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
#16351
Scott Barry Kaufman
#16362
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Scott Barry Kaufman is an American cognitive scientist, author, podcaster, coach, and popular science writer. His writing and research focuses on intelligence, creativity, and human potential. Most media attention has focused on Kaufman's attempt to redefine intelligence. Kaufman is founder and director of the Center for Human Potential and has taught courses at Columbia, NYU, the University of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. He is one of the top 20 most cited scientists studying intelligence, and is among the top 1% most cited scientists in the world. In 2015, he was named one of "50 groundbreak...
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Arnold Alexander Hall
#16363
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
Sir Arnold Alexander Hall was an English aeronautical engineer, scientist and industrialist. Early life Hall was born in Liverpool, and attended Alsop High School in Walton, before going to Clare College, Cambridge, where he took the Mechanical Science Tripos, and was awarded a first class honours degree with distinction in aeronautics, heat engines, applied mathematics and theory of structure. He also won a unique trio of awards – the Rex Moir Prize in Engineering, the John Bernard Seely Prize in Aeronautics, and the Ricardo Prize in Thermodynamics. By now, his interest in aeronautics had...
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Carl Reiner
#16364
Overall Influence
1922 - 2020 (98 years)
Carl Reiner was an American actor, stand-up comedian, director, screenwriter, and author whose career spanned seven decades. He was the recipient of many awards and honors, including 11 Primetime Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. He was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999.
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Henryk Iwaniec
#16365
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Henryk Iwaniec is a Polish-American mathematician, and since 1987 a professor at Rutgers University. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Polish Academy of Sciences. He has made important contributions to analytic and algebraic number theory as well as harmonic analysis. He is the recipient of Cole Prize , Steele Prize , and Shaw Prize .
Go to Profile#16355
L. David Mech
#16366
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Lucyan David Mech , also known as Dave Mech, is an American biologist specializing in the study of wolves. He is a senior research scientist for the U.S. Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota. He has researched wolves since 1958 in locations including northern Minnesota, Isle Royale, Alaska, Yellowstone National Park, Ellesmere Island, and Italy.
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Harold Scheraga
#16367
Overall Influence
1921 - 2020 (99 years)
Harold Abraham Scheraga was an American biophysicist and the George W. and Grace L. Todd Professor Emeritus in the chemistry department at Cornell University. Scheraga is regarded as a pioneer in protein biophysics and has been especially influential in the study of protein solvation and the hydrophobic effect as it relates to protein folding.
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John Guy
#16368
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
John Alexander Guy is a British historian and biographer. Biography Born in Warragul, Victoria, Australia, Guy moved to Britain with his parents in 1952. He was educated at King Edward VII School in Lytham St Annes in Lancashire, and Clare College, Cambridge, where he read history, achieving a First. At Cambridge, Guy studied under the Tudor specialist Geoffrey Rudolph Elton. He was awarded a Greene Cup by Clare College and the Yorke Prize by the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#16358
Thorkild Jacobsen
#16369
Overall Influence
1904 - 1993 (89 years)
Thorkild Peter Rudolph Jacobsen was a renowned Danish historian specializing in Assyriology and Sumerian literature. He was one of the foremost scholars on the ancient Near East. Biography Thorkild Peter Rudolph Jacobsen received, in 1927, an M.A. from the University of Copenhagen and then came to the United States to study at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, where, in 1929, he received his Ph.D.
Go to Profile#16359
Bruce Wilcox
#16370
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Bruce Wilcox is an artificial intelligence programmer. Work MTS/LISP and Computer Go A graduate of Michigan, Wilcox wrote the MTS/LISP interpreter back in the early 1970s, in order to be able to write a Go program for Dr. Walter Reitman. The Go program was the first one to be able to give a 9-stone handicap to a human beginner and win.
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Nouri al-Maliki
#16371
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Nouri Kamil Muhammad-Hasan al-Maliki , also known as Jawad al-Maliki , is an Iraqi politician. Leading the Islamic Dawa Party since 2007, he served as Iraqi prime minister from 2006 to 2014 and as Iraqi vice president from 2014 to 2015 and again from 2016 to 2018.
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Douglas A. Blackmon
#16372
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Douglas A. Blackmon is an American writer and journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
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Andrew M. Butler
#16373
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Andrew M. Butler is a British academic who teaches film, media and cultural studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. He is a former editor of Vector, the Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association and was membership secretary of the Science Fiction Foundation. He is a former Arthur C. Clarke Award judge and is now a member of the Serendip Foundation which administers the award.
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Alicia Dickenstein
#16374
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Alicia Dickenstein is an Argentine mathematician known for her work on algebraic geometry, particularly toric geometry, tropical geometry, and their applications to biological systems. She is a full professor at the University of Buenos Aires, a 2019 Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, a former vice-president of the International Mathematical Union , and a 2015 recipient of The World Academy of Sciences prize.
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Jean-Jacques Becker
#16375
Overall Influence
1928 - 2023 (95 years)
Jean-Jacques Becker was a French historian. A specialist of contemporary history, he was the brother of historian Annie Kriegel and father to World War I specialist Annette Becker. Biography Jean-Jacques Becker was born into a family descended from the Jewish community of Alsace-Lorraine, located in Paris. In July 1942, he entered the South zone with his parents who settled in Grenoble . He continued his studies at the Lycée Champollion earning his Baccalauréat. Following the popularity of his family to communism, he became a member of the Communist Party from 1947 to 1960. Because of his membership in the Communist Party, he did not participate in the war in Algeria.
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Ronnie James Dio
#16376
Overall Influence
1942 - 2010 (68 years)
Ronald James Padavona , known professionally as Ronnie James Dio, was an American heavy metal singer. He fronted and founded numerous bands throughout his career, including Elf, Rainbow, Black Sabbath, Dio and Heaven & Hell.
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Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld
#16377
Overall Influence
1921 - 2015 (94 years)
Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld was a Dutch astronomer. Background In a jointly credited trio with Tom Gehrels and her husband Cornelis Johannes van Houten, she was the discoverer of many thousands of asteroids . In the Palomar–Leiden survey, Gehrels took the images using the 48-inch Schmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory and shipped the photographic plates to the van Houtens at Leiden Observatory, who analyzed them for new asteroids. The trio are jointly credited with several thousand asteroid discoveries. Van Houten-Groeneveld died on 30 March 2015, at the age of 93, in Oegstgeest, Netherlan...
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Hakan Fidan
#16378
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Hakan Fidan is a Turkish bureaucrat and politician serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs since June 2023. He is a member of the AK Party. He previously served as the Director of the National Intelligence Organization from 2010 to 2023.
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Steven B. Smith
#16379
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Steven B. Smith is the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science at Yale University. From 1996 to 2011 he was the Master of Branford College at Yale. Early life and education Steven Smith was born in 1951. He received his undergraduate degree from University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and continued his studies at Durham University , where he completed an MPhil in 1976, with his thesis written on the social and political doctrine of G. W. F. Hegel.
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Mark Ruffalo
#16380
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Mark Alan Ruffalo is an American actor. He began acting in the early 1990s and first gained recognition for his work in Kenneth Lonergan's play This Is Our Youth and drama film You Can Count on Me . He went on to star in the romantic comedies 13 Going on 30 , Just like Heaven and the thrillers In the Cut , Zodiac , and Shutter Island . He received a Tony Award nomination for his supporting role in the Broadway revival of Awake and Sing! in 2006. Ruffalo gained international recognition for playing Bruce Banner / Hulk since 2012 in the superhero franchise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
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Robert G. Bartle
#16381
Overall Influence
1927 - 2003 (76 years)
Robert Gardner Bartle was an American mathematician specializing in real analysis. He is known for writing the popular textbooks The Elements of Real Analysis , The Elements of Integration , and Introduction to Real Analysis with Donald R. Sherbert, published by John Wiley & Sons.
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Trevor Nunn
#16382
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Sir Trevor Robert Nunn is an English theatre director. He has been the artistic director for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, and, currently, the Theatre Royal Haymarket. He has directed dramas for the stage, like Macbeth, as well as opera and musicals, such as Cats and Les Misérables .
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William Gasarch
#16383
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
William Ian Gasarch is an American computer scientist known for his work in computational complexity theory, computability theory, computational learning theory, and Ramsey theory. He is currently a professor at the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science with an affiliate appointment in Mathematics.
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Julia Higgins
#16384
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Dame Julia Stretton Higgins is a British polymer scientist. Since 1976 she has been based at the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London, where she is professor and senior research investigator.
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Roger Taylor
#16385
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Roger Meddows Taylor is an English musician, songwriter and singer. He achieved international fame as the drummer for the rock band Queen. As a drummer, Taylor was recognised early in his career for his unique sound and was voted the eighth-greatest drummer in classic rock music history in a listener poll conducted by Planet Rock in 2005. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001 as a member of Queen.
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Susan Rose-Ackerman
#16386
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Susan Rose-Ackerman is Henry R. Luce Professor Emeritus of Law and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Yale University. She is an expert in political corruption and development, administrative law, law and regulatory policy, the nonprofit sector, and federalism.
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L. Gary Leal
#16387
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Leslie Gary Leal is the Warren & Katharine Schlinger Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is known for his research work in the dynamics of complex fluids.
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Predrag Matvejević
#16388
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Predrag Matvejević was a Bosnian and Croatian writer and scholar. A literature scholar who taught at universities in Zagreb, Paris and Rome, he is best known for his 1987 non-fiction book Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape, a seminal work of cultural history of the Mediterranean region which has been translated into more than 20 languages.
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Benny Shanon
#16389
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Benny Shanon is an emeriti professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and holds the Mandel Chair in cognitive psychology and education. Born in Tel Aviv, Shanon studied philosophy and linguistics at Tel Aviv University and received his doctorate in experimental psychology from Stanford University. He is best known for his research on the cognitive effects of ayahuasca and the Biblical entheogen hypothesis, the idea that the use of hallucinogenic drugs influenced religion.
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Jonathan K. Pritchard
#16390
Overall Influence
Jonathan Karl Pritchard is an English-born professor of genetics at Stanford University, best known for his development of the STRUCTURE algorithm for studying population structure and his work on human genetic variation and evolution. His research interests lie in the study of human evolution, in particular in understanding the association between genetic variation among human individuals and human traits.
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Derek Warwick
#16391
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Derek Stanley Arthur Warwick is a British former professional racing driver from England, who lives in Jersey. He raced for many years in Formula One, collecting four podiums but never winning a Grand Prix. He did, however, win the 1992 24 Hours of Le Mans and 1992 World Sportscar Championship. He was the elder brother of Paul Warwick, who died racing while leading the British Formula 3000 Championship in 1991.
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Gary Cziko
#16392
Overall Influence
Gary Cziko is an American researcher, and author in the field of educational psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign who has worked on the philosophical model known as perceptual control theory – a model whose original developer, William T. Powers, was his mentor. He has written two introductory books on the subject, and in 1995 he introduced the concept of "universal selectionism" into the PCT model.
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Alistair MacLeod
#16393
Overall Influence
1936 - 2014 (78 years)
Alistair MacLeod, was a Canadian novelist, short story writer and academic. His powerful and moving stories vividly evoke the beauty of Cape Breton Island's rugged landscape and the resilient character of many of its inhabitants, the descendants of Scottish immigrants, who are haunted by ancestral memories and who struggle to reconcile the past and the present. MacLeod has been praised for his verbal precision, his lyric intensity and his use of simple, direct language that seems rooted in an oral tradition.
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Bruce C. Murray
#16394
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Bruce Churchill Murray was an American planetary scientist. He was a director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and co-founder of The Planetary Society. Education and early life Murray received his Ph.D. in geology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and joined Standard Oil of California as a geologist. He served in the United States Air Force as a geophysicist, and the U.S. Civil Service before joining California Institute of Technology in 1960.
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Kwame Dawes
#16395
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Kwame Senu Neville Dawes is a Ghanaian poet, actor, editor, critic, musician, and former Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina. He is now Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and editor-in-chief at Prairie Schooner magazine.
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Yanghee Lee
#16396
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Yanghee Lee is a South Korean developmental psychologist and professor at Sungkyunkwan University. She is most noted for her work in international human rights organisations. Lee is highly recognized nationally, regionally, and internationally for her expertise in human rights. She has published numerous articles and books on human rights and children’s rights.
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Tohru Fukuyama
#16397
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Tohru Fukuyama is a Japanese organic chemist and Professor of Chemistry at University of Tokyo in Japan. He discovered the Fukuyama coupling in 1998. Biography Fukuyama studied chemistry at Nagoya University with degrees Bachelor's and Master's degrees. As a graduate student, he then worked at Harvard University, where he received his doctorate in 1977 as an academic student of Yoshito Kishi. Until 1978, he continued his research as a postdoc in the Department of Chemistry of Harvard University and then moved to Rice University as an assistant professor, where in 1988 he obtained the rank of a chair holder.
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David Caminer
#16398
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
David Caminer OBE was a British computer engineer who helped to develop the world's first business computer, LEO . He has been called "the world's first corporate electronic systems analyst" and "the world's first software engineer". He carried out the systems analysis and charting for the world's first routine business computer job, thus he is also called "the first business application programmer".
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Marc Swartz
#16399
Overall Influence
1931 - 2011 (80 years)
Marc Jerome Swartz was an American political and cultural anthropologist specializing in eastern Africa. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Swartz trained in anthropology in the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations at Harvard, receiving his PhD in 1958.
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Guillermo Owen
#16400
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Guillermo Owen is a Colombian mathematician, and professor of applied mathematics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, known for his work in game theory. He is also the son of the Mexican Poet and Diplomat Gilberto Owen.
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Bharath Sriraman
#16401
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Bharath Sriraman is an Indian-born Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Montana – Missoula and an academic editor, known for his interdisciplinary contributions at the nexus of math-science-arts, theory development in mathematics education, creativity research, and gifted education.
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Ben Yagoda
#16402
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Ben Yagoda is an American writer and educator. He is a professor of journalism and English at the University of Delaware. Early life Born in New York City to Louis Yagoda , a labor mediator and arbitrator with the New York State Mediation Board, visiting lecturer at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and a former organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, and Harriet , he grew up in New Rochelle, New York. He entered Yale University to study English in 1971 and graduated in 1976 with a bachelor of arts. He later earned an M.A. in American civiliza...
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Lawrence Grossberg
#16403
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Lawrence Grossberg is an American scholar of cultural studies and popular culture whose work focuses primarily on popular music and the politics of youth in the United States. He is widely known for his research in the philosophy of communication and culture. Though his scholarship focused significantly throughout the 1980s and early 1990s on the politics of postmodernism, his more recent work explores the possibilities and limitations of alternative and emergent formations of modernity.
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Patrick Bond
#16404
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Patrick Bond is Distinguished Professor at the University of Johannesburg Department of Sociology, where he directs the Centre for Social Change. From 2020-21 he was professor at the University of the Western Cape School of Government and from 2015-19, distinguished professor of political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand Wits School of Governance. Before that, from 2004, he was senior professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where he directed the Centre for Civil Society. His research interests include political economy, environment, social policy, and geopolitics.
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Alice Shalvi
#16405
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Alice Shalvi was an Israeli professor and educator. She played a leading role in progressive Jewish education for girls and advancing the status of women. Biography Alice Hildegard Margulies was born in Essen, Germany, to an Orthodox Jewish family. Her parents, Benzion and Perl Margulies, were religious Zionists. Alice was the younger of two children. The family had a wholesale linen and housewares business.
Go to Profile#16395
Frederick Campion Steward
#16406
Overall Influence
1904 - 1993 (89 years)
Frederick Campion "Camp" Steward FRS was a British botanist and plant physiologist. Early life and education He was born in Pimlico, London, but brought up in Yorkshire. He was educated at Heckmondwike Grammar School and then attended the University of Leeds, where he gained a BSc in biology in 1924 and then undertook research in the botany department.
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Syd Field
#16407
Overall Influence
1935 - 2013 (78 years)
Sydney Alvin Field was an American author and speaker who wrote several books on screenwriting, the first being Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting . He led workshops and seminars about producing salable screenplays. Hollywood film producers use Field's ideas on structure to measure the potential of screenplays.
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Vitaly Korotich
#16408
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Vitaly Korotich is a Soviet, Ukrainian and Russian writer and journalist. Born in 1936 in Kyiv, he graduated from the Kyiv Medical University in 1959 and worked as a doctor between 1959 and 1966. Later, he became a full-time writer, and served as an officer of the Union of Soviet Writers.
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Christa Neuper
#16409
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Christa Neuper is a psychologist who graduated from the University of Graz. Christa Neuper was the first woman in the 426 years of history of the University of Graz to be its rector . After her doctorate in 1984, Neuper worked on the research and teaching at the Institute of Psychology, from the University of Graz and the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, from the Graz University of Technology. In 2002 Christa Neuper completed her free docency at the University of Graz, where in 2005 she was named professor of applied psychology and human-machine interfaces. Neuper was named in various man...
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Sonia Johnson
#16410
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Sonia Ann Johnson, is an American feminist activist and writer. She was an outspoken supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment and in the late 1970s was publicly critical of the position of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , of which she was a member, against the proposed amendment. She was eventually excommunicated from the church for her activities. She went on to publish several radical feminist books, ran for president in 1984, and become a popular feminist speaker.
Go to Profile#16400
Geoff Emerick
#16411
Overall Influence
1945 - 2018 (73 years)
Geoffrey Ernest Emerick was an English sound engineer and record producer who worked with the Beatles on their albums Revolver , Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road . Beatles producer George Martin credited him with bringing "a new kind of mind to the recordings, always suggesting sonic ideas, different kinds of reverb, what we could do with the voices".
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