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 Economics,

#2351

L. Alan Winters

#103671
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Leonard Alan Winters CB is a professor of economics at the University of Sussex and former chief economist at the Department for International Development . His father is the composer Geoffrey Winters. His speciality is the empirical and policy analysis of international trade. He was director of the Development Research Group of the World Bank , and had worked at the bank intermittently in a range of posts since 1994. He is a fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the IZA and a former Programme Director at the former. In the UK his previous posts have included spells at Cambridge, Bristol, Wales and Birmingham universities.
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#2352

Takashi Hikino

#28336
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Takashi Hikino is specially appointed professor at the Graduate School of Management at Kyoto University after serving as associate professor of industrial and business organization at the Graduate School of Management at Kyoto University where he taught industrial organization, business economics, and corporate strategy, and comparative management since 1998. He attended Hitotsubashi University, where he studied at the Graduate School of Sociology
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#2353

Andrew Neely

#110884
Overall Influence
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#2354

Pavel Polian

Pavel Polian
#29972
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Pavel Markovich Polian, pseudonym: Pavel Nerler is a Russian geographer and historian, and Doctor of Geographical Sciences with the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He authored over 300 publications and is most known for his research on the history and geography of forced migrations.
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#2355

Alfred P. Thorne

#36289
Overall Influence
1913 - 2012 (99 years)
Alfred Palmerston Thorne was a development economist, international consultant and educator. He was a featured university lecturer at a number of international campuses including Oxford University. Authoring many articles on the economic development experience of developing countries, his scholarly works were published by Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oxford Economic Papers, University of Puerto Rico, and University of the West Indies. Among other works, Dr. Thorne authored the Size, Structure and Growth of the Economy of Jamaica: A National Economic Accounts Study.
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#2356

Frank Asche

#93408
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Frank Asche is a Norwegian marine economist. Frank Asche is a professor at the University of Stavanger, president of the International Association of Aquaculture Economics and Management and associate editor for Marine Resource Economics. He is currently a Fulbright scholar at Duke University. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia, the University of Rhode Island and Duke University.
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#2357

Mao Shoulong

#29089
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Mao Shoulong is a famous Chinese scholar of public administration, a professor at Renmin University of China. Biography Mao Shoulong received his B.A, Master, and Ph.D degrees from Beijing University in 1988, 1992 and 1994. After graduation, he joined the faculty of the Department of Public Administration, Renmin University of China and was the Head of the Department. Now he is executive dean of Academe of Public Policy, Rennmin University of China based in Beijing.
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#2358

Anton Barten

#89353
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Anton Peter Barten was a Dutch economist. Barten was born in Amsterdam. He studied economics at the University of Amsterdam and obtained his PhD at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He worked at the Econometric Institute at the same university in the late 1950s. He there developed in interest in consumer demand. In 1966 Barten started working at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics in Leuven, Belgium, which had been set up by Jacques Drèze.
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#2359

Jasper Kim

Jasper Kim
#7621
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Jasper Kim is an attorney, author, media contributor, professor, and expert in international business law, negotiation strategy , and contemporary East–West issues and trends from a socio-economic and legal perspective.
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#2360

Henry Wai-chung Yeung

#111049
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
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#2361

Daniel F. Spulber

#92371
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Daniel F. Spulber is the Elinor Hobbs Distinguished Professor of International Business and professor of strategy at the Kellogg School of Management , where he has taught since 1990. Spulber is also professor of law at the Northwestern University School of Law and research director of the Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy.
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#2362

Albert Marcet

#96153
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Albert Marcet Torrens is a Spanish economist, specialized in macroeconomics, time series, financial economics and economic dynamic theory. He is currently serving as Professor of Macroeconomics at the UCL Department of Economics, on leave from his position as ICREA Research Professor and Director of the Institute for Economic Analysis , a research centre of the Spanish National Research Council , and AXA Research Chair on Macroeconomic Risk at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. He is also a Fellow of the Econometric Society and he has been a Research Fellow of Centre for Economic Pol...
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#2363

Anil Kashyap

#76466
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Anil K. Kashyap, is the Stevens Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Kashyap's research focuses on price setting, the Japanese economy, monetary policy, financial intermediation and regulation. As an author, he is held in libraries worldwide.
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#2364

Wayne Cascio

#54911
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Wayne F. Cascio is an American economist, currently a Distinguished Professor and the Robert H. Reynolds Chair in Global Leadership at University of Colorado Denver Business School and previously the President of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in 1992 to 1993. In 2004, he was the G. T. Kok Distinguished Professor of Management at Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
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#2365

Marina Halac

#71614
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Marina Halac is a professor of economics at Yale University. She is also an associate editor of Econometrica and a member of the editorial board of the American Economic Review. She was the 2016 recipient of the Elaine Bennett Research Prize, which is awarded biennially by the American Economic Association to recognize outstanding research by a woman. She received this award within the first seven years after completing her PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2017, she was named one of the "Best 40 under 40 Business School Professors" by Poets and Quants. She was a recipient of the George S.
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#2366

Richard Ruggles

#81292
Overall Influence
1916 - 2001 (85 years)
Richard Francis Ruggles was an American economist known for "developing accounting tools for measuring national income and improving price indexes used in formulating government policy." Early life and education Ruggles was born June 15, 1916, in Columbus, Ohio. He spent most of his youth in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father, Clyde O. Ruggles, also an economist, served as the dean of Harvard Business School. Ruggles later pursued both undergraduate and graduate economic studies at Harvard. In 1942, he was awarded a PhD for his thesis titled Price Structure and Distribution over the C...
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#2367

Arik Levinson

#79062
Overall Influence
Arik Mark Levinson is a Professor of Economics at Georgetown University and Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary for Climate and Energy Economics since October 2022. He is known for his research in the fields of energy economics and environmental economics. He was a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration from 2010 to 2011.
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#2368

Syed Abdus Samad

#65957
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Syed Abdus Samad was a teacher of economics. He was a faculty member at the University of Dhaka, Boston State College, Boston University, the University of the South Pacific, and the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea. Samad worked as a national and international civil servant, economist, and human rights activist. In Bangladesh, he was the permanent secretary to the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, and a principal secretary to the Prime Minister. Samad was the executive chairman of the Bangladesh Board of Investment.
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#2369

Jonathan Zinman

#96079
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Jonathan Zinman is a professor of economics at Dartmouth College and a research affiliate at the New Haven-based research outfit Innovations for Poverty Action and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-based Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Formerly an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Zinman is currently a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and Fellow at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Center for Financial Research. Zinman is also a member of the Behavioral Finance Forum and a Research Advisory Board member of stickK, a web-bas...
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#2370

Arnoud Boot

Arnoud Boot
#48075
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Arnoud W.A. Boot is a Dutch economist and professor of Corporate Finance and Financial Markets at the University of Amsterdam. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2008.
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#2371

Marno Verbeek

#98342
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Marno Verbeek is a professor of finance at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University in Rotterdam. His main areas of research are empirical finance, particular analysing mutual funds, hedge funds, asset pricing, investment strategies, survival bias and performance evaluation. He has extensive publications in Finance, Economics and Econometrics and he is the author of the noted textbook A Guide to Modern Econometrics . He serves as an editor of De Economist the Netherlands Economic Review.
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#2372

Mustapha Kamel Nabli

Mustapha Kamel Nabli
#82205
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Mustapha Kamel Nabli is a Tunisian economist. He served as Governor of the Central Bank of Tunisia from January 2011 until July 2012. Biography Born on February 10, 1948, in Téboulba, Tunisia, Nabli studied Economics in Tunisia, where he received the Prize of the President of the Republic in June 1969 for his Bachelor in Economics. He received his Master's degree and a PhD in Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He also holds a degree from Tunis Ecole Nationale d’ Administration .
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#2373

Luigi Lodovico Pasinetti

#111561
Overall Influence
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#2374

Yongheng Yang

#111573
Overall Influence
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#2375

Peter J. Hammond

#68471
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Peter Jackson Hammond , is a Professor of Economics and a Research Associate for CAGE at the University of Warwick. In the past he has also worked as the Marie Curie Professor of Economic Theory at the University of Warwick and an Emeritus Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He has made numerous significant contributions to the advancement of Economic Theory.
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#2376

Stephen Adei

Stephen Adei
#62166
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Stephen Adei is a Ghanaian economist, administrator and writer who is a former Director General and Rector of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration. He is a former chairperson of the National Development Planning Commission under the Nana Akufo-Addo government.
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#2377

Barbara Harriss-White

Barbara Harriss-White
#63376
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Barbara Harriss-White is an English economist and emeritus professor of development studies. She was trained in geography, agricultural science, agricultural economics and self-taught in development economics. In the 1990s, she helped to create the multi- and inter- disciplinary thematic discipline of development studies in Oxford Department of International Development; and in 2005-7 founded Oxford's Contemporary South Asia Programme. She has developed an approach to the understanding of Indian rural development and its informal economy, grounded in political economy and decades of what the ...
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#2378

Hilary Hoynes

#80689
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Hilary Hoynes is an economist and Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. She studies the impact of tax and transfer programs on low-income families, particularly single parent families. She was the 2014 winner of the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. She has been a co-editor of the American Economic Review, co-editor of American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Associate editor of Journal of Public Economics and Journal...
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#2379

Michael Mikhail

#52355
Overall Influence
Michael Mikhail is Dean Emeritus of the College of Business Administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Prior to assuming his role as dean in 2012, Mikhail was the KPMG Professor, and Director of the School of Accountancy at Arizona State University. At ASU, he was named a DC 100 Distinguished Scholar.
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#2380

Luis Alberiko Gil‐alana

#111704
Overall Influence
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#2381

Raymond Mikesell

#70666
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
Raymond Frech Mikesell was an economics professor at the University of Oregon and was believed to be the last surviving economist from the Bretton Woods conference. Mikesell was born in Eaton, Ohio. He received a bachelor's degree from Ohio State University and, in 1939, received a doctorate in economics from OSU. From 1937 to 1941, he was assistant professor at the University of Washington.
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#2382

Yutaka Tsujinaka

#22451
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Yutaka Tsujinaka is a professor of political science and the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Tsukuba. He is now teaching at the College of Social Sciences and the doctoral program in International and Advanced Japanese Studies. He is also the president of Japan Political Science Association, a member of the International Association of Universities , the director of Internationalization Subcommittee of IAU , the executive assistant to the President at University of Tsukuba and the director of Institute for Comparative Research in Human and Social Sciences .
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#2383

Bart Nooteboom

#111957
Overall Influence
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#2384

Shirley Robin Letwin

#53969
Overall Influence
1924 - 1993 (69 years)
Shirley Robin Letwin was an American academic who lived in London. Biography Early life Shirley Robin Letwin was born in Chicago, Illinois. Her family were Jewish immigrants from Kiev. She graduated from the University of Chicago, where she was taught by Friedrich Hayek, and did graduate studies at the London School of Economics. She decided to move to England permanently in 1965.
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#2385

Hiroshi Mizuta

#41617
Overall Influence
1919 - 2023 (104 years)
Hiroshi Mizuta was a Japanese economist, historian of social thought and activist. An emeritus professor of Nagoya University and a member of the Japan Academy, he is best known as a leading scholar of Adam Smith.
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#2386

Dana Goldman

Dana Goldman
#75713
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Dana Paul Goldman is the dean of the USC Price School of Public Policy, Leonard D. Schaeffer Chair and director of the University of Southern California Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics, and Professor of Public Policy, Pharmacy, and Economics at the Price School and USC School of Pharmacy. He is also an adjunct professor of health services and radiology at UCLA, and a managing director and founding partner, along with Darius Lakdawalla and Tomas J. Philipson, at Precision Heath Economics, a health care consulting firm. Previously held positions include the director o...
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#2387

Lutz Kilian

#112117
Overall Influence
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#2388

Brian M. Lucey

#112119
Overall Influence
Brian M. Lucey is a professor at the Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin. He is editor-in-chief of the International Review of Financial Analysis and the International Review of Economics & Finance.
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#2389

Harry Brautigam

Harry Brautigam
#65215
Overall Influence
1948 - 2008 (60 years)
Harry Emil Brautigam was a Nicaraguan economist, banker and academic. Biography Harry Emil Brautigam, son of Harry and Lucille Brautigam, was born and raised in Bluefields, Nicaragua. He received a bachelor's degree in Business Administration in Guadalajara, Mexico. Harry was then awarded a British Council Scholarship and went on to receive a postgraduate diploma in Manchester, England. He finalized his master's degree in economics at the University of Leeds and later received a Ph.D. in agriculture economics from the University of Illinois in the United States.
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#2390

John Vernon Henderson

#112252
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
John Vernon Henderson is a Canadian-American economist and an academic. He is a Research Affiliate at the International Growth Centre, Director of the Urbanisation in Developing Countries Program, and a School Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics.
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#2391

Grahame Thompson

#49424
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Grahame Thompson is Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the Open University, and a visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School. Training and career Thompson was educated at the University of Birmingham where he obtained his MA in economics. He also has a PhD from the University of Leicester.
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#2392

Iftekhar Hasan

#112398
Overall Influence
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#2393

Ulrich Braukmann

#58628
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Ulrich Braukmann is a German professor at the Schumpeter School of Business and Economics of the Bergische Universität Wuppertal. At the Schumpeter School, he is the head of the Institut für Gründungs- und Innovationsforschung and at the same time the chair holder of the Faculty of Educational Theory of Economics, Gründungspädagogik und Gründungsdidaktik.
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#2394

José Antonio González Anaya

José Antonio González Anaya
#30872
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
José Antonio González Anaya is a Mexican economist who served as the minister of finance and public credit of Mexico until November 30, 2018. Previously he served as CEO of PEMEX and general director at the Mexican Social Security Institute . Also at the Ministry of Finance in Mexico he was: Undersecretary of Revenue; Chief of Staff of the Minister and head of the Unit of Coordination with States; head of the Unit of Pensions, Insurance and Securities; and chief of staff of the undersecretary. He was a lecturer and senior researcher at Stanford University; senior economist for Bolivia, Parag...
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#2395

Ajay Agrawal

#35571
Overall Influence
Ajay K. Agrawal works at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management as the Geoffrey Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation as well as the Professor of Strategic Management. Agrawal co-founded NEXT Canada, previously The Next 36 in 2010. He founded the Creative Destruction Lab in 2012 at the University of Toronto. Agrawal is co-founder of an annual conference, held at the University of Toronto, "Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence." Agrawal is a co-author of the books Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence , and Prediction Ma...
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#2396

Rhonda Sharp

#92335
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Rhonda Dawn Sharp , is an adjunct professor of economics at the University of South Australia and project team leader and chief researcher of the university's Hawke Research Institute and Research Centre for Gender Studies.
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#2397

Guy Quaden

#37531
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Guy, Baron Quaden is a Belgian economist. He was Governor of the National Bank of Belgium 2003–11, and as such a member of the Governing and General Councils of the European Central Bank. Since 2003 he has been the President of the King Baudouin Foundation.
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#2398

Amelia Fletcher

#96678
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Amelia Fletcher is a British singer, songwriter, guitarist and economist. Music career Fletcher has been the frontwoman of an evolving series of pop groups from the 1980s to the present. Her bands included Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, Marine Research, Tender Trap, and, since 2014, The Catenary Wires. In 2020, she began a new band, Swansea Sound, with The Pooh Sticks's Hue Williams.
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#2399

Toke Reichstein

#48161
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Toke Reichstein is a Danish economist and Professor at Copenhagen Business School. He is best known for his work on "Investigating the sources of process innovation among UK manufacturing firms." Life and work Reichstein has obtained his BSc and his MSc in economics at the Aalborg University in 1999, and his PhD in economics at the Aalborg University in 2003.
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#2400

Stephen Borgatti

#106183
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Stephen Peter Borgatti is an American business professor and author, currently the Professor and Chellgren Endowed Chair of Corporate Strategy at the Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky. His work is highly cited by peers and held in libraries worldwide.
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