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
#5651
Yoweri Museveni
#5659
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Yoweri Kaguta Museveni Tibuhaburwa is a Ugandan politician, military officer and revolutionary who has been the ninth President of Uganda since 1986. His government is considered autocratic. After Museveni lost the election of 1980, he started the Ugandan Bush War which led to the removal of Milton Obote.
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Michael R. Gottfredson
#5660
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Michael Ryan Gottfredson is the former President of the University of Oregon, serving from August 1, 2012 to August 6, 2014. Biography He has a B.A from the University of California, Davis, a M.A. and a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Albany.
Go to Profile#5653
Bert Vogelstein
#5661
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Bert Vogelstein is director of the Ludwig Center, Clayton Professor of Oncology and Pathology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at The Johns Hopkins Medical School and Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. A pioneer in the field of cancer genomics, his studies on colorectal cancers revealed that they result from the sequential accumulation of mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. These studies now form the paradigm for modern cancer research and provided the basis for the notion of the somatic evolution of cancer.
Go to Profile#5654
Mikhael Gromov
#5662
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
#5655
Shah Rukh Khan
#5663
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Shah Rukh Khan , also known by the initialism SRK, is an Indian actor and film producer who works in Hindi films. Referred to in the media as the "Baadshah of Bollywood" and "King Khan", he has appeared in more than 90 films, and earned numerous accolades, including 14 Filmfare Awards. He has been awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India, as well as the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and Legion of Honour by the Government of France. Khan has a significant following in Asia and the Indian diaspora worldwide. In terms of audience size and income, several media outlets have described him as one of the most successful film stars in the world.
Go to Profile#5656
Jagdish Sheth
#5664
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Jagdish N. Sheth is the Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing at the Goizueta Business School of Emory University. He was a prominent member of the core team during the initial years of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, the first Indian Institute of Management. Prof. Sheth was awarded by Padma Bhushan 2020 for his work in literature & education in United States.
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Vicky Pryce
#5665
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Vasiliki "Vicky" Pryce is a Greek-born British economist and a former Joint Head of the United Kingdom's Government Economic Service. She is currently the Chief Economic Adviser at the Centre for Economics and Business Research, in London, where she is also a board member. In 2023, Pryce joined the British Chambers of Commerce's newly-launched Economic Advisory Council as a senior member. She is a visiting professor at Birmingham City University and King's College London.
Go to Profile#5658
Didier Drogba
#5666
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Didier Yves Drogba Tébily is an Ivorian former professional footballer who played as a striker. He is the all-time top scorer and former captain of the Ivory Coast national team. He is best known for his career at Chelsea, for whom he has scored more goals than any other foreign player and is currently the club's fourth highest goal scorer of all time. Drogba was named Chelsea's greatest ever player in a poll of 20,000 fans conducted by Chelsea FC Magazine in 2012, and he was also named in the Chelsea team of the 2010–2020 decade by Chelsea's fans in 2020. He is regarded as one of the greate...
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John Dupré
#5667
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
John A. Dupré is a British philosopher of science. He is the director of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, and professor of philosophy at the University of Exeter. Dupré's chief work area lies in philosophy of biology, philosophy of the social sciences, and general philosophy of science. Dupré, together with Nancy Cartwright, Ian Hacking, Patrick Suppes and Peter Galison, are often grouped together as the "Stanford School" of philosophy of science. In 2023, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Go to Profile#5660
Robert Alter
#5668
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Robert Bernard Alter is an American professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He published his translation of the Hebrew Bible in 2018.
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S. Rao Kosaraju
#5669
Overall Influence
Sambasiva Rao Kosaraju is an Indian-American professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, and division director for Computing & Communication Foundations at the National Science Foundation. He has done extensive work in the design and analysis of parallel and sequential algorithms.
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Ronald Fagin
#5670
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Ronald Fagin is an American mathematician and computer scientist, and IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He is known for his work in database theory, finite model theory, and reasoning about knowledge.
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Yakov Eliashberg
#5671
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Yakov Matveevich Eliashberg is an American mathematician who was born in Leningrad, USSR. Education and career Eliashberg received his PhD, entitled Surgery of Singularities of Smooth Mappings, from Leningrad University in 1972, under the direction of Vladimir Rokhlin.
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Shaun Gallagher
#5672
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
#5665
Lewis F. Powell Jr.
#5673
Overall Influence
1907 - 1998 (91 years)
Lewis Franklin Powell Jr. was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1972 to 1987. Born in Suffolk, Virginia, he graduated from both the Washington and Lee University School of Law and Harvard Law School and served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. He worked for Hunton & Williams, a large law firm in Richmond, Virginia, focusing on corporate law and representing clients such as the Tobacco Institute. His 1971 Powell Memorandum became the blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement...
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Ulf-Dietrich Reips
#5674
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Prof. Dr. Ulf-Dietrich Reips is a full professor in the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Konstanz, where he holds the Chair for Psychological Methods, Assessment, and iScience. Between 2009 and 2013 he was a full-time tenured IKERBASQUE research professor at University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain, and remains affiliated with Ikerbasque. Until 2009 he was an assistant professor and lecturer at the Psychology Department of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He received his PhD in 1997 and his habilitation in 2004 from the University of Tübingen, Germany. In 1992, he received an M.A. in Psychology from Sonoma State University, California.
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James Kirkup
#5675
Overall Influence
1918 - 2009 (91 years)
James Harold Kirkup, FRSL was an English poet, translator and travel writer. He wrote over 45 books, including autobiographies, novels and plays. He wrote under many pen-names including James Falconer, Aditya Jha, Jun Honda, Andrew James, Taeko Kawai, Felix Liston, Edward Raeburn, and Ivy B. Summerforest. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
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Doug Moench
#5676
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Douglas Moench is an American comic book writer notable for his Batman work and as the creator of Moon Knight, Deathlok, Black Mask, Harvey Bullock, Electric Warrior, and Six from Sirius. He is also known for his critically acclaimed eight-year run on Master of Kung Fu.
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Everett True
#5677
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Everett True is an English music journalist and musician. He became interested in rock music after hearing The Residents, and formed a band with school friends. He has written and recorded as The Legend!
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Al Jaffee
#5678
Overall Influence
1921 - 2023 (102 years)
Allan Jaffee was an American cartoonist. He was notable for his work in the satirical magazine Mad, including his trademark feature, the Mad Fold-in. Jaffee was a regular contributor to the magazine for 65 years and is its longest-running contributor. In a 2010 interview, Jaffee said, "Serious people my age are dead."
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Gregg L. Semenza
#5679
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Gregg Leonard Semenza is a pediatrician and Professor of Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He serves as the director of the vascular program at the Institute for Cell Engineering. He is a 2016 recipient of the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. He is known for his discovery of HIF-1, which allows cancer cells to adapt to oxygen-poor environments. He shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability" with William Kaelin Jr. and Peter J. Ratcliffe. Semenza has had ten research papers r...
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Luc Illusie
#5680
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Luc Illusie is a French mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. His most important work concerns the theory of the cotangent complex and deformations, crystalline cohomology and the De Rham–Witt complex, and logarithmic geometry. In 2012, he was awarded the Émile Picard Medal of the French Academy of Sciences.
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David Dunning
#5681
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
David Alan Dunning is an American social psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. He is a retired professor of psychology at Cornell University. Education He received his BA from Michigan State University in 1982 and PhD from Stanford University in 1986, both in psychology.
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Calvin Trillin
#5682
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Calvin Marshall Trillin is an American journalist, humorist, food writer, poet, memoirist and novelist. He is a winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .
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John Tanton
#5683
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
John Hamilton Tanton was an American ophthalmologist, white nationalist and anti-immigration activist. He was the founder and first chairman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform , an anti-immigration organization. He was the co-founder of the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank; and NumbersUSA, an anti-immigration lobbying group. He was chairman of U.S. English and ProEnglish. He was briefly President of Zero Population Growth. He was the founder of The Social Contract Press, which published a quarterly journal of nativist and white nationalist writers called The Social Contract until Fall 2019.
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Anthony Hopkins
#5684
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins is a Welsh actor, director, and producer. One of Britain's most recognisable and prolific actors, he is known for his performances on the screen and stage. Hopkins has received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Laurence Olivier Award. He has also received the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2005 and the BAFTA Fellowship for lifetime achievement in 2008. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to drama in 1993.
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Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
#5685
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva , also known as Lula da Silva or simply Lula, is a Brazilian politician who is the 39th and current president of Brazil. A member of the Workers' Party, he previously served as the 35th president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010.
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Muhammad Hamidullah
#5686
Overall Influence
1908 - 2002 (94 years)
Muhammad Hamidullah was a scholar of hadiths and Islamic law and a prolific academic author. A polymath with competence in 22 languages, including Urdu , Persian, Arabic, French, English, German, Italian, Greek, Turkish, and Russian, his dozens of books and hundreds of articles on Islamic science, history and culture appeared in several languages. He was still studying Thai at the age of 84.
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Robert N. Proctor
#5687
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Robert Neel Proctor is an American historian of science and Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University, where he is also Professor by courtesy of Pulmonary Medicine. While a professor of the history of science at Pennsylvania State University in 1999, he became the first historian to testify against the tobacco industry.
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David Levering Lewis
#5688
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
David Levering Lewis is an American historian, a Julius Silver University Professor, and professor emeritus of history at New York University. He is twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, for part one and part two of his biography of W. E. B. Du Bois . He is the first author to win Pulitzer Prizes for biography for two successive volumes on the same subject.
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Princess Margriet of the Netherlands
#5689
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Princess Margriet of the Netherlands is the third daughter of Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard. As an aunt of the reigning monarch, King Willem-Alexander, she is a member of the Dutch Royal House and currently eighth and last in the line of succession to the throne.
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Linda Ronstadt
#5690
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Linda Maria Ronstadt is an American singer who performed and recorded in diverse genres including rock, country, light opera, the Great American Songbook, and Latin music. She has earned 11 Grammy Awards, three American Music Awards, two Academy of Country Music awards, an Emmy Award, and an ALMA Award. Many of her albums have been certified gold, platinum or multiplatinum in the United States and internationally. She has also earned nominations for a Tony Award and a Golden Globe award. She was awarded the Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award by the Latin Recording Academy in 2011 and also awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award by the Recording Academy in 2016.
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Guy L. Steele Jr.
#5691
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Guy Lewis Steele Jr. is an American computer scientist who has played an important role in designing and documenting several computer programming languages and technical standards. Biography Steele was born in Missouri and graduated from the Boston Latin School in 1972. He received a Bachelor of Arts in applied mathematics from Harvard University and a Master's degree and Doctor of Philosophy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in computer science . He then worked as an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and a compiler implementer at Tartan Laboratories.
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Cora Diamond
#5692
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Cora Diamond is an American philosopher who works in the areas of moral philosophy, animal ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy and literature, and the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, and Elizabeth Anscombe. Diamond is the Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Virginia.
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Juliane Kokott
#5693
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Juliane Kokott is the German Advocate General at the Court of Justice of the European Union and Professor at the University of St. Gallen. Education Kokott studied law in Bonn and Geneva. Subsequent to her studies, she earned the academic title of Master of Laws at the American University Washington, D.C., while being on a scholarship of the Fulbright Program. There she also worked as an Assistant to Thomas Buergenthal, Judge at the International Court of Justice and former president of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. She worked as a judicial intern at the Landgericht Heidelberg ...
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Bill Griffith
#5694
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
William Henry Jackson Griffith is an American cartoonist who signs his work Bill Griffith and Griffy. He is best known for his surreal daily comic strip Zippy. The catchphrase "Are we having fun yet?" is credited to Griffith.
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Samuel Karlin
#5695
Overall Influence
1924 - 2007 (83 years)
Samuel Karlin was an American mathematician at Stanford University in the late 20th century. Education and career Karlin was born in Janów, Poland and immigrated to Chicago as a child. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household, Karlin became an atheist in his teenage years and remained an atheist for the rest of his life. Later in life he told his three children, who all became scientists, that walking down the street without a yarmulke on his head for the first time was a milestone in his life.
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Madeleine Albright
#5696
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
Madeleine Jana Korbel Albright was an American diplomat and political scientist who served as the 64th United States secretary of state from 1997 to 2001. A member of the Democratic Party, Albright was the first woman to hold that post.
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Andrew Ranicki
#5697
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Andrew Alexander Ranicki was a British mathematician who worked on algebraic topology. He was a professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. Life Ranicki was the only child of the well-known literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki and the artist Teofila Reich-Ranicki; he spoke Polish in his family. Born in London, he lived in Warsaw, in Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg, and attended school in England at the King's School, Canterbury from the age of sixteen.
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Anthony Hecht
#5698
Overall Influence
1923 - 2004 (81 years)
Anthony Evan Hecht was an American poet. His work combined a deep interest in form with a passionate desire to confront the horrors of 20th century history, with the Second World War, in which he fought, and the Holocaust being recurrent themes in his work.
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Martha Minow
#5699
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
#5692
Jean-Claude Passeron
#5700
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Jean-Claude Passeron is a French sociologist and leader of social science studies. As part of a mixed interdisciplinary team involving sociologists, historians, and anthropologists, he led the magazine Enquêtes.
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Savannah Guthrie
#5701
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Savannah Clark Guthrie is an Australian-born American broadcast journalist and attorney. She is a main co-anchor of the NBC News morning show Today, a position she has held since July 2012. Guthrie joined NBC News in September 2007 as a legal analyst and correspondent, regularly reporting on trials throughout the country. After serving as a White House correspondent between 2008 and 2011 and as co-anchor of the MSNBC program The Daily Rundown in 2010 and 2011, Guthrie was announced as the co-host of Todays third hour alongside Natalie Morales and Al Roker. In that role, she substituted as news anchor and main co-host and appeared as the chief legal analyst across all NBC platforms.
Go to Profile#5694
Wang Dan
#5702
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Wang Dan is a leader of the Chinese democracy movement and was one of the most visible student leaders in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. He holds a PhD in history from Harvard University, and from August 2009 to February 2010, Wang taught cross-strait history at Taiwan's National Chengchi University as a visiting scholar. He then taught at National Tsing Hua University until 2015.
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Jack Ruina
#5703
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Jack P. Ruina was an American electrical engineer who was a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1963 until 1997 and thereafter an MIT professor emeritus. From 1966 to 1970, he was also vice president for special laboratories at MIT.
Go to Profile#5696
Lior Pachter
#5704
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Lior Samuel Pachter is a computational biologist. He works at the California Institute of Technology, where he is the Bren Professor of Computational Biology. He has widely varied research interests including genomics, combinatorics, computational geometry, machine learning, scientific computing, and statistics.
Go to Profile#5697
Stanley Coren
#5705
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Stanley Coren is a psychology professor, neuropsychological researcher and writer on the intelligence, mental abilities and history of dogs. He works in research and instructs in psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia. He writes for Psychology Today in the feature series Canine Corner.
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Gary W. Keller
#5706
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Gary Keller is an American entrepreneur and best-selling author. He is the founder and Executive Chairman of Keller Williams, which is the largest real estate company in the world by agent count and second in closed sales volume, and units sold. Keller founded Keller Williams on training and education and later brought his teachings to print. His books include The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, The Millionaire Real Estate Investor, and The ONE Thing. He is considered one of the most influential people in real estate.
Go to Profile#5699
Anne-Marie Slaughter
#5707
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Anne-Marie Slaughter is an American international lawyer, foreign policy analyst, political scientist and public commentator. From 2002 to 2009, she was the dean of Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs and the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 university professor of politics and international affairs. Slaughter was the first woman to serve as the director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department from January 2009 until February 2011 under U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton. She is a former president of the American Society of International Law and the current p...
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Mel Brooks
#5708
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Melvin James Brooks is an American actor, comedian, filmmaker, songwriter, and playwright. With a career spanning over seven decades, he is known as a writer and director of a variety of successful broad farces and parodies. A recipient of numerous accolades, he is one of 18 entertainers to win the EGOT, which includes an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Tony Award. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015, a National Medal of Arts in 2016, a BAFTA F...
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