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
#1301
Terry Gross
#1302
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Terry Gross is an American journalist who is the host and co-executive producer of Fresh Air, an interview-based radio show produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and distributed nationally by NPR. Since joining NPR in 1975, Gross has interviewed thousands of guests.
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Joseph Greenberg
#1303
Overall Influence
1915 - 2001 (86 years)
Joseph Harold Greenberg was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages. Life Early life and education Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915, to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York. His first great interest was music. At the age of 14, he gave a piano concert in Steinway Hall. He continued to play the piano frequently throughout his life.
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Woody Allen
#1304
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Heywood Allen is an American filmmaker, actor, and comedian whose career spans more than six decades. Allen has received many accolades, including the most nominations for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He has won four Academy Awards, ten BAFTA Awards, two Golden Globe Awards and a Grammy Award, as well as nominations for a Emmy Award and a Tony Award. Allen was awarded an Honorary Golden Lion in 1995, the BAFTA Fellowship in 1997, an Honorary Palme d'Or in 2002, and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2014. Two of his films have been inducted into the National Film R...
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Tracey Emin
#1305
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Tracey Karima Emin is an English artist known for autobiographical and confessional artwork. She produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Once the "enfant terrible" of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is now a Royal Academician.
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Robert Huber
#1306
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Robert Huber is a German biochemist and Nobel laureate. known for his work crystallizing an intramembrane protein important in photosynthesis and subsequently applying X-ray crystallography to elucidate the protein's structure.
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Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka
#1307
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka was a Polish philosopher, phenomenologist, founder and president of The World Phenomenology Institute, and editor of the book series, Analecta Husserliana. She had a thirty-two-year friendship and occasional academic collaboration with Pope John Paul II.
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Benedict Anderson
#1308
Overall Influence
1936 - 2015 (79 years)
Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson was an Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian who lived and taught in the United States. Anderson is best known for his 1983 book Imagined Communities, which explored the origins of nationalism. A polyglot with an interest in Southeast Asia, he was the Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor of International Studies, Government & Asian Studies at Cornell University. His work on the "Cornell Paper", which disputed the official story of Indonesia's 30 September Movement and the subsequent anti-Communist purges of 1965–1966, led to his expulsion from that country....
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Adolfo Pérez Esquivel
#1309
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Adolfo Pérez Esquivel is an Argentine activist, community organizer, painter, writer and sculptor. He was the recipient of the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to Argentina's last civil-military dictatorship , during which he was detained, tortured, and held without trial for 14 months. He also received, among other distinctions, the Pacem in Terris Award.
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Rudy Rucker
#1310
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which both won Philip K. Dick Awards. Until its closure in 2014 he edited the science fiction webzine Flurb.
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Jamie Oliver
#1311
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Jamie Trevor Oliver MBE OSI is a British celebrity chef, restaurateur and cookbook author. He is known for his casual approach to cuisine, which has led him to front numerous television shows and open many restaurants.
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Armand Borel
#1312
Overall Influence
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
Armand Borel was a Swiss mathematician, born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and was a permanent professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States from 1957 to 1993. He worked in algebraic topology, in the theory of Lie groups, and was one of the creators of the contemporary theory of linear algebraic groups.
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Studs Terkel
#1313
Overall Influence
1912 - 2008 (96 years)
Louis "Studs" Terkel was an American writer, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for The Good War and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago.
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Robert Tibshirani
#1314
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Robert Tibshirani is a professor in the Departments of Statistics and Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University. He was a professor at the University of Toronto from 1985 to 1998. In his work, he develops statistical tools for the analysis of complex datasets, most recently in genomics and proteomics.
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Mario Testino
#1315
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Mario Eduardo Testino Silva OBE HonFRPS is a Peruvian fashion and portrait photographer. His work has featured internationally in magazines such as Vogue, V Magazine, Vanity Fair and GQ. He has also created images for brands such as Gucci, Burberry, Versace, Michael Kors, Chanel, Stuart Weitzman, Carolina Herrera and Estée Lauder. Alongside his practice as a photographer, Testino has also worked as a creative director, guest editor, museum founder, art collector and collaborator, and entrepreneur. His professional work as a photographer has been dogged by numerous accusations of sexual haras...
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Gustavo Gutiérrez
#1316
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino is a Peruvian philosopher, Catholic theologian, and Dominican priest, regarded as one of the founders of Latin American liberation theology. He currently holds the John Cardinal O'Hara Professorship of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, and has previously been a visiting professor at many major universities in North America and Europe.
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John Polkinghorne
#1317
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
John Charlton Polkinghorne was an English theoretical physicist, theologian, and Anglican priest. A prominent and leading voice explaining the relationship between science and religion, he was professor of mathematical physics at the University of Cambridge from 1968 to 1979, when he resigned his chair to study for the priesthood, becoming an ordained Anglican priest in 1982. He served as the president of Queens' College, Cambridge, from 1988 until 1996.
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Nouriel Roubini
#1318
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
#1318
Don DeLillo
#1319
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.
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Edward Yourdon
#1320
Overall Influence
1944 - 2016 (72 years)
Edward Nash Yourdon was an American software engineer, computer consultant, author and lecturer, and software engineering methodology pioneer. He was one of the lead developers of the structured analysis techniques of the 1970s and a co-developer of both the Yourdon/Whitehead method for object-oriented analysis/design in the late 1980s and the Coad/Yourdon methodology for object-oriented analysis/design in the 1990s.
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Roy E. Disney
#1321
Overall Influence
1930 - 2009 (79 years)
Roy Edward Disney KCSG was an American businessman. He was the longtime senior executive for the Walt Disney Company, which was founded by his uncle, Walt Disney, and his father, Roy O. Disney. At the time of his death, he held more than 16 million shares , and served as a consultant for the company, as director emeritus for the board of directors. During his tenure, he organized the ousting of two top Disney executives: Ron W. Miller in 1984 and Michael Eisner in 2005.
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Paul Lauterbur
#1322
Overall Influence
1929 - 2007 (78 years)
Paul Christian Lauterbur was an American chemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2003 with Peter Mansfield for his work which made the development of magnetic resonance imaging possible.
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Philip Alston
#1323
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Philip Geoffrey Alston is an Australian international law scholar and human rights practitioner. He is John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, and co-chair of the law school's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. In human rights law, Alston has held a range of senior UN appointments for over two decades, including United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, a position he held from August 2004 to July 2010, and UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights from 2014-2020.
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Robert Merrihew Adams
#1324
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Robert Merrihew Adams is an American analytic philosopher, specializing in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and the history of early modern philosophy. Life and career Adams was born on September 8, 1937, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He taught for many years at the University of California, Los Angeles, before moving to Yale University in the early 1990s as the Clark Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics. As chairman, he helped revive the philosophy department after its near-collapse due to personal and scholarly conflicts between analytical and Continental philosophers.
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Christian de Duve
#1325
Overall Influence
1917 - 2013 (96 years)
Christian René Marie Joseph, Viscount de Duve was a Nobel Prize-winning Belgian cytologist and biochemist. He made serendipitous discoveries of two cell organelles, peroxisome and lysosome, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 with Albert Claude and George E. Palade . In addition to peroxisome and lysosome, he invented scientific names such as autophagy, endocytosis, and exocytosis in a single occasion.
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Gay Talese
#1326
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Gaetano "Gay" Talese is an American writer. As a journalist for The New York Times and Esquire magazine during the 1960s, Talese helped to define contemporary literary journalism and is considered, along with Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Hunter S. Thompson, one of the pioneers of New Journalism. Talese's most famous articles are about Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra.
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Graham Harman
#1327
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
#1327
Alan Edelman
#1328
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Alan Stuart Edelman is an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Principal Investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where he leads a group in applied computing. In 2004, he founded a business called Interactive Supercomputing which was later acquired by Microsoft. Edelman is a fellow of American Mathematical Society , Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics , Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers , and Association for Computing Machine...
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Gerd Binnig
#1329
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Gerd Binnig is a German physicist. He is most famous for having won the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Heinrich Rohrer in 1986 for the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope. Early life and education Binnig was born in Frankfurt am Main and played in the ruins of the city during his childhood. His family lived partly in Frankfurt and partly in Offenbach am Main, and he attended school in both cities. At the age of 10, he decided to become a physicist, but he soon wondered whether he had made the right choice. He concentrated more on music, playing in a band. He also started playi...
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Alexander Markovich Polyakov
#1330
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Alexander Markovich Polyakov is a Russian theoretical physicist, formerly at the Landau Institute in Moscow and, since 1989, at Princeton University, where he is the Joseph Henry Professor of Physics Emeritus.
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Kuvempu
#1331
Overall Influence
1904 - 1994 (90 years)
Kuppali Venkatappa Puttappa , popularly known by his pen name Kuvempu, was an Indian poet, playwright, novelist and critic. He is widely regarded as the greatest Kannada poet of the 20th century. He was the first Kannada writer to receive the Jnanpith Award.
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Dennis Sullivan
#1332
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Dennis Parnell Sullivan is an American mathematician known for his work in algebraic topology, geometric topology, and dynamical systems. He holds the Albert Einstein Chair at the City University of New York Graduate Center and is a distinguished professor at Stony Brook University.
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Richard Herrnstein
#1333
Overall Influence
1930 - 1994 (64 years)
Richard Julius Herrnstein was an American psychologist at Harvard University. He was an active researcher in animal learning in the Skinnerian tradition. Herrnstein was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology until his death, and previously chaired the Harvard Department of Psychology for five years. With political scientist Charles Murray, he co-wrote The Bell Curve, a controversial 1994 book on human intelligence. He was one of the founders of the Society for Quantitative Analysis of Behavior.
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Vladimir Drinfeld
#1334
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Vladimir Gershonovich Drinfeld , surname also romanized as Drinfel'd, is a renowned mathematician from the former USSR, who emigrated to the United States and is currently working at the University of Chicago.
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Alain Aspect
#1335
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Alain Aspect is a French physicist noted for his experimental work on quantum entanglement. Aspect was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science".
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Dan Harmon
#1336
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Daniel James Harmon is an American screenwriter, producer, comedian and occasional actor. He is best known as the creator and producer of the NBC and Yahoo! Screen sitcom Community , creator and host of the comedy podcast Harmontown , co-creator of the Adult Swim animated sitcom Rick and Morty and its subsequent franchise along with Justin Roiland, and co-founder of the alternative television network and website Channel 101 along with Rob Schrab.
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Axel Honneth
#1337
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Axel Honneth is a German philosopher who is the Professor for Social Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Jack B. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities in the department of philosophy at Columbia University. He was also director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt am Main, Germany between 2001 and 2018.
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Simon Singh
#1339
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Simon Lehna Singh, is a British popular science author, theoretical and particle physicist. His written works include Fermat's Last Theorem , The Code Book , Big Bang , Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial and The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets . In 2012 Singh founded the Good Thinking Society, through which he created the website "Parallel" to help students learn mathematics.
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Shoshana Zuboff
#1340
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Shoshana Zuboff is an American author, professor, social psychologist, philosopher, and scholar. Zuboff is the author of the books In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power and The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism, co-authored with James Maxmin. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, integrates core themes of her research: the Digital Revolution, the evolution of capitalism, the historical emergence of psychological individuality, and the conditions for human...
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David Ruelle
#1341
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
David Pierre Ruelle is a Belgian mathematical physicist, naturalized French. He has worked on statistical physics and dynamical systems. With Floris Takens, Ruelle coined the term strange attractor, and developed a new theory of turbulence.
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Ram Sharan Sharma
#1342
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
Ram Sharan Sharma was an Indian Marxist historian and Indologist who specialised in the history of Ancient and early Medieval India. He taught at Patna University and Delhi University and was visiting faculty at University of Toronto . He also was a senior fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was a University Grants Commission National Fellow and the president of Indian History Congress in 1975. It was during his tenure as the dean of Delhi University's History Department that major expansion of the department took place in the 1970s. The creation of most of the positions in the department were the results of his efforts.
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Raewyn Connell
#1343
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
#1342
Giovanni Falcone
#1344
Overall Influence
1939 - 1992 (53 years)
Giovanni Falcone was an Italian judge and prosecuting magistrate. From his office in the Palace of Justice in Palermo, Sicily, he spent most of his professional life trying to overthrow the power of the Sicilian Mafia. After a long and distinguished career, culminating in the Maxi Trial in 1986–1987, on 23 May 1992, Falcone was assassinated by the Corleonesi Mafia in the Capaci bombing, on the A29 motorway near the town of Capaci.
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Jean-Luc Marion
#1345
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jean-Luc Marion is a French philosopher and Roman Catholic theologian. Marion is a former student of Jacques Derrida whose work is informed by patristic and mystical theology, phenomenology, and modern philosophy. Much of his academic work has dealt with Descartes and phenomenologists like Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, but also religion. God Without Being, for example, is concerned predominantly with an analysis of idolatry, a theme strongly linked in Marion's work with love and the gift, which is a concept also explored at length by Derrida.
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Martin Litchfield West
#1346
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
Martin Litchfield West, was a British philologist and classical scholar. In recognition of his contribution to scholarship, he was awarded the Order of Merit in 2014. West wrote on ancient Greek music, Greek tragedy, Greek lyric poetry, the relations between Greece and the ancient Near East, and the connection between shamanism and early ancient Greek religion, including the Orphic tradition. This work stems from material in Akkadian, Phoenician, Hebrew, Hittite, and Ugaritic, as well as Greek and Latin. West also studied the reconstitution of Indo-European mythology and poetry and its influ...
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Brian Gardner
#1347
Overall Influence
Brian Knapp Gardner, also known as Brian "Big Bass" Gardner, is an American mastering engineer. He has worked on a number of recordings since the mid-1960s, including classic rock, funk, disco, alternative rock, R&B, hip hop, pop punk and dance-pop. He is known for his work on hip hop albums, including collaborations with Dr. Dre, who gave him the nickname "Big Bass".
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Patrick Moore
#1348
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Sir Patrick Alfred Caldwell-Moore was a British amateur astronomer who attained prominence in that field as a writer, researcher, radio commentator and television presenter. Moore's early interest in astronomy led him to join the British Astronomical Association at the age of eleven. He served in the Royal Air Force during World War II and briefly taught before publishing his first book on lunar observation in 1953. Renowned for his expertise in Moon observation and the creation of the Caldwell catalogue, Moore authored more than seventy astronomy books. He hosted the world's longest-running...
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William Hanna
#1349
Overall Influence
1910 - 2001 (91 years)
William Denby Hanna was an American animator, cartoonist and occasional musician who was the creator of Tom and Jerry as well as the voice actor for the two titular characters. Alongside Joseph Barbera, he also founded the animation studio and production company Hanna-Barbera.
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Melvyn Bragg
#1350
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Melvyn Bragg, Baron Bragg, is an English broadcaster, author and parliamentarian. He is the editor and presenter of The South Bank Show , and made the BBC Radio 4 documentary series In Our Time. Earlier in his career, Bragg worked for the BBC in various roles including presenter, a connection that resumed in 1988 when he began to host Start the Week on BBC Radio 4. After his ennoblement in 1998, he switched to presenting the new In Our Time, an academic discussion radio programme, which has run to more than one thousand broadcast editions and is also a podcast. He was Chancellor of the Unive...
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Lawrence Klein
#1351
Overall Influence
1920 - 2013 (93 years)
Lawrence Robert Klein was an American economist. For his work in creating computer models to forecast economic trendss in the field of econometrics in the Department of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1980 specifically "for the creation of econometric models and their application to the analysis of economic fluctuations and economic policies." Due to his efforts, such models have become widespread among economists. Harvard University professor Martin Feldstein told the Wall Street Journal that Klein "was the first t...
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Ian McEwan
#1352
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Ian Russell McEwan is a British novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945" and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 in its list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".
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