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
#5751
Mike Tirico
#5759
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Mike Tirico is an American sportscaster. He is currently the NFL play-by-play announcer on NBC's Sunday Night Football, having replaced Al Michaels in 2022. From 2006 to 2015, Tirico served as a play-by-play announcer on ESPN's Monday Night Football. Tirico has called a multitude of sports in his career, including the NBA, NHL, college football and basketball, golf, tennis, and World Cup soccer.
Go to Profile#5752
Martin Jacques
#5760
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Martin Jacques is a British journalist, editor, academic, political commentator and author. Early life Jacques was born in October 1945 in the city of Coventry , the son of Dennis Jacques and Dorothy Preston, a mathematics undergraduate at Royal Holloway College, University of London in the late 1930s. Both parents worked in an aircraft factory during the war and during this period joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. They subsequently both became school teachers. He was brought up in Coventry.
Go to Profile#5753
B. K. S. Iyengar
#5761
Overall Influence
1918 - 2014 (96 years)
Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar was an Indian teacher of yoga and author. He is founder of the style of yoga as exercise, known as "Iyengar Yoga", and was considered one of the foremost yoga gurus in the world. He was the author of many books on yoga practice and philosophy including Light on Yoga, Light on Pranayama, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and Light on Life. Iyengar was one of the earliest students of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who is often referred to as "the father of modern yoga". He has been credited with popularizing yoga, first in India and then around the worl...
Go to Profile#5754
Wade Davis
#5762
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Edmund Wade Davis is a Canadian cultural anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author, and photographer. Davis came to prominence with his 1985 best-selling book The Serpent and the Rainbow about the zombies of Haiti. He is professor of anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia.
Go to Profile#5755
Frank Ankersmit
#5763
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit is professor of intellectual history and historical theory at the University of Groningen. Ankersmit, member of the family of textile manufacturers Ankersmit, initially studied physics and mathematics in Leiden for three years and then did his military service. He next studied both history and philosophy at the University of Groningen. In 1981 he took his doctoral degree at that same University with a dissertation entitled Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language. In 1986 he was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences .
Go to Profile#5756
Nick Katz
#5764
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Nicholas Michael Katz is an American mathematician, working in arithmetic geometry, particularly on p-adic methods, monodromy and moduli problems, and number theory. He is currently a professor of Mathematics at Princeton University and an editor of the journal Annals of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#5757
P. Roy Vagelos
#5765
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Pindaros Roy Vagelos is an American physician and business executive, who was president and chief executive officer and chairman of the American pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. . Since 1995, Vagelos has served as chairman of the board of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
Go to Profile#5758
A. K. Ramanujan
#5766
Overall Influence
1929 - 1993 (64 years)
Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan was an Indian poet and scholar of Indian literature and linguistics. Ramanujan was also a professor of Linguistics at University of Chicago. Ramanujan was a poet, scholar, linguist, philologist, folklorist, translator, and playwright. His academic research ranged across five languages: English, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Sanskrit. He published works on both classical and modern variants of this literature and argued strongly for giving local, non-standard dialects their due. Though he wrote widely and in a number of genres, Ramanujan's poems are remembered as enigmatic works of startling originality, sophistication and moving artistry.
Go to Profile#5759
Abdul Salam Hanafi
#5767
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Abdul Salam Hanafi is an Afghan Uzbek political and Deobandi-Islamic religious leader who is a senior leader of the Taliban, an acting second deputy prime minister, alongside Abdul Ghani Baradar and Abdul Kabir, of Afghanistan since 2021, and was a central member of the negotiation team in the Qatar office. He has also served as deputy minister of education in the Taliban government from 1996-2001. After the Taliban government collapse in 2001, following the United States invasion of Afghanistan, Hanafi was appointed by the Taliban leadership as a top general to oversee the Taliban’s military...
Go to Profile#5760
David Albert
#5768
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
David Z. Albert is Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy and Director of the MA Program in The Philosophical Foundations of Physics at Columbia University in New York. Education and career He received his bachelor's degree in physics from Columbia College and his PhD in theoretical physics from The Rockefeller University under Professor Nicola Khuri. Afterwards he worked with Yakir Aharonov of Tel Aviv University. He has spent most of his career in the philosophy department at Columbia University, although he has also been a frequent visiting professor of philosophy at Rutgers University.
Go to Profile#5761
Hubert Reeves
#5769
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Hubert Reeves was a Canadian astrophysicist and popularizer of science. Early life and education Reeves was born in Montreal on July 13, 1932, and as a child lived in Léry. Reeves attended Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, a prestigious French-language college in Montreal. He obtained a BSc degree in physics from the Université de Montréal in 1953, an MSc degree from McGill University in 1956 with a thesis entitled "Formation of Positronium in Hydrogen and Helium" and a PhD degree at Cornell University in 1960.
Go to Profile#5762
Robert Nisbet
#5770
Overall Influence
1913 - 1996 (83 years)
Robert Alexander Nisbet was an American conservative sociologist, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Vice-Chancellor at the University of California, Riverside, and an Albert Schweitzer Professor at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#5763
Nicola Acocella
#5771
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Nicola Acocella is an Italian economist and academic, Emeritus Professor of Economic Policy since 2014. In 1963 he graduated in Economics from the “Sapienza University of Rome” with a thesis on ‘Time lags in economic policy’, under the supervision of Federico Caffè. After becoming full professor , he got a reputation for his holistic contribution to systematisation and development of Economic policy. He also introduced remarkable innovations in the theory of economic policy as well as in monetary and fiscal policy and the theory of social pacts.
Go to Profile#5764
A. W. Kuchler
#5772
Overall Influence
1907 - 1999 (92 years)
August William Kuchler was a German-born American geographer and naturalist who is noted for developing a plant association system that has become widely used in the United States. Some of this database has been digitized for integration into GIS mapping systems. Kuchler received his Ph.D. in geography from the University of Munich in 1935. In 1978, he received the Association of American Geographers' Honors award. He is the author of the book Vegetation Mapping.
Go to Profile#5765
Siegfried Scherer
#5773
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Siegfried Scherer is a German biologist, since 1991 Professor of Microbiology at the Technical University of Munich, Weihenstephan since 1991, where he is Managing Director of the Nutrition and Food Research Center ZIEL. Scherer is not a prominent creationist as often purported. He believes that religion and science are two different ways of approaching reality. He is married to anthropologist Sigrid Hartwig-Scherer.
Go to Profile#5766
Daniel Woolf
#5774
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
#5767
Joe Haldeman
#5775
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Joe William Haldeman is an American science fiction author. He is best known for his novel The Forever War , which was inspired by his experiences as a combat soldier in the Vietnam War. That novel and other works, including The Hemingway Hoax and Forever Peace , have won science fiction awards, including the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. He received the SFWA Grand Master for career achievements. In 2012, he was inducted as a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#5768
Philip J. Currie
#5776
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Philip J. Currie is a professor at the University of Alberto in Edmonton and the founder of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology. He earned his bachelor of science from the University of Toronto, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in biology from McGill University. Currie has been very active in fossil discovery, working on sites in Dinosaur Provincial Park, Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park, Antarctica, Mongolia, China, and Argentina. He was the curator of earth sciences for the Provincial Museum of Alberta while he worked on his Ph.D. So successful was he with his fieldwork that the museum had to expand.
Go to Profile#5769
Joel Lebowitz
#5777
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Joel Louis Lebowitz is a mathematical physicist widely acknowledged for his outstanding contributions to statistical physics, statistical mechanics and many other fields of Mathematics and Physics. Lebowitz has published more than five hundred papers concerning statistical physics and science in general, and he is one of the founders and editors of the Journal of Statistical Physics, one of the most important peer-reviewed journals concerning scientific research in this area. He has been president of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#5770
Amy Tan
#5778
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Amy Ruth Tan is an American author of Chinese heritage, best known for the novel The Joy Luck Club , which was adapted into a 1993 film. She is also known for other novels, short story collections, children's books, and a memoir.
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Mikhail Botvinnik
#5779
Overall Influence
1911 - 1995 (84 years)
Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik was a Soviet and Russian chess grandmaster who held five world titles in three different reigns. The sixth World Chess Champion, he also worked as an electrical engineer and computer scientist and was a pioneer in computer chess. He also had a mathematics degree.
Go to Profile#5772
Nigel Cross
#5780
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Nigel Cross is a British academic, a design researcher and educator, Emeritus Professor of Design Studies at The Open University, United Kingdom, where he was responsible for developing the first distance-learning courses in design in the early 1970s. He was an editor of the journal Design Studies from its inception in 1979, Editor in Chief 1984-2017 and Emeritus Editor in Chief 2018-23. Cross helped clarify and develop the concept of design thinking related to the development of design as an academic discipline. He is one of the key people of the Design Research Society.
Go to Profile#5773
Mario Savio
#5781
Overall Influence
1942 - 1996 (54 years)
Mario Savio was an American activist and a key member of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He is most famous for his passionate speeches, especially the "Bodies Upon the Gears" address given at Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley on December 2, 1964.
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Charles E. Lindblom
#5782
Overall Influence
1917 - 2018 (101 years)
Charles Edward Lindblom was an American academic who studied economics at the University of Chicago and was Sterling Professor emeritus of political science and economics at Yale University. He served as president of the American Political Science Association and the Association for Comparative Economic Studies, as well as director of Yale's Institute for Social and Policy Studies.
Go to Profile#5775
Lanford Wilson
#5783
Overall Influence
1937 - 2011 (74 years)
Lanford Wilson was an American playwright. His work, as described by The New York Times, was "earthy, realist, greatly admired [and] widely performed." Wilson helped to advance the Off-Off-Broadway theater movement with his earliest plays, which were first produced at the Caffe Cino beginning in 1964. He was one of the first playwrights to move from Off-Off-Broadway to Off-Broadway, then Broadway and beyond.
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Bappi Lahiri
#5784
Overall Influence
1952 - 2022 (70 years)
Bappi Aparesh Lahiri , also known as Bappida was an Indian singer, composer and record producer. He popularised the use of synthesised disco music in Indian music industry and sang some of his own compositions. He was popular in the 1980s and 1990s with filmi soundtracks. He also delivered major box office successes in Bengali, Telugu, and Kannada films. His music was well received into the 21st century.
Go to Profile#5777
Frank Close
#5785
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Francis Edwin Close, is a particle physicist who is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. Education Close was a pupil at King's School, Peterborough , where he was taught Latin by John Dexter, brother of author Colin Dexter. He took a BSc in physics at St Andrews University graduating in 1967, before researching for a DPhil in theoretical physics at Magdalen College, Oxford, under the supervision of Richard Dalitz, which he was awarded in 1970. He is an atheist.
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T. Keith Glennan
#5786
Overall Influence
1905 - 1995 (90 years)
Thomas Keith Glennan was the first Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, serving from August 19, 1958 to January 20, 1961. Early career Born in Enderlin, North Dakota, the son of Richard and Margaret Glennan, he attended the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire and then earned a degree in electrical engineering from the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University in 1927, where he was a member of the Chi Phi Fraternity. Following graduation, he became associated with the newly developed sound motion picture industry, and later became assistant general service superintendent for Electrical Research Products Company, a subsidiary of Western Electric Company.
Go to Profile#5779
Syed Farid al-Attas
#5787
Overall Influence
Syed Farid Alatas is a Malaysian author and educator, serving as a professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. Books Ibn Khaldun , Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013Applying Ibn Khaldun: The Recovery of a Lost Tradition in Sociology , 2014An Islamic Perspective on the Commitment to Inter-Religious Dialogue, Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies Malaysia, 2008Alternative Discourses in Asian Social Science: Responses to Eurocentrism, Delhi: Sage, 2006Democracy and Authoritarianism in Indonesia and Malaysia: The Rise of the Post-Colonial State,
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Sheldon Axler
#5788
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Sheldon Jay Axler is an American mathematician and textbook author. He is a professor of mathematics and the Dean of the College of Science and Engineering at San Francisco State University. He graduated from Miami Palmetto Senior High School in Miami, Florida in 1967. He obtained his AB in mathematics with highest honors at Princeton University and his PhD in mathematics, under professor Donald Sarason, from the University of California, Berkeley" in 1975. As a postdoc, he was a C. L. E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#5781
Joseph Massad
#5789
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Joseph Andoni Massad is a Jordanian academic specializing in Middle Eastern studies, who serves as Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. His academic work has focused on Palestinian, Jordanian, and Israeli nationalism.
Go to Profile#5782
Jeb Bush
#5790
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
John Ellis "Jeb" Bush is an American politician and businessman who served as the 43rd governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007. A member of the Bush political family, he was an unsuccessful candidate for president of the United States in the 2016 Republican primaries.
Go to Profile#5783
Dorothy Vaughan
#5791
Overall Influence
1910 - 2008 (98 years)
Dorothy Jean Johnson Vaughan was an American mathematician and human computer who worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics , and NASA, at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. In 1949, she became acting supervisor of the West Area Computers, the first African-American woman to receive a promotion and supervise a group of staff at the center.
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Tim Schafer
#5792
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Timothy John Schafer is an American video game designer. He founded Double Fine Productions in July 2000, after having spent over a decade at LucasArts. Schafer is best known as the designer of critically acclaimed games Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, Brütal Legend and Broken Age, co-designer of Day of the Tentacle, and assistant designer on The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. He is well known in the video game industry for his storytelling and comedic writing style, and has been given both a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Game Developers Choic...
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Sheri Berman
#5793
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Sheri E. Berman is a Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of scholarly books and articles on European social democracy, fascism, populism and the development of democracies and dictatorships.
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Ted Fujita
#5794
Overall Influence
1920 - 1998 (78 years)
Tetsuya Theodore Fujita was a Japanese American meteorologist whose research primarily focused on severe weather. His research at the University of Chicago on severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and typhoons revolutionized the knowledge of each. Although he is best known for creating the Fujita scale of tornado intensity and damage, he also discovered downbursts and microbursts and was an instrumental figure in advancing modern understanding of many severe weather phenomena and how they affect people and communities, especially through his work exploring the relationship between wind...
Go to Profile#5787
Wu Wenjun
#5795
Overall Influence
1919 - 2017 (98 years)
Wu Wenjun , also commonly known as Wu Wen-tsün, was a Chinese mathematician, historian, and writer. He was an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences , best known for Wu class, Wu formula, and Wu's method of characteristic set.
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L. Randall Wray
#5796
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Larry Randall Wray is a professor of Economics at Bard College and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute. Previously, he was a professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City in Kansas City, Missouri, USA, whose faculty he joined in August 1999, and a professor at the University of Denver, where he served from 1987 to 1999. He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Rome, Italy, the University of Paris, France, and the UNAM, in Mexico City. From 1994 to 1995 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bologna. From 2015 he is a visiting professor at the University of Bergamo, located in Italy.
Go to Profile#5789
Pierre Restany
#5797
Overall Influence
1930 - 2003 (73 years)
Pierre Restany , was an internationally known French art critic and cultural philosopher. Restany was born in Amélie-les-Bains-Palalda, Pyrénées-Orientales, and spent his childhood in Casablanca. On returning to France in 1949 he attended the Lycée Henri-IV before studying at universities in France, Italy and Ireland. From their first meeting in 1955, Restany maintained a strong tie with Yves Klein .
Go to Profile#5790
Michael Murphy
#5798
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Michael Murphy is the co-founder of the Esalen Institute, a key figure in the Human Potential Movement and author of The Future of the Body and other books on topics related to extraordinary human potential.
Go to Profile#5791
Jadranka Skorin-Kapov
#5799
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Jadranka Skorin-Kapov is a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in the College of Business, and with affiliated positions in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. Her background includes PhD degrees in Operations Research, in Philosophy, and in Art History. She serves as the Head of Management Area in the College of Business. She founded and currently directs the Center for Integration of Business Education & Humanities . Skorin-Kapov received the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2016.
Go to Profile#5792
Mahathir Mohamad
#5800
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (101 years)
Mahathir bin Mohamad is a Malaysian politician, author, and physician who served as the fourth and seventh prime minister of Malaysia. He held office from 1981 to 2003 and later from 2018 to 2020 for a cumulative total of 24 years, making him the country's longest-serving prime minister. Before becoming premier, he served as deputy prime minister and in other cabinet positions. He was a member of Parliament for Langkawi from 2018 to 2022, Kubang Pasu from 1974 to 2004, and Kota Star Selatan from 1964 to 1969. His political career spanned more than 75 years, from joining protests opposing citi...
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Leon Botstein
#5801
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Leon Botstein is a Swiss-American conductor, educator, and scholar serving as the President of Bard College. Biography 1946–1975: Early life, education, and career Botstein was born in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1946. The son of Polish-Jewish physicians, Botstein immigrated to New York City at the age of two. Interested in music from an early age, he studied violin with Roman Totenberg and, during the summers, studied with faculty from the National Conservatory in Mexico City. At the age of sixteen, Botstein graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, and earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1967, where he graduated with a degree in history.
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David Papineau
#5802
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
David Papineau is a British academic philosopher, born in Como, Italy. He works as Professor of Philosophy of Science at King's College London and the City University of New York Graduate Center, and previously taught for several years at Cambridge University, where he was a fellow of Robinson College.
Go to Profile#5795
Simon Gray
#5803
Overall Influence
1936 - 2008 (72 years)
Simon James Holliday Gray was an English playwright and memoirist who also had a career as a university lecturer in English literature at Queen Mary, University of London, for 20 years. While teaching at Queen Mary, Gray began his writing career as a novelist in 1963 and, during the next 45 years, in addition to five published novels, wrote 40 original stage plays, screenplays, and screen adaptations of his own and others' works for stage, film and television and became well known for the self-deprecating wit characteristic of several volumes of memoirs or diaries.
Go to Profile#5796
Eric Valentine
#5804
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Eric Dodd, known professionally as Eric Valentine, is an American record producer who began his career as drummer and producer in the heavy metal band T-Ride. He subsequently produced albums for artists such as Good Charlotte, Lostprophets, Taking Back Sunday, Nickel Creek, Queens of the Stone Age, Third Eye Blind, Smash Mouth, The All-American Rejects, Persephone's Bees, and Slash, among others. He is married to Grace Potter and they had a son born on January 12, 2018.
Go to Profile#5797
Harlan Mills
#5805
Overall Influence
1919 - 1996 (77 years)
Harlan D. Mills was Professor of Computer Science at the Florida Institute of Technology and founder of Software Engineering Technology, Inc. of Vero Beach, Florida . Mills' contributions to software engineering have had a profound and enduring effect on education and industrial practice. Since earning his Ph.D. in Mathematics at Iowa State University in 1952, Mills led a distinguished career.
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Miguel Alcubierre
#5806
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Miguel Alcubierre Moya is a Mexican theoretical physicist. Alcubierre is known for the proposed Alcubierre drive, a speculative warp drive by which a spacecraft could achieve faster-than-light travel.
Go to Profile#5799
Masahiro Sakurai
#5807
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
is a Japanese video game director and game designer best known as the creator of the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. series. Apart from his work on those series, he also led the design of Meteos in 2005 and directed Kid Icarus: Uprising in 2012.
Go to Profile#5800
Brian Dunning
#5808
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Brian Andrew Dunning is an American writer and producer who focuses on science and skepticism. He has hosted a weekly podcast, Skeptoid, since 2006, and he is an author of a series of books on the subject of scientific skepticism, some of which are based on the podcast. Skeptoid has been the recipient of several podcast awards such as the Parsec Award. Dunning has also created the Skeptoid.org spin-off video series, inFact, and The Feeding Tube both available on YouTube.
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