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
#15651
Kim Campbell
#15662
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Avril Phaedra Douglas "Kim" Campbell is a Canadian former politician, diplomat, lawyer, and writer who served as the 19th prime minister of Canada from June 25 to November 4, 1993. Campbell is the first and so far only female prime minister of Canada. Prior to becoming the final Progressive Conservative prime minister, she was also the first woman to serve as minister of justice in Canadian history and the first woman to become minister of defence in a NATO member state.
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Chelsea Peretti
#15663
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Chelsea Peretti is an American comedian, actress, television writer, singer, and songwriter. She is best known for portraying Gina Linetti in the comedy series Brooklyn Nine-Nine. She wrote for various TV series, including Parks and Recreation, Saturday Night Live and Kroll Show.
Go to Profile#15653
Mike Parker Pearson
#15664
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Michael Parker Pearson, is an English archaeologist specialising in the study of the Neolithic British Isles, Madagascar and the archaeology of death and burial. A professor at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, he previously worked for 25 years as a professor at the University of Sheffield in England, and was the director of the Stonehenge Riverside Project. A prolific author, he has also written a variety of books on the subject.
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Carl Bernstein
#15665
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Carl Milton Bernstein is an American investigative journalist and author. While a young reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, Bernstein was teamed up with Bob Woodward, and the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal.These scandals led to numerous government investigations and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon. The work of Woodward and Bernstein was called "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time" by longtime journalism figure Gene Roberts.
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Michael Perelman
#15666
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Michael Perelman was an American economist and economic historian, former professor of economics at California State University, Chico. Perelman has written 19 books, including Railroading Economics, Manufacturing Discontent, The Perverse Economy, and The Invention of Capitalism.
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Manfred Fuhrmann
#15667
Overall Influence
1925 - 2005 (80 years)
Manfred Fuhrmann was a professor for classical Latin philology and one of the most eminent German philologists. Life Fuhrmann was born on 23 June 1925 in Hiddesen . He started his studies in Leiden. While Fuhrmann wanted to study music, he gave up this plan in favour of classical philology and jurisprudence, whereby the classical philology was decisive for him. 1953 he obtained his doctorate in classical philology in Freiburg, followed by his habilitation ibidem. 1962 Fuhrmann accepted a chair at the University of Kiel, 1966 one at the University of Konstanz. Also, he was a member of the Heid...
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Roy DeCarava
#15668
Overall Influence
1919 - 2009 (90 years)
Roy Rudolph DeCarava was an American artist. DeCarava received early critical acclaim for his photography, initially engaging and imaging the lives of African Americans and jazz musicians in the communities where he lived and worked. Over a career that spanned nearly six decades, DeCarava came to be known as a founder in the field of black and white fine art photography, advocating for an approach to the medium based on the core value of an individual, subjective creative sensibility, which was separate and distinct from the "social documentary" style of many predecessors.
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James Crawford
#15669
Overall Influence
1948 - 2021 (73 years)
James Richard Crawford, AC, SC, FBA was an Australian academic and practitioner in the field of public international law. He was elected as Judge of the International Court of Justice for a full term of 9 years in November 2014 and took his seat on the court in February 2015. From 1990 to 1992 Crawford was Dean of the Sydney Law School where he was also the Challis Professor of International Law from 1986 to 1992. From 1992 to 2014, he was Whewell Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge and Fellow in Law at Jesus College, Cambridge. He was formerly Director of the Lauter...
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Luis Eduardo Luna
#15670
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Luis Eduardo Luna is an anthropologist and noted ayahuasca researcher. Biography Luna was born in 1947, in Florencia, Colombia. He received his doctorate in 1989 from the Institute of Comparative Religion at Stockholm University, as well as an honorary doctorate in 2000 from Saint Lawrence University, New York. He currently is a language teacher at the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland.
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Laurent Bigorgne
#15671
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Laurent Bigorgne is a French essayist. He was the Director of the Institut Montaigne from 2010 until 27 February 2022. Early life and education Laurent Bigorgne is the son of two secondary school teachers. His father was head teacher at the lycée professionnel of Pompey and his mother was an IT teacher. He was born on 20 October 1974 in Épinal, a commune in the Vosges, a department of the Grand Est region of France. He was brought up in Meurthe-et-Moselle.
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Frances Egan
#15672
Overall Influence
Frances Egan is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. She has authored a number of articles and book chapters on philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and perception. Education and career Egan graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1976 with a B.A. in philosophy. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario in 1988. She has taught at Rutgers University since her appointment as an assistant professor in 1990. Besides her Rutgers appointment, she is also an associate editor of Noûs, a quarterly journal of philosophy.
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Arif Dirlik
#15673
Overall Influence
1940 - 2017 (77 years)
Arif Dirlik was a Turkish-American historian who published on historiography and political ideology in modern China, as well as issues in modernity, globalization, and post-colonial criticism. Dirlik received a BSc in Electrical Engineering at Robert College, Istanbul in 1964 and a PhD in History at the University of Rochester in 1973.
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Peter Lee
#15674
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Peter Lee is an American computer scientist. He is Corporate Vice President and head of Microsoft Research. Previously, he was the head of the Transformational Convergence Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the chair of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on software security and reliability.
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Robert E. Whaley
#15675
Overall Influence
Robert E. Whaley is Valere Blair Potter Professor of Management and Director of the Financial Markets Research Center at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. Whaley developed the Market Volatility Index for the Chicago Board Options Exchange in 1993.
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Daniel Kleppner
#15676
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Daniel Kleppner, born 1932, is the Lester Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-founder and co-director of the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms. His areas of science include atomic, molecular, and optical physics, and his research interests include experimental atomic physics, laser spectroscopy, and high precision measurements.
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Tiffany Field
#15677
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Tiffany Martini Field is professor in the departments of pediatrics, psychology, and psychiatry at the University of Miami School of Medicine and director of the Touch Research Institute. She specializes in infant development, especially with regard to the impact of maternal postpartum depression on mother-infant interaction and the efficacy of massage and touch therapy in promoting growth and emotional well-being in premature and low birth weight infants.
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Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#15678
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-born American author, poet, and the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Her short story collection, Arranged Marriage, won an American Book Award in 1996. Two of her novels , as well as a short story were adapted into films.
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Eva Jablonka
#15679
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Eva Jablonka is an Israeli evolutionary theorist and geneticist, known especially for her interest in epigenetic inheritance. Born in 1952 in Poland, she emigrated to Israel in 1957. She is a professor at the Cohn Institute for the History of Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. In 1981 she was awarded the Landau prize of Israel for outstanding Master of Science work and in 1988, the Marcus prize for outstanding Ph.D. work. She is a proponent of academic freedom, recognising that on such matters, "academic and political issues cannot really be kept apart", although she i...
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Salima Hashmi
#15680
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Salima Hashmi is a Pakistanii painter, artist, former college professor, anti-nuclear weapons activist and former caretaker minister in Sethi caretaker ministry. She has served for four years as a professor and the dean of National College of Arts. She is the eldest daughter of the renowned poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and his British-born wife Alys Faiz.
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Pentti Kanerva
#15681
Overall Influence
Pentti Kanerva is an American neuroscientist who is the originator of the sparse distributed memory model. He is responsible for relating the properties of long-term memory to mathematical properties of high-dimensional spaces and compares artificial neural-net associative memory to conventional computer random-access memory and to the neurons in the brain. This theory has been applied to design and implement the random indexing approach to learning semantic relations from linguistic data.
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Tony Stewart
#15682
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Anthony Wayne Stewart , nicknamed "Smoke", is an American semi-retired professional stock car racing driver, current NASCAR team co-owner of Stewart-Haas Racing, and current co-owner of the Superstar Racing Experience. He is a four-time NASCAR Cup Series champion, winning two as a driver , one as owner/driver , and one as an owner .
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Michael Lipsky
#15683
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Michael Lipsky is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, a public policy institution based in New York with offices in Washington, D.C., and Boston. He was a program officer at the Ford Foundation after serving as a professor of political science at MIT. In 1998, Lipsky was elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
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Barys Kit
#15684
Overall Influence
1910 - 2018 (108 years)
Boris Uladzimiravich Kit was a Belarusian-American rocket scientist. Biography Kit was born on April 6, 1910, in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire to the family of an employee at the Post and Telegraph Department of Belarusian origin. His true surname is Kita. In 1918 Kit's family moved to their native village of Aharodniki, now the town of Karelichy, Grodno Region. In 1921 this area became a part of the Second Polish Republic.
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Leopoldo Zea Aguilar
#15685
Overall Influence
1912 - 2004 (92 years)
Leopoldo Zea Aguilar was a Mexican philosopher. Biography Zea was born in Mexico City. One of the integral Latin Americanism thinkers in history, Zea became famous thanks to his master's thesis, El Positivismo en México , in which he applied and studied positivism in the context of his country and the world during the transition between the 19th and 20th centuries. With it he began the defense of American Integration, first suggested by the Liberator and Statesman Simón Bolívar, giving it his own interpretation based in the context of neocolonialism during the separation of the American Empir...
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Richard K. Betts
#15686
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Richard Kevin Betts is an American political scientist and international relations scholar who centers on U.S. foreign policy. He is currently the Arnold Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies in the Department of Political Science, former director of the International Security Policy Program in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and former director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies.
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Robert Kates
#15687
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Robert W. Kates was an American geographer and independent scholar in Trenton, Maine, and University Professor at Brown University. Background Kates was born in Brooklyn, New York. Unusually for an academic, he never completed an undergraduate degree. He studied Economics at New York University from 1946-8, but dropped out. He married Ellie Hackman at the age of 19 and went to work in a steel mill in Indiana for 12 years, working with the labor union and other movements. He had a chance encounter with a naturalist in a state park in Indiana when on vacation with his family, and this meeting...
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Stephen Fienberg
#15688
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Stephen Elliott Fienberg was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Statistics, the Machine Learning Department, Heinz College, and Cylab at Carnegie Mellon University. Fienberg was the founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application and of the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality.
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Jens Franke
#15689
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Jens Franke is a German mathematician. He has held a chair at the University of Bonn's Hausdorff Center for Mathematics since 1992. Franke's research has covered various problems of number theory, algebraic geometry and analysis on locally symmetric spaces.
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Charles J. Hitch
#15690
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
Charles J. Hitch was an American economist and Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1965. He later served as vice chancellor and president of the University of California and president of Resources for the Future .
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Gladys Knight
#15691
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Gladys Maria Knight , known as the "Empress of Soul", is an American singer and actress. A seven-time Grammy Award-winner, Knight recorded hits through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s with her family group Gladys Knight & the Pips, which included her brother Merald "Bubba" Knight and cousins William Guest and Edward Patten.
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Barrie Thorne
#15692
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Barrie Thorne is a professor of sociology and of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on the sociology of gender, feminist theory, the sociology of age relations, childhood, and families, and ethnographic methods. She is perhaps best known as author of the widely read book Play: Girls and Boys in School which has been cited in over 170 books and over 500 publications.
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Christoph von der Malsburg
#15693
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Christoph von der Malsburg is a German physicist and neuroscientist. Early life von der Malsburg obtained his PhD with a concentration in elementary particle physics at CERN and the University of Heidelberg in 1970.
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Mathukumalli Vidyasagar
#15694
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Mathukumalli Vidyasagar is a leading control theorist and a Fellow of Royal Society. He is currently a Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering at IIT Hyderabad. Previously he was the Cecil & Ida Green Chair of Systems Biology Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. Prior to that he was an executive vice-president at Tata Consultancy Services where he headed the Advanced Technology Center. Earlier, he was the director of Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics , a DRDO defence lab in Bangalore. He is the son of eminent mathematician M V Subbarao.
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Arthur Smith
#15695
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Brian Arthur John Smith is an English alternative comedian, presenter and writer. Early life Smith was born on 27 November 1954 in Bermondsey, south London. His eldest brother is Richard Smith, a medical doctor, editor and businessman. His younger brother is Nick Smith, a civil servant who was also a stand-up comic but in recent years has turned to amateur dramatics. Arthur was a student and school captain at The Roan School for Boys, a grammar school, now The John Roan School in Blackheath, London. He then studied at the University of East Anglia, where he was chairman of the poetry society, wrote for the student newspaper and contributed sketches for a student revue.
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Alex McLeish
#15696
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Alexander McLeish is a Scottish professional football manager and former player. He played as a defender for Aberdeen during their 1980s glory years, making nearly 500 League appearances for the club, and won 77 caps for Scotland.
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Allan Wilson
#15697
Overall Influence
1934 - 1991 (57 years)
Allan Charles Wilson FRS AAA&S was a professor of biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, a pioneer in the use of molecular approaches to understand evolutionary change and reconstruct phylogenies, and a revolutionary contributor to the study of human evolution. He was one of the most significant figures in post-war biology; his work attracted a great deal of attention both from within and outside the academic world. He is the only New Zealander to have won the MacArthur Fellowship.
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Carl Potts
#15698
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Carl Potts is an American comics artist, writer, teacher, and editor best known for creating the series Alien Legion for the Marvel Comics imprint Epic Comics. Early life Born in Oakland, California, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Hawaii, Potts received an associate degree in commercial art from Chabot College in Hayward, California. He received his bachelor's degree in creative writing and editing from SUNY – Empire State College.
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Douglas Irwin
#15699
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Douglas A. Irwin is the John French Professor of Economics in the Economics Department at Dartmouth College and the author of seven books. He is an expert on both past and present U.S. trade policy, especially policy during the Great Depression. He is frequently sought by media outlets such as The Economist and Wall Street Journal to provide comment and his opinion on current events. He also writes op-eds and articles about trade for mainstream media outlets like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Financial Times. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute f...
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Alexander Dalgarno
#15700
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Alexander Dalgarno FRS was a British physicist who was a Phillips Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University. Biography Alexander Dalgarno was born in London in 1928, and spent his childhood there. He was educated in mathematics and atomic physics at University College, London, earning a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1951 under the joint supervision of Harrie Massey and Richard Buckingham. He was an academic at the Queen's University, Belfast from 1951 to 1967 where he worked with Sir David Bates and rose from assistant lecturer to professor. In the 1950s, he laid the foundations for lon...
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Miroslav Radman
#15701
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Miroslav Radman is a Croatian biologist. Biography Radman was born in Split, PR Croatia, Yugoslavia. From 1962–1967 he studied experimental biology, physical chemistry and molecular biology at the University of Zagreb and in 1969 he obtained a doctorate degree in molecular biology at the Free University of Brussels. He spent the next three years at Harvard University as a postdoctoral researcher. From 1973 until 1983 he was Professor of Molecular Biology at the Free University of Brussels and from 1983 until 1998 the Research Director at the French Centre for Scientific Research at the University of Paris 7.
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Roger Evans Howe
#15702
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Roger Evans Howe is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Yale University, and Curtis D. Robert Endowed Chair in Mathematics Education at Texas A&M University. He is known for his contributions to representation theory, in particular for the notion of a reductive dual pair and the Howe correspondence, and his contributions to mathematics education.
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Katie Roiphe
#15703
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Katie Roiphe is an American author and journalist. She is best known as the author of the non-fiction book The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus . She is also the author of Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End , and the 2007 study of writers and marriage, Uncommon Arrangements. Her 2001 novel Still She Haunts Me is an imagining of the relationship between Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell, the real-life model for Dodgson's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She is also known for allegedly planning to name the creator of the Shitty Media Men list in an art...
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Halle Berry
#15704
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Halle Maria Berry is an American actress. She began her career as a model and entered several beauty contests, finishing as the first runner-up in the Miss USA pageant and coming in sixth in the Miss World 1986. Her breakthrough film role was in the romantic comedy Boomerang , alongside Eddie Murphy, which led to roles in The Flintstones and Bulworth as well as the television film Introducing Dorothy Dandridge , for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award.
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Filip Reyntjens
#15705
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Filip Reyntjens is professor emeritus at University of Antwerp. His academic training is in constitutional law, but he later pivoted towards the study of politics especially of the Great Lakes region of Africa.
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Leonard Nathan
#15706
Overall Influence
1924 - 2007 (83 years)
Leonard E. Nathan, was an American poet, critic, and professor emeritus of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley where he retired in 1991. Born in El Monte, California, Nathan earned a bachelor's degree in English at UC Berkeley in 1950, a master's degree in English in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1961. He was then hired as a lecturer in UC Berkeley's Department of Speech, and was promoted to associate professor in 1965 and to professor in 1968.
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Thomas Hazlett
#15707
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Thomas W. Hazlett is the Hugh H. Macaulay Endowed Professor of Economics in the John E. Walker Department of Economics at Clemson University where he also directs the Information Economy Project. Hazlett's essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Economist, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, and Time. He was a New Technology Policy Forum columnist for the Financial Times, 2002–11, and wrote the "Selected Skirmishes" column for magazine . He is a founding partner of the consulting firm, Arlington Economics, with economists David Porter and Vernon L. Smith. He...
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Joe Satriani
#15708
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Joseph Satriani is an American rock guitarist, composer, and songwriter. Early in his career he worked as a guitar instructor, with many of his former students achieving fame, including Steve Vai, Larry LaLonde, Rick Hunolt, Kirk Hammett, Andy Timmons, Charlie Hunter, Kevin Cadogan, and Alex Skolnick. Satriani went on to have a successful solo music career, starting in the late 1980s. He is a 15-time Grammy Award nominee and has sold over 10 million albums, making him the bestselling instrumental rock guitarist of all time.
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Ashraf Ghani
#15709
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Mohammad Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai is an Afghan former politician, academic, and economist who served as the president of Afghanistan from September 2014 until August 2021, when his government was overthrown by the Taliban.
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Sarah Coakley
#15710
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Sarah Anne Coakley is an English Anglican priest, systematic theologian and philosopher of religion with interdisciplinary interests. She is an honorary professor at the Logos Institute, the University of St Andrews, after she stepped down as Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. She is also a visiting professorial fellow at the Australian Catholic University, both in Melbourne and Rome.
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Uhuru Kenyatta
#15711
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta is a Kenyan politician who served as the fourth president of Kenya from 2013 to 2022. Daniel Arap Moi had picked Kenyatta as his preferred successor. Uhuru Kenyatta, however, was defeated by the then opposition leader Mwai Kibaki in the 2002 election, and Kibaki was subsequently sworn in as the President. Kenyatta served as the member of parliament for Gatundu South from 2002 to 2013. He also served as Deputy Prime Minister to Raila Odinga from 2008 to 2013. Currently he is the member and the party leader of the Jubilee Party of Kenya, whose popularity has since dwindled.
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