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 Political Science,
#351
Xiao Qiang
#12268
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Xiao Qiang is the Director and Research Scientist of the Counter-Power Lab, an interdisciplinary faculty-student research group focusing on digital rights and internet freedom, based in the School of Information, University of California, Berkeley. He also serves as the director of the China Internet Project at Berkeley. Xiao is an adjunct professor at the School of Information and the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of China Digital Times, a bilingual news website.
Go to Profile#352
Walter Dean Burnham
#11940
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Walter Dean Burnham was an American political scientist who was an expert on elections and voting patterns. He was known for his quantitative analysis of national trends and patterns in voting behavior, the development of the "Party Systems" model, and the assembling of county election returns for the entire country. He was a professor in the political science department at the University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#353
Jeffrey Herbst
#9884
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Jeffrey I. Herbst is an American political scientist, specializing in comparative politics, and in July 2018 became the president of the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, California. Herbst was previously the 16th president of Colgate University, and president and CEO of the Newseum in Washington, D.C. He resigned from his post at the Newseum in 2017 as the museum announced financial issues. Prior to assuming the presidency of Colgate in 2010, he was provost, executive vice president for academic affairs, and professor of political science at Miami University. He received his B.A. from Princeton University in 1983, M.A., MPhil from Yale University in 1985, and Ph.D.
Go to Profile#354
Dimitri Kitsikis
#4337
Overall Influence
1935 - 2021 (86 years)
Dimitri Kitsikis was a Greek Philosopher, Turkologist and Sinologist, as well as a Professor of International Relations and Geopolitics. He also published poetry in French and Greek. Life Dimitri Kitsikis was a Turkologist and Sinologist Professor of International Relations and Geopolitics at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada since 1970, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; he received his doctoral degree in 1963 from the Sorbonne, Paris, under the supervision of Pierre Renouvin. He has been named one of the "three top geopolitical thinkers worldwide, Karl Haushofer, Halford Mackinder and Dimitri Kitsikis".
Go to Profile#355
Dennis Kavanagh
#10833
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Dennis Kavanagh is a British political analyst and since 1996 has been Professor of Politics at the University of Liverpool, and now Emeritus Professor. He has written extensively on post-war British politics. With David Butler, he wrote the series of books on British general elections, such as The British General Election of 2010, and most recently, The British General Election of 2015.
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H. R. McMaster
#4460
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Herbert Raymond McMaster is a retired United States Army lieutenant general who served as the 25th United States National Security Advisor from 2017 to 2018. He is also known for his roles in the Gulf War, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Iraqi Freedom.
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David Samuels
#11482
Overall Influence
David Julian Samuels is an American political scientist who is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Samuels earned his BA from Swarthmore College in 1989 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 1998. He joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota in 1998, and was named full professor in 2010. He was awarded a Distinguished McKnight University Professorship in 2012.
Go to Profile#358
Sumantra Bose
#16065
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Sumantra Bose is an Indian political scientist and professor of international and comparative politics at the London School of Economics. He specialises in the study of ethnic and national conflicts and their management, with a particular focus on the Indian subcontinent and the former Yugoslavia .
Go to Profile#359
Donatella della Porta
#9235
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Donatella della Porta is an Italian sociologist and political scientist, who is Professor of political science and political sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore. She is known for her research in the areas of social movements, corruption, political violence, police and policies of public order. In 2022, she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Ossip K. Flechtheim
#9904
Overall Influence
1909 - 1998 (89 years)
Ossip Kurt Flechtheim was a German jurist, political scientist, author, futurist, and a humanist. He is credited with coining of the term "Futurology". Early life Flechtheim was born in Nikolaev , into a Jewish family, the son of bookseller Herrmann Flechtheim and his wife Olga, née Farber . In 1910 the family moved back into the father's hometown of Westphalian Münster, where his relatives had a grain trade business, and later to Düsseldorf. The art dealer Alfred Flechtheim was his uncle.
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As'ad AbuKhalil
#8264
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
As'ad AbuKhalil is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. AbuKhalil is the author of Historical Dictionary of Lebanon , Bin Laden, Islam & America's New "War on Terrorism" , and The Battle for Saudi Arabia .
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David C. Rapoport
#6311
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
David Charles Rapoport is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at University of California, Los Angeles who focuses on the study of terrorism. Biography Rapoport received his Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley in 1960. In 1962 he joined the UCLA political science department. In the late 1960s he became interested in terrorism and in 1969 taught the first terrorist course in the U.S. In 1989, he established the journal Terrorism and Political Violence and is its chief editor., credited as “one of two journals which has made terrorism into an academic field”. He received 12 Award...
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David Norris
#7036
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
David Patrick Bernard Norris is an Irish scholar, independent Senator and civil rights activist. Internationally, Norris is credited with having "managed, almost single-handedly, to overthrow the anti-homosexuality law which brought about the downfall of Oscar Wilde", a feat he achieved in 1988 after a fourteen-year campaign. He has also been credited with being "almost single-handedly responsible for rehabilitating James Joyce in once disapproving Irish eyes".
Go to Profile#364
James Fearon
#11036
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
James D. Fearon is the Theodore and Francis Geballe Professor of Political Science at Stanford University; he is known for his work on the theory of civil wars, international bargaining, war's inefficiency puzzle, audience costs, and ethnic constructivism. According to a 2011 survey of International Relations scholars, Fearon is among the most influential International Relations scholars of the last twenty years. His 1995 article "Rationalist Explanations for War" is the most assigned journal article in International Relations graduate training at U.S. universities.
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Karl Deutsch
#10693
Overall Influence
1912 - 1992 (80 years)
Karl Wolfgang Deutsch was a Czech social and political scientist. He was a professor at MIT, Yale University and Harvard University, as well as Director of WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Deutsch studied war and peace, nationalism, co-operation, and communication, as well as pioneered quantitative methods and formal system analysis and model-thinking into the field of political and social sciences, contributing to the development of sociological liberalism school in international relations.
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Paul Brass
#16458
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Paul Richard Brass was an American political scientist known for his research on the politics of India. He was professor emeritus of political science and international relations at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, where he taught since 1965. After his B.A. in government in 1958 from Harvard College, he did M.A. in political science, University of Chicago in 1959, followed by Ph.D. in political science, University of Chicago in 1964.
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Hassan Rouhani
#8245
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Hassan Rouhani is an Iranian Islamist politician who served as the seventh president of Iran from 2013 to 2021. He is also a sharia lawyer , academic, former diplomat and Islamic cleric. He has been a member of Iran's Assembly of Experts since 1999. He was a member of the Expediency Council from 1991 to 2021, and also was a member of the Supreme National Security Council from 1989 to 2021. Rouhani was deputy speaker of the fourth and fifth terms of the Parliament of Iran and Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council from 1989 to 2005. In the latter capacity, he was the country's top...
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Susan Shirk
#17746
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Susan L. Shirk is an American political scientist and China specialist currently serving as a research professor at UCSD's School of Global Policy and Strategy. Shirk served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs of the US State Department from 1997 to 2000 during the Clinton administration.
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Gerald M. Steinberg
#13523
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Gerald M. Steinberg. a professor of politics at Bar Ilan University, is an Israeli academic, political scientist, and political activist. He is founder and president of NGO Monitor, a policy analysis think tank focusing on non-governmental organizations.
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George Tsebelis
#15221
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
George Tsebelis is a Greek-American political scientist who specializes in comparative politics and formal modeling. He is currently Anatol Rapoport Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#371
Kathleen Thelen
#11681
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Kathleen Thelen is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. She is the Ford Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , a permanent external member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies , and a faculty associate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.
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Bülent Ecevit
#11298
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
Mustafa Bülent Ecevit was a Turkish politician, statesman, poet, writer, scholar, and journalist, who served as the Prime Minister of Turkey four times between 1974 and 2002. He served as prime minister in 1974, 1977, 1978–1979, and 1999–2002. Ecevit was chairman of the Republican People's Party between 1972 and 1980, and in 1987 he became chairman of the Democratic Left Party .
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René Rémond
#4675
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
René Rémond was a French historian, political scientist and political economist. Born in Lons-le-Saunier, Rémond was the Secretary General of Jeunesses étudiantes Catholiques and a member of the International YCS Center of Documentation and Information in Paris . The author of books on French political, intellectual and religious history, he was elected to the Académie Française in 1998. He was also a founding member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
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Molefi Kete Asante
#1546
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Molefi Kete Asante is an American professor and philosopher. He is a leading figure in the fields of African-American studies, African studies, and communication studies. He is currently a professor in the Department of Africology at Temple University, where he founded the PhD program in African-American Studies. He is president of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies.
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Daniel A. Bell
#8833
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Daniel A. Bell is a Canadian political theorist. He is currently Chair of Political Theory at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. He was previously Dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University and professor at Tsinghua University .
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Paul Starr
#6584
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Paul Elliot Starr is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. He is also the co-editor and co-founder of The American Prospect, a notable liberal magazine created in 1990. In 1994, he founded the Electronic Policy Network, or Moving Ideas, an online public policy resource. In 1993, Starr was the senior advisor for President Bill Clinton's proposed health care reform plan. He is also the president of the Sandra Starr Foundation.
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Corey Robin
#6189
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Corey Robin is an American political theorist, journalist and professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written books on the role of fear in political life, tracing its presence from Aristotle through the war on terror, and on the nature of conservatism in the modern world, from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. Most recently, he is the author of a study of Justice Clarence Thomas that argues that the mainspring of Thomas's jurisprudence is a combination of black nationalism and black conservatism.
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Stephen Skowronek
#14920
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Stephen Skowronek is an American political scientist, noted for his research on American national institutions and the U.S. presidency, and for helping to stimulate the study of American political development.
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Arturo Valenzuela
#18052
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Arturo A. Valenzuela is a Chilean-American academic who was the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs from November 5, 2009, until August 2011. His confirmation had been blocked by Senator Jim DeMint due to a dispute over President Barack Obama's approach to the 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis. He previously served as Professor of Government and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He was previously Professor of Political Science and Director of the Council on Latin American Studies at Duke University.
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Ivor Crewe
#9601
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Sir Ivor Martin Crewe DL FAcSS was until 2020 the Master of University College, Oxford, and President of the Academy of Social Sciences. He was previously Vice-Chancellor of the University of Essex and also a Professor in the Department of Government at Essex.
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John Shattuck
#12418
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
John Howard Francis Shattuck is an international legal scholar and human rights leader. He served as the fourth President and Rector of Central European University from August 2009 until July 31, 2016. He is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and he joined the faculty of Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in January 2017.
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Lisa Wedeen
#14686
Overall Influence
Lisa Wedeen is Professor of Political Science and the College and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. In 1995, Wedeen received her Ph.D. in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her former advisor is Hanna Pitkin. She has taught courses on nationalism, identity formation, power and resistance, and citizenship. Her work on the Middle East includes Ambiguities of Domination, an ethnographic study of the culture of the spectacle in Syria under Hafez al-Assad.
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Hans Bergström
#18339
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Nils Hans Ingemar Bergström is a Swedish-American journalist and political scientist. Biography Bergström was born in Ambjörby, Torsby Municipality, Värmland County, Sweden. His father was a local politician of the Social Democratic Party and editor of the local newspaper Värmlands Folkblad. He studied at Karlstad campus of the University of Gothenburg from 1967 to 1970 and earned a B.A. in political science, economics, cultural geography and statistics. Thereafter he was employed as a secretary at the People's Party's parliament office . In 1972 he became a speech writer and assistant to People's Party leader Gunnar Helén.
Go to Profile#384
Ralph Miliband
#3714
Overall Influence
1924 - 1994 (70 years)
Ralph Miliband was a British sociologist. He has been described as "one of the best known academic Marxists of his generation", in this manner being compared with E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson.
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David Truman
#14218
Overall Influence
1913 - 2003 (90 years)
David Bicknell Truman was an American academic who served as the 14th president of Mount Holyoke College from 1969–1978. He is also known for his role as a Columbia University administrator during the Columbia University protests of 1968. Truman was an elected member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Stephen P. Cohen
#13980
Overall Influence
1936 - 2019 (83 years)
Stephen Philip Cohen was an American political scientist and professor of security studies. He was a leading expert on India, Pakistan and South Asian security, He was a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution and an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He authored, co-authored or edited over 12 books, was named as one of America's 500 most influential people in foreign affairs, and was a fixture on radio and television talk shows.
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René Lemarchand
#17918
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
René Lemarchand is a French-American political scientist who is known for his research on ethnic conflict and genocide in Rwanda, Burundi and Darfur. Publishing in both English and French, he is particularly known for his work on the concept of clientelism. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida, and continues to write, teach internationally and consult. Since retiring he has worked for USAID out of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire as a Regional Consultant for West Africa in Governance and Democracy, and as Democracy and Governance advisor to USAID / Ghana.
Go to Profile#389
William E. Connolly
#4958
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
William Eugene Connolly is an American political theorist known for his work on democracy, pluralism, capitalism and climate change. He is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His 1974 work The Terms of Political Discourse won the 1999 Benjamin Lippincott Award.
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Harvey Klehr
#7390
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Harvey Elliott Klehr is a professor of politics and history at Emory University. Klehr is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist movement, and on Soviet espionage in America . Early years He was born in Newark, New Jersey. He received his Bachelor's degree from Franklin and Marshall College in 1967. He received his doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1971, after defending a dissertation entitled The Theory of American Exceptionalism.
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Hartmut Rosa
#6353
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Hartmut Rosa is a German sociologist and political scientist, most well known for his theory of resonance and temporal sociology of social acceleration. Life Hartmut Rosa was born in Lörrach. He grew up in Grafenhausen in the Black Forest, where he spoke the local Alemannic dialect and played the organ in the Protestant parish. After graduating from high school in 1985 and completing his civilian service, he began studying political science, philosophy and German studies at the University of Freiburg in 1986, which he graduated with honours in 1993. In 1997, he graduated summa cum laude from the Humboldt University of Berlin and received his Ph.D.
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Rainer Knopff
#11428
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Rainer Knopff is a writer, professor of political science at the University of Calgary, Canada, and member of a group known as the Calgary School. He especially well known for his views about the influence of judicial decisions on Canadian public policy. In 2010, Knopff was appointed by the then Prime Minister Stephen Harper to the Governor General Consultation Committee, a special committee to recommend a successor to Governor General of Canada Michaëlle Jean. The panel recommended David Johnston who was installed as viceroy on October 1, 2010.
Go to Profile#393
Susan Brownmiller
#1881
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Susan Brownmiller is an American journalist, author and feminist activist best known for her 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, which was selected by The New York Public Library as one of 100 most important books of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#394
Richard L. Hasen
#5481
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Richard L. Hasen is an American legal scholar and law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is an expert in legislation, election law and campaign finance. Early life and education Hasen received his Bachelor of Arts with highest honors from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. His Bachelor's degree is in Middle Eastern studies. He received his Master of Arts with distinction in political science in 1988 and Doctor of Philosophy in political science in 1992, both from the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Juris Doctor from UCLA School of La...
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Robert Klitgaard
#5137
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Robert Klitgaard is an American academic, former president of Claremont Graduate University and former dean of the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School, where he was also the Ford Distinguished Professor of International Development and Security. He currently serves as university professor at Claremont Graduate University.
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Bertrand Badie
#15373
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Bertrand Badie is a French political scientist and international relations specialist, emeritus professor at Sciences Po. He is one of the most renowned French specialists in international relations.
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Philip Converse
#10091
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Philip Ernest Converse was an American political scientist. He was a professor in political science and sociology at the University of Michigan who conducted research on public opinion, survey research, and quantitative social science.
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Renu Khator
#6506
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Renu Khator is the fifth chancellor of the University of Houston System and the thirteenth president of the University of Houston. In 2008, she became the first female chancellor in the state of Texas and the first Indian immigrant to lead a comprehensive research university in the U.S.
Go to Profile#399
Ricardo Lagos
#9788
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Ricardo Froilán Lagos Escobar is a Chilean lawyer, economist and social-democratic politician who served as president of Chile from 2000 to 2006. During the 1980s he was a well-known opponent of the Chilean military dictatorship and astounded contemporaries in 1988 by openly denouncing dictator Augusto Pinochet on live television. He served as Minister of Education from 1990 to 1992 and Minister of Public Works from 1994 to 1998 under president Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle before narrowly winning the 1999-2000 presidential election in a runoff against Independent Democrat Union candidate Joaquín Lavín.
Go to Profile#400
Aaron Friedberg
#15713
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Aaron Louis Friedberg is an American political scientist. He served from 2003 to 2005 in the office of the Vice President of the United States as deputy assistant for national-security affairs and director of policy planning.
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