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
#12551
Tom Rockmore
#12562
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Tom Rockmore is an American philosopher. Although he denies the usual distinction between philosophy and the history of philosophy, he has strong interests throughout the history of philosophy and defends a constructivist view of epistemology. The philosophers whom he has studied extensively are Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Lukács, and Heidegger. He received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 1974 and his Habilitation à diriger des recherches from the Université de Poitiers in 1994. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Duquesne University, as well as Distinguished Humanities Chair Pro...
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Rita Gross
#12563
Overall Influence
1943 - 2015 (72 years)
Rita M. Gross was an American Buddhist feminist scholar of religions and author. Before retiring, she was Professor of Comparative Studies in Religion at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. In 1974 Gross was named the head of Women and Religion, a newly created section of the American Academy of Religion. She earned her PhD in 1975 from the University of Chicago in History of Religions, with the dissertation "Exclusion and Participation: The Role of Women in Aboriginal Australian Religion." This was the first dissertation ever on women's studies in religion. In 1976 she published the ar...
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Bernard Knight
#12564
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Bernard Henry Knight is a British forensic pathologist and writer. He became a Home Office pathologist in 1965 and was appointed Professor of Forensic Pathology, University of Wales College of Medicine, in 1980.
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Johannes Fabian
#12565
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Johannes Fabian is an emeritus professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His ethnographic and historical research focuses on religious movements, language, work, and popular culture in the Shaba mining region of Zaire . His theoretical and critical work addresses questions of epistemology and history in anthropology, notably the influential book Time and the Other , which has become a classic in the field of anthropology.
Go to Profile#12555
Marshall Applewhite
#12566
Overall Influence
1931 - 1997 (66 years)
Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr. , also known as Do, among other names, was an American religious leader who founded and led the Heaven's Gate new religious movement , and organized their mass suicide in 1997. The suicide is the largest mass suicide to occur inside the U.S.
Go to Profile#12556
Giuseppe Conte
#12567
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Giuseppe Conte is an Italian jurist, academic, and politician who served as prime minister of Italy from June 2018 to February 2021. He has been the president of the Five Star Movement since August 2021.
Go to Profile#12557
Orest Subtelny
#12568
Overall Influence
1941 - 2016 (75 years)
Orest Subtelny was a Ukrainian-Canadian historian. Born in Kraków, Poland, he received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1973. From 1982 to 2015, he was a Professor in the Departments of History and Political Science at York University in Toronto.
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Cecilia Berdichevsky
#12569
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Cecilia Berdichevsky or Berdichevski was a pioneering Argentinian computer scientist and began her work in 1961 using the first Ferranti Mercury computer in that country. Biography She was born Mirjam Tuwjasz on 30 March 1925 in Vidzy, at that time part of Poland, now Belarus.
Go to Profile#12559
Zvi Laron
#12570
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Zvi Laron is an Israeli paediatric endocrinologist. Born in Cernăuţi, Romania, Laron is a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University. In 1966, he described the type of dwarfism later called Laron syndrome. His research opened the way to the treatment of many cases of growth hormone disorders. He was the first to introduce the multidisciplinary treatment for juvenile diabetes.
Go to Profile#12560
Napoleone Ferrara
#12571
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Napoleone Ferrara , is an Italian-American molecular biologist who joined University of California, San Diego Moores Cancer Center in 2013 after a career in Northern California at the biotechnology giant Genentech, where he pioneered the development of new treatments for angiogenic diseases such as cancer, age-related macular degeneration , and diabetic retinopathy. At Genentech, he discovered VEGF—and made the first anti-VEGF antibody—which suppresses growth of a variety of tumors. These findings helped lead to development of the first clinically available angiogenesis inhibitor, bevacizumab ...
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Jeff Dahn
#12572
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Jeff Dahn is a Professor in the Department of Physics & Atmospheric Science and the Department of Chemistry at Dalhousie University. He is recognized as one of the pioneering developers of the lithium-ion battery, which is now used worldwide in laptop computers, cell-phones, cars and many other mobile devices. Although Dr. Dahn made numerous contribution to the development of lithium-ion batteries, his most important discovery was intercalation of Li+ ions into graphite from solvents comprising ethylene carbonate, which was the final piece of the puzzle in the invention of commercial Li-ion battery.
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Michael Krausz
#12573
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Michael Krausz is a Swiss-born American philosopher as well as an artist and orchestral conductor. His philosophical works focus on the theory of interpretation, theory of knowledge, philosophy of science, philosophy of history, and philosophy of art and music. Krausz is Milton C. Nahm Professor of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College, and he teaches Aesthetics at the Curtis Institute of Music. He has taught at University of Toronto and has been visiting professor at American University, Georgetown University, Oxford University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, American University in Cairo, University of Nairobi, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, and University of Ulm, among others.
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Kenneth C. Laudon
#12574
Overall Influence
1944 - 2019 (75 years)
Kenneth C. Laudon was a professor of Information Systems at the Stern School of Business at New York University. Life and work Kenneth Laudon graduated from Stanford University and has a Ph.D from Columbia University.
Go to Profile#12564
Scott Horton
#12575
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Scott Horton is an American attorney known for his work in human rights law and the law of armed conflict, as well as emerging markets and international law. He graduated Texas Law School in Austin with a JD and was a partner in a large New York law firm, Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler. He "has advised sovereigns on the pursuit of kleptocratic predecessors." In April 2007, he joined Harper's Magazine as a legal affairs and national security contributor, and he currently authors the No Comment blog at Harper's Online. Horton has also written for The American Lawyer, and The Daily Beast and has been interviewed on Antiwar Radio.
Go to Profile#12565
Wendy Beckett
#12576
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Wendy Mary Beckett , better known as Sister Wendy, was a British religious sister and art historian who became known internationally during the 1990s when she presented a series of BBC television documentaries on the history of art. Her programmes, such as Sister Wendy's Odyssey and Sister Wendy's Grand Tour, often drew a 25 percent share of the British viewing audience. In 1997 she made her debut on US public television, with The New York Times describing her as "a sometime hermit who is fast on her way to becoming the most unlikely and famous art critic in the history of television."
Go to Profile#12566
Jack Lemmon
#12577
Overall Influence
1925 - 2001 (76 years)
John Uhler Lemmon III was an American actor. Considered equally proficient in both dramatic and comic roles, Lemmon was known for his anxious, middle-class everyman screen persona in dramedy pictures, leading The Guardian to label him as "the most successful tragi-comedian of his age."
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Michael Ende
#12578
Overall Influence
1929 - 1995 (66 years)
Michael Andreas Helmuth Ende was a German writer of fantasy and children's fiction. He is known for his epic fantasy The Neverending Story ; other well-known works include Momo and Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver. His works have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 35 million copies.
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J. L. Schellenberg
#12579
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
John L. Schellenberg is a Canadian philosopher, best known for his work in philosophy of religion. He has earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, and is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University, both in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
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Sidney G. Winter
#12580
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Sidney Graham Winter is an American economist and Professor Emeritus of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He is recognized as a leading figures in the revival of evolutionary economics.
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Marten Toonder
#12581
Overall Influence
1912 - 2005 (93 years)
Marten Toonder was a Dutch comic strip creator, born in Rotterdam. He was probably the most successful comic artist in the Netherlands and had a great influence on the Dutch language by introducing new words and expressions. He is most famous for his series Tom Puss and Panda.
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Charles Vacanti
#12582
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Charles Alfred "Chuck" Vacanti is a researcher in tissue engineering and stem cells and the Vandam/Covino Professor of Anesthesiology, Emeritus, at Harvard Medical School. He is a former head of the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Massachusetts and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, now retired.
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Mario Monti
#12583
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Mario Monti is an Italian economist and academic who served as the Prime Minister of Italy from 2011 to 2013, leading a technocratic government in the wake of the Italian debt crisis. Monti served as a European Commissioner from 1995 to 2004, with responsibility for the Internal Market, Services, Customs and Taxation from 1995 to 1999 and for Competition from 1999 to 2004. Monti has also been rector and president of Bocconi University in Milan for many years.
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Franz Karl Stanzel
#12584
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (103 years)
Franz Karl Stanzel was an Austrian literary theorist who specialised in English literature. Academia Born in Molln, Austria, Stanzel finished his degree with Herbert Koziol in Graz. After his habilitation in 1955, he was professor in Göttingen. In 1959, he was offered a position as professor in Erlangen. In 1962, he succeeded Koziol in Graz. He was a professor emeritus of English literature at the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz.
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Leonard Herzenberg
#12585
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Leonard Arthur "Len" Herzenberg was an immunologist, geneticist and professor at Stanford University. His contributions to the development of cell biology made it possible to sort viable cells by their specific properties.
Go to Profile#12575
Daniel Cordaro
#12586
Overall Influence
Daniel Cordaro is an American research scientist and psychologist who specializes in emotion psychology and human wellbeing. As a former faculty member at Yale University, Cordaro is best-known for his research in human emotion and positive psychology. Formerly the director of the Universal Expression Project at the University of California, Berkeley, Cordaro has conducted various worldwide studies on human emotional expression.
Go to Profile#12576
Boris Dubin
#12587
Overall Influence
1946 - 2014 (68 years)
Boris Vladimirovich Dubin was a Russian sociologist, and a translator for English, French, Spanish, Latin American and Polish literature. Dubin was the head of department of sociopolitical researches at the Levada Center and the assistant to Lev Gudkov, editor-in-chief of the sociological journal Russian Public Opinion Herald published by the center. Additionally he was a lecturer of sociology of culture at the Russian State University for the Humanities and the Moscow higher school of social and economic sciences.
Go to Profile#12577
Marc Trachtenberg
#12588
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Marc Trachtenberg is a professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974 and taught for many years for the history department at the University of Pennsylvania before coming to UCLA.
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Zdeněk Kopal
#12589
Overall Influence
1914 - 1993 (79 years)
Zdeněk Kopal was a Czechoslovak astronomer who mainly worked in England. Kopal was born and grew up in Litomyšl . In his early astronomical career, he studied variable stars and in particular close eclipsing binary stars. He attended Cambridge University in 1938 and later that year he went to Harvard College Observatory. After the war he became head of the astronomy department at the University of Manchester. He later assisted NASA with the Apollo program as an external expert.
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Benny Andersson
#12590
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Göran Bror Benny Andersson is a Swedish musician, composer and producer best known as a member of the pop group ABBA and co-composer of the musicals Chess, Kristina från Duvemåla, and Mamma Mia! For the 2008 film version of Mamma Mia! and its 2018 sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, he worked also as an executive producer. Since 2001, he has been active with his own band Benny Anderssons orkester.
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Arthur Geoffrey Walker
#12591
Overall Influence
1909 - 2001 (92 years)
Prof Arthur Geoffrey Walker FRS FRSE was a British mathematician who made important contributions to physics and physical cosmology. Although he was an accomplished geometer, he is best remembered today for two important contributions to general relativity.
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Peter Mayer
#12592
Overall Influence
1936 - 2018 (82 years)
Peter Michael Mayer was a British-born American independent publisher who was president of The Overlook Press/Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc., a Woodstock, New York–based publishing company he founded with his father in 1971. At the time of Overlook’s founding, Mayer was head of Avon Books, a large New York–based paperback publisher. From 1978 to 1996, Mayer was CEO of Penguin Books, where he introduced a flexible style in editorial, marketing, and production. During his tenure, he was credited with reviving the company into "the most formidable and admired publisher in the English language". R...
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Garrett Eckbo
#12593
Overall Influence
1910 - 2000 (90 years)
Garrett Eckbo was an American landscape architect notable for his seminal 1950 book Landscape for Living. Youth He was born in Cooperstown, New York, to Axel Eckbo, a businessman, and Theodora Munn Eckbo. In 1912, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois. After Eckbo's parents divorced, he and his mother relocated to Alameda, California, where they struggled financially while he grew up. After Eckbo graduated from high school in 1929, he felt a lack of ambition and direction and went to stay with a wealthy paternal uncle, Eivind Eckbo, in Norway. It was during his stay in Norway that he began to focus on his future.
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Emanuel Tov
#12594
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Emanuel Tov, is a Dutch–Israeli biblical scholar and linguist, emeritus J. L. Magnes Professor of Bible Studies in the Department of Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been intimately involved with the Dead Sea Scrolls for many decades, and from 1991, he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project.
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K. VijayRaghavan
#12595
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Dr. Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan is an emeritus professor and former director of the National Centre for Biological Sciences. On 26 March 2018, the Government of India appointed him as the principal scientific adviser to succeed Dr. R Chidamabaram. His term as Principal Scientific Adviser ended on April 2, 2022. In 2012, he was elected a fellow of The Royal Society and in April 2014 he was elected as a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. He was conferred the Padma Shri on 26 January 2013 and is also a recipient of the Infosys Prize in the life sciences category in 2009...
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Nelly Furtado
#12596
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Nelly Kim Furtado is a Canadian singer and songwriter. She has sold over 45 million records, including 35 million in album sales worldwide, making her one of the most successful Canadian artists. Critics have noted Furtado's musical versatility and experimentation with genres.
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Ahmad Fardid
#12597
Overall Influence
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Seyyed Ahmad Fardid , born Ahmad Mahini Yazdi, was a prominent Iranian philosopher and a professor of Tehran University. He is considered to be among the philosophical ideologues of the Islamic government of Iran which came to power in 1979. Fardid was under the influence of Martin Heidegger, the influential German philosopher, whom he considered "the only Western philosopher who understood the world and the only philosopher whose insights were congruent with the principles of the Islamic Republic. These two figures, Khomeini and Heidegger, helped Fardid argue his position." What he decried w...
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Anne Fadiman
#12598
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Anne Fadiman is an American essayist and reporter. Her interests include literary journalism, essays, memoir, and autobiography. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and the Salon Book Award.
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Nicolas Bratza
#12599
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Sir Nicolas Dušan Bratza is a British lawyer and a former President of the European Court of Human Rights. Bratza was the Judge of the Court in respect of the United Kingdom, the second person to hold the post as a full-time appointment since Protocol 11 to the European Convention on Human Rights established the Court as a permanent body. His term ended on 31 October 2012. He was appointed as a board member of the International Service for Human Rights in May 2013.
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David Ortiz
#12600
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
David Américo Ortiz Arias , nicknamed "Big Papi", is a Dominican-American former professional baseball designated hitter and first baseman who played 20 seasons in Major League Baseball from 1997 to 2016, primarily for the Boston Red Sox. After playing parts of six seasons with the Minnesota Twins with unremarkable results, Ortiz moved to the Red Sox, where he played a leading role in ending the team's 86-year World Series championship drought in 2004, as well as winning championships in 2007 and 2013; he was named the World Series Most Valuable Player in 2013. In his first five seasons with t...
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Charles Goodsell
#12601
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Charles True Goodsell is Professor Emeritus at Virginia Tech's Center for Public Administration and Policy. He is perhaps best known for his volume The Case for Bureaucracy, now in its 4th edition. Goodsell is a co-author of the Blacksburg Manifesto, written with Gary Wamsley, Robert Bacher, Philip Kronenberg, John Rohr, Camilla Stivers, Orion White, and James Wolf – all of whom were at Virginia Tech during the 1980s. In 1994, Goodsell was elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
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Francis Jeanson
#12602
Overall Influence
1922 - 2009 (87 years)
Francis Jeanson was a French political activist known for his commitment to the FLN during the Algerian war. Life Although his father's name was Henri, Francis Jeanson was not related to the Henri Jeanson who was a journalist at Le Canard enchaîné, Le Crapouillot, and a screenwriter.
Go to Profile#12592
Simone Browne
#12603
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Simone Arlene Browne is an author and educator. She is on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Early life and education Browne was born in 1973, and grew up in Toronto, Ontario, where she received a BA , MA, and PhD at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies at the University of Toronto. Her 2001 Masters thesis was titled Surveilling the Jamaican body, leisure imperialism, immigration and the Canadian imagination. Her doctoral dissertation in 2007 was titled ...
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Wande Abimbola
#12604
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Chief Ògúnwán̄dé "Wán̄dé" Abím̄bọ́lá is a Nigerian academician, a professor of Yoruba language and literature, and a former vice-chancellor of the University of Ife . He has also served as the Majority Leader of the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Chief Abimbola was installed as Àwísẹ Awo Àgbàyé in 1981 by the Ooni of Ife on the recommendation of a conclave of Babalawos of Yorubaland.
Go to Profile#12594
Daniel J. Harrington
#12605
Overall Influence
1940 - 2014 (74 years)
Daniel J. Harrington, S.J. , was an American academic and Jesuit priest who served as professor of New Testament and chair of the Biblical Studies department at Boston College School of Theology and Ministry .
Go to Profile#12595
Henry Chesbrough
#12606
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Henry William Chesbrough is an American organizational theorist, adjunct professor and the faculty director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley and Maire Tecnimont Chair of Open Innovation at Luiss. He is known for coining the term open innovation.
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Michael G. Crandall
#12607
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Michael Grain Crandall is an American mathematician, specializing in differential equations. Mathematical career In 1962 Crandall earned a baccalaureate in engineering physics from University of California, Berkeley, changed to mathematics, earning a master's in 1964 and a PhD in 1965 under Heinz Cordes at Berkeley, with a thesis that solved a problem in celestial mechanics posed by Carl Ludwig Siegel; the thesis title is Two families of plane solutions of the four body problem. In 1965 he was an instructor at Berkeley, in 1966 an assistant professor at Stanford University and from 1969 at the University of California, Los Angeles , where he was a professor from 1973 to 1976.
Go to Profile#12597
Peter Brook
#12608
Overall Influence
1925 - 2022 (97 years)
Peter Stephen Paul Brook was an English theatre and film director. He worked first in England, from 1945 at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, from 1947 at the Royal Opera House, and from 1962 for the Royal Shakespeare Company . With them, he directed the first English-language production in 1964 of Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss, which was transferred to Broadway in 1965 and won the Tony Award for Best Play, and Brook was named Best Director. He also directed films such as an iconic version of Lord of the Flies in 1963.
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Andrew R. George
#12609
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Andrew R. George is a British Assyriologist and academic best known for his edition and translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Andrew George is Professor of Babylonian, Department of the Languages and Cultures of Near and Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Go to Profile#12599
Buster Olney
#12610
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Robert Stanbury "Buster" Olney III is an American sports journalist for ESPN, ESPN: The Magazine, and ESPN.com. He previously covered the New York Giants and New York Yankees for The New York Times. He is also a regular analyst for the ESPN's television program Baseball Tonight and hosts ESPN's Baseball Tonight daily podcast.
Go to Profile#12600
Richard J. Haier
#12611
Overall Influence
Richard J. Haier is an American psychologist who has researched a neural basis for human intelligence, psychometrics, general intelligence, and sex and intelligence. Haier is currently a Professor Emeritus in the Pediatric Neurology Division of the School of Medicine at University of California, Irvine. He has a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. He is also the editor-in-chief of the journal Intelligence since 2016.
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