The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#17251
Ralph Brown
#83999
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Ralph William John Brown is an English actor and writer, known for playing Danny the drug dealer in Withnail and I, the security guard Aaron in Alien 3, DJ Bob Silver in The Boat That Rocked aka Pirate Radio, super-roadie Del Preston in Wayne's World 2, the pilot Ric Olié in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, and Henry Clinton in Turn: Washington's Spies. He won the Samuel Beckett Award for his first play Sanctuary written for Joint Stock Theatre Company in 1987, and the Raindance and Sapporo Film Festival awards for his first screenplay for the British film New Year's Day in 2001.
Go to Profile#17252
Hiroki Ueda
#89493
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
is a Japanese professor of biology at the University of Tokyo and the RIKEN Quantitative Biology Center. He is known for his studies on the circadian clock. Career Hiroki R. Ueda was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1975. He graduated from the Faculty of Medicine, the University of Tokyo in 2000, and obtained his Ph.D. in 2004 from the same university. He was appointed as a team leader in RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology from 2003 and promoted to be a project leader at RIKEN CDB in 2009, and to be a group director at RIKEN Quantitative Biology Center in 2011. He became a professor of Graduate School of Medicine, the University of Tokyo in 2013.
Go to Profile#17253
Maude Abbott
1869 - 1940 (71 years)
Maude Elizabeth Seymour Abbott was a Canadian physician, among Canada's earliest female medical graduates, and an internationally known expert on congenital heart disease. She was one of the first women to obtain a BA from McGill University.
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Sidney Gordin
#68111
Overall Influence
1918 - 1996 (78 years)
Sidney Alexander Gordin was a Russian-born American artist and educator, known for his abstract paintings, prints, and sculptures. He was a Professor Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1958 to 1986. Gordin was associated with abstract expressionism and constructivism.
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Dante Della Terza
#83750
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Dante Della Terza was an Italian academic living and working in the United States. Biography He studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, under the supervision of Luigi Russo, a major critic between the 1930s and the 1960s. After studying philology in Zurich and teaching in Italy for some time, Della Terza moved to Los Angeles, where he started teaching Italian at the University of California Los Angeles. In the early 60's he moved to Harvard University, where he was Professor of Romance Languages and the Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literatures until Fall 1993. His supervision was fundamental for many American scholars in Italian literature.
Go to Profile#17256
Axel Beer
#111148
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Axel Beer is a German musicologist. He has been teaching at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz since 1995. Born in Fulda, Beer studied musicology, Latin philology and auxiliary sciences of history at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main .
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Alexander Robertson
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Sir Alexander Robertson was a Scottish veterinarian and administrator. Life Robertson was born on 3 February 1908 in Aberdeen, the youngest and only surviving child of Barbara Minty Strath and Alexander Robertson, a chauffeur and gardener. He was educated at Mackie Academy in Stonehaven.
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Thomas Lewis
1881 - 1945 (64 years)
Sir Thomas Lewis, CBE, FRS, FRCP was a Welsh cardiologist. He coined the term "clinical science". Early life and education Lewis was born in Taffs Well, Cardiff, Wales, the son of Henry Lewis, a mining engineer, and his wife Catherine Hannah . He was educated at home by his mother, apart from a year at Clifton College, which he left due to ill-health, and the final two years by a tutor. Already planning to become a doctor, at the age of sixteen he began a Bachelor of Science course at University College, Cardiff, graduating three years later with first class honours. In 1902 he entered University College Hospital in London to train as a doctor, graduating MBBS with the gold medal in 1905.
Go to Profile#17259
Alice Rebecca Brooks McGuire
1902 - 1975 (73 years)
Alice "Sally" Rebecca Brooks McGuire was an American librarian. She was named Librarian of the Year by the Texas Library Association, and taught at the University of Texas in its Graduate School of Library Science.
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Leonard Thompson
1908 - 1935 (27 years)
Leonard Thompson is the first person to have received an injection of insulin as a treatment for Type 1 diabetes. Biography Thompson was first treated at the Hospital for Sick Children before being transferred to the care of physicians Andrew Almon Fletcher, Duncan Archibald Graham, and Walter Ruggles Campbell. Thompson received his first injection in Toronto, Ontario, on 11 January 1922, at 13 years of age. The first injection had an apparent impurity which was the likely cause for the allergic reaction he displayed. After a refined process was developed by James Collip to improve the canine...
Go to Profile#17261
Michael Bernhard Valentini
1657 - 1729 (72 years)
Michael Bernhard Valentini was a German doctor and a collector. After obtaining his doctorate in 1686 in Giessen he became Professor of Medicine in that city and personal physician to the Margrave of Assia. He had an important Cabinet of curiosities and was the author of Museorum Museum, the first study of collections in Europe. In 1720 he published a work on the comparative anatomy of vertebrates. He was elected a Member of the Royal Society on 10 November 1715 and was also a Member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher and the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin.
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Hans Skjervheim
#92117
Overall Influence
1926 - 1999 (73 years)
Hans Skjervheim was a Norwegian philosopher. He was born in Voss. He was a research fellow at the University of Oslo from 1963, professor at the Roskilde University from 1968, lector at the University of Bergen from 1969, and professor there from 1982. His work Deltakar og tilskodar og andre essays was selected for the Norwegian Sociology Canon in 2009–2011.
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Michael Glanzberg
#187758
Overall Influence
Michael Glanzberg is an American analytic philosopher specializing in philosophy of language and philosophical logic who is currently affiliated with Rutgers University. He received his PhD in philosophy from Harvard University, where Charles Parsons and Warren Goldfarb supervised his dissertation. Glanzberg has previously held faculty positions at Northwestern University, University of California, Davis, University of Toronto, and MIT. Often working at the intersection of logic and the philosophy of language, Glanzberg is recognized for his work on quantification, paradox, semantics, theories of truth, and the role of context in various linguistic settings.
Go to Profile#17264
G. R. Searle
#59523
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Geoffrey Russell Searle, born 1941, is a British historian, specialising in British nineteenth century history. He is Emeritus Professor at the University of East Anglia. Works The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899-1914 .Eugenics and Politics in Britain, 1900-1914 .Corruption in British Politics, 1895-1930 .The Liberal Party: Triumph and Disintegration, 1886-1929 .Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid-Victorian Britain .Country Before Party: Coalition and the Idea of National Government in Modern Britain, 1885-1987 .Morality and the Market in Vic...
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Joseph Schmidt-Görg
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Joseph Schmidt-Görg was a German musicologist, composer and music editor. As a researcher at the University of Bonn and director of the Beethoven Archive, he is regarded as one of the leading Beethoven scholars of his time. He completed the new edition of Beethoven's complete works.
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C. Mel Wilcox
#188550
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Charles Melburn "Mel" Wilcox is a professor of medicine and director of the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. Wilcox has authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications, book chapters, and miscellaneous articles such as Atlas of Clinical Gastrointestinal Endoscopy.
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Charles Frederick Hartt
1840 - 1878 (38 years)
Charles Frederick Hartt was a Canadian-American geologist, paleontologist and naturalist who specialized in the geology of Brazil. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick Hartt graduated from Acadia College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, in 1860, and by his graduation he had made extensive geological explorations in Nova Scotia. In 1860, he accompanied his father, Jarvis William Hartt, to Saint John, New Brunswick, where they established a high school for young women in which Charles Frederick taught for a year. Hartt also studied the geology of New Brunswick, and devoted special attention to the Devonian ...
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Celio Calcagnini
1479 - 1541 (62 years)
Celio Calcagnini , also known as Caelius Calcagninus, was an Italian humanist and scientist from Ferrara. His learning as displayed in his collected works is very broad. He had a wide experience: as soldier, academic, diplomat and in the chancery of Ippolito d'Este. He was consulted by Richard Croke on behalf of Henry VIII of England in the question of the latter's divorce. He was a major influence on Rabelais's literary and linguistic ideas and is presumed to have met him in Italy, as well as being a teacher of Clément Marot and was praised by Erasmus.
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Lois Mai Chan
#71402
Overall Influence
1934 - 2014 (80 years)
Lois Mai Chan was an American librarian, author, and professor at the University of Kentucky School of Library and Information Science until 2011. Her publications on cataloging, library classification, and subject indexing were recognized with various awards.
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Mary Ronnie
#81929
Overall Influence
1926 - 2023 (97 years)
Mary Allan Ronnie was a New Zealand librarian. She was New Zealand's first female National Librarian, from 1976 to 1981, and the first woman in the world to head a national library. Before becoming National Librarian she was head of Dunedin Public Library, and afterwards she served as Auckland City Librarian.
Go to Profile#17271
Jean-Jacques Askenasy
#100621
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Jean-Jacques Askenasy is an Israeli neurologist. He is an honorary member of the Romanian Academy. Biography Askenasy received his doctorate in medicine degree cum laude from the University of Cluj in Romania 1954. Appointed instructor of neurology in his 5 ler School of Medicine. Residence of Neurology- Neurological Institute of Academy 1956. Doctor in Science at the University C.I.Parhon Bucharest, 1969. Chairman of the dpt. of Neurology at the University Hospital CFR II Bucharest. In 1973 neurologist at Ichilov Hospital-Tel Aviv University. Researcher in Neuroscience at Weitzman Institute 1974–1975.In 1981 was appointed Associated Prof.
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Michèle Cloonan
#157543
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Michèle V. Cloonan is an American library and information science educator. She is a professor in the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University, in Boston, Massachusetts, and Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons. She is an advocate for the preservation of cultural heritage.
Go to Profile#17273
Ammonius of Alexandria
Ammonius of Alexandria is assumed to be a Christian philosopher who lived in the 3rd century. He is possibly Ammonius Saccas, the Neoplatonist philosopher, also from Alexandria. Life Eusebius, who is followed by Jerome, asserted that Ammonius was born a Christian, and remained faithful to Christianity throughout his life. He wrote that Ammonius produced several scholarly works, most notably The Harmony of Moses and Jesus. Eusebius also wrote that Ammonius composed a synopsis of the four canonical gospels, traditionally assumed to be the Ammonian Sections, now known as the Eusebian Canons.
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Jean Arnauld
#84839
Overall Influence
Jean Arnauld was a French philosopher and theologian of the 17th century. He predominantly lived in Reims and most of his work was focused on logic and the failure of reason. He was unrelated to Antoine Arnauld, although contemporaneous. His arguments that reason is flawed are what he is most known for.
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Latunde Odeku
1927 - 1974 (47 years)
E. Latunde Odeku was the first Nigerian neurosurgeon trained in the United States who also pioneered neurosurgery in Africa. Early life and education Of Yoruba heritage, Latunde was born in Lagos, Nigeria. His father was a native of Awe while his mother was a Lagosian. He attended Methodist Boys High School, Lagos. and proceeded to Howard University and graduated summa cum laude in Zoology in 1950. He was subsequently awarded a scholarship to study Medicine at Howard University, earning his MD in 1954.
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Christian of Prachatice
1368 - 1439 (71 years)
Christian of Prachatice was a medieval Bohemian astronomer, mathematician and former Catholic priest who converted to the Hussite movement. He was the author of several books about medicine and herbs, and contributed to the field of astronomy with many papers and data recordings.
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Angela Byars-Winston
#101335
Overall Influence
Angela Michelle Byars-Winston is a professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was the first African American to achieve the rank of tenured Full Professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She studies the impact of culture on career development, in particular for women and minorities in STEM. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and was one of Barack Obama's Champions of Change.
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Alfred Michael
#122895
Overall Influence
Alfred Michael was an American physician and medical educator and scientist. He was Emeritus Regents' Professor and Dean of the university of Minnesota Medical School and previously served as chair of the department of pediatrics. He was Regents' Professor and dean of the University of Minnesota Medical School. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was president of the American Society of Nephrology from which he received the Peters Award. He received numerous other awards and was a member of numerous academic and scientific societies. A cited...
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Chen Hongmou
1696 - 1771 (75 years)
Chen Hongmou , courtesy name Ruzi and Rongmen , was a Chinese official, scholar, and philosopher, who is widely regarded as a model official of the Qing dynasty. Early life Chen was born in Lingui, Guangxi, to a family who migrated from Chenzhou in Hunan province in the late Ming dynasty. He was noted for the longest total service and most provincial posts than any other official during the Qing dynasty. In their work Anthology of Qing Statecraft Writings, He Changling and Wei Yuan praised him as an exemplary official, being surpassed only by Gu Yanwu.
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Margaret Mann
1873 - 1960 (87 years)
Margaret Mann was a noted librarian and teacher who dominated the field of cataloging for almost fifty years. The bulk of her career was spent as a professor at the University of Michigan. She was hired as one of the first three full-time faculty members in the department of library science at Michigan in 1926 and retired in 1938. In 1999, American Libraries named her one of the "100 Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century".
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Heinrich Sievers
#176483
Overall Influence
1908 - 1999 (91 years)
Heinrich Sievers was a German musicologist, music critic, university lecturer, and conductor. He was regarded as an authority on the history of music in Hanover and Lower Saxony, and wrote music-historical monographs in English and Finnish publications.
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Peter Agostini
#82393
Overall Influence
1913 - 1993 (80 years)
Peter Agostini was an American sculptor. Life Agostini studied at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School in 1935 and 1936. He taught sculpture and painting at the New York Studio School, Columbia University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the Parsons School of Design.
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Selmar Aschheim
1878 - 1965 (87 years)
Selmar Aschheim was a German gynecologist who was a native resident of Berlin. Born into a Jewish family, in 1902 he received a doctorate of medicine in Freiburg, and later became director of the laboratory of the Universitäts-Frauenklinik at the Berlin Charité. In 1930 Aschheim attained the chair of biological research in gynecology at the University of Berlin. In 1933 he fled Nazi Germany and moved to Paris, where he worked in medical research at the Hôpital Beaujon.
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Susanne Rode-Breymann
#116228
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Susanne Rode-Breymann is a German musicologist and since 2010 the president of the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien in Hanover. Biography Rode-Breymann studied early music and music education at the Hamburg Conservatory and musicology, art history and literature at the University of Hamburg and received her doctorate in 1988 with a thesis on Alban Berg and Karl Kraus. She was a researcher at the University of Bayreuth and the University of Bonn , a research fellow of the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel in 1989 researching Anton Webern etc. From 1996 to 1999 she taught as a universit...
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William Ashbrook
#33891
Overall Influence
1922 - 2009 (87 years)
William Ashbrook was an American musicologist, writer, journalist, and academic. He was perhaps best noted as a historian, researcher and popularizer of the works of Italian opera composer Gaetano Donizetti.
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Gerbrand Bakker
1771 - 1828 (57 years)
Gerbrand Bakker was an eminent Dutch physician, professor at the University of Groningen. He first studied medicine with M.S. du Pui, physician in Alkmaar. In 1788 he enrolled at the University of Groningen, transferring two years later to the University of Leiden, where he received his doctorate in May 1794. His instructors were the celebrated Dupui, Sandifort, Paradys, and Voltelen. He married Jacoba Johanna Poel on January 4, 1800 at Enkhuizen. He practised first at Edam, and was made a reader at the Teyler surgical school at Haarlem in 1806. The next year, he declined a professorship at the University of Franeker.
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Robert M. Epstein
#97339
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Robert Marvin Epstein is an American anesthesiologist, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, and the Harold Carron Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Virginia. Early life and education Epstein was born in the Bronx, New York on March 10, 1928, the son of immigrants from Slonim, in present-day Belarus. He attended primary school in the Bronx, and completed his secondary education in Miami Beach, Florida where the family moved in 1940. From there he attended the University of Michigan from 1944 to 1951, where he obtained both his bachelor's and MD degrees. Epstein serv...
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Edmund Biernacki
1866 - 1911 (45 years)
Edmund Faustyn Biernacki was a Polish physician. Biernacki was the first one to note a relationship between the sedimentation rate of red blood cells in a human blood sample and the general condition of the organism. This method, known as the Biernacki Reaction, is used worldwide to assess erythrocyte sedimentation rate , which is one of the major blood tests.
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Wilhelm Daniel Joseph Koch
1771 - 1849 (78 years)
Wilhelm Daniel Joseph Koch was a German physician and botanist from Kusel, a town in the Rhineland-Palatinate. Education Koch studied medicine at the Universities of Jena and Marburg, and afterwards was a Stadtphysicus in Trarbach and Kaiserslautern . In 1824 he became a professor of medicine and botany at the University of Erlangen, where he stayed for the remainder of his life. At Erlangen, he was also director of the botanical gardens. In 1833, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
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Sara Cohen
#178525
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Sara Cohen is a musicologist and academic. She completed her doctoral studies at the University of Oxford; her DPhil in social anthropology was awarded in 1987. The following year, she joined the newly founded Institute of Popular Music at the University of Liverpool as a research fellow; she has remained with the IPM since then, and is its director as of 2018. Since 2017, she has also been the James and Constance Alsop Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool. She is a specialist in ethnographic research into popular music. Her first book Rock Culture in Liverpool has been described...
Go to Profile#17291
Thomas L. Riis
#97567
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Thomas L. Riis or Thomas Laurence Riis is an American musicologist and professor. His current position is the Joseph Negler Professor of Musicology and Director of the American Music Research Center at the College of Music, at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Go to Profile#17292
Georg Heinrich Weber
1752 - 1828 (76 years)
Georg Heinrich Weber was a German botanist, physician and professor at the University of Kiel. He was also the father of Friedrich Weber, the German entomologist. In botany, Weber was known for his work on lichens, algae, and bryophytes in addition to seed plants.
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Henry Mwandumba
#150491
Overall Influence
Henry Charles Mwandumba is an African Professor of Medicine and the Director of the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Programme. He works on the tuberculosis phagosome in the University of Malawi College of Medicine, and serves as President of the Federation of African Immunological Societies. In 2019 Mwandumba was awarded the Royal Society Africa Prize.
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Bhisham Sahni
#78281
Overall Influence
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
Bhisham Sahni was an Indian writer, playwright in Hindi and an actor, most famous for his novel and television screenplay Tamas , a powerful and passionate account of the Partition of India. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan for literature in 1998, and Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 2002. He was the younger brother of the noted Hindi film actor, Balraj Sahni.
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Andrzej Abrek
1650 - 1700 (50 years)
Andrzej Abrek was a Polish philosopher. A rector and professor, he was the author of several Latin panegyrics.
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Thomas Horsfield
1773 - 1859 (86 years)
Thomas Horsfield was an American physician and naturalist who worked extensively in Indonesia, describing numerous species of plants and animals from the region. He was later a curator of the East India Company Museum in London.
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Larry Travis
#73136
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Larry E. Travis was a Professor Emeritus at the Department of Computer Sciences as the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He had a faculty position at the University of Wisconsin as early as 1964 until 1994. He got his Ph.D. from University of California, Los Angeles in 1966, with a dissertation titled as: A Logical Analysis of the Concept of Stored Program: A Step Toward a Possible Theory of Rational Learning.
Go to Profile#17298
David Ludwig
#73521
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
David S. Ludwig is an American endocrinologist and low-carbohydrate diet advocate in Boston, Massachusetts. Education Ludwig received a PhD and an MD from Stanford University School of Medicine. He completed an internship and residency in pediatrics and a fellowship in pediatric endocrinology at Boston Children's Hospital.
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James Clark McKerrow
1887 - 1965 (78 years)
James Clark McKerrow was a British physician and philosopher. Biography McKerrow was born on 21 May 1887 in Workington. He was educated at University of Edinburgh and obtained his M.B. in 1912. During World War I he served in the Territorial Army but after being wounded joined family medical practice in Workington. McKerrow dedicated much of his life to studying evolution, philosophy, psychology and religious experiences. He studied at the British Museum Reading Room and filled 500 notebooks with his ideas. He wrote numerous philosophical and psychology books.
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Robert McMurtry
#78335
Overall Influence
Robert McMurtry is a physician and special advisor to the Canadian Royal Commission on the Future of Health Care. He is actively involved in discussions on creating an accessible medical system for the Canadian public, and has long advocated for more effective public involvement in healthcare policy.
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