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 in Biology,

#14601

Susie Wood

#173235
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Susanna Wood is a New Zealand scientist whose research focuses on understanding, protecting and restoring New Zealand's freshwater environments. One of her particular areas of expertise is the ecology, toxin production, and impacts of toxic freshwater cyanobacteria in lakes and rivers. Wood is active in advocating for the incorporation of DNA-based tools such as metabarcoding, genomics and metagenomics for characterising and understanding aquatic ecosystems and investigating the climate and anthropogenic drivers of water quality change in New Zealand lakes. She has consulted for government de...
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#14602

Dení Ramírez Macías

#171543
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Dení Ramírez Macías is a Mexican marine biologist ocean scientist, and conservationist, and director of Whale Shark México since 2003. She leads the "Giants of Peru" project of the Save Our Seas Foundation.
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#14603

Pat Langhorne

Pat Langhorne
#81724
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Patricia Jean Langhorne is an Antarctic sea ice researcher. She retired as Professor in the physics department at the University of Otago, New Zealand in 2020. She was previously head of department . She was New Zealand's leading sea ice physicist. For a time she led the observational component of one of New Zealand’s National Science Challenges – the Deep South.
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#14604

Daniel Schechter

#62293
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Daniel S. Schechter is an American and Swiss psychiatrist known for his clinical work and research on intergenerational transmission or "communication" of violent trauma and related psychopathology involving parents and very young children. His published work in this area following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York of September 11, 2001 led to a co-edited book entitled "September 11: Trauma and Human Bonds" and additional original articles with clinical psychologist Susan Coates that were translated into multiple languages and remain among the first accounts of 9/1...
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#14605

Andrew Millar

#172604
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Andrew John McWalter Millar, FRS, FRSE is a Scottish chronobiologist, systems biologist, and molecular geneticist. Millar is a professor at The University of Edinburgh and also serves as its chair of systems biology. Millar is best known for his contributions to plant circadian biology; in the Steve Kay lab, he pioneered the use of luciferase imaging to identify circadian mutants in Arabidopsis. Additionally, Millar's group has implicated the ELF4 gene in circadian control of flowering time in Arabidopsis. Millar was elected to the Royal Society in 2012 and the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 20...
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#14606

Indre Viskontas

Indre Viskontas
#127468
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Indre Viskontas is a Lithuanian-Canadian neuroscientist and operatic soprano. She holds a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience and a M.M. in opera. She is a Professor of Psychology at the University of San Francisco and serves on the faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She is also the Creative Director of Pasadena Opera.
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#14607

Bruno Granier

#157198
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Bruno R.C. Granier is Professor of Geology at the University of Brest , a post he held in 2004. He is the author of over 90 scientific papers. He is also editor of the open access electronic journal Carnets de Géologie, associate editor of PALAIOS and the manager of the internet website Geoscience e-Journals. From 2007 to 2011 he was president of the French Committee of Stratigraphy; accordingly, he organized the 4th French meeting on Stratigraphy, STRATI2010.
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#14608

Eberhard Fetz

#151192
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Eberhard Erich Fetz is an American neuroscientist, academic and researcher. He is a Professor of Physiology and Biophysics and DXARTS at the University of Washington. Fetz has authored over 160 papers on experimental neuroscience, brain-computer interfaces, and neural networks. His research focuses on the neural control of limb movement in primates. He pioneered the recording of cortical and spinal neurons in behaving monkeys and the applications of bidirectional brain-computer interfaces.
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#14609

Gwenda Louise Davis

#171126
Overall Influence
1911 - 1993 (82 years)
Gwenda Louise Davis was an Australian botanist. She is known for her work on embryology, in particular, for work on the embryology of Australian Asteraceae and the genus Eucalyptus. She started her career as a plant taxonomist in 1945 at the New England University College at Armidale
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#14610

Idah Sithole-Niang

#126860
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Idah Sithole-Niang is a Zimbabwean biochemist and educator. Her main area of research has been viruses which attack the cowpea, one of the major food crops of Zimbabwe. Biography Idah Sithole was born in Hwange, Zimbabwe, on 2 October 1957. She attended the University of London, on scholarship, earning a BS in biochemistry in 1982. When she was awarded a USAID Fellowship in 1983, Sithole chose to continue her education, studying plant and virus genetics. She earned a PhD in 1988 from Michigan State University in Lansing, Michigan. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Plant Researc...
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#14611

Wayne Parrott

#168880
Overall Influence
Wayne Allen Parrott is a professor of crop sciences in the University of Georgia's College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences in Athens. Since 2017, he has also been an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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#14612

Tara C. Smith

Tara C. Smith
#150617
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Tara C. Smith is an American epidemiologist and science communicator. She is a professor at the Kent State University College of Public Health who studies zoonotic infections. Smith was the first to identify strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus associated with livestock in the United States.
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#14613

Miguel Ferrer Baena

#176022
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
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#14614

Pehr Harbury

#82022
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Pehr A. B. Harbury is an American biochemist, and associate professor of biochemistry at Stanford University. He is a native of Menlo Park. He graduated from Harvard University with a BA, and from Harvard Medical School, with a Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry in 1994.
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#14615

Michael Paradiso

#144459
Overall Influence
Michael A. Paradiso is an American neuroscientist, currently the Sidney A. Fox and Dorothea Doctors Fox Professor and Founding Director of the Center for Vision Research at Brown University.
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#14616

Christopher Jaroniec

#121091
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Christopher Jaroniec is an American professor of analytical, physical, chemical physics and biochemistry. Education He obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Kent State University in 1997 and six years got his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is graduate research fellow of National Science Foundation and is Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation postdoc fellow.
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#14617

Courtney A. Miller

Courtney A. Miller
#164864
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Courtney A. Miller is an American neuroscientist and Professor of the Department of Molecular Medicine at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida. Miller investigates the biological basis of neurological and neuropsychiatric diseases and develops novel therapeutics based on her mechanistic discoveries.
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#14618

Diana Fleischman

#109286
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Diana Santos Fleischman is an American evolutionary psychologist. Her field of research includes the study of disgust, human sexuality, and hormones and behaviour. She is also involved in the effective altruism, animal welfare, and feminism movements.
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#14619

Ellen Covey

#148949
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Ellen Covey is an American neurobiologist, researcher, perfumer and professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington. Member Association for Research in Otolaryngology, Society for Neurosci., European Neurosci. Association, Sigma Xi.
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#14620

Elaine M. Tobin

#175337
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Elaine Munsey Tobin is a professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology at the University of California, Los Angeles . Tobin is recognized as a Pioneer Member of the American Society of Plant Biologists .
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#14621

Kirsten Benkendorff

#172280
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Kirsten Benkendorff is a marine scientist who works on molluscs, antibiotics, anti-inflammatory properties and cancer fighting properties. She was awarded Young Australian of the Year in 2000 and a Dorothy Hill Medal for Science in 2011.
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#14622

Elizabeth Gavis

#174977
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Gavis is an American biologist who is the Damon B. Pfeiffer Professor of Life Sciences, at Princeton University. Gavis served as the President of the North American Drosophila Board of Directors in 2011.
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#14623

Susan Mackem

#175253
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Susan Marie Mackem is an American anatomic pathologist and physician-scientist. She researches vertebrate primary axis formation and the regulation of patterning and differentiation during limb development. She is a senior investigator and head of the regulation of vertebrate morphogenesis section at the National Cancer Institute's Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research. She is also an attending pathologist at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center.
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#14624

Justin B. Ries

Justin B. Ries
#73670
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Justin Baker Ries is an American marine scientist, best known for his contributions to ocean acidification, carbon sequestration, and biomineralization research. Biography Ries was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and attended the Friends School of Baltimore. He received a B.A. from Franklin and Marshall College and a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University for a dissertation 'Experiments on the effect of secular variation in seawater Mg/Ca on calcareous biomineralization'. He received postdoctoral training at the Johns Hopkins University, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the California Institute of Technology.
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#14625

Soejatmi Dransfield

#130762
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Soejatmi Dransfield is an Indonesia-born British plant taxonomist specializing in bamboos and currently honorary research fellow at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK. Early life Soejatmi Soenarko was born in Nganjuk, Indonesia in 1939.
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#14626

Dayu Lin

#170965
Overall Influence
Dayu Lin is a neuroscientist and Professor of Psychiatry, Neuroscience and Physiology at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine in New York City. Lin discovered the neural circuits in the hypothalamus that give rise to aggression in mice. Her lab at NYU now probes the neural circuits underlying innate social behaviors, with a focus on aggressive and defensive behaviors.
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#14627

Asuman Baytop

Asuman Baytop
#71430
Overall Influence
1920 - 2015 (95 years)
Dr. Asuman Baytop was a Turkish botanist, plant collector, pharmacologist, and educator known for her research regarding the medicinal properties of the flora of Turkey. In 1964, she founded the Department of Pharmaceutical Botany at Istanbul University, and established the department's herbarium, to which she contributed over 23,000 specimens. She is also noted for describing several species of crocus, and the species Allium baytopiorum and Colchicum baytopiorum are named in her honor. She was married to fellow botanist Turhan Baytop.
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#14628

Yves Brun

#174697
Overall Influence
Yves Brun is an American biologist, currently a Distinguished Professor and Clyde Culbertson Professor at Indiana University.
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#14629

Jeffery Pettis

#176213
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Jeffery Stuart Pettis is an American-born biologist and entomologist known for his extensive research on honeybee behavior. He is currently head of Apimondia. He was the research leader at the United States Department of Agriculture's Beltsville Bee Laboratory . His research has led to significant breakthroughs in understanding and managing CCD, a primary cause of North American bee population decline. He is also known for discovering with Dennis vanEngelsdorp, then at Pennsylvania State University, the ability of bees to detect pesticides and harmful fungi in collected pollen and subsequently quarantine the harmful substances from the rest of the hive.
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#14630

Alejandro Rodriguez

#77170
Overall Influence
1918 - 2012 (94 years)
Alejandro Rodriguez was a Venezuelan-American pediatrician and psychiatrist, known for his pioneering work in child psychiatry. He was the director of the division of child psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and conducted pivotal studies on autism and other developmental disorders in children.
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#14631

Mario Baudoin

Mario Baudoin
#134229
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Mario Jorge Baudoin Weeks was a Bolivian biologist and conservationist known for his research in Bolivia and Costa Rica. He was the first director of Bolivia's national park system, and served as director of several academic and government institutes, including the , the Institute of Ecology at Higher University of San Andrés, Dirección Nacional Conservación de Biodiversidad and the La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica. In the early 1990s he was involved in the creation of the , which led to the 1995 establishment of Madidi National Park. He received the 2008 Distinguished Services Awa...
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#14632

Stephanie S. Watowich

#175696
Overall Influence
Stephanie S. Watowich is an American immunologist. Watowich is the deputy chair of the Department of Immunology at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX. She is a professor within the department as well and serves as the co-director of the Center for Inflammation and Cancer at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. Watowich’s research has focused on transcriptional control of innate immunity, with specific interest in the actions of the cytokine-activated STAT transcriptional regulators.
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#14633

Lori Burrows

#175780
Overall Influence
Lori Lee Burrows is a Canadian microbiologist. She is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Microbe-Surface Interactions at McMaster University. Early life and education Burrows completed her Bachelor of Science degree and PhD at the University of Guelph. Upon completing her degrees, she was an Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Industrial Fellow with Langford Inc. and a Cystic Fibrosis Canada Kinsmen Postdoctoral Fellow.
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#14634

Catherine Anderson

#102356
Overall Influence
Catherine Anderson is a Canadian scientist. She researched pre-eclampsia, a potentially fatal disease that can impact pregnant women, at BC Children's and Women's Hospital and the University of Nottingham. She currently serves as Clinical Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at University of British Columbia and runs the Future Science Leaders program at Science World. Maclean's described her as a "nationally renowned science educator."
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#14635

Griffith Edwards

#72952
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
James Griffith Edwards CBE was a British psychiatrist. Edwards was born on 3 October 1928 in India and received his M.D. from Balliol College, Oxford. His research focused on the study and treatment of alcohol and other drug dependence and related aspects of addictions.
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#14636

Herman M. Van Praag

#176281
Overall Influence
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#14637

Elizabeth Rakoczy

#142658
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Elizabeth P. Rakoczy is a Hungarian-born molecular ophthalmologist. She is a professor at the University of Western Australia. She started the molecular ophthalmology department at the Lions Eye Institute. In 2017, Rakoczy was awarded the Florey Medal for her human gene therapy trial to modify viruses for the treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration.
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#14638

Anne Lingford-Hughes

#175939
Overall Influence
Anne Lingford-Hughes is a British psychiatrist who is Professor of Addiction Biology at Imperial College London. She works on addictions at the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust. Her research uses neuroimaging and pharmacology to understand the neurobiology of addiction.
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#14639

Joanne Berger-Sweeney

Joanne Berger-Sweeney
#113398
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Joanne E. Berger-Sweeney is an American neuroscientist and the 22nd president of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. She is the first African-American and the first woman to serve in the position. Earlier in her career, Berger-Sweeney did proof-of-concept work on galantamine , the second-most used drug to treat Alzheimer's disease.
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#14640

Kristina Micheva

#171116
Overall Influence
Dr Kristina Micheva is a Bulgarian-American neuroscientist at Stanford University. She is one of the inventors of Array Tomography, a technique in which proteins are detected with antibodies in ultra-thin sections of brain tissue using confocal microscopy.
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#14641

Enitan Bababunmi

#117869
Overall Influence
1940 - 2017 (77 years)
Enitan Abisogun Bababunmi was a Nigerian academic and a Professor of Biochemistry who served as the third Vice-Chancellor of Lagos State University between 1993 and 1996. Recognition In 2002, Enitan was granted a patent by the United States government after he produced a formulation that would prevent muscle atrophy in AIDS and cancer patients.
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#14642

Jeremy P. E. Spencer

#148747
Overall Influence
Jeremy P. E. Spencer is a British biochemist, specialising in nutrition and cognitive function. He is Professor of Molecular Nutrition at the Department of Food and Nutritional Sciences of the University of Reading. He is an Institute for Scientific Information highly-cited researcher.
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#14643

Jessica Meeuwig

#142827
Overall Influence
Professor Jessica Meeuwig is the inaugural director of the Centre for Marine Futures at the University of Western Australia . In 2012 she was appointed as a Conservation Fellow of the Zoological Society of London and was also named as one of the 100 most influential people in Western Australia by The West Australian newspaper.
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#14644

Francisco Sánchez-Bayo

#174185
Overall Influence
Francisco Sánchez-Bayo is an environmental scientist and ecologist at the University of Sydney. The author or co-author of over 80 articles and book chapters, Sánchez-Bayo's research interests have focused on the ecological effects of pesticides. In 2019 he was the lead author of a study that predicted the large-scale extinction of insect species. He serves on the board of associate editors of the journal Entomologia Generalis.
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#14645

Paula DePriest

#168830
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Paula DePriest is an American lichenologist and specialist in artefact conservation. She has been curator of the lichen collection at the National Museum of Natural History, USA and Deputy Director of the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute.
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#14646

Margarita Behrens

Margarita Behrens
#173171
Overall Influence
Margarita Behrens is a neuroscientist and biochemist. She is currently an associate professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where her lab studies the impact of oxidative stress on the post-natal brain through probing the biology of fast-spiking parvalbumin interneurons in models of schizophrenia.
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#14647

Dudley Williams

#114574
Overall Influence
1937 - 2010 (73 years)
Dudley Howard Williams was a British biochemist known for utilizing nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometry in the study of molecular structure, especially the antibiotic vancomycin.
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#14648

Etienne Karita

#162789
Overall Influence
Etienne Karita is a Rwandan scientist who has been researching HIV/AIDS in Rwanda since the mid-1980s. He has held numerous leadership positions in different organizations that are working to control HIV in Rwanda. Some of his work is concentrated on preventing mother to child transmission of HIV and in collaboration with Projet San Francisco, he has studied HIV in discordant couples.
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#14649

Aola Richards

#173118
Overall Influence
Dr Aola Mary Richards was a New Zealand entomologist specialising in the study of New Zealand and Australian cave crickets, or wētā , and Australian ladybird beetles . She was the first New Zealand woman to gain a PhD in biology.
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#14650

Susan Kilham

#147334
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Susan Soltau Kilham was an American aquatic ecologist. She made notable contributions to phycology and to ecological stoichiometry, and much of her research focused on diatoms. Kilham has also been described as a particularly prolific and impactful scientific mentor. She served on the faculty of the University of Michigan from the early 1970s until the early 1990s, and then moved to Drexel University, where she was a professor in the Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science, as well as chairing that department and serving on the faculty senate. Kilham received the Phycologi...
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