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.
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#14251
Hans Knappertsbusch
1888 - 1965 (77 years)
Hans Knappertsbusch was a German conductor, best known for his performances of the music of Wagner, Bruckner and Richard Strauss. Knappertsbusch followed the traditional route for an aspiring conductor in Germany in the early 20th century, starting as a musical assistant and progressing to increasingly senior conducting posts. In 1922, at the age of 34, he was appointed general music director of the Bavarian State Opera, holding that post for eleven years. In 1936 the Nazi régime dismissed him. As a freelance he was a frequent guest conductor in Vienna and Bayreuth, where his performances of ...
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Blind Willie McTell
1898 - 1959 (61 years)
Blind Willie McTell was a Piedmont blues and ragtime singer and guitarist. He played with a fluid, syncopated fingerstyle guitar technique, common among many exponents of Piedmont blues. Unlike his contemporaries, he came to use twelve-string guitars exclusively. McTell was also an adept slide guitarist, unusual among ragtime bluesmen. His vocal style, a smooth and often laid-back tenor, differed greatly from many of the harsher voices of Delta bluesmen such as Charley Patton. McTell performed in various musical styles, including blues, ragtime, religious music and hokum.
Go to Profile#14253
Fausto Veranzio
1551 - 1617 (66 years)
Fausto Veranzio was a Croatian polymath and bishop from Šibenik, then part of the Republic of Venice. Life Family history Fausto was born in Sebenico , Venetian Dalmatia into the Croatian family of count Michele/Mihovil Vrančić and Katarina Berislavić. His father was a Latin poet, while his uncle was Antun Vrančić, archbishop of Esztergom , a diplomat and a civil servant, who was in touch with Erasmus , Philip Melanchthon , and Nikola IV Zrinski , who took care of Fausto's education and later travelled with him during some of Antun's travels through Hungary and in the Republic of Venice. F...
Go to Profile#14254
V. Shantaram
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Shantaram Rajaram Vankudre , referred to as V. Shantaram or Shantaram Bapu, was an Indian filmmaker, film producer, and actor known for his work in Hindi and Marathi films. He is most known for films such as , Amar Bhoopali , Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baaje , Do Aankhen Barah Haath , Navrang , Duniya Na Mane , Pinjara , Chani, Iye Marathiche Nagari and Zunj.
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Rosa Ponselle
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Rosa Ponzillo, known as Rosa Ponselle was an American operatic dramatic soprano. She sang mainly at the New York Metropolitan Opera and is generally considered to have been one of the greatest sopranos of the 20th century.
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James P. Johnson
1894 - 1955 (61 years)
James Price Johnson was an American pianist and composer. A pioneer of stride piano, he was one of the most important pianists in the early era of recording, and like Jelly Roll Morton, one of the key figures in the evolution of ragtime into what was eventually called jazz. Johnson was a major influence on Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, Thelonious Monk, and Fats Waller, who was his student.
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Lois Weber
1879 - 1939 (60 years)
Florence Lois Weber was an American silent film director, screenwriter, producer and actress. She is identified in some historical references as among "the most important and prolific film directors in the era of silent films". Film historian Anthony Slide has also asserted, "Along with D.W.Griffith, Weber was the American cinema's first genuine auteur, a filmmaker involved in all aspects of production and one who utilized the motion picture to put across her own ideas and philosophies".
Go to Profile#14258
Cesare Pugni
1802 - 1870 (68 years)
Cesare Pugni was an Italian composer of ballet music, a pianist and a violinist. In his early career he composed operas, symphonies, and various other forms of orchestral music. Pugni is most noted for the ballets he composed for Her Majesty's Theatre in London , and for the Imperial Theatres in St. Petersburg, Russia . The majority of his ballet music was composed for the works of the ballet master Jules Perrot, who mounted nearly every one of his ballets to scores by Pugni. In 1850 Perrot departed London for Russia, having accepted the position of Premier maître de ballet of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres at the behest of Carlotta Grisi, who was engaged as Prima ballerina.
Go to Profile#14259
Don Byas
1912 - 1972 (60 years)
Carlos Wesley "Don" Byas was an American jazz tenor saxophonist, associated with swing and bebop. He played with Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Art Blakey, and Dizzy Gillespie, among others, and also led his own band. He lived in Europe for the last 26 years of his life.
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Jack Conway
1887 - 1952 (65 years)
Hugh Ryan "Jack" Conway was an American film director and film producer, as well as an actor of many films in the first half of the 20th century. Conway and director Edmund Goulding share the distinction of directing the most Best Picture-nominated films without ever being nominated for Best Director, with three apiece. Conway's nominated films were Viva Villa!, A Tale of Two Cities, and Libeled Lady.
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Buddy Bolden
1877 - 1931 (54 years)
Charles Joseph "Buddy" Bolden was an African American cornetist who was regarded by contemporaries as a key figure in the development of a New Orleans style of ragtime music, or "jass", which later came to be known as jazz.
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Alexander Dargomyzhsky
1813 - 1869 (56 years)
Alexander Sergeyevich Dargomyzhsky was a 19th-century Russian composer. He bridged the gap in Russian opera composition between Mikhail Glinka and the later generation of The Five and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
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Nikolai Rubinstein
1835 - 1881 (46 years)
Nikolai Grigoryevich Rubinstein was a Russian pianist, conductor, and composer. He was the younger brother of Anton Rubinstein and a close friend of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Life Born to Jewish parents in Moscow, where his father had just opened a small factory, Rubinstein showed talent at the keyboard early on. He studied piano first with his mother, and while the family was in Berlin between 1844 and 1846, he studied piano with Theodor Kullak and harmony and counterpoint with Siegfried Dehn; during this time both he and his brother Anton attracted the interest and support of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer.
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Alan Rawsthorne
1905 - 1971 (66 years)
Alan Rawsthorne was a British composer. He was born in Haslingden, Lancashire, and is buried in Thaxted churchyard in Essex. Early years Alan Rawsthorne was born in Deardengate House, Haslingden, Lancashire, to Hubert Rawsthorne , a well-off medical doctor, and his wife, Janet Bridge . Despite what appears to have been a happy and affectionate family life with his parents and elder sister, Barbara , in beautiful Lancashire countryside, as a boy Rawsthorne suffered from fragile health. Although he did at various times attend schools in Southport, much of Rawsthorne's early education came through private tutoring at home.
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Bill Black
1926 - 1965 (39 years)
William Patton Black Jr. was an American musician and bandleader who is noted as one of the pioneers of rock and roll. He played in Elvis Presley's early trio, The Blue Moon Boys. Black later formed Bill Black's Combo.
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Donald Tovey
1875 - 1940 (65 years)
Sir Donald Francis Tovey was a British musical analyst, musicologist, writer on music, composer, conductor and pianist. He had been best known for his Essays in Musical Analysis and his editions of works by Bach and Beethoven, but since the 1990s his compositions have been recorded and performed with increasing frequency. The recordings have mostly been well received by reviewers.
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Wynton Kelly
1931 - 1971 (40 years)
Wynton Charles Kelly was an American jazz pianist and composer. He is known for his lively, blues-based playing and as one of the finest accompanists in jazz. He began playing professionally at the age of 12 and was pianist on a No. 1 R&B hit at the age of 16. His recording debut as a leader occurred three years later, around the time he started to become better known as an accompanist to singer Dinah Washington, and as a member of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie's band. This progress was interrupted by two years in the United States Army, after which Kelly worked again with Washington and Gillespie, and played with other leaders.
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Gustaf Molander
1888 - 1973 (85 years)
Gustaf Harald August Molander was a Swedish actor and film director. His parents were director Harald Molander, Sr. and singer and actress Lydia Molander, née Wessler, and his brother was the director Olof Molander . He was the father of director and producer Harald Molander from his first marriage to actress Karin Molander and father to actor Jan Molander from his second marriage to Elsa Fahlberg .
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Fritz Wunderlich
1930 - 1966 (36 years)
Friedrich "Fritz" Karl Otto Wunderlich was a German lyric tenor, famed for his singing of the Mozart repertory and various lieder. He died in an accident aged 35. Biography Wunderlich was born in Kusel in the Palatinate, Germany. His mother was a violinist and his father was a choirmaster. For a short time, the family kept the inn "Emrichs Bräustübl" . Fritz's father lost his job due to pressure imposed upon him by local Nazis, in addition to suffering from a severe battlefield injury. He died by suicide when Fritz was five years old.
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Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck
1562 - 1621 (59 years)
Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck was a Dutch composer, organist, and pedagogue whose work straddled the end of the Renaissance and beginning of the Baroque eras. He was among the first major keyboard composers of Europe, and his work as a teacher helped establish the north German organ tradition.
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Antônio Carlos Gomes
1836 - 1896 (60 years)
Antônio Carlos Gomes was the first New World composer whose work was accepted by Europe. He was the only non-European who was successful as an opera composer in Italy, during the "golden age of opera", contemporary to Verdi and Puccini and the first composer of non-European lineage to be accepted into the Classic tradition of music.
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Othmar Schoeck
1886 - 1957 (71 years)
Othmar Schoeck was a Swiss Romantic classical composer, opera composer, musician, and conductor. He was known mainly for his considerable output of art songs and song cycles, though he also wrote a number of operas, notably his one-act Penthesilea, which was premiered at the Semperoper in Dresden in 1927 and revived at the Lucerne Festival in 1999. He wrote a handful of instrumental compositions, including two string quartets and concertos for violin , cello and horn.
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King Curtis
1934 - 1971 (37 years)
Curtis Ousley , known professionally as King Curtis, was an American saxophonist who played rhythm and blues, jazz, and rock and roll. A bandleader, band member, and session musician, he was also a musical director and record producer. A master of the instrument, he played tenor, alto, and soprano saxophone. He played riffs and solos on hit singles such as "Respect" by Aretha Franklin , and "Yakety Yak" by The Coasters and his own "Soul Twist" , "Soul Serenade" , and "Memphis Soul Stew" .
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Harry Beaumont
1888 - 1966 (78 years)
Harry Beaumont was an American film director, actor, and screenwriter. He worked for a variety of production companies including Fox, Goldwyn, Metro, Warner Brothers, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Career Beaumont's greatest successes were during the silent film era, when he directed films including John Barrymore's Beau Brummel and the silent youth movie Our Dancing Daughters , featuring Joan Crawford. He then directed MGM's first talkie musical, The Broadway Melody . The latter film won the Best Picture Academy Award that year, and Beaumont was nominated for Best Director.
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Polly Moran
1883 - 1952 (69 years)
Pauline Theresa Moran billed as Polly Moran, was an American actress of vaudeville, stage and screen and a comedian. Career Born in Chicago, Illinois, Moran started in vaudeville, and widely toured North America, as well as various other locations that included Europe and South Africa. An attractive beauty of Irish descent, she left vaudeville in 1914 after signing for Mack Sennett at Keystone Studios as one of his Sennett Bathing Beauties. There she honed the style of the brash, loud-mouthed, knock-about comedian by which she later became known. She proved effective at slapstick and remained...
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Helen Adolf
1895 - 1998 (103 years)
Helen Adolf was an Austrian–American linguist and literature scholar. Early life and education Helen Adolf was born in 1895 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. Her family was Jewish. Her mother, Hedwig Adolf, was an artist, while her father, Jakob Adolf, was a lawyer. Adolf had one older sister, Anna Adolf Spiegel. She was a first cousin of writer Leonie Adele Spitzer.
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Ivan Caryll
1861 - 1921 (60 years)
Félix Marie Henri Tilkin , better known by his pen name Ivan Caryll, was a Belgian-born composer of operettas and Edwardian musical comedies in the English language, who made his career in London and later New York. He composed some forty musical comedies and operettas.
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Hans Hausamann
1897 - 1974 (77 years)
Ernst Johann Hausamann was a Swiss photographer, businessman, and freemason who later became an intelligence officer. Hausamann's father was a photographer, and when Hausamann grew up he became an amateur photographer himself. He joined the Swiss Militia during World War I and this established his political character. He was initially opposed to left-wing politics and supported a strong military. After the war, he opened a specialist photography business and published an associated magazine, that eventually led the company to work for the Swiss press. During the early 1930's, he worked in the militia's education film service, where he created films that promoted a strong military.
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Cal Tjader
1925 - 1982 (57 years)
Callen Radcliffe Tjader Jr. was an American Latin Jazz musician, often described as the most successful non-Latino Latin musician. He explored other jazz idioms, especially small group modern jazz, even as he continued to perform music of Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America.
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Felix Draeseke
1835 - 1913 (78 years)
Felix August Bernhard Draeseke was a composer of the "New German School" admiring Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. He wrote compositions in most forms including eight operas and stage works, four symphonies, and much vocal and chamber music.
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Johann Jahn
1750 - 1816 (66 years)
Johann Jahn was a German orientalist. Biography He studied at the Faculty of Philosophy of University of Olomouc, and in 1772 began his theological studies at the Premonstratensian convent of Bruck, near Znaim. Having been ordained in 1775, he for a short time held a cure at Misslitz, but was soon recalled to Bruck as professor of Oriental languages and Biblical hermeneutics.
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Henry Wilson
1864 - 1934 (70 years)
Henry Wilson was a British architect, jeweller and designer. Career He was born at 91 Red Rock Street in West Derby near Liverpool on 12 March 1864. He studied at the Kidderminster School of Art before being articled to the architect Edward James Shrewsbury in Maidenhead. He then worked and was trained in the practices of John Oldrid Scott, John Belcher and J. D. Sedding.
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Elmer Clifton
1890 - 1949 (59 years)
Elmer Clifton Forsyth was an American director, screenwriter, and actor from the early silent days. Early life Elmer Clifton Forsyth was born in Toronto, Canada, to Cecil Carl Forsyth and Margaret Nicolle.
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Gene Ammons
1925 - 1974 (49 years)
Eugene "Jug" Ammons , also known as "The Boss", was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. The son of boogie-woogie pianist Albert Ammons, Gene Ammons is remembered for his accessible music, steeped in soul and R&B.
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Ronnie Van Zant
1948 - 1977 (29 years)
Ronald Wayne Van Zant was an American singer, best known as the original lead vocalist, primary lyricist and a founding member of the southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. He was the older brother of Johnny Van Zant, the current Lynyrd Skynyrd lead vocalist, and Donnie Van Zant, the founder and vocalist of the rock band .38 Special.
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William Thalbitzer
1873 - 1958 (85 years)
William C. Thalbitzer was a Danish philologist and professor of Eskimo studies at the University of Copenhagen. He studied Danish, English and Latin at the university, but after graduating in 1899 he decided to focus on "exotic" languages. In 1900 he spent a year in Ilulissat in western Greenland studying the Greenlandic language. From 1905 to 1907 he with his wife spent eighteen months among the natives in Tasiilaq, one of the most isolated places on the coast of eastern Greenland. In 1920 the University of Copenhagen established a permanent lecture position for Thalbitzer in "Greenlandic language and culture".
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Henny Porten
1890 - 1960 (70 years)
Frieda Ulricke "Henny" Porten was a German actress and film producer of the silent era, and Germany's first major film star. She appeared in more than 170 films between 1906 and 1955. Biography Frieda Ulricke Porten was born in Magdeburg, in what was then the German Empire. She was one of the few German actresses of the era to enter film without having stage experience. Many of her earlier films were directed by her husband Curt A. Stark, who died during World War I in Transylvania on the Eastern Front in 1916. Her father, Franz Porten, was also an actor and film director, as was her older si...
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Francis X. Bushman
1883 - 1966 (83 years)
Francis Xavier Bushman was an American film actor and director. His career as a matinee idol started in 1911 in the silent film His Friend's Wife. He gained a large female following and was one of the biggest stars of the 1910s and early 1920s.
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Gordon Harker
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
William Gordon Harker was an English stage and film actor. Harker was one of the sons of Sarah Elizabeth Harker, née Hall, , and Joseph Harker , a much admired set painter for the theatre for whom the Dracula character Jonathan Harker was named.
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Vasily Safonov
1852 - 1918 (66 years)
Vasily Ilyich Safonov , also known as Wassily Safonoff, was a Russian pianist, teacher, conductor and composer. Biography Vasily Safonov, or Safonoff as he was known in the West during his lifetime, was born at , Russian Caucasus , son of the Cossack General Ilya Ivanovich Safonov.
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Pierre Beaumarchais
1732 - 1799 (67 years)
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was a French polymath. At various times in his life, he was a watchmaker, inventor, playwright, musician, diplomat, spy, publisher, horticulturist, arms dealer, satirist, financier and revolutionary .
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Carl Stockdale
1874 - 1953 (79 years)
Carl Stockdale also known as Carlton Stockdale was one of the longest-working Hollywood veteran actors, with a career dating from the early 1910s. He also made the difficult transition from silent films to talkies.
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Lew Fields
1867 - 1941 (74 years)
Lew Fields was an American actor, comedian, vaudeville star, theatre manager, and producer. He was part of a comedy duo with Joe Weber. He also produced shows on his own and starred in comedy films.
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Barney Bigard
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Albany Leon "Barney" Bigard was an American jazz clarinetist known for his 15-year tenure with Duke Ellington. He also played tenor saxophone. Biography Bigard was born in New Orleans to Creole parents, Alexander and Emanuella Bigard. He had two brothers, Alexander Jr. and Sidney. His uncle, Emile Bigard, was a jazz violinist. He attended local schools and studied music and clarinet with Lorenzo Tio.
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Alberta Hunter
1895 - 1984 (89 years)
Alberta Hunter was an American jazz and blues singer and songwriter from the early 1920s to the late 1950s. After twenty years of working as a nurse, Hunter resumed her singing career in 1977. Early life Hunter was born in Memphis, Tennessee, to Laura Peterson, who worked as a maid in a Memphis brothel, and Charles Hunter, a Pullman porter. Hunter said she never knew her father. She attended Grant Elementary School, off Auction Street, which she called Auction School, in Memphis. She attended school until around age 15.
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Arthur Somervell
1863 - 1937 (74 years)
Sir Arthur Somervell was an English composer and educationalist. After Hubert Parry, he was one of the most successful and influential writers of art song in the English music renaissance of the 1890s–1900s. According to Michael Hurd, his most important work is found in the five song cycles, particularly his settings of Tennyson in Maud and Housman in A Shropshire Lad .
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Frank Damrosch
1859 - 1937 (78 years)
Frank Heino Damrosch was a German-born American music conductor and educator. In 1905, Damrosch founded the New York Institute of Musical Art, a predecessor of the Juilliard School. Life and career Damrosch was born on June 22, 1859, in Breslau, Silesia, the son of Helene von Heimburg, a former opera singer, and conductor Leopold Damrosch. He came to the United States with his father, brother, conductor Walter Damrosch, and sister, music teacher Clara Mannes, in 1871. His parents were Lutheran .
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Martin Shaw
1875 - 1958 (83 years)
Martin Edward Fallas Shaw was an English composer, conductor, and theatre producer. His over 300 published works include songs, hymns, carols, oratorios, several instrumental works, a congregational mass setting , and four operas including a ballad opera.
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Alan Wilson
1943 - 1970 (27 years)
Alan Christie Wilson , nicknamed "Blind Owl", was an American musician, best known as the co-founder, leader, co-lead singer, and primary composer of the blues band Canned Heat. He sang and played harmonica and guitar with the group live and on recordings. Wilson was the lead singer for the group's two biggest U.S. hit singles: "On the Road Again" and "Going Up the Country".
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