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 Communications,
#51
Alastair Campbell
#492
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Alastair John Campbell is a British journalist, author, strategist, broadcaster and activist, known for his political roles during Tony Blair's leadership of the Labour Party. Campbell worked as Blair's spokesman and campaign director in opposition , then as Downing Street Press Secretary, and as the Prime Minister's Official Spokesperson . He then became Downing Street director of communications and spokesman for the Labour Party . He returned as campaign director for the 2005 general election in Blair's third win.
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Oriana Fallaci
#747
Overall Influence
1929 - 2006 (77 years)
Oriana Fallaci was an Italian journalist and author. A partisan during World War II, she had a long and successful journalistic career. Fallaci became famous worldwide for her coverage of war and revolution, and her "long, aggressive and revealing interviews" with many world leaders during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
Go to Profile#53
André Martinet
#3322
Overall Influence
1908 - 1999 (91 years)
André Martinet was a French linguist, influential due to his work on structural linguistics. In linguistic theory, Martinet is known especially for his studies on linguistic economy and double articulation.
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Ray Jackendoff
#2416
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ray Jackendoff is an American linguist. He is professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities and, with Daniel Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has always straddled the boundary between generative linguistics and cognitive linguistics, committed to both the existence of an innate universal grammar and to giving an account of language that is consistent with the current understanding of the human mind and cognition .
Go to Profile#55
Christopher Hitchens
#269
Overall Influence
1949 - 2011 (62 years)
Christopher Eric Hitchens was a British author and journalist who is widely regarded as one of the most influential atheists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Author of 18 books on faith, culture, politics, and literature, he was born and educated in Britain, graduating in the 1970s from Oxford with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. In the early 1980s, he emigrated to the United States and wrote for The Nation and Vanity Fair. Known as "one of the 'four horsemen'" of New Atheism, he gained prominence as a columnist and speaker. His epistemological razor, which states that "what ca...
Go to Profile#56
Rudolf Nureyev
#1687
Overall Influence
1938 - 1993 (55 years)
Rudolf Khametovich Nureyev was a Soviet-born ballet dancer and choreographer. Nureyev is regarded by some as the greatest male ballet dancer of his generation. Nureyev was born on a Trans-Siberian train near Irkutsk, Siberia, Soviet Union, to a Tatar family. He began his early career with the company that in the Soviet era was called the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad. He defected from the Soviet Union to the West in 1961, despite KGB efforts to stop him. This was the first defection of a Soviet artist during the Cold War, and it created an international sensation. He went on to dance with The Royal Ballet in London and from 1983 to 1989 served as director of the Paris Opera Ballet.
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Derek Bickerton
#3433
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Derek Bickerton was an English-born linguist and professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Based on his work in creole languages in Guyana and Hawaii, he has proposed that the features of creole languages provide powerful insights into the development of language both by individuals and as a feature of the human species. He is the originator and main proponent of the language bioprogram hypothesis according to which the similarity of creoles is due to their being formed from a prior pidgin by children who all share a universal human innate grammar capacity.
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Paul Sidwell
#2840
Overall Influence
Paul James Sidwell is an Australian linguist based in Canberra, Australia who has held research and lecturing positions at the Australian National University. Sidwell, who is also an expert and consultant in forensic linguistics, is most notable for his work on the historical linguistics of the Austroasiatic language family, and has published reconstructions of the Bahnaric, Katuic, Palaungic, Khasic, and Nicobaric proto-languages. Sidwell is currently the President of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society and also regularly organises the International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistic...
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Vincent Canby
#617
Overall Influence
1924 - 2000 (76 years)
Vincent Canby was an American film and theatre critic who served as the chief film critic for The New York Times from 1969 until the early 1990s, then its chief theatre critic from 1994 until his death in 2000. He reviewed more than one thousand films during his tenure there.
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Roger Blench
#2595
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Roger Marsh Blench is a British linguist, ethnomusicologist and development anthropologist. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and is based in Cambridge, England. He researches, publishes, and works as a consultant.
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Damien Hirst
#372
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist and art collector. He is one of the Young British Artists who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is reportedly the United Kingdom's richest living artist, with his wealth estimated at US$384 million in the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.
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Katie Couric
#683
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Katherine Anne Couric is an American journalist and presenter. She is founder of Katie Couric Media, a multimedia news and production company. She also publishes a daily newsletter, Wake Up Call. From 2013 to 2017, she was Yahoo's Global News Anchor. Couric has been a television host at all of the Big Three television networks in the United States, and in her early career she was an assignment editor for CNN. She worked for NBC News from 1989 to 2006, CBS News from 2006 to 2011, and ABC News from 2011 to 2014. In 2021, she appeared as a guest host for the game show Jeopardy!, the first woman ...
Go to Profile#63
Baz Luhrmann
#593
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Mark Anthony "Baz" Luhrmann is an Australian film director, producer, writer, and actor. With projects spanning film, television, opera, theater, music, and recording industries, he is regarded by some as a contemporary example of an auteur for his style and deep involvement in the writing, directing, design, and musical components of all his work. He is the most commercially successful Australian director, with four of his films in the top ten highest worldwide grossing Australian films of all time.
Go to Profile#64
Diane Sawyer
#563
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Lila Diane Sawyer is an American television broadcast journalist known for anchoring major programs on two networks including ABC World News Tonight, Good Morning America, 20/20, and Primetime newsmagazine while at ABC News. During her tenure at CBS News she hosted CBS Morning and was the first woman correspondent on 60 Minutes. Prior to her journalism career, she was a member of U.S. President Richard Nixon's White House staff and assisted in his post-presidency memoirs. Presently she works for ABC News producing documentaries and interview specials.
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Robert Crumb
#641
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert Dennis Crumb is an American cartoonist who often signs his work R. Crumb. His work displays a nostalgia for American folk culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and satire of contemporary American culture.
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Geoffrey K. Pullum
#2853
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Geoffrey Keith Pullum is a British and American linguist specialising in the study of English. Pullum has published over 300 articles and books on various topics in linguistics, including phonology, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, and philosophy of language. He is Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.
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Henri Wittmann
#5405
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Henri Wittmann is a Canadian linguist from Quebec. He is best known for his work on Quebec French. Biography Henri Wittmann was born in Alsace in 1937. After studying with André Martinet at the Sorbonne, he moved to North America and taught successively at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Alberta in Edmonton, the University of Windsor and McGill University in Montreal before teaching in the French university system of Quebec, the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and at Rimouski as well as the Université de Sherbrooke. He retired from teaching in 1997, after an extensive tour of teaching and conferencing in France.
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Larry Flick
#813
Overall Influence
Larry Flick is an American journalist, former dance music columnist, single reviewer, and Senior Talent Editor for Billboard magazine, where he worked for 14 years. Now he produces and hosts Sirius XM radio shows. Flick started in the music business at 21 as a college radio rep at a company called Gold Mountain. He went on the road as a touring assistant to the Power Station and KISS during their 1980s heyday, before starting as a part-time assistant/mail sorter at Billboard. He later became the dance music/single reviews editor of the magazine. Flick also worked as a music consultant for Prin...
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Marianne Mithun
#4278
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Marianne Mithun is an American linguist specializing in American Indian languages and language typology. She is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has held an academic position since 1986.
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Anna Wierzbicka
#2191
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Anna Wierzbicka is a Polish linguist who is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Canberra. Brought up in Poland, she graduated from Warsaw University and emigrated to Australia in 1972, where she has lived since. With over twenty published books, many of which have been translated into other languages, she is a prolific writer.
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Randolph Quirk
#4330
Overall Influence
1920 - 2017 (97 years)
Charles Randolph Quirk, Baron Quirk, CBE, FBA was a British linguist and life peer. He was the Quain Professor of English language and literature at University College London from 1968 to 1981. He sat as a crossbencher in the House of Lords.
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Daniel Everett
#2700
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Daniel Leonard Everett is an American linguist and author best known for his study of the Amazon basin's Pirahã people and their language. Everett is currently Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. From July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2018, Everett served as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley. Prior to Bentley University, Everett was chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. He has taught at the University of Manchester and the University of Campinas and is former chair of the ...
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Robert Blust
#2729
Overall Influence
1940 - 2022 (82 years)
Robert A. Blust was an American linguist who worked in several areas, including historical linguistics, lexicography and ethnology. He was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Blust specialized in the Austronesian languages and made major contributions to the field of Austronesian linguistics.
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John Grinder
#808
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
John Thomas Grinder Jr. is an American linguist, author, management consultant, trainer and speaker. Grinder is credited with co-creating neuro-linguistic programming with Richard Bandler. He is co-director of Quantum Leap Inc., a management consulting firm founded by his partner Carmen Bostic St. Clair in 1987 . Grinder and Bostic St. Clair also run workshops and seminars on NLP internationally.
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Roland Petit
#4033
Overall Influence
1924 - 2011 (87 years)
Roland Petit was a French ballet company director, choreographer and dancer. He trained at the Paris Opera Ballet school, and became well known for his creative ballets. Life and work The son of shoe designer Rose Repetto, Petit was born in Villemomble, near Paris. He trained at the Paris Opéra Ballet school under Gustave Ricaux and Serge Lifar and began to dance with the corps de ballet in 1940. He founded the Ballets des Champs-Élysées in 1945 and the Ballets de Paris in 1948, at Théâtre Marigny, with Zizi Jeanmaire as star dancer.
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John R. Ross
#4366
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
John Robert "Haj" Ross is an American poet and linguist. He played a part in the development of generative semantics along with George Lakoff, James D. McCawley, and Paul Postal. He was a professor of linguistics at MIT from 1966 to 1985 and has worked in Brazil, Singapore and British Columbia, and until spring 2021, he taught at the University of North Texas.
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John Schlesinger
#1357
Overall Influence
1926 - 2003 (77 years)
John Richard Schlesinger was an English film and stage director, and actor. He emerged in the early 1960’s as a leading light of the British New Wave, before embarking on a successful career in Hollywood, often directing films dealing frankly in provocative subject matter, combined with his status as one of the only openly-gay directors working in mainstream films.
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Bernard Comrie
#5128
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Bernard Sterling Comrie, is a British-born linguist. Comrie is a specialist in linguistic typology, linguistic universals and on Caucasian languages. Early life and education Comrie was born in Sunderland, England on 23 May 1947. He earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where he also taught Russian and Linguistics until he moved to the Linguistics Department of the University of Southern California.
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Elizabeth II
#605
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Elizabeth II was Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms from 6 February 1952 until her death in 2022. She was queen regnant of 32 sovereign states over the course of her lifetime and remained the monarch of 15 realms by the time of her death. Her reign of over 70 years is the longest of any British monarch and the longest verified reign of any female head of state in history.
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Peter Trudgill
#4555
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Peter Trudgill, FBA is an English sociolinguist, academic and author. Trudgill was born in Norwich, England and grew up in the area of Thorpe St Andrew. He attended the City of Norwich School from 1955. Trudgill studied modern languages at King's College, Cambridge and obtained a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1971.
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Charles J. Fillmore
#4090
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Charles J. Fillmore was an American linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan in 1961. Fillmore spent ten years at Ohio State University and a year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University before joining Berkeley's Department of Linguistics in 1971. Fillmore was extremely influential in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics.
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Algirdas Julien Greimas
#2114
Overall Influence
1917 - 1992 (75 years)
Algirdas Julien Greimas was a Lithuanian literary scientist who wrote most of his body of work in French while living in France. Greimas is known among other things for the Greimas Square . He is, along with Roland Barthes, considered the most prominent of the French semioticianss. With his training in structural linguistics, he added to the theory of signification, plastic semiotics, and laid the foundations for the Parisian school of semiotics. Among Greimas's major contributions to semiotics are the concepts of isotopy, the actantial model, the narrative program, and the semiotics of the natural world.
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Tina Brown
#1240
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Christina Hambley Brown, Lady Evans , is an English journalist, magazine editor, columnist, broadcaster, and author. She is the former editor in chief of Tatler , Vanity Fair and The New Yorker , and the founding editor in chief of The Daily Beast . From 1998 to 2002, Brown was chairman of Talk Media, which included Talk Magazine and Talk Miramax Books. In 2010, she founded Women in the World, a live journalism platform to elevate the voices of women globally, with summits held through 2019. Brown is author of The Diana Chronicles , The Vanity Fair Diaries and The Palace Papers .
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Norman Fairclough
#3284
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Norman Fairclough is an emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. He is one of the founders of critical discourse analysis as applied to sociolinguistics. CDA is concerned with how power is exercised through language. CDA studies discourse; in CDA this includes texts, talk, video and practices.
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Ken Scott
#1277
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ken Scott is a British record producer and engineer known for being one of the five main engineers for the Beatles, as well as engineering Elton John, Pink Floyd, Procol Harum, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Duran Duran, the Jeff Beck Group, Supertramp and many more.
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Storm Thorgerson
#837
Overall Influence
1944 - 2013 (69 years)
Storm Elvin Thorgerson was an English graphic designer and music video director. He is best known for closely working with the group Pink Floyd through most of their career, and also created album or other art for Led Zeppelin, Phish, Black Sabbath, Def Leppard, Al Stewart, Scorpions, UFO, Peter Gabriel, the Alan Parsons Project, Genesis, Yes, Kansas, Dream Theater, Muse, Audioslave, the Mars Volta, The Cranberries, Helloween, Ween, Shpongle and Catherine Wheel.
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Anderson Cooper
#496
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Anderson Hays Cooper is an American broadcast journalist and political commentator currently anchoring the CNN news broadcast show Anderson Cooper 360°. In addition to his duties at CNN, Cooper serves as a correspondent for 60 Minutes on CBS News. After graduating from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1989, he began traveling the world, shooting footage of war-torn regions for Channel One News. Cooper was hired by ABC News as a correspondent in 1995, but he soon took more jobs throughout the network, working for a short time as a co-anchor, reality game show host, and fill-in mornin...
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Michael Silverstein
#1194
Overall Influence
1945 - 2020 (75 years)
Michael Silverstein was an American linguist. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago. He was a theoretician of semiotics and linguistic anthropology. Over the course of his career he created an original synthesis of research on the semiotics of communication, the sociology of interaction, Russian formalist literary theory, linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, early anthropological linguistics and structuralist grammatical theory, together with his own theoretical contributions, yielding a comprehensive account of the semiotics of human communication and its relation to culture.
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Peter Jennings
#1430
Overall Influence
1938 - 2005 (67 years)
Peter Charles Archibald Ewart Jennings was a Canadian-American television journalist, best known for serving as the sole anchor of ABC World News Tonight from 1983 until his death from lung cancer in 2005. Despite dropping out of high school, Jennings transformed himself into one of American television's most prominent journalists.
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Geoffrey Leech
#6682
Overall Influence
1936 - 2014 (78 years)
Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author, or editor of more than 30 books and more than 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, and semantics.
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Paul Postal
#3613
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Paul Martin Postal is an American linguist. Biography Postal received his PhD from Yale University in 1963 and taught at MIT until 1965. That year, he moved to the City University of New York. In 1967 he was appointed to a research position at IBM and he remained on their research staff until 1994.
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Peter Ladefoged
#6184
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
Peter Nielsen Ladefoged was a British linguist and phonetician. He was Professor of Phonetics at University of California, Los Angeles , where he taught from 1962 to 1991. His book A Course in Phonetics is a common introductory text in phonetics, and The Sounds of the World's Languages is widely regarded as a standard phonetics reference. Ladefoged also wrote several books on the phonetics of African languages. Prior to UCLA, he was a lecturer at the universities of Edinburgh, Scotland and Ibadan, Nigeria .
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Jason Thompson
#3640
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Jason Bradley Thompson is an American artist, author, comics creator, critic, and editor. He is best known for his Eisner-nominated book Manga: The Complete Guide, his graphic novel interpretation of H. P. Lovecraft's DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath and Other Stories, and his Dungeons and Dragons adventure walkthrough maps published by Wizards of the Coast on their website as well in books such as Waterdeep Dragon Heist.
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Malcolm Gladwell
#194
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has published seven books: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference ; Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking ; Outliers: The Story of Success ; What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures , a collection of his journalism; David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants ; Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know and The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War .
Go to Profile#95
Ben Brantley
#791
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Benjamin D. Brantley is an American theater critic, journalist, editor, publisher, and writer. He served as the chief theater critic for The New York Times from 1996 to 2017, and as co-chief theater critic from 2017 to 2020.
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Joss Whedon
#304
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Joseph Hill Whedon is an American screenwriter, director, producer, comic book writer, and composer. He is the founder of Mutant Enemy Productions, co-founder of Bellwether Pictures, and is best known as the creator of several television series: the supernatural drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel , the short-lived space Western Firefly , the Internet musical miniseries Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog , the science fiction drama Dollhouse , the Marvel Cinematic Universe series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. , and the science fiction drama The Nevers .
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Balthus
#3425
Overall Influence
1908 - 2001 (93 years)
Balthasar Klossowski de Rola , known as Balthus, was a Polish-French modern artist. He is known for his erotically charged images of pubescent girls, but also for the refined, dreamlike quality of his imagery.
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Diana, Princess of Wales
#1222
Overall Influence
1961 - 1997 (36 years)
Diana, Princess of Wales , was a member of the British royal family. She was the first wife of Charles III and mother of Princes William and Harry. Her activism and glamour made her an international icon, and earned her enduring popularity.
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Maurice Béjart
#3039
Overall Influence
1927 - 2007 (80 years)
Maurice Béjart was a French-born dancer, choreographer and opera director who ran the Béjart Ballet Lausanne in Switzerland. He developed a popular expressionistic form of modern ballet, talking vast themes. He was awarded Swiss citizenship posthumously.
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Geraldo Rivera
#591
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Geraldo Rivera is an American journalist, attorney, author, and political commentator who worked at the Fox News Channel from 2001 to 2023. He hosted the tabloid talk show Geraldo from 1987 to 1998. He gained publicity with the live 1986 TV special The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults. Rivera hosted the news magazine program Geraldo at Large, hosts the occasional broadcast of Geraldo Rivera Reports . He served as a rotating co-host of The Five from 2022 to 2023.
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