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
#1201
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
#1202
Overall Influence
1932 - 2007 (75 years)
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes was a French physicist and the Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 1991. Education and early life He was born in Paris, France, and was home-schooled to the age of 12. By the age of 13, he had adopted adult reading habits and was visiting museums. Later, de Gennes studied at the École Normale Supérieure. After leaving the École in 1955, he became a research engineer at the Saclay center of the Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique, working mainly on neutron scattering and magnetism, with advice from Anatole Abragam and Jacques Friedel. He defended his Ph.D. in 1957 at the U...
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Paul Nurse
#1203
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Sir Paul Maxime Nurse is an English geneticist, former President of the Royal Society and Chief Executive and Director of the Francis Crick Institute. He was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Leland Hartwell and Tim Hunt, for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division of cells in the cell cycle.
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Chris Lord-Alge
#1204
Overall Influence
Chris Lord-Alge is an American mix engineer. He is the brother of both Tom Lord-Alge and Jeff Lord-Alge, both of whom are also audio engineers. Chris and Tom are known for their abundant use of dynamic compression for molding mixes that play well on small speakers and FM radio. Lord-Alge frequently collaborates with Howard Benson, who has produced the plurality of his mix discography.
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Frederick Copleston
#1205
Overall Influence
1907 - 1994 (87 years)
Frederick Charles Copleston was an English Roman Catholic Jesuit priest, philosopher, and historian of philosophy, best known for his influential multi-volume A History of Philosophy . Copleston achieved a degree of popularity in the media for debating the existence of God with Bertrand Russell in a celebrated 1948 BBC broadcast; the following year he debated logical positivism and the meaningfulness of religious language with his friend the analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer.
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Margaret Boden
#1206
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Margaret Ann Boden is a Research Professor of Cognitive Science in the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex, where her work embraces the fields of artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, and cognitive and computer science.
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Loïc Wacquant
#1207
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
#1207
M. H. Abrams
#1208
Overall Influence
1912 - 2015 (103 years)
Meyer Howard Abrams , usually cited as M. H. Abrams, was an American literary critic, known for works on romanticism, in particular his book The Mirror and the Lamp. Under Abrams's editorship, The Norton Anthology of English Literature became the standard text for undergraduate survey courses across the U.S. and a major trendsetter in literary canon formation.
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Jon Caramanica
#1209
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Jon Caramanica is an American journalist and pop music critic who writes for The New York Times. He is also known for writing about hip hop music. Biography Born in Brooklyn, New York, Caramanica received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1997, after which he attended Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published articles in Rolling Stone and Spin, before becoming a senior contributing writer for XXL. In 2006, he left XXL to become the music editor for Vibe, a position he held until leaving the magazine in 2008. He began working for The New York Times in 2010, after previously having freelanced for the paper.
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Andrew Neil
#1210
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Andrew Ferguson Neil is a Scottish journalist and broadcaster who is chairman of The Spectator and presenter of The Andrew Neil Show on Channel 4. He was editor of The Sunday Times from 1983 to 1994. He has presented BBC political programmes and was chairman of GB News.
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Frank Drake
#1211
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Frank Donald Drake was an American astrophysicist and astrobiologist. He began his career as a radio astronomer, studying the planets of the Solar System and later pulsars. Drake expanded his interests to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence , beginning with Project Ozma in 1960, an attempt at extraterrestrial communications. He developed the Drake equation, which attempts to quantify the number of intelligent lifeforms that could potentially be discovered. Working with Carl Sagan, Drake helped to design the Pioneer plaque, the first physical message flown beyond the Solar System, and was part of the team that developed the Voyager record.
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Hamid Dabashi
#1212
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Hamid Dabashi is an Iranian-American professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City. He is the author of over twenty books. Among them are Theology of Discontent, several books on Iranian cinema, Staging a Revolution, the edited volume Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, and his one-volume analysis of Iranian history, Iran: A People Interrupted.
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Ringo Starr
#1213
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Sir Richard Starkey , known professionally as Ringo Starr, is an English musician, songwriter and actor who achieved international fame as the drummer for the Beatles. Starr occasionally sang lead vocals with the group, usually for one song on each album, including "Yellow Submarine" and "With a Little Help from My Friends". He also wrote and sang the Beatles songs "Don't Pass Me By" and "Octopus's Garden", and is credited as a co-writer of four others.
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Donald A. Glaser
#1214
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Donald Arthur Glaser was an American physicist, neurobiologist, and the winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the bubble chamber used in subatomic particle physics. Education Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Glaser completed his Bachelor of Science degree in physics and mathematics from Case School of Applied Science in 1946. He completed his PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1949. Glaser accepted a position as an instructor at the University of Michigan in 1949, and was promoted to professor in 1957. He joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, in 1959, as a professor of physics.
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Emanuel Derman
#1215
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Emanuel Derman is a South African-born academic, businessman and writer. He is best known as a quantitative analyst, and author of the book My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance. He is a co-author of Black–Derman–Toy model, one of the first interest-rate models, and the Derman–Kani local volatility or implied tree model, a model consistent with the volatility smile.
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Edwin McMillan
#1216
Overall Influence
1907 - 1991 (84 years)
Edwin Mattison McMillan was an American physicist credited with being the first to produce a transuranium element, neptunium. For this, he shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Glenn Seaborg.
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Jonathan Miller
#1217
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE was an English theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, humourist and physician. After training in medicine and specialising in neurology in the late 1950s, he came to prominence in the early 1960s in the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett.
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George Mandler
#1218
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
George Mandler was an Austrian-born American psychologist, who became a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego. Career Mandler was born in Vienna, Austria in 1924. He received his B.S. from New York University, and his Ph.D. degree from Yale University in 1953 after serving in the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Service and Counter Intelligence Corps in World War II. Later he studied at the University of Basel and taught at Harvard University and the University of Toronto. In 1965 he became the founding chair of the Department of Psychology at the Uni...
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Oliver Hart
#1219
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Sir Oliver Simon D'Arcy Hart is a British-born American economist, currently the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. Together with Bengt R. Holmström, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2016.
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William Julius Wilson
#1220
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist, a professor at Harvard University, and an author of works on urban sociology, race, and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
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George Harrison
#1221
Overall Influence
1943 - 2001 (58 years)
George Harrison was an English musician, singer and songwriter who achieved international fame as the lead guitarist of the Beatles. Sometimes called "the quiet Beatle", Harrison embraced Indian culture and helped broaden the scope of popular music through his incorporation of Indian instrumentation and Hindu-aligned spirituality in the Beatles' work. Although the majority of the band's songs were written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, most Beatles albums from 1965 onwards contained at least two Harrison compositions. His songs for the group include "Taxman", "Within You Without You", "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", "Here Comes the Sun" and "Something".
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Diana, Princess of Wales
#1222
Overall Influence
1961 - 1997 (36 years)
Diana, Princess of Wales , was a member of the British royal family. She was the first wife of Charles III and mother of Princes William and Harry. Her activism and glamour made her an international icon, and earned her enduring popularity.
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Neil Postman
#1223
Overall Influence
1931 - 2003 (72 years)
Neil Postman was an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic, who eschewed digital technology, including personal computers, mobile devices, and cruise control in cars, and was critical of uses of technology, such as personal computers in school. He is best known for twenty books regarding technology and education, including Amusing Ourselves to Death , Conscientious Objections , Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology , The Disappearance of Childhood and The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School .
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Dave Marsh
#1224
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Dave Marsh is an American music critic, and radio talk show host. He was an early editor of Creem magazine, has written for various publications such as Newsday, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone, and has published numerous books about music and musicians, mostly focused on rock music. He is also a committee member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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Hyman Minsky
#1225
Overall Influence
1919 - 1996 (77 years)
Hyman Philip Minsky was an American economist, a professor of economics at Washington University in St. Louis, and a distinguished scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His research attempted to provide an understanding and explanation of the characteristics of financial crises, which he attributed to swings in a potentially fragile financial system. Minsky is sometimes described as a post-Keynesian economist because, in the Keynesian tradition, he supported some government intervention in financial markets, opposed some of the financial deregulation of the 1980s, stressed ...
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Richard Hammond
#1226
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Richard Mark Hammond is an English journalist, television presenter, mechanic, and writer. He is best known for co-hosting the BBC Two motoring programme Top Gear from 2002 until 2015 with Jeremy Clarkson and James May. Since 2016, the trio have presented Amazon Studios' The Grand Tour.
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Edwin Catmull
#1227
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Edwin Earl Catmull is an American computer scientist who is the co-founder of Pixar and was the President of Walt Disney Animation Studios. He has been honored for his contributions to 3D computer graphics, including the 2019 ACM Turing Award.
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Jeane Kirkpatrick
#1228
Overall Influence
1926 - 2006 (80 years)
Jeane Duane Kirkpatrick was an American diplomat and political scientist who played a major role in the foreign policy of the Ronald Reagan administration. An ardent anticommunist, she was a longtime Democrat who became a neoconservative and switched to the Republican Party in 1985. After serving as Ronald Reagan's foreign policy adviser in his 1980 presidential campaign, she became the first woman to serve as United States Ambassador to the United Nations.
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Alain Touraine
#1229
Overall Influence
1925 - 2023 (98 years)
Alain Touraine was a French sociologist. He was research director at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he founded the Centre d'étude des mouvements sociaux. Touraine was an important figure in the founding of French sociology of work after World War II and later became an internationally-renowned sociologist of social movements, particularly the May 68 student movement in France and the Solidarity trade-union movement in communist Poland.
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Everett Rogers
#1230
Overall Influence
1931 - 2004 (73 years)
Everett M. "Ev" Rogers was an American communication theorist and sociologist, who originated the diffusion of innovations theory and introduced the term early adopter. He was distinguished professor emeritus in the department of communication and journalism at the University of New Mexico.
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Willis Lamb
#1231
Overall Influence
1913 - 2008 (95 years)
Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955 "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum." The Nobel Committee that year awarded half the prize to Lamb and the other half to Polykarp Kusch, who won "for his precision determination of the magnetic moment of the electron." Lamb was able to precisely determine a surprising shift in electron energies in a hydrogen atom . Lamb was a professor at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences.
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Marsha M. Linehan
#1232
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Marsha M. Linehan is an American psychologist and author. She is the creator of dialectical behavior therapy , a type of psychotherapy that combines cognitive restructuring with acceptance, mindfulness, and shaping.
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Bob Carr
#1233
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Robert John Carr is an Australian retired politician and journalist who served as the 39th Premier of New South Wales from 1995 to 2005, as the leader of the NSW Branch of the Australian Labor Party . He later entered federal politics as a New South Wales senator, and served as Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2012 to 2013. Following his departure from politics he served as the Director of the Australia-China Relations Institute from 2014 to 2019 at the University of Technology Sydney .
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Martin Fowler
#1234
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Martin Fowler is a British software developer, author and international public speaker on software development, specialising in object-oriented analysis and design, UML, patterns, and agile software development methodologies, including extreme programming.
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Rudolf Simek
#1235
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Rudolf Simek is an Austrian philologist and religious studies scholar who is Professor and Chair of Ancient German and Nordic Studies at the University of Bonn. Simek specializes in Germanic studies, and is the author of several notable works on Germanic religion and mythology , Germanic peoples, Vikings, Old Norse literature, and the culture of Medieval Europe.
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Solomon Asch
#1236
Overall Influence
1907 - 1996 (89 years)
Solomon Eliot Asch was a Polish-American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. He created seminal pieces of work in impression formation, prestige suggestion, conformity, and many other topics. His work follows a common theme of Gestalt psychology that the whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts, but the nature of the whole fundamentally alters the parts. Asch stated: "Most social acts have to be understood in their setting, and lose meaning if isolated. No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function". Asc...
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Susumu Tonegawa
#1237
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
is a Japanese scientist who was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1987 for his discovery of VJ recombination, the genetic mechanism which produces antibody diversity. Although he won the Nobel Prize for his work in immunology, Tonegawa is a molecular biologist by training and he again changed fields following his Nobel Prize win; he now studies neuroscience, examining the molecular, cellular and neuronal basis of memory formation and retrieval.
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Don Rickles
#1238
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Donald Jay Rickles was an American stand-up comedian and actor. He became known primarily for his insult comedy. His film roles include Run Silent, Run Deep , Enter Laughing , Kelly's Heroes , and Casino . From 1976 to 1978, Rickles had a two-season starring role in the NBC television sitcom C.P.O. Sharkey, having previously starred in two eponymous half-hour programs, an ABC variety show titled The Don Rickles Show and a CBS sitcom identically titled The Don Rickles Show .
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Don Norman
#1239
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Donald Arthur Norman is an American researcher, professor, and author. Norman is the director of The Design Lab at University of California, San Diego. He is best known for his books on design, especially The Design of Everyday Things. He is widely regarded for his expertise in the fields of design, usability engineering, and cognitive science, and has shaped the development of the field of cognitive systems engineering. He is a co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, along with Jakob Nielsen. He is also an IDEO fellow and a member of the Board of Trustees of IIT Institute of Design in Chicago.
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Tina Brown
#1240
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Christina Hambley Brown, Lady Evans , is an English journalist, magazine editor, columnist, broadcaster, and author. She is the former editor in chief of Tatler , Vanity Fair and The New Yorker , and the founding editor in chief of The Daily Beast . From 1998 to 2002, Brown was chairman of Talk Media, which included Talk Magazine and Talk Miramax Books. In 2010, she founded Women in the World, a live journalism platform to elevate the voices of women globally, with summits held through 2019. Brown is author of The Diana Chronicles , The Vanity Fair Diaries and The Palace Papers .
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Thierry Mugler
#1241
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
Manfred Thierry Mugler was a French fashion designer, creative director and creative adviser of Mugler. In the 1970s, Mugler launched his eponymous fashion house; and quickly rose to prominence in the following decades for his avant-garde, architectural, hyperfeminine and theatrical approach to haute couture. He was one of the first designers to champion diversity in his runway shows, which often tackled racism and ageism, and incorporated non-traditional models such as drag queens, porn stars, and transgender women. In 2002, he retired from the brand, and returned in 2013 as the creative adv...
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Gerhard Herzberg
#1242
Overall Influence
1904 - 1999 (95 years)
Gerhard Heinrich Friedrich Otto Julius Herzberg, was a German-Canadian pioneering physicist and physical chemist, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1971, "for his contributions to the knowledge of electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals". Herzberg's main work concerned atomic and molecular spectroscopy. He is well known for using these techniques that determine the structures of diatomic and polyatomic molecules, including free radicals which are difficult to investigate in any other way, and for the chemical analysis of astronomical objects. Herzbe...
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Bernard Katz
#1243
Overall Influence
1911 - 2003 (92 years)
Sir Bernard Katz, FRS was a German-born British physician and biophysicist, noted for his work on nerve physiology; specifically, for his work on synaptic transmission at the nerve-muscle junction. He shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1970 with Julius Axelrod and Ulf von Euler. He was made a Knight Bachelor in 1969.
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Gunpei Yokoi
#1244
Overall Influence
1941 - 1997 (56 years)
Gunpei Yokoi, sometimes transliterated as Gumpei Yokoi, was a Japanese video game designer. As a long-time Nintendo employee, he was best known as creator of the Game & Watch handheld system, inventor of the cross-shaped Control Pad, the original designer of the Game Boy, and producer of a few long-running and critically acclaimed video game franchises such as Metroid and Kid Icarus.
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John Clute
#1245
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
John Frederick Clute is a Canadian-born author and critic specializing in science fiction and fantasy literature who has lived in both England and the United States since 1969. He has been described as "an integral part of science fiction's history" and "perhaps the foremost reader-critic of sf in our time, and one of the best the genre has ever known." He was one of eight people who founded the English magazine Interzone in 1982 .
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Alston Scott Householder
#1246
Overall Influence
1904 - 1993 (89 years)
Alston Scott Householder was an American mathematician who specialized in mathematical biology and numerical analysis. He is the inventor of the Householder transformation and of Householder's method.
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Satoshi Ōmura
#1247
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
is a Japanese biochemist. He is known for the discovery and development of hundreds of pharmaceuticals originally occurring in microorganisms. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with William C. Campbell for their role in the discovery of avermectins and ivermectin, the world's first endectocide and a safe and highly effective microfilaricide. It is believed that the large molecular size of ivermectin prevents it from crossing the blood/aqueous humour barrier, and renders the drug an important treatment of helminthically-derived blindness.
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Patrick Olivelle
#1248
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Patrick Olivelle is an Indologist. A philologist and scholar of Sanskrit Literature whose work has focused on asceticism, renunciation and the dharma, Olivelle has been Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Religions in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin since 1991.
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Roy J. Glauber
#1249
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
Roy Jay Glauber was an American theoretical physicist. He was the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University and Adjunct Professor of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. Born in New York City, he was awarded one half of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence", with the other half shared by John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch. In this work, published in 1963, he created a model for photodetection and explained the fundamental characteristics of different types of light, such as laser light and light from light bulbs .
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Whitey Bulger
#1250
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger Jr. was an American organized crime boss who led the Winter Hill Gang in the Winter Hill neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts, a city directly northwest of Boston. On December 23, 1994, Bulger fled the Boston area and went into hiding after his former FBI handler, John Connolly, tipped him off about a pending RICO indictment against him. Bulger remained at large for sixteen years. After his 2011 arrest, federal prosecutors tried Bulger for nineteen murders based on grand jury testimony from Kevin Weeks and other former criminal associates.
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Aharon Barak
#1251
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Aharon Barak is an Israeli lawyer and jurist who served as President of the Supreme Court of Israel from 1995 to 2006. Prior to this, Barak served as a Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel from 1978 to 1995, and before this as Attorney General of Israel from 1975 to 1978.
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