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
#12101
Galen Rowell
#12112
Overall Influence
1940 - 2002 (62 years)
Galen Avery Rowell was a wilderness photographer, adventure photojournalist and mountaineer. Born in Oakland, California, he became a full-time photographer in 1972. Early life and education Rowell was introduced to the wilderness at a very young age and completed his first roped climb in Yosemite Valley when he was 16. For the rest of his life, he climbed mountains and explored landscapes. He began taking pictures on excursions into the wild so that he could share his experiences with friends and family. After graduating from Berkeley High School in 1958, he stayed in Berkeley to study at t...
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John C. McAdams
#12113
Overall Influence
1945 - 2021 (76 years)
John Charles McAdams was an American conservative and associate professor of political science at Marquette University. McAdams taught courses on American politics and public policy, voter behavior, and the John F. Kennedy assassination; he ran a website on the assassination and published a book on the subject, JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy . He described himself as "a debunker by temperament". McAdams was suspended by Marquette in 2014 for publicly criticizing and sharing the first and last names of a graduate student on his personal blog. McAdams filed su...
Go to Profile#12103
Nachum Dershowitz
#12114
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Nachum Dershowitz is an Israeli computer scientist, known e.g. for the Dershowitz–Manna ordering and the multiset path ordering used to prove termination of term rewrite systems. He obtained his B.Sc. summa cum laude in 1974 in Computer Science–Applied Mathematics from Bar-Ilan University, and his Ph.D. in 1979 in Applied Mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science. From 1978, he worked at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was hired as a full professor of the Tel Aviv University in 1998. He was a guest researcher at Weizmann Inst...
Go to Profile#12104
J. Baird Callicott
#12115
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
J. Baird Callicott is an American philosopher whose work has been at the forefront of the new field of environmental philosophy and ethics. He is a University Distinguished Research Professor and a member of the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies and the Institute of Applied Sciences at the University of North Texas. Callicott held the position of Professor of Philosophy and Natural Resources at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point from 1969 to 1995, where he taught the world's first course in environmental ethics in 1971. From 1994 to 2000, he served as vice president then president of the International Society for Environmental Ethics.
Go to Profile#12105
Pierre Dansereau
#12116
Overall Influence
1911 - 2011 (100 years)
Pierre Dansereau was a Canadian ecologist from Quebec known as one of the "fathers of ecology". Biography Born in Outremont, Quebec , he received a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture in 1936 and a Ph.D. in Biological Science in 1939 from the University of Geneva. From 1939 until 1942 he worked at the Montreal Botanical Garden. From 1943 until 1950 he taught at the Université de Montréal. From 1950 until 1955 he worked at the University of Michigan Botanical Gardens. From 1955 until 1961 he worked in the Faculty of Science and as the director of the Botanical Institute at the Université de Montréal.
Go to Profile#12106
Alexander R. Galloway
#12117
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Alexander R. Galloway is an author and professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He has a bachelor's degree in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and earned a Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University in 2001. Galloway is known for his writings on philosophy, media theory, contemporary art, film, and video games.
Go to Profile#12107
Angus Wilson
#12118
Overall Influence
1913 - 1991 (78 years)
Sir Angus Frank Johnstone-Wilson, CBE was an English novelist and short story writer. He was one of England's first openly gay authors. He was awarded the 1958 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot and later received a knighthood for his services to literature.
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John Reid
#12119
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
John Reid is a music manager, known for being the manager and former lover of singer Elton John, as well as for managing the British rock band Queen. Life and career Reid was born in Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland, the son of John Reid, a welder, and Betty, a shop worker. Apart from three years in New Zealand, he was brought up in the Gallowhill district of Paisley. He attended St Mirin's Academy, where he was a fellow pupil with singers Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan. At the age of 16 he attended Stow College in Glasgow where he studied marine engineering, but dropped out to move to London in ...
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Jonathan Crary
#12120
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Jonathan Crary is an art critic and essayist, and is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University. His first notable works were Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century , and Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture . He has published critical essays for over 30 Exhibition catalogues, mostly on contemporary art. His style is often classified as observational mixed with scientific, and a dominant theme in his work is the role of the human eye.
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Michele Boldrin
#12121
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Michele Boldrin is an Italian-born economist, academic, philanthropist and former politician expert in economic growth, business cycles, technological progress and intellectual property. He is the Joseph Gibson Hoyt Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Along with his colleague and coauthor David Levine, he was part of the group of 200 economists publicly opposing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. He later publicly defended his position on the issue in various international media, including a public debate with Brad DeLong.
Go to Profile#12111
Ben Smith
#12122
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Benjamin Eli Smith is an American journalist who is the co-founder of Semafor, a global news organization he formed with Justin Smith in early 2022. He was previously a media columnist at The New York Times from 2020 to 2022. From 2011 to 2020, he was the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News.
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Juliet Winters Carpenter
#12123
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Juliet Winters Carpenter is an American translator of modern Japanese literature. Born in the American Midwest, she studied Japanese literature at the University of Michigan and the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo. After completing her graduate studies in 1973, she returned to Japan in 1975, where she became involved in translation efforts and teaching.
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Carol M. Swain
#12124
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Carol Miller Swain is an American political scientist and legal scholar who is a retired professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University. A frequent television analyst, she is the author and editor of several books. Her interests include race relations, immigration, representation, evangelical politics, and the United States Constitution.
Go to Profile#12114
José van Dijck
#12125
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Johanna Francisca Theodora Maria "José" van Dijck is a new media author and a distinguished university professor in media and digital society at Utrecht University since 2017. From 2001 to 2016 she was a professor of Comparative Media Studies where she was the former chair of the Department of Media Studies and former dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of ten authored and edited books including Mediated Memory in the Digital Age; The Culture of Connectivity.; and The Platform Society. Public Values in a Connective World. Her work has been trans...
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B. J. Habibie
#12126
Overall Influence
1936 - 2019 (83 years)
Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie was an Indonesian engineer and politician who was the third president of Indonesia from 1998 to 1999. Less than three months after his inauguration as the seventh vice president in March 1998, he succeeded Suharto who resigned after 32 years in office. His presidency was seen as a landmark and transition to the Reformation era. Upon becoming president, he liberalized Indonesia's press and political party laws, ended Indonesian occupation of East Timor leading to its independence, and held an early democratic election three years sooner than scheduled, which resulted in the end of his presidency.
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Annemarie Mol
#12127
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Annemarie Mol is a Dutch ethnographer and philosopher. She is the Professor of Anthropology of the Body at the University of Amsterdam. Winner of the Constantijn & Christiaan Huijgens Grant from the NWO in 1990 to study 'Differences in Medicine', she was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant in 2010 to study 'The Eating Body in Western Practice and Theory'. She has helped to develop post-ANT/feminist understandings of science, technology and medicine. In her earlier work she explored the performativity of health care practices, argued that realities are generated within those practices, and noted that since practices differ, so too do realities.
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Prabhat Patnaik
#12128
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Prabhat Patnaik is an Indian Marxist economist and political commentator. He taught at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in the School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, from 1974 until his retirement in 2010. He was the vice-chairman of Kerala State Planning Board from June 2006 to May 2011.
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Alan T. Peacock
#12129
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Sir Alan Turner Peacock DSC, FBA, FRSE was a British economist. Early life Alan Turner Peacock was born in County Durham in 1922. He was the son of the scientist Alexander David Peacock, who in 1926 became Professor of Natural History at University College, Dundee . On his father's appointment, the family moved to Broughty Ferry. He was educated at Grove Academy, the High School of Dundee and the University of St Andrews, where he completed a war-shortened degree in economics and history.
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Ulrich Lemmer
#12130
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Ulrich Lemmer is a German electrical engineer and professor specializing in optoelectronics. Education Ulrich Lemmer received a diploma degree in physics from RWTH Aachen University in 1990 and a Ph.D. from the University of Marburg in 1995. From 1995 to 1996, he held a postdoctoral position with the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Go to Profile#12120
Per Lindström
#12131
Overall Influence
1936 - 2009 (73 years)
Per "Pelle" Lindström was a Swedish logician, after whom Lindström's theorem and the Lindström quantifier are named. He was one of the key followers of Lars Svenonius. Lindström was awarded a PhD from the University of Gothenburg in 1966. His thesis was titled Some Results in the Theory of Models of First Order Languages. A festschrift for Lindström was published in 1986.
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Gabriel Vahanian
#12132
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Gabriel Vahanian was a French Protestant Christian theologian who was most remembered for his pioneering work in the theology of the "death of God" movement within academic circles in the 1960s, and who taught for 26 years in the U.S. before finishing a prestigious career in Strasbourg, France.
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Andrew Gamble
#12133
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Andrew Michael Gamble is a British scholar of politics. He was Professor of Politics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Queens' College from 2007 to 2014. He was a member of the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield , for many years as a professor and rejoined the department in 2014.
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Robert F. Spetzler
#12134
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Robert F. Spetzler is a neurosurgeon and the J.N. Harber Chairman Emeritus of Neurological Surgery and director emeritus of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. He retired as an active neurosurgeon in July 2017. He is also Professor of Surgery, Section of Neurosurgery, at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, Arizona.
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Kenneth Ring
#12135
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Kenneth Ring is an American psychologist, born in San Francisco, California. He is the co-founder and past president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies and is the founding editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies. He currently lives in Kentfield, California.
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Hector Levesque
#12136
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Hector Joseph Levesque is a Canadian academic and researcher in artificial intelligence. His research concerns incorporating commonsense reasoning in intelligent systems and he initiated the Winograd Schemas Challenge.
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Emmanuel Kriaras
#12137
Overall Influence
1906 - 2014 (108 years)
Emmanuel G. Kriaras was a Greek lexicographer and philologist. He was Emeritus Professor of the School of Philosophy at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He was a student of Jean Psychari and the practice and ideology of demotic Greek.
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Marc Hauser
#12138
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Marc D. Hauser is an American evolutionary biologist and a researcher in primate behavior, animal cognition and human behavior and neuroscience. Hauser was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1998 to 2011. In 2010 Harvard found him guilty of research misconduct, specifically fabricating and falsifying data, after which he resigned. Because Hauser's research was financed by government grants, the Office of Research Integrity of the Health and Human Services Department also investigated, finding in 2012 that Hauser had fabricated data, manipulated experimental results, and pub...
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William H. McNeill
#12139
Overall Influence
1917 - 2016 (99 years)
William Hardy McNeill was an American historian and author, noted for his argument that contact and exchange among civilizations is what drives human history forward, first postulated in The Rise of the West . He was the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1947 until his retirement in 1987.
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Adolfo Gilly
#12140
Overall Influence
1928 - 2023 (95 years)
Adolfo Atilio Gilly Malvagni was an Argentine-born Mexican historian and author of various books on the history of and politics of Mexico and Latin America. He served as Professor of History and Political Science at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, where he taught from 1979. He was well known for his prolific articles in La Jornada, a major Mexico City newspaper. His research particularly focused on globalization and the Zapatista movement centered in the southeastern state of Chiapas.
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Robin Collins
#12141
Overall Influence
Robin Alan Collins is an American philosopher. He currently serves as the Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and chair of the Department of Philosophy at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. His main interests include philosophical issues related to the relationship between religion and science and philosophical theology.
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Preston McAfee
#12142
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Randolph Preston McAfee is an American economist and distinguished scientist at Google. Previously, he served as chief economist at Microsoft. He has also served as an economist at Google, vice president and research fellow at Yahoo! Research, where he led the Microeconomics and Social Systems group, and was the J. Stanley Johnson Professor of Business, Economics, and Management at the California Institute of Technology, where he was the executive officer for the social sciences. He has taught business strategy, managerial economics, and introductory microeconomics.
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Murray Sidman
#12143
Overall Influence
1923 - 2019 (96 years)
Murray Sidman was an American behavioral scientist, best known for Sidman Avoidance, also called "free-operant avoidance", in which an individual learns to avoid an aversive stimulus by remembering to produce the response without any other stimulus. Sidman's explanation of free-operant avoidance is an alternative to the Miller-Mowrer two-process theory of avoidance.
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Michael Sterling
#12144
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Sir Michael John Howard Sterling is a British professor, and a former Vice-Chancellor of the Brunel University and the University of Birmingham . Early life In 1964, Sterling joined Associated Electrical Industries as a student apprentice. He was awarded a scholarship to the University of Sheffield to read electronic and electrical engineering. He graduated with a 1st class honours degree and subsequently a PhD degree in computer control in 1971.
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Renata Kallosh
#12145
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Renata Elizaveta Kallosh is a Russian-American theoretical physicist. She is a professor of physics at Stanford University, working there on supergravity, string theory and inflationary cosmology. Biography She completed her Bachelor's from Moscow State University in 1966 and obtained her Ph.D. from Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow in 1968. She was then a professor at the same institute, before moving to CERN for a year in 1989. Kallosh joined Stanford in 1990 and continues to work there. In 2009 she received the Lise Meitner Award of the Gothenburg University. In 2014 awarded Doctorate Honoris Causa of the University of Groningen.
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Mark Olshaker
#12146
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Mark Olshaker is an American author from Washington, D.C. who frequently collaborates with FBI agent John E. Douglas in writing books about criminal and investigative psychology. In 1995, they formed Mindhunters, Inc. and later released Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, which was made into a Netflix series Mindhunter in 2017.
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Mammootty
#12147
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Muhammad Kutty Panaparambil Ismail , known mononymously by the hypocorism Mammootty , is an Indian actor and film producer who works predominantly in Malayalam and Tamil language films. He has also appeared in Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, and English-language productions. In a career spanning five decades, he has acted in more than 400 films. He is the recipient of several accolades, including three National Film Awards, eight Kerala State Film Awards, eleven Kerala Film Critics Awards and thirteen Filmfare Awards South. For his contribution to film, the Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri in 1998.
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Masud Ahmad
#12148
Overall Influence
1942 - 2018 (76 years)
Muhammad Masud Ahmad , best known as Masood Ahmad, was a Pakistani theoretical physicist and ICTP laureate known for his work in dual resonance and Veneziano model, a strings sting mathematically described the fundamental forces and forms of matter in quantum state.
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Maqsudul Alam
#12149
Overall Influence
1954 - 2014 (60 years)
Maqsudul Alam was an East Bengal-born life-science scientist who is known for his work on genome sequencing. His work on genome sequencing started with bacteria Idiomarina loihiensis in 2003. He came into the focus of Bangladeshi people after his work on genome sequencing of jute species and jute attacking fungus.
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Avinash Kak
#12150
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Avinash C. Kak is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University who has conducted pioneering research in several areas of information processing. His most noteworthy contributions deal with algorithms, languages, and systems related to networks , robotics, and computer vision. Born in Srinagar, Kashmir, he did his Bachelors in BE at University of Madras and Phd in Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He joined the faculty of Purdue University in 1971.
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Matthew Palmer
#12151
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Matthew Simon Russell Palmer is a New Zealand judge, legal academic and former public servant. Palmer graduated with a BA in Economics & Political Science from University of Canterbury in 1983. This was followed by a LLB in 1987. Then a LLM & JSD from Yale Law School in 1993.
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Halil Berktay
#12152
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Halil Berktay is a Turkish historian at Ibn Haldun University and was columnist for the daily Taraf. Life and career Berktay was born into an intellectual Turkish communist family. His father, Erdoğan Berktay, was a member of the old clandestine Communist Party of Turkey. As a result of this influence, Halil Berktay remained a Maoist for two decades before he became "an independent left-intellectual".
Go to Profile#12142
Ladislas Orsy
#12153
Overall Influence
1921 - Present (105 years)
Ladislas Orsy is a canonical theologian. Early life Father Orsy was born on July 30, 1921, in Hungary. He entered Society of Jesus, Budapest in 1943 and was ordained in 1951 at Leuven . Education Orsy earned a licentiate in philosophy at the Gregorian University, Rome in 1948 followed by a licentiate in Theology at the Jesuit College at the Catholic University of Leuven in 1952. Five years later he obtained his doctorate in Canon Law at the Gregorian University. In 1960 he earned a MA degree in civil law from Honours School of Jurisprudence at Oxford University.
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Kimberly Young
#12154
Overall Influence
1965 - 2019 (54 years)
Kimberly Sue Young O'Mara was a psychologist and expert on Internet addiction disorder and online behavior. She founded the Center for Internet Addiction in 1995 while she was a psychology professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. Until her death in 2019, Young was a professor of management at St. Bonaventure University. During her career, she published numerous journal articles and book chapters and served as an expert witness regarding her pioneer research including testimony for the Child Protection Online Act Congressional Committee. Young was a member of the American Psychol...
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Abiola Irele
#12155
Overall Influence
1936 - 2017 (81 years)
Francis Abiola Irele was a Nigerian academic best known as the doyen of Africanist literary scholars worldwide. He was Provost at Kwara State University, founded in 2009 in Ilorin, Nigeria. Before moving back to Nigeria, Irele was Visiting Professor of African and African American Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.
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Leonard Compagno
#12156
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Leonard Joseph Victor Compagno is an international authority on shark taxonomy and the author of many scientific papers and books on the subject, best known of which is his 1984 catalogue of shark species produced for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Compagno was mentioned in the credits of the 1975 film Jaws along with the National Geographic Society.
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Moon Jae-in
#12157
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Moon Jae-in is a South Korean former politician who served as the 12th president of South Korea from 2017 to 2022. Prior to his presidency, he served as Senior Secretary for Civil Affairs and Chief of Staff to President Roh Moo-hyun, Member of the National Assembly, and Leader of the Democratic Party of Korea.
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Joseph M. Williams
#12158
Overall Influence
1933 - 2008 (75 years)
Joseph M. Williams was a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago where he promoted clarity in writing for many years. He authored several books on language and writing.
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Greg Stafford
#12159
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Francis Gregory Stafford , usually known as Greg Stafford, was an American game designer, publisher, and practitioner of shamanism. Stafford is most famous as the creator of the fantasy world of Glorantha, but he was also a prolific games designer. He was designer of Pendragon, he was co-designer of the RuneQuest, Ghostbusters, Prince Valiant and HeroQuest role-playing systems, founder of the role-playing game companies Chaosium and Issaries, designer of the White Bear and Red Moon, Nomad Gods, King Arthur's Knights and Elric board games, and co-designer of the King of Dragon Pass computer gam...
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Nancy Qian
#12160
Overall Influence
Nancy Qian is a Chinese American economist and currently serves as the James J. O'Connor Professor in the Kellogg School of Management Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences and a Professor by Courtesy at the Department of Economics at Northwestern University. Her research interests include development economics, political economy and economic history. She is a leading development economist and an expert of autocracies and the Chinese economy.
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Patrick Atiyah
#12161
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Patrick Selim Atiyah, was an English lawyer and academic. He was best known for his work as a common lawyer, particularly in the law of contract and for advocating reformation or abolition of the law of tort. He was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1979.
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