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
#13351
Göran Therborn
#13362
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Göran Therborn FAcSS is a professor of sociology at Cambridge University and is amongst the most highly cited contemporary Marxian-influenced sociologists. He has published widely in journals such as the New Left Review, and is notable for his writing on topics that fall within the general political and sociological framework of post-Marxism. Topics on which he has written extensively include the intersection between the class structure of society and the function of the state apparatus, the formation of ideology within subjects, and the future of the Marxist tradition. Therborn was awarded the 2019 Lenin Award.
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Eric McLuhan
#13363
Overall Influence
1941 - 2018 (77 years)
Eric Marshall McLuhan was a communications theorist, son of Marshall McLuhan. Biography Eric McLuhan was the eldest of Marshall McLuhan's six children. He received his BSc in communications from Wisconsin State University in 1972 and his M.A. and PhD in English Literature from the University of Dallas in 1980 and 1982. In 2007, he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association. In 2011, the University of St. Michael's College in Toronto, Canada awarded him an L.L.D. of Sacred Letters.
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Lil' Kim
#13364
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Kimberly Denise Jones , better known by her stage name Lil' Kim, is an American rapper. She was born and raised in New York City and lived much of her adolescent life on the streets after being expelled from home. In her teens, she would freestyle rap, influenced by fellow female hip-hop artists like MC Lyte and the Lady of Rage. In 1994, she was discovered by fellow rapper The Notorious B.I.G., who invited her to join his group Junior M.A.F.I.A.; their debut album, Conspiracy, generated two top 20 singles in the United States and was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of Ame...
Go to Profile#13354
Raj Krishna
#13365
Overall Influence
Raj Krishna was an Indian economist who taught at the Delhi School of Economics. He is most famous for the phrase "Hindu rate of growth" which he coined for India's low rate of GDP growth between the 1950s and 1980s.
Go to Profile#13355
Adam Liptak
#13366
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Adam Liptak is an American journalist, lawyer and instructor in law and journalism. He is the Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times. Liptak has written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New York Observer, Business Week and other publications. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 2009 for a series of articles that examined ways in which the American legal system differs from those of other developed nations.
Go to Profile#13356
Chris Hull
#13367
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Christopher Michael Hull is a professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London. Hull is known for his work on string theory, M-theory, and generalized complex structures. Edward Witten drew partially from Hull's work for his development of M-theory.
Go to Profile#13357
John Palfrey
#13368
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
John Gorham Palfrey VII is an American educator, scholar, and law professor. He is an authority on the legal aspects of emerging media and an advocate for Internet freedom, including increased online transparency and accountability as well as child safety. In March 2019, he was named the president of the MacArthur Foundation effective September 1, 2019. Palfrey was the 15th Head of School at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts from 2012 to 2019. He has been an important figure at Harvard Law School and served as executive director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society fro...
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Lars Rasmussen
#13369
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Lars Eilstrup Rasmussen is a Danish computer scientist, technology executive, and the co-founder of Google Maps. He was later the director of engineering for Facebook in London. In early 2003, Lars and his brother Jens co-founded a mapping-related startup, Where 2 Technologies, which was acquired by Google in October 2004. Rasmussen became the head of the Google Maps team and worked at Google until joining Facebook in late 2010.
Go to Profile#13359
Yasheng Huang
#13370
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Yasheng Huang is an American professor in international management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he founded and heads the China Lab and India Lab. His research areas include human capital formation in China and India.
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Bob Behnken
#13371
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Robert Louis Behnken is an American engineer, a former NASA astronaut, and former Chief of the Astronaut Office. Behnken holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and the rank of colonel in the U.S. Air Force, where he served before joining NASA in 2000. He flew aboard Space Shuttle missions STS-123 and STS-130 as a mission specialist, accumulating over 708 hours in space, including 55 hours of spacewalk time. He is married to fellow astronaut Megan McArthur.
Go to Profile#13361
Jacob Millman
#13372
Overall Influence
1911 - 1991 (80 years)
Jacob Millman was a professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University. He immigrated to the United States in 1913 with his mother, Gertrude Millman and sister Rebecca. Millman received a PhD from MIT in 1935. He joined Columbia University in 1951, and retired in 1975. From 1941 to 1987, Millman wrote eight textbooks on electronics, and he helped develop radar systems. Millman's theorem is named after him. He received in 1970 the IEEE Education Medal.
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Debra Ann Livingston
#13373
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Debra Ann Livingston is an American lawyer who serves as the Chief United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Early life and education Livingston was born in Waycross, Georgia, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree, magna cum laude, from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1980 and a Juris Doctor, magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1984, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
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Tom Kenny
#13374
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Thomas James Kenny is an American actor and comedian. Since 1999, he has voiced the titular character in SpongeBob SquarePants and associated media. Kenny has voiced many other characters, including Heffer Wolfe in Rocko's Modern Life, the Ice King in Adventure Time and its spinoff Fionna and Cake, the Narrator and Mayor in The Powerpuff Girls, Carl Chryniszzswics in Johnny Bravo, Dog in CatDog, Hank and Jeremy in Talking Tom and Friends, The Penguin in various animated media based on DC Comics, and Spyro from the Spyro video game series. His live action work includes the comedy variety shows The Edge and Mr.
Go to Profile#13364
Lars Bak
#13375
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Lars Bak is a Danish computer programmer. He is known as a JavaScript expert and for his work on virtual machines. He previously worked for Google, having contributed to the Chrome browser by developing the V8 JavaScript engine.
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Jean Pictet
#13376
Overall Influence
1914 - 2002 (88 years)
Jean Simon Pictet was a Swiss citizen, jurist, legal practitioner working in international humanitarian law. First as a secretary-jurist, and then as a senior executive and Vice-President of the International Committee of the Red Cross , Pictet was instrumental in drafting the 1949 Geneva Conventions for the protection of victims of war, their Commentaries, and negotiating the 1977 Additional Protocols . He also proposed the Red Cross Movement’s seven Fundamental Principles, which were adopted at Vienna in 1965: Humanity, Impartiality, Neutrality, Independence, Voluntary Service, Unity and Universality.
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Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı
#13377
Overall Influence
1940 - 2017 (77 years)
Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı was a Turkish scientist and professor. She was a university professor since 1969 and received the APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology in 1993.
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Merlin Stone
#13378
Overall Influence
1931 - 2011 (80 years)
Merlin Stone was an American author, artist and academic. She was an important thinker of the feminist theology and Goddess movements and is known for her book When God Was a Woman. Biography Merlin Stone was born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York. She attended P.S. 217 and Erasmus Hall High School, where she graduated in 1949 with a Metallic Art Medal Award. After enrolling at the University of Buffalo later that year and marrying in 1950, she continued her studies while raising her children, ultimately earning a B.S. and teaching certificate in art from the institution in 1958. She became in...
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Daniel Miller
#13379
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Areas of Specialization: Digital Anthropology Daniel Miller is a Professor of Anthropology at UCL Institute of Education. He earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology and Archaeology from University of Cambridge. He is the founder of University College of London’s digital anthropology program and the director of Why We Post: Global Social Media Impact Study, an international anthropological study of human social media usage. In so doing, he pioneered the study of digital anthropology, which investigates the experience of human/technology interactions. Why We Post generated a body of research that has been downloaded more than half a million times.
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Mike Breen
#13380
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Michael Breen is an American play-by-play sports commentator. He has been the lead announcer for NBA games on ABC and ESPN since 2006, including the NBA Finals. He is also the lead announcer for New York Knicks games on the MSG Network. Breen previously called NFL regular season games for both NFL on Fox and NFL on NBC, as well as New York Giants preseason games.
Go to Profile#13370
Yahya Rahmat-Samii
#13381
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Yahya Rahmat-Samii is the Northrop Grumman Chair Professor in Electromagnetics at the electrical engineering department at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he teaches and conducts research on microwave transmission and radio antennas. Rahmat-Samii received his Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1970 from the University of Tehran, Iran, and the Master of Science in 1972 and the Doctor of Philosophy degrees in electrical engineering in 1975 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining UCLA in 1989, he was a senior research scientist at...
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David Hestenes
#13382
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
David Orlin Hestenes is a theoretical physicist and science educator. He is best known as chief architect of geometric algebra as a unified language for mathematics and physics, and as founder of Modelling Instruction, a research-based program to reform K–12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics education.
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Thelton Henderson
#13383
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Thelton Eugene Henderson is an inactive senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. He has played an important role in the field of civil rights as a lawyer, educator, and jurist.
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Taner Edis
#13384
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Taner Edis is a Turkish American physicist and skeptic. He is a professor of physics at Truman State University. He received his B.S. from Boğaziçi University in Turkey and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Edis is the author of several books on creationism, religion and science. He is a scientific and technical consultant for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
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Oliver O'Donovan
#13385
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Oliver Michael Timothy O'Donovan is a British Anglican priest and academic, known for his work in the field of Christian ethics. He has also made contributions to political theology, both contemporary and historical. He was Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford from 1982 to 2006, and Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the University of Edinburgh from 2006 to 2013.
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George Lindbeck
#13386
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
George Arthur Lindbeck was an American Lutheran theologian. He was best known as an ecumenicist and as one of the fathers of postliberal theology. Early life and education Lindbeck was born on March 10, 1923, in Luoyang, China, the son of American Lutheran missionaries. Raised in that country and in Korea for the first seventeen years of his life, he was often sickly as a child and found himself often isolated from the world around himself.
Go to Profile#13376
Tom Morello
#13387
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Thomas Baptist Morello is an American guitarist, singer, songwriter, and political activist. He is best known for his tenure with the rock bands Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave. Between 2016 and 2019, Morello was a member of the supergroup Prophets of Rage. Morello was a touring musician with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Under the moniker the Nightwatchman Morello released his solo work. Together with Boots Riley, he formed Street Sweeper Social Club. Morello co-founded Axis of Justice, which airs a monthly program on Pacifica Radio station KPFK in Los Angeles.
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William Thaddeus Coleman, Jr.
#13388
Overall Influence
1920 - 2017 (97 years)
William Thaddeus Coleman Jr. was an American attorney and judge. Coleman was the fourth United States Secretary of Transportation, from March 7, 1975, to January 20, 1977, and the second African American to serve in the United States Cabinet. As an attorney, Coleman played a major role in significant civil rights cases. At the time of his death, Coleman was the oldest living former Cabinet member.
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R. Stanley Williams
#13389
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Richard Stanley Williams is a research scientist in the field of nanotechnology and a Senior Fellow and the founding director of the Quantum Science Research Laboratory at Hewlett-Packard. He has over 57 patents, with 40 more patents pending. At HP, he led a group that developed a working solid state version of Leon Chua's memristor.
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Edith Hall
#13390
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Edith Hall, is a British scholar of classics, specialising in ancient Greek literature and cultural history, and professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. From 2006 until 2011 she held a Chair at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she founded and directed the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome until November 2011. She resigned over a dispute regarding funding for classics after leading a public campaign, which was successful, to prevent cuts to or the closure of the Royal Holloway Classics department.
Go to Profile#13380
Ian Watson
#13391
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Ian Watson is a British science fiction writer. He lives in Gijón, Spain. Life In 1959, Watson worked as an accounts clerk at Runciman's, a Newcastle shipping company. The experience was not particularly satisfying.
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Richard Poirier
#13392
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
Richard Poirier was an American literary critic. Career He graduated from Amherst College, Yale University, and Harvard University, and also studied under the literary critic F. R. Leavis at Downing College, Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship.
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Carla Anderson Hills
#13393
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Carla Anderson Hills is an American lawyer and a public figure. A member of the Republican Party, she previously served as the 5th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Gerald Ford from 1975 to 1977 and as the 10th United States Trade Representative under President George H. W. Bush from 1989 to 1993. Hills was the first woman to hold each of those posts, the third woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet, and the first appointed to both cabinet and cabinet-rank positions. Hills is the earliest-serving living former U.S. Cabinet member.
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Joel Westheimer
#13394
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Joel Westheimer is an American-born academic, and is a full professor at the University of Ottawa, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He is known for his work in citizenship education. Biography Joel Westheimer was born to Manfred and Ruth Westheimer in Washington Heights, New York City. Ruth Westheimer, better known as Dr. Ruth, is a sex therapist, professor, author, and media personality, and one of the first to develop the field of media psychology.
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Susanna Hecht
#13395
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Susanna B. Hecht is an American geographer, professor of Urban Planning at UCLA and professor of international history at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Life and work Her early work on the deforestation of the Amazon led to the founding of the subfield of political ecology. This subfield of geography embraces sociology, economics, history, literature, ecology, environmental studies and a wide variety of other fields in an effort to paint a more intricate picture of a particular geographic region and the influence it has on the world around it as well as how the world impacts the region.
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George Strait
#13396
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
George Harvey Strait Sr. is an American country music singer, songwriter, actor, and music producer. Strait is credited for pioneering the neotraditional country style in the 1980s, famed for his authentic cowboy image and roots-oriented sound at a time when the Nashville music industry was dominated by country pop crossover acts. Given his influence on the genre, Strait has been named the "King of Country Music" by writers and music critics. Strait currently holds the record for most number one songs on all charts by an artist, in any genre of music."
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Larry David
#13397
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Lawrence Gene David is an American comedian, writer, actor, and television producer. He and Jerry Seinfeld created the television sitcom Seinfeld, on which David was head writer and executive producer for the first seven seasons. He gained further recognition for the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm, which he created and stars in as a fictionalized version of himself. He has written or co-written the story of every episode since its pilot episode in 1999.
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Georgios Papachatzis
#13398
Overall Influence
1905 - 1991 (86 years)
Georgios Papachatzis , alternately spelled as Giorgos or George Papahatzis or Papachatzis, was a Greek jurist. Early life Papachatzis was born in Chalcis in 1905. He studied law at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and was awarded a Ph.D. in Law in 1932.
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Guido Münch
#13399
Overall Influence
1921 - 2020 (99 years)
Guido Münch Paniagua was a Mexican astronomer and astrophysicist. Biography Münch was born in San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico. He studied civil engineering and mathematics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, receiving his bachelor's degree in civil engineering and mathematics in 1939 and his master's degree in mathematics in 1944. He then went to the University of Chicago, where he was published in Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1946 . He then went to the Tacubaya Observatory of the University of Mexico, but returned to the University of Chicago in 1947 as an instructor, and became an assistant professor in 1949.
Go to Profile#13389
Berys Gaut
#13400
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Berys Gaut is an author and Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He writes on aesthetics, creativity, philosophy of film, and ethics. He was president of the British Society of Aesthetics until 2018.
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Margaret W. Rossiter
#13401
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Margaret W. Rossiter is an American historian of science, and Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science, at Cornell University. Rossiter coined the term Matilda effect for the systematic suppression of information about women in the history of science, and the denial of the contribution of women scientists in research, whose work is often attributed to their male colleagues.
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Bill Bruford
#13402
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
William Scott Bruford is an English former drummer and percussionist who first gained prominence as a founding member of the progressive rock band Yes. After leaving Yes in 1972, Bruford spent the rest of the 1970s recording and touring with King Crimson , Roy Harper , and U.K. , as well as touring with Genesis . In 1978, he formed his own group, Bruford, which was active until 1980.
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Hélène Esnault
#13403
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Hélène Esnault is a French and German mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. Biography Born in Paris, Esnault earned her PhD in 1976 from the University of Paris VII. She wrote her dissertation on Singularites rationnelles et groupes algebriques under the direction of Lê Dũng Tráng.
Go to Profile#13393
Norton Juster
#13404
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Norton Juster was an American academic, architect, and writer. He was best known as an author of children's books, notably for The Phantom Tollbooth and The Dot and the Line. Early life Juster was born in Brooklyn on June 2, 1929. Both his parents were Jewish and immigrated to the United States. His father, Samuel Juster, was born in Romania and became an architect through a correspondence course. His mother, Minnie Silberman, was of Polish Jewish descent. His brother, Howard, became an architect as well. Juster studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, obtaining a bachelor's degree in 1952.
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Raimo Tuomela
#13405
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Raimo Heikki Tuomela Career Tuomela received his first degree of doctor of philosophy in 1968 from the University of Helsinki and the second one in 1969 from Stanford University. Tuomela was full professor of philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki in 1971–2008.
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Andrea M. Ghez
#13406
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Andrea Mia Ghez is an American astrophysicist, Nobel laureate, and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Lauren B. Leichtman & Arthur E. Levine chair in Astrophysics, at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
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Robin Wright
#13407
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Robin B. Wright , is an American foreign affairs analyst, author and journalist who has covered wars, revolutions and uprisings around the world. She writes for The New Yorker and is a fellow of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson Center. Wright has authored five books and coauthored or edited three others.
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Charles Bernstein
#13408
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Charles Bernstein is an American poet, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor, Emeritus, Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or Language poets. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. and in 2019 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize from Yale University, the premiere American prize for lifetime achievement, given on the occasion of the publication of Near/Miss. Bernstein was David Gray Professor of Poetry and Poetics at SUNY-Buffalo from 1990 to 2003, where he co-founded the Poetics Program.
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James H. Moor
#13409
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
James H. Moor is the Daniel P. Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Dartmouth College. He earned his Ph.D. in 1972 from Indiana University. Moor's 1985 paper entitled "What is Computer Ethics?" established him as one of the pioneering theoreticians in the field of computer ethics. He has also written extensively on the Turing Test. His research includes study in philosophy of artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and logic.
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Frank Bidart
#13410
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Frank Bidart is an American academic and poet, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Biography Bidart is a native of California and considered a career in acting or directing when he was young. In 1957, he began to study at the University of California at Riverside, where he was introduced to writers such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and started to look at poetry as a career path. He then went on to Harvard, where he was a student and friend of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. He began studying with Lowell and Reuben Brower in 1962.
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Mike Wallace
#13411
Overall Influence
1918 - 2012 (94 years)
Myron Leon Wallace was an American journalist, game show host, actor, and media personality. Known for his investigative journalism, he interviewed a wide range of prominent newsmakers during his seven-decade career. He was one of the original correspondents featured on CBS news program 60 Minutes, which debuted in 1968. Wallace retired as a regular full-time correspondent in 2006, but still appeared occasionally on the series until 2008. He is the father of Chris Wallace.
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