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 female people in Mathematics,

#1301

Nadia Heninger

#35869
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Nadia Heninger is an American cryptographer, computer security expert, and computational number theorist at the University of California, San Diego. Contributions Heninger is known for her work on freezing powered-down security devices to slow their fading memories and allow their secrets to be recovered via a cold boot attack, for her discovery that weak keys for the RSA cryptosystem are in widespread use by internet routerss and other embedded devices, for her research on how failures of forward secrecy in bad implementations of the Diffie–Hellman key exchange may have allowed the National ...
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#1302

Lois McMaster Bujold

Lois McMaster Bujold
#2573
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Lois McMaster Bujold is an American speculative fiction writer. She is an acclaimed writer, having won the Hugo Award for best novel four times, matching Robert A. Heinlein's record . Her novella The Mountains of Mourning won both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. In the fantasy genre, The Curse of Chalion won the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature and was nominated for the 2002 World Fantasy Award for best novel, and both her fourth Hugo Award and second Nebula Award were for Paladin of Souls. In 2011 she was awarded the Skylark Award. She has won two Hugo Awards for Best Series, in 2017 for the Vorkosigan Saga and in 2018 for the World of the Five Gods.
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#1303

Dominique Hulin

#89013
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Dominique Hulin is a French mathematician specializing in differential geometry and known for her textbook on Riemannian geometry. Hulin studied mathematics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris from 1978 to 1983, working there with Marcel Berger and completing her doctorate in 1983 with the dissertation Pinching and Betti numbers. She was an assistant professor at Paris Diderot University from 1983 to 1985, when she became maître de conferences at Paris-Sud University, which later became Paris-Saclay University. In 2019 she was advanced to the exceptional class of maîtres de conferences.
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#1304

Elizabeth Simpson

#55434
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Elizabeth Simpson OBE FRS FMedSci is a British biologist. She is the Emeritus Professor of Transplantation Biology at Imperial College London. Simpson is particularly known for her elucidation of the nature of male-associated minor transplantation antigens, and their roles in the generation of immunological tolerance, graft versus host disease, and transplant rejection.
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#1305

Nicole Spillane

#89146
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (36 years)
Nicole Spillane is a French and Irish applied mathematician. She is a researcher with the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in France, where she works in the center for applied mathematics of the École Polytechnique. Her research concerns parallel algorithms for solving large systems of linear equations.
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#1306

Estelle Basor

#94098
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Estelle Lucille Basor is an American mathematician interested in operator theory and the theory of random matrices. She is professor emeritus of mathematics at the California Polytechnic State University , and deputy director of the American Institute of Mathematics.
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#1307

Kathryn E. Hare

#111140
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Kathryn Elizabeth Hare is a Canadian mathematician specializing in harmonic analysis and fractal geometry. She was the Chair of the Pure Mathematics Department at the University of Waterloo from 2014 to 2018. She retired from the University of Waterloo in 2021.
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#1308

María Manzano

María Manzano
#71582
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
María Gracia Manzano Arjona is a Spanish philosopher specializing in mathematical logic and model theory. Manzano earned her Ph.D. in 1977 from the University of Barcelona. Her dissertation, Sistemas generales de la lógica de segundo orden [General systems of second-order logic], was supervised by Jesús Mosterín. She is a professor of logic and the philosophy of science at the University of Salamanca.
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#1309

Iryna Sushko

#81620
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Iryna Sushko is a Ukrainian mathematician who works as a senior research fellow in the Institute of Mathematics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and as a visiting professor at the Kyiv School of Economics. Her research concerns nonlinear dynamical systems and their applications in economics and radio engineering.
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#1310

Marloes Maathuis

#41204
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Marloes Henriette Maathuis is a Dutch statistician known for her work on causal inference using graphical models, particularly in high-dimensional data from applications in biology and epidemiology. She is a professor of statistics at ETH Zurich in Switzerland.
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#1311

Nicole De Grande-De Kimpe

#107907
Overall Influence
1936 - 2008 (72 years)
Nicole Leonie Jean Marie De Grande-De Kimpe was a Belgian mathematician known as a pioneer of -adic functional analysis, and particularly for her work on locally convex topological vector spaces over fields with non-Archimedean valuations.
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#1312

Olga Beaver

#62279
Overall Influence
1942 - 2012 (70 years)
Olga Beaver , informally called Ollie, was a Czech-American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Williams College. She was the recipient of the second Louise Hay Award from the Association for Women in Mathematics. She is noted for having founded the Summer Science Program at Williams. She served as the director of the SSP for many years, and was the chair of the Mathematics Department at Williams for five and a half years.
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#1313

Selenne Bañuelos

#109563
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (39 years)
Selenne Bañuelos is an American mathematician and associate professor of mathematics at California State University Channel Islands. Her research is in the areas of differential and difference equations and dynamical systems, with a focus on their applications to mathematical biology.
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#1314

Kristina Vušković

#106960
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Kristina L. Vušković is a Serbian mathematician and theoretical computer scientist working in graph theory. She is Professor in Algorithms and Combinatorics in the School of Computing at the University of Leeds, and a professor of computer science at Union University .
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#1315

Berit Stensønes

#107968
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Berit Stensønes was a Norwegian mathematician specializing in complex analysis and complex dynamics and known for her work on several complex variables. She was a professor of mathematical sciences at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology , and a professor emerita at the University of Michigan.
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#1316

Hélène Morlon

#92805
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Hélène Morlon, born in 1978, is a French mathematician and ecologist specializing in biodiversity computational modeling, identifying the factors that influence diversification of species and their phenotypic evolution over millions of years. For her work, she was awarded an Irène Joliot-Curie Prize in 2017.
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#1317

Rebecca Willett

#82835
Overall Influence
Rebecca Willett is an American statistician and computer scientist whose research involves machine learning, signal processing, and data science. She is a professor of statistics and computer science at the University of Chicago.
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#1318

Thérèse Stukel

#111359
Overall Influence
Thérèse A. Stukel is a Canadian statistician who works as a senior core scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, as a professor in the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation of the University of Toronto, and as an adjunct professor of epidemiology and of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at Dartmouth College. Topics in her research include surgical mortality, the effects of regional variations in healthcare spending, and heart-related health care.
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#1319

Anne-Laure Dalibard

#113935
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Anne-Laure Dalibard is a French mathematician working on asymptotic behavior of fluid equations occurring in oceanographic models. She works as a staff scientist at the Jacques-Louis Lions Laboratory, a joint research unit between Sorbonne University and the French National Centre for Scientific Research
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#1320

Eleanor Rieffel

#91986
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Eleanor Gilbert Rieffel is a mathematician interested in quantum computing, computer vision, and cryptography. She is a senior research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center. Rieffel earned her Ph.D. in 1993 from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation, Groups Coarse Quasi-Isometric to the Hyperbolic Plane Cross the Real Line, concerned geometric group theory, and was supervised by Geoffrey Mess. After working for FX Palo Alto Laboratory, she joined NASA in 2012. In 2019 she won the NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal.
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#1321

Anna Maria Bigatti

#113189
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Anna Maria Bigatti is an Italian mathematician specializing in computational methods for commutative algebra. She is a ricercatore in the department of mathematics at the University of Genoa. She is one of the developers of CoCoA, a computer algebra system, and of its core library CoCoALib.
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#1322

Rosamund Sutherland

#105463
Overall Influence
1947 - 2019 (72 years)
Rosamund Sutherland was a British mathematics educator. She was a professor emeritus at the University of Bristol, and the former head of the school of education at Bristol. Education and career Sutherland was born in Birmingham; her mother taught geography and her father was a physicist. The family moved to south Wales when she was young, and after attending Haberdashers' Monmouth School for Girls she became a student at the University of Bristol, where she met and married her husband, mechanical and biomedical engineer Ian Sutherland.
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#1323

Freda Porter

#61092
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Freda Porter, a member of the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina, is an applied mathematician and environmental scientist known as one of the first Native American women to earn a PhD in the mathematical sciences. She is the president and CEO of Porter Scientific, Inc. and president of Lumbee Tribe Enterprises, LLC.
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#1324

Tan Lei

Tan Lei
#112724
Overall Influence
1963 - 2016 (53 years)
Tan Lei was a mathematician specialising in complex dynamics and functions of complex numbers. She is most well-known for her contributions to the study of the Mandelbrot set and Julia set. Career After gaining her PhD in Mathematics in 1986 at University of Paris-Sud, Orsay, Tan worked as an assistant researcher in Geneva. She then conducted postdoctoral projects at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics and University of Bremen until 1989, when she was made a lecturer at Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon in France. Tan held a research position at University of Warwick from 1995 to 1999, before becoming a senior lecturer at Cergy-Pontoise University.
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#1325

Merrilyn Goos

Merrilyn Goos
#84118
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Merrilyn Goos is an Australian mathematics educator. Since October 2017 she has been Professor of STEM Education and Director of EPI*STEM at the University of Limerick, Ireland. From 2012-2017 Goos was professor and head of the School of Education at the University of Queensland, and prior to this was Director of the Teaching and Educational Development Institute at The University of Queensland. She has taught in mathematics education and in 2003 she received the university's Award for Excellence in Teaching.
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#1326

Consuelo Martínez

#109383
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Consuelo Martínez López is a Spanish mathematician, and a frequent collaborator of Fields Medalist Efim Zelmanov. Her research topics include abstract algebra including group theory and superalgebras, algebraic coding theory, and cryptography. She is the professor of algebra at the University of Oviedo.
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#1327

Joyce E. Penner

#81739
Overall Influence
Joyce Penner is an atmospheric scientist known for her research on climate change, especially on the impact of aerosols and clouds. Education and career Penner has a B.A. in mathematics from the University of California Santa Barbara , and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Harvard University . Penner moved to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1977 and remained there until 1996, serving as a group leader from 1987 until her departure for University of Michigan in 1996. At the University of Michigan, Penner was named the Ralph J. Cicerone Distinguished University Professor ...
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#1328

Leslie Ann Goldberg

#48039
Overall Influence
Leslie Ann Goldberg is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Her research concerns the design and analysis of algorithms for random sampling and approximate combinatorial enumeration.
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#1329

Mia Hubert

#97657
Overall Influence
Mia Hubert is a Belgian mathematical statistician known for her research on topics in robust statistics including medoid-based clustering, regression depth, the medcouple for robustly measuring skewness, box plots for skewed data, and robust principal component analysis, and for her implementations of robust statistical algorithms in the R statistical software system, MATLAB, and S-PLUS. She is a professor in the statistics and data science section of the department of mathematics at KU Leuven.
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#1330

Linda Gilbert Saucier

#107625
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Linda Phillips Gilbert Saucier is an American mathematician and textbook author, a distinguished professor emerita of mathematics and computer science at the University of South Carolina Upstate. Education and career Linda Phillips was the daughter of Rudd George Phillips, an education specialist for the United States Air Force. She grew up in Gulfport, Mississippi, and earned B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Louisiana Tech University in 1970, 1972, and 1977 respectively. Her dissertation applied linear algebra to epidemiology; it was titled An application of the Jordan canonical form to the epidemic problem.
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#1331

Ulla Dinger

Ulla Dinger
#109417
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Ulla Margarete Dinger is a Swedish mathematician specializing in mathematical analysis. She was the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Gothenburg. Dinger completed her doctorate at the University of Gothenburg in 1989. Her dissertation, On the ball problem and the Laguerre maximal operators, was jointly supervised by Christer Borell and Peter Sjögren.
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#1332

Jenny Baglivo

#109858
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Jenny Antoinette Baglivo is an American mathematician, statistician, and book author. She is retired as a professor of mathematics at Boston College, where she retains an affiliation as research professor.
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#1333

Clara Claiborne Park

#33513
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Clara Claiborne Park was an American college English teacher and author who was best known for her writings about her experiences raising her autistic daughter, the artist Jessica Park. Her 1967 book, The Siege was credited as one of the first books to allay the blame that parents, especially mothers, were made to feel at having caused their child's autism through their cold detachment.
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#1334

Yulia Gel

#91447
Overall Influence
Yulia R. Gel is a professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas and an adjunct professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science of the University of Waterloo.
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#1335

Tatiana Roque

Tatiana Roque
#108820
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Tatiana Marins Roque is a Brazilian historian of mathematics and politician. Academic career Roque is a professor at the Institute of Mathematics of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro , with a Ph.D. in Production Engineering from the Alberto Luiz Coimbra Institute of Graduate Studies and Research in Engineering , also at UFRJ. Her research area covers the historiography of mathematics, the relationship between history and mathematics education, and the history of differential equations and celestial mechanics theories at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Her book História da m...
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#1336

Louise M. Ryan

#72022
Overall Influence
Louise Marie Ryan is an Australian biostatistician, a distinguished professor of statistics in the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, president-elect of the International Biometric Society, and an editor-in-chief of the journal Statistics in Medicine. She is known for her work applying statistics to cancer and risk assessment in environmental health.
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#1337

Anna-Karin Tornberg

#88249
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Anna-Karin Tornberg is a Swedish mathematician currently at Royal Institute of Technology who was awarded the Göran Gustafsson Prize and Leslie Fox Prize for Numerical Analysis and elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. Her research concerns computational mathematics.
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#1338

Rebecca Doerge

#75700
Overall Influence
Rebecca Whitbeck Doerge is an American researcher in statistical bioinformatics, known for her research on quantitative traits. She is currently the provost at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She was previously the Trent and Judith Anderson Distinguished Professor of Statistics at Purdue University and then dean of the Mellon College of Science at Carnegie Mellon University, with joint appointments in the departments of biology and statistics.
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#1339

Patti Frazer Lock

#100764
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Patricia Frazer Lock is an American mathematician, mathematics educator, statistician, statistics educator, and textbook author whose research interests include social networks and quantum logic. She is the Cummings Professor of Mathematics at St. Lawrence University.
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#1340

Margot Gerritsen

#94308
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Margot Geertrui Gerritsen is a professor of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University and a senior associate dean for educational initiatives in the Stanford University School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. Her research interests include energy production, ocean dynamics, and sailboat design.
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#1341

Amel Ben Abda

#112889
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Amel Ben Abda is a professor of mathematics at the National Engineering School of Tunis. She was the first person in Tunisia to earn a PhD in applied mathematics. She is the Tunisian representative of the steering committee of the International Laboratory for Computer Sciences and Applied Mathematics on the advisory board of the Tunisian Woman Mathematician Association.
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#1342

Alison Marr

#103059
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Alison M. Marr is an American mathematician and mathematics educator. Her research concerns graph theory and graph labeling, and she is also an advocate of inquiry-based learning in mathematics. She works as a professor of mathematics and computer science at Southwestern University in Texas.
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#1343

Mireille Bousquet-Mélou

#44283
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Mireille Bousquet-Mélou is a French mathematician who specializes in enumerative combinatorics and who works as a senior researcher for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique at the computer science department of the University of Bordeaux.
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#1344

Lis Brack-Bernsen

#108398
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Lis Brack-Bernsen is a Danish and Swiss mathematician, historian of science, and historian of mathematics, known for her work on Babylonian astronomy. She is an extraordinary professor of the history of science at the University of Regensburg.
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#1345

Antonella Ferrara

#97377
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Antonella Ferrara is an Italian control theorist and engineer, known for her work on sliding mode control. Education and career Ferrara is originally from Genoa, and studied electrical engineering at the University of Genoa, earning a laurea in 1987 and completing a Ph.D. in 1992. She became an assistant professor at the University of Genoa in 1992, and moved to the University of Pavia in 1998 as an associate professor. She was named professor of automatic control in 2005. At Pavia, she was originally affiliated with the department of computer engineering and systems science, and in 2011 beca...
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#1346

Hilary Finucane

#69244
Overall Influence
Hilary Kiyo Finucane is an American computational biologist who is Co-Director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute. Her group combines genetic data with molecular data to understand the origins and mechanisms of disease.
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#1347

Yaiza Canzani

Yaiza Canzani
#117281
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
Yaiza Canzani García is a Spanish and Uruguayan mathematician known for her work in mathematical analysis, and particularly in spectral geometry and microlocal analysis. She is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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#1348

Marisa Fernández

#98530
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
María Luisa Fernández Rodríguez is a Spanish mathematician specializing in differential geometry, symplectic geometry, and -structures. She is the professor of geometry and topology in the department of mathematics at the University of the Basque Country.
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#1349

Monica Nevins

#114235
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Monica A. Nevins is a Canadian mathematician, and a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Ottawa. Her research interests include abstract algebra, representation theory, algebraic groups, and mathematical cryptography.
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#1350

Georgia Salanti

#125409
Overall Influence
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