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
#14951
James H. Fowler
#14962
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
James H. Fowler is an American social scientist specializing in social networks, cooperation, political participation, and genopolitics . He is currently Professor of Medical Genetics in the School of Medicine and Professor of Political Science in the Division of Social Science at the University of California, San Diego. He was named a 2010 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Go to Profile#14952
Scott Adams
#14963
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Scott Adams is an American entrepreneur, computer programmer, and video game designer. He co-founded, with then-wife Alexis, Adventure International in 1979. The company developed and published video games for home computers. The cornerstone products of Adventure International in its early years were the Adventure series of text adventures written by Adams.
Go to Profile#14953
Gastón Guzmán
#14964
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Gastón Guzmán Huerta , a Mexican mycologist and anthropologist, was an authority on the genus Psilocybe. Career He was born in Xalapa, Veracruz, in 1932. His interest in mycology began in 1955 when as a graduate student he decided to update his school's poorly kept collection of fungi. During his early field work he found a large assortment of species about which little was known at the time. This inspired him to choose fungi as the topic of his professional thesis.
Go to Profile#14954
Gene Youngblood
#14965
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
Gene Youngblood was an American theorist of media arts and politics, and a respected scholar in the history and theory of alternative cinemas. His best-known book, Expanded Cinema, was the first to consider video as an art form and has been credited with helping to legitimate the fields of computer art and media arts. He is also known for his pioneering work in the media democracy movement, a subject on which he taught, wrote, and lectured, beginning in 1967.
Go to Profile#14955
Robert Bauval
#14966
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Robert Bauval is a Belgian author and lecturer, perhaps best known for the fringe Orion Correlation Theory regarding the Giza pyramid complex. Early life Bauval was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to parents of Belgian and Maltese origins. He attended the British Boys' School in Alexandria and the Franciscan College in Buckinghamshire, England. He left Egypt in 1967 just before the Six-Day War, during the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser. He has spent most of his engineering career living and working in the Middle East and Africa as a construction engineer.
Go to Profile#14956
Spain Rodriguez
#14967
Overall Influence
1940 - 2012 (72 years)
Manuel Rodriguez , better known as Spain or Spain Rodriguez, was an American underground cartoonist who created the character Trashman. His experiences on the road with the motorcycle club, the Road Vultures M.C., provided inspiration for his work, as did his left-wing politics. Strongly influenced by 1950s EC Comics illustrator Wally Wood, Spain pushed Wood's sharp, crisp black shadows and hard-edged black outlines into a more simplified, stylized direction. His work also extended the eroticism of Wood's female characters.
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Guy Lafleur
#14968
Overall Influence
1951 - 2022 (71 years)
Guy Damien Lafleur , nicknamed "the Flower" and "Le Démon Blond", was a Canadian professional ice hockey player. He was the first player in National Hockey League history to score 50 goals in six consecutive seasons as well as 50 goals and 100 points in six consecutive seasons. Between 1971 and 1991, Lafleur played right wing for the Montreal Canadiens, New York Rangers, and Quebec Nordiques in an NHL career spanning 17 seasons, and five Stanley Cup championships in 1973, 1976, 1977, 1978, and 1979 . Lafleur was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1988, named one of the 100 Greatest NH...
Go to Profile#14958
Ran Raz
#14969
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Ran Raz is a computer scientist who works in the area of computational complexity theory. He was a professor in the faculty of mathematics and computer science at the Weizmann Institute. He is now a professor of computer science at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#14959
David B. Wexler
#14970
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
David B. Wexler is a Professor of Law at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, Puerto Rico, a Distinguished Research Professor of Law Emeritus at the James E. Rogers College of Law, Tucson, Arizona, and an Honorary President of the International Society for Therapeutic Jurisprudence.
Go to Profile#14960
Ellen Bialystok
#14971
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ellen Bialystok, OC, FRSC is a Canadian psychologist and professor. She carries the rank of Distinguished Research Professor at York University, in Toronto, where she is director of the Lifespan Cognition and Development Lab, and is also an associate scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care.
Go to Profile#14961
Amin Shokrollahi
#14972
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Amin Shokrollahi is a German-Iranian mathematician who has worked on a variety of topics including coding theory and algebraic complexity theory. He is best known for his work on iterative decoding of graph based codess for which he received the IEEE Information Theory Paper Award of 2002 . He is one of the inventors of a modern class of practical erasure codes known as tornado codes, and the principal developer of raptor codes, which belong to a class of rateless erasure codes known as Fountain codes. In connection with the work on these codes, he received the IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award in 20...
Go to Profile#14962
Jacek Karpiński
#14973
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Jacek Karpiński was a Polish pioneer in computer engineering and computer science. During World War II, he was a soldier in the Batalion Zośka of the Polish Home Army, and was awarded multiple times with a Cross of Valour. He took part in Operation Kutschera and the Warsaw Uprising, where he was heavily wounded.
Go to Profile#14963
Mikhail Shultz
#14974
Overall Influence
1919 - 2006 (87 years)
Mikhail Mikhaylovich Shultz , was a Soviet/Russian physical chemist, and an artist. In Soviet Union, Russia, and outside Shultz is primarily known for his research in the chemical thermodynamics of heterogeneous chemical compounds, electrochemistry of glasses, membrane electrochemistry; for works in the field of ion exchange and phase equilibria of multicomponent compounds, and theory of glass electrode; Shultz also worked on thermal protection system for the Soviet Buran spacecraft and credited with research in optical fibers in 80s.
Go to Profile#14964
Yoseph Imry
#14975
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Yoseph Imry was an Israeli physicist. He was best known for taking part in the foundation of mesoscopic physics, a relatively new branch of condensed matter physics. It is concerned with how the behavior of systems whose size is in between micro- and macroscopic, crosses over between these two regimes. These systems can be handled and addressed by more or less usual macroscopic methods, but their behavior may still show quantum effects.
Go to Profile#14965
Chandra Wilson
#14976
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Chandra Danette Wilson is an American actress and director. She is best known for her role as Dr. Miranda Bailey in the ABC television drama Grey's Anatomy since 2005, for which she has been nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series four times. She also played the character of Bailey on Private Practice and Station 19. She made her New York stage debut in 1991 and began to land guest spots on a variety of prime-time television shows. She made her first film appearance in the 1993 film Philadelphia.
Go to Profile#14966
William Langston
#14977
Overall Influence
J. William Langston is the founder and chief scientific officer, movement disorder specialist, and chief executive officer of the Parkinson's Institute and Clinical Center in Sunnyvale, California, the founding member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Michael J. Fox Foundation and the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Parkinson's Disease. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Medicine. Langston was formerly a faculty member at Stanford University and Chairman of Neurology at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, California. Langston has authored or co-au...
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Yosef Ben-Jochannan
#14978
Overall Influence
1918 - 2015 (97 years)
Yosef Alfredo Antonio Ben-Jochannan , referred to as "Dr. Ben", was an American writer and historian. He was considered to be one of the more prominent Afrocentric scholars by some Black Nationalists, while most mainstream scholars, such as Mary Lefkowitz, dismissed him because of the basic historical inaccuracies in his work, as well as disputes about the authenticity of his educational degrees and academic credentials.
Go to Profile#14968
Gail Carpenter
#14979
Overall Influence
Gail Alexandra Carpenter is an American cognitive scientist, neuroscientist and mathematician. She is now a "Professor Emerita of Mathematics and Statistics, Boston University." She had also been a Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University, and the director of the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems Technology Lab at Boston University.
Go to Profile#14969
Lisa Nakamura
#14980
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Lisa Nakamura is an American professor of media and cinema studies, Asian American studies, and gender and women’s studies. She teaches at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is also the Coordinator of Digital Studies and the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Cultures.
Go to Profile#14970
Matthew Flatt
#14981
Overall Influence
Matthew Flatt is an American computer scientist and professor at the University of Utah School of Computing in Salt Lake City. He is also a member of the core development team for the Racket programming language.
Go to Profile#14971
Kent Bach
#14982
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Kent Bach is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. His primary areas of research include the philosophy of language, linguistics and epistemology. He is the author of three books: Exit-existentialism: A philosophy of self-awareness, Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, and Thought and Reference published by Wadsworth, the MIT Press, and Oxford University Press, respectively.
Go to Profile#14972
Billy Preston
#14983
Overall Influence
1946 - 2006 (60 years)
William Everett Preston was an American keyboardist, singer and songwriter whose work encompassed R&B, rock, soul, funk, and gospel. Preston was a top session keyboardist in the 1960s, during which he backed artists such as Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, the Everly Brothers, Reverend James Cleveland, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He gained attention as a solo artist with hit singles such as "That's the Way God Planned It", the Grammy-winning "Outa-Space", "Will It Go Round in Circles", "Space Race", "Nothing from Nothing", and "With You I'm Born Again". Additionally, Preston co...
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Hossein Dehghan
#14984
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Hossein Dehghani Poudeh , commonly known as Hossein Dehghan, is an Iranian military officer and former IRGC Air Force officer with the rank of brigadier general. He is currently head of the Mostazafan Foundation since 2023.
Go to Profile#14974
Lelia Green
#14985
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Lelia Green is a professor at the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University, Perth. Green is the author of Technoculture: From Alphabet to Cybersex and the editor of Framing Technology: Society, Choice and Change, and also on the editorial board of the Australia Journal of Communication and Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy.
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Freda Nkirote
#14986
Overall Influence
Freda Nkirote M’Mbogori is a Kenyan archaeologist, who is Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and President of the Pan-African Archaeological Association. Biography Nkirote studied for her BA at the University of Nairobi, for her MA at the University of Bergen and for her PhD at the University of Paris. She also holds a PG Diploma in Museum Studies from University College London, and a Field Research qualification from the University of Harvard. She is project lead, alongside Paul Lane, for the 'Well Being' project, funded by the British Academy, which is an academic research ...
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A. J. Baker
#14987
Overall Influence
1922 - 2017 (95 years)
Allan James "Jim" Baker , usually cited as A. J. Baker, was an Australian philosopher who was best known for having systematised the realist philosophy of John Anderson. He studied under Anderson at Sydney University and had taught philosophy in Scotland, New Zealand, the United States, and Australia. He was a prominent member of the Sydney Libertarians and the Sydney Push. He instigated, and was a prolific contributor to, several journals, compilations and newsletters that addressed issues, philosophical and otherwise, associated with Sydney Libertarianism. Among these were Libertarian , Broa...
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Mário Soares
#14988
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Mário Alberto Nobre Lopes Soares was a Portuguese politician, who served as prime minister of Portugal from 1976 to 1978 and from 1983 to 1985, and subsequently as the 17th president of Portugal from 1986 to 1996. He was the first secretary-general of the Socialist Party, from its foundation in 1973 to 1986. A major political figure in Portugal, he is considered the father of Portuguese democracy.
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Judith S. Beck
#14989
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Judith S. Beck is an American psychologist who is best known for her work in cognitive therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. Her father is Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, with whom she has worked on many occasions. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982.
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Robert Lusch
#14990
Overall Influence
1949 - 2017 (68 years)
Dr. Robert Frank Lusch was an American business professor and Professor of Marketing at the University of Arizona business school. Early life and education Lusch was born in Grosse Point, Michigan, in 1949. As an adolescent Lusch moved with his mother, father, and two sisters to Tucson, Arizona. Lusch often claimed he "grew up in Arizona"; he graduated from Tucson High School and attended the University of Arizona where he received a bachelor's degree and an MBA. In 1975 he received his Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Grigory E. Volovik
#14991
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Grigory Efimovich Volovik is a Russian theoretical physicist, who specializes in condensed matter physics. He is known for the Volovik effect. Education and career After graduating in 1970 from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Volovik became a graduate student at Moscow's Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, where his received his Russian Candidate of Science degree in 1973. His thesis was on Dynamics of a particle strongly interacting with a Bose System. He has held since 1973 an appointment as a staff member of the Landau Institute and since 1993 a simultaneous appointment as a professor at the Low Temperature Laboratory at the Helsinki University of Technology .
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Edmund Clowney
#14992
Overall Influence
1917 - 2005 (88 years)
Edmund Prosper Clowney was a theologian, educator, and pastor. Early life and education Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he earned a Bachelor of Arts from Wheaton College in 1939, a Bachelor of Theology from Westminster Theological Seminary in 1942, a Master of Sacred Theology from Yale Divinity School in 1944, and a Doctor of Divinity from Wheaton College in 1966.
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Watt W. Webb
#14993
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Watt Wetmore Webb was an American biophysicist, known for his co-invention of multiphoton microscopy in 1990. Early life and education Watt Wetmore Webb was born on August 27, 1927, in Kansas City, Missouri. Webb hailed from a family of bankers. In 1891, his grandfather, Watt Webb, had founded the Missouri Savings Bank, an organization that would be led by Webb's uncle Wilson S. Webb, and eventually his father Watt Webb Jr. Due to a long illness, Watt W. Webb did not start formal schooling until the age of 10. As a young man, Webb worked at the family banking business; when Webb joined MIT ...
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Richard Holmes
#14994
Overall Influence
1946 - 2011 (65 years)
Edward Richard Holmes, CBE, TD, JP, VR , known as Richard Holmes, was a British military historian. He was co-director of Cranfield University's Security and Resilience Group from 1989 to 2009 and became Professor of Military and Security Studies at Cranfield in 1995.
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Darren Aronofsky
#14995
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Darren Aronofsky is an American filmmaker. His films are noted for their surreal, melodramatic, and often disturbing elements, frequently in the form of psychological fiction. Aronofsky studied film and social anthropology at Harvard University before studying directing at the AFI Conservatory. He won several film awards after completing his senior thesis film, Supermarket Sweep, which became a National Student Academy Award finalist. In 1997, he founded the film and TV production company Protozoa Pictures. His feature film debut, the surrealist psychological thriller Pi , was produced for $6...
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John A. Hawkins
#14996
Overall Influence
John A. Hawkins is Professor of English and Applied Linguistics at the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. As of 2007 he is also a professor in the Department of Linguistics at UC Davis.
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John Perdew
#14997
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
John P. Perdew is a theoretical condensed matter physicist known for his contributions to the fields of solid-state physics and quantum chemistry. His work on density functional theory has led to him being one of the world's most cited physicists. Perdew currently teaches and conducts research at Temple University.
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Karl Gordon Henize
#14998
Overall Influence
1926 - 1993 (67 years)
Karl Gordon Henize was an American astronomer, space scientist, NASA astronaut, and professor at Northwestern University. He was stationed at several observatories around the world, including McCormick Observatory, Lamont–Hussey Observatory , Mount Wilson Observatory, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Mount Stromlo Observatory . He was a member of the astronaut support crew for Apollo 15 and Skylab 2, 3, and 4. As a mission specialist on the Spacelab-2 mission , he flew on Space Shuttle Challenger in July/August 1985. He was awarded the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in...
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Underwood Dudley
#14999
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Underwood Dudley is an American mathematician and writer. His popular works include several books describing crank mathematics by pseudomathematicians who incorrectly believe they have squared the circle or done other impossible things.
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Bob Dole
#15000
Overall Influence
1923 - 2021 (98 years)
Robert Joseph Dole was an American politician and attorney who represented Kansas in the United States Senate from 1969 to 1996. He was the Republican Leader of the Senate during the final 11 years of his tenure, including three non-consecutive years as Senate Majority Leader. Prior to his 27 years in the Senate, he served in the United States House of Representatives from 1961 to 1969. Dole was also the Republican presidential nominee in the 1996 election and the vice presidential nominee in the 1976 election.
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Albrecht Dold
#15001
Overall Influence
1928 - 2011 (83 years)
Albrecht Dold was a German mathematician specializing in algebraic topology who proved the Dold–Thom theorem, the Dold–Kan correspondence, and introduced Dold manifolds, Dold–Puppe stabilization, and Dold fibrations.
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Paul Griffiths
#15002
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Paul Anthony Griffiths is a British music critic, novelist and librettist. He is particularly noted for his writings on modern classical music and for having written the libretti for two 20th century operas, Tan Dun's Marco Polo and Elliott Carter's What Next?.
Go to Profile#14992
Donald Green
#15003
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Donald Philip Green is a political scientist and quantitative methodologist at Columbia University. Green's primary research interests lie in the development of statistical methods for field experiments and their application to American voting behavior.
Go to Profile#14993
Joaquin Phoenix
#15004
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Joaquin Rafael Phoenix is an American actor. Known for playing dark and unconventional characters in independent films and period dramas, he has received various accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, a Grammy Award, and two Golden Globe Awards. In 2020, The New York Times named him one of the greatest actors of the 21st century.
Go to Profile#14994
Don L. Anderson
#15005
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Don Lynn Anderson was an American geophysicist who made significant contributions to the understanding of the origin, evolution, structure, and composition of Earth and other planets. An expert in numerous scientific disciplines, Anderson's work combined seismology, solid state physics, geochemistry and petrology to explain how the Earth works. Anderson was best known for his contributions to the understanding of the Earth's deep interior, and more recently, for the plate theory hypothesis that hotspots are the product of plate tectonics rather than narrow plumes emanating from the deep Earth.
Go to Profile#14995
Phil Harding
#15006
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Philip James Harding is an English music producer, audio engineer, remixer, academic and author. Harding started in the music industry aged 16 at London's Marquee Studios in 1973, where he got to work as an assistant engineer under the guidance of top producers on albums for artists such as Elton John, Kiki Dee and Barry Blue. As Harding's career progressed, a long list of credits began to accumulate, with artists as diverse as The Clash, Killing Joke, Toyah Willcox, Amii Stewart and Matt Bianco, all taking advantage of Harding's fast-growing reputation as a top engineer. The very first band ...
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Nina Berberova
#15007
Overall Influence
1901 - 1993 (92 years)
Nina Nikolayevna Berberova was a Russian writer who chronicled the lives of anti-communist Russian refugees in Paris in her short stories and novels. She visited post-Soviet Russia. Her 1965 revision of the Constance Garnett translation of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina with Leonard J. Kent is considered the best translation so far by the academic Zoja Pavlovskis-Petit.
Go to Profile#14997
K. Patricia Cross
#15008
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Kathryn Patricia Cross was an American scholar of educational research. Throughout her career, she explored adult education and higher learning, discussing methodology and pedagogy in terms of remediation and advancement in the university system.
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Robert Gilman
#15009
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Robert C. Gilman, born 1945, is a thinker on sustainability who, along with his late wife Diane Gilman, has researched and written about ecovillages. The Gilmans’ work was important in giving definition to the ecovillage movement and shaping the direction of the Global Ecovillage Network. In 1991, the Gilmans co-authored Eco-Villages and Sustainable Communities, a seminal study of ecovillages for Gaia Trust.
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Stephen Ziliak
#15010
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Stephen T. Ziliak is an American professor of economics whose research and essays span disciplines from statistics and beer brewing to medicine and poetry. He is currently a faculty member of the Angiogenesis Foundation, conjoint professor of business and law at the University of Newcastle in Australia, and professor of economics at Roosevelt University in Chicago, IL. He previously taught for the Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, and Bowling Green State University. Much of his work has focused on welfare and poverty, rhetoric, public policy, and the history and philosophy of science and statistics.
Go to Profile#15000
Alexander Nove
#15011
Overall Influence
1915 - 1994 (79 years)
Alexander Nove, FRSE, FBA was a Professor of Economics at the University of Glasgow and a noted authority on Russian and Soviet economic history. According to Ian D. Thatcher, "[T]he consensus is that he was one of the most significant scholars of 'Soviet' studies in its widest sense and beyond."
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