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
#10651
Philip D. Zelikow
#10661
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Philip David Zelikow is an American diplomat, academic and author. He has worked as the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, and counselor of the United States Department of State. He is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia and was American Academy in Berlin Axel Springer Fellow, in the fall of 2009.
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Yannis Stavrakakis
#10662
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Yannis Stavrakakis is a Greek–British political theorist. A member of the Essex School of discourse analysis, he is mainly known for his explorations of the importance of psychoanalytic theory for contemporary political and cultural analysis and for his discourse studies on populism.
Go to Profile#10653
Ravi Vakil
#10663
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Ravi D. Vakil is a Canadian-American mathematician working in algebraic geometry. Education and career Vakil attended high school at Martingrove Collegiate Institute in Etobicoke, Ontario, where he won several mathematical contests and olympiads. After earning a BSc and MSc from the University of Toronto in 1992, he completed a PhD in mathematics at Harvard University in 1997 under Joe Harris. He has since been an instructor at both Princeton University and MIT. Since the fall of 2001, he has taught at Stanford University, becoming a full professor in 2007.
Go to Profile#10654
John Lofland
#10664
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
John Franklin Lofland is an American sociologist best known for his studies of the peace movement and for his first book, Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith, which was based on field work among a group of Unification Church members in California in the 1960s. It is considered to be one of the most important and widely cited studies of the process of religious conversion, and one of the first modern sociological studies of a new religious movement.
Go to Profile#10655
Vashishtha Narayan Singh
#10665
Overall Influence
1946 - 2019 (73 years)
Vashishtha Narayan Singh was an Indian mathematician and academic. He taught mathematics at various institutes in India between the 1960s and the 1970s. He is popular on social media for supposedly having challenged Einstein's Theory of Relativity but there are no credible sources that prove so. In the early 1970s, Singh was diagnosed with schizophrenia due to which he was repeatedly in and out of psychiatric hospitals and only returned to academia in 2014. He was posthumously awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award of India for his contributions, in 2020.
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Anatole Abragam
#10666
Overall Influence
1914 - 2011 (97 years)
Anatole Abragam was a French physicist who wrote The Principles of Nuclear Magnetism and made significant contributions to the field of nuclear magnetic resonance. Originally from Griva, Courland Governorate, Russian Empire, Abragam and his family emigrated to France in 1925.
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Stanley Elkins
#10667
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Stanley Maurice Elkins was an American historian, best known for his unique and controversial comparison of slavery in the United States to Nazi concentration camps, and for his collaborations with Eric McKitrick regarding the early American Republic. They together wrote The Age of Federalism, on the history of the founding fathers of America. He obtained his BA from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. Elkins first taught at the University of Chicago but spent most of his career as a professor of history at Smith College in Northampton, MA, where he raised ...
Go to Profile#10658
Evi Nemeth
#10668
Overall Influence
1940 - 2013 (73 years)
Evi Nemeth was an engineer, author, and teacher known for her expertise in computer system administration and networks. She was the lead author of the "bibles" of system administration: UNIX System Administration Handbook , Linux Administration Handbook , and UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook . Evi Nemeth was known in technology circles as the matriarch of system administration.
Go to Profile#10659
Philippe-Joseph Salazar
#10669
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Philippe-Joseph Salazar , a French rhetorician and philosopher, was born on 10 February 1955 in Casablanca, then part of French Morocco. Salazar attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand a prestigious secondary-school in Paris before studying philosophy, politics and literature at the École Normale Supérieure. Since 1999 Salazar is a Distinguished Professor in Rhetoric in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Salazar's lifelong achievements made him the recipient of Africa's premier research award in 2008, the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award. In 2015 he received a presti...
Go to Profile#10660
Marvin Kalb
#10670
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Marvin Leonard Kalb is an American journalist. He was the founding director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and Edward R. Murrow Professor of Press and Public Policy from 1987 to 1999. The Shorenstein Center and the Kennedy School are part of Harvard University. Kalb is currently a James Clark Welling Fellow at George Washington University and a member of the Atlantic Community Advisory Board. He is a guest scholar in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.
Go to Profile#10661
Abdelwahab Meddeb
#10671
Overall Influence
1946 - 2014 (68 years)
Abdelwahab Meddeb was a French-language writer and cultural critic, and a professor of comparative literature at the University of Paris X-Nanterre. Biography and career Meddeb was born in Tunis, French Tunisia, in 1946, into a learned and patrician milieu. His family's origins stretch from Tripoli and Yemen on his mother's side, to Spain and Morocco on his father's side. Raised in a traditionally observant Maghrebi Muslim family, Meddeb began learning the Qur'an at the age of four from his father, Sheik Mustapha Meddeb, a scholar of Islamic law at the Zitouna, the great mosque and university of Tunis.
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Bill Cunningham
#10672
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
William Daniel Cunningham is an American radio and television talk show host, conservative commentator, attorney, and entrepreneur. On the radio, he hosts The Big Show with Bill Cunningham, heard weekdays on AM 700 WLW in Cincinnati, and Sunday Nights with Bill Cunningham, a program syndicated nationally by Premiere Radio Networks.
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William Henry Danforth
#10673
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
William Henry Danforth II was an American physician, professor of medicine, academic administrator, and philanthropist. He was chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis from 1971 until 1995. Danforth was the grandson of Ralston-Purina founder and St. Louis businessman William H. Danforth, and the brother of former U.S. Senator John Danforth.
Go to Profile#10664
Anthony Quinn
#10674
Overall Influence
1915 - 2001 (86 years)
Manuel Antonio Rodolfo Quinn Oaxaca , better known by his stage name Anthony Quinn, was an American actor. Born in Mexico to a Mexican mother and a first-generation Irish-Mexican father, he was known for his portrayal of earthy, passionate characters "marked by a brutal and elemental virility" in numerous critically acclaimed films both in Hollywood and abroad. His notable films include La Strada , The Guns of Navarone , Lawrence of Arabia , Guns for San Sebastian , The Shoes of the Fisherman , The Message , Lion of the Desert , Jungle Fever and Seven Servants . He also had an Oscar-nominated...
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Ann Elizabeth Mayer
#10675
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Ann Elizabeth Mayer is an Associate Professor of Legal Studies in the Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Biography Ann E. Mayer has taught law courses on subjects comprising law and policy in international business, globalization and human rights, introductions to U.S. law, comparative law, and Islamic law in contemporary Middle Eastern legal systems.
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L. K. Advani
#10676
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Lal Krishna Advani is an Indian politician who served as the 7th Deputy Prime Minister of India from 2002 to 2004. He is one of the co-founders of Bharatiya Janata Party and a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh , a right-wing Hindu nationalist volunteer organisation. He was also the longest serving Minister of Home Affairs serving from 1998 to 2004. He was also the longest serving Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha. He was the leader of the BJP during the 2009 general election.
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Jeffrey L. Whitten
#10677
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Jeffrey L. Whitten is an American computer scientist, and professor of information technology at Purdue University, known with Kevin C. Dittman and Lonnie D. Bentley as co-author of the textbook Systems Analysis and Design Methods, which is now in its 7th edition.
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Abhay Bhushan
#10678
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Abhay Bhushan is an Indian computer scientist. Bhushan has been a major contributor to the development of the Internet TCP/IP architecture, and is the author of the File Transfer Protocol and the early versions of email standards. He is currently chairman of Asquare Inc., Secretary of Indians for Collective Action and the former President of the IIT-Kanpur Foundation. In 2023, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman
#10679
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Greg Kroah-Hartman is a major Linux kernel developer. he is the Linux kernel maintainer for the branch, the staging subsystem, USB, driver core, debugfs, kref, kobject, and the sysfs kernel subsystems, Userspace I/O , and TTY layer. He also created linux-hotplug, the udev project, and the Linux Driver Project. He worked for Novell in the SUSE Labs division and, , works at the Linux Foundation.
Go to Profile#10670
R. J. Rushdoony
#10680
Overall Influence
1916 - 2001 (85 years)
Rousas John Rushdoony was an Armenian-American Calvinist philosopher, historian, and theologian. He is credited as being the father of Christian Reconstructionism and an inspiration for the modern Christian homeschool movement. His followers and critics have argued that his thought exerts considerable influence on the evangelical Christian right.
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John Goldthorpe
#10681
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
John Harry Goldthorpe is a British sociologist. He is an emeritus Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. His main research interests are in the fields of social stratification and mobility, and comparative macro-sociology. He also writes on methodological issues in relation to the integration of empirical, quantitative research and theory with a particular focus on issues of causation.
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Rajni Kothari
#10682
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Rajni Kothari was an Indian political scientist, political theorist, academic and writer. He was the founder of Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in 1963, a social sciences and humanities research institute, based in Delhi and Lokayan , started in 1980 as a forum for interaction between activists and intellectuals. He was also associated with Indian Council of Social Science Research, International Foundation for Development Alternatives, and People's Union for Civil Liberties.
Go to Profile#10673
Mattei Dogan
#10683
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Mattei Dogan was a Romanian-born French political sociologist and senior research officer emeritus of the French National Center for Scientific Research and professor emeritus of political science of the University of California, Los Angeles. Over a period of 22 years, he also taught at UCLA, Indiana University, Yale University, the Institute of Statistical Mathematics in Tokyo, the University of Florence, and the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was a foreign honorary member of the Romanian Academy from 1992, and he received the CNRS Silver Medal.
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David Laidler
#10684
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
David Ernest William Laidler is an English/Canadian economist who has been one of the foremost scholars of monetarism. He published major economics journal articles on the topic in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His book, The Demand for Money, was published in four editions from 1969 through 1993 , initially setting forth the stability of the relationship between income and the demand for money and later taking into consideration the effects of legal, technological, and institutional changes on the demand for money. The book has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Ch...
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Walter M. Fitch
#10685
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Walter Monroe Fitch was a pioneering American researcher in molecular evolution. Education and career Fitch attended University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated with an A.B. in chemistry in 1953 and a Ph.D. in comparative biochemistry in 1958. Fitch spent 24 years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, followed by three years at the University of Southern California and then was professor of molecular evolution at the University of California, Irvine, until his death. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was a Foreign Member of the London Linnean Society.
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John Gorton
#10686
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Sir John Grey Gorton was an Australian politician, farmer and airman who served as the 19th prime minister of Australia from 1968 to 1971. He held office as the leader of the Liberal Party of Australia, having previously been a senator for Victoria. He was the first and only member of the upper house of the parliament of Australia to assume the office of prime minister.
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Aryeh Dvoretzky
#10687
Overall Influence
1916 - 2008 (92 years)
Aryeh Dvoretzky was a Ukrainian-born Israeli mathematician, the winner of the 1973 Israel Prize in Mathematics. He is best known for his work in functional analysis, statistics and probability. He was the eighth president of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
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Gordon Fee
#10688
Overall Influence
1934 - 2022 (88 years)
Gordon Donald Fee was an American-Canadian Christian theologian who was an ordained minister of the Assemblies of God . He was professor of New Testament Studies at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Go to Profile#10679
Andriy Shevchenko
#10689
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Andriy Mykolayovych Shevchenko, or Andrii Mykolaiovych Shevchenko is a Ukrainian football manager, a former professional football player and a former politician. Shevchenko played as a striker for Dynamo Kyiv, AC Milan, Chelsea and the Ukraine national team. He was most recently head coach of Serie A club Genoa. Shevchenko is considered one of the greatest strikers of all time and Ukraine’s greatest ever player. He is the all-time top scorer for the Ukraine national team with 48 goals.
Go to Profile#10680
Joey Styles
#10690
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Joseph Carmine Bonsignore better known by his ring name Joey Styles, is an American former professional wrestling commentator. He is best known for his time with ECW and WWE. Before working for WWE, Styles was a full-time professional in the field of print advertising sales in New York City. He started selling digital advertising with WWE and is now selling digital advertising full-time in New York City.
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Wilfrid Hodges
#10691
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Wilfrid Augustine Hodges, FBA is a British mathematician and logician known for his work in model theory. Life Hodges attended New College, Oxford , where he received degrees in both Literae Humaniores and Theology. In 1970 he was awarded a doctorate for a thesis in Logic. He lectured in both Philosophy and Mathematics at Bedford College, University of London. He has held visiting appointments in the department of philosophy at the University of California and in the department of mathematics at University of Colorado. Hodges was Professor of Mathematics at Queen Mary College, University of ...
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Philip Hobsbaum
#10692
Overall Influence
1932 - 2005 (73 years)
Philip Dennis Hobsbaum was a British teacher, poet and critic. Life Hobsbaum was born into a Polish Jewish family in London, and brought up in Bradford, Yorkshire, where he attended Belle Vue Boys' Grammar School. He read English at Downing College, Cambridge, where he was taught and heavily influenced by F. R. Leavis. At Cambridge he took over the editing of the magazine delta from Peter Redgrove. After Cambridge, he worked as a school teacher in London from 1955 to 1959, when he moved to Sheffield to study for a PhD under William Empson. In 1962, he took up an academic position at Queen's University, Belfast, and moved again in 1966, to take up a post in the University of Glasgow.
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Karl Deutsch
#10693
Overall Influence
1912 - 1992 (80 years)
Karl Wolfgang Deutsch was a Czech social and political scientist. He was a professor at MIT, Yale University and Harvard University, as well as Director of WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Deutsch studied war and peace, nationalism, co-operation, and communication, as well as pioneered quantitative methods and formal system analysis and model-thinking into the field of political and social sciences, contributing to the development of sociological liberalism school in international relations.
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Joanne Liu
#10694
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Joanne Liu is a Canadian pediatric emergency medicine physician, Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Montreal, Professor of Clinical Medicine at McGill University, and the previous International President of Médecins sans Frontières . She was elected president during MSF's International General Assembly in June 2013.
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E. Mark Gold
#10695
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
E. Mark Gold is an American physicist, mathematician, and computer scientist. He became well known for his article Language identification in the limit which pioneered a formal model for inductive inference of formal languages, mainly by computers. Since 1999, an award of the conference on Algorithmic learning theory is named after him.
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Amos Rapoport
#10696
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Amos Rapoport is an architect and one of the founders of Environment-Behavior Studies . He is the author of over 200 academic publications in this field, including books that have been translated into foreign languages, including French, Spanish, German, Persian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. He has held honorable and visiting positions in many universities around the globe, is professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Go to Profile#10687
Neil Bissoondath
#10697
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Neil Devindra Bissoondath is a Trinidadian-Canadian author who lives in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. He is a noted writer of fiction. He is an outspoken critic of Canada's system of multiculturalism and is the nephew of authors V.S. Naipaul and Shiva Naipaul, grandson of Seepersad Naipaul, grandnephew of Rudranath Capildeo and Simbhoonath Capildeo, and cousin of Vahni Capildeo.
Go to Profile#10688
M. M. Kalburgi
#10698
Overall Influence
1938 - 2015 (77 years)
Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi was an Indian scholar of Vachana sahitya in the Kannada-language and academic who served as the vice-chancellor of Kannada University in Hampi. A noted epigraphist of Kannada, he was awarded the National Sahitya Akademi Award in 2006 for Marga 4, a collection of his research articles.
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Winfried Scharlau
#10699
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Winfried Scharlau was a German mathematician. Biography Scharlau received his doctorate in 1967 from the University of Bonn. His doctoral thesis Quadratische Formen und Galois-Cohomologie was supervised by Friedrich Hirzebruch. Scharlau was at the Institute for Advanced Study for the academic year 1969–1970 and in spring 1972. From 1970 he was a professor at the University of Münster, where he has now retired.
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William Nyhan
#10700
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
William Leo Nyhan is an American physician best known as the co-discoverer of Lesch–Nyhan syndrome. Nyhan currently serves as professor of pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine in La Jolla, California. He has held positions at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine and has served on a number of advisory committees, pediatric advisory boards, and research foundation boards.
Go to Profile#10691
Marlan Scully
#10701
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Marlan Orvil Scully is an American physicist best known for his work in theoretical quantum optics. He is a professor at Texas A&M University and Princeton University. Additionally, in 2012 he developed a lab at the Baylor Research and Innovation Collaborative in Waco, Texas.
Go to Profile#10692
Curtis T. McMullen
#10702
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Curtis Tracy McMullen is an American mathematician who is the Cabot Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998 for his work in complex dynamics, hyperbolic geometry and Teichmüller theory.
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Stephen Stills
#10703
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Stephen Arthur Stills is an American musician, singer, and songwriter best known for his work with Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Manassas. As both a solo act and member of three successful bands, Stills has combined record sales of over 35 million albums. He was ranked number 28 in Rolling Stones 2003 list of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and number 47 in the 2011 list. Stills became the first person to be inducted twice on the same night into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. According to Neil Young, "Stephen is a genius."
Go to Profile#10694
Walter Brueggemann
#10704
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Walter Brueggemann is an American Protestant Old Testament scholar and theologian who is widely considered one of the most influential Old Testament scholars of the last several decades. His work often focuses on the Hebrew prophetic tradition and sociopolitical imagination of the Church. He argues that the Church must provide a counter-narrative to the dominant forces of consumerism, militarism, and nationalism.
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John Coleman Moore
#10705
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
John Coleman Moore was an American mathematician. The Borel−Moore homology and Eilenberg–Moore spectral sequence are named after him. Early life and education Moore was born in 1923 in Staten Island, New York. He received his B.A. in 1948 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in 1952 from Brown University under the supervision of George W. Whitehead.
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Sim Van der Ryn
#10706
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Sim Van der Ryn is an American architect, researcher and educator. Van der Ryn's professional interest has been applying principles of physical and social ecology to architecture and environmental design.
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John Rajchman
#10707
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John Rajchman is a philosopher working in the areas of art history, architecture, and continental philosophy. Son of Jan A. Rajchman, a Polish-American computer scientist. John Rajchman is an Adjunct Professor and Director of Modern Art M.A. Programs in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He has previously taught at Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, and The Cooper Union, among others.
Go to Profile#10698
Susan Landau
#10708
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
#10699
Christian Marclay
#10709
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Christian Marclay is a visual artist and composer. He holds both American and Swiss nationality. Marclay's work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video and film. A pioneer of using gramophone records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collages, Marclay is, in the words of critic Thom Jurek, perhaps the "unwitting inventor of turntablism." His own use of turntables and records, beginning in the late 1970s, was developed independently of but roughly parallel to hip hop's use of the instrument.
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Michelangelo Antonioni
#10710
Overall Influence
1912 - 2007 (95 years)
Michelangelo Antonioni was an Italian director and filmmaker. He is best known for his "trilogy on modernity and its discontents"—L'Avventura , La Notte , and L'Eclisse —as well as the English-language film Blowup . His films have been described as "enigmatic and intricate mood pieces" that feature elusive plots, striking visual composition, and a preoccupation with modern landscapes. His work substantially influenced subsequent art cinema. Antonioni received numerous awards and nominations throughout his career, being the only director to have won the Palme d'Or, the Golden Lion, the Golden ...
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