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,
#16551
John Gorham
1783 - 1829 (46 years)
John Gorham was an American physician and educator. Biography He graduated from Harvard in 1801, with a B.A., and later received two medical degrees there . Between his medical degrees, he studied chemistry privately in London with Friedrich Accum, and then with Thomas Hope at the University of Edinburgh. He opened a medical practice in Boston in 1806, and maintained it throughout his academic career. In 1809 he was appointed adjunct professor of chemistry and materia medica in Harvard, and in 1816 was made professor of chemistry and mineralogy. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy...
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Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò
#183457
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is a philosopher and professor of African political thought at the Africana Studies Research Center at Cornell University. He was born in Nigeria, where he lived most of his life except for five years in Canada.
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Valerii Kryshen
#78520
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Valerii Kryshen is a Ukrainian scientist, Doctor of Medicine, and professor of general surgery. Biography Kryshen was born on 11 September 1955 in Dnipropetrovsk in what was then the Soviet Union to a medical family. He completed his medical degree in 1978 and began working in the surgical unit in Dnipropetrovsk city hospital. He chairs the general surgery department at Dnipropetrovsk State Medical Academy.
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David N. Sundwall
#91642
Overall Influence
Dr. David N. Sundwall is a primary care physician and served as the executive director of the Utah Department of Health from January 2005 to January 2011. Background He was born and raised in Murray, Utah, and followed several family members into the medical profession, including his father, Dr. Val Sundwall, great uncles Dr. Olaf Sundwall and Dr. John Sundwall, and brother, Dr. Peter Sundwall.
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Tobias Delbruck
#91070
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Tobias "Tobi" Delbrück is an American neuromorphic engineer at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 "for contributions to neuromorphic visual sensors and processing".
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Romolo Spezioli
1642 - 1723 (81 years)
Romolo Spezioli was an Italian doctor and the personal physician of the Ottoboni family, Queen Christina of Sweden, Cardinal Decio Azzolino and of Pope Alexander VIII. Life After studies initiated in Fermo, graduating in 1664, he worked for a short period nearby Grottammare, Ripatransone and Jesi.
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Harold M. Weintraub
#62029
Overall Influence
1945 - 1995 (50 years)
Harold M. "Hal" Weintraub was an American scientist who lived from 1945 until his death in 1995 from an aggressive brain tumor. Only 49 years old, Weintraub left behind a legacy of research. Early life and education Born on June 2, 1945, in Newark, New Jersey, Weintraub's childhood revolved around sports, including basketball, an activity he would continue to particularly relish throughout his adult life. Weintraub was also the pitcher for an all-city high school baseball team, and a football fullback.
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Julius Vincenz von Krombholz
1782 - 1843 (61 years)
Julius Vincenz von Krombholz was a physician and mycologist born in Oberpolitz , northern Bohemia. He studied medicine at the University of Prague, receiving his doctorate in 1814. In 1828 he was appointed professor of special pathology and therapy. At Prague, he used his influence to help the penniless August Carl Joseph Corda get admitted to the university. In 1831 he was named rector of the university.
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Harold Raley
#168922
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Harold C. Raley, born , is an American Hispanist, philosopher and writer. A retired university professor, he is best known as a scholar and translator of the work of Julián Marías. Biography Harold Cecil Raley was born November 23, 1934, near Hartselle, Alabama. He grew up working in a rural community in Winston County, Alabama. He is descended from Walter Raleigh, through the patrilineal line.
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Petra Klinge
#179664
Overall Influence
Petra Klinge is a neurosurgeon and academic. She is professor of neurosurgery at Brown University. Education and training Klinge earned her medical degree from the University of Kiel in 1993. She conducted her neurosurgical residency at Hannover Medical School in Germany, completing it in 2002. The same year, she earned her habilitation and postdoctoral qualification "venia legendi".
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Mu'min al-Taq
#102352
Overall Influence
Abū Ja'far Muḥammad ibn 'Alī ibn Nu'mān ibn Abī Ṭurayfa al-Bajalī al-Kūfī , known as Mu'min al-Ṭāq was a companion of Ja'far al-Sadiq and a Shia theologian in the 2nd/8th century. He was renowned for providing incisive and thought-provoking responses to questions from his opponents. He allegedly got into a heated argument with renowned scholar Abu Hanifa. He advocated for the rights of the imam and held that the imams are the only ones with the greatest knowledge required to lead humanity to felicity at its highest level. He wrote a number of works including Kitab al-imama and Kitab al-radd '...
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Joan Venes
#122508
Overall Influence
1935 - 2010 (75 years)
Joan Venes was a neurosurgeon. She helped to develop the practice of neurosurgery in children. Early life Venes was born on June 27, 1935. She was raised in a blue-collar neighborhood in Queens, New York. She was a first-generation American and the first person in her neighborhood to go to college.
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Emil Carl Wilm
1877 - 1932 (55 years)
Emil Carl Kunibert Wilm was an American philosopher. His published scholarship, often written for a popular audience, was mainly in the history of philosophy and psychology. Early life and education Wilm was born in 1877 in Margonin, then part of Prussia and now in Poland. He moved to the United States in 1890, at age 13. He received a bachelor of arts from Southwestern University in 1902, a master of arts from Vanderbilt University in 1903, and a PhD from Cornell University in 1905.
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Irving Pichel
1891 - 1954 (63 years)
Irving Pichel was an American actor and film director, who won acclaim both as an actor and director in his Hollywood career. Career Pichel was born to a Jewish family in Pittsburgh. He attended Pittsburgh Central High School with George S. Kaufman. The two collaborated on a play, The Failure. Pichel graduated from Harvard University in 1914 and went immediately into the theater. Pichel's first work in musical theatre was as a technical director for the theater of the San Francisco Bohemian Club; he also helped with the annual summer pageant, held at the elite Bohemian Grove, in which up to 300 of its wealthy, influential members from finance and government participate.
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David Blumenthal
#26031
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
David Blumenthal is an academic physician and health care policy expert, known as the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology from 2009 to 2011 during the early implementation of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act provisions on "meaningful use".
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Anne-Françoise Schmid
#183296
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Anne-Françoise Schmid is a Swiss-born French philosopher, formerly an associate researcher of Mines Paris-Tech. Schmid is a specialist in the philosophical works of Henri Poincaré, as well as being an associate researcher at the Henri Poincaré archives. Schmid has also edited the letters of correspondence between Bertrand Russell and Louis Couturat. She is also a founding member of a philosophical research initiative known as non-philosophy, alongside her spouse François Laruelle. Through this work, she has been publishing on generic epistemologies, which entails a non-exclusive epistemologic...
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Neelam Giri
#90551
Overall Influence
Neelam K. Giri is an Indian pediatric hematologist/oncologist and physician-scientist who researches bone marrow failure syndromes. She is a staff clinician in the clinical genetics branch at the National Cancer Institute.
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Bob Anderson
#53033
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Bob Anderson is an American animation director on The Simpsons. He also contributed additional sequence direction on The Simpsons Movie. After high school, Bob Anderson enrolled at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art to pursue an education in animation. Before Bob graduated from The Joe Kubert School, he began his professional career. Hired by Broadcast Arts in New York City, he started work on a variety of commercials.
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Helmi Järviluoma
#152925
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Helmi Järviluoma-Mäkelä is a Finnish sound, music, and cultural scholar and writer. She is a Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Eastern Finland. As sensory and soundscape ethnographer, Järviluoma has developed the mobile method of sensobiographic walking. Her research and art spans the fields of sensory remembering, qualitative methodology , environmental cultural studies, sound art and fiction writing. Helmi Järviluoma was married to Finnish writer Matti Mäkelä .[in Finnish]
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James McCune Smith
1813 - 1865 (52 years)
James McCune Smith was an American physician, apothecary, abolitionist and author. He was the first African American to earn a medical degree. His M.D. was awarded by the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland. After his return to the United States, he also became the first African American to run a pharmacy in the nation.
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John Peel
#42806
Overall Influence
1904 - 2005 (101 years)
Sir John Harold Peel was a leading British obstetrician and gynecologist, who was Surgeon-Gynaecologist to Elizabeth II from 1961 to 1973, present at a number of royal births. Early life The son of a Methodist clergyman, John Harold Peel was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Queen's College, Oxford.
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Carl Joseph Begas
1794 - 1854 (60 years)
Carl Joseph Begas, or Karl Begas, was a German painter who played an important role in the transition from Romanticism to Realism. He was the first in a multi-generational "dynasty" of artists. Life and work His family came from Belgium, in the region near Verviers and Liège. He was the third child of Franz Anton Begasse , a judge, and his wife, Susanne née Hoffstadt. In 1802, they moved to Cologne, where he received his first artistic training from the miniaturist, . Later, he studied at the Lyceum in Bonn with Clemens August Philippart . In 1813, he went to Paris, where he became a student of Antoine-Jean Gros.
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Lizhi Zhang
#185878
Overall Influence
#16574
John Alexander Stewart
1882 - 1948 (66 years)
John Alexander Stewart CIE MC was a classical scholar, colonial public servant, and professor of Burmese. Stewart was born in Strichen, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and educated at the University of Aberdeen where he graduated with first-class honours in classics in 1903. He passed the Indian civil service examination in 1904 and went to Myanmar in 1905. He worked for five years in the Settlement Department where he met J S Furnivall. During the First World War, and the Anglo-Afghan War, Stewart served for years with the Burma Sappers and Miners in Mesopotamia and Persia. He returned to Myanmar and was Commissioner of the Magwe Division in the 1930s.
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Lisa Jackson Pulver
#99769
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Lisa Rae Jackson Pulver is an Aboriginal Australian epidemiologist and researcher in the area of Aboriginal health who has been Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Sydney since October 2018.
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Nadia Badawi
#79128
Overall Influence
Nadia Badawi AM is a medical researcher and an expert on newborn encephalopathy and cerebral palsy. She is the Chair of Cerebral Palsy at the University of Sydney. Life Badawi grew up in Egypt and trained in paediatrics and neonatology there. She later moved to Dublin, Ireland, and arrived in Australia in 1992 to work with Fiona Stanley at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in Perth. Enrolling at the University of Western Australia, and with Stanley as her supervisor, Badawi worked on a research project for her Ph.D, completing it in 1998. The research, into newborn encephalopathy, remains unique in the world.
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Herman Høst
#183814
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Herman Høst was a Norwegian physician. Høst was born in Bærum as a son of physician Herman Fleischer Høst. He graduated with the cand.med. degree in 1951 and took the dr.med. degree in 1966. He was a chief physician at the Norwegian Radium Hospital from 1974 and a professor of radiological cancer therapy at the University of Oslo from 1975. From 1980 to 1985 he was the dean of the Faculty of Medicine. He was also a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He retired in 1996. Høst died on 14 September 2023, at the age of 97.
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Hilda Lloyd
1891 - 1982 (91 years)
Dr. Dame Hilda Nora Lloyd, DBE was a British physician and surgeon. She was the first woman to be elected as president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Born in Birmingham, the younger of two daughters, she attended King Edward VI High School, Edgbaston before entering Birmingham University .
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Steve Green
#98973
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Steve Green is an American Christian music singer. Early life Green was born in Portland, Oregon, to Charles and Jo Green, who were Baptist missionaries. He spent much of his early life in Argentina and then proceeded to attend Phoenix Christian High School along with two of his six siblings. He graduated from Phoenix Christian High School in 1974 and, at age 18, enrolled at Grand Canyon University. His intended major was pre-law, but a professor recognized his musical talent and encouraged him to develop it.
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Ian Edward Smith
#185915
Overall Influence
#16581
Larisa Trembovler
#92263
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
#16582
Alejandro L. Madrid
#96739
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Alejandro Luis Madrid-González is an American music scholar, cultural theorist, and professor, whose research focuses on Latino and Latin American musics and sound practices. He is the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard University.
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Lucius Aemilius Juncus
100 - Present (1926 years)
Lucius Aemilius Juncus was a senator of the Roman Empire, and a philosopher. He was consul suffect in the last three months of 127 with Sextus Julius Severus as his colleague. Life According to John Oliver, Juncus came of an equestrian background. There is a lead tessera found in Beirut attesting to a procurator of Syria named L. Aemilius Juncus , who has been identified with this suffect consul or the suffect consul of 179 who was exiled in 183. In either case, Juncus is likely not related to the patrician Aemilia gens, although he may be descended from a client or freedman of a member of tha...
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James Martin
1550 - 1584 (34 years)
James Martin was a Scottish philosophical writer and early Ramist. Life He was a native of Dunkeld, Perthshire, and is said to have been educated at the University of Oxford. A James Martin, whose college is not mentioned, commenced M.A. at Oxford on 31 March 1522.
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Sölvi Helgason
1820 - 1895 (75 years)
Sölvi Helgason was an artist, philosopher and drifter in Iceland. If he hadn't been arrested, we might not know anything more about Sölvi than folk tales about his life. He never went to school, but was known to always be painting and writing. It is posited from his writings that he was mentally ill and suffered from paranoia; he was known to accuse people of stealing his work. He often referred to himself by made-up names as well as names of playwrights, artists, musicians and philosophers: Sókrates, Plato, Sólon, Melanchthon, Sölvi Spekingur, Sjúlvi, Húsfriður, Sjúlvi Hinn Vitri, Húmboldt, ...
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Sheryl Sandberg
#89256
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Sheryl Kara Sandberg is an American technology executive, philanthropist, and writer. Sandberg served as chief operating officer of Meta Platforms, a position from which she stepped down in August 2022. She is also the founder of LeanIn.Org. In 2008, she was made COO at Facebook, becoming the company's second-highest ranking official. In June 2012, she was elected to Facebook's board of directors, becoming the first woman to serve on its board. As head of the company's advertising business, Sandberg was credited for making the company profitable. Prior to joining Facebook as its COO, Sandber...
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Carlo Cignani
1628 - 1719 (91 years)
Carlo Cignani was an Italian painter. His innovative style referred to as his 'new manner' introduced a reflective, intimate mood of painting and presaged the later pictures of Guido Reni and Guercino, as well as those of Simone Cantarini. This gentle manner marked a break with the more energetic style of earlier Bolognese classicism of the Bolognese School of painting.
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Lynne Brindley
#48037
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Dame Lynne Janie Brindley, is the former Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, a post she held until June 2020. Prior to this appointment she was a professional librarian, and served as the first female chief executive of the British Library, the United Kingdom's national library, from July 2000 to July 2012 and was founding chair of the Digital Preservation Coalition. She is also a member of the Ofcom board.
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Judith Palfrey
#68073
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Judith Palfrey is the T. Berry Brazelton Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the author of Community Child Health: An Action Plan for Today and Child Health In America: Making A Difference Through Advocacy , and co-editor of Global Child Health Advocacy and the Disney Encyclopedia of Baby and Childcare . She is also the former Faculty Dean of Adams House at Harvard University along with her husband Sean Palfrey who is also a pediatrician in Boston.
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James Scott
#70758
Overall Influence
1924 - 2006 (82 years)
James Steel Scott was a Scottish obstetrician and gynaecologist who was a pioneer in the field of reproductive immunology. He was Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Leeds from 1961 to 1989.
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Peter Anderson
#83513
Overall Influence
Peter Anderson is a cinematographer, visual effects supervisor, and expert on specialized imaging technologies, many of which he helped to develop, including modern 3-D, motion control, large format, high frame rate, and high dynamic range.
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Owen Goldin
#185959
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Owen Goldin is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University. He is the President of the Metaphysical Society of America. Goldin is known for his research on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics.
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Erik W. Tawaststjerna
#104996
Overall Influence
1916 - 1993 (77 years)
Erik Werner Tawaststjerna was a Finnish musicologist who also worked as a pianist, pedagogue, and critic. He is remembered as a significant biographer of Jean Sibelius. Biography Erik Werner Tawaststjerna was born in Mikkeli, Grand Duchy of Finland in 1916. His piano studies were with Ilmari Hannikainen, K. Bernhard, Heinrich Leygraf, Heinrich Neuhaus, Alfred Cortot and Jules Gentil. His concert career began in 1943, and was confined to Scandinavia, Vienna and the Soviet Union, after which he became a private teacher. He held posts in the Press and Cultural Affairs Department of the Foreign Ministry of Finland from 1948 to 1960.
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Juan José López-Ibor
#69387
Overall Influence
1906 - 1991 (85 years)
Juan José Lopez-Ibor was a Spanish psychiatrist. He studied medicine at the University of Valencia and of Madrid, where he obtained his doctorate in 1930. In 1932, he was awarded the chair of Legal Medicine in Santiago de Compostela; later, the chair of Psychiatry in Salamanca, In 1960, he succeeded Antonio Vallejo Nájera at the Chair of Psychiatry in Madrid. In 1940, he founded Actas Españolas de Psiquiatría. From a very young age he was considered opposed to the Freudian method of psychoanalysis. In 1967 he created the López Ibor Clinic in Madrid.
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Jalaluddin Umri
#31045
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Syed Jalaluddin Umri was an Islamic scholar and writer. He was the Amir of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind from 2007 to 2019. Early life and education Jalaluddin Umri was born in 1935 in a village called Puttagram, District of North Arcot, Tamil Nadu, British India. He was a graduate of Jamia Darussalam, Oomerabad, Tamil Nadu. He received a master's degree in Islamic Studies from Jamia Darussalam. He also received a bachelor's degree in English literature from Aligarh Muslim University.
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Andrea Hayes-Jordan
#176706
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Andrea A. Hayes Dixon is an American surgeon. She was the first pediatric surgeon to perform a high-risk, life-saving procedure in children with a rare form of cancer and developed the first orthotropic xenograft model of metastatic Ewing's sarcoma. In 2002, she became the first African American female pediatric surgeon board-certified in the United States.
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Donato LaRossa
#94060
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Donato D. LaRossa was a medical doctor and Professor Emeritus of Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Career LaRossa was born in New Jersey in 1941. He received his A.B. from Seton Hall University in 1963 and his M.D. from Georgetown University School of Medicine in 1967. LaRossa served in the United States Army for two years as the Assistant Chief of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Denver, Colorado where he was promoted to the rank of Major. He was also an instructor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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Jason Mittell
#55485
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Jason Mittell is a professor of American studies and film and media culture at Middlebury College whose research interests include the history of television, media, culture, and new media. He is author of three books, Genre and Television , Television and American Culture , and Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling , and co-editor of How To Watch Television .
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Alexander of Lycopolis
300 - Present (1726 years)
Alexander of Lycopolis was the writer of a short treatise, in twenty-six chapters, against the Manicheans . He says in the second chapter of this work that he derived his knowledge of Manes' teaching apo ton gnorimon .
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Thomas D. Kirsch
#39342
Overall Influence
Thomas Dean Kirsch is an American physician, scientist, and writer whose career has focused on disaster preparedness and response. He has been described as “…an expert in disaster research, planning and response, and disaster and wilderness medicine… both nationally and internationally”.
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