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
#15101
Michael Sheetz
#15112
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Michael Patrick Sheetz is a cell biologist, a pioneer of mechanobiology and biomechanics, and a key contributor to the discovery of kinesin. He serves as the Robert A. Welch Distinguished University Chair in Chemistry at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, the department of biochemistry and molecular biology. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Cell Biology at Columbia University, former distinguished professor and the founding director of the Mechanobiology Institute at the National University of Singapore, and former professor at Washington University in St. ...
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Jacques Ruffié
#15113
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Jacques Ruffié was a French haematologist, geneticist, and anthropologist. He founded a discipline, called blood typing, which allowed the study of blood characteristics to find the history of the people, their migration and their successive interbreeding. He was a colleague and great personal friend of Michel Foucault at the College de France; Foucault mentions him in a newly discovered essay review of a book that Ruffié published in 1976, entitled De la biologie à la culture .
Go to Profile#15103
Joseph W. Polisi
#15114
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Joseph William Polisi was the President of The Juilliard School from 1984 to May 2017, having assumed the position upon the death of his predecessor, Peter Mennin. Born in New York City to an Italian family, Dr. Polisi is the son of William Polisi, a bassoonist who performed with the New York Philharmonic. He was instrumental in the construction of Juilliard's Meredith Willson Residence Hall, and has focused his tenure on "community building". Polisi is the author of The Artist as Citizen, a book which implores the classical music world to reach out to society at large.
Go to Profile#15104
John Denver
#15115
Overall Influence
1943 - 1997 (54 years)
Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. , known professionally as John Denver, was an American singer and songwriter. He is known for popularizing acoustic folk music in the 1970s as part of the ongoing singer-songwriter movement of the mid-to-late 20th century. Denver is widely recognized as a cultural icon of the American West.
Go to Profile#15105
Graeme Wood
#15116
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Graeme Charles Arthur Wood is an American staff writer for The Atlantic and a lecturer in political science at Yale University since 2014. Prior to his staff writer position he was a contributing editor to The Atlantic, and he has also written for The Cambodia Daily, The New Yorker, The American Scholar, The New Republic, Bloomberg Businessweek, Culture+Travel, The Wall Street Journal and the International Herald Tribune. He served as books editor of Pacific Standard. He was awarded the 2015-2016 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellowship of the Council on Foreign Relations and a 2009 Reporting Fell...
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Norman Birnbaum
#15117
Overall Influence
1926 - 2019 (93 years)
Norman Birnbaum was an American sociologist. He was an emeritus professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, and a member of the editorial board of The Nation. Early life He was educated in New York City's public schools, at Williams College, and has a doctorate in sociology from Harvard University. He taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Oxford University, the University of Strasbourg, Amherst College, served on the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research and was Distinguished Fulbright Professor at the University of Bologna.
Go to Profile#15107
Matthew Lipman
#15118
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Matthew Lipman is recognized as the founder of Philosophy for Children. His decision to bring philosophy to young people came from his experience as a professor at Columbia University, where he witnessed underdeveloped reasoning skills in his students. His interest lay particularly in developing reasoning skills by teaching logic. The belief that children possess the ability to think abstractly from an early age led him to the conviction that bringing logic to children's education earlier would help them to improve their reasoning skills.
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Egon Wolff
#15119
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Egon Wolff was a Chilean playwright and author. Born in Santiago, he was educated in Chile and the United States. Early life Egon Wolff was born into a middle-class family of German immigrants, to parents who espoused traditional family values and encouraged traditional work ethics. During his childhood Wolff suffered periods of ill health and turned to reading; he read the classics of world literature to escape the boredom of being sick and bedridden. At the age of 16 Wolff produced his first novel, El Ocaso .
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Roberta Flack
#15120
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Roberta Cleopatra Flack is a retired American singer who topped the Billboard charts with the No. 1 singles "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face", "Killing Me Softly with His Song", "Feel Like Makin' Love", "Where Is the Love" and "The Closer I Get to You", the latter two duets with Donny Hathaway. Flack influenced the subgenre of contemporary R&B called quiet storm, and interpreted songs by songwriters such as Leonard Cohen and members of the Beatles.
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Akeel Bilgrami
#15121
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Akeel Bilgrami is an Indian philosopher. He has been in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University since 1985 after spending two years as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
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Quazi Deen Mohammad
#15122
Overall Influence
Quazi madam r ch od Mohammad is a Bangladeshi physician, academic and neurologist. He is the founding director of National Institute of Neuroscience, Dhaka. He was the 37th principal of Dhaka Medical College and 19th President of Bangladesh College of Physicians and Surgeons .
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Brad Wood
#15123
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Brad Wood is an American record producer based in Los Angeles. He has produced many albums, including Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville and Placebo's self-titled debut. Career Wood is from Rockford, Illinois. In 1988, Wood, along with Brian Deck and Daniel Sonis, built Idful Music Corporation recording studio in Chicago's Wicker Park. While at Idful he recorded and produced hundreds of records, including Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville, Veruca Salt's American Thighs, Ben Lee's Grandpaw Would, Sunny Day Real Estate's Diary and LP2, and albums by Red Red Meat, Seam, That Dog, and others. In addition t...
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Michael Aris
#15124
Overall Influence
1946 - 1999 (53 years)
Michael Vaillancourt Aris was a British historian who wrote and lectured on Bhutanese, Tibetan, and Himalayan culture and history. He was the husband of Aung San Suu Kyi, who would later become State Counsellor of Myanmar.
Go to Profile#15114
Dexter Kozen
#15125
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Dexter Campbell Kozen is an American theoretical computer scientist. He is Joseph Newton Pew, Jr. Professor in Engineering at Cornell University. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1974 and his PhD in computer science in 1977 from Cornell University, where he was advised by Juris Hartmanis. He advised numerous Ph.D. students.
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Ichirō Fujisaki
#15126
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
was Japanese Ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2012. He was previously the Japanese Ambassador to the United Nations and to the World Trade Organization. Fujisaki attended junior high school in Seattle, Washington as an exchange student in the 1960s. Fujisaki entered the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1969. Over the course of his diplomatic career, Fujisaki served as director-general of the North American Affairs Bureau in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and as Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs and overseas in Jakarta, London, and Paris. In his capacity as Deputy Foreign...
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Mary Ann Doane
#15127
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Mary Ann Doane is the Class of 1937 Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley and was previously the George Hazard Crooker Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is a pioneer in the study of gender in film.
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Matthew Kaufman
#15128
Overall Influence
1942 - 2013 (71 years)
Matthew H. Kaufman was a British biologist. He was Professor Emeritus at University of Edinburgh having been Professor of Anatomy there from 1985 to 2007. He taught anatomy and embryology for more than 30 years, initially at the University of Cambridge, when he was a Fellow of King's College, and more recently in Edinburgh.
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Albrecht Unsöld
#15129
Overall Influence
1905 - 1995 (90 years)
Albrecht Otto Johannes Unsöld was a German astrophysicist known for his contributions to spectroscopic analysis of stellar atmospheres. Career Albrecht Unsöld was born in Bolheim, Württemberg, Germany. After school attendance in Heidenheim, Unsöld studied physics at the University of Tübingen and the University of Munich. At Munich, he studied under Arnold Sommerfeld, and was granted his doctorate in 1927. As a Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation, he was an assistant in Potsdam and worked at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. He then completed his Habilitation in Munich in 1929.
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Alireza Shapour Shahbazi
#15130
Overall Influence
1942 - 2006 (64 years)
Alireza Shapour Shahbazi was a prominent Persian archaeologist, Iranologist and a world expert on Achaemenid archaeology. Shahbazi got a BA degree in and an MA degree in East Asian archaeology from SOAS. Shahbazi had a doctorate degree in Achaemenid archaeology from University of London. Alireza Shapour Shahbazi was a lecturer in Achaemenid archaeology and Iranology at Harvard University. He was also a full professor of archaeology at Shiraz University and founded at Persepolis the Institute of Achaemenid Research in 1974. After the Islamic revolution, he moved to the US, firstly teaching ...
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Ikuo Hirayama
#15131
Overall Influence
1930 - 2009 (79 years)
was a Japanese Nihonga painter and educator. Born in Setoda-chō, Hiroshima Prefecture, he was famous in Japan for Silk Road paintings of dreamy desert landscapes in Iran, Iraq, and China. Biography In 1952, he graduated from the Tokyo School of Art, or what is today's Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music , and became a disciple of Maeda Seison. Hirayama also served as President of his alma mater twice .
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Norman Myers
#15132
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Norman Myers was a British environmentalist specialising in biodiversity and also noted for his work on environmental refugees. Biography Myers was born in Whitewell and was raised until the age of 11 on the family farm, without electricity, gas or an internal toilet. He lived in Kenya for over 30 years and later settled in Headington, Oxford, England. He attended grammar school and then the University of Oxford and became a District Officer in the last few years of the Kenya Administration from 1958 to 1961. He then worked as a high school teacher in Nairobi from 1961 to 1966 and a freelance writer and broadcaster until 1969.
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Gianfranco Zola
#15133
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Gianfranco Zola is an Italian football manager and former footballer who played predominantly as a forward. He is currently in charge as vice-president of the Lega Pro, the Serie C football league.
Go to Profile#15123
Neil Smith
#15134
Overall Influence
1954 - 2012 (58 years)
Neil Robert Smith was a Scottish geographer and Marxist academic. He was Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and winner of numerous awards, including the Globe Book Award of the Association of American Geographers.
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David Almond
#15135
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
David Almond is a British author who has written many novels for children and young adults from 1998, each one receiving critical acclaim. He is one of thirty children's writers, and one of three from the UK, to win the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award. For the 70th anniversary of the British Carnegie Medal in 2007, his debut novel Skellig was named one of the top ten Medal-winning works, selected by a panel to compose the ballot for a public election of the all-time favourite. It ranked third in the public vote from that shortlist.
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Shaun Nichols
#15136
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
#15126
Thomas J. Reese
#15137
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Thomas J. Reese, is an American Catholic Jesuit priest, author, and journalist. He is a senior analyst at Religion News Service, a former columnist at National Catholic Reporter, and a former editor-in-chief of the weekly Catholic magazine America.
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Maria Todorova
#15138
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Maria Nikolaeva Todorova is a Bulgarian historian who is best known for her influential book, Imagining the Balkans, in which she applies Edward Said's notion of "Orientalism" to the Balkans. She is the daughter of historian and politician Nikolai Todorov, who was Speaker of the National Assembly of Bulgaria and acting President of Bulgaria in July 1990.
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Vinylz
#15139
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Anderson Hernandez , professionally known as Vinylz, is an American record producer from Washington Heights, New York City. He is known for his work with Jay-Z, Travis Scott, Rick Ross, Drake, J. Cole, Nicki Minaj, Jeremih and Tinashe.
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David Tabor
#15140
Overall Influence
1913 - 2005 (92 years)
David Tabor , FRS was a British physicist who was an early pioneer of tribology, the study of frictional interaction between surfaces, and well known for his influential undergraduate textbook "Gases, Liquids and Solids".
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Warren Ewens
#15141
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Warren John Ewens is an Australian-born mathematician who has been Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania since 1997. He concentrates his research on the mathematical, statistical and theoretical aspects of population genetics. Ewens has worked in mathematical population genetics, computational biology, and evolutionary population genetics. He introduced Ewens's sampling formula.
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Norman H. Nie
#15142
Overall Influence
1943 - 2015 (72 years)
Norman H. Nie was an American social scientist, university professor, inventor, and pioneering technology entrepreneur, known for being one of the developers of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences . Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1943, Nie was educated at the University of the Americas in Mexico City, Washington University in St. Louis and Stanford University, where he received a Ph.D. in political science in 1971. He died on April 2, 2015, of lung cancer.
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Alan J. Auerbach
#15143
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Alan J. Auerbach is an American economist. He is currently the director of the Robert D. Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his undergraduate degree in economics and mathematics from Yale University and earned his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University and was an assistant and then an associate professor at Harvard. He was then a professor of law and economics at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Omkar Goswami
#15144
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Omkar Goswami is an Indian economist and business journalist for Business India. He is the founder and chairperson of Corporate and Economic Research Group Advisory Private Limited . Early life and education Goswami did his B.A. from St. Xavier's College, Calcutta, and Calcutta University. Omkar Goswami holds a Master's in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University, in 1978, and in 1982 he received the doctor of philosophy in Economics from Oxford University for the thesis "The jute economy of Bengal, 1900–1947: unequal interaction between the industrial, trading, and agri...
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Sully Sullenberger
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#15145
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Chesley Burnett "Sully" Sullenberger III is a retired American fighter pilot, diplomat, and airline pilot best known for his actions as captain of US Airways Flight 1549 that he ditched in the Hudson River in 2009 after both engines were disabled by a bird strike. All 155 people aboard survived. Sullenberger became an outspoken advocate for aviation safety and has helped develop new protocols for airline safety. He served as the co-chairman, along with his co-pilot on Flight 1549, Jeffrey Skiles, of the Experimental Aircraft Association 's Young Eagles youth introduction-to-aviation program f...
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Derek Jacobi
#15146
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Sir Derek George Jacobi is an English actor. Jacobi is known for his work at the Royal National Theatre and for his film and television roles. He has received numerous accolades including a BAFTA Award, two Olivier Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and a Tony Award. He was given a knighthood for his services to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1994.
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Sam Gilliam
#15147
Overall Influence
1933 - 2022 (89 years)
Sam Gilliam was an American color field painter and lyrical abstractionist artist. Gilliam was associated with the Washington Color School, a group of Washington, D.C.-area artists that developed a form of abstract art from color field painting in the 1950s and 1960s. His works have also been described as belonging to abstract expressionism and lyrical abstraction. He worked on stretched, draped and wrapped canvas, and added sculptural 3D elements. He was recognized as the first artist to introduce the idea of a draped, painted canvas hanging without stretcher bars around 1965. This was a maj...
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David Lowenthal
#15148
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
David Lowenthal was an American historian and geographer, renowned for his work on heritage. He is credited with having made heritage studies a discipline in its own right. Biography David Lowenthal was born on 26 April 1923 in New York City to Max Lowenthal and Eleanor Mack , and was also the brother of John Lowenthal and Betty Levin.
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Andrew Revkin
#15149
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Andrew C. Revkin is an American science and environmental journalist, author and educator. He has written on a wide range of subjects including destruction of the Amazon rain forest, the 2004 Asian tsunami, sustainable development, climate change, and the changing environment around the North Pole. From 2019 to 2023 he directed fthe Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at The Earth Institute of Columbia University.
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Ivan Ljubičić
#15150
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Ivan Ljubičić is a Croatian former professional tennis player. He reached a career-high Association of Tennis Professionals world No. 3 singles ranking on 1 May 2006. His career highlights include reaching a major semifinal at the 2006 French Open, and a Masters title at the Indian Wells Masters in 2010. He also contested three other Masters finals, two in 2005 at Madrid and Paris, and the other at the 2006 Miami Open.
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Diane F. Halpern
#15151
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Diane F. Halpern is an American psychologist and former president of the American Psychological Association . She is Dean of Social Science at the Minerva Schools at KGI and also the McElwee Family Professor of Psychology at Claremont McKenna College. She is also past-president of the Western Psychological Association, The Society for the Teaching of Psychology, and the Division of General Psychology.
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Yvonne Seon
#15152
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Yvonne Seon is an American professor, university administrator, and Unitarian Universalist minister. She specializes in African studies, African American studies, and government administration. She was an administrative officer in the government of Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and also worked in the U.S. federal government. She then worked as a university administrator and founded a Black Studies Center at Wright State University, and helped to design one of the first doctoral programs in Black Studies in the United States. In 1981 Seon became the first African Ame...
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Stephen Bright
#15153
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Stephen B. Bright is an American lawyer known for representing people facing the death penalty, advocating for the right to counsel for poor people accused of crimes, and challenging inhumane practices and conditions in prisons and jails. He has taught at Yale Law School since 1993 and has been teaching at the Georgetown Law Center since 2017 . In 2016, he ended almost 35 years at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, first as director from 1982 to 2005, and then as president and senior counsel from 2006 to 2016.
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George Ayittey
#15154
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
George B. N. Ayittey was a Ghanaian economist, author, and president of the Free Africa Foundation in Washington, D.C. He was a professor at American University, and an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
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Sarah McLachlan
#15155
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Sarah Ann McLachlan OC OBC is a Canadian singer-songwriter. As of 2015, she had sold over 40 million albums worldwide. McLachlan's best-selling album to date is Surfacing, for which she won two Grammy Awards and four Juno Awards. In addition to her personal artistic efforts, she founded the Lilith Fair tour, which showcased female musicians.
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Mohammad Abbasi
#15156
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Mohammad Abbasi is an Iranian politician who is the former minister of youth affairs and sports. He was Minister of Cooperatives in the first and second Cabinet of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from 2005 to 2011.
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Roger Parker
#15157
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Roger Parker is an English musicologist who was previously Thurston Dart Professor of Music at King's College London. His work has centred on opera. Between 2006 and 2010, while Professor of Music at Gresham College, London, Parker presented four series of free public lectures, one example being "Verdi and Milan" in 2007 which is available on video.
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Paul Pierson
#15158
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
#15148
Joaquin Mazdak Luttinger
#15159
Overall Influence
1923 - 1997 (74 years)
Joaquin Mazdak Luttinger was an American physicist well known for his contributions to the theory of interacting electrons in one-dimensional metals and the Fermi-liquid theory. He received his BS and PhD in physics from MIT in 1947. His brother was the physical chemist Lionel Luttinger and his nephew is the mathematician Karl Murad Luttinger .
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A. Sreedhara Menon
#15160
Overall Influence
1925 - 2010 (85 years)
Alappat Sreedhara Menon , known as A. Sreedhara Menon, was an Indian historian from Kerala. He is best known as the State Editor of Kerala District Gazetteers . He served as registrar of the Kerala University from 1968 to 1977, before retiring in 1980.
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Dominique Wilkins
#15161
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Jacques Dominique Wilkins is an American former professional basketball player who primarily played for the Atlanta Hawks of the National Basketball Association . Wilkins was a nine-time NBA All-Star, a seven-time All-NBA Team member and is widely viewed as one of the most acrobatic slam dunkers in NBA history, earning the nickname "the Human Highlight Reel". In October 2021, he was honored as one of the league’s greatest players of all-time by being named to the NBA 75th Anniversary Team.
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