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,
#15351
Rezvi Sheriff
#34000
Overall Influence
Vidya Jyothi Mohamed Hussain Rezvi Sheriff, FRCP , FRCPE , FRACP, FCCP, FSLCGP, FNASSL is a Sri Lankan academic, nephrologist and physician. He served as the director of the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine; senior professor of medicine; head of the Department of Clinical Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo. He is currently serving as the Senior Professor of Medicine at General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University. He is also a consultant physician and nephrologist at National Hospital Sri Lanka. He is widely regarded as the Father of Nephrology or either hailed as Father of Modern Nephrology and Dialysis.
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Albert Wojciech Adamkiewicz
1850 - 1921 (71 years)
Albert Wojciech Adamkiewicz was a Polish pathologist born in Żerków. Biography Adamkiewicz earned his medical doctorate in 1873 from the University of Breslau where he was a student-assistant to physiologist Rudolf Peter Heinrich Heidenhain. From 1879 until 1892, he was chief of general and experimental pathology at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow.
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Maurice Ewing
#139072
Overall Influence
1912 - 1999 (87 years)
Maurice Rossie Ewing, CBE, FRCSEd, FRCS, FRACS was a Scottish surgeon who was the first professor of surgery at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His department established an early programme of renal transplantation in Australia.
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Clare Hocking
#179446
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Clare Hocking is a New Zealand occupational therapy academic, and New Zealand's first occupation therapy professor. She is currently a full professor at the Auckland University of Technology and an honorary professor at Plymouth University.
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Julius Wolff
1836 - 1902 (66 years)
Julius Wolff was a German surgeon. Biography Julius Wolf was born on 21 March 1836 in Märkisch Friedland, and received his doctorate in 1861 in the field of surgery under Bernhard von Langenbeck at Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin. In 1861 he settled down after the state examination as a general practitioner in Berlin. He participated as a surgeon in three military campaigns .
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Fyodor Lesh
1840 - 1903 (63 years)
Fyodor Alexandrovich Lesh, alternatively spelled as Lösch , was a Russian Empire medical doctor. He is credited with identifying Amoeba coli in 1875. This species was later classified in the genus Entamoeba.
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Francis Barnes
1744 - 1838 (94 years)
Francis Barnes was an English philosopher and a Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy. Early life and education Barnes was born in Bolton-le-Sands, Lancashire the son of Joseph Barnes a yeoman farmer. He attended local schools at Kellett and Silverdale, but his teachers noticed his abilities and he won a place at Eton College. His family were not wealthy and it was said that he travelled to Eton seated behind his father on one of the farm's horses. After finishing his schooling he went up to King's College, Cambridge. He graduated in 1764 at the age of twenty.
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Diodotus the Stoic
100 BC - 59 BC (41 years)
Diodotus was a Stoic philosopher, and was a friend of Cicero. Biography Diodotus lived for most of his life in Rome in Cicero's house, where he instructed Cicero in Stoic philosophy and especially Logic. Although Cicero never fully accepted Stoic philosophy, he always spoke of Diodotus with fondness, and ranked him equal to other philosophers of his era such as Philo of Larissa, Antiochus and Posidonius.
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Boghuma Kabisen Titanji
#135721
Overall Influence
Boghuma Kabisen Titanji is a Cameroonian medical doctor and clinical researcher. She is an expert on HIV drug resistant viruses. Education and work Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, clinically trained in Cameroon, received her MSc and DTM&H in Tropical Medicine and International Health from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in 2010 and a PhD in Infectious Diseases studying HIV-1 cell-to-cell spread and Antiretroviral therapy drug resistance from University College London in 2014. Titanji's work focuses on the mechanisms of HIV transmission and antiretroviral drug resistance. In May 2012,...
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Charles William Mayo
1898 - 1968 (70 years)
Charles William Mayo was an American surgeon and a member of the board of governors of the Mayo Clinic beginning in 1933. He was the son of Mayo Clinic co-founder Charles Horace Mayo and Edith Mayo.
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Tomis Kapitan
#122199
Overall Influence
1949 - 2016 (67 years)
Tomis Kapitan was an American philosopher and Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at Northern Illinois University. He worked primarily in metaphysics and philosophy of language. Kapitan was especially interested in the free will debate, where he was a "compatibilist," defending the view that free will is possible even in a completely deterministic universe. He also published in philosophy of religion and wrote extensively on the Palestine-Israeli conflict.
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Alfred Bielschowsky
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
Alfred Bielschowsky was a German ophthalmologist. His specialty was physiology and pathology of the eye, particularly in regards to research of eye movement, space perception and diagnosis of oculomotor anomalies.
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Jürgen Schläder
#102732
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Jürgen Schläder is a German theatre director and musicologist, who was from May 1987 to March 2014 Professor of Theatre Studies with a focus on stage music at the LMU München. He studied German literature and musicology at the Ruhr-University Bochum and achieved his doctorate in musicology in 1978 with the dissertation Undine in stage music. In 1986 he habilitated on the subject of Das Opernduett. A 19th century scene type and its prehistory. His current research focuses are: Aesthetic foundations and analysis of contemporary directorial theatre, experimental forms of modern music for theatre...
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Victor Chang
#7415
Overall Influence
1936 - 1991 (55 years)
Victor Peter Chang was a Chinese-born Australian cardiac surgeon and a pioneer of modern heart transplantation in Australia. His murder in 1991 stunned Australia and is considered one of the most notorious in the country's history. Chang was given a state funeral, and in 1999, he was voted Australian of the Century at the People's Choice Awards.
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Hans-Heinz Dräger
1909 - 1968 (59 years)
Hans-Heinz Dräger , complete name Hans-Heinz Gerhard Kurt Dräger, was a German-American musicologist. He died in November 1968 at age 58. Life and career Born in Stralsund, Dräger attended the secondary school in Stralsund from 1920 to 1931. From 1931 to 1937, he studied musicology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin with Friedrich Blume, Curt Sachs, Arnold Schering, Georg Schünemann and Erich Schumann. In addition, he studied art history with and , philosophy with Max Dessoir and Nicolai Hartmann and German literature with Herrmann.
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Nilofer S. Azad
#128546
Overall Influence
Nilofer Saba Azad is an American oncologist and physician-scientist specialized in gastrointestinal, colorectal, cholangiocarcinoma, and pancreaticobiliary cancers. She is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and oversees clinical trials at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.
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Marie-Jo Thiel
#170165
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Marie-Jo Thiel is a French theologian, medical doctor, and professor of ethics. She is a professor of moral theology, specialising in ethics and bioethics, at the University of Strasbourg. Her research focuses on topics such as ageing, death, medical ethics, and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. She is also the founder and former director of the European Centre for Studies and Research in Ethics and former president of the European Society for Catholic Theology.
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William D. Haseman
#53770
Overall Influence
1948 - 2019 (71 years)
William David Haseman was an American computer scientist who was an expert in Management Information Systems and Wisconsin Distinguished Professor of MIS of University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee . His expertise is Internet-based technologies.
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Steve Sawyer
#178338
Overall Influence
Steven Burton Sawyer is a professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. He is known for his research on social and organizational informatics, how people work together and how they use technology, and the relationships among changing forms of work & organization. Sawyer has worked on improving the social components of teamwork, as well as the distinctions between packaged and custom software development. His research is done through field-based studies of software developers, scientific collaborators, scientific data repositories, real estate agents, police officers, ...
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Victor Cherbuliez
1829 - 1899 (70 years)
Charles Victor Cherbuliez was a Swiss, and then French novelist and author. He was born at Geneva, Switzerland and died at Combs-la-Ville. He was the eleventh member elected to occupy seat 3 of the Académie Française in 1881.
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Hermann Schloffer
1868 - 1937 (69 years)
Hermann Schloffer was an Austrian surgeon. He studied medicine at the University of Freiburg and University of Graz, where in 1892 he earned his medical doctorate. He spent several years in Prague as a surgical assistant and associate professor, and in 1903-1911 was a surgeon and professor at the University of Innsbruck. Afterwards he was a professor at Charles University in Prague.
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Georgy Fedotov
1886 - 1951 (65 years)
Georgy Petrovich Fedotov was a Russian religious philosopher, historian, essayist, author of many books on Orthodox culture, regarded by some as a founder of Russian "theological culturology". Fedotov left Soviet Russia under duress for France in 1925, then in 1939 emigrated to the United States where he taught at St. Vladimir Orthodox Seminary, New York, and continued publishing books up until his death in 1951.
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David ben Abraham ha-Laban
1201 - Present (825 years)
David ben Abraham ha-Laban was a French religious philosopher and kabalist who lived after 1200. His grandfather, Judah, was rabbi of Coucy-le-Château. David was the author of Masoret ha-Berit , on the existence, the unity, and the attributes of God, and also on creation and its purpose . The fact that the work exists in several manuscript copies shows that it was much read.
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Sophie Bledsoe Aberle
1896 - 1996 (100 years)
Sophie Bledsoe Aberle was an American anthropologist, physician and nutritionist known for her work with Pueblo people. She was one of two women first appointed to the National Science Board. Early life and education Sophie Bledsoe Herrick was born in 1896 to Albert and Clara S. Herrick in Schenectady, New York. Her paternal grandmother and namesake was the writer Sophia Bledsoe Herrick. Sophie was educated at home and had a brief marriage at age 21 to a man surnamed Aberle, which surname she chose to keep. She began attending University of California in Berkeley but switched to Stanford University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1923, a master's degree in 1925, and a Ph.D.
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Frank Daniel
#22150
Overall Influence
1926 - 1996 (70 years)
František "Frank" Daniel was a Czech-American screenwriter, film director and teacher. He is known for developing the sequence paradigm of screenwriting, in which a classically constructed movie can be broken down into three acts, and a total of eight specific sequences. He served as co-chair of the Columbia University film program, and as a dean of FAMU, the American Film Institute and the USC School of Cinema-Television. He was also an Artistic Director of the Sundance Institute.
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A. Ranganadha Rao
#63390
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Professor A. Ranganadha Rao M.B.B.S., M.S., M.Ch., D.Sc. was an Indian urologist. He is the first Urologist from Andhra Pradesh and the first person to perform a kidney transplantation in Andhra Pradesh.
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Michele Barry
#49225
Overall Influence
Michele Barry is a professor of medicine. She became Stanford's inaugural Senior Associate Dean of global health in 2009 and started the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health in 2010. Prior to this, she was a professor at Yale, where she started the first refugee health clinic and homeless health mobile van project, for which she was awarded the Elm Ivy Mayor’s Award. She specializes in tropical medicine, emerging infectious diseases, women’s leadership in global health, and human and planetary health.
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Ingetraut Dahlberg
#85313
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Ingetraut Dahlberg was a German information scientist and philosopher who developed the universal Information Coding Classification covering some 6,500 subject fields. Her career spanned various roles in research, teaching, editing, and publishing. Dahlberg founded the journal International Classification as well as both the scientific Society for Classification and International Society for Knowledge Organization.
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Joakim Norbeck
#51145
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Joakim Norbeck, born 1965, is a scientist in molecular biotechnology at Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden. He received his Ph.D. from Gothenburg University in 1996 on a thesis entitled "Protein expression of yeast during growth under osmotic stress",. He identified the genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae encoding glycerol-3-phosphatase , as well as the genes encoding dihydroxyacetone kinase in the same organism.
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Anton Margaritha
1490 - 1542 (52 years)
Anton Margaritha was a sixteenth-century Jewish Hebraist and convert to Christianity. He was a possible source for some of Martin Luther's conception of Judaism. Biography Anton Margaritha's father, Jacob Margolioth, was a Rabbi in Ratisbon, Germany. Anton converted in 1522, being baptized at Wasserburg am Inn, and later became a Lutheran. He suffered imprisonment and then expulsion from Augsburg due to complaints from the Jewish community there and action by Charles V.
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Kevin Thomas
#69603
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Kevin B. Thomas is an American film critic who has written reviews for the Los Angeles Times since 1962. His long tenure makes him the longest-running film critic among major United States newspapers.
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Andrew Wilkinson
#173868
Overall Influence
Andrew Wilkinson is a Professor Emeritus of Paediatrics and Perinatal Medicine at All Souls College, Oxford. Wilkinson is most notable for being an international authority in neonatology and a lead author of the Standards of Care for NICU and NICE guidelines on retinopathy of prematurity.
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Nancy E. Dunlap
#39980
Overall Influence
Nancy E. Dunlap is a physician, researcher and business administrator focused in the area of pulmonary and critical care medicine. She is now an emeritus professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine.
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Peter Ormerod
#129448
Overall Influence
1950 - 2019 (69 years)
Professor Lawrence Peter Ormerod FRCP, FRCP, FRCP was an English chest physician. Ormerod was educated at Bacup and Rawtenstall Grammar School. He qualified as a doctor in 1974 and gained a DSc in 2000 for his work researching tuberculosis.
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Rahul Potluri
#32226
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Rahul Potluri is a British physician, researcher and founder of ACALM Study Unit, United Kingdom . His clinical epidemiology research unit is one of the first to use big data in healthcare and medical research. His work has shown for the first time a link between high cholesterol and breast cancer. Further research has suggested the role of cholesterol and possibly statins improving the mortality in patients with breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer and bowel cancer. Other prominent studies include health services research evaluating differences in death rates from weekend admission ...
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David Bivar
#171561
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Adrian David Hugh Bivar, FRAS was a British numismatist and archaeologist, who was Emeritus Professor of Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He specialized in Sasanian seals and rock reliefs, Kushanoo-Sasanian coins and chronology, Mithraic iconography, Arsacid history and pre-Islamic folklore. His written works include book chapters written for the Fischer Weltgeschichte and The Cambridge History of Iran .
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Merfyn Jones
#25905
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
R. Merfyn Jones CBE is a Welsh historian and broadcaster, was vice-chancellor of Bangor University and a governor of the BBC . He grew up and still lives in Gwynedd, Wales. Academic career Jones has specialized as an historian in modern and contemporary Welsh history, and has made several TV documentaries in this area. He has a particular interest is the history of the process of devolution in Wales.
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Eduard Bendemann
1811 - 1889 (78 years)
Eduard Julius Friedrich Bendemann was a German-Jewish painter. Biography Bendemann was born in Berlin. His father, Anton Heinrich Bendemann, was a Jewish banker. His mother, Fanny Eleonore Bendemann née von Halle, was a daughter of the Jewish banker Joel Samuel von Halle. His father monitored his education closely and it would have naturally led him to some sort of technical occupation, but his talent and propensity towards art resulted in his being allowed to pursue other interests. After he completed elementary school, he enrolled in the Wilhelm von Schadow's school in Düsseldorf. In 1828 he painted a portrait of his grandmother which attracted some attention.
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Ilse Korotin
#111697
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Ilse Erika Korotin is an Austrian philosopher and sociologist. She researched and published on the history of ideas of Nazism. At the Institute for Science and Art in Vienna, she heads the Documentation Centre for Women's Studies. Her work focuses on feminist biographical research and history of science.
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Robin Cook
#37874
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Robert Brian "Robin" Cook is an American physician and novelist who writes about medicine and topics affecting public health. He is best known for combining medical writing with the thriller genre. Many of his books have been bestsellers on The New York Times Best Seller List. Several of his books have also been featured in Reader's Digest. His books have sold nearly 400 million copies worldwide.
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Curt Sachs
1881 - 1959 (78 years)
Curt Sachs was a German musicologist. He was one of the founders of modern organology . Among his contributions was the Hornbostel–Sachs system, which he created with Erich von Hornbostel. Biography Born in Berlin, Sachs studied piano, music theory and composition as a youth in that city. However, his doctorate from Berlin University in 1904 was on the history of art, with his thesis on the sculpture of Verrocchio. He began a career as an art historian, but promptly became more devoted to music, eventually being appointed director of the Staatliche Instrumentensammlung, a large collection of musical instruments.
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John H. Newman
#179700
Overall Influence
#15393
Adrian Zingg
1734 - 1816 (82 years)
Adrian Zingg was a Swiss painter. Life Adrian Zingg received his professional training with his father, the steel cutter Bartolomäus Zingg, then became an apprentice with the engraver . In 1757 he worked in Bern, painting vedute with Johann Ludwig Aberli. Together with the medalist Johann Caspar Mörikofer , he travelled to Paris in 1759, where Zingg worked for seven years with the engraver Johann Georg Wille.
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Hattie Alexander
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Hattie Elizabeth Alexander was an American pediatrician and microbiologist. She earned her M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1930 and continued her research and medical career at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Alexander became the lead microbiologist and the head of the bacterial infections program at Columbia-Presbyterian. She occupied many prestigious positions at Columbia University and was well honored even after her death from liver cancer in 1968. Alexander is known for her development of the first effective remedies for Haemophilus influenzae infection, as well as being one of the first scientists to identify and study antibiotic resistance.
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Marc Jean-Bernard
#172267
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Marc Jean-Bernard is a French philosopher, academic, writer, classical guitarist and musicologist. Among the main academic interests reflected in his research and publications are Philosophy, Aesthetics, Musicology, Cultural Diplomacy, Austrian culture, Latin American culture, Italian culture, Diplomacy, and generally the hermeneutics of culture. He is currently based at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan.
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Hieronymus David Gaubius
1705 - 1780 (75 years)
Hieronymus David Gaubius was a German physician and chemist. Life He was a native of Heidelberg. He studied medicine and sciences at the Universities of Harderwijk and Leiden, where he was a pupil of Hermann Boerhaave and Bernhard Siegfried Albinus . He earned his degree at Leiden in 1725 with a thesis on psychosomatic medicine called . After graduation he continued his training in Paris, and then practiced medicine in Amsterdam and Deventer.
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Leonard Erickson
#70490
Overall Influence
1946 - 2013 (67 years)
Leonard C. Erickson was the Robert Wallace Miller Professor of Oncology at the Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Cancer Center, and he also served as Deputy Director of the Indiana University Cancer Center.
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G. Aldo Antonelli
#179609
Overall Influence
1962 - 2015 (53 years)
G. Aldo Antonelli was an Italian-born philosopher and academic. He taught at the University of California, Irvine before joining the philosophy department at the University of California, Davis in 2008. Professor Antonelli was known largely for his work in logic.
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Michael Frass
#103618
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Michael Frass is an Austrian medicine specialist for internal medicine and professor at the Medical University of Vienna . He is known for his work on homeopathy and his inventions in the field of airway management.
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Henry P. Armsby
1853 - 1921 (68 years)
Henry Prentiss Armsby was an American agricultural chemist, animal nutritionist, and academic administrator. He served as Vice Principal and Acting Principal of the Storrs Agricultural School , associate director of the Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station , and director of the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Institute of Animal Nutrition at the Pennsylvania State University.
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