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
#11751
Richard A. Lupoff
#11762
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Richard Allen Lupoff was an American science-fiction and mystery author, who also wrote humor, satire, nonfiction and reviews. In addition to his two dozen novels and more than 40 short stories, he also edited science-fantasy anthologies. He was an expert on the writing of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and had an equally strong interest in H. P. Lovecraft. He also co-edited the non-fiction anthology All in Color For a Dime , which has been described as "the very first published volume dedicated to comic book criticism"; as well as its sequel, The Comic-Book Book.
Go to Profile#11752
David Bowie
#11763
Overall Influence
1947 - 2016 (69 years)
David Robert Jones , known professionally as David Bowie , was an English singer, songwriter, musician, and actor. A leading figure in the music industry, he is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. Bowie was acclaimed by critics and musicians, particularly for his innovative work during the 1970s. His career was marked by reinvention and visual presentation, and his music and stagecraft had a significant impact on popular music.
Go to Profile#11753
Mohamed Salah
#11764
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Mohamed Salah Hamed Mahrous Ghaly , known as Mohamed Salah or Mo Salah, is an Egyptian professional footballer who plays as a right winger or forward for Premier League club Liverpool and captains the Egypt national team. Widely regarded as one of the best players of his generation and one of the greatest African players of all time, he is known for his clinical finishing, dribbling and speed.
Go to Profile#11754
Jean Paul Van Bendegem
#11765
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jean Paul Van Bendegem is a mathematician, a philosopher of science, and a professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Brussels. Career Van Bendegem received his master's degree in mathematics in 1976. Afterwards, he went to study philosophy. He attended lectures on the philosophy of mathematics from Leo Apostel. He received his master's degree in philosophy in 1979.
Go to Profile#11755
Edward Gierek
#11766
Overall Influence
1913 - 2001 (88 years)
Edward Gierek was a Polish Communist politician and de facto leader of Poland between 1970 and 1980. Gierek replaced Władysław Gomułka as First Secretary of the ruling Polish United Workers' Party in the Polish People's Republic in 1970. He is known for opening communist Poland to the Western Bloc and for his economic policies based on foreign loans. He was removed from power after labor strikes led to the Gdańsk Agreement between the communist state and workers of the emerging Solidarity free trade union movement.
Go to Profile#11756
Ratko Mladić
#11767
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Ratko Mladić is a Bosnian Serb former military officer and convicted war criminal who led the Army of Republika Srpska during the Yugoslav Wars. In 2017, he was found guilty of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia .
Go to Profile#11757
Nancy Rothwell
#11768
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Areas of Specialization: Physiology Nancy Rothwell is the President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester, the director of AstraZeneca, a global pharmaceuticals company, and a physiologist. She is also a trustee of Cancer Research UK and chair of the Research Defence Society. She earned her first class degree in physiology and a PhD from Queen Elizabeth College. Her early research efforts were focused on obesity, cachexia, and energy balance regulation. She is a vocal supporter of women in science and has provided visionary leadership in her roles as the president of the Royal Society of Biology.
Go to Profile#11758
Andy Morahan
#11769
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Andrew Douglas Morahan is a British commercial, film and music video director. He is the son of director Christopher Morahan and the half-brother of actress Hattie Morahan. Married to Joanna Lewis, he has two children.
Go to Profile#11759
Mark Siegler
#11770
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Mark Siegler is an American physician who specializes in internal medicine. He is the Lindy Bergman Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Chicago. , He is the Founding Director of Chicago's MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Siegler has practiced and taught internal medicine at the University of Chicago for more than 50 years.
Go to Profile#11760
Joshua Wong
#11771
Overall Influence
1996 - Present (30 years)
Joshua Wong Chi-fung is a Hong Kong activist and politician. He served as secretary-general of the pro-democracy party Demosisto until it disbanded following the implementation of the Hong Kong national security law on 30 June 2020. Wong was previously convenor and founder of the Hong Kong student activist group Scholarism. Wong first rose to international prominence during the 2014 Hong Kong protests, and his pivotal role in the Umbrella Movement resulted in his inclusion in TIME magazine's Most Influential Teens of 2014 and nomination for its 2014 Person of the Year; he was further called o...
Go to Profile#11761
Amer Iqbal
#11772
Overall Influence
Amer Iqbal is a Pakistanii American theoretical physicist. He is primarily known for his work in string theory and mathematical physics. Biography Amer Iqbal has a Doctorate in Theoretical physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He carried out his doctoral research under the supervision of Barton Zwiebach. He has held a faculty position at University of Washington and postdoctoral positions at the University of Texas at Austin and at Harvard University. He also worked as an associate professor of physics at Lahore University of Management Sciences and Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences.
Go to Profile#11762
Peter Armbruster
#11773
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Peter Armbruster is a German physicist at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung facility in Darmstadt, Germany, and is credited with co-discovering elements 107 , 108 , 109 , 110 , 111 , and 112 with research partner Gottfried Münzenberg.
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Bruce H. McCormick
#11774
Overall Influence
1928 - 2007 (79 years)
Bruce Howard McCormick was an American computer scientist, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Computer Science, and founding director of the Brain Networks Lab at Texas A&M University. Biography McCormick took his BS in Physics from MIT in 1950, followed by two years on a Fulbright Scholarship to Cambridge University, England. There he studied quantum field theory with Professor Paul Dirac, founder of the field of quantum mechanics and holder of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Professor Erwin Schrödinger. McCormick returned to the U.S. to take his PhD in physics at Harvard U...
Go to Profile#11764
Margaret Canovan
#11775
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Margaret Canovan was an English political theorist. Born in Carlisle in 1939, Canovan studied history at Girton College, Cambridge, where she subsequently completed a PhD on Joseph Priestley. She became a professor in the Politics Department at Lancaster University not long after its inception, later moving to Keele University where she remained until her retirement in 2002.
Go to Profile#11765
Claude Chabrol
#11776
Overall Influence
1930 - 2010 (80 years)
Claude Henri Jean Chabrol was a French film director and a member of the French New Wave group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s. Like his colleagues and contemporaries Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, Chabrol was a critic for the influential film magazine Cahiers du cinéma before beginning his career as a film maker.
Go to Profile#11766
Goodluck Jonathan
#11777
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan is a Nigerian politician who served as the president of Nigeria from 2010 to 2015. He lost the 2015 presidential election to former military head of state General Muhammadu Buhari, and was the first incumbent president in Nigerian history to concede defeat in an election.
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Alex Filippenko
#11778
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Alexei Vladimir "Alex" Filippenko is an American astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Filippenko graduated from Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California. He received a Bachelor of Arts in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1979 and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology in 1984, where he was a Hertz Foundation Fellow. He was a postdoctoral Miller Fellow at Berkeley from 1984 to 1986 and was appointed to Berkeley's faculty in 1986. In 1996 and 2005, he a Miller Research Professor, and he is currently a Senior Miller Fellow.
Go to Profile#11768
Neil Peart
#11779
Overall Influence
1952 - 2020 (68 years)
Neil Ellwood Peart OC was a Canadian musician, best known as the drummer and primary lyricist of the rock band Rush. Peart earned numerous awards for his musical performances, including an induction into the Modern Drummer Readers Poll Hall of Fame in 1983 at the age of thirty, making him the youngest person ever so honoured. He was known to fans by the nickname 'The Professor'. His drumming was renowned for its technical proficiency and his live performances for their exacting nature and stamina.
Go to Profile#11769
Martin Lipton
#11780
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Martin Lipton is an American lawyer, a founding partner of the law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz specializing in advising on mergers and acquisitions and matters affecting corporate policy and strategy. From 1958–1978 he taught courses on Federal Regulation of Securities and Corporation Law as a lecturer and adjunct professor of law at New York University School of Law.
Go to Profile#11770
Hamid Jafarkhani
#11781
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Hamid Jafarkhani is an Iranian-born American electrical engineer and professor. He serves as the Chancellor's Professor in electrical engineering and computer science in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine . His research focuses on communications theory, particularly coding and wireless communications and networks.
Go to Profile#11771
Linda Woodhead
#11782
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Linda Jane Pauline Woodhead is a British sociologist of religion and scholar of religious studies at King's College London Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She is best known for her work on religious change since the 1980s, and for initiating public debates about faith. She has been described by Matthew Taylor, head of the Royal Society of Arts, as "one of the world's leading experts on religion".
Go to Profile#11772
Mohammed Dib
#11783
Overall Influence
1920 - 2003 (83 years)
Mohammed Dib was an Algerian author. He wrote over 30 novels, as well as numerous short stories, poems, and children's literature in the French language. His work covers the breadth of 19th century Algerian history, focusing on Algeria's fight for independence.
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Jaap Haartsen
#11784
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Jacobus "Jaap" Cornelis Haartsen is a Dutch electrical engineer, researcher, inventor and entrepreneur best known for being credited as the inventor of Bluetooth. He obtained his Master of Science degree in 1986 in electrical engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. After a brief period at Siemens in The Hague and Philips in Eindhoven, he continued his studies and in 1990 obtained a PhD degree from the Delft University of Technology defending the thesis titled Programmable surface acoustic wave detection in silicon: design of programmable filters. Since 1991 he worked for Ericsson, first in United States between 1991 and 1993 and later, between 1993 and 1997, in Sweden.
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Janet Radcliffe Richards
#11785
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Janet Radcliffe Richards is a British philosopher specialising in bioethics and feminism and Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Sceptical Feminist , Philosophical Problems of Equality , Human Nature after Darwin , and The Ethics of Transplants .
Go to Profile#11775
Gaisi Takeuti
#11786
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Gaisi Takeuti was a Japanese mathematician, known for his work in proof theory. After graduating from Tokyo University, he went to Princeton to study under Kurt Gödel. He later became a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Takeuti was president of the Kurt Gödel Society, having worked on the book Memoirs of a Proof Theorist: Godel and Other Logicians. His goal was to prove the consistency of the real numbers. To this end, Takeuti's conjecture speculates that a sequent formalisation of second-order logic has cut-elimination. He is also known for his work on ordina...
Go to Profile#11776
Dikembe Mutombo
#11787
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo is a Congolese-American former professional basketball player. Mutombo played 18 seasons in the National Basketball Association . Outside of basketball, he is well known for his humanitarian work.
Go to Profile#11777
Magnus Carlsen
#11788
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (36 years)
Sven Magnus Øen Carlsen is a Norwegian chess grandmaster. He is a five-time World Chess Champion, the reigning four-time World Rapid Chess Champion, the reigning six-time World Blitz Chess Champion, and the reigning Chess World Cup Champion. He has held the position in the FIDE world chess rankings since 1 July 2011 and trails only Garry Kasparov in time spent as the highest-rated player in the world. His peak rating of 2882 is the highest in history. He also holds the record for the longest unbeaten streak at the elite level in classical chess.
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Rustum Roy
#11789
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Rustum Roy was a physicist, born in India, who became a professor at Pennsylvania State University and was a leader in materials research. As an advocate for interdisciplinarity, he initiated a movement of materials research societies and, outside of his multiple areas of scientific and engineering expertise, wrote impassioned pleas about the need for a fusion of religion and science and humanistic causes.
Go to Profile#11779
Michel Winock
#11790
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Michel Winock is a French historian, specializing in the history of the French Republic, intellectual movements, antisemitism, nationalism and the far right movements of France. He is a professeur des universités in contemporary history at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris and member of L'Histoire magazine's editing board. Winock has also worked as a reporter for Le Monde.
Go to Profile#11780
Krishna Bharat
#11791
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Krishna Bharat is an Indian research scientist at Google Inc. He was formerly a founding adviser for Grokstyle Inc. a visual search company and Laserlike Inc., an interest search engine startup based on Machine Learning.
Go to Profile#11781
Mike Ashley
#11792
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Michael Raymond Donald Ashley is a British bibliographer, author and editor of science fiction, mystery, and fantasy. He edits the long-running Mammoth Book series of short story anthologies, each arranged around a particular theme in mystery, fantasy, or science fiction. He has a special interest in fiction magazines and has written a multi-volume History of the Science Fiction Magazine and a study of British fiction magazines, The Age of the Storytellers. He won the Edgar Award for The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction. In addition to the books listed below he edited and prepared for publication the novel The Enchantresses by Vera Chapman.
Go to Profile#11782
Gary Graff
#11793
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Gary Graff is an American music journalist and author. Biography Originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Graff attended Taylor Allderdice High School where he wrote for school newspaper The Taylor Allderdice Foreword. He received his Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Missouri. He wrote for the Detroit Free Press from 1982 until 1995 when there was a strike at the newspaper. Graff refused to cross the picket line and subsequently lost his job. Graff has contributed to publications including The New York Times, Billboard, The Boston Globe, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Sa...
Go to Profile#11783
Tom Santopietro
#11794
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Tom Santopietro is an American author and Broadway theater manager. He worked for 25 years in the New York theater scene, managing over 30 Broadway shows. Tom Santopietro is the author of five books: The Sound of Music Story, The Godfather Effect: Changing Hollywood, America, and Me, Sinatra in Hollywood, Considering Doris Day , and The Importance of Being Barbra. A frequent media commentator in programs ranging from the PBS documentary The Italian Americans to the Jimmy van Heusen biography Swingin' With Frank & Bing, Tom conducts monthly interviews for Barnes and Noble and lectures on classic films.
Go to Profile#11784
Robert E. Goodin
#11795
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
#11785
Alan S. Kaufman
#11796
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Alan S. Kaufman is an American psychologist, writer, and research professor known for his work on intelligence testing. Early life and career Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, Kaufman earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965; M.A. in Educational Psychology from Columbia University in 1967; and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1970 , specializing in psychometrics.
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Regina Barzilay
#11797
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Regina Barzilay is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a faculty lead for artificial intelligence at the MIT Jameel Clinic. Her research interests are in natural language processing and applications of deep learning to chemistry and oncology.
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Bruno Perreau
#11798
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Bruno Perreau is the Cynthia L. Reed Professor of French Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also Faculty Associate at the Center for European Studies, Harvard. Perreau taught political science, law, and gender studies at Sciences Po, where he opened with Françoise Gaspard the first undergraduate course on LGBT politics. Perreau has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study , a Newton fellow in sociology and a Jesus College research associate at the University of Cambridge, and, more recently, a fellow at Stanford Humanities Center. He was also Burkhardt Fellow...
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Rick Perry
#11799
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
James Richard Perry is an American politician who served as the 14th United States secretary of energy from 2017 to 2019. He previously served as the 47th governor of Texas from 2000 to 2015 and ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for President of the United States in the 2012 and 2016 elections.
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Norman Spinrad
#11800
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Norman Richard Spinrad is an American science fiction author, essayist, and critic. His fiction has won the Prix Apollo and been nominated for numerous awards, including the Hugo Award and multiple Nebula Awards.
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Carlos Simpson
#11801
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Carlos Tschudi Simpson is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. Simpson received his Ph.D. in 1987 from Harvard University, where he was supervised by Wilfried Schmid; his thesis was titled Systems of Hodge Bundles and Uniformization. He became a professor at the University of Toulouse III and then at the University of Nice. He is research director of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique.
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Bob Seger
#11802
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Robert Clark Seger is a retired American singer, songwriter, and musician. As a locally successful Detroit-area artist, he performed and recorded as Bob Seger and the Last Heard and the Bob Seger System throughout the 1960s, breaking through with his first album, Ramblin' Gamblin' Man in 1969. By the early 1970s, he had dropped the 'System' from his recordings and continued to strive for broader success with various other bands. In 1973, he put together the Silver Bullet Band, with a group of Detroit-area musicians, with whom he became most successful on the national level with the album Live Bullet , recorded live with the Silver Bullet Band in 1975 at Cobo Hall in Detroit, Michigan.
Go to Profile#11792
Richard Kirkham
#11803
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Richard Ladd Kirkham is an American philosopher. Among his published works are Theories of Truth , "Does the Gettier Problem Rest on a Mistake?" Mind , and "On Paradoxes and a Surprise Exam" Philosophia .
Go to Profile#11793
Georges Reeb
#11804
Overall Influence
1920 - 1993 (73 years)
Georges Henri Reeb was a French mathematician. He worked in differential topology, differential geometry, differential equations, topological dynamical systems theory and non-standard analysis. Biography Reeb was born in Saverne, Bas-Rhin, Alsace, to Theobald Reeb and Caroline Engel. He started studying mathematics at University of Strasbourg, but in 1939 the entire university was evacuated to Clermont-Ferrand due to the German occupation of France.
Go to Profile#11794
Michael Kearns
#11805
Overall Influence
Michael Justin Kearns is an American computer scientist, professor and National Center Chair at the University of Pennsylvania, the founding director of Penn's Singh Program in Networked & Social Systems Engineering , the founding director of Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences, and also holds secondary appointments in Penn's Wharton School and department of Economics. He is a leading researcher in computational learning theory and algorithmic game theory, and interested in machine learning, artificial intelligence, computational finance, algorithmic trading, computational social science and social networks.
Go to Profile#11795
Álvaro Uribe
#11806
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Álvaro Uribe Vélez is a Colombian politician who served as the 31st President of Colombia from 7 August 2002 to 7 August 2010. Uribe started his political career in his home department of Antioquia. He held offices in the Public Enterprises of Medellín and in the Ministry of Labor and was the director of the Special Administrative Unit of Civil Aeronautics . He became the Mayor of Medellín in October 1982. He was a senator between 1986 and 1994 and finally the Governor of Antioquia between 1995 and 1997 before being elected President of Colombia in 2002.
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Forrest McDonald
#11807
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Forrest McDonald, Jr. was an American historian who wrote extensively on the early national period of the United States, republicanism, and the presidency, but he is possibly best known for his polemic on the American South. He was a professor at the University of Alabama, where, together with Grady McWhiney, he developed the hypothesis that the South had been colonized by "Anglo-Celts," rather than the British Protestant farmers who populated the North.
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Antonio Banderas
#11808
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
José Antonio Domínguez Bandera , known professionally as Antonio Banderas , is a Spanish actor and director. Known for his work in films of several genres, he has received various accolades, including a Cannes Film Festival Award and a European Film Award, in addition to nominations for an Academy Award, a Tony Award, two Primetime Emmy Awardss, and five Golden Globe Awards.
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Randall Kennedy
#11809
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Randall LeRoy Kennedy is an American legal scholar. He is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard University and his research focuses on the intersection of racial conflict and legal institutions in American life. He specializes in contracts, freedom of expression, race relations law, civil rights legislation, and the Supreme Court.
Go to Profile#11799
Gregg Popovich
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#11810
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Gregg Charles Popovich is an American professional basketball coach and executive who is the president and head coach for the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Association . Popovich has been a member of the Spurs organization since 1994, as president of basketball operations and general manager before taking over as coach of the Spurs in 1996. Popovich is the longest tenured active coach in the NBA as well as all other major sports leagues in the United States. Nicknamed "Coach Pop", Popovich has the most wins of any coach in NBA history, and is widely regarded as one of the great...
Go to Profile#11800
Edward Castronova
#11811
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Edward "Ted" Castronova is a professor of media at Indiana University Bloomington. He is known in particular for his work on the economies of synthetic worlds. Biography Castronova obtained a BS in international affairs from Georgetown University in 1985 and a PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1991. In between, he spent 18 months studying German postwar reconstruction and social policy at universities and research institutes in Mannheim, Frankfurt, and Berlin. From 1991 to 2000, he worked as an assistant and then associate professor of public policy and political sci...
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