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).
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#4501
Manoel de Oliveira
#79958
Overall Influence
1908 - 2015 (107 years)
Manoel Cândido Pinto de Oliveira was a Portuguese film director and screenwriter born in Cedofeita, Porto. He first began making films in 1927, when he and some friends attempted to make a film about World War I. In 1931, he completed his first film Douro, Faina Fluvial, a documentary about his home city Porto made in the city-symphony genre. He made his feature film debut in 1942 with Aniki-Bóbó and continued to make shorts and documentaries for the next 30 years, gaining a minimal amount of recognition without being considered a major world film director.
Go to Profile#4502
Matt Chamberlain
#37048
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Matthew Chamberlain is an American session musician, drummer, producer and songwriter. He has played with various artists, including Pearl Jam, Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, David Bowie, Tori Amos, The Wallflowers, Elton John, Lisa Marie Presley, Brandi Carlile, Garbage, and Macy Gray.
Go to Profile#4503
Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith
#75461
Overall Influence
1921 - 2014 (93 years)
Arthur Smith was an American musician, composer, and record producer, as well as a radio and TV host. He produced radio and TV shows; The Arthur Smith Show was the first nationally syndicated country music show on television. After moving to Charlotte, North Carolina, Smith developed and ran the first commercial recording studio in the Southeast.
Go to Profile#4504
Mahmood Bijankhan
#60332
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Mahmood Bijankhan is an Iranian linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of Tehran. He is the creator of Bijankhan Corpus and a winner of Khwarizmi International Award. Bijankhan received his BSc in applied mathematics from the University of Texas at Arlington and his MA and PhD in linguistics from the University of Tehran. He is known for his research on Persian phonetics and phonology and creating Persian corpora.
Go to Profile#4505
Maxim Vengerov
#70006
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Maxim Alexandrovich Vengerov is a Soviet-born Israeli violinist, violist, and conductor. Classic FM has called him "one of the greatest violinists in the world". Biography Vengerov was born in Chelyabinsk, the only child of Aleksandr and Larisa Borisovna, oboist and orphanage children's choir director respectively, and is Jewish. He sang in his mother's choir from the age of three. He began studying the violin at age five with Galina Turchaninova. Upon meeting him, she asked: "Do you have strength in these hands?" The five-year-old punched her in the stomach as hard as he could. He said years...
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Erika Check Hayden
#92441
Overall Influence
Erika Check Hayden is an American science journalist and the director of the Science Communication Program , a graduate program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, created in January 2017. She is based in San Francisco, California.
Go to Profile#4507
Fritz Rau
#46191
Overall Influence
1930 - 2013 (83 years)
Fritz Rau was a German music promoter, who was influential in the development of the appreciation of jazz and blues music in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, and has since been a leading promoter of rock and pop music. He was nominated to the Blues Hall of Fame in 2012, together with his former business partner Horst Lippmann.
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Fumiaki Shishida
#70526
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Fumiaki Shishida is a Japanese aikido teacher, and one of traditionally two Shihan of the Japan Aikido Association, where he holds the rank of 8th dan. He is a Professor of Intellectual History of the Japanese Martial Arts at Waseda University and author of several works on the subject. He obtained his doctoral degree from Waseda University in 2003. He won the Japan Society of Sport History prize in 2006 for his book The Educational Strength of Japanese Budo: The Budo Training at Kenkoku University in Manchukuo . He is also the primary author of Aikido Kyougi ; the English translation is titled Aikido Tradition and the Competitive Edge .
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Amy Schwartz Moretti
#92369
Overall Influence
Amy Schwartz Moretti is an American violinist, currently the Caroline Paul King Chair in Strings at Mercer University's Townsend School of Music. Moretti was born in Wisconsin and raised in North Carolina and California. She studied in the pre-college program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, who awarded her their Distinguished Alumni Award in 2014, and earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music, who awarded her an Alumni Achievement Award in 2005. She has been concertmaster at The Florida Orchestra and the Oregon Symphony and in 2007 became the fir...
Go to Profile#4510
Joan Chissell
#91774
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
Joan Olive Chissell was an English writer and lecturer on music, and music reviewer for The Times 1948–79. She made a special study of the life and works of Robert Schumann. Career Joan Chissell was born in Cromer, and was educated at the Manor School in Sheringham. She gained a scholarship at Royal College of Music in 1937, where she studied piano and composition with Kendall Taylor, theory under Herbert Howells and history and criticism under Frank Howes. Her pianistic career was cut short by an injury. Despite this, while at the RCM she gave the first UK performance of Maurice Ravel's P...
Go to Profile#4511
Adam Ledgeway
#104598
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Adam Noel Ledgeway, FBA is an academic linguist, specialising in Italian and other Romance languages. Since 2015, he has been Chair of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge; he has also been Professor of Italian and Romance Linguistics at the University since 2013 and a Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, since 1996 . After completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Salford, Ledgeway studied for his master's degree at the University of Manchester, which also awarded him his doctorate in 1996. He took up a temporary assistant lectureship at...
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Mats Malm
#34581
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Mats Ulrik Malm is a Swedish literary writer and translator. On 18 October 2018, Malm was elected a member of the Swedish Academy, on 26 April 2019 he was elected the new Permanent Secretary and Speaker of the Swedish Academy.
Go to Profile#4513
Anne Jackson
#67368
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
Anne Jackson was an American actress of stage, screen, and television. She was the wife of actor Eli Wallach, with whom she often co-starred. In 1956, she was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her performance in Paddy Chayefsky's Middle of the Night. In 1963, she won an Obie Award for Best Actress for her performance in two Off-Broadway plays, The Typists and The Tiger.
Go to Profile#4514
Denise Gonzales Crisp
#112644
Overall Influence
Denise Gonzales Crisp is a graphic designer, writer, and professor of graphic design at North Carolina State University College of Design , where she currently directs the graduate program. She holds a M.F.A. in graphic design from the California Institute of the Arts and a B.F.A. from Art Center College of Design.
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Janet E. Steele
#88256
Overall Influence
Janet E. Steele is a professor of journalism at George Washington University's school of journalism and an author. She published a book with a collection of newspaper articles from Indonesia. She also published a book about Tempo, an Indonesian magazine, during the Soeharto era in Indonesia and wrote a biography of Charles Anderson Dana. It has been described as covering "the complete history of the Sun. Steele found that experts appearing on television news programs are typically from a cadre of former political and military elites.
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Dejan Verčič
#63873
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Dejan Verčič is a communication researcher and public relations theorist. Dejan Verčič is Professor, Head of Department of Communication and Head of Centre for Marketing and Public Relations at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana , and Partner and Knowledge Director in strategic communication group Stratkom d.o.o., Slovenia.
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Marin Alsop
#52437
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Marin Alsop is an American conductor, the first woman to win the Koussevitzky Prize for conducting and the first conductor to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She is music director laureate of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and chief conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Ravinia Festival. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2020. On June 5, 2023, she was named as the artistic director and conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.
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Art Taylor
#72194
Overall Influence
1929 - 1995 (66 years)
Arthur S. Taylor Jr. was an American jazz drummer, who "helped define the sound of modern jazz drumming". Career As a teenager, Taylor joined a local Harlem band that featured Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean and Kenny Drew. After playing in the bands of Howard McGhee , Coleman Hawkins , Buddy DeFranco , Bud Powell , George Wallington and Art Farmer , Powell and Wallington again , Gigi Gryce and Donald Byrd , he formed his own group, Taylor's Wailers. Between 1957 and 1963, he toured with Donald Byrd, recorded with Miles Davis, Gene Ammons and John Coltrane, and performed with Thelonious Monk; Ta...
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Carl Davis
#46035
Overall Influence
1934 - 2012 (78 years)
Carl H. Davis Sr. was an American record producer and music executive, who was particularly active in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. He was responsible for hit R&B records by Gene Chandler, Major Lance, Jackie Wilson, The Chi-Lites, Barbara Acklin, Tyrone Davis and others.
Go to Profile#4520
James Conlon
#76578
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
James Conlon is an American conductor. He is currently the music director of Los Angeles Opera, principal conductor of the RAI National Symphony Orchestra, and artistic advisor to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
Go to Profile#4521
Silvina Montrul
#116513
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Silvina Montrul is a linguist specializing in generative approaches to second language acquisition. She is currently Professor of Linguistics and Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, as well as Second Language Acquisition, at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Go to Profile#4522
Elisabeth Selkirk
#112784
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Elisabeth O. Selkirk is a theoretical linguist specializing in phonological theory and the syntax-phonology interface. She is currently a professor emerita in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Go to Profile#4523
Efim Etkind
#82503
Overall Influence
1918 - 1999 (81 years)
Efim Etkind was a Soviet philologist and translation theorist. In the 1960s and 1970s he was a dissident; from 1974 he lived in France. Works BooksArticles Further reading Notes
Go to Profile#4524
Giuliana Bruno
#78774
Overall Influence
Giuliana Bruno is a scholar of visual art and media. She is currently the Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is internationally known as the author of numerous influential books and articles on art, architecture, film, and visual culture.
Go to Profile#4525
John G. Avildsen
#72148
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
John Guilbert Avildsen was an American film director. He is best known for directing Rocky , which earned him the Academy Award for Best Director. He is also renowned for directing the first three films in The Karate Kid franchise . Other films he directed include Joe , Save the Tiger , The Formula , Neighbors , Lean on Me , Rocky V , 8 Seconds , and Inferno .
Go to Profile#4526
Andrew Stanton
#45854
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Andrew Ayers Stanton is an American filmmaker and voice actor based at Pixar, which he joined in 1990. His film work includes co-writing and co-directing Pixar's A Bug's Life , directing Finding Nemo and its sequel Finding Dory , WALL-E , and the live-action film, Disney's John Carter , and co-writing all four Toy Story films and Monsters, Inc. .
Go to Profile#4527
Helmut Lachenmann
#64122
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Helmut Friedrich Lachenmann is a German composer of contemporary classical music. His work has been associated with "instrumental musique concrète". Life and works Lachenmann was born in Stuttgart and after the end of the Second World War started singing in his local church choir. Showing an early aptitude for music, he was already composing in his teens. He studied piano with Jürgen Uhde and composition and theory with Johann Nepomuk David at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart from 1955 to 1958 and was the first private student of the Italian composer Luigi Nono in Venice from 1958 to 1960. He a...
Go to Profile#4528
Ketil Bjørnstad
#85639
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Ketil Bjørnstad is a pianist, composer and author. Initially trained as a classical pianist, Bjørnstad discovered jazz at an early age and has embraced the emergence of "European jazz". He is an artist on the ECM record label, but has also published some twenty books, including novels, poetry, and essay collections.
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Šimon Ondruš
#67995
Overall Influence
1924 - 2011 (87 years)
Šimon Ondruš was a Slovak linguist, Slavist and indo-Europeanist, member of several international linguistic societies. Life He studied Slovak language and philosophy at the Comenius University in Bratislava. He became a professor in 1967, then he worked in several positions at the university . The head of the Slovak Committee of Slavists . He dealt with comparative Slavic and Indo-European linguistics, especially etymology, Old Slavonic, general linguistics and history of linguistics. He taught Slovak and Czech at the University of Debrecen and Slovak and Czech studies at the University of Cologne.
Go to Profile#4530
Alan Rubin
#76646
Overall Influence
1943 - 2011 (68 years)
Alan Rubin , also known as Mr. Fabulous, was an American musician. He played trumpet, flugelhorn, and piccolo trumpet. Early life and education Rubin was born in Brooklyn. He began attending Juilliard School of Music in New York when he was 17 and studied with William Vacchiano, who was principal trumpet in the New York Philharmonic. Vacchiano described Rubin as his best student. While at Juilliard, Rubin was invited to play with Paul Hindemith on his last concert tour of the United States, but Rubin chose instead to play with Peggy Lee at the Village Vanguard. Rubin dropped out of Juilliard a...
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Larry Graham
#35506
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Larry Graham Jr. is an American bassist and baritone singer, both with the psychedelic soul/funk band Sly and the Family Stone and as the founder and frontman of Graham Central Station. In 1980, he released the single "One in a Million You", which reached the top ten on the US Billboard Hot 100. He is credited with the invention of the slapping technique on the electric bass guitar, which radically expanded the tonal palette of the bass, although he himself refers to the technique as "thumpin' and pluckin' ". In 1993, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Sly and the Family Stone.
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Alphonse Mouzon
#79609
Overall Influence
1948 - 2016 (68 years)
Alphonse Lee Mouzon was an American musician and vocalist, most prominently known as a jazz fusion drummer. He was also a composer, arranger, producer, and actor. Mouzon gained popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was the owner of Tenacious Records, a label that primarily released Mouzon's recordings.
Go to Profile#4533
Jonathan Larson
#68405
Overall Influence
1960 - 1996 (36 years)
Jonathan David Larson was an American composer, lyricist and playwright most famous for writing the musicals Rent and Tick, Tick... Boom!, which explored the social issues of multiculturalism, substance use disorder, and homophobia. He received three posthumous Tony Awards and a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Rent.
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Maureen Warner-Lewis
#35998
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Maureen Warner-Lewis is a Trinidadian and Tobagonian academic whose career focused on the linguistic heritage and unique cultural traditions of the African diaspora of the Caribbean. Her area of focus has been to recover the links between African cultures and Caribbean cultures. She has been awarded multiple prizes for her works, including two Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Awards, the Gold Musgrave Medal of the Institute of Jamaica, and was inducted into the Literary Hall of Fame of Tobago.
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Yona Sabar
#40357
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Yona Sabar is a Kurdistani Jewish scholar, linguist and researcher. He is professor emeritus of Hebrew at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a native speaker of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic and has published more than 90 research articles about Jewish Neo-Aramaic and the folklore of the Jews of Kurdistan.
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John Madden
#62154
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
John Philip Madden is an English director of stage, film, television, and radio. He is known for directing Shakespeare in Love , which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. He has also gained recognition for directing The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel .
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Elisabeth Leinfellner
#67797
Overall Influence
1938 - 2010 (72 years)
Elisebeth Leinfellner was professor in linguistics at the University of Vienna, Department of Linguistics. She moved to the United States in 1967, and taught at Doane College in Crete, Nebraska, and at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is notable for her contributions to linguistics and philosophy. She received the Austrian Grand Decoration of Honour for services to the province of Lower Austria for Science and Art. She co-founded the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society and International Wittgenstein Symposium.
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Horace Andy
#56100
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Horace Andy is a Jamaican roots reggae songwriter and singer, known for his distinctive vocals and hit songs such as "Government Land", as well as "Angel", "Spying Glass", and "Five Man Army" with English trip hop group Massive Attack. He is also famous for a cover version of "Ain't No Sunshine". Andy is often described as one of the most respected and influential singers in Jamaica.
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Terry Britten
#47640
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Terence Ernest Britten is an English-Australian singer-songwriter and record producer, who has written songs for Tina Turner, Cliff Richard, Olivia Newton-John, Status Quo and Michael Jackson amongst many others. Britten won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 1985 for "What's Love Got to Do with It".
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Joyce DiDonato
#83541
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Joyce DiDonato is an American lyric-coloratura mezzo-soprano. She is notable for her interpretations of operas and concert works in the 19th-century romantic era in addition to works by Handel and Mozart.
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Lucía Lijtmaer
#98975
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Lucía Lijtmaer Paskvan is a journalist and writer born in Argentina and raised in Barcelona, where her parents went into exile. She is a specialist in pop culture from a gender perspective. She is also cultural curator, literary translator, and university professor. She currently writes for various media, including El País, El Diario, and .
Go to Profile#4542
Rick Fisher
#60469
Overall Influence
Rick Fisher is an American lighting designer, known for his work with Stephen Daldry on Billy Elliot the Musical and An Inspector Calls. He is from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and attended Dickinson College, but has been based in the UK for the last 30 years.
Go to Profile#4543
Maurice Hasson
#81838
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Maurice Hasson is a French-Venezuelan violinist. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Line Talluel and Joseph Calvet, winning a First Prize for Violin, "Grand Prix" for chamber music, and the first “Prix d'Honneur" Prize awarded in 60 years. He was a laureate of the Thibaud Violin Competition 1953, where he met Henryk Szeryng, who would become his teacher for many years. He emigrated with his first wife, pianist Monique Duphil, and their two daughters to Venezuela from 1960 to 1973.
Go to Profile#4544
Douglas Trumbull
#45158
Overall Influence
1942 - 2022 (80 years)
Douglas Hunt Trumbull was an American film director and visual effects supervisor, who pioneered innovative methods in special effects. He created scenes for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner and The Tree of Life, and directed the movies Silent Running and Brainstorm.
Go to Profile#4545
Jaime Lloret
#116811
Overall Influence
#4546
Gabriele Salvatores
#65274
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Gabriele Salvatores is an Italian Academy Award-winning film director and screenwriter. Biography Born in Naples, Salvatores debuted as a theatre director in 1972, founding in Milan the Teatro dell'Elfo, for which he directed several avant-garde pieces until 1989.
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Susan Gal
#42317
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Susan Gal is the Mae & Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, of Linguistics, and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago She is the author or co-author of several books and numerous articles on linguistic anthropology, gender and politics, and the social history of Eastern Europe.
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Wanda Sykes
#45468
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Wanda Yvette Sykes is an American stand-up comedian, actress, and writer. She was first recognized for her work as a writer on The Chris Rock Show, for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award in 1999. In 2004, Entertainment Weekly named Sykes as one of the 25 funniest people in America. She is also known for her recurring roles on CBS' The New Adventures of Old Christine , and HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm . She received Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series nominations for her roles in ABC's Black-ish , and Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel . She currently stars in...
Go to Profile#4549
Maurizio Pollini
#68473
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Maurizio Pollini is an Italian pianist. He is known for performances of compositions by Beethoven, Chopin and Debussy, among others. He has also championed and performed works by contemporary composers such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, George Benjamin, Roberto Carnevale, Gianluca Cascioli and Bruno Maderna. Works composed for him include Luigi Nono's ... sofferte onde serene ..., Giacomo Manzoni's Masse: omaggio a Edgard Varèse and Salvatore Sciarrino's Fifth Sonata.
Go to Profile#4550
Yolanda Adams
#46075
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Yolanda Yvette Adams is an American gospel singer, actress, and host of her own nationally syndicated morning gospel show. She is one of the best-selling gospel artists of all time, having sold over 10 million albums worldwide. In addition to achieving multi-platinum status, she has won four Grammy Awards, four Dove Awards, five BET Awards, six NAACP Image Awards, six Soul Train Music Awards, two BMI Awards and sixteen Stellar Awards. She was the first Gospel artist to be awarded an American Music Award.
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