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
Dallas Willard
#3946
Overall Influence
1935 - 2013 (78 years)
Dallas Albert Willard was an American philosopher also known for his writings on Christian spiritual formation. Much of his work in philosophy was related to phenomenology, particularly the work of Edmund Husserl, many of whose writings he translated into English for the first time.
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Don Page
#5888
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Don Nelson Page, , is an American-born Canadian theoretical physicist at the University of Alberta, Canada. Work Page's work focuses on quantum cosmology and theoretical gravitational physics, and he is noted for being a doctoral student of Stephen Hawking, in addition to publishing several journal articles with him. Page got his BA at William Jewell College in the United States in 1971, attaining an MS in 1972 and a PhD in 1976 at Caltech.
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Terry Teachout
#15642
Overall Influence
1956 - 2022 (66 years)
Terrance Alan Teachout was an American author, critic, biographer, playwright, stage director, and librettist. He was the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, the critic-at-large of Commentary, and the author of "Sightings", a column about the arts in the U.S. that was published biweekly in The Wall Street Journal. He weblogged at About Last Night and wrote about the arts for many other magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times and National Review. He was a co-host on Three on the Aisle, a monthly podcast about theater in the United States, hosted by American Theatre magazine...
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Bill Snyder
#32690
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
William D. Snyder is a retired college football coach and former player. He served as the head football coach at Kansas State University from 1989 to 2005 and again from 2009 to 2018. Snyder initially retired from the position from 2006 to 2008 before being rehired. Snyder retired for the second time on December 2, 2018 and is serving as a special ambassador for the athletics department.
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Jack P. Greene
#35437
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Jack Philip Greene is an American historian, specializing in Colonial American history and Atlantic history. Greene was born in Lafayette, Indiana and received his PhD from Duke University in 1956. He spent most of his career as Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University’s history department. In 1990-1999 he was a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and he has been a visiting professor at the College of William and Mary, Oxford University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Universi...
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Harold E. Brooks
#36251
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Harold Edward Brooks is an American meteorologist whose research is concentrated on severe convective storms and tornadoes, particularly severe weather climatology, as well as weather forecasting. Life and work Brooks began his higher education career at William Jewell College, studying physics and mathematics, achieving a B.A., summa cum laude, in 1982. While there he studied abroad at the University of Cambridge, passing Part 1 of the tripos in Archaeology and Anthropology in 1980. In 1985 he earned a M.A. and M.Phil. at Columbia University from the Atmospheric Sciences Program within the Department of Geological Sciences.
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Robert H. Williams
#38621
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Robert H. Williams is a senior research scientist at the Princeton Environmental Institute , Princeton University. He graduated from Yale University with a BS in physics in 1962, and from University of California, Berkeley with a PhD, in theoretical plasma physics, in 1967. He taught at University of Michigan, Physics Department, in 1970. In 1972, he became Chief Scientist with the Ford Foundation's Energy Policy Project.
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Orvar Swenson
#45374
Overall Influence
1909 - 2012 (103 years)
Orvar Swenson was a Swedish-born American pediatric surgeon. He discovered the cause of Hirschsprung's disease and in 1948, with Alexander Bill, performed the first pull-through operation in a child with megacolon, which then became a treatment for the disease.
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Brian Knight
#50108
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Brian Michael Knight is an American professional baseball umpire. He has worked as a full-time Major League Baseball umpire since 2011. He wears uniform number 91. Umpiring career From 2001 to 2010, Knight was a minor league umpire who substituted as needed in the major leagues. His minor league service included the Pioneer, Midwest, Florida State, Southern, and Pacific Coast Leagues. He umpired the Tokyo in 2006 World Baseball Classic.
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Donald Marolf
#55654
Overall Influence
Donald Michael Marolf is a theoretical physicist, a professor of physics, and former head of the physics department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Biography Marolf gained his Ph.D. from University of Texas at Austin in 1992, under Bryce DeWitt with a thesis on Green's Bracket Algebras and Their Quantization. His undergraduate-degree is from William Jewell College, in 1987.
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Josephine Staton
#62276
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Josephine Laura Staton is a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Central District of California. Early life and education Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Staton graduated from Lindbergh High School, earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1983 from William Jewell College and obtained a Juris Doctor in 1986 from Harvard Law School. From 1986 until 1987, Staton was a law clerk for Judge John R. Gibson on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
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Homer Drew
#70312
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Homer Walter Drew Jr. is an American former college basketball coach and administrator who coached at Washington State, LSU, Bethel College, Indiana-South Bend, and Valparaiso. He retired from college basketball in 2011 with 640 career wins, which ranked him sixth amongst all Division I coaches at the time of his retirement. Drew was inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2019.
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Zel Fischer
#82759
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Zel M. Fischer is an American lawyer who has served as a judge of the Supreme Court of Missouri since 2008. Fischer served a two-year term as chief justice from 2017 to 2019. A native of Watson, he received his undergraduate degree from William Jewell College and his law degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. While at William Jewell College he was a member of the Alpha Delta Chapter of Kappa Alpha Order. He was elected as a Republican to serve as Atchison County judge in 2006 after private practice in Atchison, Nodaway and Holt counties for nearly 15 years.
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Robin Carnahan
#190462
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Robin Colleen Carnahan is an American businesswoman, lawyer, and politician, who previously served as the Missouri Secretary of State and currently serves as the Administrator of General Services in the Biden administration. She is the daughter of Missouri politicians Mel and Jean Carnahan. In 2010, she was the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate to replace retiring Republican Senator Kit Bond. She was then a senior advisor at the global strategy firm Albright Stonebridge Group. In 2013, Carnahan was named a fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. In February 2016, she ...
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Clarence Cannon
1879 - 1964 (85 years)
Clarence Andrew Cannon was a Democratic Congressman from Missouri serving from 1923 until his death in Washington, D.C. in 1964. He was a notable parliamentarian and chaired the U.S. House Committee on Appropriations. He is the longest-serving member of the United States House of Representatives from the state of Missouri.
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William Linvill
1919 - 1980 (61 years)
William Kirby Linvill was an American electrical engineer. He served as a professor at Stanford University from 1960 to 1980. He was the founder of the Institute in Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford, which later became the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems, with Linvill as the first chair.
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Jim Davis
1909 - 1981 (72 years)
Jim Davis was an American actor, best known for his roles in television Westerns. In his later career, he became famous as Jock Ewing in the CBS primetime soap opera Dallas, a role he continued until he was too ill from multiple myeloma to perform.
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