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
#6651
Pavle Savić
#6660
Overall Influence
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Pavle Savić was a Serbian physicist and chemist. In his early years, he worked in Serbia as well as France, and became one of the pioneers in the research of nuclear fission. He was also a sympathiser of Yugoslav communists in the interwar period, and then rose to prominence during World War II in Yugoslavia. He made important contributions to the Partisan resistance to the Axis occupation, became a delegate to AVNOJ, and was also sent on high level missions to the Soviet Union. After the war, he founded the Vinča Nuclear Institute and was a tenured professor at the University of Belgrade as ...
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Barry Hearn
#6661
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Barry Maurice William Hearn is an English sporting events promoter and the founder and president of promotions company Matchroom Sport. Through Matchroom, Hearn is also involved in many sports including snooker, darts, pool, tenpin bowling, golf , table tennis and fishing. Hearn was until April 2021 the chairman of the Professional Darts Corporation, and was also until July 2010 chairman of the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association . He was also, until July 2014, the chairman of Leyton Orient F.C.
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John Gutfreund
#6662
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
John Halle Gutfreund was an American banker, businessman, and investor. He was the CEO of Salomon Brothers Inc, an investment bank that gained prominence in the 1980s. Gutfreund turned Salomon Brothers from a private partnership into a publicly traded corporation, which started a trend in Wall Street for investment companies to go public. In 1985, Business Week gave him the nickname "King of Wall Street".
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Igal Talmi
#6663
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (101 years)
Igal Talmi is an Israeli nuclear physicist. Biography Igal Talmi was born in 1925 in Kiev, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. His family immigrated to Mandate Palestine later that year and settled in Kfar Yehezkel. After graduating from Gymnasia Herzliya in Tel Aviv in 1942, he joined the Palmach.
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Michel Aglietta
#6664
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Michel Aglietta is a French economist, currently Professor of Economics at the University of Paris X: Nanterre. Michel Aglietta is a scientific counsellor at CEPII, a member of the University Institute of France, and a consultant to Groupama. An alumnus of the École Polytechnique, from 1998 to 2006, he was a member of the Circle of economists. From 1997 to 2003, he was a member of the Council of economic analysis for the French Prime Minister. His monograph A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience laid the foundation for the regulation school of economics. He is a teacher at HEC...
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Randy Thornhill
#6665
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Randy Thornhill is an American entomologist and evolutionary biologist. He is a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico, and was president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society from 2011 to 2013. He is known for his evolutionary explanation of rape as well as his work on insect mating systems and the parasite-stress theory.
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Dan Geer
#6666
Overall Influence
Dan Geer is a computer security analyst and risk management specialist. He is recognized for raising awareness of critical computer and network security issues before the risks were widely understood, and for ground-breaking work on the economics of security.
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Erich Gamma
#6667
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Erich Gamma is a Swiss computer scientist and one of the four co-authors of the software engineering textbook, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Gamma is an expert in the Eclipse Java development editor, and with Kent Beck he co-wrote the JUnit software testing framework which helped create Test-Driven Development and influenced the whole software industry. He also led the design of the Eclipse platform's Java Development Tools , and worked on the IBM Rational Jazz project.
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Claire Voisin
#6668
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Claire Voisin is a French mathematician known for her work in algebraic geometry. She is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and holds the chair of algebraic geometry at the Collège de France.
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Albert Schatz
#6669
Overall Influence
1920 - 2005 (85 years)
Albert Israel Schatz was an American microbiologist and academic who discovered streptomycin, the first antibiotic known to be effective for the treatment of tuberculosis. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1942 with a bachelor's degree in soil microbiology, and received his doctorate from Rutgers in 1945. His PhD research led directly to the discovery of streptomycin.
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Alan Cox
#6670
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Alan Cox is a British computer programmer who has been a key figure in the development of Linux. He maintained the 2.2 branch of the Linux kernel and continues to be heavily involved in its development, an association that dates back to 1991. He lives in Swansea, Wales, where he lived with his wife Telsa Gwynne, who died in 2015 and now lives with author Tara Neale, whom he married in 2020. He graduated with a BSc in Computer Science from Swansea University in 1991 and received an MBA from the same university in 2005.
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Adam Cheyer
#6671
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Adam Cheyer is a co-founder of Siri Inc. and formerly a director of engineering in the iPhone group at Apple. Early life and education Cheyer attended Sharon High School, in Sharon, Massachusetts. After graduating in 1984, Cheyer earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Brandeis University in 1988, and a master's degree in computer science and artificial intelligence from UCLA in 1993.
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Kenneth T. Jackson
#6672
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Kenneth Terry Jackson is a professor emeritus of history and social sciences at Columbia University. A frequent television guest, he is best known as an urban historian and a preeminent authority on the history of New York City, where he lives on the Upper West Side.
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Daniel G. Bobrow
#6673
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Daniel Gureasko Bobrow was an American computer scientist who created an oft-cited artificial intelligence program STUDENT, with which he earned his PhD., worked at BBN Technologies , then was a Research Fellow in the Intelligent Systems Laboratory of the Palo Alto Research Center.
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Christopher Nolan
#6674
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Christopher Edward Nolan is a British and American filmmaker. Known for his Hollywood blockbusters with complex storytelling, Nolan is considered a leading filmmaker of the 21st century. His films have grossed more than $6 billion worldwide. The recipient of many accolades, he has been nominated for five Academy Awards, five BAFTA Awards and six Golden Globe Awards. In 2015, he was listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time, and in 2019, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his contributions to film.
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Donna Summer
#6675
Overall Influence
1948 - 2012 (64 years)
Donna Adrian Gaines , known professionally as Donna Summer, was an American singer and songwriter. She gained prominence during the disco era of the 1970s and became known as the "Queen of Disco", while her music gained a global following.
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Rupert Hart-Davis
#6676
Overall Influence
1907 - 1999 (92 years)
Sir Rupert Charles Hart-Davis was an English publisher and editor. He founded the publishing company Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd. As a biographer, he is remembered for his Hugh Walpole , as an editor, for his Collected Letters of Oscar Wilde , and, as both editor and part-author, for the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters.
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Sander Gilman
#6677
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Sander L. Gilman, born on February 21, 1944, is an American cultural and literary historian. He is known for his contributions to Jewish studies and the history of medicine. He is the author or editor of over ninety books.
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Joe Frazier
#6678
Overall Influence
1944 - 2011 (67 years)
Joseph William Frazier , nicknamed "Smokin' Joe", was an American professional boxer who competed from 1965 to 1981. Widely regarded as one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time, he was known for his strength, durability, formidable left hand, and relentless pressure fighting style and was the first boxer to defeat Muhammad Ali. Frazier held the NYSAC heavyweight title from 1968 to 1973 and the undisputed heavyweight champion from 1970 to 1973 and as an amateur won a gold medal at the 1964 Summer Olympics.
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John D. Roberts
#6679
Overall Influence
1918 - 2016 (98 years)
John Dombrowski Roberts was an American chemist. He made contributions to the integration of physical chemistry, spectroscopy, and organic chemistry for the understanding of chemical reaction rates. Another characteristic of Roberts' work was the early use of NMR, focusing on the concept of spin coupling.
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Joseph P. Allen
#6680
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Joseph Percival "Joe" Allen IV is an American former NASA astronaut. He logged more than 3,000 hours flying time in jet aircraft. Early life and education Allen was born in Crawfordsville, Indiana, on June 27, 1937. His parents, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph P. Allen III, had resided in Frankfort, Indiana. He attended Mills School, and is a graduate of Crawfordsville High School in Indiana, Class of 1955; received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics and Physics from DePauw University in 1959, where he was a member of The Delta Chapter of Beta Theta Pi, and a Master of Science and a Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Physics from Yale University in 1961 and 1965, respectively.
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Cynthia Enloe
#6681
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Cynthia Holden Enloe is an American political theorist, feminist writer, and professor. She is best known for her work on gender and militarism and for her contributions to the field of feminist international relations. She has also influenced the field of feminist political geography, with feminist geopolitics in particular.
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Geoffrey Leech
#6682
Overall Influence
1936 - 2014 (78 years)
Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author, or editor of more than 30 books and more than 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, and semantics.
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Raúl Alfonsín
#6683
Overall Influence
1927 - 2009 (82 years)
Raúl Ricardo Alfonsín was an Argentine lawyer and statesman who served as President of Argentina from 10 December 1983 to 8 July 1989. He was the first democratically elected president after more than seven years of military dictatorship, and is considered the "father of modern democracy in Argentina". Ideologically, he identified as a radical and a social democrat, serving as the leader of the Radical Civic Union from 1983 to 1991, 1993 to 1995, 1999 to 2001, with his political approach being known as "Alfonsinism".
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Klaus Hurrelmann
#6684
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Klaus Hurrelmann is professor of public health and education at the Hertie School in Berlin, Germany. Klaus Hurrelmann was born on 10 January 1944 in Gdynia and studied sociology, psychology and education in Berkeley , Freiburg and Münster.
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Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
#6685
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed , often known by his initials KSM, is a Pakistani terrorist and the former Head of Propaganda for al-Qaeda. He is currently held by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp under terrorism-related charges. He was named as "the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks" in the 2004 9/11 Commission Report.
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Valerie Thomas
#6686
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Valerie L. Thomas is an American data scientist and inventor. She invented the illusion transmitter, for which she received a patent in 1980. She was responsible for developing the digital media formats that image processing systems used in the early years of NASA's Landsat program.
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Marshall Rosenbluth
#6687
Overall Influence
1927 - 2003 (76 years)
Marshall Nicholas Rosenbluth was an American plasma physicist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, and member of the American Philosophical Society. In 1997 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for discoveries in controlled thermonuclear fusion, contributions to plasma physics, and work in computational statistical mechanics. He was also a recipient of the E.O. Lawrence Prize , the Albert Einstein Award , the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics , the Enrico Fermi Award , and the Hannes Alfvén Prize .
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Lawrence Block
#6688
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Lawrence Block is an American crime writer best known for two long-running New York-set series about the recovering alcoholic P.I. Matthew Scudder and the gentleman burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr. Block was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1994. Block has written in the genres of crime, mystery, and suspense fiction for more than half a century, releasing over 100 books.
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John Corcoran
#6689
Overall Influence
1937 - 2021 (84 years)
John Corcoran was an American logician, philosopher, mathematician, and historian of logic. He is best known for his philosophical work on concepts such as the nature of inference, relations between conditions, argument-deduction-proof distinctions, the relationship between logic and epistemology, and the place of proof theory and model theory in logic. Nine of Corcoran's papers have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Persian, and Arabic; his 1989 "signature" essay was translated into three languages. Fourteen of his papers have been reprinted; one was reprinted twice.
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David B. Audretsch
#6690
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
David Bruce Audretsch is an American economist. He is a distinguished professor at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University and also serves as director of the SPEA International Office, Ameritech Chair of Economic Development, and director of SPEA's Institute for Development Strategies . He is co-founder and co-editor of Small Business Economics: An Entrepreneurship Journal, and also works as a consultant to the United Nations, the World Bank, the OECD, the EU Commission, and the U.S. Department of State. He was the director of the Entrepreneurship, Growth and Public Policy Group at the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Germany from 2003 to 2009.
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Andrew B. Newberg
#6691
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Andrew Newberg is an American neuroscientist who is a professor in the Department of Integrative Medicine and Nutritional Sciences and the director of research at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, previously an adjunct professor of religious studies and a lecturer in psychology in the Biological Basis of Behavior Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Twinkle Khanna
#6692
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Twinkle Khanna , also known as Tina Jatin Khanna, is an Indian author, columnist, interior designer, film producer, and former actress. In 2015, Khanna released her first non-fiction book, Mrs Funnybones which was declared a bestseller, making Khanna India's highest-selling woman writer that year. Khanna's second book The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad, a collection of short stories, one of which was based on social entrepreneur Arunachalam Muruganantham, was later made into National Award winning feature film, Pad Man with the focus on dispelling taboos around menstruation. It was produced under Khanna's production house Mrs.
Go to Profile#6684
John C. Hull
#6693
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John C. Hull is a professor of Derivatives and Risk Management at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He is a respected researcher in the academic field of quantitative finance and is the author of two books on financial derivatives that are widely used texts for market practitioners: "Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives" and "Fundamentals of Futures and Options Markets". He has also written "Risk Management and Financial Institutions" and "Machine Learning in Business: An Introduction to the World of Data Science"
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Jack Miles
#6694
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
John R. Miles is an American author. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the MacArthur Fellowship. His writings on religion, politics, and culture have appeared in numerous national publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Commonweal Magazine.
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Erik Swyngedouw
#6695
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Erik Achille Marie Swyngedouw is professor of geography at the University of Manchester in the School of Environment, Education and Development and a member of the Manchester Urban Institute. Background Born in Dutch-speaking Belgium and fluent in Dutch, English, French, and Spanish, he graduated from Sint-Jozefscollege, Hasselt in 1974. He graduated with an MSc in Agricultural Engineering from the Catholic University of Leuven in 1979, with a thesis focussed on agrarian change in the community of Heers. His 1985 Master in Urban and Regional Planning was also from Leuven. He earned his PhD wi...
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Mahasweta Devi
#6696
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Mahasweta Devi was an Indian writer in Bengali and an activist. Her notable literary works include Hajar Churashir Maa, Rudali, and Aranyer Adhikar. She was a leftist who worked for the rights and empowerment of the tribal people of West Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh states of India. She was honoured with various literary awards such as the Sahitya Akademi Award , Jnanpith Award and Ramon Magsaysay Award along with India's civilian awards Padma Shri and Padma Vibhushan.
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Stanley Krippner
#6697
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
#6689
Kurt Wiesenfeld
#6698
Overall Influence
Kurt Wiesenfeld is an American physicist working primarily on non-linear dynamics. His works primarily concern stochastic resonance, spontaneous synchronization of coupled oscillators, and non-linear laser dynamics. Since 1987, he has been professor of physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
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Marion Dönhoff
#6699
Overall Influence
1909 - 2002 (93 years)
Marion Hedda Ilse Gräfin von Dönhoff was a German journalist and publisher who participated in the resistance against Nazism, along with Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, and Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. After the war, she became one of Germany's leading journalists and intellectuals, working for over 55 years as an editor and later publisher of the Hamburg-based weekly newspaper Die Zeit.
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Linda Martín Alcoff
#6700
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
#6692
Harvey Friedman
#6701
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Harvey Friedman is an American mathematical logician at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. He has worked on reverse mathematics, a project intended to derive the axioms of mathematics from the theorems considered to be necessary. In recent years, this has advanced to a study of Boolean relation theory, which attempts to justify large cardinal axioms by demonstrating their necessity for deriving certain propositions considered "concrete".
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Sanjay Ghemawat
#6702
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Sanjay Ghemawat is an Indian American computer scientist and software engineer. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Google in the Systems Infrastructure Group. Ghemawat's work at Google, much of it in close collaboration with Jeff Dean, has included big data processing model MapReduce, the Google File System, and databases Bigtable and Spanner. Wired have described him as one of the "most important software engineers of the internet age".
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Tarun Khanna
#6703
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Tarun Khanna is an Indian-born American academic, author, and an economic strategist. He is currently the Jorge Paulo Lemann professor at Harvard Business School; where he is a member of the strategy group, and the director of Harvard University’s South Asia initiative since 2010.
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Haakon, Crown Prince of Norway
#6704
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Haakon, Crown Prince of Norway is the heir apparent to the Norwegian throne. He is the only son of King Harald V and Queen Sonja. Haakon represents the fourth generation of the sitting Norwegian royal family of the House of Glücksburg. He married Mette-Marit Tjessem Høiby, with whom he has two children, Princess Ingrid Alexandra and Prince Sverre Magnus.
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David Maraniss
#6705
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
David Maraniss is an American award-winning journalist and author, currently serving as an associate editor for The Washington Post. Maraniss is the author of numerous award-winning books, ranging from politics to sports. He has written books on Green Bay Packers head coach Vince Lombardi, Baseball Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente, the 1960 Summer Olympics, and on U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
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Bill Clinton
#6706
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
William Jefferson Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and again from 1983 to 1992. Clinton, whose policies reflected a centrist "Third Way" political philosophy, became known as a New Democrat.
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Patricia Cornwell
#6707
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Patricia Cornwell is an American crime writer. She is known for her best-selling novels featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, of which the first was inspired by a series of sensational murders in Richmond, Virginia, where most of the stories are set. The plots are notable for their emphasis on forensic science, which has influenced later TV treatments of police work. Cornwell has also initiated new research into the Jack the Ripper killings, incriminating the popular British artist Walter Sickert. Her books have sold more than 100 million copies.
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Joanna Russ
#6708
Overall Influence
1937 - 2011 (74 years)
Joanna Russ was an American writer, academic and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God, and one children's book, Kittatinny. She is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire, and the story "When It Changed".
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Paul Abbott
#6709
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Paul Abbott is an English screenwriter and producer. He became one of the most successful television writers in Britain following his work on popular series such as Cracker and Coronation Street , and would become more widely known for creating some of the most acclaimed television dramas of the 1990s and 2000s, including Reckless , Touching Evil , Clocking Off , State of Play , Shameless , and No Offence .
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