacklisted by the National Institute of Mental Health for ten years without his knowledge.

#49

Charles Bigelow

#16108

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Charles A. Bigelow is an American type historian, professor, and designer. Bigelow grew up in the Detroit suburbs and attended the Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982, the Frederic W. Goudy Award in 1987, Sloan Science and Film screenwriting awards in 2001 and 2002, and other honors. Along with Kris Holmes, he is the co-creator of Lucida and Wingdings font families. He is a principal of the Bigelow and Holmes studio.

#50

Eve Marder

#16754

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Eve Marder is a University Professor and the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of Neuroscience at Brandeis University. At Brandeis, Marder is also a member of the Volen National Center for Complex Systems. Dr. Marder is known for her pioneering work on small neuronal networks which her team has interrogated via a combination of complementary experimental and theoretical techniques.

Image Attributions