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).
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List of the most influential people
#7351
George Lusztig
#7361
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
George Lusztig is a Romanian-born American mathematician and Abdun Nur Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He was a Norbert Wiener Professor in the Department of Mathematics from 1999 to 2009.
Go to Profile#7352
Ruth Wodak
#7362
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ruth Wodak is an Austrian linguist, who is Emeritus Distinguished Professor and Chair in Discourse Studies in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University and Professor in Linguistics at the University of Vienna.
Go to Profile#7353
Shelby Steele
#7363
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Shelby Steele is an author, columnist, documentary film maker, and a Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He specializes in the study of race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action.
Go to Profile#7354
Enid Mumford
#7364
Overall Influence
1924 - 2006 (82 years)
Enid Mumford was a British social scientist, computer scientist and Professor Emerita of Manchester University and a visiting fellow at Manchester Business School, largely known for her work on human factors and socio-technical systems.
Go to Profile#7355
Jeffrey Bub
#7365
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Jeffrey Bub is a physicist and philosopher of physics, and Distinguished Professor in the department of philosophy, the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Go to Profile#7356
Kerson Huang
#7366
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Kerson Huang was a Chinese-born American theoretical physicist and translator. Huang was born in Nanning, China and grew up in Manila, Philippines. He earned a B.S. and a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1950 and 1953, respectively. He served as an instructor at MIT from 1953 to 1955, and subsequently spent two years as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. After returning to the MIT faculty in 1957, Huang became an authority on statistical physics, and worked on Bose–Einstein condensation and quantum field theory. At MIT, he had many PhD students in theoretical physics including Raymond G.
Go to Profile#7357
Jerry Lee Lewis
#7367
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Jerry Lee Lewis was an American pianist, singer and songwriter. Nicknamed "The Killer", he was described as "rock 'n' roll's first great wild man". A pioneer of rock 'n' roll and rockabilly music, Lewis made his first recordings in 1952 at Cosimo Matassa's J&M Studio in New Orleans, Louisiana, and early recordings in 1956 at Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee. "Crazy Arms" sold 300,000 copies in the Southern United States, but it was his 1957 hit "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" that shot Lewis to worldwide fame. He followed this with the major hits "Great Balls of Fire", "Breathless", and "High...
Go to Profile#7358
Joel S. Engel
#7368
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Joel Stanley Engel is an American electrical engineer who made fundamental contributions to the development of cellular networks. Born in New York City, he obtained a B.Sc. in engineering at City College of New York . While working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the research staff at Draper Laboratory on inertial guidance and stabilization systems, he also obtained an M.Sc. in electrical engineering . He then moved to New Jersey and worked for Bell Labs most of his active research career , and also earned a Ph.D. from Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn on a thesis on data tra...
Go to Profile#7359
Kenneth Kaunda
#7369
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Kenneth Kaunda , also known as KK, was a Zambian politician who served as the first president of Zambia from 1964 to 1991. He was at the forefront of the struggle for independence from British rule. Dissatisfied with Harry Nkumbula's leadership of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress, he broke away and founded the Zambian African National Congress, later becoming the head of the socialist United National Independence Party .
Go to Profile#7360
Martin Odersky
#7370
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Martin Odersky is a German computer scientist and professor of programming methods at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. He specializes in code analysis and programming languages. He spearheaded the design of Scala and Generic Java .
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Greg Costikyan
#7371
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Greg Costikyan , sometimes known under the pseudonym "Designer X", is an American game designer and science fiction writer. Costikyan's career spans nearly all extant genres of gaming, including: hex-based wargames, role-playing games, boardgames, card games, computer games, online games, and mobile games. Several of his games have won Origins Awards. He co-founded Manifesto Games, now out of business, with Johnny Wilson in 2005.
Go to Profile#7362
Drew Weissman
#7372
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Drew Weissman is an American physician and immunologist known for his contributions to RNA biology. Weissman is the inaugural Roberts Family Professor in Vaccine Research, director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation, and professor of medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania .
Go to Profile#7363
Wolfgang A. Herrmann
#7373
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Wolfgang Anton Herrmann is a German chemist and academic administrator. From 1995 to 2019, he was President of the Technical University of Munich. Education Herrmann attended the Donau-Gymnasium Kelheim, where he passed the Abitur in 1967. He then studied chemistry at the Technical University of Munich on a scholarship from Cusanuswerk, where he wrote his diploma thesis in 1971 under the supervision of Ernst Otto Fischer, a later Nobel Prize laureate. He received his doctorate in 1973 at the University of Regensburg. After a research fellowship of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft with Phil...
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Rosalind Picard
#7374
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Rosalind Wright Picard is an American scholar and inventor who is Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, and co-founder of the startups Affectiva and Empatica.
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Gigliola Staffilani
#7375
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Gigliola Staffilani is an Italian-American mathematician who works as the Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research concerns harmonic analysis and partial differential equations, including the Korteweg–de Vries equation and Schrödinger equation.
Go to Profile#7366
Sylvère Lotringer
#7376
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
Sylvère Lotringer was a French-born literary critic and cultural theorist. Initially based in New York City, he later lived in Los Angeles and Baja California, Mexico. He is best known for synthesizing French theory with American literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde movements as founder of the journal Semiotext and for his interpretations of theory in a 21st-century context. He is regarded as an influential interpreter of Jean Baudrillard's theories, among others.
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Alok Bhargava
#7377
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Alok Bhargava is an Indian econometrician. He studied mathematics at Delhi University and economics and econometrics at the London School of Economics. He is currently a full professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.
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Dan Flavin
#7378
Overall Influence
1933 - 1996 (63 years)
Dan Flavin was an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures. Early life and career Daniel Nicholas Flavin Jr. was born in Jamaica, New York, of Irish Catholic descent, and was sent to Catholic schools. He studied for the priesthood at the Immaculate Conception Preparatory Seminary in Brooklyn between 1947 and 1952 before leaving to join his twin brother, David John Flavin, and enlist in the United States Air Force.
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Anita Borg
#7379
Overall Influence
1949 - 2003 (54 years)
Anita Borg was an American computer scientist celebrated for advocating for women’s representation and professional advancement in technology. She founded the Institute for Women and Technology and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.
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Hua Chunying
#7380
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Hua Chunying is a Chinese diplomat who has been serving as Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs of China since 2021 and the fifth spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 2012. After graduating from Nanjing University with a major in English language and literature in 1992, Hua joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a section member. She served as staff member, attaché, and third secretary in the Ministry's Department of Western Europe and the China Embassy in Singapore from 1992 to 2003. She served as second secretary, first secretary, and then counselor in the Mission of China to the European Union from 2003 to 2010.
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Odo Marquard
#7381
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Odo Marquard was a German philosopher. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Giessen from 1965 to 1993. In 1984 he received the Sigmund Freud Prize for Scientific Prose. Early life and education Odo Marquard was born in Stolp, Farther Pomerania. He studied philosophy, German literature and theology, obtaining his doctorate at the University of Münster and his habilitation at the University of Freiburg. In Münster he studied under Joachim Ritter, whose Ritter School he sometimes is considered a member of. An even greater influence was Max Müller, whom Marquard studied under in ...
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Murray Turoff
#7382
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Murray Turoff was a Distinguished Professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology who was a key founding father of computer-mediated communication. Career Turoff received his B.A. degree in Mathematics and Physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1958. He received his PhD in Physics from Brandeis University in 1965.
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Vivek Chibber
#7383
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Vivek Aslam Chibber is an American academic, social theorist, editor, and professor of sociology at New York University, who has published widely on development, social theory, and politics. Chibber is the author of three books, The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn , Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital and Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India .
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Bruce Beutler
#7384
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Bruce Alan Beutler is an American immunologist and geneticist. Together with Jules A. Hoffmann, he received one-half of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for "discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity." Beutler discovered the long-elusive receptor for lipopolysaccharide . He did so by identifying spontaneous mutations in the gene coding for mouse Toll-like receptor 4 in two unrelated strains of LPS-refractory mice and proving they were responsible for that phenotype. Subsequently, and chiefly through the work of Shizuo Akira, other TLRs were shown to detect signa...
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Andreas Kaplan
#7385
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Andreas Marcus Kaplan is president of Kühne Logistics University. He is specialized in the areas of social media, viral marketing, and the digital world in general. Life Kaplan was born on October 5, 1977, and grew up in Munich, Germany. His mother is Anneliese Kaplan and his father is Vincenc Kaplan .
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Tom Harpur
#7386
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Thomas William Harpur was a Canadian biblical scholar, columnist, and broadcaster. An ordained Anglican priest, he was a proponent of the Christ myth theory, the idea that Jesus did not exist but is a fictional or mythological figure. He was the author of a number of books, including For Christ's Sake , Life after Death , The Pagan Christ , and Born Again .
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Gustave Thibon
#7387
Overall Influence
1903 - 2001 (98 years)
Gustave Thibon was a French philosopher. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times by Édouard Delebecque, in 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966 and 1968. Biography Although essentially self-taught , Thibon was an avid reader – especially of poetry, in French, Provençal and Latin. He was very impressed by the First World War, which led him to hate patriotism and democracy. The young Gustave Thibon travelled extensively, at first to London and Italy, and later to North Africa, where he served in the military, before returning to his native village at the age of 23. Under the influence of writers such as Léon Bloy and Jacques Maritain he converted to Catholicism.
Go to Profile#7378
Tim Montgomerie
#7388
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Timothy Montgomerie is a British political activist, blogger, and columnist. He is best known as the co-founder of the Centre for Social Justice and as creator of the ConservativeHome website, which he edited from 2005 until 2013, when he left to join The Times. He was formerly the newspaper's comment editor, but resigned in March 2014. On 17 February 2016, Montgomerie resigned his membership of the Conservative Party, citing the leadership's stance on Europe, which was then supportive of EU membership. In 2019, he was briefly a special adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, advising on soc...
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Jamaica Kincaid
#7389
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua . She lives in North Bennington, Vermont and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University during the academic year.
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Harvey Klehr
#7390
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Harvey Elliott Klehr is a professor of politics and history at Emory University. Klehr is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist movement, and on Soviet espionage in America . Early years He was born in Newark, New Jersey. He received his Bachelor's degree from Franklin and Marshall College in 1967. He received his doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1971, after defending a dissertation entitled The Theory of American Exceptionalism.
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Samantha Cristoforetti
#7391
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Samantha Cristoforetti is an Italian European Space Agency astronaut, former Italian Air Force pilot and engineer. She holds the record for the longest uninterrupted spaceflight by a European astronaut , and she held the record for the longest single space flight by a woman until this was broken by Peggy Whitson in June 2017, and later by Christina Koch. She is also the first Italian woman in space. She took command of ISS Expedition 68 on 28 September 2022.
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Yitzhak Shamir
#7392
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Yitzhak Shamir was an Israeli politician and the seventh prime minister of Israel, serving two terms . Before the establishment of the State of Israel Shamir was a leader of the Zionist militant group Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang.
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Richard Gasquet
#7393
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Richard Gabriel Cyr Gasquet is a French professional tennis player. His career-high ATP singles ranking is world No. 7, attained on 9 July 2007. He has won 16 singles titles on the ATP Tour tied for seventh most among active players. He is also fourth among active players with 600 career match wins. His best performances in Grand Slam singles tournaments have been three semifinal appearances, two at the Wimbledon Championships and once at the US Open . His best performance in ATP World Tour Masters 1000 singles tournaments was being the runner-up in Hamburg in 2005 and Toronto in 2006 and 2012.
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Adam Podgórecki
#7394
Overall Influence
1925 - 1998 (73 years)
Adam Podgórecki was a sociologist and one of the founders of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law. Podgórecki was also one of the founders of the first institute at Warsaw University which was devoted to the social scientific studies of law. He moved to Carlton University in Ottawa, Canada, and took up a Chair in sociology and anthropology, when the communists expelled him from his professorship for "anti-communist academic activities". "He worked tirelessly and fearlessly" to ensure the independence of the sociology of law "against the pull of the large disciplines of sociology on the ...
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Shinzo Abe
#7395
Overall Influence
1954 - 2022 (68 years)
Shinzo Abe was a Japanese politician and statesman who served as Prime Minister of Japan and President of the Liberal Democratic Party from 2006 to 2007 and again from 2012 to 2020. He was the longest-serving prime minister in Japanese history, serving for almost nine years in total. Abe also served as Chief Cabinet Secretary from 2005 to 2006 under Junichiro Koizumi and was briefly the opposition leader in 2012.
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Susan Griffin
#7396
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Susan Griffin is a radical feminist philosopher, essayist and playwright particularly known for her innovative, hybrid-form ecofeminist works. Life Griffin was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1943 and has resided in California since then. Following her father's death when she was 16, she bounced around the family but was eventually taken into the home and family of noted artist Morton Dimondstein. Her biological family were of Irish, Scottish, Welsh and German ancestry. Having spent a year in a post-War Jewish home, her German heritage wasn't openly spoken of and she initially demonized Germans, but later made several trips to Germany to reconcile her Jewish and German heritages.
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Brian David Ellis
#7397
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Brian Ellis is an Australian philosopher. He is an Emeritus Professor in the philosophy department at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, and Professional Fellow in philosophy at the University of Melbourne. He was the Editor of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy for twelve years. He is one of the major proponents of the New Essentialist school of philosophy of science. In later years he has brought his understanding of scientific realism to the Social Sciences, developing the philosophy of Social Humanism.
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Robert Ulanowicz
#7398
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Robert Edward Ulanowicz is an American theoretical ecologist and philosopher of Polish descent who in his search for a unified theory of ecology has formulated a paradigm he calls Process Ecology. He was born September 17, 1943, in Baltimore, Maryland.
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Queen Anne-Marie of Greece
#7399
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Anne-Marie is a Greek and Danish royal who was Queen of Greece as the consort of King Constantine II from their marriage on 19 September 1964 until 1 June 1973. Anne-Marie is the youngest daughter of King Frederick IX and Queen Ingrid of Denmark. In 1964, she married Constantine and became queen consort of Greece. They had five children: Princess Alexia, Crown Prince Pavlos, Prince Nikolaos, Princess Theodora, and Prince Philippos. As queen, Anne-Marie spent much of her time working for a charitable foundation known as "Her Majesty's Fund" and later as the "Anne-Marie Foundation", which provided assistance to people in rural areas of Greece.
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Saul Newman
#7400
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Saul Newman is a British political theorist who writes on post-anarchism. He is professor of political theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Newman took up the term "post-anarchism" as a general term for political philosophies filtering 19th century anarchism through a post-structuralist lens, and later popularized it through his 2001 book From Bakunin to Lacan. Thus he rejects a number of concepts traditionally associated with anarchism, including essentialism, a "positive" human nature, and the concept of revolution. The links between poststructuralism and anarchism have also ...
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Austin Sarat
#7401
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Austin Sarat is an American political scientist who is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is also a Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor. He has written, co-written, or edited more than fifty books in the fields of law and political science. Professor Sarat received a B.A. from Providence College in 1969, and both an M.A. and Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1970 and 1973, respectively. He also received a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1988.
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Dumitru Stăniloae
#7402
Overall Influence
1903 - 1993 (90 years)
Dumitru Stăniloae was a Romanian Orthodox Christian priest, theologian and professor. He worked for over 45 years on a comprehensive Romanian translation of the Greek Philokalia, a collection of writings on prayer by the Church Fathers, together with the hieromonk, Arsenie Boca, who brought manuscripts from Mount Athos. His book, The Dogmatic Orthodox Theology , made him one of the best-known Christian theologians of the second half of the 20th century. He also produced commentaries on earlier Christian thinkers, such as St Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Maximus the Confessor, and St Athanasius of Alexandria.
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Michel Butor
#7403
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Michel Butor was a French poet, novelist, teacher, essayist, art critic and translator. Life and work Michel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul, a suburb of Lille, the third of seven children. His parents were Émile Butor , a railroad inspector and Anna . He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1947.
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Leonard Cheshire
#7404
Overall Influence
1917 - 1992 (75 years)
Geoffrey Leonard Cheshire, Baron Cheshire, was a highly decorated Royal Air Force pilot and group captain during the Second World War, and a philanthropist. Among the honours Cheshire received as a pilot was the Victoria Cross, the highest award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces. He was the youngest group captain in the RAF and one of the most highly decorated pilots of the war.
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Leon Edel
#7405
Overall Influence
1907 - 1997 (90 years)
Joseph Leon Edel was an American/Canadian literary critic and biographer. He was the elder brother of North American philosopher Abraham Edel. The Encyclopædia Britannica calls Edel "the foremost 20th-century authority on the life and works of Henry James." His work on James won him both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.
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David Miller
#7406
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
David William Miller is an English philosopher and prominent exponent of critical rationalism. He taught in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK. where he is Reader in Philosophy. He has been Honorary Treasurer of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science.
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José A. Cabranes
#7407
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
José Alberto Cabranes is an American lawyer who serves as a senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and a former presiding judge of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review . Formerly a practicing lawyer, government official, and law teacher, he was the first Puerto Rican appointed to a federal judgeship in the continental United States .
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James T. Richardson
#7408
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
James T. Richardson is Emeritus Foundation Professor of Sociology and Judicial Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is a sociologist with legal training, who has edited and co-edited over a dozen books and has authored more than 300 scholarly journal articles and book chapters. Areas in which he is specialized include the sociology of religion, the sociology of law, religion and human rights, social control of religions, social psychology of law, social and behavioral science evidence, and treatment of Muslims in courts. Richardson has been an outstanding figure in American sociology...
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James M. Poterba
#7409
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
James Michael "Jim" Poterba, FBA is an American economist, Mitsui Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and current NBER president and chief executive officer. Early years Poterba was born in New York City. He attended Pennsbury High School in Pennsylvania, where he won the 1976 championship of the National Forensic League in policy debate. He completed his A.B., summa cum laude, in 1980 from Harvard University and completed his PhD in 1983 from Nuffield College, Oxford. He was a Marshall Scholar.
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Emil Martinec
#7410
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Emil John Martinec is an American string theorist, a physics professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, and director of the Kadanoff Center for Theoretical Physics. He was part of a group at Princeton University that developed heterotic string theory in 1985.
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