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 Philosophy,
#13651
Thomas A. Finlay
1848 - 1940 (92 years)
Thomas Aloysius Finlay, S.J. was an Irish Catholic priest, economist, philosopher and editor. Early life He was born on 6 July 1848 near Lanesborough, the son of William Finlay, an engineer, and his wife Maria Magan; the politician Thomas Finlay, named after him, was his nephew. His father, who died in 1864, was from Fifeshire, a Protestant convert to Catholicism; his mother was a Catholic from County Cavan.
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Noah Diffenbaugh
#90994
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Noah S. Diffenbaugh is an American climate scientist at Stanford University, where he is the Kara J Foundation Professor of Earth System Science and Kimmelman Family Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and an affiliate at the Precourt Institute for Energy. From 2015-2018, he served as editor-in-chief of the peer-review journal Geophysical Research Letters . He is known for his research on the climate system, including the effects of global warming on extreme weather and climate events such as the 2011-2017 California drought.
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Peter Elsbach
#117302
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Peter Elsbach was a Dutch physician. He was professor of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. He specialized in biochemistry, infectious diseases and natural anti-bacterial host defense.
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James Jurin
1684 - 1750 (66 years)
James Jurin FRS FRCP was an English scientist and physician, particularly remembered for his early work in capillary action and in the epidemiology of smallpox vaccination. He was a staunch proponent of the work of Sir Isaac Newton and often used his gift for satire in Newton's defence.
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Publio Fausto Andrelini
1450 - 1518 (68 years)
Publio Fausto Andrelini was an Italian humanist poet, an intimate friend of Erasmus in the 1490s, who spread the New Learning in France. He taught at the University of Paris as "professor of humanity" from 1489, and became a court poet in the circle around Anne of Brittany, the queen to two kings.
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Samuel Henry Dickson
1798 - 1872 (74 years)
Samuel Henry Dickson was an American poet, physician, writer and educator born in Charleston, South Carolina. Dickson graduated from Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. He was one of the founders of the Medical College of South Carolina. He also taught at NYU and the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dickson was a popular published poet and a leader in Charleston intellectual circles. He was friends with Charleston poet William Gilmore Simms and William Cullen Bryant. He and his brother Dr. John Dickson played a significant role in the medical education of the US's first female doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell.
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Sándor Liezen-Mayer
1839 - 1898 (59 years)
Sándor Liezen-Mayer, or Alexander von Liezen-Mayer was a Hungarian-born German illustrator and history painter. Biography Apparently destined for a military career, he showed an aptitude for drawing and, thanks to the intervention of an uncle, was able to attend the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he studied with Karl von Blaas. After eighteen months there, he held his first exhibit in Pest in 1857. He then went to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich under Hermann Anschütz but, by 1862, had found a position in the studios of Karl von Piloty, which had a decisive influence on his style.
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Peter Desbarats
#60029
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Peter Hullett Desbarats, OC was a Canadian author, playwright and journalist. He was also the dean of journalism at the University of Western Ontario , a former commissioner in the Somalia Inquiry and a former Maclean-Hunter chair of Communications Ethics at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario.
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David Turner
1927 - 1990 (63 years)
David Turner was a British playwright. Turner was born in Birmingham and came from a working-class background. He studied French at Birmingham University and later worked as a school teacher in that city. He is best remembered for his stage play Semi-Detached, first performed during 1962, which reached Broadway and was adapted for the film All the Way Up . He prepared modern versions of classic plays including John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, a version seen in London in 1968, and The Miser by Molière, which was performed at the Birmingham Rep in 1973.
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Supriya Gupta Mohile
#112183
Overall Influence
Supriya Gupta Mohile is an American geriatric oncologist specialized in clinical trials and genitourinary and gastrointestinal cancers. She is a professor of Medicine and Surgery at the James P. Wilmot Cancer Center at the University of Rochester. Mohile holds the Philip and Marilyn Wehrheim Professorship. She completed a MD at the Thomas Jefferson Medical College in 1998. She completed a fellowship in oncology at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
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Helaine Selin
#21063
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Helaine Selin is an American librarian, historian of science, author and the editor of several bestselling books. Career Selin attended Binghamton University, where she earned her bachelor's degree. She received her MLS from SUNY Albany. She was a Peace Corps volunteer from the fall of 1967 through the summer of 1969 as a teacher of English and African History in Karonga, Malawi. She retired in 2012 from being the science librarian at Hampshire College.
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Frits van Oostrom
#27603
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Frits van Oostrom is university professor for the Humanities at Utrecht University. In 1999 he was a visiting professor at Harvard for the Erasmus Chair. From September 2004 to June 2005, he was a fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study . He was awarded the Spinozapremie in 1995. In May 2005 he became president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for a three-year period. He had been member of the same institution since 1994.
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Michael J. Bronson
#31749
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Michael J. Bronson, M.D., is an American orthopaedic surgeon, Chairman of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery, Mount Sinai West and Mount Sinai Morningside, and Chief of Joint Replacement Surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, and the author of extensive advances in the development of minimally invasive surgical instruments to advance unicondylar partial knee replacement, including the Vision Total Hip System, a widely used hip replacement system that avoids the use of cement.
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Ibrahim Gashi
#41029
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Ibrahim Gashi is a Kosovar Albanian academic. He is a professor at the University of Pristina, and was a rector there between 2012 and 2014. Early life Ibrahim Gashi studied at the University of Pristina, and began working there as an assistant after his masters thesis defense between 1994 and 1998. He worked as a lecturer between 1998 and 2004 in the Department of History. In 2003 he earned a doctorate in political history of the Balkans in a three-year study program at the Institute for East European Studies of the University of Graz. In 2004 he was elected assistant professor in the Depart...
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Paul Lehmann
1884 - 1964 (80 years)
Paul Lehmann was a German paleographer and philologist. Biography Paul Lehmann was the son of businessman Gustav Lehmann and his wife Louisa Meyer. After attending school in his hometown, Lehmann started studying at the University of Göttingen. A successor to Ludwig Traube, Paul Lehmann began as docent at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1911 and became professor of medieval Latin philology there in 1917. Author of a dissertation on Franciscus Modius and a Habilitationsschrift on Johannes Sichardus, he made numerous contributions to the Sitzungsberichte der bayerischen Akademie. He is best known for Parodie im Mittelalter .
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Werner Danckert
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Werner Danckert was a German folk song researcher. Life Born in Erfurt, Danckert trained as a concert pianist after graduating from high school in 1917. He studied musicology with the subsidiary subjects philosophy and physics. In 1923 he received his doctorate in Erlangen ; the habilitation followed at the University of Jena in 1926.
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Gabrielle Suchon
1631 - 1703 (72 years)
Gabrielle Suchon was a French moral philosopher who participated in debates about the social, political and religious condition of women in the early modern era. Her most prominent works are the Traité de la morale et de la politique and Du célibat volontaire .
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Gelareh Zadeh
#102148
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Gelareh Zadeh is an Iranian-Canadian physician who is a professor and the Wilkins Family Chair in the Department of Surgery at the University of Toronto. She is a neurosurgeon-scientist at Toronto Western Hospital. In 2020, Zadeh became the first woman to be elected Chair of the Division of Neurosurgery at the University of Toronto.
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Jonathan Beller
#40393
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Jonathan Beller is a film theorist, culture critic and mediologist. He currently holds the position of Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and Critical and Visual Studies, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including Mellon, J.P. Getty and Fulbright Foundation grants and honors.
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Barry S. Brook
#72412
Overall Influence
1918 - 1997 (79 years)
Barry Shelley Brook was an American musicologist. Education & academia Brook received his master's degree from Columbia University, where he studied with Paul Henry Lang, Erich Hertzmann , Hugh Ross, and Roger Sessions, in 1942; he received the doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1959. He became a fellow at City College of New York and continued at Queens College . He founded the graduate program in music in 1967; he served as the program's Executive Officer until his retirement in 1989 from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York.
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Richard Brody
#43719
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Richard Brody is an American film critic who has written for The New Yorker since 1999. Background Brody grew up in Roslyn, New York. He is Jewish and has personally identified as an atheist. Brody attended Princeton University, receiving a BA in comparative literature in 1980. He first became interested in films after seeing Jean-Luc Godard's seminal French New Wave film Breathless during his freshman year at Princeton.
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Swami Yogananda
1861 - 1899 (38 years)
Swami Yogananda was a disciple of Ramakrishna, the 19th-century mystic. He took his formal initiation from Sarada Devi, the "holy mother" of Ramakrishna Order and spiritual consort of Ramakrishna. He was the first vice-president of Ramakrishna Mission. He belonged to the family of Sabarna Roy Choudhury, an aristocratic family of erstwhile Bengal. He had a very short life, but he played a very important role during the formative years of Ramakrishna Mission. He was also a dedicated and devoted attendant to Sarada Devi during her stay in Calcutta after Ramakrishna's death. He was one of the dis...
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Fe del Mundo
1900 - 2011 (111 years)
Fe Villanueva del Mundo, , was a Filipina pediatrician. She founded the first pediatric hospital in the Philippines and is known for shaping the modern child healthcare system in the Philippines. Her pioneering work in pediatrics in the Philippines while in active medical practice spanned eight decades. She gained international recognition, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service in 1977. In 1980, she was conferred the rank and title of National Scientist of the Philippines, and in 2010, she was conferred the Order of Lakandula. She was the first female president of the Philippine Pediatric Society and the first woman to be named National Scientist of the Philippines in 1980.
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Kamran Abbasi
#168264
Overall Influence
#13675
Edward Bawden
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Edward Bawden, was an English painter, illustrator and graphic artist, known for his prints, book covers, posters, and garden metalwork furniture. Bawden taught at the Royal College of Art, where he had been a student, worked as a commercial artist and served as a war artist in World War II. He was a fine watercolour painter but worked in many different media. He illustrated several books and painted murals in both the 1930s and 1960s. He was admired by Edward Gorey, David Gentleman and other graphic artists, and his work and career is often associated with that of his contemporary Eric Ravi...
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Oskar Zwintscher
1870 - 1916 (46 years)
Oskar Zwintscher was a German painter. He is often associated with the Jugendstil movement. Life From 1887 to 1890 he studied at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig and, from 1890 to 1892 was a student of Leon Pohle and Ferdinand Pauwels at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. After his studies, he became a free-lance painter in Meißen, where he received a stipendium, awarded to Saxon painters by the "Munkeltsche Legat". This enabled him to work for three years with no financial worries. In 1898, he presented his first large collection of paintings to the public.
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James Lenman
#155972
Overall Influence
James W. Lenman is a British philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. He is known for his expertise on ethics. Lenman is a former president of the British Society for Ethical Theory .
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Gerry Stimson
#130472
Overall Influence
Gerry Stimson is a British public health social scientist, emeritus professor at Imperial College London from 2004, and an honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine from 2017. Stimson has over 220 scientific publications mainly on social and health aspects of illicit drug use, including HIV infection. He has sat on numerous editorial boards including AIDS, Addiction, and European Addiction Research, and with Tim Rhodes he was the co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Drug Policy from 2000 to 2016. He is one of the global leaders for research on and ...
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Günter Katzenberger
#120961
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
Günter Katzenberger was a German musician, musicologist, conductor, and university faculty, professor for Historical musicology at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover as well as a non fiction writer and publisher.
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Ivan Hodovský
#147103
Overall Influence
1938 - 2009 (71 years)
Ivan Hodovský was a Czech Marxist and former director of the Department of scientific atheism of Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Brno. He graduated in 1956 in Blansko and then learn history and philosophy at the Masaryk University. In 1976 he became a candidate of sciences, associate professor in 1986.
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Max Schwimmer
1895 - 1960 (65 years)
Max Schwimmer was a German painter, graphic artist and illustrator. Life Schwimmer was born in Leipzig as the son of a factory bookbinder. He attended the there. He then worked for several years as a school teacher in in the Erzgebirge and in Marienberg. During the First World War, he was drafted as a soldier. After returning from the war, he began studying art history and philosophy at the Leipzig University in 1919. This period saw the beginnings of his artistic activity. He also found a connection to the anti-bourgeois cabaret scene, which was dominated by Hans Reimann, Erich Weinert, Slang , and Ringelnatz.
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Cornelius Golightly
1917 - 1976 (59 years)
Cornelius Lacy Golightly was the first black president of the Detroit Board of Education. He was a teacher, civil rights activist, public intellectual, and educational administrator. Early life Cornelius L. Golightly was born on March 23, 1917, in Waterford, Mississippi. His father, Reverend Richmond Mack Golightly, was from Livingston, Alabama. His mother, Margaret Fullilove was from Honey Island, Mississippi. Golightly was one of ten children.
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Roger Steare
#102283
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Roger Steare is a British ethicist and corporate philosopher. Career Steare's early career included roles as a social worker and banker, and ten years as chief executive of a recruitment company. He is now Honorary Visiting Professor of Organisational Ethics, and Corporate Philosopher in Residence at the Cass Business School in London. He teaches on the Executive MBA Programs as well as consulting with external corporate clients through Cass Executive Education.
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Khurshid Ahmad
#62500
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Khurshīd Ahmad , is a Pakistani economist, philosopher, politician, and an Islamic activist who helped to develop Islamic economic jurisprudence as an academic discipline and one of the co-founders of The Islamic Foundation in Leicester, UK.
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James S. Goodwin
#168343
Overall Influence
#13686
Jan Rokycana
1396 - 1471 (75 years)
Jan Rokycana was a Czech Hussite theologian in the Kingdom of Bohemia and a key figure of the Bohemian Reformation. Life In his youth, Jan Rokycana entered the Augustinian monastery in Rokycany. Later, he left the monastery to study in Prague, gaining his baccalaureate in 1415. He joined the movement against Jan Želivský, after which he had to flee from Prague. He also opposed the Taborites, most notably at Konopiště in 1423. Later in Prague he opposed Jan Žižka, when he was blamed for the defeat of the Prague militia at Malešov.
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Susan Shur-Fen Gau
#91506
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Susan Shur-Fen Gau , also known as Susan Gau, Shur-Fen Gau, Gau Shur-Fen and in Chinese:高淑芬, is a Taiwanese psychiatrist and academic with specialized in psychiatry, psychology, epidemiology, preventive medicine, occupational therapy, and brain and mind sciences.
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Patrick Forrest
#114809
Overall Influence
1923 - 2021 (98 years)
Sir Andrew Patrick McEwen Forrest was a Scottish surgeon. After qualifying in medicine from the University of St Andrews and completing a Fellowship at the Mayo in Rochester, Minnesota, he took up surgical posts first in Glasgow, then in Wales, followed by a position as Regius Chair of Clinical Surgery at Edinburgh.
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Luciana Borio
#44800
Overall Influence
Luciana Borio is a Brazilian-American infectious disease physician and public health administrator. She is a vice president at In-Q-Tel. She previously served as director for Medical and Biodefense Preparedness at the National Security Council, acting chief scientist of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration , assistant commissioner for counterterrorism policy of the FDA, and director of FDA's Office of Counterterrorism and Emerging Threats. She is known for her work advancing clinical trials, the development of medical countermeasures for health emergencies, and the public health responses to ...
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Mirt Komel
#77145
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Mirt Komel is a Slovenian philosopher, novelist, sociologist, playwright, essayist and translator. Komel is currently employed as assistant professor in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and researcher at the Center of Cultural and Religious Studies .
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Karim Brohi
#124872
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Karim Hassan Brohi is a British surgeon who is currently the clinical director of the London Major Trauma Network, Professor of Trauma Sciences at Queen Mary University of London and a Consultant vascular and trauma surgeon for Barts Health NHS Trust at the Royal London Hospital.
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Pascal Madeleine
#114242
Overall Influence
Pascal Madeleine is a professor in sports science and ergonomics at the Department of Health Science and Technology at Aalborg University. Pascal Madeleine holds an Master of Science degree in Medical Technology and a DEA in bio-signal treatment from the Paul Sabatier University and the Paris 12 Val de Marne University.
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Alexander Crombie
1762 - 1840 (78 years)
Alexander Crombie FRS was a Scottish Presbyterian minister, schoolmaster and philosopher. Biography He was born in Aberdeen on 17 July 1760, the son of Thomas Crombie. He studied at Marischal College. There he was taught divinity by James Beattie, gaining a M.A. in 1778. In 1794 his college awarded him an honorary doctorate .
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Raghavan N. Iyer
#46530
Overall Influence
1930 - 1995 (65 years)
Raghavan Narasimhan Iyer was an Indian academic, political theorist and philosopher. Educated at Oxford, he was professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1965 to 1986, when he retired as professor emeritus. A founding member of the Santa Barbara branch of the United Lodge of Theosophists, he also co-founded the Institute of World Culture in Santa Barbara in 1976, and remained its president until 1986.
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Stefan R. Bornstein
#60113
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Stefan R. Bornstein is the director of the Centre for Internal Medicine and the Medical Clinic and Policlinic III at the University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus of the Technical University of Dresden as well as the medical faculty's vice dean of international affairs and development and a member of the supervisory board of the University Hospital of Dresden. Furthermore, he is chair and honorary consultant for diabetes and endocrinology at King's College London. Previously, Bornstein worked as assistant director and professor of endocrinology at the University Hospital of Düsseldorf, as unit ch...
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Rio Preisner
#81414
Overall Influence
1925 - 2007 (82 years)
Rio Preisner was a Czech poet, philosopher, translator, and scholar of Czech and German literature. Biography Rio Preisner was born in the eastern town of Mukačevo . In his childhood, he was exposed to a multicultural environment of Czech, Slovak, German, Ukrainian, Hungarian and Jewish communities. He spent his adolescence growing up in Prague under the shadow of the Nazi protectorate.
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Sebastiano Conca
1680 - 1764 (84 years)
Sebastiano Conca was an Italian painter. Biography He was born at Gaeta, then part of the Kingdom of Naples, and apprenticed in Naples under Francesco Solimena. In 1706, along with his brother Giovanni, who acted as his assistant, he settled in Rome, where for several years he worked only in chalk, to improve his drawing. He was patronized by the Cardinal Ottoboni, who introduced him to Clement XI, who commissioned him a well-received Jeremiah painted for the church of St. John Lateran. He also painted an Assunta for the church of Santi Luca e Martina in Rome.
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Leana Wen
#11422
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Leana Sheryle Wen is an American physician, author, professor, speaker, consultant, newspaper columnist and television commentator. She is former health commissioner for the city of Baltimore and former president of Planned Parenthood. She has written two books based on her experiences as a medical professional.
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Ernst Hilmar
#131580
Overall Influence
1938 - 2016 (78 years)
Ernst Hilmar was an Austrian librarian, editor, and musicologist. Biography Hilmar was born in Graz and studied musicology at the University of Graz and the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna.
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Dandamis
#86943
Overall Influence
Dandamis was a philosopher, Brahmin, swami and a gymnosophist, whom Alexander encountered in the woods near Taxila, when he invaded India in 4th century B.C. He is also referred to as Mandanes. He was guru of Kalanos, the noted gymonsophist, who accompanied Alexander to Persis.
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