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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#13051
Dag Østerberg
#67941
Overall Influence
1938 - 2017 (79 years)
Dag Østerberg was a Norwegian sociologist, philosopher and musicologist. He was born in Trondheim to police officer Erling Østerberg and Jørgine Sofie Kleven. He was a central contributor to the so-called positivism debate in the 1960s and 1970s. From 1981 to 1991 he was appointed professor in sociology at the University of Oslo. Among his works are Metasosiologisk Essay from 1963, Makt og materiell from 1971, and a biography of Jean-Paul Sartre from 1993. His 1966 work Forståelsesformer. Et filosofisk bidrag was selected for the Norwegian Sociology Canon in 2009–2011.
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Wendy Baltzer
#128241
Overall Influence
Wendy Irene Baltzer is an American veterinarian, small animal surgeon and academic. Academic career Baltzer was educated at the University of California, Davis where she completed a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine in 1994. Following a PhD at Texas A&M University in 2003, she was employed as associate professor at Oregon State University where she specialised in small animal surgery from 2005 to 2016. She then moved to New Zealand to take up a position at Massey University where she was appointed full professor in November 2019, with effect from 1 January 2020. She practised at Massey's Working D...
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Robert Molimard
#126518
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Robert Molimard was a French doctor and professor at Paris-Sud University. He was a pioneer in tobacco research in France. Publications Tabac : comprendre la dépendance pour agirLa fume : Smoking Petit manuel de Défume : se reconstruire sans tabac, Éditions De Borée L’Homme, avatar de Dieu
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Carl Feit
#120006
Overall Influence
Carl Feit is a noted cancer research scientist and occupant of the Dr. Joseph and Rachel Ades Chair in Health Sciences at Yeshiva University. He has served as Chairman of the Science Division of Yeshiva College since 1985. Prior to that he was a research scientist at The Laboratory of Immunodiagnosis at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. Feit also serves on the editorial board of Cancer Investigation.
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Max Bygraves
#141712
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
Walter William Bygraves , best known by the stage name Max Bygraves , was an English comedian, singer, actor and variety performer. He appeared on his own television shows, sometimes performing comedy sketches between songs. He made twenty Royal Variety Performance appearances and presented numerous programmes, including Family Fortunes between 1983 and 1985. His catchphrase "I wanna tell you a story" became an integral part of his act, although it had originated with comedian Mike Yarwood impersonating Bygraves.
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Alex Jadad
#172897
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Alejandro R. Jadad Bechara is a Canadian-Colombian physician whose work focuses on the creation of a pandemic of health through digital technologies and collaboration across traditional boundaries. He is also known as the researcher responsible for the development of the Jadad Scale, the first validated tool to assess the methodological quality of clinical trials.
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Joyce Ackroyd
#79445
Overall Influence
1918 - 1991 (73 years)
Joyce Irene Ackroyd, was an Australian academic, translator, author and editor. She was a scholar of Japanese language and literature. Early life Ackroyd apparently acquired an interest Japan during her childhood, but she was not permitted to study Japanese at the University of Sydney on a teacher’s scholarship in 1936 because there was insufficient demand for Japanese in secondary schools. She graduated with honours in English and history and a major in mathematics . Ackroyd studied Japanese part-time at the University of Sydney while teaching mathematics at a Sydney boys’ school. In 1944 she began teaching Japanese at the Royal Australian Air Force language school in Sydney.
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Aasim Sajjad Akhtar
#47269
Overall Influence
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar is a teacher, left wing politician and columnist based in Pakistan. Akhtar is associate professor of political economy at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan. He served as the president of the Awami Workers Party's Punjab executive committee from March 16, 2014 to January 17, 2020. He is deputy general secretary of Awami Workers Party.
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Per Hjalmar Nakstad
#138505
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Per Hjalmar Nakstad is a Norwegian professor of medicine. He was born in Kongsvinger and grew up in Kongsvinger, Målselv and Stjørdal. He finished his secondary education at Trondheim Cathedral School in 1965, and graduated in medicine in Freiburg in 1971. From 1979 he got the specialist title in radiology, and in 1985 he took the dr.med. degree at the University of Oslo.
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Christian Graugaard
#126068
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Christian Lykke Graugaard is a Danish medical doctor, author, poet, and professor of sexology at the Aalborg University. He has published widely about sexology, both in popular and scientific contexts, and has published a number of collections of his own poetry as well as translations of works by Nordic poets. He has also been a regular contributor to the debate section in the newspaper Politiken. Furthermore, in his role as director of the organization Sex & Samfund , he is a frequent commentator on issues related to human sexuality in the Danish public debate. He is a critic of the practice...
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Sebastian Wille
#93220
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Sebastian Wille is a German medical specialist, university professor and assistant medical director at the Clinic and Polyclinic of Urology at the University Hospital Cologne. Wille covers the whole diagnostic and therapeutic spectrum of urological disorders. His scientific focus is the reconstructive urology and the urological dysfunction of the lower urinary tract, including male and female incontinence. Wille was significantly involved in the invention of the Wille capsule.
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Kurt Mueller-Vollmer
#189524
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Kurt Mueller-Vollmer , born in Hamburg, Germany, was an American philosopher and professor of German Studies and Humanities at Stanford University. Mueller-Vollmer studied in Germany, France, Spain and the United States. He held a master's degree in American Studies from Brown University, and a doctorate in German Studies and Humanities from Stanford University, where he taught for over 40 years. His major publications concentrate in the areas of Literary Criticism, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Romantic and Comparative Literature, language theory, cultural transfer and translation studies. Mue...
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Isabelle Rapin
#28025
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Isabelle Juliette Martha Rapin, M.D. , was a Professor of both Neurology and Pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. She was a leading authority on autism for decades, and a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology.
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Josephine Myers-Wapp
#121230
Overall Influence
1912 - 2014 (102 years)
Josephine Myers-Wapp was a Comanche weaver and educator. After completing her education at the Haskell Institute, she attended Santa Fe Indian School, studying weaving, dancing, and cultural arts. After her training, she taught arts and crafts at Chilocco Indian School before joining the faculty of the newly opened Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. She taught weaving, design, and dance at the institute, and in 1968 was one of the coordinators for a dance exhibit at the Mexican Summer Olympic Games. In 1973, she retired from teaching to focus on her own work, exhibiting throughout the Americas and in Europe and the Middle East.
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Joy H. Calico
#169509
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Joy Haslam Calico is an American musicologist, and Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Musicology, at Vanderbilt University. Life She graduated from Baylor University, University of Illinois, and Duke University. She was a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
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Albert Ziegler
#70662
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Albert Ziegler is a German psychologist and the Chair Professor of Educational Psychology and Research on Excellence at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen Nürnberg. Ziegler is the Secretary-General of the International Research Association for Talent Development and Excellence ; the Vice President of the European Council for High Ability .; and Chairman of the European Talent Support Network . As of August 2017, he serves as Director of the Sound Research Branch at the World Giftedness Center. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of ECHA’s scholarly journal, High Ability Studies.
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Michael Hicks
#116856
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Michael Dustin Hicks is an American professor of music, poet and artist, who has studied a broad array of topics, although his work on music and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been groundbreaking in that field.
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Rebecca Herissone
#176490
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Rebecca Louise Herissone is Professor of Musicology at the University of Manchester. Biography Herissone has a Master of Arts degree from the University of Cambridge, a Master of Music degree from the University of London and a PhD from Cambridge. She held a research fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge from 1995 until 1999 and a lectureship at Lancaster University before joining the University of Manchester as a Senior Lecturer in 2006. She was appointed as a fellow of the British Academy in 2019.
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Colin L. Masters
#84381
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Colin Louis Masters is an Australian neuropathologist who researches Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders. He is laureate professor of pathology at the University of Melbourne.
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Osmund Reynolds
#180456
Overall Influence
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
Edward Osmund Royle Reynolds, CBE, FRCP, FRCOG, FRCPCH, FMedSci, FRS , was a British paediatrician and Neonatologist who was most notable for the introduction of new techniques intended to improve the survival of newborns, especially those with respiratory failure, and for a series of papers regarding the value of techniques such as ultrasound imaging, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and near infrared spectroscopy in determining the development and response to injury of the infant brain after birth.
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Irene Neverla
#126694
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Irene Neverla is an Austrian professor of communication. Neverla chairs the Austrian state broadcaster's advisory board. Life Neverla was born in Graz in 1952. She first studied journalism at the Vienna International Press Centre, before she studied Irene Neverla studied communication science, sociology and psychology at the Universities of Vienna and Salzburg.
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Jim Newhook
#186774
Overall Influence
1915 - 1997 (82 years)
James Carl Newhook was a New Zealand veterinary scientist, university lecturer and writer.
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Cheryl Metoyer-Duran
#118201
Overall Influence
Cheryl Metoyer is an Eastern Band Cherokee researcher and professor of library and information science. Her research is focused on Indigenous systems of knowledge, especially in relation to American Indian and Alaskan tribal nations, as well as ethics and leadership in cultural communities. She holds the position of Associate Professor Emeritus and the Director of the Indigenous Information Research Group at the iSchool at the University of Washington.
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Ralina Joseph
#190134
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Ralina Joseph is an American academic. She is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, examining representations of race, gender, and sexuality in popular media.
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Harry Medovy
#108944
Overall Influence
1904 - 1995 (91 years)
Harry Medovy, OC was a Canadian pediatrician and academic. Born in the Russian Empire, his parents moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba when Medovy was one to escape persecution against Jews. He studied at the University of Manitoba receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1923 and a Doctor of Medicine in 1928. During World War II, he served with the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps. In 1932, he joined the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Manitoba and was department head from 1954 to 1970. In 1954, he was appointed head of the Department of Pediatrics and Pediatrician-in-Chief of the Children's...
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Alain Vadeboncoeur
#75176
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Alain Vadeboncoeur is a Canadian emergency physician and science communicator living in Montreal. In addition to have built and lead the Montreal Heart Institute's emergency department from 1999 to 2021, he is active in the research community and is a frequent speaker in French-language media, dispelling myths about health issues, and very active in social media. He is also an author and a playwright. His social commitment to the public health system has made him more visible in Quebec news.
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Marguerite Littleton Kearney
#27902
Overall Influence
Marguerite T. Littleton Kearney is an American nurse scientist. She is the director of the National Institute of Nursing Research's Division of Extramural Science Programs. Littleton Kearney was the associate dean for research at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences Graduate School of Nursing.
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Fares Sayegh
#189059
Overall Influence
Fares E. Sayegh is a Greek orthopaedic surgeon at the G. Papanikolaou General Hospital and a professor at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, both in Thessaloniki, Greece. He has an h-index of 18 His most-cited articles are:
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Petra Lewis
#149112
Overall Influence
Petra Lewis is a Professor of Radiology and Obstetrics at Dartmouth College. She is a leader in radiology education. Early life and education Lewis studied medicine at Guy's Hospital, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery in 1987. After graduating, she was awarded a fellowship in nuclear medicine at Johns Hopkins University.
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Valerie Montgomery Rice
#45726
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Valerie Montgomery Rice is an American obstetrician, gynecologist, and college administrator. She is the president and dean of Morehouse School of Medicine. Early life and education Montgomery Rice is from Georgia. She completed a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Georgia Institute of Technology. In 1987, she earned a medical degree from Harvard Medical School.
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Kerry Murphy
#183529
Overall Influence
Kerry Murphy is an Australian musicologist noted for her scholarship of colonial music history and French music. Murphy is Professor of Music and Head of Musicology at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
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Malegapuru William Makgoba
#132975
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Malegapuru William Makgoba is a leading South African immunologist, physician, public health advocate, academic and former vice-chancellor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. In 2013 he was recognised as "a pioneer in higher education transformation", by being awarded the Order of Mapungubwe in Silver, but has also generated extensive controversy during that process. He is also responsible for the unjust and unfair dismissal of several high profile academics from UDW and was accused of sexual harassment from his direct staff.
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Mike Ashley
#144482
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Michael James Wallace Ashley is a British retail entrepreneur and chief executive of Frasers Group Plc . He owned the Newcastle United football club between 2007 and 2021. According to The Sunday Times Rich List in 2021, Ashley is the 61st richest person in the UK with an estimated net worth of £2.718 billion. In August 2021, Ashley announced that he intended to step down as CEO of Frasers Group Plc in May 2022, but would remain a director of the main Board.
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Jerzy Limon
#64659
Overall Influence
1950 - 2021 (71 years)
Jerzy Limon was a Polish literary scholar, translator and writer specialising in Shakespearean and Elizabethan theatre. He initiated the creation of the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre and served as its first director.
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Tetyana Pertseva
#77301
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Tetyana Oleksiivna Pertseva is a Ukrainian pulmonologist, physician-scientist, and academic administrator. She is the rector of the Dnipro State Medical University and editor-in-chief of Medičnì Perspektivi. Pertseva is an elected academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
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Nalla Tan
#124433
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Nallammah "Nalla" Ruth Tan was a Singaporean physician, women's rights advocate and writer. She is known for her early advocacy of sex education and public health education in Singapore. She was also known for her poetry and short story writing.
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John Wilson
#177337
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
John Michael Wilson is an American documentary filmmaker. He is the creator and director of How To with John Wilson, a comedy-docuseries on HBO. Early life and education Wilson was born in Astoria, Queens, and grew up on Long Island. He became interested in film as a teenager when his father gave him a movie camera. Wilson cites Les Blank, George Kuchar and Bruce Brown as influences.
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Firdous Azim
#121442
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Firdous Azim is a professor of English at BRAC University, a literary critic, and a women's rights activist. She is the chairperson of the Department of English and Humanities at BRAC University. She is a member of Naripokkho.
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Greg Murphy
#132802
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Gregory Francis Murphy is an American politician and urologist representing North Carolina's 3rd congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2019. He served as a representative in the North Carolina General Assembly from 2015 to 2019.
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Safra Catz
#123936
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Safra Ada Catz is an American billionaire banker and technology executive. She is the CEO of Oracle Corporation. She has been an executive at Oracle since April 1999, and a board member since 2001. In April 2011, she was named co-president and chief financial officer , reporting to founder Larry Ellison. In September 2014, Oracle announced that Ellison would step down as CEO and that Mark Hurd and Catz had been named as joint CEOs. In September 2019, Catz became the sole CEO after Hurd resigned due to health issues.
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Janaka de Silva
#26941
Overall Influence
Janaka de Silva FRCP FNASSL is a Sri Lankan physician and academic. He is Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of Kelaniya. Janaka de Silva was educated at Royal College, Colombo and holds degrees from the universities of Colombo and Oxford. He had his higher specialist clinical training at the John Radcliffe Hospital.
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Türkan Saylan
#35800
Overall Influence
1935 - 2009 (74 years)
Türkan Saylan was a Turkish medical doctor in dermatology, academic, writer, teacher and social activist. She was famous for fighting leprosy, and for founding a charitable foundation called "Association for the Support of Contemporary Living" .
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Franziska Grieder
#38783
Overall Influence
Franziska B. Grieder is a Swiss-American veterinary scientist. She is the director of the Office of Research Infrastructure Programs at the National Institutes of Health. Grieder was a faculty member and researcher at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.
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Thaddeus Seymour
#52675
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Thaddeus Seymour was an American academician. Seymour was born in New York City. His father, Whitney North Seymour was president of the American Bar Association. Seymour went to Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley, and studied English literature at the University of North Carolina, where he received his master's degree and doctoral degrees. He was an English professor at Dartmouth College and later dean at Dartmouth. From 1969 to 1978 he was president of Wabash College, and from 1978 to 1990 he was president of Rollins College.
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Tula Giannini
#30267
Overall Influence
Prof. Tula Giannini is an American academic with subject expertise in musicology, digital culture, and digital heritage. Tula Giannini holds B.M. and M.M. degrees in Performance from the Manhattan School of Music, an M.L.S. degree in Library Science from Rutgers University, and a Ph.D. degree in Musicology from Bryn Mawr College. Early in her career, she was a professional flautist. She taught at the Catholic University, Rutgers University, and the University of Hawaiʻi. Director of the Talbott Library at Westminster Choir College, and Head of Collection Management at Adelphi University. She j...
Go to Profile#13097
Thomas Bayrle
#85041
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Thomas Bayrle is a German sculptor, painter, graphic artist and video artist. He is known as a pop artist. Life Thomas Bayrle is the son of the painter and graphic artist Alf Bayrle and the art historian Elisabeth Weiss. Bayrle wanted to become a textile engineer, and completed a two-year apprenticeship as a pattern designer and weaver in 1956. While working on Jacquard looms in Göppingen, Bayrle became inspired by the machine's rhythmic sound and the repetitive patterns of the fabric.
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N. Frank Ukadike
#115034
Overall Influence
1950 - 2018 (68 years)
Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike was a scholar of African cinema and film history, and a member of faculty at Tulane University. Life Born in 1950, Udadike gained a BA from Croydon College and a master's in film and telecommunications from the University of Oregon. At New York University he gained a master's in cinema studies in 1986 and a PhD in 1989. He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan before moving to Tulane University in 1998.
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Paul Draper
#107908
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Paul Edward Draper is an English singer-songwriter, musician and record producer, formerly the frontman of the rock band Mansun. Biography Early days Paul Draper grew up on Garmoyle Road in Wavertree, Liverpool before moving with his family to Connah's Quay, Deeside. Draper described the area as being "the absolute nothing of Great Britain", adding "Deeside is just the bit where the Welsh people really aren't Welsh because they were infiltrated by the English in the Fifties and Sixties. It's where everyone from Liverpool ended up. Basically, just after the war, Liverpool had 800,000 people; now it's got 390,000 people, and the missing 400,000 all live in Deeside.
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Helen O'Toole
#186994
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Helen O'Toole is an Irish-born painter based in the United States, who is known for abstract paintings suggestive of landscape. She has exhibited throughout Ireland and the United States, in Singapore, and at venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Portland Art Museum, Chicago Cultural Center, Tacoma Art Museum, and Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Her work has been featured in the journals Artforum, Arts Magazine, New Art Examiner, and Zyzzyva, as well as the Chicago Tribune, The Irish Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and National Public Radio. Art writers frequen...
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