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,

#14851

Herman H. Fussler

#79151
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
Herman Howe Fussler was an American librarian, library administrator, teacher, writer and editor, who was a pioneer in the use of microphotography. Fussler was ranked as one of the "100 of the Most Important Leaders we had in the 20th Century" by American Libraries. Fussler served as director of the University of Chicago libraries from 1948 to 1971, was Dean of the University of Chicago Graduate Library School, from 1961 to 1963, and was instrumental in the founding of the Regenstein Library. He helped create the Center for Research Libraries. He was an elected fellow of the American Academy ...
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#14852

Timothy L. Jackson

#96928
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Timothy L. Jackson is an American professor of music theory who has spent most of his career at the University of North Texas and specializes in music of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, Schenkerian theory, politics and music. He is the co-founder of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies. In 2020, he became controversial for editing a special issue of that journal containing articles criticizing Philip Ewell's plenary talk "Music Theory's White Racial Frame".
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#14853

Viktor Schauberger

Viktor Schauberger
1885 - 1958 (73 years)
Viktor Schauberger was an Austrian forest caretaker, naturalist, philosopher, inventor and pseudoscientist. Early life Schauberger was born in Holzschlag, Upper Austria on 30 June 1885. His parents were Leopold Schauberger and Josefa, née Klimitsch. From 1891 to 1897 he attended the elementary school in Aigen, then until 1900 the state grammar school in Linz. Until 1904 he went to the forestry school in Aggsbach in the Kartause Aggsbach, where he passed the exam as a forester. From 1904 to 1906 he was forest clerk in Groß-Schweinbarth in Lower Austria.
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#14854

François Vatable

François Vatable
1495 - 1547 (52 years)
François Vatable was a French humanist scholar, a hellenist and hebraist. Life Born in Gamaches, Picardy, he was for a time rector of Bramet in Valois. In 1530 Francis I of France appointed him as one of his Royal Lecturers in what afterwards became known as the Collège de France. Vatable got the chair of Hebrew. At a later date a royal grant conferred upon Vatable the title of Abbot of Bellozane, with the benefices attached thereto. Vatable is regarded as the restorer of Hebrew scholarship in France, and his lectures in Paris attracted a large audience including Jews. He was known by his im...
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#14855

Clinomachus

400 BC - 400 BC (0 years)
Clinomachus , was a Megarian philosopher from Thurii, Magna Graecia. He is said by Diogenes Laërtius to have been the first who composed treatises on the fundamental principles of dialectics, and is described as the founder of the Dialectical school. According to the Suda, he was the disciple of Euclid of Megara, and he taught Bryson, the teacher of Pyrrho. He thus lived towards the earlier half of the 4th century BC.
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#14856

Hayim Greenberg

1889 - 1953 (64 years)
Hayim Greenberg was a Jewish-American thinker and Labor Zionist thinker. He was the head of Poalei Zion and he was the editor along with Marie Syrkin of the important American Zionist journal Jewish Frontier. Its writers included David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Shertok, Sholom Asch and Maurice Samuel. He edited a literary journal, Kadima, in Kiev in 1920 with Koigen and Fischel Schneerson.
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#14857

Michael Barrymore

#74096
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Michael Ciaran Parker , known by his stage name Michael Barrymore, is an English comedian and television presenter of game shows and light entertainment programmes on British television in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. These included Strike It Lucky, My Kind of People, My Kind of Music, Kids Say the Funniest Things, and his own variety show, Barrymore. In 1993, he headlined the Royal Variety Performance.
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#14858

Arnold Feil

#100908
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
Arnold Feil was a German musicologist and academic scholar. Life Feil was born in Mannheim, but grew up in Ludwigshafen am Rhein. He studied music at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Mannheim and the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Mannheim as well as musicology, Latin philology of the Middle Ages, history , philosophy and history of art at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, which he completed with a doctorate in 1954. From 1954 to 1958, he worked as a music commissioner at the cultural office of the city of Ludwigshafen am Rhein. From 1959 to 1982, he was a le...
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#14859

Aleksandr Filippov

1891 - Present (135 years)
Aleksandr Pavlovich Filippov was a Russian philosopher. Filippov completed his training for the law at the University of Kharkiv in 1913. He then devoted four years to the study of natural sciences at that university. He held a research fellowship in European culture at the university and worked as a scientific fellow of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.
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#14860

Amit Patel

#20061
Overall Influence
Amit Nilkanth Patel MD, BS, MS is an Indian-American cardiac surgeon and former director of clinical regenerative medicine and tissue engineering at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He was a tenured professor of surgery-cardiothoracic at the University of Utah until December 2016.
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#14861

Karl Ernst Ranke

1870 - 1926 (56 years)
Karl Ernst Ranke was a German internist, pediatrician and pulmonologist known for his research of tuberculosis. He was the son of anthropologist Johannes Ranke . In 1896 he received his medical doctorate from the University of Munich, then spent the following year as an assistant to his uncle, Heinrich von Ranke , at the pediatric clinic in Munich. Afterwards, he was in charge of an anthropological research expedition to Brazil. Following his return to Germany, he spent two additional years as an assistant in the pediatric clinic, then relocated to Arosa, Switzerland, where he worked as a doc...
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#14862

Marjane Satrapi

Marjane Satrapi
#36055
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Marjane Satrapi is a French-Iranian graphic novelist, cartoonist, illustrator, film director, and children's book author. Her best-known works include the graphic novel Persepolis and its film adaptation, the graphic novel Chicken with Plums, and the Marie Curie biopic Radioactive.
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#14863

Demetrios Chalkokondyles

Demetrios Chalkokondyles
1423 - 1511 (88 years)
Demetrios Chalkokondyles , Latinized as Demetrius Chalcocondyles and found variously as Demetricocondyles, Chalcocondylas or Chalcondyles was one of the most eminent Greek scholars in the West. He taught in Italy for over forty years; his colleagues included Marsilio Ficino, Poliziano, and Theodorus Gaza in the revival of letters in the Western world, and Chalkokondyles was the last of the Greek humanists who taught Greek literature at the great universities of the Italian Renaissance . One of his pupils at Florence was the famous Johann Reuchlin. Chalkokondyles published the first printed pu...
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#14864

David Ing

#46634
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
David Ing is a Canadian systems scientist, business architect, management consultant, and marketing scientist. He served as president of the International Society for the Systems Sciences . Ing was employed by IBM Canada from 1985 to 2012, with assignments as a management consultant, solution architect, industry sales specialist and headquarters planner.
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#14865

Choi Ki-young

#116287
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Choi Ki-young is a South Korean professor of electrical engineering at Seoul National University who served as Minister of Science and ICT under President Moon Jae-in from 2019 to 2021. After working at now-LG Electronics and Cadence Design Systems, he return to his first alma mater. He took several roles in his faculty including the director of Neural Processing Research Center and Embedded Systems Research Center.
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#14866

Takashi Hibiki

#28140
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Takashi Hibiki is a Japanese scientist who is a professor emeritus of nuclear engineering at Purdue University and a chair professor of thermal-fluid engineering at City University of Hong Kong. Early life and education Hibiki was born in 1963 at Kyoto in Japan. Hibiki graduated from Osaka University in 1985. He obtained his Ph.D. from Department of Chemical Engineering, Osaka University in 1990 under the supervision of Professor Takashi Katayama.
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#14867

Michael Wheeler

#136548
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Michael William Wheeler is a British philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling. He is known for his Heideggerian approach to contemporary cognitive science research. Books Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance CultureDistributed Cognition in Enlightenment and Romantic CultureHeidegger and Cognitive ScienceReconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step
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#14868

John of Głogów

John of Głogów
1445 - 1507 (62 years)
John of Głogów was a notable Polish polyhistor at the turn of the Middle Ages and Renaissance—a philosopher, geographer and astronomer at the University of Krakow. Life John was born into the Schelling family in Głogów in the Lower Silesian Duchy of Głogów, which from 1331 had belonged to Bohemia and thus, during his lifetime, to the Holy Roman Empire. He variously styled himself Johannes Glogoviensis, Glogerus, de Glogovia and Glogowita; but while he may have been of German extraction, he never used the name "Schelling." He began his education in a local school at the Collegiate Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.
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#14869

Paul Auerbach

#38054
Overall Influence
1951 - 2021 (70 years)
Paul Stuart Auerbach was an American physician and author in the academic discipline of wilderness medicine. He was the founder and past president of the Wilderness Medical Society. Auerbach was the editor for the Journal of Wilderness Medicine published by the Wilderness Medical Society from 1990 to 1995. Auerbach was also the author of a number of articles and books on topics such as emergency medicine, hazardous marine animals, and scuba diving, including two books of underwater photography.
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#14870

Joseph Cogswell

Joseph Cogswell
1786 - 1871 (85 years)
Joseph Green Cogswell was an American librarian, bibliographer and an innovative educator. Education Born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, Cogswell received a grammar school education in Ipswich, and attended Phillips Exeter Academy. He graduated from Harvard in 1806, and studied law from 1807 to 1809. After making a voyage to India as supercargo of the vessel in which he sailed, Cogswell studied law with Fisher Ames in Dedham, and practised for a few years in Belfast, Maine. In 1812 he married Mary, the daughter of Gov. John Taylor Gilman. She died in 1813. Her death, and a distaste for the profession, led him to abandon the practice of law.
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#14871

Alexander Wood

Alexander Wood
1817 - 1884 (67 years)
Alexander Wood was a Scottish physician. He invented the first true hypodermic syringe. He served as President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh from 1858 to 1861. Life The son of Dr James Wood and his wife Mary Wood , Alexander was born on 10 December 1817 in Cupar, Fife. The family moved to Edinburgh around 1825, where they lived at 19 Royal Circus in the Second New Town. He was educated at Edinburgh Academy from 1825 to 1832, and then studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh .
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#14872

Michael Levy

#176580
Overall Influence
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#14873

Robert Baratz

#69541
Overall Influence
Robert Sears Baratz is an American dentist and skeptic who practices in Braintree, Massachusetts. Baratz has practiced dentistry since 1972 and emergency medicine since 1991. He was formerly the executive director of the National Council Against Health Fraud .
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#14874

Jacques Morcos

#64267
Overall Influence
Jacques Morcos is a professor of neurosurgery in the Department of Neurological Surgery and Otolaryngology at the University of Miami and serves as the director of skull base and endoscopic surgery and cerebrovascular surgery. Morcos' training began in London at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery at Queen's Square and Maida Vale in London, England. He completed his residency at the University of Minnesota and his fellowships at the University of Florida and the premiere Barrow Neurological Institute.
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#14875

Claire Wainwright

#149839
Overall Influence
Claire E. Wainwright is a paediatric respiratory physician and professor of pediatrics, residing and working in Queensland. She commenced her medical training in London and completed her specialist training at the Royal Children's Hospital, Brisbane. She is now head of the Cystic Fibrosis Service at the Queensland Children's Hospital and a professor of pediatric medicine at the University of Queensland, Australia. Wainwright has published numerous academic papers focusing upon her main area of interest; the impacts of fungal infections upon children with cystic fibrosis. However, her interes...
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#14876

Cara Tannenbaum

#137338
Overall Influence
Cara Tannenbaum is a Canadian researcher and practicing physician in the fields of geriatrics, women's health and gender research. Since 2015, Tannenbaum has served as the Scientific Director of Canadian Institutes of Health Research's Institute of Gender and Health. She was appointed as a Member of the Order of Canada on November 17, 2021.
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#14877

Susan Shaw

Susan Shaw
#50646
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Susan D. Shaw was an American environmental health scientist, marine toxicologist, explorer, ocean conservationist, and author. A Doctor of Public Health, she was a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the School of Public Health at the State University of New York at Albany, and Founder/President of the Shaw Institute, a nonprofit scientific institution with a mission to improve human and ecological health through innovative science and strategic partnerships. Shaw is globally recognized for pioneering high-impact environmental research on ocean pollution, climate change, oil spills, and plastics that has fueled public policy over three decades.
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#14878

Richard Whitlock

#78998
Overall Influence
Richard Whitlock FRCSC is a Canadian cardiovascular surgeon and intensivist, the Canada Research Chair in Cardiovascular Surgery and a professor of surgery at McMaster University Medical School. He is most well known for being the principal investigator of the SIRS trial and the LAAOS III trial. On April 9, 2015, Whitlock and his team performed the first transcatheter aortic valve implantation on a pregnant woman in the world.
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#14879

Miguel Ángel Virasoro

1900 - 1966 (66 years)
Miguel Ángel Virasoro was an Argentine philosopher. Life Born in Santa Fe, Argentina, in 1900, Virasoro graduated with a law degree from the University of La Plata. In 1947 he took over the direction of the magazine Logos | Report which resulted in the same year which still remains the best version of Being and Nothingness Sartre into Castilian. In 1949, Virasoro participated in the first National Congress of Philosophy held in Mendoza with a presentation dialectical existentialism. In 1952 he was appointed vice dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and also takes over the leadership of the Department of Philosophy.
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#14880

Dirk Baltzly

#175575
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Dirk Christian Baltzly is an Australian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania. He is known for his research on ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy. Baltzly is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities .
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#14881

Nicholas Russo

Nicholas Russo
1845 - 1902 (57 years)
Nicholas Russo was an Italian Catholic priest, Jesuit, philosopher, and missionary. Born in Italy, he ran away from his family and joined the Society of Jesus in France in 1862, where he was educated and began teaching. In 1875, Russo was sent to the United States to study at Woodstock College. For ten years, he was a professor and the chair of philosophy at Boston College and became its first faculty member to publish a book. Specializing in Thomism, he was regarded as a successful professor. He served as president of the college from 1887 to 1888.
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#14882

Mayo Fuster Morell

#55631
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Mayo Fuster Morell is a social researcher. Her research has focused on sharing economy, social movements, online communities and digital Commons, frequently using participatory action research and method triangulation. She has been part of the most important research centres studying Internet and its social effects, including the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the MIT Center for Civic Media or the Berkeley School of Information. As an active citizen, she is the co-founder of multiple initiatives around digital Commons and Free Culture, such as the Procomuns Forum on collaborative ec...
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#14883

Heinrich Neumann von Héthárs

Heinrich Neumann von Héthárs
1873 - 1939 (66 years)
Heinrich Neumann Ritter von Héthárs was the foremost ear-nose-and-throat doctor in Vienna before World War II. In 1938 he transmitted to the Evian Conference the infamous offer by the German government to sell the Austrian Jews at a price of $250 per capita to any foreign country that would accept them and pay. This offer - and the Conference delegates' refusal to accept it - is the focal point of Hans Habe's novel The Mission .
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#14884

Eric Coleman

#42451
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Eric Coleman is an American geriatrician and academic. He was a professor at the University of Colorado. His research focuses on improving care transitions. Coleman was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012.
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#14885

Mary Renfrew

#97185
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Mary Josephine Renfrew is a British midwife and academic. Education Renfrew graduated in nursing from the University of Edinburgh in 1975, and in midwifery from the same institution in 1978. She obtained a PhD on breastfeeding in 1982, while at the Medical Research Council's reproductive biology unit in Edinburgh.
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#14886

Steven Lehrer

Steven Lehrer
#63005
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Steven Lehrer is a physician and writer, known for medical research and for his English translation of Else Ury. Early years and education Lehrer was born in Los Angeles. He attended UCLA and graduated from Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
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#14887

Daniel Drake

Daniel Drake
1785 - 1852 (67 years)
Daniel Drake was a pioneering American physician and prolific writer. Early life Drake was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, to Isaac Drake and Elizabeth Shotwell. He was the elder brother of Benjamin Drake, author of Life of Tecumseh. Daniel Drake "was predestined for the medical profession by his father. The latter, we are told by those who knew him, was a gentleman by nature and a Christian from convictions produced by a simple and unaffected study of the Word of God. His poverty he regretted, his ignorance he deplored."
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#14888

Colin Bradley

#173677
Overall Influence
Colin Bradley is a professor of general practice at University College Cork, best known for his 1995 paper on significant event audit, co-authored with Mike Pringle. Selected publications “Significant Event Auditing”, co-authored with Bradley C, Carmichael C, Wallis H, Moore A., Occasional Paper 70. London: Royal College of General Practitioners, 1995
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#14889

Josephine Nambooze

#52477
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Josephine Nambooze is a Ugandan physician, public health specialist, academic, and medical researcher. She is an emeritus professor of public health at Makerere University School of Public Health. Nambooze was the first female East African to qualify as a physician circa 1959.
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#14890

Igor Kvetnoy

#115316
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Igor Moiseevich Kvetnoy is a Russian expert in the field of molecular medicine and neuroendocrinology. He participated in the discovery of extrapineal melatonin production. He contributed to the discovery and development of the doctrine of diffuse neuroendocrine immune system and considered a founder of the Russian scientific school of neuroimmunoendoсrinology.
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#14891

Dietrich Grönemeyer

Dietrich Grönemeyer
#56896
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Dietrich H. W. Grönemeyer is a German professor of medicine and one of the inventors of Microtherapy. He grew up in Bochum with his two brothers. One of them, Herbert Grönemeyer, is a popular musician.
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#14892

Rosemary Pattenden

#101453
Overall Influence
Rosemary Pattenden is emeritus professor at UEA Law School. She took the degrees of bachelor of commerce and bachelor of laws at the University of New South Wales and doctor of philosophy at the University of Oxford. On the completion of her DPhil in 1979 she joined the University of East Anglia where she was lecturer, senior lecturer, reader and, between 1998 and 2013, professor.
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#14893

Hanna Wallach

#60384
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Hanna Wallach is a computational social scientist and partner research manager at Microsoft Research. Her work makes use of machine learning models to study the dynamics of social processes. Her current research focuses on issues of fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics as they relate to AI and machine learning.
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#14894

Mona Loutfy

#168693
Overall Influence
Mona R. Loutfy is a Canadian clinician-scientist and infectious disease specialist. Early life and education Loutfy earned her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Western Ontario and her medical degree from the University of Toronto. Following this, she completed her Internal Medicine Residency in 1999 and her Infectious Diseases Fellowship in 2001 at the University of Toronto. Loutfy then did a Master's of Public Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2002 and a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at McGill University.
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#14895

Bernhard Casper

#171635
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Bernhard Casper was a German philosopher. Biography Born in Trier in 1931, Casper passed his Abitur in Aschaffenburg in 1949. From 1979 to 2000, he taught Christian philosophy at the University of Freiburg. He was a Roman Catholic priest in the Diocese of Würzburg and lived in Wittnau, Baden-Württemberg. In 1995, he earned an honorary doctorate from the Institut Catholique de Paris. In 2012, he was named a citizen of honor of Travagliato.
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#14896

Alexander Phoebus Dionysiou Mourelatos

#176752
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Alexander Phoebus Dionysiou Mourelatos is an American philosopher. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Works The Route of Parmenides. Yale UP, 1974.: The Pre-Socratics: A Collection of Critical Essays. Doubleday 1974, ND Princeton University Press 1993.
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#14897

Christine Beveridge

#132390
Overall Influence
Christine Beveridge is an Australian scientist and plant physiologist whose research focuses on the shoot architecture of plants, shrubs and trees. She is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Queensland, Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture, and affiliated professor at the Centre for Crop Science at the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation.
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#14898

Hugh Borton

#42105
Overall Influence
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
Hugh Borton was an American historian who specialized in the history of Japan, later serving as president of Haverford College. Biography Borton was born on May 14, 1903, to a devout Quaker household in Moorestown Township, New Jersey. His parents sent him to Quaker schools and after graduating from Haverford College in 1927, he and his wife Elizabeth Wilbur, proceeded to find a way of making a living that was in line with their Quaker beliefs. They looked to the American Friends Service Committee, which set up teaching posts for them at a small school in the foothills of the Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains.
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#14899

Wang Fu

78 - 163 (85 years)
Wang Fu , courtesy name Jiexin was a Chinese essayist, historian, philosopher, and poet during the Eastern Han Dynasty. Born in Gansu Province, Wang Fu was a studious and knowledgeable man of humble birth. Once he was discriminated by fellow villagers in youth and was later not recommended to the Court as a government official. There is little information left about him, but his only masterpiece, Qianfu Lun, is a most valuable source. Nowadays, scholars have begun to attach importance to him, but the study is confined by the lack of historical records.
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#14900

George Jelinek

#54718
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
George Jelinek is an Australian doctor who is professor and founder, Neuroepidemiology Unit, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health. This unit expressly evaluates modifiable risk factors that predict the progression of Multiple sclerosis. He has served since 2017 as the Chief Editor for Neuroepidemiology in the journal Frontiers in Neurology, and he was Founding Editor – and is currently the Editor Emeritus – for Emergency Medicine Australasia. Jelinek also has the distinction of being the first Professor of Emergency Medicine in Australasia. Between 1987 and 2018, he published more ...
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