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

#14601

Donald Kingsbury

#14612
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Donald MacDonald Kingsbury is an American–Canadian science fiction author. Kingsbury taught mathematics at McGill University, Montreal, from 1956 until his retirement in 1986. Bibliography Books Courtship Rite. New York : Simon and Schuster, July 1982. . Published in UK as Geta.The Moon Goddess and the Son. New York : Baen Books, December 1986. . Psychohistorical Crisis. New York : Tor Books, December 2001. . The Finger Pointing Solward has been awaited ever since the publication of Courtship Rite. Kingsbury has never finished the story, noting as far back as September 1982 that he was still "polishing" it and as recently as his self-supplied Readercon biography in July 2006.
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#14602

Andrzej Kajetan Wróblewski

Andrzej Kajetan Wróblewski
#14613
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Andrzej Kajetan Wróblewski – Polish experimental physicist, ordinary professor doctor habilitatus , dean of the Physics Department Warsaw University , Rector of the Warsaw University , President of the Academic Council of the Institute for the History of Science, Polish Academy of Sciences.
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#14603

Chandrashekhar Khare

#14614
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Chandrashekhar B. Khare is a professor of mathematics at the University of California Los Angeles. In 2005, he made a major advance in the field of Galois representations and number theory by proving the level 1 Serre conjecture, and later a proof of the full conjecture with Jean-Pierre Wintenberger. He has been on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2015, serving as Jury Chair from 2020.
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#14604

Bernard Lietaer

Bernard Lietaer
#14615
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Bernard Lietaer was a Belgian civil engineer, economist, author, and educator. He studied monetary systems and promoted the idea that communities can benefit from creating their own local or complementary currency, which circulate parallel with national currencies.
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#14605

Chick Corea

#14616
Overall Influence
1941 - 2021 (80 years)
Armando Anthony "Chick" Corea was an American jazz composer, pianist, keyboardist, bandleader, and occasional percussionist. His compositions "Spain", "500 Miles High", "La Fiesta", "Armando's Rhumba", and "Windows" are widely considered jazz standards. As a member of Miles Davis's band in the late 1960s, he participated in the birth of jazz fusion. In the 1970s he formed Return to Forever. Along with McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett, Corea is considered to have been one of the foremost jazz pianists of the post-John Coltrane era.
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#14606

Fernando Collor de Mello

#14617
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Fernando Affonso Collor de Mello is a Brazilian politician who served as the 32nd president of Brazil from 1990 to 1992, when he resigned in a failed attempt to stop his impeachment trial by the Brazilian Senate. Collor was the first President democratically elected after the end of the Brazilian military dictatorship. He became the youngest president in Brazilian history, taking office at the age of 40. After he resigned from the presidency, the impeachment trial on charges of corruption continued. Collor was found guilty by the Senate and disqualified from holding elected office for eight years .
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#14607

Steven Weber

#14618
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Steven Weber is a professor at the School of Information and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. After studying history and international development at Washington University in St. Louis, he received an M.D. and a Ph.D in political science from Stanford University.
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#14608

Christophe Rousset

Christophe Rousset
#14619
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Christophe Rousset is a French harpsichordist and conductor, who specializes in the performance of Baroque music on period instruments. He is also a musicologist, particularly of opera and European music of the 17th and 18th centuries and is the founder of the French music ensemble Les Talens Lyriques.
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#14609

Tansu Çiller

#14620
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Tansu Çiller is a Turkish academic, economist, and politician who served as the 22nd Prime Minister of Turkey from 1993 to 1996. She was Turkey's first and only female prime minister. As the leader of the True Path Party, she went on to concurrently serve as Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey and as Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1996 and 1997.
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#14610

Luis Leal

#14621
Overall Influence
1907 - 2010 (103 years)
Luis Leal was a Mexican-American writer and literary critic. Biography Born into a family that had participated in the Mexican Revolution, Leal lived in the United States beginning in 1927, studying at Northwestern University. There, in 1936, he met his future wife Gladys Clemens, with whom he had two sons, Antonio and Luis Alfonso. In 1939 he was naturalized as an American citizen. After serving in the Philippines during the Second World War, he resumed his literary studies at the University of Chicago, where in 1950 he acquired a doctorate in Spanish and Italian literature.
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#14611

Wen-mei Hwu

#14622
Overall Influence
Wen-mei Hwu is the Walter J. Sanders III-AMD Endowed Chair professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research is on compiler design, computer architecture, computer microarchitecture, and parallel processing. He is a principal investigator for the petascale Blue Waters supercomputer, is co-director of the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center , and is principal investigator for the first NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence at UIUC. At the Illinois Coordinated Science Lab, Hwu leads the IMPA...
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#14612

William Ascher

#14623
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
William Ascher is the Donald C. McKenna Professor of Government and Economics at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, where he was academic vice president and dean of the faculty . Previously, as professor of public policy and political science, Ascher directed Duke University's Center for International Development Research . He studies strategic planning, policymaking in developing countries, natural resource and environmental policy, Latin American and Asian political economy, political psychology, and forecasting methods.
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#14613

Bob Colwell

Bob Colwell
#14624
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Robert P. "Bob" Colwell is an electrical engineer who worked at Intel and later served as Director of the Microsystems Technology Office at DARPA. He was the chief IA-32 architect on the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, and Pentium 4 microprocessors. Bob retired from Intel in 2000. He was an Intel Fellow from 1995 to 2000.
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#14614

Piet Hut

Piet Hut
#14625
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Piet Hut is a Dutch-American astrophysicist, who divides his time between research in computer simulations of dense stellar systems and broadly interdisciplinary collaborations, ranging from other fields in natural science to computer science, cognitive psychology and philosophy.
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#14615

Sidney W. Bijou

#14626
Overall Influence
1908 - 2009 (101 years)
Sidney William Bijou was an American developmental psychologist who developed an approach of treating childhood disorders using behavioral therapy, in which positive actions were rewarded and negative behaviors were largely ignored, rather than punished.
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#14616

Randall G. Holcombe

#14627
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Randall Gregory Holcombe is an American economist, and the DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics at Florida State University. He is a Senior Fellow at The Independent Institute, a Senior Fellow and member of the Research Advisory Council at The James Madison Institute, and past president of the Public Choice Society. From 2000 to 2006 he served on Governor Jeb Bush's Council of Economic Advisors.
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#14617

James Luther Adams

#14628
Overall Influence
1901 - 1994 (93 years)
James Luther Adams , an American professor at Harvard Divinity School, Andover Newton Theological School, and Meadville Lombard Theological School, and a Unitarian parish minister, was the most influential theologian among American Unitarian Universalists in the 20th century.
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#14618

Andrew Benjamin

#14629
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Andrew Benjamin is an Australian philosopher. He holds a post as distinguished professor at the University of Technology, Sydney. Benjamin first came to critical attention with his writings in continental philosophy, writing articles and editing books on the thinking of Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Julia Kristeva and Jean-François Lyotard. Benjamin has become involved in the field of architecture, to the extent that he has also taught in various schools of architecture in UK, US and Australia.
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#14619

Cynthia Ann Humes

#14630
Overall Influence
Cynthia Ann Humes is a professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College, in Claremont, California. The college lists her research interests as: History of Hinduism in America, Modern Hindu Goddess Worship, and Gender and Religion. She is also an author, the college's Chief Technology Officer and a Commissioner on the Claremont City Planning Commission.
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#14620

Tomasz Mrowka

Tomasz Mrowka
#14631
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Tomasz Mrowka is an American mathematician specializing in differential geometry and gauge theory. He is the Singer Professor of Mathematics and former head of the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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#14621

Richard Kieckhefer

#14632
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Richard Kieckhefer is an American medievalist, religious historian, scholar of church architecture, and author. He is Professor of History and John Evans Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University.
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#14622

Sammy Hagar

Sammy Hagar
#14633
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Sam Roy Hagar , also known as the Red Rocker, is an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist. He rose to prominence in the early 1970s with the hard rock band Montrose before launching a successful solo career, scoring a hit in 1984 with "I Can't Drive 55". He enjoyed further commercial success when he replaced David Lee Roth as the lead vocalist of Van Halen in 1985, but left in 1996. He returned to the band from 2003 to 2005. In 2007, Hagar was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Van Halen. His musical style primarily consists of hard rock and heavy metal.
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#14623

Lori White

#14634
Overall Influence
Lori White is an American academic and administrator. White currently serves as the President of DePauw University, a liberal arts college in Greencastle, Indiana. She was previously the vice chancellor of student affairs at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the first woman and first person of color to serve as president of the DePauw University, and the only person of color to serve as president of an Indiana university.
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#14624

Dimitris Anastassiou

#14635
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Dimitris Anastassiou is an electrical engineer and Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Columbia University School of Engineering. Anastassiou's earlier work focuses primarily on signal and information processing and reverse engineering. His more recent work involves interdisciplinary research, specifically in systems biology, with investigators at Columbia University Medical Center. Anastassiou is Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to video technology, developing high-performance digital image and video coding techniques . He is also a Fellow of the National Academy ...
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#14625

Maricel Soriano

#14636
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Maricel Soriano is a Filipino actress and television personality. Referred to as the "Diamond Star", she is particularly known for her intense style of acting and versatility across film and television in the Philippines. Soriano achieved greater success in her dramatic and comedic performances and became a leading box-office star in the late 80s to mid 90s. She has garnered numerous accolades throughout her career spanning over five decades, including three Asian Television Awards, five FAMAS Awards, three Luna Awards, thirteen Box Office Entertainment Awards and ten Star Awards for Televisi...
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#14626

B. J. Fogg

B. J. Fogg
#14637
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Brian Jeffrey Fogg is an American social scientist and author who is a research associate and adjunct professor at Stanford University. He is the founder and director of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab, formerly known as the Persuasive Technology Lab.
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#14627

Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout
#14638
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Elizabeth Strout is an American novelist and author. She is widely known for her works in literary fiction and her descriptive characterization. She was born and raised in Portland, Maine, and her experiences in her youth served as inspiration for her novels–the fictional "Shirley Falls, Maine" is the setting of four of her nine novels.
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#14628

Gary L. Wells

Gary L. Wells
#14639
Overall Influence
Gary L. Wells is an American psychologist and an internationally recognized pioneer and scholar in eyewitness memory research. Wells is a professor at Iowa State University with a research interest in the integration of both cognitive psychology and social psychology and its interface with law. He has extensive research on lineup procedures and the reliability and accuracy of eyewitness identification, and has been widely acknowledged in both the field of psychology and the criminal justice system. Wells has received many awards and honorary degrees and been widely recognized for his work an...
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#14629

John G. Gunderson

#14640
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
John Gunder Gunderson was a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University and a director at the Borderline center at McLean Hospital. Education, residencies and fellowships Born in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, Gunderson graduated from Johns Hopkins College in 1963, received his MBS from Dartmouth Medical School in 1965 and his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1967. Between 1967 and 1971, he was an Intern in Medicine at Hennepin County General Hospital, Resident in Psychiatry at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, and Chief Resident in Psychiatry at Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Between 1971 ...
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#14630

Eric Heinze

#14641
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Eric Heinze is Professor of Law and Humanities at the School of Law Queen Mary, University of London. He has made contributions in the areas of legal philosophy, justice theory, jurisprudence, and human rights. He has also contributed to the law and literature movement.
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#14631

J. David Singer

#14642
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
J. David Singer was an American professor of political science at the University of Michigan. Singer was a pioneer in the application of quantitative methods to puzzles in the field of international relations. His major contribution was the Correlates of War project, which he began in 1964 at the University of Michigan. It is a major database of statistics relating to war and its causes.
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#14632

Keith Emerson

#14643
Overall Influence
1944 - 2016 (72 years)
Keith Noel Emerson was an English keyboardist, songwriter, composer and record producer. He played keyboards in a number of bands before finding his first commercial success with the Nice in the late 1960s. He became internationally famous for his work with the Nice, which included writing rock arrangements of classical music. After leaving the Nice in 1970, he was a founding member of Emerson, Lake & Palmer , one of the early progressive rock supergroups.
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#14633

Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte

Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte
#14644
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte is a Spanish biochemist and developmental biologist. He is a professor in the Gene Expression Laboratories at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California since 1993.
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#14634

Geezer Butler

Geezer Butler
#14645
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Terence Michael Joseph "Geezer" Butler is an English retired musician and songwriter. He is best known as the bassist and primary lyricist of the heavy metal band Black Sabbath. He has also recorded and performed with Heaven & Hell, GZR, Ozzy Osbourne, and Deadland Ritual.
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#14635

Patricia Flatley Brennan

Patricia Flatley Brennan
#14646
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Patricia Flatley Brennan is the director of the National Library of Medicine. Prior to that, she was the Lillian L. Moehlman Bascom Professor, School of Nursing and College of Engineering, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Brennan received a Master of Science in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She served as chair of University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Engineering's Department of Industrial Engineering from 2007 to 2010.
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#14636

Bernard Gert

Bernard Gert
#14647
Overall Influence
1934 - 2011 (77 years)
Bernard Gert was a moral philosopher known primarily for his work in normative ethics, as well as in medical ethics, especially pertaining to psychology. His work has been called "among the clearest and most comprehensive on the contemporary scene", "far more detailed and more concretely worked out" and "systematic" than competing comprehensive ethical theories. Because it avoids pitfalls associated with other dominant ethical theoretical approaches , Gert's moral theory "provides what many people are looking for".
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#14637

Gavin Kitching

#14648
Overall Influence
Gavin Kitching is a British author and professor of social sciences and international relations at the University of New South Wales, where he has taught since 1991. In 2007 Kitching became a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
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#14638

Karol Sikora

#14649
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Karol Sikora is a British physician specialising in oncology, who has been described as a leading world authority on cancer. He was a founder and medical director of Rutherford Health, a company that provided proton therapy services, and is Director of Medical Oncology at the Bahamas Cancer Centre.
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#14639

Norma Merrick Sklarek

Norma Merrick Sklarek
#14650
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Norma Merrick Sklarek was an American architect. Sklarek was the first African American woman to become a licensed architect in the states of New York and California . Her notable works include the United States Embassy in Tokyo, Japan and the Terminal One station at the Los Angeles International Airport .
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#14640

Heinz-Hermann Koelle

#14651
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Heinz-Hermann Koelle was a German aeronautical engineer who made the preliminary designs on the rocket that would emerge as the Saturn I. Closely associated with Wernher von Braun's team at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency , he was a member of the launch crew on Explorer 1 and later directed the Marshall Space Flight Center's involvement in Project Apollo. In 1965, he accepted the Chair of Space Technology at the Technical University of Berlin.
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#14641

Heinrich Leutwyler

#14652
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Heinrich Leutwyler is a Swiss theoretical physicist, with interests in elementary particle physics, the theory of strong interactions, and quantum field theory. Early life and education Leutwyler went to the Gymnasium in Bern and studied physics, mathematics, and astronomy at the University of Bern. After the diploma in 1960 he went to the US, including Princeton. In 1962 he received his PhD under the supervision of John R. Klauder , for his thesis entitled "Generally covariant Dirac equation and associated Boson Fields."
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#14642

Cal Ripken Jr.

#14653
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Calvin Edwin Ripken Jr. , nicknamed "the Iron Man", is an American former baseball shortstop and third baseman who played his entire 21-season career in Major League Baseball for the Baltimore Orioles . One of his position's most productive offensive players, Ripken compiled 3,184 hits, 431 home runs, and 1,695 runs batted in during his career, and he won two Gold Glove Awards for his defense. He was a 19-time All-Star and was twice named American League Most Valuable Player . Ripken holds the record for consecutive games played , having surpassed Lou Gehrig's streak of 2,130 that had stood for 56 years and that many deemed unbreakable.
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#14643

Terry M. Moe

#14654
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Terry M. Moe is a professor of political science at Stanford University, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and a member of the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education. Moe is a political scientist, an education scholar, and a bestselling author. He has a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota. At Stanford, he holds an endowed professorship of political science called the William Bennett Munro professorship.
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#14644

Mark Spitz

Mark Spitz
#14655
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Mark Andrew Spitz is an American former competitive swimmer and nine-time Olympic champion. He was the most successful competitor at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, winning seven gold medals, each in world-record time. This achievement set a record that lasted for 36 years, until it was surpassed by fellow American Michael Phelps, who won eight golds at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.
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#14645

Ion Iliescu

#14656
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Ion Iliescu is a Romanian politician and engineer who served as President of Romania from 1989 until 1996 and from 2000 until 2004. Between 1996 and 2000 and also from 2004 to 2008, the year in which he retired, Iliescu was a senator for the Social Democratic Party , of which he is the founder and honorary president to this day.
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#14646

Omori Sogen

Omori Sogen
#14657
Overall Influence
1904 - 1994 (90 years)
Ōmori Sōgen was a Japanese Rinzai Rōshi, a successor in the Tenryū-ji line of Rinzai Zen, and former president of Hanazono University, the Rinzai university in Kyoto, Japan. He became a priest in 1945.
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#14647

Tsutomu Ōhashi

#14658
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Tsutomu Ōhashi is a Japanese agricultural scientist, composer, and record producer. He is also known by his pseudonym, Shoji Yamashiro. Early life Born in Tochigi Prefecture, he attended Tohoku University and graduated from the Faculty of Agriculture. He received a Doctorate of Agriculture.
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#14648

Keith Glover

#14659
Overall Influence
Keith Glover FRS, FREng, FIEEE is a British electrical engineer. He is an emeritus professor of control engineering at the University of Cambridge. He is notable for his contributions to robust controller design and model order reduction.
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#14649

Diomidis Spinellis

Diomidis Spinellis
#14660
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Diomidis D. Spinellis is a Greek computer science academic and author of the books Code Reading, Code Quality, Beautiful Architecture and Effective Debugging. Education Spinellis holds a Master of Engineering degree in Software Engineering and a Ph.D. in Computer Science both from Imperial College London. His PhD was supervised by Susan Eisenbach and Sophia Drossopoulou.
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#14650

Loïc Merel

Loïc Merel
#14661
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Loïc Merel is a French mathematician. His research interests include modular forms and number theory. Career Born in Carhaix-Plouguer, Brittany, Merel became a student at the École Normale Supérieure. He finished his doctorate at Pierre and Marie Curie University under supervision of Joseph Oesterlé in 1993. His thesis on modular symbols took inspiration from the work of Yuri Manin and Barry Mazur from the 1970s. In 1996, Merel proved the torsion conjecture for elliptic curves over any number field . In recognition of his achievement, in 1998 he was an Invited Speaker of the International Con...
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