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).
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List of the most influential people
#1351
Homi K. Bhabha
#1353
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Homi Kharshedji Bhabha is an Indian-British scholar and critical theorist. He is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is one of the most important figures in contemporary postcolonial studies, and has developed a number of the field's neologisms and key concepts, such as hybridity, mimicry, difference, and ambivalence. Such terms describe ways in which colonised people have resisted the power of the coloniser, according to Bhabha's theory. In 2012, he received the Padma Bhushan award in the field of literature and education from the Indian government. H...
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David G. Bromley
#1354
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
David G. Bromley is a professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, specialized in sociology of religion and the academic study of new religious movements. He has written extensively about cults, new religious movements, apostasy, and the anti-cult movement.
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Kunihiko Fukushima
#1355
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Kunihiko Fukushima is a Japanese computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is currently working part-time as a senior research scientist at the Fuzzy Logic Systems Institute in Fukuoka, Japan.
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Hal Varian
#1356
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Hal Ronald Varian is Chief Economist at Google and holds the title of emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he was founding dean of the School of Information. Varian is an economist specializing in microeconomics and information economics.
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John Schlesinger
#1357
Overall Influence
1926 - 2003 (77 years)
John Richard Schlesinger was an English film and stage director, and actor. He emerged in the early 1960’s as a leading light of the British New Wave, before embarking on a successful career in Hollywood, often directing films dealing frankly in provocative subject matter, combined with his status as one of the only openly-gay directors working in mainstream films.
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Lenny Henry
#1358
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Sir Lenworth George Henry is a British actor, comedian, singer, television presenter and writer. Henry gained success as a stand-up comedian and impressionist in the late 1970s and early 1980s, culminating in The Lenny Henry Show in 1984. He was the most prominent black British comedian of the time and much of his material served to celebrate and parody his African-Caribbean roots.
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Chantal Mouffe
#1359
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Chantal Mouffe is a Belgian political theorist, formerly teaching at University of Westminster. She is best known for her contribution to the development—jointly with Ernesto Laclau, with whom she co-authored her most frequently cited publication Hegemony and Socialist Strategy—of the so-called Essex School of discourse analysis, a type of post-Marxist political inquiry drawing on Gramsci, post-structuralism and theories of identity, and redefining Leftist politics in terms of radical democracy. She is also the author of influential works on agonistic political theory, including Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically and The Democratic Paradox.
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Mike Judge
#1360
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Michael Craig Judge is an American actor, animator, filmmaker, and musician. He is the creator of the animated television series Beavis and Butt-Head , and the co-creator of the television series King of the Hill , The Goode Family , Silicon Valley , and Mike Judge Presents: Tales from the Tour Bus . He wrote and directed the films Beavis and Butt-Head Do America , Office Space , Idiocracy , and Extract , and co-wrote the screenplay to Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe .
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Arthur Kleinman
#1361
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Areas of Specialization: Medical Anthropology Arthur Kleinman is a medical anthropologist and the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University. Kleinman is also the Professor of Medical Anthropology in Global Health and Social Medicine and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He earned his AB and MD from Stanford University and an M.A. in social anthropology from Harvard University. He completed his internship at the Yale University of Medicine, before completing his psychiatric residency in Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital.
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Jacques Le Goff
#1362
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Jacques Le Goff was a French historian and prolific author specializing in the Middle Ages, particularly the 12th and 13th centuries. Le Goff championed the Annales School movement, which emphasizes long-term trends over the topics of politics, diplomacy, and war that dominated 19th-century historical research. From 1972 to 1977, he was the head of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He was a leading figure of New History, related to cultural history. Le Goff argued that the Middle Ages formed a civilization of its own, distinct from both Classical Antiquity and ...
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Rudolph A. Marcus
#1363
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (101 years)
Rudolph Arthur Marcus is a Canadian-born chemist who received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems". Marcus theory, named after him, provides a thermodynamic and kinetic framework for describing one electron outer-sphere electron transfer. He is a professor at Caltech, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.
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Denise Scott Brown
#1364
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Denise Scott Brown is an American architect, planner, writer, educator, and principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in Philadelphia. Scott Brown and her husband and partner, Robert Venturi , are regarded as among the most influential architects of the twentieth century, both through their architecture and planning, and theoretical writing and teaching.
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Trygve Haavelmo
#1365
Overall Influence
1911 - 1999 (88 years)
Trygve Magnus Haavelmo , born in Skedsmo, Norway, was an economist whose research interests centered on econometrics. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1989. Biography After attending Oslo Cathedral School, Haavelmo received a degree in economics from the University of Oslo in 1930 and eventually joined the Institute of Economics with the recommendation of Ragnar Frisch. Haavelmo was Frisch's assistant for a period of time until he was appointed as head of computations for the institute. In 1936, Haavelmo studied statistics at University College London while he subsequently traveled to Berlin, Geneva, and Oxford for additional studies.
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Joseph Barbera
#1366
Overall Influence
1911 - 2006 (95 years)
Joseph "Joe" Roland Barbera was an American animator, cartoon artist, storyboard artist, screenwriter, director and producer who co-founded the animation studio and production company Hanna-Barbera.
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Aaron Ciechanover
#1367
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Aaron Ciechanover is an Israeli biologist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for characterizing the method that cells use to degrade and recycle proteins using ubiquitin. Biography Early life Ciechanover was born in Haifa, British Mandate of Palestine on 1 October 1947 into a Jewish family. He is the son of Bluma , a teacher of English, and Yitzhak Ciechanover, an office worker. His mother and father supported the Zionist movement and immigrated to Israel from Poland in the 1920s.
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J. Bradford DeLong
#1368
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
James Bradford "Brad" DeLong is an economic historian who is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. DeLong served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration under Lawrence Summers.
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Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
#1369
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji is a French physicist. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Chu and William Daniel Phillips for research in methods of laser cooling and trapping atoms. Currently he is still an active researcher, working at the École normale supérieure .
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Michael Pollan
#1370
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Michael Kevin Pollan is an American author and journalist, who is currently Professor of the Practice of Non-Fiction and the first Lewis K. Chan Arts Lecturer at Harvard University. Concurrently, he is the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism and the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism where in 2020 he cofounded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, in which he leads the public-education program. Pollan is best known for his books that explore the socio-cultural impacts of...
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Arvid Carlsson
#1371
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Arvid Carlsson was a Swedish neuropharmacologist who is best known for his work with the neurotransmitter dopamine and its effects in Parkinson's disease. For his work on dopamine, Carlsson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000, together with Eric Kandel and Paul Greengard.
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Roderick Chisholm
#1372
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Roderick Milton Chisholm was an American philosopher known for his work on epistemology, metaphysics, free will, value theory, and the philosophy of perception. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy remarks that he "is widely regarded as one of the most creative, productive, and influential American philosophers of the 20th Century."
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John Major
#1373
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Sir John Major is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1997. He previously held Cabinet positions under prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the last as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1989 to 1990. Major was the member of Parliament for Huntingdon, formerly Huntingdonshire, from 1979 to 2001. Since stepping down as an MP in 2001, Major has focused on writing and his business, sporting and charity work, and has occasionally commented on political developments in the role of an elder statesman.
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Maxim Kontsevich
#1374
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
#1373
Daphne Koller
#1375
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
#1374
Hal Abelson
#1376
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Harold Abelson is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , a founding director of both Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation, creator of the MIT App Inventor platform, and co-author of the widely-used textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, sometimes also referred to as "the wizard book."
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Robert Lucas Jr.
#1377
Overall Influence
1937 - 2023 (86 years)
Robert Emerson Lucas Jr. was an American economist at the University of Chicago. Widely regarded as the central figure in the development of the new classical approach to macroeconomics, he received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1995 "for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of economic policy". He was characterized by N. Gregory Mankiw as "the most influential macroeconomist of the last quarter of the 20th century". In 2020, he ranked as the 10th most cited economist in the...
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Vang Pao
#1378
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Vang Pao was a major general in the Royal Lao Army. He was a leader of the Hmong American community in the United States. He was also known as General Vang Pao to the people in the Hmong community. Early life Vang, an ethnic Hmong, was born on 8 December 1929, in a Hmong village named Nonghet, located in Central Xiangkhuang Province, in the northeastern region of Laos, where his father, Neng Chu Vang, was a county leader.
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Abdolkarim Soroush
#1379
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Abdolkarim Soroush , born Hossein Haj Faraj Dabbagh , is an Iranian Islamic thinker, reformer, Rumi scholar, public intellectual, and a former professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran and Imam Khomeini International University. He is arguably the most influential figure in the religious intellectual movement of Iran. Soroush is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. He was also affiliated with other institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, the Leiden-based International Institute as a visiting professor for the Study of Islam in the Modern World and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.
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Rafael Nadal
#1380
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Rafael Nadal Parera is a Spanish professional tennis player. Nadal has been ranked world No. 1 in singles by the Association of Tennis Professionals for 209 weeks, and has finished as the year-end No. 1 five times. Nadal has won 22 Grand Slam men's singles titles, including a record 14 French Open titles. He has won 92 ATP singles titles, including 36 Masters titles, with 63 of these on clay courts. Nadal is one of only two men to complete the Career Golden Slam in singles. His 81 consecutive wins on clay constitute the longest single-surface win streak in the Open Era.
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Robert Sapolsky
#1381
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Robert Morris Sapolsky is an American neuroendocrinology researcher and author. He is a professor of biology, neurology, neurological sciences, and neurosurgery at Stanford University. In addition, he is a research associate at the National Museums of Kenya.
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Russell L. Ackoff
#1382
Overall Influence
1919 - 2009 (90 years)
Russell Lincoln Ackoff was an American organizational theorist, consultant, and Anheuser-Busch Professor Emeritus of Management Science at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Ackoff was a pioneer in the field of operations research, systems thinking and management science.
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Scooter Libby
#1383
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Irve Lewis "Scooter" Libby is an American lawyer and former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney known for his high-profile indictment and clemency. From 2001 to 2005, Libby held the offices of Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs, Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States, and Assistant to the President during the administration of President George W. Bush.
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Michael Tomasello
#1384
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Michael Tomasello is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University. Earning many prizes and awards from the end of the 1990s onward, he is considered one of today's most authoritative developmental and comparative psychologists. He is "one of the few scientists worldwide who is acknowledged as an expert in multiple disciplines". His "pioneering research on the origins of social cognition has led to revolutionary insights in both developmental psychology and primate cognition."
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Michael Stonebraker
#1385
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Michael Ralph Stonebraker is a computer scientist specializing in database systems. Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to many relational databases. He is also the founder of many database companies, including Ingres Corporation, Illustra, Paradigm4, StreamBase Systems, Tamr, Vertica and VoltDB, and served as chief technical officer of Informix. For his contributions to database research, Stonebraker received the 2014 Turing Award, often described as "the Nobel Prize for computing."
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Jerry Coyne
#1386
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Areas of Specialization: Ecology, Evolution Jerry Coyne is professor emeritus at the University of Chicago for the Department of Ecology and Evolution. He earned a BS in biology from the William & Mary. He was drafted while attending graduate school at Rockefeller University, but returned to his studies upon his return, earning a PhD in biology from Harvard University. He went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Davis. He is an expert in speciation and ecological and evolutionary genetics. He has been a vocal critic of religion, intelligent design, theistic evolution, and creationism, and has authored several books on the topic, including Faith vs.
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Nicholas Kristof
#1387
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Nicholas Donabet Kristof is an American journalist and political commentator. A winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, he is a regular CNN contributor and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. Born in Chicago, Kristof was raised in Yamhill, Oregon, the son of two professors at nearby Portland State University. After graduating from Harvard University, where he wrote for The Harvard Crimson, Kristof intermittently interned at The Oregonian. He joined the staff of The New York Times in 1984.
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Michel Serres
#1388
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Michel Serres was a French philosopher, theorist and writer. His works explore themes of science, time and death, and later incorporated prose. Life and career The son of a bargeman, Serres entered France's naval academy, the École Navale, in 1949 and the École Normale Supérieure in 1952. He aggregated in 1955, having studied philosophy. He spent the next few years as a naval officer before finally receiving his doctorate in 1968 from the University of Paris , and began teaching in 1969 at the University of Paris I.
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William Glasser
#1389
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
William Glasser was an American psychiatrist. He was the developer of W. Edwards Deming's workplace ideas, reality therapy and choice theory. His innovations for individual counseling, work environments and school, highlight personal choice, personal responsibility and personal transformation. Glasser positioned himself in opposition to conventional mainstream psychiatrists, who focus instead on classifying psychiatric syndromes as "illnesses" and prescribe psychotropic medications to treat mental disorders.
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James G. March
#1390
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
James Gardner March was an American political scientist, sociologist, and economist. A professor at Stanford University in the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Stanford Graduate School of Education, he is best known for his research on organizations, his seminal work on A Behavioral Theory of the Firm, and the organizational decision making model known as the Garbage Can Model.
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Arthur Scargill
#1391
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Arthur Scargill is a British trade unionist who was President of the National Union of Mineworkers from 1982 to 2002. He is best known for leading the UK miners' strike , a major event in the history of the British labour movement.
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Amy Goodman
#1392
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Amy Goodman is an American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter, and author. Her investigative journalism career includes coverage of the East Timor independence movement, Morocco's occupation of Western Sahara, and Chevron Corporation's role in Nigeria.
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Bob Clearmountain
#1393
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Bob Clearmountain is an American record producer. Described by Sound on Sound magazine as having "his name on more hit records than anyone else in the history of popular music", he is well known for his work with major acts, including Bruce Springsteen, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Roxy Music, The Pretenders, and Bryan Adams. He has mixed some of the most iconic live shows in music history, including Live Aid, The Concert for New York for 9/11, and most recently, the Foo Fighters Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concerts at Wembley Stadium and The Forum. Records he mixed have won eight Grammys. His most recent nomination was for Best Immersive Audio Album, "The Savior".
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James McClelland
#1394
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
James Lloyd "Jay" McClelland, FBA is the Lucie Stern Professor at Stanford University, where he was formerly the chair of the Psychology Department. He is best known for his work on statistical learning and Parallel Distributed Processing, applying connectionist models to explain cognitive phenomena such as spoken word recognition and visual word recognition. McClelland is to a large extent responsible for the large increase in scientific interest in connectionism in the 1980s.
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Rudolph Rummel
#1395
Overall Influence
1932 - 2014 (82 years)
Rudolph Joseph Rummel was an American political scientist and professor at the Indiana University, Yale University, and University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He spent his career studying data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination. Contrasting genocide, Rummel coined the term democide for murder by government, such as the genocide of indigenous peoples and colonialism, Nazi Germany, the Stalinist purges, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, and other authoritarian, totalitarian, or undemocratic regimes, coming to the conclusion that democratic regimes...
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Jean Bricmont
#1396
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jean Bricmont is a Belgian theoretical physicist and philosopher of science. Professor at the Catholic University of Louvain , he works on renormalization group and nonlinear differential equations. Since 2004, He is a member of the Division of Sciences of the Royal Academy of Belgium.
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Jacob M. Appel
#1397
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Jacob M. Appel is an American author, bioethicist, physician, lawyer and social critic. He is best known for his short stories, his work as a playwright, and his writing in the fields of reproductive ethics, organ donation, neuroethics, and euthanasia. Appel's novel The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up won the Dundee International Book Prize in 2012. He is the director of Ethics Education in Psychiatry and a professor of psychiatry and medical education at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and he practices emergency psychiatry at the adjoining Mount Sinai Health System. Appel is the subject of the...
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Joseph Murray
#1398
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Joseph Edward Murray was an American plastic surgeon who performed the first successful human kidney transplant on identical twins Richard and Ronald Herrick on December 23, 1954. Murray shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1990 with E. Donnall Thomas for "their discoveries concerning organ and cell transplantation in the treatment of human disease."
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Martin Scorsese
#1399
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American filmmaker and actor who holds both American and Italian citizenship. He emerged as one of the major figures of the New Hollywood era. Scorsese has received many accolades, including an Academy Award, four BAFTA Awards, three Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and two Directors Guild of America Awards. He has been honored with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1997, the Film Society of Lincoln Center tribute in 1998, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2007, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2010, and the BAFTA Fellowship in 2012. Five of his fil...
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Christof Koch
#1400
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Christof Koch is a German-American neurophysiologist and computational neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural basis of consciousness. He is the president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. From 1986 until 2013, he was a professor at the California Institute of Technology.
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Samuel C. C. Ting
#1401
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Samuel Chao Chung Ting is an American physicist who, with Burton Richter, received the Nobel Prize in 1976 for discovering the subatomic J/ψ particle. More recently he has been the principal investigator in research conducted with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a device installed on the International Space Station in 2011.
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Michaëlle Jean
#1402
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Michaëlle Jean is a Canadian stateswoman and former journalist who served from 2005 to 2010 as governor general of Canada, the 27th since Canadian Confederation. She is the first Haitian Canadian and black person to hold this office.
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