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
#9651
Monika Płatek
#9661
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Monika Stanisława Płatek is a Polish legal scholar, criminologist, and politician. She is a professor at the University of Warsaw, and her research focuses on penal systems, criminal and civil law, gender studies, and feminist jurisprudence. She has been a candidate for the Senate of Poland and the European Parliament.
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Vanessa Redgrave
#9662
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Dame Vanessa Redgrave is an English actress. Throughout her career spanning over six decades, Redgrave has garnered numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a Tony Award and two Primetime Emmy Awards, making her one of the few performers to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting. She has also received various honorary awards, including the BAFTA Fellowship Award, the Golden Lion Honorary Award, and an induction into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#9653
Gershom Gorenberg
#9663
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Gershom Gorenberg is an American-born Israeli journalist, and blogger, specializing in Middle Eastern politics and the interaction of religion and politics. He is currently a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, a monthly American political magazine. Gorenberg self-identifies as "a left-wing, skeptical Orthodox Zionist Jew".
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Oscar De La Hoya
#9664
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Oscar De La Hoya is an American boxing promoter and former professional boxer who competed from 1992 to 2008. His accolades include winning 11 world titles in six weight classes, including the lineal championship in three weight classes. He is ranked as the 38th best boxer of all time, pound for pound, by BoxRec. De La Hoya was nicknamed "The Golden Boy of boxing" by the media when he represented the United States at the 1992 Summer Olympics where, shortly after having graduated from James A. Garfield High School, he won a gold medal in the lightweight division, and reportedly "set a sport ba...
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Laura Rockefeller Chasin
#9665
Overall Influence
1936 - 2015 (79 years)
Laura Spelman Rockefeller was an American philanthropist. She was the eldest child of Laurance Spelman Rockefeller and Mary French , and a fourth generation member of the Rockefeller family. She has two younger sisters, Marion, Lucy Aldrich Rockefeller, and a younger brother, Laurance Spelman Rockefeller Jr. Her patrilineal great-grandfather was Standard Oil's co-founder John D. Rockefeller and her matrilineal great-grandfather was Frederick H. Billings, a president of Northern Pacific Railway. Both of her grandmothers, Mary Billings French and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, were important to the early development of YWCA USA.
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Pete Conrad
#9666
Overall Influence
1930 - 1999 (69 years)
Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr. was an American NASA astronaut, aeronautical engineer, naval officer and aviator, and test pilot, and commanded the Apollo 12 space mission, on which he became the third person to walk on the Moon. Conrad was selected for NASA's second astronaut class in 1962.
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Manuel Sadosky
#9667
Overall Influence
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
Manuel Sadosky was an Argentine mathematician, civil servant and author who was born in Buenos Aires to Jewish Russian immigrants who had fled the pogroms in Europe. Bibliography Son of a shoemaker, Natalio Sadosky and his wife Maria Steingart of Ekaterinoslav , Ukraine, the family had arrived in Argentina in 1905.
Go to Profile#9658
Marine Le Pen
#9668
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen is a French lawyer and politician who ran for the French presidency in 2012, 2017, and 2022. A member of the National Rally , she served as its president from 2011 to 2021. She has been the member of the National Assembly for the 11th constituency of Pas-de-Calais since 2017. She currently serves as parliamentary party leader of the National Rally in the Assembly, a position she has held since June 2022. Le Pen has been widely described as being far-right on the political spectrum.
Go to Profile#9659
Arvind Panagariya
#9669
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Arvind Panagariya is an Indian-American economist who is the Jagdish Bhagwati Professor of Indian Political Economy at Columbia University and is also the Director of Deepak and Neera Raj Center on Indian Economic Policies at School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in New York City. He served as first vice-chairman of the government of India think-tank NITI Aayog between January 2015 and August 2017. He is a former Chief Economist of the Asian Development Bank. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the President of India in 2012 for his contributions in the field of economics and Public Policy.
Go to Profile#9660
Robert Bruce Merrifield
#9670
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Robert Bruce Merrifield was an American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1984 for the invention of solid phase peptide synthesis. Early life He was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on 15 July 1921, the only son of George E. Merrifield and Lorene née Lucas. In 1923 the family moved to California where he attended nine grade schools and two high schools before graduating from Montebello High School in 1939. It was there that he developed an interest both in chemistry and in astronomy.
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Michael Bratman
#9671
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Michael E. Bratman is an American philosopher who is Durfee Professor in the School of Humanities & Sciences and Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. Education and career Bratman graduated from Haverford College in 1967 and earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Rockefeller University in 1974, where he worked with Donald Davidson. He joined the faculty at Stanford University in 1974, where he has taught ever since.
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Carlos Queiroz
#9672
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Carlos Manuel Brito Leal de Queiroz is a Portuguese football coach who currently is the head coach of the Qatar national team. He has served as the manager of his native Portugal's national team, the United Arab Emirates, South Africa, Iran, Colombia and Egypt, leading South Africa , Portugal and Iran to the FIFA World Cup. At club level, he has also managed Sporting CP, the New York/New Jersey Metrostars in Major League Soccer and Spanish club Real Madrid. He also had two spells as Alex Ferguson's assistant manager at English club Manchester United.
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Detlef Weigel
#9673
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Detlef Weigel is a German American scientist working at the interface of developmental and evolutionary biology. Education Weigel was an undergraduate in biology and chemistry at the universities of Bielefeld and Cologne. In 1986, he graduated with a Diploma in biology for this thesis on Drosophila neurogenesis with the late José Campos-Ortega. In 1988, he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen. During his PhD work with , he discovered the founding member of an important class of transcription factors, the Forkhead/FOX proteins. In 1988, he graduated with a Ph...
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Tommie Smith
#9674
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Tommie C. Smith is an American former track and field athlete and former wide receiver in the American Football League. At the 1968 Summer Olympics, Smith, aged 24, won the 200-meter sprint finals and gold medal in 19.83 seconds – the first time the 20-second barrier was broken officially. His Black Power salute with John Carlos atop the medal podium to protest racism and injustice against African Americans in the United States caused controversy, as it was seen as politicizing the Olympic Games. It remains a symbolic moment in the history of the Black Power movement.
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Michael H. Schill
#9675
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Michael Harry Schill is an American legal scholar and academic administrator currently serving as the 17th president of Northwestern University since September 2022. Schill previously served as the 18th president of the University of Oregon from 2015 to 2022, dean of the University of Chicago Law School from 2009 to 2015, and dean of the UCLA School of Law from 2004 to 2009.
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Tomas Venclova
#9676
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Tomas Venclova is a Lithuanian poet, prose writer, scholar, philologist and translator of literature. He is one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. In 1977, following his dissident activities, he was forced to emigrate and was deprived of his Soviet citizenship. Since 1980, he has taught Russian and Polish literature at Yale University. Considered a major figure in world literature, he has received many awards, including the Prize of Two Nations , and The Person of Tolerance of the Year Award from the Sugihara Foundation, among other honors.
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Martin Sheen
#9677
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Ramón Antonio Gerardo Estévez , known professionally as Martin Sheen, is an American actor. In a career spanning six decades he received numerous accolades including three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and four Screen Actors Guild Awards.
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Peter Elbow
#9678
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Peter Elbow is a professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he also directed the Writing Program from 1996 until 2000. He writes about theory, practice, and pedagogy, and has authored several books and papers. He is one of the pioneers of freewriting.
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Katsuhito Iwai
#9679
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Katsuhito Iwai is a Japanese economist and critic. He has studied the theory of money, macro dynamics, evolutionary economics, philosophy of corporations, fiduciary law, and the history of sociology. His work includes the book, Disequilibrium Dynamics , and many articles published in academic journals. He has also written books and articles in newspapers and magazines for the general public on a wide variety of subjects ranging from global capitalism, post-modernity, civil society, money and language to literature and movies. His keen observations and analysis of the works of Shakespeare, Marx, J.
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Enric Miralles
#9680
Overall Influence
1955 - 2000 (45 years)
Enric Miralles Moya was a Spanish architect from Barcelona, Catalonia. He graduated from the Barcelona School of Architecture at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in 1978. After establishing his reputation with a number of collaborations with his first wife Carme Pinós, the couple separated in 1991. Miralles later married fellow architect Benedetta Tagliabue, and the two practiced together as EMBT Architects. Miralles' magnum opus and his largest project, the new Scottish Parliament Building, was unfinished at the time of his death.
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R Adams Cowley
#9681
Overall Influence
1917 - 1991 (74 years)
R Adams Cowley was an American surgeon considered a pioneer in emergency medicine and the treatment of shock trauma. Called the "Father of Trauma Medicine", he was the founder of the United States' first trauma center at the University of Maryland in 1958, after the United States army awarded him $100,000 to study shock in people—the first award of its kind in the United States. The trauma unit at first consisted of two beds, and was later expanded to four beds. Many people called the four-bed unit the "death lab." Cowley was the creator of the "Golden Hour" concept, the period of 60 minutes or less following injury when immediate definitive care is crucial to a trauma patient's survival.
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Eugene Charniak
#9682
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Eugene Charniak was a professor of computer Science and cognitive Science at Brown University. He held an A.B. in Physics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. in Computer Science. His research was in the area of language understanding or technologies which relate to it, such as knowledge representation, reasoning under uncertainty, and learning. Since the early 1990s he was interested in statistical techniques for language understanding. His research in this area included work in the subareas of part-of-speech tagging, probabilistic context-free grammar induction, and, more...
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Agostinho da Silva
#9683
Overall Influence
1906 - 1994 (88 years)
George Agostinho Baptista da Silva, GCSE was a Portuguese philosopher, essayist, and writer. His thought combines elements of pantheism and millenarism, an ethic of renunciation , and a belief in freedom as the most important feature of man. Anti-dogmatic, he asserts that truth is only found in the sum of all conflicting hypothesis . He may be considered a practical philosopher, living and working for a change in society, according to his beliefs.
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Gøsta Esping-Andersen
#9684
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Gøsta Esping-Andersen is a Danish sociologist whose primary focus has been on the welfare state and its place in capitalist economies. Jacob Hacker describes him as the "dean of welfare state scholars." Over the past decade his research has moved towards family demographic issues. A synthesis of his work was published as Families in the 21st Century .
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Norman Ornstein
#9685
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Norman Jay Ornstein is an American political scientist and an Emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute , a Washington, D.C., conservative think tank. He is the co-author of It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.
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Norman Golb
#9686
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Norman Golb was a scholar of Jewish history and the Ludwig Rosenberger Professor in Jewish History and Civilization at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Life Golb was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States, on 15 January 1928 to Joseph and Rose Golb, child immigrants from Ukraine.
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Albert J. Libchaber
#9687
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Albert Joseph Libchaber is a Detlev W. Bronk Professor at The Rockefeller University. He won the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1986. In 1999 he received the Prix des Trois Physiciens from the Fondation de France.
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Nikhil Srivastava
#9688
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Nikhil Srivastava is an associate professor of Mathematics at University of California, Berkeley. In July 2014, he was named a recipient of the Pólya Prize with Adam Marcus and Daniel Spielman. Early life and education Nikhil Srivastava was born New Delhi, India. He attended Union College in Schenectady, New York, graduating summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and computer science in 2005. He received a PhD in computer science from Yale University in 2010 .
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Ryue Nishizawa
#9689
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Ryue Nishizawa is a Japanese architect based in Tokyo. He is a graduate of Yokohama National University, and is director of his own firm, Office of Ryue Nishizawa, established in 1997. In 1995, he co-founded the firm SANAA with the architect Kazuyo Sejima. In 2010, he became the youngest recipient ever of the Pritzker Prize, together with Sejima.
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Lauryn Hill
#9690
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Lauryn Noelle Hill is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, and record producer. She is regarded as one of the greatest rappers of all time, as well as one of the most influential musicians of her generation. Hill is credited for breaking barriers for female rappers, popularizing melodic rap, redefining hip hop, and helping neo soul reach mainstream popularity. In addition to being named one of the 50 Great Voices by NPR, Hill was listed as one of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time by Rolling Stone. In 2015, she was ranked as the greatest woman rapper by Billboard. Her accolades include e...
Go to Profile#9681
William D. Cohan
#9691
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
William David Cohan is an American business writer. Early life and education Cohan was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 20, 1960. His father was an accountant and his mother worked in administration. Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism, and Columbia University Graduate School of Business.
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Wen Jiabao
#9692
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Wen Jiabao is a Chinese retired politician who served as the premier of China from 2003 to 2013. In his capacity as head of government, Wen was regarded as the leading figure behind China's economic policy. From 2002 to 2012, he held membership in the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, the country's de facto top power organ, where he was ranked third out of nine members and after general secretary Hu Jintao and Wu Bangguo, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress.
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Walter Jackson Bate
#9693
Overall Influence
1918 - 1999 (81 years)
Walter Jackson Bate was an American literary critic and biographer. He is known for Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography-winning biographies of Samuel Johnson and John Keats . Samuel Johnson also won the 1978 U.S. National Book Award in Biography.
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Christine King Farris
#9694
Overall Influence
1927 - 2023 (96 years)
Willie Christine King Farris was an American teacher and civil rights activist. King was the sister of Martin Luther King Jr. She taught at Spelman College and was the author of several books and was a public speaker on various topics, including the King family, multicultural education, and teaching.
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Jacob Metzer
#9695
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Jacob Metzer is an Israeli economic historian who is the Alexander Brody Emeritus Professor of Economic History in the Department of Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the eighth President of the Open University of Israel.
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Lewis H. Lapham
#9696
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Lewis Henry Lapham is an American writer. He was the editor of the American monthly Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and from 1983 until 2006. He is the founder of Lapham's Quarterly, a quarterly publication about history and literature, and has written numerous books on politics and current affairs.
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Leland B. Yeager
#9697
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
Leland Bennett Yeager was an American economist dealing with monetary policy and international trade. Biography Yeager graduated from Oberlin College in 1948 with an A.B. and was granted an M.A. from Columbia University in 1949 and a Ph.D. from there in 1952. He had previously served in the United States Army in World War II, translating Japanese codes. He temporarily served as the Vice President of the Interlingua Institute from 1997 to 1998 after Deanna Hammond died. He was a regular contributor to Liberty magazine and an occasional contributor to the "Mises Daily".
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Nitin Saxena
#9698
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Nitin Saxena is an Indian scientist in mathematics and theoretical computer science. His research focuses on computational complexity. He attracted international attention for proposing the AKS Primality Test in 2002 in a joint work with Manindra Agrawal and Neeraj Kayal, for which the trio won the 2006 Fulkerson Prize, and the 2006 Gödel Prize. They provided the first unconditional deterministic algorithm to test an n-digit number for primality in a time that has been proven to be polynomial in n. This research work came out as a part of his undergraduate study.
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Andrey Piontkovsky
#9699
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Andrey Andreyevich Piontkovsky is a Russian scientist and political writer and analyst, a member of International PEN Club. He is a former member of the Russian Opposition Coordination Council. Biography He graduated from the Mathematics Department of Moscow State University and has published more than a hundred scientific papers on applied mathematics.
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David Edgar
#9700
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
David Edgar is a British playwright and writer who has had more than sixty of his plays published and performed on stage, radio and television around the world, making him one of the most prolific dramatists of the post-1960s generation in Great Britain. He was resident playwright at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1974–5 and has been a board member there since 1985. Awarded a Fellow in Creative Writing at Leeds Polytechnic, he was made a Bicentennial Arts Fellow .
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Jacques Cohen
#9701
Overall Influence
Jacques Cohen is a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and of the Volen National Center for Complex Systems at Brandeis University. There he served as the TJX/Feldberg Chair in Computer Science. He has performed research in algorithms, parsing and compiling, memory management, logic and constraint logic programming, and parallelism. Cohen has published extensively, frequently with undergraduate and graduate students.
Go to Profile#9692
Rinchen Barsbold
#9702
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Rinchen Barsbold is a Mongolian paleontologist and geologist. He works with the Institute of Geology, at Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. He is an expert in vertebrate paleontology and Mesozoic stratigraphy. Barsbold has been instrumental in the discovery and recovery of one of the largest dinosaur collections in the world. His work has helped to form a more modern understanding of the later stages of dinosaur evolution in Eurasia.
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J. Peter May
#9703
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Jon Peter May is an American mathematician working in the fields of algebraic topology, category theory, homotopy theory, and the foundational aspects of spectra. He is known, in particular, for the May spectral sequence and for coining the term operad. The word "operad" was created by May as a portmanteau of "operations" and "monad" .
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Arthur Galston
#9704
Overall Influence
1920 - 2008 (88 years)
Arthur W. Galston was an American plant physiologist and bioethicist. As a plant biologist, Galston studied plant hormones and the effects of light on plant development, particularly phototropism. He identified riboflavin and other flavins as the photoreceptors for phototropism, the bending of plants toward light, challenging the prevailing view that carotenoids were responsible.
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Kevin Harlan
#9705
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Kevin Robert Harlan is an American television and radio sports announcer. The son of former Green Bay Packers executive Bob Harlan, and a two-time National Sportscaster of the Year, he broadcasts NFL and college basketball games on CBS and the NBA for TNT. 2023 is his 39th consecutive season doing NFL play by play, and 2023-24 is his 37th year doing NBA play by play. He has broadcast 13 consecutive Super Bowls. He is also the lead NFL radio voice nationally for Westwood One and Monday Night Football since 2009. Overall he is third all time in the total number of network television sports bro...
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George Alfred Barnard
#9706
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
George Alfred Barnard was a British statistician known particularly for his work on the foundations of statistics and on quality control. Early life and education George Barnard was born in Walthamstow, London. His father was a cabinet maker and his mother had been a domestic servant. His sister Dorothy Wedderburn became a sociologist and eventually Principal of Royal Holloway, University of London. Barnard attended the local grammar school, the Monoux School, and from there he won a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge, to read mathematics. In 1937 he went on to Princeton University t...
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Syd Barrett
#9707
Overall Influence
1946 - 2006 (60 years)
Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett was an English singer, guitarist and songwriter who co-founded the rock band Pink Floyd in 1965. Barrett was the band's frontman and primary songwriter, known for his whimsical style of psychedelia, English-accented singing, and stream-of-consciousness writing style. As a guitarist, he was influential for his free-form playing and for employing effects such as dissonance, distortion, echo and feedback.
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Galway Kinnell
#9708
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Galway Mills Kinnell was an American poet. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1982 collection, Selected Poems and split the National Book Award for Poetry with Charles Wright. From 1989 to 1993, he was poet laureate for the state of Vermont.
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Mike D'Antoni
#9709
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Michael Andrew D'Antoni is an Italian-American professional basketball coach and former player who is a coaching advisor for the New Orleans Pelicans of the National Basketball Association . Nicknamed “Mr. Pringles”, he is regarded by many to be one of the greatest offensive minds of all time.
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Michael K. Young
#9710
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Michael Kent Young is an American lawyer and academic administrator. He previously served as president of Texas A&M University from 2015 to 2020, president of the University of Washington from 2011 to 2015, president of the University of Utah from 2004 to 2011, and dean of the George Washington University Law School from 1998 to 2004.
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