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 Engineering,
#9801
William Callyhan Robinson
1834 - 1911 (77 years)
William Callyhan Robinson was an American jurist and academic. Life After studies at Norwich Academy and Williston Seminary, he matriculated at Wesleyan University in 1850, leaving the college at the close of his sophomore year in 1852. Subsequently, Robinson entered Dartmouth College, graduating from the latter institution in 1854 . He then entered the Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and graduated in 1857. Ordained to the Episcopalian ministry, he served first at Pittston, Pennsylvania , and then at Scranton, Pennsylvania . After a religious conversion, he was rece...
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Palle Suenson
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Palle Suenson was a Danish modernist architect. He was the son of Professor Edouard Suenson, engineer, and of Henriette Benedicte Hartmann. Biography After studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, he first worked with Kay Fisker and Søren Christian Larsen and Kaj Gottlob before starting an autonomous activity as architect in 1930. He rapidly established himself as a leading modernist architect in Denmark, a pioneer in this style, and is remembered today for numerous iconic buildings, such as the B&W building on Christianshavn. The buildings are reputed for their simpl...
Go to Profile#9803
Daniel Massey
1798 - 1856 (58 years)
Daniel Massey was an American-born blacksmith and businessman in what is now Newcastle, Ontario, who began production of agricultural implements in 1847. Life and career Massey was born in Windsor, Vermont, to Daniel Massey Sr. and Rebecca Kelley. The Massey family originated in Cheshire, England, and arrived in America around 1630, first in Essex, Massachusetts, and later in New Hampshire and Watertown, New York.
Go to Profile#9804
Theodore Roberts
1861 - 1928 (67 years)
Theodore Roberts was an American film and stage actor. Early life Roberts was born in San Francisco, California. He was a cousin of the stage actress Florence Roberts. His choice of a career disappointed his mother and his father .
Go to Profile#9805
Don S.S. Goodloe
1878 - 1959 (81 years)
Rev. Don Speed Smith Goodloe , born in the Lowell community, near Paint Lick, Kentucky, was a black teacher who became a pioneer for racial integration in the Unitarian church. He was the first principal of the Maryland Normal and Industrial School at Bowie for the Training of Colored Youth, also known as Maryland State Normal School No. 3—which later became Bowie State University.
Go to Profile#9806
William Galloway
1840 - 1927 (87 years)
Sir William Galloway was a Scottish mining engineer, professor and industrialist. He spent much of his life as an Inspector of Mines, before being offered the post of Professor of Mining at the University College of Wales. His life was spent improving the lot of miners and working to determine the causes of explosions and accidents in mines and finding ways of preventing them or alleviating their impact. His efforts were recognised in 1924, when, at the age of 83, he was knighted.
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John Moffat
1841 - 1918 (77 years)
John Moffat was a Scottish-born entrepreneur who developed a mining and industrial empire around Loudoun Mill and Irvinebank in North Queensland which drove the development of north-eastern Australia. He was a devout Swedenborgian who was famous for both vision and enterprise. He was born in Newmilns , Ayrshire and spent most of his youth immersed in books. Extremely shy in temperament, he was known to hide whenever visitors approached. It was a habit he was to retain throughout his life.
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Josiah Wedgwood II
1769 - 1843 (74 years)
Josiah Wedgwood II , the son of the English potter Josiah Wedgwood, continued his father's firm and was a Member of Parliament for Stoke-upon-Trent from 1832 to 1835. He was an abolitionist, and detested slavery.
Go to Profile#9809
Samuel Train Dutton
1849 - 1919 (70 years)
Samuel Train Dutton was the superintendent of schools at Teachers College, Columbia University. He was a founder of the New York Peace Society and the treasurer of the American College for Girls at Constantinople.
Go to Profile#9810
Igor Ilyinsky
1901 - 1987 (86 years)
Igor Vladimirovich Ilyinsky was a Soviet and Russian stage and film actor, director and comedian. Hero of Socialist Labour and People's Artist of the USSR . Early years Igor Ilyinsky was born on 24 July 1901 in Moscow. At age 16 he entered the Theatre Studio of Theodore Komisarjevsky and in half a year already debuted on the professional stage in Komissarzhevskaya Theatre. His first theatre role was that of the "Old Man" in Aristophanes' play Lysistrata. In 1920, he joined the Vsevolod Meyerhold Theatre. The young actor's style was in correspondence with the principles of Meyerhold, and so Ilyinsky soon became the central actor of that theatre.
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Andrew Bryan
1893 - 1988 (95 years)
Sir Andrew Meikle Bryan was a Scottish mining engineer and academic. Life Andrew Bryan was born on 1 March 1893, the son of John Bryan, of Hamilton, Lanarkshire, and was educated at Greenfields School and at the former Hamilton Academy and is listed as a notable former pupil of the school in the Scottish Secondary Teachers' Association Magazine, February 1950, feature on Hamilton Academy in the article series 'Famous Scottish Schools'.
Go to Profile#9812
George Washington
1871 - 1946 (75 years)
George Constant Louis Washington was a Belgian inventor and businessman. He is best remembered for his improvement of an early instant coffee process and for the company he founded to mass-produce it, the G. Washington Coffee Company.
Go to Profile#9813
H. B. Warner
1875 - 1958 (83 years)
Henry Byron Warner was an English film and theatre actor. He was popular during the silent era and played Jesus Christ in The King of Kings. In later years, he successfully moved into supporting roles and appeared in numerous films directed by Frank Capra. Warner's most recognizable role to modern audiences is Mr. Gower in It's a Wonderful Life, directed by Capra. He appeared in the original 1937 version of Lost Horizon as Chang, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
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Haig P. Manoogian
1916 - 1980 (64 years)
Haig Manoogian was an Armenian-American professor of film at New York University who served as the main influence for many filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, who was a student of his at New York University. Martin Scorsese called Manoogian teachings “The most precious gift I have ever received.”
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Luchino Visconti
1287 - 1349 (62 years)
Luchino Visconti was lord of Milan from 1339 to 1349. He was also a condottiero, and lord of Pavia. Biography Ruler of Pavia from 1315, five years later he was podestà of Vigevano, where he erected the castle that is still visible. In 1323, along with all his family, he was excommunicated with the charge of heresy. The charges of heresy and excommunication were later withdrawn and he became a Papal Vicar in 1341.
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Peter Faber
1810 - 1877 (67 years)
Peter Christian Frederik Faber was a Danish telegraphy pioneer and song writer. In Denmark, he is remembered first and foremost for his songwriting. Faber was also an amateur photographer and is credited with the oldest photograph on record in Denmark.
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Édouard Collignon
1831 - 1913 (82 years)
Édouard Charles Romain Collignon was a French engineer and scientist, known for the Collignon projection and for his role in building railways in Russia. Career After graduating from the l'École polytechnique in 1849, he became an ingénieur des ponts et chaussées. He became inspecteur des Ponts et chaussées in 1878.
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Mahendranath Gupta
1854 - 1932 (78 years)
Mahendranath Gupta , , was a disciple of Ramakrishna and a great mystic himself. He was the author of Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita , a Bengali classic; in English, it is known as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. He was also an early teacher to Paramahansa Yogananda, a famous 20th-century yogi, guru and philosopher. In his autobiography, Yogananda noted that Gupta ran a small boys' high school in Kolkata, and he recounted their visits, as they often traveled to the Dakshineshwar Kali Temple together. Having a devotional nature, Gupta worshipped the Divine Mother in the form of Kali, and often reflected the wisdom of his guru Ramakrishna in his daily life and mannerisms.
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Emil Wohlwill
1835 - 1912 (77 years)
Wolf Emil Wohlwill was a German-Jewish engineer of electrochemistry. He invented the Wohlwill process in 1874. Literary works Galilei und sein Kampf für die copernikanische Lehre, the 1st volume, 1909the 2nd volume, 1926
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Charles Combes
1801 - 1872 (71 years)
Charles Pierre Mathieu Combes was a French engineer. He was Inspector-General of Mines and the Director of the School of Mines in Paris. His name is on the Eiffel Tower. Biography Early life Charles-Pierre-Mathieu Combes was born on 26 December 1801 in Cahors. His father was a senior policeman named Pierre Combes Mathieu. He joined the Ecole Polytechnique before the usual starting age of seventeen on 1 September 1817 and completed his studies in 1820 when he was admitted to the School of Mines. Combes completed the three-year course in just two years. He graduated on 1 July 1822.
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Émile Jouguet
1871 - 1943 (72 years)
Jacques Charles Émile Jouguet was a French engineer and scientist, whose name is attached to the Chapman–Jouguet condition. He was the son of Félix Jouguet , mining engineer and mayor of Bessèges.
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Frank Benford
1883 - 1948 (65 years)
Frank Albert Benford Jr. was an American electrical engineer and physicist best known for rediscovering and generalizing Benford's Law, an earlier statistical statement by Simon Newcomb, about the occurrence of digits in lists of data.
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Alexander Tselikov
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Alexander Ivanovich Tselikov was a Soviet metallurgist, industrial machines designer, and Hero of Socialist Labor . He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1953 and full member in 1964.
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Ben Shahn
1898 - 1969 (71 years)
Ben Shahn was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content. Biography Shahn was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents Joshua Hessel and Gittel Shan. His father was exiled to Siberia for possible revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, his mother, and two younger siblings moved to Vilkomir . In 1906, the family immigrated to the United States where they rejoined Hessel, a carpenter, who had fled Siberia and emigrated to the US by way of South Africa.
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Joseph Henry Keenan
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Joseph Henry Keenan was an American thermodynamicist and mechanical engineer noted for his work in the calculation of steam tables, research in jet-rocket propulsion, and his work in furthering the development in the understanding of the laws of thermodynamics in the mid 20th century.
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Charles Stark Draper
1901 - 1987 (86 years)
Charles Stark "Doc" Draper was an American scientist and engineer, known as the "father of inertial navigation". He was the founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Instrumentation Laboratory, later renamed the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, which made the Apollo Moon landingss possible through the Apollo Guidance Computer it designed for NASA.
Go to Profile#9827
Mária Telkes
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Mária Telkes was a Hungarian-American biophysicist and inventor who worked on solar energy technologies. She moved to the United States in 1925 to work as a biophysicist. She became an American citizen in 1937 and started work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create practical uses of solar energy in 1939.
Go to Profile#9828
Edward Kimbark
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Edward Wilson Kimbark was a noted power engineer and professor of Electrical Engineering at Northwestern University. Kimbark was born in Chicago, Illinois to Edward Hall and Maude Kimbark. In 1920 Kimbark enrolled at Northwestern University where he earned his B.S. in 1924 and his E.E. in 1925. After graduation, he worked for two years as a substation operator and testing lab assistant for the Public Service Company of Northern Illinois at Evanston, and for two years as an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Antoine Marc Gaudin
1900 - 1974 (74 years)
Antoine Marc Gaudin was a metallurgist who laid the foundation for understanding the scientific principles of the froth flotation process in the minerals industry. He was also a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and during World War II developed there the ore-processing techniques needed to extract uranium from its low grade ores for the Manhattan Project. He was a founding member of the National Academy of Engineering.
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Donald Burmister
1883 - 1981 (98 years)
Donald M. Burmister was a professor of civil engineering and a pioneer in the field of soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering. Career Donald Burmister served as faculty member at Columbia University for 34 years, beginning in 1929. He was a consultant on the foundation design for many notable construction projects including the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Verazanno-Narrows Bridge, Tappan Zee Bridge, first New York World's Fair at Flushing Meadows, and reconstruction of the White House in 1950.
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Philip Drinker
1894 - 1972 (78 years)
Philip Drinker was an American industrial hygienist. With Louis Agassiz Shaw, he invented the first widely used iron lung in 1928. Family and early life Drinker's father was railroad man and Lehigh University president Henry Sturgis Drinker; his siblings included lawyer and musicologist Henry Sandwith Drinker, Jr., pathologist Cecil Kent Drinker, businessman James Drinker, and biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen. After graduating from St. George's and Princeton in 1915, Philip Drinker trained as a chemical engineer at Lehigh for two years.
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Norbert Wiener
1894 - 1964 (70 years)
Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician, computer scientist and philosopher. He became a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . A child prodigy, Wiener later became an early researcher in stochastic and mathematical noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems.
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Stephen Timoshenko
1878 - 1972 (94 years)
Stepan Prokopovich Timoshenko , later known as Stephen Timoshenko, was an ethnic Ukrainian, citizen of the Russian Empire and later, an American engineer and academician. He is considered to be the father of modern engineering mechanics. An inventor and one of the pioneering mechanical engineers at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University. A founding member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Timoshenko wrote seminal works in the areas of engineering mechanics, elasticity and strength of materials, many of which are still widely used today. Having started his scientific career in the Russi...
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Forest Baskett
Forest Baskett is an American venture capitalist, computer scientist and former professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. He is a venture capitalist at New Enterprise Associates. Baskett designed the operating system for the original Cray-1 supercomputer, was an original pioneer of Very Large Scale Integration, and co-introduced the eponymous BCMP networks.
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Theodore von Kármán
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Theodore von Kármán , was a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer, and physicist who worked in aeronautics and astronautics. He was responsible for crucial advances in aerodynamics characterizing supersonic and hypersonic airflow. The human-defined threshold of outer space is named the "Kármán line" in recognition of his work. Kármán is regarded as an outstanding aerodynamic theoretician of the 20th century.
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John D. Eshelby
1916 - 1981 (65 years)
John Douglas Eshelby FRS was a scientist in micromechanics. He made significant contributions to the fields of defect mechanics and micromechanics of inhomogeneous solids for fifty years, including important aspects of the controlling mechanisms of plastic deformation and fracture.
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Robert W. Newcomb
Robert W. Newcomb is a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. He obtained a BSEE degree from Purdue University in 1955, an MS from Stanford University in 1957, and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1960. He was a professor in the electrical engineering department at Stanford University through 1968, and from 1969 onward has been a professor in the electrical engineering department at the University of Maryland at College Park. He has graduated over 70 Ph.D. students from both Stanford and the University of Maryland, including Brian D.
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Horst Rittel
1930 - 1990 (60 years)
Horst Wilhelm Johannes Rittel was a design theorist and university professor. He is best known for popularizing the concept of wicked problem, but his influence on design theory and practice was much wider.
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Lloyd A. Jeffress
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Lloyd Alexander Jeffress was an acoustical scientist, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and a developer of mine-hunting models for the US Navy during World War II and after, Jeffress was known to psychologists for his pioneering research on auditory masking in psychoacoustics, his stimulus-oriented approach to signal-detection theory in psychophysics, and his "ingenious" electronic and mathematical models of the auditory process.
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Theodore Paul Wright
1895 - 1970 (75 years)
Theodore Paul Wright , also known as T. P. Wright, was a U.S. aeronautical engineer and educator. Biography He was born in Galesburg, Illinois on May 25, 1895. His father was the economist Philip Green Wright and his brothers were the geneticist Sewall Wright and the political scientist Quincy Wright. He graduated from Lombard College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served in World War I.
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Geoffrey Raynor
1913 - 1983 (70 years)
Geoffrey Vincent Raynor FRS was an English metallurgist and university academic. Life Raynor was educated at Nottingham High School before studying Chemistry at Keble College, Oxford, obtaining a first-class degree in 1936. He then worked as a research assistant at the University of Oxford, working with William Hume-Rothery, and carried out metallurgical research for the Ministry of Supply and Ministry of Aircraft Production during the Second World War. In 1945, he moved to the University of Birmingham as a research fellow, with the course that he taught in structural and theoretical metallurgy becoming "the forerunner for the development of metallurgical teaching all over the world".
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Lan Jen Chu
1913 - 1973 (60 years)
Lan Jen Chu was a noted electrical engineer and a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Chu is noted for his work on the fundamental limitations for small antennas, also known as Chu's limit.
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Harold Barlow
1899 - 1989 (90 years)
Harold Everard Monteagle Barlow FRS was a British engineer. He was born in Islington, London, the son of Leonard Barlow, an electrical engineer. He entered University College, London where, apart from the World War II years , he spent most of his working life. He was taught by Ambrose Fleming, who held the Pender Chair there. Barlow went on to succeed Fleming in that chair, and hence also in the post of head of department. Among his students, Barlow supervised Charles Kao, the 2009 Nobel Laureate for Physics, for a doctoral degree.
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Arnold Tustin
1899 - 1994 (95 years)
Arnold Tustin, , was a British engineer, and Professor of Engineering at the University of Birmingham and at Imperial College London, who made important contributions to the development of control engineering and its application to electrical machines.
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Harry Platt
1886 - 1986 (100 years)
Sir Harry Platt, 1st Baronet, FRCS, KStJ was an English orthopaedic surgeon, president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England . He was a founder of the British Orthopaedic Association, of which he became president in 1934–1935.
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Alan Mara Bateman
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Alan Mara Bateman was an economic geologist who worked on mining in North America and a professor at Yale University who also served as a long-standing editor of the journal Economic Geology. He also wrote several textbooks on mining including the Formation of Mineral Deposits.
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Herbert Reich
1900 - 2000 (100 years)
Herbert Reich was a pioneering figure in electrical engineering. Reich made substantial contributions towards the design of early oscilloscopes as a graduate student at Cornell University. Reich later taught as a Professor of Electrical Engineering at University of Illinois and Yale University . From 1944 to 1946 he worked at the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University with Frederick Terman. After his retirement from Yale, he periodically taught courses at Deep Springs College.
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Mayo D. Hersey
1886 - 1978 (92 years)
Mayo Dyer Hersey was an American engineer, physicist at the National Bureau of Standards and other government agencies, and Professor of Engineering at Brown University. He received the 1957 ASME Medal, and the first Mayo D. Hersey award in 1965.
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Edwin Howard Armstrong
1890 - 1954 (64 years)
Edwin Howard Armstrong was an American electrical engineer and inventor, who developed FM radio and the superheterodyne receiver system. He held 42 patents and received numerous awards, including the first Medal of Honor awarded by the Institute of Radio Engineers , the French Legion of Honor, the 1941 Franklin Medal and the 1942 Edison Medal. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and included in the International Telecommunication Union's roster of great inventors. Armstrong attended Columbia University, and served as a professor there for most of his life.
Go to Profile#9850
Walter Boas
1904 - 1982 (78 years)
Walter Moritz Boas FAA was a German-Australian metallurgist. Boas was born in Berlin, Germany and was educated at the Berlin Institute of Technology . After several positions at German and Swiss institutions, Boas became a lecturer in metallurgy at University of Melbourne in 1938; then from 1940 to 1947, senior lecturer. From 1947 to 1949, Boas was principal research officer, CSIR Division of Tribophysics; and from 1949 to 1969 chief of the division.
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