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
#11101
David Shulkin
#11112
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
David Jonathon Shulkin is an American physician and former government official. In 2017, Shulkin became the ninth United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs and served under President Donald Trump. He was the Under Secretary of Veterans Affairs for Health from 2015 until 2017, appointed by President Barack Obama. On March 28, 2018, President Trump dismissed Shulkin from his position by tweet, and announced that Physician to the President Ronny Jackson would be nominated as Shulkin's successor, although Jackson's nomination was withdrawn on April 26, 2018, after allegations surfaced of misconduct and mismanagement while serving in the White House.
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Michael Dine
#11113
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Michael Dine is an American theoretical physicist, specializing in elementary particle physics, supersymmetry, string theory, and physics beyond the Standard Model. Education and career Dine received in 1974 a bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University and in 1978 a Ph.D. under Thomas Appelquist from Yale University with thesis Interactions of Heavy Quarks in Quantum Chromodynamics. He did research at SLAC and was for a number of years at the Institute for Advanced Study and the Henry Semat Professor at City College of New York. He is currently a professor at Santa Cruz Institute for Par...
Go to Profile#11103
Anthony Wilden
#11114
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
Anthony George Wilden was a writer, social theorist, college lecturer, and consultant. Wilden published numerous books and articles which intersect a number of fields, including systems theory, film theory, structuralism, cybernetics, psychiatry, anthropological theory, water control projects, urban ecosystems, resource conservation, and communications and social relations.
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Herman Feshbach
#11115
Overall Influence
1917 - 2000 (83 years)
Herman Feshbach was an American physicist. He was an Institute Professor Emeritus of physics at MIT. Feshbach is best known for Feshbach resonance and for writing, with Philip M. Morse, Methods of Theoretical Physics.
Go to Profile#11105
Ali Akbar Rashad
#11116
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Ali Akbar Rashad is an Iranian philosopher and Islamic scholar who pioneered the Ibtina Theory, a theory for explaining the process and mechanism of "religious knowledge" formation. He is currently a professor at the Islamic Research Institute for Culture and Thought as well as a member of the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council . He is also the founder and chair of Imam Reza Islamic seminary. The has presented articles and delivered speeches at conferences and scientific and philosophical conventions and conferences in different countries including Germany, the United States, the United Arab...
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John M. Carroll
#11117
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
John Millar Carroll is an American distinguished professor of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University, where he previously served as the Edward Frymoyer Chair of Information Sciences and Technology. Carroll is perhaps best known for his theory of Minimalism in computer instruction, training, and technical communication.
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Gerald Curtis
#11118
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Gerald L. Curtis is an American academic, a political scientist interested in comparative politics, Japanese politics, and U.S.-Japan relations. Columbia University Curtis was the Burgess Professor of Political Science at Columbia University from 1998 until he retired in December 2015. He is now Burgess Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Columbia. Between 1974 and 1990, Curtis was head of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia.
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Lawrence Weschler
#11119
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Lawrence Weschler is an author of works of creative nonfiction. A graduate of Cowell College of the University of California, Santa Cruz , Weschler was for over twenty years a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Awards—for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992—and was also a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award .
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Eliot Spitzer
#11120
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Eliot Laurence Spitzer is an American politician and attorney. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the 54th governor of New York from 2007 until his resignation in 2008. Spitzer was born in New York City, attended Princeton University, and earned his Juris Doctor degree from Harvard. He began his career as an attorney in private practice with New York law firms before becoming a prosecutor with the office of the New York County District Attorney. From 1999 to 2006, he was the Attorney General of New York, earning a reputation as the "Sheriff of Wall Street" for his efforts to curb corruption in the financial services industry.
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Elizabeth Drew
#11121
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Elizabeth Drew is an American political journalist and author. Early life Elizabeth Brenner was born on November 16, 1935, in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is the daughter of William J. Brenner, a furniture manufacturer, and Estelle Brenner .
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Maurice Papon
#11122
Overall Influence
1910 - 2007 (97 years)
Maurice Papon was a French civil servant and Nazi collaborator who was convicted of crimes against humanity committed during the occupation of France. Papon led the police in major prefectures from the 1930s to the 1960s, before he became a Gaullist politician. When he was secretary general for the police in Bordeaux during World War II, he participated in the deportation of more than 1,600 Jews. He is also known for his activities in the Algerian War , during which he tortured insurgent prisoners as prefect of the Constantinois department, and ordered, as prefect of the Paris police, the dea...
Go to Profile#11112
Emőke Bagdy
#11123
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Emőke Bagdy is a Hungarian clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, professor emerita at the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary , and former director of the National Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology. Her research, books, papers and talks focus on psychotherapy, health psychology and foundational problems of clinical psychology and clinical supervision.
Go to Profile#11113
Martin Löb
#11124
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Martin Hugo Löb was a German mathematician. He settled in the United Kingdom after the Second World War and specialised in mathematical logic. He moved to the Netherlands in the 1970s, where he remained in retirement. He is perhaps best known for having formulated Löb's theorem in 1955.
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Bin He
#11125
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Bin He is a Chinese American biomedical engineering scientist. He was the Trustee Professor and Head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Professor by courtesy in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Professor of the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior, he was Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medtronic-Bakken Endowed Chair for Engineering in Medicine at the University of Minnesota. He previously served as the director of the Institute for Engineering in Medicine and the Center for Neuroengineering at the University of Minnesota.
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Xiuxiong Chen
#11126
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Xiuxiong Chen is a Chinese-American mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry and differential equations. A professor at Stony Brook University since 2010, he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2015 and awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry in 2019. In 2019, he was awarded the Simons Investigator award.
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#11127
Overall Influence
1927 - 2003 (76 years)
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an American politician and diplomat. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented New York in the United States Senate from 1977 until 2001 after serving as an adviser to President Richard Nixon.
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Michael McIntyre
#11128
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Michael Hazen James McIntyre is a British comedian, writer, and television presenter. In 2012, he was the highest-grossing stand-up comedian in the world. , he presents his own Saturday night series, Michael McIntyre's Big Show, and the game show, The Wheel, on BBC One. He also hosts the American version of The Wheel on NBC.
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Kenneth J. Gergen
#11129
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Kenneth J. Gergen is an American social psychologist and emeritus professor at Swarthmore College. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts from Yale University and his PhD from Duke University . Biography The son of John Jay Gergen, the chair of the Mathematics Department at Duke University, and Aubigne Munger , Gergen grew up in Durham, North Carolina. He had three brothers, one of whom is David Gergen, the prominent political analyst. After completing public schooling, he attended Yale University. Graduating in 1957, he subsequently became an officer in the U.S. Navy. He then returned to graduate school at Duke University, where he received his PhD in psychology in 1963.
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David Foster Wallace
#11130
Overall Influence
1962 - 2008 (46 years)
David Foster Wallace was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His posthumous novel, The Pale King , was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. The Los Angeles Timess David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years".
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Jean-Marie Klinkenberg
#11131
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jean-Marie Klinkenberg is a Belgian linguist and semiotician, professor at the State University of Liège, born in Verviers in 1944. Member of the interdisciplinary Groupe µ. President of the International Association for visual Semiotics.
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Gary Numan
#11132
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Gary Anthony James Webb , known professionally as Gary Numan, is an English musician. He entered the music industry as frontman of the new wave band Tubeway Army. After releasing two studio albums with the band, he released his debut solo studio album The Pleasure Principle in 1979, topping the UK Albums Chart. While his commercial popularity peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s with hits including "Are 'Friends' Electric?" and "Cars" , Numan maintains a cult following. He has sold over 10 million records.
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Joaquim Barbosa
#11133
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Joaquim Benedito Barbosa Gomes is a former Justice of the Supreme Federal Court in Brazil. He served as the president of the court between 2012 and 2014. Barbosa studied law at University of Brasília and holds a master's degree and a doctorate from Panthéon-Assas University. He is a Doctor Honoris Causa of Hebrew University .
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Basarab Nicolescu
#11134
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Basarab Nicolescu is an honorary theoretical physicist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique , Laboratoire de Physique Nucléaire et de Hautes Énergies, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris. He is also a professor at the Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and Docteur ès-Sciences Physiques , 1972, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris. He was appointed Professor Extraordinary at Stellenbosch University, South Africa for the period 1 January 2011 to 31 December 2016 and was elected as Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study Fellow in 2011.
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Maria Chudnovsky
#11135
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Maria Chudnovsky is an Israeli-American mathematician working on graph theory and combinatorial optimization. She is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Education and career Chudnovsky is a professor in the department of mathematics at Princeton University. She grew up in Russia and Israel, studying at the Technion, and received her Ph.D. in 2003 from Princeton University under the supervision of Paul Seymour. After postdoctoral research at the Clay Mathematics Institute, she became an assistant professor at Princeton University in 2005, and moved to Columbia University in 2006. By 2014, she was the Liu Family Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia.
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Tess Gallagher
#11136
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Tess Gallagher is an American poet, essayist, and short story writer. Among her many honors were a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts award, Maxine Cushing Gray Foundation Award.
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Nancy Folbre
#11137
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
#11127
Stan Franklin
#11138
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Stan Franklin was an American scientist. He was the W. Harry Feinstone Interdisciplinary Research Professor at the University of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee, and co-director of the Institute of Intelligent Systems. He is the author of Artificial Minds, and the developer of IDA and its successor LIDA, both computational implementations of Global Workspace Theory. He is founder of the Cognitive Computing Research Group at the University of Memphis.
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Bernard Dwork
#11139
Overall Influence
1923 - 1998 (75 years)
Bernard Morris Dwork was an American mathematician, known for his application of p-adic analysis to local zeta functions, and in particular for a proof of the first part of the Weil conjectures: the rationality of the zeta-function of a variety over a finite field. The general theme of Dwork's research was p-adic cohomology and p-adic differential equations. He published two papers under the pseudonym Maurizio Boyarsky.
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Samuel Mitja Rapoport
#11140
Overall Influence
1912 - 2004 (92 years)
Samuel Mitja Rapoport was a Russian Empire-born German university professor of biochemistry in East Germany. Of Jewish descent and a committed communist, he fled Austria after its annexation by Nazi Germany, and moved to the United States. In 1950, as a result of an investigation of un-American activities, he was offered a professorship in East Berlin. He was married to the renowned pediatrician Ingeborg Rapoport.
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Cesare Emiliani
#11141
Overall Influence
1922 - 1995 (73 years)
Cesare Emiliani was an Italian-American scientist, geologist, micropaleontologist, and founder of paleoceanography, developing the timescale of marine isotope stages, which despite modifications remains in use today.
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French Montana
#11142
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Karim Kharbouch , better known by his stage name French Montana, is a Moroccan-American rapper. Born and raised in Morocco, he immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of 13. He embarked on a musical career in 2002, releasing a slew of independent material until signing a joint-venture record deal with Puff Daddy's Bad Boy Records and Rick Ross's Maybach Music Group in 2012.
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Ara Darzi, Baron Darzi of Denham
#11143
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Ara Warkes Darzi, Baron Darzi of Denham, is an Armenian-British surgeon, academic, and politician. Lord Darzi is an academic surgeon and holds the Paul Hamlyn Chair of Surgery at Imperial College London, specialising in the field of minimally invasive and robot-assisted surgery, having pioneered many new techniques and technologies. He is co-director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation and the NIHR Imperial Patient Safety Translational Research Centre at Imperial College London. He has become strongly identified with trying to change the National Health Service in England and is re...
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William J. Gedney
#11144
Overall Influence
1915 - 1999 (84 years)
William J. Gedney was an American linguist notable for his work on Thai and related Tai languages. Life Gedney was born in Orchards, Washington, and spent his childhood there. He was the son of John Marshall Gedney and Viola Gedney , the descendants of English immigrants. Gedney's father died of pneumonia in 1918, when Gedney was three years old. In 1935, Gedney graduated magna cum laude from Whitman College. After graduation, Gedney lived in Leavenworth, Washington and worked as a high school English teacher. During the summers, he occupied himself seriously with linguistics. After the outbr...
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Herbert Needleman
#11145
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Herbert Leroy Needleman researched the neurodevelopmental damage caused by lead poisoning. He was a pediatrician, child psychiatrist, researcher and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, and the founder of the Alliance to End Childhood Lead Poisoning . Dr. Needleman played a key role in securing some of the most significant environmental health protections achieved during the 20th century, which resulted in a fivefold reduction in the prevalence of lead poisoning among children in the United States by the early 1990s. Despite engendering st...
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Evgeny Torchinov
#11146
Overall Influence
1956 - 2003 (47 years)
Evgeny Torchinov , , was a Russian sinologist, Buddhist scholar, professor, and translator. He was best known as an eminent Russian researcher of ancient Chinese religion and philosophy, author of many books and translations of classical Chinese texts into Russian. He founded the chair of Eastern philosophy and cultures at St. Petersburg State University.
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Hu Shuli
#11147
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Hu Shuli is the founder and publisher of Caixin Media. She is also the professor of the School of Journalism and Communication at Sun Yat-sen University and the adjunct professor of the School of Journalism and Communication at Renmin University of China.
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Harry Oldmeadow
#11148
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Kenneth "Harry" Oldmeadow is an Australian academic, author, editor and educator whose works focus on religion, tradition, traditionalist writers and philosophy. Life and career Oldmeadow was born in Melbourne in 1947. His parents were Christian missionaries in India and he spent the first nine years of his childhood there and developed an early interest in the civilisations of the East.
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Wiz Khalifa
#11149
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Cameron Jibril Thomaz , better known by his stage name Wiz Khalifa, is an American rapper and singer. He released his debut album, Show and Prove, in 2006 and signed to Warner Bros. Records in 2007. His Eurodance-influenced single "Say Yeah" received urban radio airplay, charting on the Rhythmic Top 40 and Hot Rap Tracks charts in 2008, becoming his first minor hit.
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Chris Myers
#11150
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Chris Myers is an American sportscaster. He has covered the Super Bowl, the World Series, the NBA Finals, the NCAA Final Four, The Masters, the U.S. Open, the Triple Crown, the Olympics and the Daytona 500.
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Aphex Twin
#11151
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Richard David James , best known as Aphex Twin, is an Irish-born British musician, composer and DJ. He is known for his idiosyncratic work in electronic styles such as techno, ambient, and jungle. Journalists from publications including Mixmag, The New York Times, NME, Fact, Clash and The Guardian have called James one of the most influential and important artists in contemporary electronic music.
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Theodore Ts'o
#11152
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Theodore Yue Tak Ts'o is an American software engineer mainly known for his contributions to the Linux kernel, in particular his contributions to file systems. He is the secondary developer and maintainer of e2fsprogs, the userspace utilities for the ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems, and is a maintainer for the ext4 file system.
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Giles Foden
#11153
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Giles Foden is an English author, best known for his novel The Last King of Scotland . Biography Giles William Thomas Foden was born in Warwickshire in 1967, the son of Jonathan, an agricultural adviser, and Mary, a farmer. On his grandfather's death, the family sold their farm and in 1972 moved to Malawi in south-eastern Africa. Foden was educated at Yarlet Hall and Malvern College boarding schools, then at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he read English, and at St John's College, Cambridge.
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Akhil Gupta
#11154
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Akhil Gupta is an Indian-American anthropologist whose research focuses on the anthropology of the state, development, as well as on postcolonialism. He is currently a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a former president of the American Anthropological Association.
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Mark Sedgwick
#11155
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Mark J. Sedgwick is a British historian of Islam. He is Full Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark. Sedgwick is notable for pioneering historical research into the religious movement called Traditionalism.
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Paul Helm
#11156
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Paul Helm is a Reformed British philosopher and theologian. Helm was born in 1940. He taught at Regent College, having served as the first incumbent of the J.I. Packer Chair of Theology there from 2001 to 2005. He also served as Professor of Theology at Highland Theological College, Scotland, from 2007 to 2010.
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Robert Mulligan
#11157
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Robert Patrick Mulligan was an American director and producer. He is best known for his sensitive dramas, including To Kill a Mockingbird , Summer of '42 , The Other , Same Time, Next Year , and The Man in the Moon . He was also known in the 1960s for his extensive collaborations with producer Alan J. Pakula.
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Gillian Anderson
#11158
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Gillian Leigh Anderson is an American actress. Her credits include the roles of FBI Special Agent Dana Scully in the series The X-Files, ill-fated socialite Lily Bart in Terence Davies's film The House of Mirth , DSU Stella Gibson in the BBC/RTÉ crime drama television series The Fall, sex therapist Jean Milburn in the Netflix comedy drama Sex Education, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the fourth season of Netflix drama series The Crown. Among other honors, she has won two Primetime Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and four Screen Actors Guild Awardss.
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Hean Tat Keh
#11159
Overall Influence
Hean Tat Keh is a professor and chair of the Department of Marketing at the Monash University Faculty of Business and Economics. He is known for his work on services marketing, consumer behavior, brand management, and marketing strategy. In particular, his research on services marketing addresses the limitations of the concepts of service inseparability and service intangibility. Keh has also published on the antecedents and consequences of brand equity. More recently, he has conducted research on sustainable marketing and healthcare marketing. His works have been cited over 10,000 times acco...
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William Eggleston
#11160
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
William Eggleston is an American photographer. He is widely credited with increasing recognition for color photography as a legitimate artistic medium. Eggleston's books include William Eggleston's Guide and The Democratic Forest .
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Max Stafford-Clark
#11161
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Maxwell Robert Guthrie Stewart "Max" Stafford-Clark is a British theatre director. Life and career Stafford-Clark was born in Cambridge, England. the son of David Stafford-Clark, a physician, and Dorothy Crossley . He was educated at Felsted School, in Essex, England and Riverdale Country School in New York City, followed by Trinity College, Dublin.
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