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
#5101
Robert J. Sampson
#5109
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Robert J. Sampson is the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor at Harvard University and Director of the Social Sciences Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. From 2005 through 2010, Sampson served as the Chair of the Department of Sociology at Harvard. In 2011–2012, he was elected as the President of the American Society of Criminology.
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Joe Rogan
#5110
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Joseph James Rogan is an American UFC color commentator, podcaster, comedian, actor, and former television host. He hosts The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast in which he discusses current events, comedy, politics, philosophy, science, martial arts, and hobbies with a variety of guests.
Go to Profile#5103
Vijay Vazirani
#5111
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Vijay Virkumar Vazirani is an Indian American distinguished professor of computer science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Education and career Vazirani first majored in electrical engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi but in his second year he transferred to MIT and received his bachelor's degree in computer science from MIT in 1979 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983. His dissertation, Maximum Matchings without Blossoms, was supervised by Manuel Blum. After postdoctoral research with Michael O.
Go to Profile#5104
Will Self
#5112
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
William Woodard Self is an English writer, journalist, political commentator and broadcaster. He has written 11 novels, five collections of shorter fiction, three novellas and nine collections of non-fiction writing. Self is currently Professor of Modern Thought at Brunel University London, where he teaches psychogeography.
Go to Profile#5105
Barbara Cassin
#5113
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Barbara Cassin is a French philologist and philosopher. She was elected to the Académie française on 4 May 2018. Cassin is the recipient of the Grand Prize of Philosophy of the Académie française. She is an Emeritus Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. Cassin is a program Director at the International College of Philosophy and the director of its Scientific Council and member of its board of directors. She was a director of Collège international de philosophie established by Jacques Derrida. In 2006 she succeeded Jonathan Barnes to the directorship of the leading centre of excellence in Ancient philosophy, Centre Leon-Robin, at the Sorbonne.
Go to Profile#5106
Andy Goldsworthy
#5114
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Andy Goldsworthy is an English sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist who produces site-specific sculptures and land art situated in natural and urban settings. Early life Goldsworthy was born in Cheshire on 26 July 1956, the son of Muriel and F. Allin Goldsworthy , a former professor of applied mathematics at the University of Leeds. He grew up on the Harrogate side of Leeds. From the age of 13, he worked on farms as a labourer. He has likened the repetitive quality of farm tasks to the routine of making sculpture: "A lot of my work is like picking potatoes; you have to get into the ...
Go to Profile#5107
Patricia Highsmith
#5115
Overall Influence
1921 - 1995 (74 years)
Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist and short story writer widely known for her psychological thrillers, including her series of five novels featuring the character Tom Ripley. She wrote 22 novels and numerous short stories throughout her career spanning nearly five decades, and her work has led to more than two dozen film adaptations. Her writing derived influence from existentialist literature, and questioned notions of identity and popular morality. She was dubbed "the poet of apprehension" by novelist Graham Greene.
Go to Profile#5108
Fritz Leiber
#5116
Overall Influence
1910 - 1992 (82 years)
Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theater and films, playwright, and chess expert. With writers such as Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, Leiber is one of the fathers of sword and sorcery and coined the term.
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Nicholas Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford
#5117
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Nicholas Herbert Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford, is a British economist, banker, and academic. He is the IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government and Chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics , and 2010 Professor of Collège de France. He was President of the British Academy from 2013 to 2017, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014.
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Richard Marcinko
#5118
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Richard Marcinko was a U.S. Navy SEAL commander and Vietnam War veteran. He was the first commanding officer of SEAL Team Six. After retiring from the United States Navy, he became an author, radio talk show host, military consultant, and motivational speaker.
Go to Profile#5111
Mike Royko
#5119
Overall Influence
1932 - 1997 (65 years)
Michael Royko Jr. was an American newspaper columnist from Chicago. Over his 30-year career, he wrote over 7,500 daily columns for the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune. A humorist who focused on life in Chicago, he was the winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
Go to Profile#5112
Vinod Dham
#5120
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Vinod Dham is an Indian-American engineer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. He is known as the 'Father of the Pentium Chip' for his contribution to the development of Intel's Pentium micro-processor. He is also a mentor and advisor, and sits on the boards of companies, including startups funded through his India-based fund Indo-US Venture Partners, where he is the founding managing director.
Go to Profile#5113
Ed Greenwood
#5121
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ed Greenwood is a Canadian fantasy writer and the original creator of the Forgotten Realms game world. He began writing articles about the Forgotten Realms for Dragon magazine beginning in 1979, and subsequently sold the rights to the setting to TSR, the creators of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, in 1986. He has written many Forgotten Realms novels, as well as numerous articles and D&D game supplement books.
Go to Profile#5114
Muqtada al-Sadr
#5122
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Muqtada al-Sadr is an Iraqi Shia Muslim cleric, politician and militia leader. He is the leader of the Sadrist Movement and the leader of the Peace Companies, a successor to the militia he had previously led during the American military presence in Iraq, the Mahdi Army. In 2018, he joined his Sadrist political party to the Saairun alliance, which won the highest number of seats in the 2018 and 2021 Iraqi parliamentary elections.
Go to Profile#5115
John Cage
#5123
Overall Influence
1912 - 1992 (80 years)
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.
Go to Profile#5116
Elon Lindenstrauss
#5124
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Elon Lindenstrauss is an Israeli mathematician, and a winner of the 2010 Fields Medal. Since 2004, he has been a professor at Princeton University. In 2009, he was appointed to Professor at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics at the Hebrew University.
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Paul Kay
#5125
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Paul Kay is an emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. He joined the University in 1966 as a member of the Department of Anthropology, transferring to the Department of Linguistics in 1982 and now working at the International Computer Science Institute . He is best known for his work with anthropologist Brent Berlin on colour: Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution . More recently, he has worked in the area of Construction Grammar with Charles J. Fillmore, authoring the textbook Construction Grammar . He is currently working on...
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Lydia Davis
#5126
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Lydia Davis is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages, who often writes short short stories. Davis has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Swann's Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
Go to Profile#5119
Kenneth Noland
#5127
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Kenneth Noland was an American painter. He was one of the best-known American color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School movement. In 1977, he was honored with a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York that then traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and Ohio's Toledo Museum of Art in 1978. In 2006, Noland's Stripe Paintings were exhibited at the Tate in London.
Go to Profile#5120
Bernard Comrie
#5128
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Bernard Sterling Comrie, is a British-born linguist. Comrie is a specialist in linguistic typology, linguistic universals and on Caucasian languages. Early life and education Comrie was born in Sunderland, England on 23 May 1947. He earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where he also taught Russian and Linguistics until he moved to the Linguistics Department of the University of Southern California.
Go to Profile#5121
Ahmed Yassin
#5129
Overall Influence
1936 - 2004 (68 years)
Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Hassan Yassin was a Palestinian politician and imam who founded Hamas, a militant Islamist and Palestinian nationalist organization in the Gaza Strip, in 1987. He served as the organization's spiritual leader after its founding.
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Pierre Joliot
#5130
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Pierre Adrien Joliot-Curie is a noted French biologist and researcher for the CNRS. A researcher there since 1956, he became a Director of Research in 1974 and a member of their scientific council in 1992. He was a scientific advisor to the French Prime Minister from 1985 to 1986 and is a member of Academia Europæa. He was made a commander of the Ordre National du Mérite in 1982 and of the Légion d'honneur in 1984.
Go to Profile#5123
Nobuo Yoneda
#5131
Overall Influence
1930 - 1996 (66 years)
Nobuo Yoneda was a Japanese mathematician and computer scientist. In 1952, he graduated the Department of Mathematics, the Faculty of Science, the University of Tokyo, and obtained his Bachelor of Science. That same year, he was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics of the University of Tokyo. He obtained his Doctor of Science degree from the University of Tokyo in 1961, under the direction of Shokichi Iyanaga. In 1962, he was appointed Associate Professor in the Faculty of Science at Gakushuin University, and was promoted in 1966 to the rank of Professor. He became a professor of Theoretical Foundation of Information Science in 1972.
Go to Profile#5124
Viral B. Shah
#5132
Overall Influence
Viral B Shah is an Indian computer scientist, best known for being a co-creator of the Julia programming language. He was also actively involved in the initial design of the Aadhaar project in India which provides a 12-digit unique identity number to each Indian resident based on their biometric and demographic data. Based on his experiences implementing Aadhaar and other complex technology projects in government, he co-authored the book Rebooting India with Nandan Nilekani.
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Roger Chartier
#5133
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Roger Chartier, , is a French historian and historiographer who is part of the Annales school. He works on the history of books, publishing and reading. He teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Collège de France, and the University of Pennsylvania.
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Farooq Azam
#5134
Overall Influence
Farooq Azam is a researcher in the field of marine microbiology. He is a Distinguished Professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the University of California San Diego. Farooq Azam grew up in Lahore and received his early education in Lahore. He attended University of Punjab, where he received his B.Sc. in chemistry. He later he received his M.Sc. from the same institution. He then went to Czechoslovakia for higher studies. He received his PhD in microbiology from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. After he received his PhD, Farooq Azam moved to California. Azam was the lead author on the paper which coined the term microbial loop.
Go to Profile#5127
Marilyn Strathern
#5135
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Areas of Specialization: Social Anthropology Marilyn Strathern was born in 1941 in North Wales. She attended Crofton Lane Primary School and Bromley High School before moving on to study Archaeology and Anthropology at Girton College. She earned her Ph.D. from Girton College in 1968. Strathern has spent her career working with the people of Papua New Guinea. Her approach to feminist anthropology has yielded important scholarship, including Self-Interest and the Social Good: Some Implications of Hagen Gender Imagery and Dealing with Inequality: Analysing Gender Relations in Melanesia and Beyond.
Go to Profile#5128
Michael Marmot
#5136
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Sir Michael Gideon Marmot is Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London. He is currently the Director of The UCL Institute of Health Equity. Marmot has led research groups on health inequalities for over thirty years, working for various international and governmental bodies. In 2023, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
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Robert Klitgaard
#5137
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 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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Robert Seamans
#5138
Overall Influence
1918 - 2008 (90 years)
Robert Channing Seamans Jr. was an MIT professor who served as NASA Deputy Administrator and 9th United States Secretary of the Air Force. Birth and education He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, to Pauline and Robert Channing Seamans. His great-great-grandfather was Otis Tufts. Seamans attended Lenox School, in Lenox, Massachusetts; earned a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from Harvard University in 1939 or 1940; a Master of Science degree in aeronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1942; and a Doctor of Science degree in instrumentation from MIT in 1951. Seaman...
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Roald Sagdeev
#5139
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Roald Zinnurovich Sagdeev is a Russian expert in plasma physics and a former director of the Space Research Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He was also a science advisor to the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Sagdeev graduated from Moscow State University. He is a member of both the Russian Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He has worked at the University of Maryland, College Park since 1989 in the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. He is also currently a Senior Advisor at the Albright Stonebridge Group, a ...
Go to Profile#5132
Benazir Bhutto
#5140
Overall Influence
1953 - 2007 (54 years)
Benazir Bhutto was a Pakistani politician and stateswoman who served as the 11th and 13th prime minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996. She was the first woman elected to head a democratic government in a Muslim-majority country. Ideologically a liberal and a secularist, she chaired or co-chaired the Pakistan People's Party from the early 1980s until her assassination in 2007.
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Martin Kramer
#5141
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Martin Seth Kramer is an American-Israeli scholar of the Middle East at Tel Aviv University and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His focus is on the history and politics of the Middle East, contemporary Islam, and modern Israel.
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Jaroslav Pelikan
#5142
Overall Influence
1923 - 2006 (83 years)
Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr. was an American scholar of the history of Christianity, Christian theology, and medieval intellectual history at Yale University. Early years Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr. was born on December 17, 1923, in Akron, Ohio, to a Slovak father Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Sr. and Slovak mother Anna Buzekova Pelikan from Šid in Serbia. His father was pastor of Trinity Slovak Lutheran Church in Chicago, Illinois. His paternal grandfather was a Lutheran pastor in Chicago, and in 1902, a charter founder, and later president of, the Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, which until 1958 wa...
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Basil Bernstein
#5143
Overall Influence
1924 - 2000 (76 years)
Basil Bernard Bernstein was a British sociologist known for his work in the sociology of education. He worked on socio-linguistics and the connection between the manner of speaking and social organization.
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Vijay Govindarajan
#5144
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Vijay Govindarajan , popularly known as VG, is the Coxe Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business and Marvin Bower Fellow, 2015–16 at Harvard Business School. He is a Faculty Partner in the Silicon Valley Incubator Mach49. He worked as General Electric's innovation consultant and professor in residence from 2008 to 2010. He is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author and a two-time winner of the McKinsey Award for the best article published in Harvard Business Review. VG was inducted into the Thinkers 50 Hall of Fame in 2019 for his life-long work dedicated to the field of management, strategy, and innovation.
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Andrzej Sapkowski
#5145
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Andrzej Sapkowski is a Polish fantasy writer, essayist, translator and a trained economist. He is best known for his six-volume series of books The Witcher, which revolves around the eponymous "witcher," a monster-hunter, Geralt of Rivia. It began with the publication of Sword of Destiny , and was completed with the publication of standalone prequel novel Season of Storms . The saga has been popularized through television, stage, comic books, video games and translated into 37 languages making him the second most-translated Polish science fiction and fantasy writer after Stanisław Lem.
Go to Profile#5138
David J. Thouless
#5146
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
David James Thouless was a British condensed-matter physicist. He was the winner of the 1990 Wolf Prize and a laureate of the 2016 Nobel Prize for physics along with F. Duncan M. Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.
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Matthew Fox
#5147
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Timothy James "Matthew " Fox is an American priest and theologian. Formerly a member of the Dominican Order within the Catholic Church, he became a member of the Episcopal Church following his expulsion from the order in 1993.
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Jonathan Borwein
#5148
Overall Influence
1951 - 2016 (65 years)
Jonathan Michael Borwein was a Scottish mathematician who held an appointment as Laureate Professor of mathematics at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He was a close associate of David H. Bailey, and they have been prominent public advocates of experimental mathematics.
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Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden
#5149
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden, Duchess of Västergötland is the heir apparent to the Swedish throne, as the eldest child of King Carl XVI Gustaf. If she ascends to the throne as expected, she would be Sweden's fourth queen regnant and the first since 1720. Her inheritance is secured by Sweden's 1979 Act of Succession, the first law in Western Europe to adopt royal absolute primogeniture.
Go to Profile#5142
Kenneth Bainbridge
#5150
Overall Influence
1904 - 1996 (92 years)
Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge was an American physicist at Harvard University who worked on cyclotron research. His precise measurements of mass differences between nuclear isotopes allowed him to confirm Albert Einstein's mass–energy equivalence concept. He was the Director of the Manhattan Project's Trinity nuclear test, which took place July 16, 1945. Bainbridge described the Trinity explosion as a "foul and awesome display". He remarked to J. Robert Oppenheimer immediately after the test, "Now we are all sons of bitches." This marked the beginning of his dedication to ending the testing of ...
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Rafael E. Núñez
#5151
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Rafael E. Núñez is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego and a proponent of embodied cognition. He co-authored Where Mathematics Comes From with George Lakoff.
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Kim Yong-nam
#5152
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Kim Yong-nam is a North Korean retired politician who served as the President of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly of North Korea, from 1998 until 2019. Previously, he served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1983 to 1998. He was elected a member of the Presidium of the Workers' Party of Korea in 2010.
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Vijay Prashad
#5153
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Vijay Prashad is an American-based Indian historian, author, journalist, political commentator, and Marxist intellectual. He is the executive-director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Editor of LeftWord Books, Chief Correspondent at Globetrotter, and a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. For Tricontinental, he writes a weekly newsletter. Ideologically a Marxist, Prashad is well known for his criticisms of capitalism, neocolonialism, American exceptionalism, and Western imperialism, while expressing support for co...
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Jean Edward Smith
#5154
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Jean Edward Smith was a biographer and the John Marshall Professor of Political Science at Marshall University. He was also professor emeritus at the University of Toronto after having served as professor of political economy there for thirty-five years. Smith was also on the faculty of the Master of American History and Government program at Ashland University.
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Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu
#5155
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Ekmeleddin Mehmet İhsanoğlu is a Turkish chemistry and science history professor, academician, diplomat and politician who was Secretary-General of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation from 2004 to 2014. He is also an author and editor of academic journals and advocate of intercultural dialogue.
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Hans Joas
#5156
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Hans Joas is a German sociologist and social theorist. Hans Joas is Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion at the Humboldt University of Berlin. From 2011 until 2014 he was a Permanent Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies ; from 2002 until 2011 he was the Director of the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. Since 2000 he has also been Visiting Professor of Sociology and Social Thought and a Member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Hans Joas is Ordinary Member of the Berlin-Brande...
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David Eisenbud
#5157
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
David Eisenbud is an American mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley and former director of the then Mathematical Sciences Research Institute , now known as Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute . He served as Director of MSRI from 1997 to 2007, and then again from 2013 to 2022.
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Jon Wiener
#5158
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jon Wiener is an American historian and journalist based in Los Angeles, California. His most recent book is Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, a Los Angeles Times bestseller co-authored by Mike Davis. He waged a 25-year legal battle to win the release of the FBI's files on John Lennon. Wiener played a key role in efforts to expose the surveillance, as well as the behind-the-scenes battling between the government and the former Beatle, and is an expert on the FBI-versus-Lennon controversy. A professor emeritus of United States history at the University of California, Irvine and host ...
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