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
#14101
Maurício Peixoto
#14112
Overall Influence
1921 - 2019 (98 years)
Maurício Matos Peixoto, , was a Brazilian engineer and mathematician. He pioneered the studies on structural stability, and was the author of Peixoto's theorem. Biography Maurício Peixoto, born in Fortaleza in 1921 to José Carlos de Matos Peixoto and Violeta Rodrigues Peixoto, pursued a career in mathematics since his adolescence. To fulfill his goal, Peixoto enrolled in engineering at the School of Engineering of the current Federal University of Rio de Janeiro .
Go to Profile#14102
Pierre Boutang
#14113
Overall Influence
1916 - 1998 (82 years)
Pierre Boutang was a French philosopher, poet and translator. He was also a political journalist, associated with the currents of Maurrasianism and Royalism. Biography Boutang was an alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and "agrégé de philosophie" in 1936, he participated that year in editing Action Française and showed fervent support for the ideas of Charles Maurras. He was a member of Giraud's government in North Africa in 1943, and enlisted in the French colonial army, serving in Tunisia and Morocco. He was discharged without pension and prohibited from teaching. Thereafter he took up...
Go to Profile#14103
Drew Bledsoe
#14114
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Drew McQueen Bledsoe is an American former football quarterback who played in the National Football League for 14 seasons, primarily with the New England Patriots. He played college football at Washington State University, where he won Pac-10 Offensive Player of the Year as a junior, and was selected by the Patriots first overall in the 1993 NFL Draft. Considered the face of the Patriots franchise during his nine seasons with the team, Bledsoe helped improve New England's fortunes from 1993 to 2001. Under Bledsoe, the Patriots ended a seven-year postseason drought, qualified for the playoffs four times, clinched their division twice, and made a Super Bowl appearance in Super Bowl XXXI.
Go to Profile#14104
John Hood
#14115
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Sir John Antony Hood is a New Zealand businessman and administrator. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 5 October 2004 until 30 September 2009. He was the first Vice-Chancellor to be elected from outside Oxford's academic body in 900 years, and the first to have addressed the scholars' congregation via a webcast. In March 2007 New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark awarded him the World Class New Zealand supreme award to honour his contribution to profiling New Zealand and New Zealanders internationally. On 15 November 2007 he announced that he would not seek an extensio...
Go to Profile#14105
Laurie Anderson
#14116
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, musician and filmmaker whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She achieved unexpected commercial success when her song "O Superman" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981.
Go to Profile#14106
Fyodor Bondarchuk
#14117
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Fyodor Sergeyevich Bondarchuk is a Russian film director, actor, TV and film producer, clipmaker, TV host, founder of production company Art Pictures Studio. Specializes in action, war, and science fiction films. Some of his most notable films include The 9th Company , The Inhabited Island , Stalingrad and Attraction .
Go to Profile#14107
Piotr Indyk
#14118
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Piotr Indyk is Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor in the Theory of Computation Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Academic biography Indyk received the Magister degree from the University of Warsaw in 1995 and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 2000 under the supervision of Rajeev Motwani. In 2000, Indyk joined MIT where he currently holds the title of Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Go to Profile#14108
Mary Shaw
#14119
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Mary Shaw is an American software engineer, and the Alan J. Perlis Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, known for her work in the field of software architecture.
Go to Profile#14109
Linnda R. Caporael
#14120
Overall Influence
Linnda Caporael is a professor at the Science and Technology Studies Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Educational background Linnda R. Caporael is a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the department of Technical Studies and Science. She received her PhD in Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and she also studied human ethology at the Institute of Child Development at the University of London. She is a Fulbright-Hayes Scholar and a visiting scientist in the Dept. of Invertebrate Paleontology and in the Dept. of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History.
Go to Profile#14110
David Haig
#14121
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
David Addison Haig is an Australian evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and professor in Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. He is interested in intragenomic conflict, genomic imprinting and parent–offspring conflict, and wrote the book Genomic Imprinting and Kinship. His major contribution to the field of evolutionary theory is the kinship theory of genomic imprinting.
Go to Profile#14111
Martin D. Ginsburg
#14122
Overall Influence
1932 - 2010 (78 years)
Martin David Ginsburg was an American lawyer who specialized in tax law and was the husband of lawyer and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He taught law at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., and was of counsel in the Washington, D.C., office of the American law firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson.
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Richard Neville
#14123
Overall Influence
1941 - 2016 (75 years)
Richard Clive Neville was an Australian writer and social commentator who came to fame as an editor of the counterculture magazine OZ in Australia and the United Kingdom in the 1960s and early 1970s. He was educated as a boarder at Knox Grammar School and enrolled for an arts degree at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Australian political magazine The Monthly described Neville as a "pioneer of the war on deference".
Go to Profile#14113
Boris Kagarlitsky
#14124
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Boris Yulyevich Kagarlitsky is a Russian Marxist theoretician and sociologist who has been a political dissident in the former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. He is an associate of the Transnational Institute. Kagarlisky hosts a YouTube channel Rabkor, associated with his online newspaper of the same name.
Go to Profile#14114
Zarmanochegas
#14125
Overall Influence
Zarmanochegas or Zarmarus was a gymnosophist , a monk of the Sramana tradition who, according to ancient historians such as Strabo and Dio Cassius, met Nicholas of Damascus in Antioch in the first years of Augustus' rule over the Roman Empire, and shortly thereafter proceeded to Athens where he burnt himself to death. He is estimated to have died in 19 BC.
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Bruce Conner
#14126
Overall Influence
1933 - 2008 (75 years)
Bruce Conner was an American artist who worked with assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography. Biography Bruce Conner was born November 18, 1933, in McPherson, Kansas. His well-to-do middle-class family moved to Wichita, when Conner was four. He attended high school in Wichita, Kansas. Conner studied at Wichita University and later at University of Nebraska, where he graduated in 1956 with a bachelor of fine arts degree. During this time as a student he visited New York City. Conner worked in a variety of media from an early age.
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Ailsa McKay
#14127
Overall Influence
1963 - 2014 (51 years)
Ailsa McKay was a Scottish economist, government policy adviser, a leading feminist economist and Professor of Economics at Glasgow Caledonian University. She was noted for her research on gender inequalities and the economics of the welfare state, for her contributions to feminist economics, as a leading proponent of the universal basic income concept and as one of the UK's foremost experts on gender budgeting. She served as Vice Dean of the Glasgow School for Business and Society, and was also well known for her support of Scottish independence and as a key adviser to the Scottish government and First Minister Alex Salmond on economic and welfare state policies.
Go to Profile#14117
Ataç İmamoğlu
#14128
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Ataç İmamoğlu is a Turkish-Swiss physicist working on quantum optics and quantum computation. His academic interests are quantum optics, semiconductor physics, and nonlinear optics. Education İmamoğlu graduated from TED Ankara College in 1981. He received his BSc in electrical engineering at the Middle East Technical University, and his Ph.D. from Stanford for his work on Electromagnetically Induced Transparency and Lasers without Inversion. He did post-doctoral work on atomic and molecular physics at Harvard.
Go to Profile#14118
Jörg Immendorff
#14129
Overall Influence
1945 - 2007 (62 years)
Jörg Immendorff was a German painter, sculptor, stage designer and art professor. He was a member of the art movement Neue Wilde. Early life and education Immendorff was born in Bleckede, Lower Saxony, near Lüneburg on the west bank of the Elbe. When he was 11 years old, his father left the family. This traumatic experience has been used to explain Immendorff's later feelings of inadequacy and emotional remoteness. He attended the boarding School ←Ernst-Kalkuhl Gymnasium as a student. At the age of sixteen he had his first exhibition in a jazz cellar in Bonn.
Go to Profile#14119
Richard Bernstein
#14130
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Richard Bernstein is an American journalist, columnist, and author. He wrote the Letter from America column for the International Herald Tribune. He has been a book critic at The New York Times and a foreign correspondent for both Time magazine and The New York Times in Europe and Asia.
Go to Profile#14120
Ron Herron
#14131
Overall Influence
1930 - 1994 (64 years)
Ronald James Herron was an English architect and teacher. He is perhaps best known for his work with the seminal experimental architecture collective Archigram, which was formed in London in the early 1960s. Herron was the creator of one of the group's best known and celebrated projects, the Walking City.
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Gilles-Gaston Granger
#14132
Overall Influence
1920 - 2016 (96 years)
Gilles-Gaston Granger was a French philosopher. Work His works discuss the philosophy of logic, mathematics, human and social sciences, Aristotle, Jean Cavaillès, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He produced the most authoritative French translation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and published more than 150 scientific articles.
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George H. Wu
#14133
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
George Howping Wu is an American senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Central District of California. Education Born in New York City, Wu is the great-grandson of Wu Tingfang, the first ethnically Chinese barrister in England, and the grandson of Wu Chaoshu. He is the son of Sylvia Wu, founder of the restaurant "Madame Wu's Garden" in Santa Monica. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Pomona College in 1972 and a Juris Doctor from the University of Chicago Law School in 1975.
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Etienne Schneider
#14134
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Etienne Schneider is a Luxembourgish politician and economist who served as First Deputy Prime Minister of Luxembourg from 2013 to 2020. He is a member of the Luxembourg Socialist Workers' Party . Schneider was a municipal councillor in Kayl from 1995 to 2005, and from 1997 to 2004, he was secretary general of the parliamentary group of the LSAP in Parliament. He was elected first alderman of the municipality of Kayl in 2005, a mandate he held until May 2010.
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Jan Strelau
#14135
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Jan Strelau was a Polish psychologist best known for his studies on temperament. He was professor of psychology at Warsaw University from 1968 to 2001 and was since 2001 professor at Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, where he took the positions of Vice-rector for Research and International Affairs , Vice-rector for Research , and the Chairman of the Board of Trustees .
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Evon Z. Vogt
#14136
Overall Influence
1918 - 2004 (86 years)
Evon Zartman Vogt, Jr. was an American cultural anthropologist best known for his work among the Tzotzil Mayas of Chiapas, Mexico. Vogt was the author of numerous articles and 19 books. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , a member of the National Academy of Sciences , a member of the American Philosophical Society , and a recipient of the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest honor awarded to foreigners by the Mexican government.
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Walter Goffart
#14137
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Walter Andre Goffart is a German-born American historian who specializes in Late Antiquity and the European Middle Ages. He taught for many years in the history department and Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Toronto , and is currently a senior research scholar at Yale University. He is the author of monographs on a ninth-century forgery , late Roman taxation , four "barbarian" historians, and historical atlases.
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Frank Land
#14138
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Fred Frank Land is a German-born information systems researcher and was the first United Kingdom Professor of Information Systems. He is currently emeritus professor in the Department of Information Systems at the London School of Economics . He was married to Ailsa Land, a professor of Operations Research.
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Michael Bolton
#14139
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Michael Bolotin , known professionally as Michael Bolton, is an American singer and songwriter. Bolton performed in the hard rock and heavy metal music genres from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, both on his early solo albums and those he recorded as the frontman of the band Blackjack. He became better known for his series of pop rock ballads, recorded after a stylistic change in the late 1980s.
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Stuart Haber
#14140
Overall Influence
Stuart Haber is an American cryptographer and computer scientist, known for his contributions in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies and widely recognized as the co-inventor of the blockchain. His 1991 paper "How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document”, co-authored with W. Scott Stornetta, won the 1992 Discover Award for Computer Software and is considered to be one of the most important papers in the development of cryptocurrencies.
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Philip L. Roe
#14141
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Philip L. Roe is a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is known for his work in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics and Magnetohydrodynamics. Roe made fundamental contributions to the development of high-resolution schemes for hyperbolic conservation laws. He has developed approximate Riemann solver called Roe solver for compressible flows with shocks.
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Edward Falco
#14142
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Edward Falco is an American author, playwright, electronic literature writer, and new media editor. Works and publications Hypertexts and electronic literature An early innovator in the field of digital writing, Falco's literary and experimental hypertexts are taught in universities internationally. His online work includes Self-Portrait as Child w/Father , Circa 1967–1968 , and "Charmin' Cleary" . Falco's work also appears in the online journal Blackbird. Falco published two works with Eastgate,a hypertext poetry collection, Sea Island and hypertext novel, A Dream with Demons , Astrid Enss...
Go to Profile#14132
Jim Kajiya
#14143
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
James Kajiya is a pioneer in the field of computer graphics. He is perhaps best known for the development of the rendering equation. Kajiya received his PhD from the University of Utah in 1979, was a professor at Caltech from 1979 through 1994, and is currently a researcher at Microsoft Research.
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Michael Van Valkenburgh
#14144
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Michael Robert Van Valkenburgh is an American landscape architect and educator. He has worked on a wide variety of projects in the United States, Canada, Korea, and France, including public parks, college campuses, sculpture gardens, city courtyards, corporate landscapes, private gardens, and urban master plans.
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Louis Pojman
#14145
Overall Influence
1935 - 2005 (70 years)
Louis Paul Pojman was an American philosopher and professor, whose name is most recognized as the author of dozens of philosophy texts and anthologies, which continue to be used widely for educational purposes, and more than one-hundred papers, which he read at some sixty universities around the world. Pojman was known for his work in applied ethics and philosophy of religion.
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U. G. Krishnamurti
#14146
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti was a philosopher who questioned the state of spiritual enlightenment. Having pursued a religious path in his youth and eventually rejecting it, U.G. claimed to have experienced a devastating biological transformation on his 49th birthday, an event he refers to as "the calamity". He emphasized that this transformation back to "the natural state" is a rare, acausal, biological occurrence with no religious context. Because of this, he discouraged people from pursuing the "natural state" as a spiritual goal.
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Cole Bennett
#14147
Overall Influence
1996 - Present (30 years)
Cole Michael Bennett is an American music video director and videographer. His multimedia company, Lyrical Lemonade, started in 2013 as an Internet blog while he was in high school. Early life Cole Bennett was born on May 14, 1996, in Plano, Illinois. He went to Plano High School and he dropped out of DePaul University to focus on his career in videography and hip hop music, something he wanted to do since childhood.
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David Eddings
#14148
Overall Influence
1931 - 2009 (78 years)
David Carroll Eddings was an American fantasy writer. With his wife Leigh, he authored several best-selling epic fantasy novel series, including The Belgariad , The Malloreon , The Elenium , The Tamuli , and The Dreamers .
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John Horgan
#14149
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
John Horgan is an American science journalist best known for his 1996 book The End of Science. He has written for many publications, including National Geographic, Scientific American, The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and IEEE Spectrum. His awards include two Science Journalism Awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Association of Science Writers Science-in-Society Award. His articles have been included in the 2005, 2006 and 2007 editions of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Since 2010 he has written the "Cross-check" blog for Sci...
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Louis Siminovitch
#14150
Overall Influence
1920 - 2021 (101 years)
Louis Siminovitch was a Canadian molecular biologist. He was a pioneer in human genetics, researcher into the genetic basis of muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis, and helped establish Ontario programs exploring genetic roots of cancer.
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Paul Horgan
#14151
Overall Influence
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
Paul George Vincent O'Shaughnessy Horgan was an American writer of historical fiction and non-fiction who mainly wrote about the Southwestern United States. He was the recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes for History.
Go to Profile#14141
Giorgio Gaja
#14152
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Giorgio Gaja is an Italian jurist. A scholar in international law, he was elected in 2012 as a judge of the International Court of Justice. Early life and education Giorgio Gaja was born in Lucerne, Switzerland in 1939. In 1960, he graduated from the Sapienza University of Rome with a degree in law. After completing his degree, he pursued a career in academia in cities including Vienna, Oxford and The Hague. In 1968, he was awarded the Libera Docenza in international law. He also worked as a research assistant at the University of Camerino from 1964 to 1969.
Go to Profile#14142
Morton Smith
#14153
Overall Influence
1915 - 1991 (76 years)
Morton Smith was an American professor of ancient history at Columbia University. He is best known for his reported discovery of the Mar Saba letter, a letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria containing excerpts from a Secret Gospel of Mark, during a visit to the monastery at Mar Saba in 1958. This letter fragment has had many names, from The Secret Gospel through The Mar Saba Fragment and the Theodoros.
Go to Profile#14143
Amie Thomasson
#14154
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Amie Lynn Thomasson is an American philosopher, currently Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College. Thomasson specializes in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the philosophy of art. She is the author of Fiction and Metaphysics , Ordinary Objects , Ontology Made Easy , and Norms and Necessity .
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Barbara Reynolds
#14155
Overall Influence
1914 - 2015 (101 years)
Eva Mary Barbara Reynolds was an English scholar of Italian Studies, lexicographer and translator. She wrote and edited several books concerning Dorothy Sayers and was president of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society. She turned 100 in June 2014. Her first marriage was to the philologist and translator Lewis Thorpe.
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C. Scott Jacobs
#14156
Overall Influence
Curtis Scott Jacobs, , is an American argumentation, communication, and rhetorical scholar. He graduated from the University of Illinois with a PhD. He taught for many years at the University of Arizona. He is now professor of Communication at the University of Illinois. He has lectured in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. He has contributed to the field of argumentation theory.
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Sayed Hassan Amin
#14157
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Sayed Hassan Amin is an Iranian lawyer, philosopher, scholar, author and pro-democracy political figure. Early life and education Born in Sabzavar, Iran, Amin attended Tehran University at the age of 17 and obtained a bachelor in Law with distinction. After completing his apprenticeship in the Ministry of Justice he qualified as a judge, working in different judicial capacities in Iran while reading for his LLM at the University of Tehran.
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A. H. Halsey
#14158
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Albert Henry 'Chelly' Halsey was a British sociologist. He was Emeritus Professor of Social and Administrative Studies at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford.
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Thomas Skidmore
#14159
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Thomas Elliott Skidmore was an American historian and scholar who specialized in Brazilian history. Biography Skidmore graduated in political science and philosophy in 1954 from Denison University. He received a Fulbright Fellowship to study philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford where he met his wife Felicity. He received a second B.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1956 and a master's degree in 1959. He obtained his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1960 with a thesis on the German Chancellor Leo von Caprivi.
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Roger Brunet
#14160
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Roger Brunet is a French geographer. Life Born in Toulouse, Brunet attended the University of Toulouse, where he earned his PhD in 1965. He was subsequently professor at the University of Reims from 1966 to 1976, where he founded IATEUR. He was a director of research at CNRS from 1976 to 1981, and from 1981 to 1984 served advisory and research roles in various French government ministries. In 1984, he founded the public interest group RECLUS, which he headed until 1991.
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James Lees-Milne
#14161
Overall Influence
1908 - 1997 (89 years)
James Henry Lees-Milne was an English writer and expert on country houses, who worked for the National Trust from 1936 to 1973. He was an architectural historian, novelist and biographer. His extensive diaries remain in print.
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