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,
#3601
Leonard Linsky
#58909
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
Leonard Linsky was an American philosopher of language. He was an Emeritus Professor of the University of Chicago. Philosophical work Linsky was best known for work on the theory of reference, and also as an historian of early analytical philosophy. He is often cited as an example of the "orthodox view" in the theory of reference. He questioned the "intensional isomorphism" concept of Rudolf Carnap.
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M. C. Chang
#63951
Overall Influence
#3603
Khan Bahadur Ahsanullah
1874 - 1965 (91 years)
Khan Bahadur Ahsanullah was an educator, litterateur, Islamic theologist and social reformer of pre-partition India. He was instrumental in the formation of the University of Dhaka and is the namesake of Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology.
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Bruce Ellis Benson
#50063
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Bruce Ellis Benson is a professor of philosophy at Wheaton College in Illinois. Bibliography Books written Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
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Brice Parain
1897 - 1971 (74 years)
Brice Parain was a French philosopher and essayist. He appeared as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's 1962 film Vivre sa vie. In Éric Rohmer's film My Night at Maud's , conversations about Pascal's Wager are directly inspired by a similar debate between Parain and Dominique Dubarle in an episode of the television series En profil dans le texte called l'Entretien sur Pascal in 1965, also produced by Rohmer.
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Juan David García Bacca
#27290
Overall Influence
1901 - 1992 (91 years)
Juan David García Bacca was a Spanish-Venezuelan philosopher and university professor. He was born in Pamplona on June 26, 1901, and passed away on August 5, 1992, in Quito, Ecuador. Bacca began his education under the Claretians and was ordained as a priest in 1925. He continued his studies at the University of Munich, the University of Zurich, and the University of Paris. However, during the 1930s, he left the Church and pursued philosophy at the University of Barcelona. In 1936 after criticizing Francisco Franco, Bacca was forced to live in exile. He first traveled to Ecuador where he taught at the Central University of Ecuador .
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Camillo Golgi
1843 - 1926 (83 years)
Camillo Golgi was an Italian biologist and pathologist known for his works on the central nervous system. He studied medicine at the University of Pavia between 1860 and 1868 under the tutelage of Cesare Lombroso. Inspired by pathologist Giulio Bizzozero, he pursued research in the nervous system. His discovery of a staining technique called black reaction in 1873 was a major breakthrough in neuroscience. Several structures and phenomena in anatomy and physiology are named for him, including the Golgi apparatus, the Golgi tendon organ and the Golgi tendon reflex.
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Hierocles
Hierocles was a Stoic philosopher. Very little is known about his life. Aulus Gellius mentions him as one of his contemporaries, and describes him as a "grave and holy man." Work Hierocles is famous for a book called Elements of Ethics , part of which was discovered as a papyrus fragment at Hermopolis in 1901. This 300 line fragment discusses self-perception, and argues that all birds, reptiles, and mammals from the moment of birth perceive themselves continuously and that self-perception is both the primary and the most basic faculty of animals. The argument draws heavily on a Stoic concep...
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John Zerzan
#30066
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
John Edward Zerzan is an American anarchist and primitivist author. His works criticize agricultural civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocates drawing upon the ways of life of hunter-gatherers as an inspiration for what a free society should look like. Subjects of his criticism include domestication and symbolic thought .
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Markku Laakso
#55239
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Markku Laakso is a Finnish professor of medicine and a type 2 diabetes researcher. He was awarded the Matti Äyräpää Prize in 2007, the Kelly West Award in 2008, and the Finnish Science Award in 2015.
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Margaret Dauler Wilson
#56495
Overall Influence
1939 - 1998 (59 years)
Margaret Dauler Wilson was an American philosopher and a professor of philosophy at Princeton University between 1970 and 1998. Biography Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Wilson earned a BA from Vassar College in 1960 and received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University five years later. While at Harvard she was a student of Burton Dreben. Wilson was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Harvard in 1960–61 and then studied at Oxford University in 1963–64. Wilson spent the early years of her career as an assistant professor of philosophy at Columbia University , and went on to teach at the Rocke...
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Jiva Goswami
1511 - 1596 (85 years)
Jiva Goswami was an Indian philosopher and saint from the Gaudiya Vaishnava school of Vedanta tradition, producing a great number of philosophical works on the theology and practice of Bhakti yoga, Vaishnava Vedanta and associated disciplines. He is known as one of the Six Goswamis of Vrindavan and was the nephew of the two leading figures, Rupa Goswami and Sanatana Goswami.
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George Syncellus
800 - 810 (10 years)
George Syncellus was a Byzantine chronicler and ecclesiastical official. He had lived many years in Palestine as a monk, before coming to Constantinople, where he was appointed synkellos to Tarasius, patriarch of Constantinople. He later retired to a monastery to write what was intended to be his great work, a chronicle of world history, Ekloge chronographias , or Extract of Chronography. According to Anastasius Bibliothecarius, George "struggled valiantly against heresy [i.e. Iconoclasm] and received many punishments from the rulers who raged against the rites of the Church", although the ...
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Jay W. Richards
#21390
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Jay Wesley Richards is an American analytic philosopher who focuses on the intersection of politics, philosophy, and religion. He is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in Heritage’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation. He serves as an adjunct professor in the School of Business at the Catholic University of America and the executive editor of The Stream and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. A former Presbyterian, Richards is now a Catholic.
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Adolphe Franck
1809 - 1893 (84 years)
Adolphe Franck was a French-Jewish philosopher who specialised in Jewish mysticism. Early life Franck was born in Liocourt in 1809. He originally studied to become a rabbi, but decided to become a philosopher instead as a protégé of Victor Cousin.
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Chin Liew Ten
#22394
Overall Influence
Chin Liew Ten , also known as C. L. Ten, is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and former Head of the Philosophy Department at the National University of Singapore. Before that, he was Professor of Philosophy and Acting Head of the School of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Bioethics at Monash University, Australia.
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Roméo Dallaire
#685
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Roméo Antonius Dallaire is a Canadian retired politician and military officer who was a senator from Quebec from 2005 to 2014, and a lieutenant-general in the Canadian Armed Forces. He notably was the force commander of UNAMIR, the ill-fated United Nations peacekeeping force for Rwanda between 1993 and 1994, and for trying to stop the genocide that was being waged by Hutu extremists against Tutsis. Dallaire is a Senior Fellow at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies and co-director of the MIGS Will to Intervene Project.
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Rigas Feraios
1757 - 1798 (41 years)
Rigas Feraios or Velestinlis ; 1757 – 24 June 1798 Early life Rigas Feraios was born in 1757 as Antonios Rigas Velestinlis into a wealthy family in the village of Velestino in the Sanjak of Tirhala, Ottoman Empire . He later was at some point nicknamed Pheraeos or Feraios, by scholars, after the nearby ancient Greek city of Pherae, but he does not seem ever to have used this name himself; he is also sometimes known as Konstantinos or Constantine Rhigas . He is often described as being of Aromanian ancestry, with his native village of Velestino being Aromanian. Rigas' family had its roots in Perivoli, another Aromanian-inhabited village, but it usually overwintered in Velestino.
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Calvin Normore
#55383
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Calvin Normore is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is an expert in medieval philosophy and the history of logic. Life and career Normore was born in Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, the son of former Newfoundland and Labrador New Democratic Party leader Calvin Normore. He earned a PhD at the University of Toronto in 1976. He has taught philosophy at Princeton University, University of Toronto and McGill University, where he held the Macdonald Chair in Moral Philosophy, before joining the UCLA faculty.
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Julius Frank
1808 - 1841 (33 years)
Johann Julius Gottfried Ludwig Frank or Julius Frank was a professor of history, geography and philosophy from Gotha, Germany. He taught at the Largo de São Francisco's Law School in São Paulo ., Brazil. He was an advocator of a liberal philosophy and founded the Students League in Brazil .
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Jean-Marc Ferry
#24263
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jean-Marc Ferry is a French philosopher who is best known for his book Les puissances de l'expérience , described by Paul Ricoeur as "one of the most important works recently published in the field of social and political philosophy". He has also translated the work of Jürgen Habermas, by whom he was influenced, into French.
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Ken Goldberg
#7050
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Kenneth Yigael Goldberg is an American artist, writer, inventor, and researcher in the field of robotics and automation. He is professor and chair of the industrial engineering and operations research department at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds the William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering at Berkeley, with joint appointments in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences , Art Practice, and the School of Information. Goldberg also holds an appointment in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco.
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Robert Denoon Cumming
#52369
Overall Influence
1916 - 2004 (88 years)
Robert Denoon Cumming was a Canadian-American philosopher and historian of twentieth-century Continental philosophy, especially phenomenology. He taught at Columbia University from 1948 to 1985, when he retired as Frederick E. Woodbridge professor emeritus of philosophy.
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Anthony E. Pegg
#64231
Overall Influence
#3625
Prof. Per Björntorp
#64247
Overall Influence
#3626
Rodolfo Mondolfo
1877 - 1976 (99 years)
Rodolfo Mondolfo was an Italian philosopher who lived in Italy and Argentina. Born in Senigallia into a prominent family of Jewish origin, he studied at University of Florence and the University of Siena. In 1910 he started teaching at University of Turin where he worked until 1914, when he left for University of Bologna and later at the University of Padova.
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Eberhardt Ritz
#64296
Overall Influence
#3628
Anthony Collins
1676 - 1729 (53 years)
Anthony Collins was an English philosopher and essayist, notable for being one of the early proponents of Deism in Great Britain. Life and writings Collins was born in Heston, near Hounslow in Middlesex, England, the son of lawyer Henry Collins and Mary . He had two sisters: Anne Collins , who married Henry Lovibond , and Mary Collins , who married Edward Lovibond , a merchant and Director of the East India Company. Mary and Edward's son was the poet Edward Lovibond.
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Robert Broom
1866 - 1951 (85 years)
Robert Broom FRS FRSE was a British- South African medical doctor and palaeontologist. He qualified as a medical practitioner in 1895 and received his DSc in 1905 from the University of Glasgow. From 1903 to 1910, he was professor of zoology and geology at Victoria College, Stellenbosch, South Africa, and subsequently he became keeper of vertebrate palaeontology at the South African Museum, Cape Town.
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Christopher Jacob Boström
1797 - 1866 (69 years)
Christopher Jacob Boström was a Swedish philosopher. His ideas dominated Swedish philosophy until the beginning of the twentieth century. He also had a great influence on Swedish cultural life. Biography As a student he briefly studied theology, and religion remained his primary interest throughout his life. During his theological studies, he was a classmate of Lutheran revivalist preacher Pehr Brandell.
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Ernst Krieck
1882 - 1947 (65 years)
Ernst Krieck was a German teacher, writer, and professor. Along with Alfred Baeumler, Krieck was considered a leading National Socialist theoretical scientist. Life Before the Third Reich Ernst Krieck was born in 1882 in Vögisheim. After his graduation from junior high school, Krieck went to a teacher’s college in Karlsruhe. In 1900 he entered the Baden elementary school service; in 1904 he was transferred to Mannheim. During his following work as an elementary school teacher, he began to criticize the dominant school system as mechanical and too bureaucratic. During this time, Krieck contin...
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Martin Deutinger
1815 - 1864 (49 years)
Martin Deutinger was a German philosopher and religious writer, born in Langenpreising, Bavaria, and died at Pfäfers, Switzerland. Life Deutinger first studied theology and philosophy at the Lyceum in Dillingen in 1832 before he heard the lectures of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling in Munich in 1833 and became enthusiastic about the philosophy of art. He was ordained as a priest in 1837, and after filling several clerical positions, taught philosophy at Freising , Munich , and Dillingen .
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Branko Bošnjak
#51306
Overall Influence
1923 - 1996 (73 years)
Branko Bošnjak was a Croatian philosopher, member of the Praxis school in the former Yugoslavia. Bošnjak was a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Zagreb and for a period a head of the Department for History of Philosophy and a dean of the faculty. He was a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He died in Zagreb and was buried in Mirogoj Cemetery.
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Ross J. Baldessarini
#61184
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Ross J. Baldessarini , a psychopharmacologist, is the Director, International Consortium for Bipolar & Psychotic Disorders Research at McLean Hospital and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
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Sarvajna
#8748
Overall Influence
Sarvajña was a Kannada poet, pragmatist and philosopher of the 16th century. The word "Sarvajna" in Sanskrit literally means "the all knowing". His father was Kumbara Malla and his mother was Mallaladevi. His birth anniversary is celebrated on February 20 every year. He belongs to the caste of Kumbara. He is famous for his pithy three-lined poems called tripadi . He is also referred as Sarvagna in modern translation.
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Victor Delbos
1862 - 1916 (54 years)
Étienne Marie Justin Victor Delbos was a Catholic philosopher and historian of philosophy. Delbos was appointed a lecturer at the Sorbonne in 1902. In 1911 he became a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. He died in July 1916 as a result of an infectious myocarditis brought on by pleurisy. Maurice Blondel, a close friend, wrote an obituary account of Delbos and saw various posthumous publications through the press.
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Zoltan Istvan
#19148
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Zoltan Istvan Gyurko, professionally known as Zoltan Istvan , is an American transhumanist, journalist, entrepreneur, political candidate, and futurist. Formerly a reporter for the National Geographic Channel, Istvan now writes futurist, transhumanist, secular and political-themed articles for major media, including The New York Times. He believes transhumanism will grow into a mainstream social movement in the 2020s. Istvan is the author of The Transhumanist Wager, a philosophical science fiction novel.
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Robert L. Holmes
#40546
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Robert L. Holmes is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Rochester, and an expert on issues of peace and nonviolence. Holmes specializes in ethics, and in social and political philosophy. He has written numerous articles and several books on those topics, and has been invited to address national and international conferences.
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Eduardo Rabossi
#32437
Overall Influence
1930 - 2005 (75 years)
Eduardo Rabossi was an Argentine philosopher and human rights activist. Biography Eduardo Rabossi was born in Buenos Aires on March 20, 1930 and graduated in Law at the University of Buenos Aires in 1955. Afterwards, he obtained his M.A. on philosophy at Duke University. The UBA was intervened by the military government in 1966, so he resigned to his work as a teacher and worked in investigations at the Oxford university instead.
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Arignote
530 BC - 450 BC (80 years)
Arignote or Arignota was a Pythagorean philosopher from Croton, Magna Graecia, or from Samos. She was known as a student of Pythagoras and Theano and, according to some traditions, their daughter as well.
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Nammalvar
800 - 800 (0 years)
Nammalvar was one of the twelve Alvar saints of Tamil Nadu, India, who are known for their affiliation to the Vaishnava tradition of Hinduism. The verses of the Alvars are compiled as the Naalayira Divya Prabandham, where praises are sung of 108 temples that are classified as divine realms, called the Divya Desams. Nammalvar is considered to be the fifth in the line of the twelve Alvars. He is highly regarded as a great mystic of the Vaishnava tradition. He is also considered to be the foremost among the twelve Alvars, and his contributions amount to 1352 among the 4000 stanzas in the Naalayi...
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Antonio Caso Andrade
1883 - 1946 (63 years)
Antonio Caso Andrade was a Mexican philosopher and rector of the former Universidad Nacional de México, nowadays known as the National Autonomous University of Mexico from December 1921 to August 1923. Along with José Vasconcelos, he founded the Ateneo de la Juventud, a humanist group against philosophical positivism. The Athenian generation opposed Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer’s philosophical views, giving credence to and expanding on the ideas of Henri Bergson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and José Enrique Rodó. Caso opposed rationalism. His group the ateneistas believed in a moral, willing, and spiritual individual being.
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Meera Nanda
#7015
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Meera Nanda is an Indian writer and historian of science, who has authored several works critiquing the influence of Hindutva, postcolonialism and postmodernism on science, and the flourishing of pseudoscience and vedic science. In 2019–2020, she was a Guest Faculty in Humanities and Social Sciences at IISER Pune.
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Frigga Haug
#20110
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Frigga Haug is a German socialist-feminist sociologist and philosopher. Life Frigga Langenberger was born in Mülheim. She studied sociology and philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. In 1963, she interrupted her studies to move to Cologne and give birth to a daughter. In 1965 she married a second time to the philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug. She graduated in sociology in 1971, and gained a PhD in sociology and social psychology in 1976.
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Geert De Schutter
#64742
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
#3646
Robert Ulanowicz
#7398
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert Edward Ulanowicz is an American theoretical ecologist and philosopher of Polish descent who in his search for a unified theory of ecology has formulated a paradigm he calls Process Ecology. He was born September 17, 1943, in Baltimore, Maryland.
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Zengzi
504 BC - 435 BC (69 years)
Zeng Shen , better known as Zengzi , courtesy name Ziyu , was a Chinese philosopher and disciple of Confucius. He later taught Zisi , the grandson of Confucius, who was in turn the teacher of Mencius, thus beginning a line of transmitters of orthodox Confucian traditions. He is revered as one of the Four Sages of Confucianism.
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Renford Bambrough
#41747
Overall Influence
1926 - 1999 (73 years)
John Renford Bambrough was a British philosopher. He was fellow of St John's College, Cambridge from 1950-1999, where he held the positions of Dean and President . Life John Renford Bambrough was born in Silksworth, Sunderland, England on 29 April 1926. He was born into a mining background, his father having been an electrician at Silksworth Colliery. And he himself worked, as part of his national service, in a coalmine at Wearmouth Colliery from 1944 to 1945 as a Bevin Boy.
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Antanas Maceina
1908 - 1987 (79 years)
Antanas Maceina was a Lithuanian philosopher, existentialist, educator, theologian, and poet. Developed philosophy of culture of Stasys Šalkauskis, adjusted Christian philosophy and existentialism, accented an importance of native language to education.
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Mikhail Ovsyannikov
1915 - 1987 (72 years)
Mikhail Fedotovich Ovsyannikov was a Soviet philosopher and academic who concentrated on in-depth study of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Ovsyannikov was head of the Philosophy Department at Moscow State University from 1968 to 1974.
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