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,
#2801
Ljubomir Nedić
1858 - 1902 (44 years)
Ljubomir Nedić was a Serbian philosopher and literary critic. Having received academic training in philosophy at the University of Leipzig, Nedić taught at the Belgrade Higher School beginning in 1885, after having defended his doctorate thesis on Sir William Hamilton's logic. During the 1890s, Nedić left philosophy and began his career as a literary critic. His criticisms were controversial during his time and targeted many highly respected Serbian writers such as Jovan Jovanović Zmaj, Laza Kostić and Milan Milićević. Nedić advocated an interpretation of literary works with minimal attention...
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Peter S. Fosl
#28788
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Peter Stanley Fosl is Professor of Philosophy at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, and the winner of a 2006 Acorn Award for outstanding professor in Kentucky. Education and professional life Fosl graduated from Freedom High School in 1981 and then summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Bucknell University in 1985 with Bachelor of Arts degrees in both philosophy and economics; he spent the Lent Term of 1984 at the London School of Economics. In 1986, Fosl became a Woodruff Fellow at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, winning Emory's Award for Excellence in Graduate Research in 1989 and taking a Master of Arts in Philosophy the following year.
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Andreas Dorschel
#16877
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Andreas Dorschel is a German philosopher. Since 2002, he has been professor of aesthetics and head of the Institute for Music Aesthetics at the University of the Arts Graz . Background Andreas Dorschel was born in 1962 in Wiesbaden, West Germany. He is a cousin of the modernist visual artist Gesine Probst-Bösch . From 1983 on, Dorschel studied philosophy, musicology and linguistics at the universities of Frankfurt am Main and Vienna . In 2002, the University of Bern awarded him the Habilitation degree . Dorschel has taught at universities in Switzerland, Austria, Germany and the UK. At University of East Anglia Norwich , he was a colleague of writer W.G.
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Sheila Jasanoff
#7181
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Sheila Sen Jasanoff is an Indian American academic and significant contributor to the field of Science and Technology Studies. In 2021 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. Her research has been recognized with many awards, including the 2022 Holberg Prize "for her groundbreaking research in science and technology studies."
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Emilio Lledó
#9515
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Emilio Lledó Íñigo is a Spanish philosopher. He has been a professor at several universities and is a member of the Royal Spanish Academy. Career He took his bachelor's degree at the Instituto de Bachillerato Cervantes and, in 1952, his degree in philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid. He went to Germany to continue his studies in classical philosophy with Hans-Georg Gadamer, who helped him to finish his doctoral thesis by securing him a scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 1955, he obtained a position at the Complutense University of Madrid, but returned to ...
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Takaaki Yoshimoto
#9128
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
, also known as Ryūmei Yoshimoto, was a Japanese poet, philosopher, and literary critic. As a philosopher, he is remembered as a founding figure in the emergence of the New Left in Japan, and as a critic, he was at the forefront of a movement to force writers to confront their responsibility as wartime collaborators.
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Yanagi Sōetsu
1889 - 1961 (72 years)
Yanagi Sōetsu, also known as Yanagi Muneyoshi, was a Japanese art critic, philosopher, and founder of the mingei movement in Japan in the late 1920s and 1930s. Personal life Yanagi was born in 1889 to Yanagi Narayoshi, a hydrographer of the Imperial Navy and Katsuko.
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Naomi Oreskes
#5269
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
#2809
George Sylvester Morris
1840 - 1889 (49 years)
George Sylvester Morris was a 19th-century American educator and philosophical writer. Biography Morris was born in Norwich, Vermont. He was the son of a well known abolitionist and temperance man. In 1861, he graduated from Dartmouth College, served in the Union army for two years during the American Civil War, and taught at Dartmouth in 1863–1864.
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Stephen Mumford
#40368
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Stephen Dean Mumford is a British philosopher, who is currently Head of Department and Professor of Metaphysics in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University. Mumford is best known for his work in metaphysics on dispositions and laws, but has also made contributions in the philosophy of sport.
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Ansgar Beckermann
#41771
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ansgar Beckermann is a German philosopher who deals primarily with philosophy of mind and epistemology. He is professor for philosophy at the University of Bielefeld and was the president of the "Gesellschaft für analytische Philosophie" . Beckermann is known for his arguments for physicalism and his discussion of the concept of emergence.
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Stephen Mulhall
#28153
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Stephen Mulhall is a British philosopher and Fellow of New College, Oxford. His main research areas are Ludwig Wittgenstein and post-Kantian philosophy. Education and career Stephen Mulhall received a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford in 1983. He then pursued an MA in Philosophy from The University of Toronto in 1984, during which time he spent several weeks studying under Sir Isaiah Berlin at Harvard. Between 1984 and 1988, he attended Balliol College and All Souls College, Oxford for his DPhil in Philosophy. From 1986 to 1991 he was a Prize Fellow at All Souls College and in 1991 he became a Reader of Philosophy at the University of Essex.
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H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr.
#29218
Overall Influence
1941 - 2018 (77 years)
Hugo Tristram Engelhardt Jr. was an American philosopher, holding doctorates in both philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin and medicine from Tulane University. He was a professor of philosophy at Rice University, in Houston, Texas, specializing in the history and philosophy of medicine, particularly from the standpoint of continental philosophy. He was also a professor emeritus at Baylor College of Medicine, and a member of the Baylor Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy.
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David H. Sanford
#33672
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
David H. Sanford was a professor of philosophy at Duke University. He specializes in perception and metaphysics. Sanford studied at Cass Technical High School, Oberlin College and at Wayne State University. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1966, taught at Dartmouth College from 1963 to 1970, and joined the Duke Faculty in 1970. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Michigan and the University of Oregon.
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John Norris
1657 - 1711 (54 years)
John Norris, sometimes called John Norris of Bemerton , was an English theologian, philosopher and poet associated with the Cambridge Platonists. Life John Norris was born at Collingbourne Kingston, Wiltshire. He was educated at Winchester School, and Exeter College, Oxford, gaining a B.A. in 1680. He was later appointed a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford . He lived a quiet life as a country parson and thinker at Fugglestone St Peter with Bemerton, Wiltshire, from 1692 until his death early in 1712.
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Edward Wheeler Scripture
1864 - 1945 (81 years)
Edward Wheeler Scripture was an American physician and psychologist. He founded the experimental psychology laboratory at Yale University, directed the Vanderbilt Speech Clinic at Columbia University and was a founder of the American Psychological Association. Trained under experimental psychology pioneer Wilhelm Wundt, Scripture became best known for his contributions to speech science.
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Peter Goadsby
#33344
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Peter Goadsby FRS FRACP FRCP is an Australian neuroscientist who is Director of the National Institute for Health Research - Wellcome Trust King’s Clinical Research Facility and Professor of Neurology at King's College London. His research has focused particularly on the mechanism and alleviation of migraine and cluster headaches.
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Victor Kanke
#21139
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Victor Andreyevich Kanke is a Russian philosopher born in the village of Nekrasovo, Slavgorod District, Altai Territory to a German family. He taught physics at school and philosophy at the Biysk State Teacher Training Institute and the Obninsk Institute for Nuclear Power Engineering .
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Mark de Bretton Platts
#41887
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Mark de Bretton Platts is a philosopher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México . He is well known for criticizing the Humean theory of motivation, especially in his book Ways of Meaning .
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Alice Hamilton
1869 - 1970 (101 years)
Alice Hamilton was an American physician, research scientist, and author. She was a leading expert in the field of occupational health, laid the foundation for health and safety protections, and a pioneer in the field of industrial toxicology.
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William of Conches
1080 - 1154 (74 years)
William of Conches was a French scholastic philosopher who sought to expand the bounds of Christian humanism by studying secular works of the classics and fostering empirical science. He was a prominent member of the School of Chartres. John of Salisbury, a bishop of Chartres and former student of William's, refers to William as the most talented grammarian after Bernard of Chartres.
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Georgia Harkness
1891 - 1974 (83 years)
Georgia Elma Harkness was an American Methodist theologian and philosopher. Harkness has been described as one of the first significant American female theologians and was important in the movement to legalize the ordination of women in American Methodism.
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Gaston Berger
1896 - 1960 (64 years)
Gaston Berger was a French futurist but also an industrialist, a philosopher and a state manager. He is mainly known for his remarkably lucid analysis of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and for his studies on the character structure.
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Clancy Martin
#18061
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Clancy Martin is a Canadian philosopher, novelist, and essayist. His interests focus on 19th century philosophy, existentialism, moral psychology, philosophy and literature, ethics & behavioral health, applied and professional ethics and philosophy of mind.
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Charles De Koninck
1906 - 1965 (59 years)
Charles De Koninck was a Belgian-Canadian Thomist philosopher and theologian. As director of the Department of Philosophy at the Université Laval in Quebec, he influenced Catholic philosophy in French Canada and also influenced Catholic philosophers in English Canada and the United States. The author of many books and articles in French and English, he contributed to a variety of philosophical fields including natural philosophy, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and political philosophy, but he also wrote on theology, especially Mariology.
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Prashastapada
#36363
Overall Influence
was an ancient Indian philosopher. He wrote the Padārtha-dharma-saṅgraha and a commentary, titled Praśastapāda Bhāṣya, on the Vaisheshika Sutrass of Kanada ; both texts are comprehensive books in physics. In these texts Prashastapada discusses the properties of motion. Ganganath Jha had translated Praśastapāda Bhāṣya which was published in 1916. Prashasta or Praśasta means praised or praiseworthy, lauded or laudable, commended or commendable or eulogized.
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Elisabeth Camp
#34769
Overall Influence
Elisabeth Camp is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. Camp's work has focused on forms of thought and speech that do not fit standard propositional models. She has written extensively about figurative speech such as sarcasm and metaphor, arguing that these forms of speech force listeners to reconsider their standard methods of delineating the difference between what is meant and what is said.
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Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
1657 - 1757 (100 years)
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle , also called Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, was a French author and an influential member of three of the academies of the Institut de France, noted especially for his accessible treatment of scientific topics during the unfolding of the Age of Enlightenment.
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Carlo Cattaneo
1801 - 1869 (68 years)
Carlo Cattaneo was an Italian philosopher, writer, and activist, famous for his role in the Five Days of Milan in March 1848, when he led the city council during the rebellion. Early life and education Cattaneo was born in Milan on 15 June 1801. He was the son of Melchiorre Cattaneo, a goldsmith, and Maria Antonia Sangiorgi. After attending school in Milan he studied law at the University of Pavia, graduating in 1824.
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Shunpei Ueyama
#45562
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Shunpei Ueyama was a Japanese philosopher associated with the postwar Kyoto School. He graduated in philosophy from Kyoto University in 1943, and trained in a kamikaze human torpedo squad. His main professional interest in philosophy were in the fields of logic, and American pragmatism, especially with its founding fathers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey. He was emeritus professor at Kyoto University.
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Nikolay Strakhov
1828 - 1896 (68 years)
Nikolay Nikolayevich Strakhov, also transliterated as Nikolai Strahov , was a Russian philosopher, publicist, journalist and literary critic. He shared the ideals of Pochvennichestvo and was a longtime friend and correspondent of Leo Tolstoy.
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Svetozar Marković
1846 - 1875 (29 years)
Svetozar Marković was a Serbian political activist, literary critic and socialist philosopher. He developed an activistic anthropological philosophy with a definite program of social change. He was called the Serbian Nikolay Dobrolyubov.
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John Skorupski
#30129
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
John Skorupski is a British philosopher whose main interests are epistemology, ethics and moral philosophy, political philosophy, and the history of 19th and 20th century philosophy. He is best known for his work on John Stuart Mill and his study of normativity, The Domain of Reasons. His most recent publication is Being and Freedom: on Late Modern Ethics in Europe.
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Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison
1856 - 1931 (75 years)
Andrew Seth, FBA, DCL , who changed his name to Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison in 1898 to fulfill the terms of a bequest, was a Scottish philosopher. His brother was James Seth, also a philosopher. Early life and education Their father, Smith Kinmont Seth, was the son of a farmer from Fife and a bank clerk in the head office of the Commercial Bank of Scotland. Their mother, Margaret, was the daughter of Andrew Little a farmer from Berwickshire. An elder brother died in infancy.
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Raymond Ruyer
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Raymond Ruyer was a French philosopher in the late 20th century. His work covered topics including the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of informatics, the philosophy of value and others. His most popular book is The Gnosis of Princeton in which he presents his own philosophical views under the pretence that he was representing the views of an imaginary group of American scientists. He developed an account of panpsychism which was a major influence on philosophers such as Adolf Portmann, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
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William Vorilong
1390 - 1463 (73 years)
William Vorilong, also known as Guillermus Vorrilong, Willem of Verolon, William of Vaurouillon, Guilelmus de Valle Rouillonis, etc. was a French philosopher and theologian. He wrote a biography of Duns Scotus. From 1457 onwards he was a regent master in Lyon, becoming licentiate and master of theology at Lyon in 1458.
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Ewa Ziarek
#36278
Overall Influence
Ewa Ziarek is the Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature at The State University of New York at Buffalo . She has a major interest in engaging with other scholars on their own terms, and believes that a model of dissensus in philosophy, rather than the traditional consensus model, may produce highly valuable results.
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Iain Thomson
#22039
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Iain D. Thomson is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico . He is a well-known expert on Martin Heidegger. Education and career Thomson studied as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked with Hubert Dreyfus, and then earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. As a visiting graduate student at UC Irvine, he also studied with Jacques Derrida. He is known for his expertise on Heidegger's philosophy, European philosophy since Kant, philosophy of education, philosophy of technology, p...
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Carol P. Christ
#10182
Overall Influence
1945 - 2021 (76 years)
Carol Patrice Christ was a feminist historian, thealogian, author, and foremother of the Goddess movement. She obtained her PhD from Yale University and served as a professor at universities such as Columbia University and Harvard Divinity School. Her best-known publication is "Why Women Need The Goddess". It was initially a keynote presentation at the "Great Goddess Re-emerging" conference" at the University of Santa Cruz in 1978. This essay helped to launch the Goddess movement in the U.S. and other countries. It discusses the importance of religious symbols in general, and the effects of male symbolism of God on women in particular.
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Hermann Brenner
#49963
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
#2841
Gerald Sacks
#13452
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Gerald Enoch Sacks was a logician whose most important contributions were in recursion theory. Named after him is Sacks forcing, a forcing notion based on perfect sets and the Sacks Density Theorem, which asserts that the partial order of the recursively enumerable Turing degrees is dense. Sacks had a joint appointment as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard University starting in 1972 and became emeritus at M.I.T. in 2006 and at Harvard in 2012.
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Tim van Gelder
#13892
Overall Influence
Tim van Gelder is the co-founder of Austhink Software, an Australian software development company, and the Managing Director of Austhink Consulting. He was born in Australia, and was educated at the University of Melbourne . He went on to receive his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh . He has held academic positions at Indiana University and the Australian National University before returning to Melbourne as an Australian Research Council QEII Research Fellow. In 1998, he transitioned to part-time academic work allowing him to pursue private training and consulting, and in 2005 began working full-time at Austhink Software.
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Jean-Luc Godard
#2931
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Jean-Luc Godard was a Franco-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Demy. He was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era. According to AllMovie, his work "revolutionized the motion picture form" through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork. His most acclaimed films include Breathless , Vivre sa vie , Contempt , Band of Outsiders , Alphaville , Pierrot l...
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Alicia Puleo
#17031
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Alicia Helda Puleo García is an Argentine-born feminist philosopher based in Spain. She is known for the development of ecofeminist thinking. Among her main publications is Ecofeminismo para otro mundo posible .
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Myroslav Popovych
#25883
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Myroslav Popovych was a Ukrainian philosopher, DA, professor, Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Biography Popovych was born on 12 April 1930 in Zhytomyr, in the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union . In 1953 he graduated from the Taras Shevchenko University, philosophy department. In 2001 he became the director of the Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. In 2003 he was elected Academician of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences.
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Max Cresswell
#40000
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Maxwell John Cresswell is a New Zealand philosopher and logician, known for his work in modal logic. Education and career Cresswell received his B.A. in 1960 and M.A. in 1961 from the University of New Zealand and then with the support of a Commonwealth Scholarship attended the Victoria University of Manchester, where he received in 1964 his PhD under the supervision of A. N. Prior. Cresswell's thesis was titled General and Specific Logics of Functions of Propositions. After returning to New Zealand, Cresswell was at the Victoria University of Wellington, from 1963 to 1967 as a lecturer, from...
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Ronald B. Levinson
1896 - 1980 (84 years)
Ronald Bartlett Levinson was an American philosopher who focused in his work on Plato. Life He was born October 18, 1896, in Chicago, Illinois, and died November 21, 1980, in Bangor, Maine.1920 A.B. from Harvard University.1924 Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.1926 University of Maine.1927 Professor and Head of the department of philosophy.
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Lance Liotta
#44069
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Lance A. Liotta is the Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine at George Mason University. His research team was the first to propose the existence of the autocrine motility factor. In 1985, he received the Rhoads Award from the American Association for Cancer Research. In 1987, he received the National Lectureship Award from the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. His other awards include the Warner-Lambert Parke Davis Award and the Surgeon General's Medallion.
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İoanna Kuçuradi
#17773
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Ioanna Kuçuradi is a Turkish philosopher from Istanbul. She is currently the president of Philosophical Society of Turkey and a full-time academic of Maltepe University. Biography Kuçuradi was born on October 4, 1936, in Istanbul, Turkey. After finishing Zappeion Greek Gymnasium for Girls in Istanbul in 1954, she studied philosophy at Istanbul University, from where she graduated with a B.A. degree in 1959. She earned a Ph.D. degree at the same university in 1965. Ioanna Kuçuradi worked as an assistant professor at her alma mater and the Atatürk University in Erzurum.
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Mary Somerville
1780 - 1872 (92 years)
Mary Somerville was a Scottish scientist, writer, and polymath. She studied mathematics and astronomy, and in 1835 she and Caroline Herschel were elected as the first female Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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