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
#6351
Judy Clarke
#6360
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Judy Clare Clarke is an American criminal defense attorney who has represented several high-profile defendants such as Ted Kaczynski, Eric Rudolph, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Joseph Edward Duncan, Zacarias Moussaoui, Jared Lee Loughner, Robert Gregory Bowers, Burford Furrow, Lisa Montgomery and Susan Smith.
Go to Profile#6352
John Isner
#6361
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
John Robert Isner is an American former professional tennis player. He was ranked as high as world No. 8 in singles and No. 14 in doubles by the Association of Tennis Professionals . Considered one of the best servers ever to play on the ATP Tour, Isner achieved his slay career-high singles ranking in July 2018 by virtue of his first Masters 1000 crown at the 2018 Miami Open and a semifinal appearance at the 2018 Wimbledon Championships. He also twice reached the quarterfinals at the US Open in 2011 and 2018, the latter of which helped qualify him for an ATP Finals appearance later that year....
Go to Profile#6353
Alan Templeton
#6362
Overall Influence
Alan R. Templeton is an American geneticist and statistician at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is the Charles Rebstock emeritus professor of biology. From 2010 to 2019, he held positions in the Institute of Evolution and the Department of Evolutionary and Environmental Biology at the University of Haifa. He is known for his work demonstrating the degree of genetic diversity among humans and, in his opinion, the biological unreality of human races.
Go to Profile#6354
Anthony DeCurtis
#6363
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Anthony DeCurtis is an American author and music critic, who has written for Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Relix and many other publications. Career DeCurtis is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where his work has appeared for more than thirty years. He holds a Ph.D in American literature from Indiana University and is a Distinguished Lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania. He collaborated with Clive Davis on Davis's autobiography, The Soundtrack of My Life, which was published by Simon and Schuster in February 2013 and rose to number two on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list.
Go to Profile#6355
Marc Guggenheim
#6364
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Marc Guggenheim is an American screenwriter, television producer, comic book writer, and novelist. He is best known as the creator of the television series Eli Stone , Arrow , and Legends of Tomorrow , executive producer of the animated series Tales of Arcadia , as well as the writer of the feature films Green Lantern , and Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters .
Go to Profile#6356
Hans Mayer
#6365
Overall Influence
1907 - 2001 (94 years)
Hans Mayer was a German literary scholar. Mayer was also a jurist and social researcher and was internationally recognized as a critic, author and musicologist. Life Hans Mayer was born in an upper-class Jewish family. He was influenced in his youth by the writings of Georg Lukács and Karl Marx. He was a socialist.
Go to Profile#6357
Howard Goldblatt
#6366
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Howard Goldblatt is a literary translator of numerous works of contemporary Chinese fiction, including The Taste of Apples by Huang Chunming and The Execution of Mayor Yin by Chen Ruoxi. Goldblatt also translated works of Chinese novelist and 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Mo Yan, including six of Mo Yan's novels and collections of stories. He was a Research Professor of Chinese at the University of Notre Dame from 2002 to 2011.
Go to Profile#6358
Andrew Abbott
#6367
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Andrew Delano Abbott is an American sociologist and social theorist working at the University of Chicago. He is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Sociology and the college. His research topics range from occupations and professions to the philosophy of methods, the history of academic disciplines, to the sociology of knowledge. He is also the founder of the field of sequence analysis. He was the editor of the American Journal of Sociology from 2000 to 2016.
Go to Profile#6359
Otto F. Kernberg
#6368
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Otto Friedmann Kernberg is an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is most widely known for his psychoanalytic theories on borderline personality organization and narcissistic pathology. In addition, his work has been central in integrating postwar ego psychology with Kleinian and other object relations perspectives . His integrative writings were central to the development of modern object relations, a school within modern psychoanalysis.
Go to Profile#6360
Sarah Lucas
#6369
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Sarah Lucas is an English artist. She is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged in 1988. Her works frequently employ visual puns and bawdy humour by incorporating photography, sculpture, collage and found objects.
Go to Profile#6361
Mehmet Haberal
#6370
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Mehmet Haberal , is the founder of Başkent University in Ankara, Turkey, best known for becoming the first transplant surgeon in Turkey after leading the team that performed Turkey's first living-related kidney transplant in 1975, after he returned from surgical training under the mentorship of American surgeon Thomas Starzl, with whom he also performed some of the longest surviving early liver transplantations.
Go to Profile#6362
Eric Grimson
#6371
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
William Eric Leifur Grimson is a Canadian-born computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he served as Chancellor from 2011 to 2014. An expert in computer vision, he headed MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from 2005 to 2011 and currently serves as its Chancellor for Academic Advancement.
Go to Profile#6363
Paul Alivisatos
#6372
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Armand Paul Alivisatos is an American chemist and academic administrator who has served as the 14th president of the University of Chicago since September 2021. He is a pioneer in nanomaterials development and an authority on the fabrication of nanocrystals and their use in biomedical and renewable energy applications. He was ranked fifth among the world's top 100 chemists for the period 2000–2010 in the list released by Thomson Reuters.
Go to Profile#6364
Gustave Solomon
#6373
Overall Influence
1930 - 1996 (66 years)
Gustave Solomon was an American mathematician and electrical engineer who was one of the founders of the algebraic theory of error detection and correction. Career Solomon completed his Ph.D. in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956 under direction of Kenkichi Iwasawa.
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Carole King
#6374
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Carole King Klein is an American singer-songwriter and musician who has been active since 1958. The most successful female songwriter of the latter half of the 20th century in the US, she wrote or co-wrote 118 pop hits on the Billboard Hot 100. She also wrote 61 hits that charted in the UK, making her the most successful female songwriter on the UK singles charts between 1962 and 2005.
Go to Profile#6366
Li Peng
#6375
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Li Peng was a Chinese politician who served as the fourth Premier of the People's Republic of China from 1987 to 1998, and as the Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, China's top legislative body, from 1998 to 2003. For much of the 1990s Li was ranked second in the Chinese Communist Party hierarchy behind then Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin. He retained his seat on the CCP Politburo Standing Committee until his retirement in 2002.
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Abdulaziz Sachedina
#6376
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Abdulaziz Sachedina is Professor and International Institute of Islamic Thought Chair in Islamic Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Biography He has been a professor for 33 years, beginning in 1975. He annually teaches courses on Classical Islam, Islam in the Modern Age, Islam, Democracy and Human Rights, Islamic Bioethics and Muslim Theology. He was born in Tanzania, his heritage originally is from India. He has an MA/PhD from the University of Toronto and has BA degrees from Aligarh Muslim University in India and Ferdowsi University of Mashad in Iran. He was one of the students of Dr.
Go to Profile#6368
Travis Oliphant
#6377
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Travis Oliphant is an American data scientist and businessman. He is a co-founder of NumFOCUS, 501 nonprofit charity in the United States, and sits on its advisory board. He is also a founder of technology startup Anaconda . In addition, Travis is the primary creator of NumPy and founding contributor to the SciPy packages in the Python programming language.
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Moishe Postone
#6378
Overall Influence
1942 - 2018 (76 years)
Moishe Postone was a Canadian historian and social theorist. He was a professor of history at the University of Chicago, where he was part of the Committee on Jewish Studies. Life and career Postone was born on April 17, 1942, the son of a Canadian rabbi. He received his PhD from University of Frankfurt in 1983.
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Bina Agarwal
#6379
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Bina Agarwal is an Indian development economist and Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the Global Development Institute at The University of Manchester. She has written extensively on land, livelihoods and property rights; environment and development; the political economy of gender; poverty and inequality; legal change; and agriculture and technological transformation.
Go to Profile#6371
Rosa Brooks
#6380
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Rosa Brooks is an American law professor, journalist, author and commentator on foreign policy, U.S. politics and criminal justice. She is the Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law and Policy at Georgetown University Law Center. Brooks is also an adjunct scholar at West Point's Modern War Institute and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. From April 2009 to July 2011, Brooks was a counselor to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy.
Go to Profile#6372
Robert S. Ellwood
#6381
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Robert S. Ellwood is an American academic, author and expert on world religions. He was educated at the University of Colorado, Berkeley Divinity School and was awarded a PhD in History of Religions from the University of Chicago in 1967. He was Professor of World Religions at the University of Southern California from 1967 until 1997 and is now professor emeritus.
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Charles R. Snyder
#6382
Overall Influence
1944 - 2006 (62 years)
Charles Richard "Rick" Snyder was an American psychologist who specialized in positive psychology. He was a Wright Distinguished Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Kansas and editor of the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.
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Sidney Nolan
#6383
Overall Influence
1917 - 1992 (75 years)
Sir Sidney Robert Nolan was one of Australia's leading artists of the 20th century. Working in a wide variety of media, his oeuvre is among the most diverse and prolific in all of modern art. He is best known for his series of paintings on legends from Australian history, most famously Ned Kelly, the bushranger and outlaw. Nolan's stylised depiction of Kelly's armour has become an icon of Australian art.
Go to Profile#6375
Carol Vorderman
#6384
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Carol Jean Vorderman is a Welsh broadcaster, media personality, and writer. Her career began in 1982 when she joined the Channel 4 game show Countdown, appearing on the show with Richard Whiteley from 1982 until his death in 2005, and subsequently with Des Lynam and Des O'Connor, before leaving in 2008.
Go to Profile#6376
Peter Conrad
#6385
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Peter Conrad is an American medical sociologist who has researched and published on numerous topics including ADHD, the medicalization of deviance, the experience of illness, wellness in the workplace, genetics in the news, and biomedical enhancements.
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Henry T. Lynch
#6386
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Henry Thompson Lynch was an American physician noted for his discovery of familial susceptibility to certain kinds of cancer and his research into genetic links to cancer. He is sometimes described as "the father of hereditary cancer detection and prevention" or the "father of cancer genetics", although Lynch himself said that title should go to the early 20th century pathologist Aldred Scott Warthin.
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Morgan Freeman
#6387
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Morgan Freeman is an American actor and producer. He is known for his distinctive deep voice and roles in a wide variety of film genres. Throughout a career spanning five decades, he has received numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Golden Globe Award. Freeman has also been awarded the Kennedy Center Honor in 2008, an AFI Life Achievement Award in 2011, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2012, and Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2018.
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Boris Vladimirovich Gnedenko
#6388
Overall Influence
1912 - 1995 (83 years)
Boris Vladimirovich Gnedenko was a Soviet mathematician and a student of Andrey Kolmogorov. He was born in Simbirsk , Russia, and died in Moscow. He is perhaps best known for his work with Kolmogorov, and his contributions to the study of probability theory, particularly extreme value theory, with such results as the Fisher–Tippett–Gnedenko theorem. Gnedenko was appointed as Head of the Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry Section of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1949, and became Director of the NASU Institute of Mathematics in 1955.
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David A. Wiley
#6389
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
David A. Wiley is an American academic, writer who is the chief academic officer of Lumen Learning, education fellow at Creative Commons, and former adjunct faculty of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, where he was previously an associate professor. Wiley's work on open content, open educational resources, and informal online learning communities has been reported in many international outlets, including The New York Times, The Hindu, MIT Technology Review, and Wired.
Go to Profile#6381
Adam Rutherford
#6390
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Adam David Rutherford is a British geneticist and science populariser. He was an audio-visual content editor for the journal Nature for a decade, and is a frequent contributor to the newspaper The Guardian. He hosts the BBC Radio 4 programmes Inside Science and The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry; has produced several science documentaries; and has published books related to genetics and the origin of life.
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Jill Tarter
#6391
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jill Cornell Tarter is an American astronomer best known for her work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence . Tarter is the former director of the Center for SETI Research, holding the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute. In 2002, Discover magazine recognized her as one of the 50 most important women in science.
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Gordon R. Dickson
#6392
Overall Influence
1923 - 2001 (78 years)
Gordon Rupert Dickson was a Canadian-American science fiction writer. He was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2000. Biography Dickson was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1923. After the death of his father, he moved with his mother to Minneapolis in 1937. He served in the United States Army, from 1943 to 1946, and received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Minnesota, in 1948. From 1948 through 1950 he attended the University of Minnesota for graduate work. His first published speculative fiction was the short story "Trespass!", written jointly with Poul Ande...
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Stephen Warshall
#6393
Overall Influence
1935 - 2006 (71 years)
Stephen Warshall was an American computer scientist. During his career, Warshall carried out research and development in operating systems, compiler design, language design, and operations research. Warshall died on December 11, 2006 of cancer at his home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He is survived by his wife, Sarah Dunlap, and two children, Andrew D. Warshall and Sophia V. Z. Warshall.
Go to Profile#6385
Mike Paterson
#6394
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
#6386
Graeme Segal
#6395
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Graeme Bryce Segal FRS is an Australian mathematician, and professor at the University of Oxford. Biography Segal was educated at the University of Sydney, where he received his BSc degree in 1961. He went on to receive his D.Phil. in 1967 from St Catherine's College, Oxford; his thesis, written under the supervision of Michael Atiyah, was titled Equivariant K-theory.
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Lindsay Davenport
#6396
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Lindsay Ann Davenport Leach is an American former professional tennis player. Davenport was ranked singles world No. 1 for a total of 98 weeks, and was the year-end singles world No. 1 four times . She also held the doubles world No. 1 ranking for 32 weeks.
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Sartaj Sahni
#6397
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Professor Sartaj Kumar Sahni is a computer scientist based in the United States, and is one of the pioneers in the field of data structures. He is a distinguished professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida.
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Floris Takens
#6398
Overall Influence
1940 - 2010 (70 years)
Floris Takens was a Dutch mathematician known for contributions to the theory of chaotic dynamical systems. Together with David Ruelle, he predicted that fluid turbulence could develop through a strange attractor, a term they coined, as opposed to the then-prevailing theory of accretion of modes. The prediction was later confirmed by experiment. Takens also established the result now known as the Takens's theorem, which shows how to reconstruct a dynamical system from an observed time-series. He was the first to show how chaotic attractors could be learned by neural networks.
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Laurie Lee
#6399
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
Laurence Edward Alan Lee, was an English poet, novelist and screenwriter, who was brought up in the small village of Slad in Gloucestershire. His most notable work is the autobiographical trilogy Cider with Rosie , As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning , and A Moment of War . The first volume recounts his childhood in the Slad Valley. The second deals with his leaving home for London and his first visit to Spain in 1935, and the third with his return to Spain in December 1937 to join the Republican International Brigades.
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Robert W. Cox
#6400
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Robert Warburton Cox was a Canadian scholar of political science and a former United Nations officer. He was cited as one of the intellectual leaders, along with Susan Strange, of the British School of International Political Economy and was still active as a scholar after his formal retirement, writing and giving occasional lectures. He was professor emeritus of political science and social and political thought at York University.
Go to Profile#6392
Oliver Grau
#6401
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Oliver Grau is a German art historian and media theoretician with a focus on image science, modernity and media art as well as culture of the 19th century and Italian art of the Renaissance. Main Areas of Research are: Digital Art, Media Art History, immersion, digital humanities, documentation and conservation strategies of born-digital media art. He is founder and director of the Archive for Digital Art and founder and head of the Society for MediaArtHistories and its biennial conference series . His monograph "Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion" is among the most cited works in rece...
Go to Profile#6393
Odd Arne Westad
#6402
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Odd Arne Westad FBA is a Norwegian historian specializing in the Cold War and contemporary East Asian history. He is the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University, where he teaches in the Yale History Department and in the Jackson School of Global Affairs. Previously, Westad held the S.T. Lee Chair of US-Asia Relations at Harvard University, teaching in the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Westad has also taught at the London School of Economics, where he served as director of LSE IDEAS. In the spring semester 2019 Westad was Boeing Company Chair in International...
Go to Profile#6394
Nicolaas Kuiper
#6403
Overall Influence
1920 - 1994 (74 years)
Nicolaas Hendrik Kuiper was a Dutch mathematician, known for Kuiper's test and proving Kuiper's theorem. He also contributed to the Nash embedding theorem. Kuiper studied at University of Leiden in 1937-41, and worked as a secondary school teacher of mathematics in Dordrecht in 1942-47. He completed his Ph.D. in differential geometry from the University of Leiden in 1946 under the supervision of Willem van der Woude. In 1947 he came to the United States at the invitation of Oscar Veblen, where he stayed at the Institute for Advanced Study for one year as Veblen's assistant, and the second yea...
Go to Profile#6395
Thierry Coquand
#6404
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Thierry Coquand is a French computer scientist and mathematician who is currently a professor of computer science at the University of Gothenburg, having previously worked at INRIA. He is known for his work in constructive mathematics, especially the calculus of constructions.
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Larry Gonick
#6405
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Larry Gonick is an American cartoonist best known for The Cartoon History of the Universe, a history of the world in comic book form, which he published in installments from 1977 to 2009. He has also written The Cartoon History of the United States, and he has adapted the format for a series of co-written guidebooks on other subjects, beginning with The Cartoon Guide to Genetics in 1983. The diversity of his interests, and the success with which his books have met, have together earned Gonick the distinction of being "the most well-known and respected of cartoonists who have applied their c...
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Erik Möller
#6406
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Erik Möller is a German freelance journalist, software developer, author, and former deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation , based in San Francisco. Möller additionally works as a web designer and previously managed his own web hosting service, myoo.de. As of 2022, he was VP of Engineering at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
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Robert A. McDermott
#6407
Overall Influence
Robert McDermott is professor of Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He received his Ph.D. in 1969 in philosophy from Boston University and is president emeritus of the California Institute of Integral Studies. He has taught at Manhattanville College and is professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Philosophy at Baruch College, CUNY . He was secretary of the American Academy of Religion and secretary treasurer of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy .
Go to Profile#6399
Frances Yao
#6408
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Frances Foong Chu Yao is a Taiwanese-born American mathematician and theoretical computer scientist. She is currently a Chair Professor at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences of Tsinghua University. She was Chair Professor and Head of the Department of computer science at the City University of Hong Kong, where she is now an honorary professor.
Go to Profile#6400
Brenda Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond
#6409
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Brenda Marjorie Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond, , is a British judge who served as President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom from 2017 until her retirement in 2020. In 2004, she joined the House of Lords as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary. She is the only woman to have been appointed to that position. She served as a Law Lord until 2009 when she, along with the other Law Lords, transferred to the new Supreme Court as a result of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. She served as Deputy President of the Supreme Court from 2013 to 2017.
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