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
#13651
Arthur Versluis
#13662
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Arthur Versluis is a professor and Department Chair of Religious Studies in the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Academic career Versluis did his Ph.D research at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His thesis Ex oriente lux: American Transcendentalism and the Orient was published in 1993 as American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions.
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Cathleen Synge Morawetz
#13663
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Cathleen Synge Morawetz was a Canadian mathematician who spent much of her career in the United States. Morawetz's research was mainly in the study of the partial differential equations governing fluid flow, particularly those of mixed type occurring in transonic flow. She was professor emerita at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at the New York University, where she had also served as director from 1984 to 1988. She was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1998.
Go to Profile#13653
David Goldblatt
#13664
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
David Goldblatt HonFRPS was a South African photographer noted for his portrayal of South Africa during the period of apartheid. After apartheid had ended he concentrated more on the country's landscapes. What differentiates Goldblatt's body of work from those of other anti-apartheid artists is that he photographed issues that went beyond the violent events of apartheid and reflected the conditions that led up to them. His forms of protest have a subtlety that traditional documentary photographs may lack: "[M]y dispassion was an attitude in which I tried to avoid easy judgments. . . . This re...
Go to Profile#13654
Gucci Mane
#13665
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Radric Delantic Davis , known professionally as Gucci Mane, is an American rapper and record executive. He is credited as a pioneer of the hip hop subgenre trap music, along with fellow Atlanta-based rappers T.I. and Jeezy, as the style gained mainstream popularity into the 2000s and 2010s. In 2005, Gucci Mane debuted with Trap House, followed by his second and third albums, Hard to Kill in 2006 and Back to the Trap House in 2007.
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Gérard Ben Arous
#13666
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Gérard Ben Arous is a French mathematician, specializing in stochastic analysis and its applications to mathematical physics. He served as the director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University from 2011 to 2016.
Go to Profile#13656
Peter Gollwitzer
#13667
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Peter Max Gollwitzer is a German professor of psychology in the Psychology Department at New York University. His research centers on how goals and plans affect cognition, emotion, and behavior. Gollwitzer has developed several models of action control: the symbolic self-completion theory ; the Rubicon Model of Action Phases ; the Auto-Motive Model of Automatic Goal Striving ; the Mindset Theory of Action Phases ; and the distinction between action control by Goal Intentions vs. Implementation Intentions .
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Connie Schultz
#13668
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Connie Schultz is an American writer, journalist, and educator. Schultz is a columnist for USA Today. She wrote for Cleveland's daily newspaper, The Plain Dealer, from 1993 to 2011, winning the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for "her pungent columns that provided a voice for the underdog and underprivileged". She teaches journalism at Denison University.
Go to Profile#13658
Lara Brown
#13669
Overall Influence
Lara M. Brown is an American political scientist who served as director of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University between 2016 and 2022. Early life and education Brown was born and brought up in California. She obtained a BA, MA and PhD in political sciences from the University of California, Los Angeles. Subsequently she also obtained an MA in American politics and public policy from the University of Arizona.
Go to Profile#13659
David Lee
#13670
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
David Morris Lee is an American physicist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics with Robert C. Richardson and Douglas Osheroff "for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3." Lee is professor emeritus of physics at Cornell University and distinguished professor of physics at Texas A&M University.
Go to Profile#13660
Sheldon Cohen
#13671
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Sheldon Cohen is the Robert E. Doherty University Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the director of the Laboratory for the Study of Stress, Immunity and Disease. He is a member of the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon and adjunct professor of Psychiatry and of Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#13661
Iris Murdoch
#13672
Overall Influence
1919 - 1999 (80 years)
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net , was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Her 1978 novel The Sea, The Sea won the Booker Prize. In 1987, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
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Joan A. Steitz
#13673
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Joan Elaine Argetsinger Steitz is Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is known for her discoveries involving RNA, including ground-breaking insights into how ribosomes interact with messenger RNA by complementary base pairing and that introns are spliced by small nuclear ribonucleic proteins , which occur in eukaryotes. In September 2018, Steitz won the Lasker-Koshland Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science. The Lasker award is often referred to as the 'American Nobel' because 87...
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Charlie Cook
#13674
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Charles Edward Cook Jr. is an American political analyst who specializes in election forecasts and political trends. Cook writes election forecasts and rankings in the publication he founded, The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, and in other media. He is a political analyst for the National Journal and since 1994 with NBC. Cook writes two columns for National Journal, "The Cook Report" for the main publication and "Off to the Races" for the online National Journal Congress Daily. Since the 1984 US presidential election, Cook has provided election night commentary for various television...
Go to Profile#13664
Risa Lavizzo-Mourey
#13675
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Risa J. Lavizzo-Mourey is an American medical doctor and executive who served as president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation from 2003 to 2017. She was the first woman and the first African-American to head the foundation, which has an endowment of about $8 billion and distributes more than $400 million a year. She has been named one of the 100 Most Powerful Women by Forbes several times, and one of The Grio's History Makers in the Making. She was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
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Roderic Ai Camp
#13676
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Roderic Ai Camp is an American academic specialized in Mexican studies. He is a frequent consultant to international media including the BBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, and was once a contributing editor to Microsoft Encarta.
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Allen J. Scott
#13677
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Allen John Scott is a professor of geography and public policy at University of California, Los Angeles. Biography Scott was born in Liverpool, England in 1938 and was raised in Carlisle. Scott graduated from St John's College, Oxford University, in 1961. He holds a Ph.D. degree from Northwestern University . He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, University College London, University of Toronto, University of Paris, University of Hong Kong, and from 1981 at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was a distinguished professor with joint appointments in the Department of Public Policy and the Department of Geography.
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Jean-Pierre Vigier
#13678
Overall Influence
1920 - 2004 (84 years)
Jean-Pierre Vigier was a French theoretical physicist, known for his work on the foundations of physics, in particular on his stochastic interpretation of quantum physics. Education A native of Paris, Vigier earned his PhD in mathematics from University of Geneva in 1946 with a study on Infinite Sequences of Hermitian Operators. In 1948 he was appointed assistant to Louis de Broglie, a position he held until the latter's retirement in 1962. Vigier was professor emeritus in the Department of Gravitational Physics at Pierre et Marie Curie University in Paris. He authored more than 300 scientific papers, and co-authored and edited a number of books and conference proceedings.
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Larry Townsend
#13679
Overall Influence
1930 - 2008 (78 years)
Larry Townsend was the American author of dozens of books including Run, Little Leather Boy and The Leatherman's Handbook , published by pioneer erotic presses such as Greenleaf Classics and the Other Traveler imprint of Olympia Press. Leatherman's Handbook, with illustrations by Sean, was among the first books to popularize BDSM among the general public.
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Mohammed bin Salman
#13680
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud , colloquially known by his initials MBS or MbS, is Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia. He is also the chairman of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs and the chairman of the Council of Political and Security Affairs. He is considered the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, being deemed as such even before his appointment as prime minister in 2022. He was minister of defense from 2015 to 2022. He is the seventh son of King Salman.
Go to Profile#13670
Jack Deere
#13681
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Jack Deere is an American charismatic pastor and theologian. He was an associate professor of Old Testament at Dallas Seminary. In the late 1980s, he abandoned his earlier theological position, announcing that he had experienced the charismatic gifts for himself through the ministry of John Wimber.
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Marc Klasfeld
#13682
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Marc Klasfeld is an American music video director. He has directed over two hundred music videos for artists such as Slipknot, Sum 41, Katy Perry, Jay-Z, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Britney Spears, Kid Rock, Michael Bublé, Nelly, Foo Fighters, Kelly Clarkson, Charli XCX, Little Mix, Nick Jonas, Twenty One Pilots, Avril Lavigne, Aerosmith, Charlie Puth and many others with multiple award wins and nominations.
Go to Profile#13672
Janet Oppenheim
#13683
Overall Influence
1948 - 1994 (46 years)
Janet Oppenheim was an American historian. Oppenheim was born in Manhattan. In 1975, she received her PhD in history from Columbia University. She worked as a professor of history at American University.
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Chris Squire
#13684
Overall Influence
1948 - 2015 (67 years)
Christopher Russell Edward Squire was an English musician, singer and songwriter best known as the bassist and backing vocalist of the progressive rock band Yes. He was the longest-serving original member, having remained in the band until his death and appearing on every studio album released from 1969 to 2014. In 2017, he was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Yes.
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Giulio Angioni
#13685
Overall Influence
1939 - 2017 (78 years)
Giulio Angioni was an Italian writer and anthropologist. Biography Angioni was a leading Italian anthropologist, professor at the University of Cagliari and fellow of St Antony's College of the University of Oxford. He is the author of about twenty books of fiction and a dozen volumes of essays in anthropology.
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Walter Jon Williams
#13686
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Walter Jon Williams is an American writer, primarily of science fiction. Previously he wrote nautical adventure fiction under the name Jon Williams, in particular, Privateers and Gentlemen , a series of historical novels set during the Age of Sail.
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Adrian Bird
#13687
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Sir Adrian Peter Bird, is a British geneticist and Buchanan Professor of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh. Bird has spent much of his academic career in Edinburgh, from receiving his PhD in 1970 to working at the MRC Mammalian Genome Unit and later serving as director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology. His research focuses on understanding DNA methylation and CpG islands, and their role in diseases such as Rett syndrome.
Go to Profile#13677
Webster Tarpley
#13688
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Webster Griffin Tarpley is an American writer, political activist, and conspiracy theorist. A one-time follower of Lyndon LaRouche, Tarpley is known for his role in the 9/11 truth movement, believing 9/11 was a false flag operation.
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Zdeněk Neubauer
#13689
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Zdeněk Neubauer was a Czech philosopher and biologist, remarkable especially for original interpretations in science history and epistemology. Biography Born in Brno to family of the Brno normative legal school representative Zdeněk Neubauer , Neubauer graduated from Charles University in Prague . During his activity in Laboratorio Internazionale di Genetica e Biofisica in Naples he made several discoveries in genetics. In 1982 left the university because of nonconformist attitudes . After that, he was mainly a philosopher , publishing underground. Since 1990, he has been a member of the dep...
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Astrid Heppenstall Heger
#13690
Overall Influence
Astrid Heppenstall Heger is a Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the USC Keck School of Medicine and the founder and Executive Director of the Violence Intervention Program at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center in East Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#13680
Samuel Totten
#13691
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Samuel Totten is an American professor of history noted for his scholarship on genocide. Totten was a distinguished professor at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville where he taught from 1987 to 2012 and served as the chief editor of the journal Genocide Studies and Prevention. He is a Member of the Council of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem.
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Donald M. Baer
#13692
Overall Influence
1931 - 2002 (71 years)
Donald M. Baer was an American psychologist who contributed to the science of applied behavior analysis and pioneered the development of behavior analysis at the University of Kansas and the University of Washington. Baer is best known for his contributions at the University of Kansas. Throughout his career, he published over two hundred articles, books, and chapters on various psychological issues. Some of his most noteworthy contributions include literature on behavior-analytic theory, experimental design, and early childhood interventions. Baer received numerous awards during his lifetime...
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Joanne Chory
#13693
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Joanne Chory is an American plant biologist and geneticist. Chory is a professor and director of the Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory, at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
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Joseph Gutheinz
#13694
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Joseph Richard Gutheinz is an American attorney, college instructor, commissioner, writer, and former Army intelligence officer, Army aviator, and Federal law enforcement officer. He is known as the founder of the "Moon Rock Project" which aims to track down missing Apollo Moon rock samples.
Go to Profile#13684
Marcus Klingberg
#13695
Overall Influence
1918 - 2015 (97 years)
Avraham Marek Klingberg , known as Marcus Klingberg , was a Polish-born, Israeli epidemologist and the highest ranking Soviet spy ever uncovered in Israel. Klingberg's espionage is reported to be regarded by Israeli intelligence services as the most damaging ever to the country's national security interests.
Go to Profile#13685
Jon Bosak
#13696
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Jon Bosak led the creation of the XML specification at the W3C. From 1996–2008, he worked for Sun Microsystems. XML Tim Bray, who was one of the editors of the XML specification, has this to say in his note on Bosak in his annotated version of the specification:
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Sheldon H. Harris
#13697
Overall Influence
1928 - 2002 (74 years)
Sheldon Howard Harris was a historian and Professor Emeritus of History at California State University, Northridge. Biography Harris was born in Brooklyn. A professor of History at California State University, Northridge, in 1984 he became involved in research on Japanese biological warfare experimentation in Manchuria. His research led him to deliver several papers to international conferences on science and ethics and to the publication of a number of scholarly articles that aroused considerable interest in the United States, Europe, Japan and China. He published six books and dozens of articles.
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John King
#13698
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
John King is an American news anchor. He is CNN's chief national correspondent, based in Washington, D.C., and is the weekday anchor of its roundtable political discussion program Inside Politics. He formerly anchored State of the Union and John King, USA.
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Goran Ivanišević
#13699
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Goran Ivanišević is a Croatian former professional tennis player and current coach. He is the only player to win a Wimbledon mens singles title as a wild card. He achieved this in 2001 while ranked world No. 125, after being runner-up at Wimbledon in 1992, 1994, and 1998. Ivanišević's career-high singles ranking was world No. 2, achieved in July 1994. Goran is known for his big serves at high speed during his career and held the record for most ever aces at Wimbledon for almost two decades with a tally of 1,377, before Roger Federer broke it in 2019. Ivanišević coached Marin Čilić from September 2013 to July 2016, leading Čilić to his only major title to date at the 2014 US Open.
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Emily Toth
#13700
Overall Influence
Emily Toth, a Robert Penn Warren Professor of English and Women's Studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, is a scholar, novelist, advice columnist, and feminist activist. She earned her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Toth's scholarly work includes over 300 articles and papers about academic mentoring, Louisiana literature and culture, women's humor, and music; biographies of the American women writers Kate Chopin and Grace Metalious; a cultural history of menstruation; edited collections of Chopin's papers and last short story collection, and a volume of essays about regionalism in women's writing.
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Trevor Francis
#13701
Overall Influence
1954 - 2023 (69 years)
Trevor John Francis was an English footballer who played as a forward for a number of clubs in England, the United States, Italy, Scotland and Australia. In 1979 he became Britain's first £1 million player following his transfer from Birmingham City to Nottingham Forest. He scored the winning goal for Forest in the 1979 European Cup final against Malmö. He won the European Cup again with the club the following year. At international level, he played for England 52 times between 1976 and 1986, scoring 12 goals, and played at the 1982 FIFA World Cup.
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Michael Broyde
#13702
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Michael Jay Broyde is a professor of law and the academic director of the Law and Religion Program at Emory University School of Law. He is also a senior fellow in the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. His primary areas of interest are law and religion, Jewish law and Jewish ethics, and comparative religious law. Broyde has published 200 articles on various aspects of law and religion and Jewish law, and a number of articles in the area of federal courts.
Go to Profile#13692
Tim Riley
#13703
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Tim Riley is a music journalist who reviews pop and classical music for NPR, and has written for The New York Times, truthdig, the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, Slate and Salon. Career His first book was Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary , a critique of the Beatles' music, which The New York Times said brought "new insight to the act we've known for all these years".
Go to Profile#13693
Marcel Detienne
#13704
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
Marcel Detienne was a Belgian historian and specialist in the study of ancient Greece. He was a professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he held the Basil L. Gildersleeve chair in Classics. Along with Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Detienne has sought to apply an anthropological approach, informed by the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, to classical and archaic Greece.
Go to Profile#13694
Russell C. Eberhart
#13705
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Russell C. Eberhart, an American electrical engineer, best known as the co-developer of particle swarm optimization concept . He is professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and adjunct professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis . He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.
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Linda Darling-Hammond
#13706
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Linda Darling-Hammond is an American academic who is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. She was also the President and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute. She is author or editor of more than 25 books and more than 500 articles on education policy and practice. Her work focuses on school restructuring, teacher education, and educational equity. She was education advisor to Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and was reportedly among candidates for United States Secretary of Education in the Obama administration.
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Robert M. Gray
#13707
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Robert M. Gray is an American information theorist, and the Alcatel-Lucent Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He is best known for his contributions to quantization and compression, particularly the development of vector quantization.
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Milford H. Wolpoff
#13708
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Milford Howell Wolpoff is a paleoanthropologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and its museum of Anthropology. He is the leading proponent of the multiregional evolution hypothesis that explains the evolution of Homo sapiens as a consequence of evolutionary processes and gene flow across continents within a single species. Wolpoff authored the widely used textbook Paleoanthropology , and co-authored Race and Human Evolution: A Fatal Attraction, which reviews the scientific evidence and conflicting theories about the interpretation of human evolution, and biologica...
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Hugo Duminil-Copin
#13709
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Hugo Duminil-Copin is a French mathematician specializing in probability theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022. Biography The son of a middle school sports teacher and a former female dancer who became a primary school teacher, Duminil-Copin grew up in the outer suburbs of Paris, where he played a lot of sports as a child, and initially considered attending a sports-oriented high school to pursue his interest in handball. He decided to attend a school focused on mathematics and science, and enrolled at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, then at the École normale supérieure and the University Paris-Sud.
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Janet Fitch
#13710
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Janet Fitch is an American author. She wrote the novel White Oleander, which became a film in 2002. She is a graduate of Reed College. Fitch was born in Los Angeles, a third-generation native, and grew up in a family of voracious readers. As an undergraduate at Reed College, Fitch had decided to become a historian, attracted to its powerful narratives, the scope of events, the colossal personalities, and the potency and breadth of its themes. But when she won a student exchange to Keele University in England, where her passion for Russian history led her, she awoke in the middle of the night ...
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Michael Peskin
#13711
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Michael Edward Peskin is an American theoretical physicist. He is currently a professor in the theory group at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Peskin has been recognized for his work in proposing and analyzing unifying models of elementary particles and forces in theoretical elementary particle physics, and proposing experimental methods for testing such models. Peskin was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000. He was appointed a co-editor of the journal Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science as of 2023.
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