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
#7651
John Mbiti
#7661
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
John Samuel Mbiti was a Kenyan-born Christian philosopher and writer. He was an ordained Anglican priest, and is considered "the father of modern African theology". Early life John Mbiti was born on 30 November 1931 in Mulango, Kitui County, eastern Kenya. His parents were two farmers, Samuel Mutuvi Ngaangi and Valesi Mbandi Kiimba; He was one of six children and was raised in a strong Christian environment. His Christian upbringing encouraged his educational journey through the African Inland Church. He attended Alliance High School in Nairobi and continued his education at University College of Makerere where he graduated in 1953.
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Takeo Kanade
#7662
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Takeo Kanade is a Japanese computer scientist and one of the world's foremost researchers in computer vision. He is U.A. and Helen Whitaker Professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. He has approximately 300 peer-reviewed academic publications and holds around 20 patents.
Go to Profile#7653
Chen Chung Chang
#7663
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Chen Chung Chang was a mathematician who worked in model theory. He obtained his PhD from Berkeley in 1955 on "Cardinal and Ordinal Factorization of Relation Types" under Alfred Tarski. He wrote the standard text on model theory. Chang's conjecture and Chang's model are named after him. He also proved the ordinal partition theorem ωω→2, originally a problem of Erdős and Hajnal. He also introduced MV-algebras as models for Łukasiewicz logic. Chang was a professor at the mathematics department of the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#7654
Nir Shavit
#7664
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Nir Shavit is an Israeli computer scientist. He is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Tel Aviv University and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#7655
Roberta Smith
#7665
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Roberta Smith is co-chief art critic of The New York Times and a lecturer on contemporary art. She is the first woman to hold that position. Early life Born in 1948 in New York City and raised in Lawrence, Kansas. Smith studied at Grinnell College in Iowa. Her career in the arts started in 1968, while an undergraduate summer intern at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
Go to Profile#7656
Benjamin Spock
#7666
Overall Influence
1903 - 1998 (95 years)
Benjamin McLane Spock was an American pediatrician and left-wing political activist whose book Baby and Child Care is one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century, selling 500,000 copies in the six months after its initial publication in 1946 and 50 million by the time of Spock's death in 1998. The book's premise to mothers was that they "know more than you think you do." Spock's parenting advice and recommendations revolutionized parental upbringing in the United States, and he is considered to be amongst the most famous and influential Americans of the 20th century.
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David Weinberger
#7667
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
David Weinberger is an American author, technologist, and speaker. Trained as a philosopher, Weinberger's work focuses on how technology — particularly the internet and machine learning — is changing our ideas, with books about the effect of machine learning’s complex models on business strategy and sense of meaning; order and organization in the digital age; the networking of knowledge; the Net's effect on core concepts of self and place; and the shifts in relationships between businesses and their markets.
Go to Profile#7658
Axel Kahn
#7668
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Axel Kahn was a French scientist and geneticist. He was the brother of the journalist Jean-François Kahn and the chemist Olivier Kahn. He was a member of the French National Consultative Ethics Committee from 1992 to 2004 and worked in gene therapy. He first entered the INSERM with a specialization in biochemistry. He was named in 2002 as a counsellor for biosciences and biotechnologies matters by the European Commission. Head of French laboratories specialized in biomedical sciences between years 1984 and 2007, he was elected President of the Paris Descartes University in December 2007, as t...
Go to Profile#7659
John Gielgud
#7669
Overall Influence
1904 - 2000 (96 years)
Sir Arthur John Gielgud, was an English actor and theatre director whose career spanned eight decades. With Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier, he was one of the trinity of actors who dominated the British stage for much of the 20th century. A member of the Terry family theatrical dynasty, he gained his first paid acting work as a junior member of his cousin Phyllis Neilson-Terry's company in 1922. After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art he worked in repertory theatre and in the West End before establishing himself at the Old Vic as an exponent of Shakespeare in 1929–31.
Go to Profile#7660
Martin J. Sherwin
#7670
Overall Influence
1937 - 2021 (84 years)
Martin Jay Sherwin was an American historian. His scholarship mostly concerned the history of nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation. He served on the faculty at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, Berkeley, and as the Walter S. Dickson Professor of English and American History at Tufts University, where he founded the Nuclear Age History and Humanities Center.
Go to Profile#7661
Mohammad Mehdi Zahedi
#7671
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Mohammad Mehdi Zahedi is an Iranian politician and was the former minister of science and technology in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Mr. Zahedi was approved by Iran's parliament with the fewest supporting votes possible . He was elected as a Member of the Parliament in 2012 election. He was reelected in 2016. On 1 January 2017, he has announced that he would run for presidency in 2017 presidential election. His nomination was rejected by the Guardian Council.
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Robert Harvey
#7672
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Robert Harvey is a literary scholar, philosopher, and academic. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He lectures in aesthetics, comparative literature, philosophy, and theory. His research and publications are primarily concerned with the interpenetrations of literary and philosophical discourses.
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Andrew P. Sage
#7673
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Andrew Patrick Sage was an American systems engineer and Emeritus Professor and Founding Dean Emeritus at the School of Information Technology and Engineering of the George Mason University. Biography Born in Charleston, South Carolina Sage received his BA in 1955 in Electrical Engineering at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, his MA in 1956 in Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his PhD also in Electrical Engineering in 1960 at the Purdue University.
Go to Profile#7664
Balfour Mount
#7674
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Balfour M. Mount, is a Canadian physician, surgeon, and academic. He is considered the father of palliative care in North America. Born in Ottawa, Ontario, he received his medical degree from Queen's University in 1963 and studied surgery and urology at McGill University. In January 1973, Dr. Mount, an urologic-cancer surgeon, was influenced by a discussion group of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' book On Death and Dying to lead a study of the conditions at Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital. After visiting Cicely Saunders' St. Christopher's Hospice, he helped to create a similar ward within the Royal Victoria Hospital in 1974 and coined the term "palliative care".
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Gahan Wilson
#7675
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Gahan Allen Wilson was an American author, cartoonist and illustrator known for his cartoons depicting horror-fantasy situations. Biography Wilson was born in Evanston, Illinois, and was inspired by the work of the satiric Mad and Punch cartoonists, and 1950s science fiction films. His cartoons and prose fiction appeared regularly in Playboy, Collier's and The New Yorker for nearly 50 years. He was a regular contributor to the National Lampoon humor magazine. He published cartoons and film reviews for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. From 1992 through end of publication, he prepared all the front covers for the annual book Passport to World Band Radio.
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Joseph Weber
#7676
Overall Influence
1919 - 2000 (81 years)
Joseph Weber was an American physicist. He gave the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the laser and the maser and developed the first gravitational wave detectors . Early life Joseph Weber was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on 17 May 1919, the last of four children born to Yiddish-speaking immigrant parents. His name was "Yonah" until he entered grammar school. He had no birth certificate, and his father had taken the last name of "Weber" to match an available passport in order to emigrate to the US. Thus, Joe Weber had little proof of either his family or his given name, which ...
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Fausto Pocar
#7677
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Fausto Pocar is an Italian jurist. He is professor emeritus of International Law at the University of Milan, where he also taught Private International Law and European Law, and where he served many years as Faculty Dean and Vice-Rector. From 1984-2000, he was an elected member of the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations, serving as the committee's chair from 1991-92.
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John Sweeney
#7678
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
John Paul Sweeney is a British investigative journalist and writer. He worked for The Observer newspaper, and the BBC's Panorama and Newsnight series. Sweeney ceased working for the BBC in October 2019.
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Joseph Bernardin
#7679
Overall Influence
1928 - 1996 (68 years)
Joseph Louis Bernardin was an American Cardinal of the Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Cincinnati from 1972 until 1982, and as Archbishop of Chicago from 1982 until his death in 1996 from pancreatic cancer. Bernardin was elevated to the cardinalate in 1983 by Pope John Paul II.
Go to Profile#7670
Lance Fortnow
#7680
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Lance Jeremy Fortnow is a computer scientist known for major results in computational complexity and interactive proof systems. He is currently Dean of the College of Computing at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
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Mark Satterthwaite
#7681
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Mark Allen Satterthwaite is an economist at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He is currently an A.C. Buehler Professor in Hospital & Health Services Management, Professor of Strategic Management & Managerial Economics, and chair of the Management & Strategy Department. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Benjamin Millepied
#7682
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Benjamin Millepied is a French dancer and choreographer, who has lived and worked in the United States since joining the New York City Ballet in 1995, where he became a soloist in 1998 and a principal in 2002. He has also created choreography for the company, and choreographed pieces for other major companies. He retired from the NYCB in 2011.
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Toyohiro Akiyama
#7683
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Toyohiro Akiyama is a retired Japanese TV journalist and professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design. In December 1990, he spent seven days aboard the Mir space station. He became the first person of Japanese nationality to fly in space, and his space mission was the second spaceflight to be commercially sponsored and funded. Akiyama was also the first civilian to use commercial space flight, and the first journalist to report from outer space.
Go to Profile#7674
Fedor Bogomolov
#7684
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
#7675
Kim Komando
#7685
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Kimberly Ann Komando is the host of two daily radio shows and one weekend radio show about consumer technology. On her weekly call-in show, she provides advice about technology gadgets, websites, smartphone apps, and internet security.
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William Poundstone
#7686
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
William Poundstone is an American author, columnist, and skeptic. He has written a number of books including the Big Secrets series and a biography of Carl Sagan. Early life and education Poundstone attended MIT and studied physics.
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Anthony Peratt
#7687
Overall Influence
Anthony L. Peratt is an American physicist whose most notable achievements have been in plasma physics,plasma petroglyphs, nuclear fusion and the monitoring of nuclear weapons. Education Peratt was a graduate student of Nobel Prize winning Hannes Alfvén. He received a Ph.D in electrical engineering / plasma physics in 1971 from the University of Southern California , Los Angeles. He was awarded a Master of Science in electrical engineering in 1967, also from USC.
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Charles de Lint
#7688
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Charles de Lint is a Canadian writer of Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese ancestry. He is married to, and plays music with, MaryAnn Harris. Primarily a writer of fantasy fiction, he has composed works of urban fantasy, contemporary magical realism, and mythic fiction. Along with authors like Terri Windling, Emma Bull, and John Crowley, de Lint during the 1980s pioneered and popularized the subgenre of urban fantasy. He writes novels, novellas, short stories, poetry]], and lyrics. His most famous works include: the Newford series of books , as well as Moonheart, The Mystery of Grace, The Painted Boy and A Circle of Cats .
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Ninian Stephen
#7689
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Sir Ninian Martin Stephen, was an English-born Australian judge who served as the 20th governor-general of Australia, in office from 1982 to 1989. He was previously a justice of the High Court of Australia from 1972 to 1982.
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Emily Lazar
#7690
Overall Influence
Emily B. Lazar is an American mastering engineer. She is the founder, president, and chief mastering engineer of The Lodge, an audio mastering facility that has operated in New York City's Greenwich Village since 1997. She won a Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical for Beck's album Colors, becoming the first female mastering engineer to win in this category.
Go to Profile#7681
Ian Horrocks
#7691
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Ian Robert Horrocks is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford in the UK and a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. His research focuses on knowledge representation and reasoning, particularly ontology languages, description logic and optimised tableaux decision proceduress.
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Václav Chvátal
#7692
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Václav Chvátal is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and a visiting professor at Charles University in Prague. He has published extensively on topics in graph theory, combinatorics, and combinatorial optimization.
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Edward A. Shanken
#7693
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Edward A. Shanken is an American art historian, whose work focuses on the entwinement of art, science and technology, with a focus on experimental new media art and visual culture. Shanken is Professor, Arts Division, at UC Santa Cruz. His scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and has been translated into many languages. Shanken is the author of Art and Electronic Media , among other titles.
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Karel Werner
#7694
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
Karel Werner was an indologist, orientalist, religious studies scholar, and philosopher of religion born in Jemnice in what is now the Czech Republic. Life Werner has described his childhood in the small town in south Moravia as idyllic. His father was a ‘master-baker’ and ran a small confectionery shop, and his mother was originally a qualified cook. The idyll ended when in 1933 their house was sold in an auction as a result of arrears in mortgage repayments during the great depression.
Go to Profile#7685
Abe Sklar
#7695
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Abe Sklar was an American mathematician and a professor of applied mathematics at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the inventor of copulas in probability theory. Education and career Sklar was born in Chicago to Jewish parents who immigrated to the United States from Ukraine. He attended Von Steuben High School and later enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1942, when he was only 16. Sklar went on to become a student of Tom M. Apostol at the California Institute of Technology, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1956. His students at IIT have included geometers Clark Kimberling and Marj...
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Mary-Claire King
#7696
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Mary-Claire King is an American geneticist. She was the first to show that breast cancer can be inherited due to mutations in the gene she called BRCA1. She studies human genetics and is particularly interested in genetic heterogeneity and complex traits. She studies the interaction of genetics and environmental influences and their effects on human conditions such as breast and ovarian cancer, inherited deafness, schizophrenia, HIV, systemic lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis. She has been the American Cancer Society Professor of the Department of Genome Sciences and of Medical Ge...
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Toyin Falola
#7697
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Toyin Omoyeni Falola is a Nigerian historian and professor of African Studies. Falola is a Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria and of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, and has served as the president of the African Studies Association. He is currently the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Arn Tellem
#7698
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Arn Herschel Tellem is an American sports executive who is the vice chairman of the Detroit Pistons of the National Basketball Association . From 1981 to 2015, he was a sports agent best known for his representation of basketball and baseball players. Tellem was vice chairman of the Wasserman Media Group, a global sport and entertainment marketing agency headed by Casey Wasserman. From 2009 to 2010, he wrote a semi-weekly sports column for The Huffington Post. He has also written for Sports Illustrated, the op-ed page of The New York Times, Grantland, Detroit Free Press, The Hollywood Reporte...
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Jacques-Louis Lions
#7699
Overall Influence
1928 - 2001 (73 years)
Jacques-Louis Lions was a French mathematician who made contributions to the theory of partial differential equations and to stochastic control, among other areas. He received the SIAM's John von Neumann Lecture prize in 1986 and numerous other distinctions. Lions is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.
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Nena von Schlebrügge
#7700
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Birgitte Caroline "Nena" von Schlebrügge is an American fashion model of the 1950s and 1960s. She started her high-fashion modelling career in London in 1957 and continued in New York City in 1958 at the Ford Modeling Agency. In New York, she worked at Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.
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Peter R. Orszag
#7701
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Peter Richard Orszag is the Chief Executive Officer of Lazard. Orszag was announced as Lazard’s incoming CEO on May 26, 2023. He assumed the role on October 1, 2023, at which time he also became a Board Director.
Go to Profile#7692
Ted Robert Gurr
#7702
Overall Influence
1936 - 2017 (81 years)
Ted Robert Gurr was an American author and professor of political science who most notably wrote about political conflict and instability. His widely translated book Why Men Rebel emphasized the importance of social psychological factors and ideology as root sources of political violence. He was Distinguished University Professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and consulted on projects he established there. He died in November 2017.
Go to Profile#7693
John Hollander
#7703
Overall Influence
1929 - 2013 (84 years)
John Hollander was an American poet and literary critic. At the time of his death, he was Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University, having previously taught at Connecticut College, Hunter College, and the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Go to Profile#7694
Judy Wajcman
#7704
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Judy Wajcman, is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the Principal Investigator of the Women in Data Science and AI project at The Alan Turing Institute. She is also a visiting professor at the Oxford Internet Institute. Her scholarly interests encompass the sociology of work, science and technology studies, gender theory, and organizational analysis. Her work has been translated into French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese and Spanish. Prior to joining the LSE in 2009, she was a Professor of Sociology in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University.
Go to Profile#7695
Ehud Olmert
#7705
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Ehud Olmert is an Israeli politician and lawyer. He served as the 12th Prime Minister of Israel from 2006 to 2009 and before that as a cabinet minister from 1988 to 1992 and from 2003 to 2006. Between his first and second stints as a cabinet member, he served as mayor of Jerusalem from 1993 to 2003. After serving as prime minister, he was sentenced to serve a prison term over convictions for accepting bribes and for obstruction of justice during his terms as mayor of Jerusalem and as trade minister.
Go to Profile#7696
Alessandro Del Piero
#7706
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Alessandro Del Piero is an Italian former professional footballer who mainly played as a deep-lying forward, although he was capable of playing in several offensive positions. Since 2015, he has worked as a pundit for Sky Sport Italia. A technically gifted and creative supporting forward who was also a free-kick specialist, Del Piero is widely regarded as one of the greatest players of his generation. He won the Serie A Italian Footballer of the Year award in 1998 and 2008 and received multiple nominations for the Ballon d'Or and FIFA World Player of the Year.
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Lynn Ahrens
#7707
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Lynn Ahrens is an American songwriter, and librettist for the musical theatre, television and film. She has collaborated with Stephen Flaherty for many years. She won the Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, and Outer Critics Circle Award for the Broadway musical Ragtime. Together with Flaherty, she has written many musicals, including Lucky Stiff, My Favorite Year, Ragtime, Seussical, A Man of No Importance, Dessa Rose, The Glorious Ones, Rocky, Little Dancer and, recently on Broadway, Anastasia and Once on This Island.
Go to Profile#7698
Jay Lorsch
#7708
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Jay William Lorsch is an American organizational theorist and the Louis Kirstein Professor of Human Relations at the Harvard Business School, known for his contribution of contingency theory to the field of organizational behavior.
Go to Profile#7699
Brian Jacques
#7709
Overall Influence
1939 - 2011 (72 years)
James Brian Jacques was an English novelist known for his Redwall series of novels and Castaways of the Flying Dutchman series. He also completed two collections of short stories entitled The Ribbajack & Other Curious Yarns and Seven Strange and Ghostly Tales.
Go to Profile#7700
Chizuko Ueno
#7710
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Chizuko Ueno is a Japanese sociologist and Japan's "best-known feminist". Her work covers sociological issues including semiotics, capitalism, and feminism in Japan. Ueno is known for the quality, polarizing nature, and accessibility of her work. She was married to historian Daikichi Irokawa.
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