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
#16451
Nigel Short
#16462
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Nigel David Short is an English chess grandmaster, columnist, coach and commentator who has been the FIDE Director for Chess Development since September 2022. Short earned the title of grandmaster at the age of 19 and was ranked third in the world by FIDE from July 1988 to July 1989. In 1993, he became the first English player to play a World Chess Championship match, when he qualified to play Garry Kasparov in the PCA world championship in London, where Kasparov won 12½ to 7½.
Go to Profile#16452
George R. R. Martin
#16463
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
George Raymond Richard Martin , also known as GRRM, is an American novelist, screenwriter, television producer and short story writer. He is the author of the series of epic fantasy novels A Song of Ice and Fire, which were adapted into the Emmy Award-winning HBO series Game of Thrones and its prequel series House of the Dragon . He also helped create the Wild Cards anthology series, and contributed worldbuilding for the 2022 video game Elden Ring.
Go to Profile#16453
Carl Pearcy
#16464
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Carl Mark Pearcy, Jr. is an American mathematician whose research has been concentrated on operator theory and operator algebras. He has coauthored several books, including "Introduction to operator theory I", Introduction to analysis", and "Measure and integration", all published by Springer and coauthored by Arlen Brown . Pearcy had 31 Ph. D. students at Michigan and TAMU , several of whom are outstanding mathematicians. Pearcy's bibliography contains more than 150 papers, and his research has concerned the invariant subspace problem and the theory of dual algebras.
Go to Profile#16454
Etta James
#16465
Overall Influence
1938 - 2012 (74 years)
Jamesetta Hawkins , known professionally as Etta James, was an American singer who performed in various genres, including gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, rock and roll, and soul. Starting her career in 1954, she gained fame with hits such as "The Wallflower", "At Last", "Tell Mama", "Something's Got a Hold on Me", and "I'd Rather Go Blind". She faced a number of personal problems, including heroin addiction, severe physical abuse, and incarceration, before making a musical comeback in the late 1980s with the album Seven Year Itch.
Go to Profile#16455
Eric Fischl
#16466
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Eric Fischl is an American painter, sculptor, printmaker, draughtsman and educator. He is known for his paintings depicting American suburbia from the 1970s and 1980s. Life Fischl was born in New York City and grew up on suburban Long Island; his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona, in 1967. His art education began at Phoenix College for two years, followed with studying at Arizona State University. Followed by studying at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, where he received a B.F.A. in 1972. He then moved to Chicago, taking a job as a guard at the Museum of Contempora...
Go to Profile#16456
Clark Glymour
#16467
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Clark N. Glymour is the Alumni University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also a senior research scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.
Go to Profile#16457
Haruo Hosoya
#16468
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Haruo Hosoya is a Japanese chemist and emeritus professor of Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, Japan. He is the namesake of the Hosoya index used in discrete mathematics and computational chemistry. Hosoya was born in Kamakura, Japan to a family of an office worker. During 1955-1959 he studied at the University of Tokyo. In 1964 he wrote his Ph.D. thesis, "Study on the Structure of Reactive Intermediates and Reaction Mechanism". After postdoc work abroad , in 1969 he became associate professor at the Ochanomizu University, where he worked for 33 years until his retirement in 2002. After retirement...
Go to Profile#16458
Naomi Sager
#16469
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Naomi Sager is an American computational linguistics research scientist. She is a former research professor at New York University, now retired. She is a pioneer in the development of natural language processing for computers.
Go to Profile#16459
Leila Araghian
#16470
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Leila Araghian is an Iranian architect. She has a master's degree in architecture from the University of British Columbia, where she won the UBC Architecture Alumni Henry Elder Prize. She previously studied architecture in Iran, at Shahid Beheshti University.
Go to Profile#16460
Imre Bárány
#16471
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Imre Bárány is a Hungarian mathematician, working in combinatorics and discrete geometry. He works at the Rényi Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and has a part-time appointment at University College London.
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Yoshinori Tokura
#16472
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
is a Japanese physicist, Professor at University of Tokyo and Director of Center for Emergent Matter Science at RIKEN. He is a specialist in physics of strongly correlated electron systems and known for his work in high-temperature superconductivity, Mott transition, colossal magnetoresistance, Multiferroics, and magnetic skyrmions.
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Sherwin Rosen
#16473
Overall Influence
1938 - 2001 (63 years)
Sherwin Rosen was an American labor economist. He had ties with many American universities and academic institutions including the University of Chicago, the University of Rochester, Stanford University and its Hoover Institution. At the time of his death, Rosen was Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago and president of the American Economic Association.
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William Happer
#16474
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
William Happer is an American physicist who has specialized in the study of atomic physics, optics and spectroscopy. He is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Princeton University, and a long-term member of the JASON advisory group, where he pioneered the development of adaptive optics. From 1991 to 1993, Happer served as director of the Department of Energy's Office of Science as part of the George H.W. Bush administration. He was dismissed from the Department of Energy in 1993 by the Clinton Administration after disagreements on the ozone hole.
Go to Profile#16464
Kenny Loggins
#16475
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Kenneth Clark Loggins is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter. His early songs were recorded with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in 1970, which led to seven albums recorded with Jim Messina as Loggins and Messina from 1972 to 1977. His early soundtrack contributions date back to A Star Is Born in 1976, and he is known as the King of the Movie Soundtrack. As a solo artist, Loggins experienced a string of soundtrack successes, including an Academy Award nomination for "Footloose" in 1985. Finally Home was released in 2013, shortly after Loggins formed the group Blue Sky Riders with Gary Burr and Georgia Middleman.
Go to Profile#16465
Joel Hedgpeth
#16476
Overall Influence
1911 - 2006 (95 years)
Joel Walker Hedgpeth was a marine biologist, environmentalist and author. He was an expert on the marine arthropods known as sea spiders , and on the seashore plant and animal life of southern and northern California. He was a spokesperson for care for the floral and faunal diversity of the California coastline.
Go to Profile#16466
Sargur Srihari
#16477
Overall Influence
1950 - 2022 (72 years)
Sargur Narasimhamurthy Srihari was an Indian and American computer scientist and educator who made contributions to the field of pattern recognition. The principal impact of his work has been in handwritten address reading systems and in computer forensics. He was a SUNY Distinguished Professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA.
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Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
#16478
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management at Yale School of Management, and Senior Associate Dean for Leadership Studies. Sonnenfeld is best known as the founder and CEO of Chief Executive Leadership Institute , affiliated with Yale University.
Go to Profile#16468
Rod Stewart
#16479
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Sir Roderick David Stewart is a British rock and pop singer and songwriter. Born and raised in London, he is of Scottish and English ancestry. With his distinctive raspy singing voice, Stewart is among the best-selling music artists of all time, having sold more than 120 million records worldwide. He has had 10 number-one albums and 31 top-ten singles in the UK, six of which reached number one. Stewart has had 16 top-ten singles in the US, with four reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100. He was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to music and charity.
Go to Profile#16469
Duran Bell
#16480
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Duran Bell, Jr. is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California, Irvine. He was formerly a professor there in two departments, Economics and Anthropology. Education and early career Bell received his B.A. in economics in 1960 and his Ph.D. in agricultural economics in 1965, both from the University of California, Berkeley. He then joined the faculty in the Economics department at the University of California, Irvine in 1965.
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Suzanne Farrell
#16481
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Suzanne Farrell is an American ballerina and the founder of the Suzanne Farrell Ballet at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Farrell began her ballet training at the age of eight. In 1960, she received a scholarship to the School of American Ballet. Her first leading roles in ballets came in the early 1960s. A muse of George Balanchine, she left the New York City Ballet in 1969 and subsequently moved to Brussels to dance for Maurice Bejart's Ballet of the 20th Century.
Go to Profile#16471
Bazaryn Shirendev
#16482
Overall Influence
1912 - 2001 (89 years)
Bazaryn Shirendev was a Mongolian historian and politician. He was a member of the Central Committee of the ruling Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party from 1947 to 1982 and a member of its Politburo from 1954 to 1958. He was the first president of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences from 1961 to 1982, when he was ousted by leader Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal. Shirendev wrote official histories of Mongolia, including History of the Mongolian People's Revolution and Bypassing Capitalism.
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Roger Wilkins
#16483
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Roger Wood Wilkins was an American lawyer, civil rights leader, professor of history, and journalist who served as the 15th United States Assistant Attorney General under President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1969.
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Janet Finch
#16484
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Dame Janet Valerie Finch DBE, DL, FAcSS is a British sociologist and academic administrator. She was Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Social Relations at Keele University, and has held a number of other public appointments in the UK. She currently holds an honorary position at the Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life, based in the School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester. She is also part of Flooved advisory board.
Go to Profile#16474
Jonathan Hopkin
#16485
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Jonathan Hopkin is Professor in the European Institute and the Department of Government of the London School of Economics and Political Science. He obtained a PhD at the European University Institute in Florence, and lectured at the Universities of Bradford, Durham and Birmingham, joining LSE in 2004. He teaches comparative politics and political economy, and has published in the areas of political parties and elections, political economy, inequality and welfare states.
Go to Profile#16475
Arthur Harold Stone
#16486
Overall Influence
1916 - 2000 (84 years)
Arthur Harold Stone was a British mathematician born in London, who worked at the universities of Manchester and Rochester, mostly in topology. His wife was American mathematician Dorothy Maharam. Stone studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. His first paper dealt with squaring the square, he proved the Erdős–Stone theorem with Paul Erdős and is credited with the discovery of the first two flexagons, a trihexaflexagon and a hexahexaflexagon while he was a student at Princeton University in 1939. His Ph.D. thesis, Connectedness and Coherence, was written in 1941 under the direction of Solomon Lefschetz.
Go to Profile#16476
Frank L. Schmidt
#16487
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Frank L. Schmidt was an American psychology professor at the University of Iowa known for his work in personnel selection and employment testing. Schmidt was a researcher in the area of industrial and organizational psychology with the most number of publications in the two major journals in the 1980s. In the 1990s he was the 4th most published researcher in Journal of Applied Psychology and Personnel Psychology , the two principal publications in the field of industrial-organizational psychology. He was also winner of the first Dunnette Prize, the most prestigious lifetime achievement award...
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Dinara Safina
#16488
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Dinara Mubinovna Safina is a Russian former world No. 1 tennis player. Safina was runner-up in singles at the 2008 French Open, 2009 Australian Open, and the 2009 French Open. She had even greater success at major events in doubles, winning the 2007 US Open with Nathalie Dechy. She also won the Olympic silver medal in women's singles at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
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Brad Bushman
#16489
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Brad J. Bushman is the Margaret Hall and Robert Randal Rinehart Chair of Mass Communication Professor at Ohio State University. He also has an appointment in psychology. He has published extensively on the causes and consequences of human aggression. His work has questioned the utility of catharsis, and relates also to violent video game effects on aggression. Along with Roy Baumeister, his work suggests that it is narcissism, not low self-esteem, that causes people to act more aggressively after an insult. Bushman's research has been featured in Newsweek, on the CBS Evening News, on 20/20, and on National Public Radio.
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Jean Seaton
#16490
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Jean Seaton is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster and the Official Historian of the BBC. She is the Director of the Orwell Prize and on the editorial board of Political Quarterly. She is the widow of Ben Pimlott, the British historian.
Go to Profile#16480
Radha Balakrishnan
#16491
Overall Influence
Radha Balakrishnan is an Indian theoretical physicist. She is a retired professor at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, India. After her early work in condensed matter physics on quantum crystals, she switched fields to nonlinear dynamics and has published research papers on a variety of topics.
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Muttiah Muralitharan
#16492
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Deshabandu Muttiah Muralitharan , also spelt Muralidaran and often referred to as Murali is a Sri Lankan cricket coach, former professional cricketer, businessman and a member of the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame. Averaging over six wickets per Test match, He is widely regarded as one of the greatest bowlers in the history of the sport. He is the only bowler to take 800 Test wickets and more than 530 One Day International wickets. , he has taken more wickets in international cricket than any other bowler. Muralitharan was a part of the Sri Lankan team that won the 1996 Cricket World Cup.
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Gilles Dreyfus
#16493
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Gilles Dreyfus is a French cardiac surgeon. Education Gilles Dreyfus graduated from the Medical Faculty of Paris . From 1978 to 1983 he was Resident in cardiac surgery at the Hôpitaux de Paris, where he was trained in adult and congenital cardiac surgery guided by Professors Binet, Dubost, Guilmet and Neveux.
Go to Profile#16483
Daniel Siewiorek
#16494
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Daniel P. Siewiorek is an American computer engineer and computer scientist, currently the Buhl University Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
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Nicolas Mahut
#16495
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Nicolas Pierre Armand Mahut is a French professional tennis player who is a former world No. 1 in doubles. He is a five-time Grand Slam champion in doubles, having completed the career Grand Slam with victories at the 2015 US Open, 2016 Wimbledon Championships, 2018 French Open, and 2019 Australian Open, all partnering Pierre-Hugues Herbert. The pair also won the 2021 French Open and finished runners-up at the 2015 Australian Open, and Mahut was runner-up at the 2013 French Open and 2019 Wimbledon Championships, with Michaël Llodra and Édouard Roger-Vasselin respectively. Mahut became world No.
Go to Profile#16485
Vince Gill
#16496
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Vincent Grant Gill is an American country music singer, songwriter and musician. He has achieved commercial success and fame both as frontman of the country rock band Pure Prairie League in the 1970s and as a solo artist beginning in 1983, where his talents as a vocalist and musician have placed him in high demand as a guest vocalist and a duet partner.
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Aron Katsenelinboigen
#16497
Overall Influence
1927 - 2005 (78 years)
Aron Iosifovich Katsenelinboigen was a founder of predispositioning theory, a subject in decision theory and systems theory that models development in the context of uncertainty. Career Katsenelinboigen was born in Izyaslavl in the Ukrainian SSR. At fourteen, he enrolled at the Uzbekistan Institute of Economics, transferring four years later, in 1945, to the Moscow State Institute of Economics. There he graduated the following year and spent a further three years pursuing post-graduate work. He received a PhD in Economics in 1957 and became a Doctor of Economic Science in 1966.
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Ferdinand Lundberg
#16498
Overall Influence
1905 - 1995 (90 years)
Ferdinand Lundberg was an American journalist and historian known for his frequent and potent criticism of American financial and political institutions. His work has been credited as an influence on Robert Caro, Ralph Nader and others.
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Mike McCarthy
#16499
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Michael John McCarthy is an American football coach who is the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League . From 2006 to 2018, he was the head coach of the Green Bay Packers. In 2011, he led the team to a win in Super Bowl XLV over his hometown Pittsburgh Steelers. He was previously the offensive coordinator for the San Francisco 49ers and New Orleans Saints.
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Alan Rickman
#16500
Overall Influence
1946 - 2016 (70 years)
Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman was an English actor and director. Known for his distinctive deep, languid voice, he trained at RADA in London and became a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company , performing in modern and classical theatre productions. He played the Vicomte de Valmont in the RSC stage production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1985, and after the production transferred to the West End in 1986 and Broadway in 1987, he was nominated for a Tony Award.
Go to Profile#16490
Pavel Tichý
#16501
Overall Influence
1936 - 1994 (58 years)
Pavel Tichý was a Czech logician, philosopher and mathematician. He worked in the field of intensional logic and founded transparent intensional logic, an original theory of the logical analysis of natural languages – the theory is devoted to the problem of saying exactly what it is that we learn, know and can communicate when we come to understand what a sentence means. He spent roughly 25 years working on it. His main work is a book The Foundations of Frege's Logic, published by Walter de Gruyter in 1988.
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Paul Ginsborg
#16502
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
Paul Anthony Ginsborg was a British historian. In the 1980s, he was Professor at the University of Siena; from 1992, he was Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Florence. Education and activism Ginsborg was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Queens' College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a BA degree in History in 1966. He was a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. With Pancho Pardi, he opposed Silvio Berlusconi's justice reforms, and campaigned alongside the girotondi movement.
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Samuel L. Stanley
#16503
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Samuel L. Stanley Jr. is an American educator and biomedical researcher. He was the President of Michigan State University from 2019 until November 2022, and he was the President of Stony Brook University from 2009 to 2019. Stanley is one of the founding directors of the Midwest Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases Research.
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Konstantin Batygin
#16504
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Konstantin Batygin is an American astronomer and Professor of Planetary Sciences at Caltech. Early life Konstantin Batygin was born in Moscow, Soviet Union. His father, Yuri Konstantinovich Batygin, worked as an accelerator physicist in the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute until 1994, when he moved along with his wife Galina and their family to Wakō, Japan, and began working at the particle accelerator facility in RIKEN. There, Konstantin graduated from a public Japanese elementary school, later attending a Russian embassy-based school and studying the martial art Gōjū-ryū.
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Boomer Esiason
#16505
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Norman Julius "Boomer" Esiason is an American former football quarterback who played in the National Football League for 14 seasons, primarily with the Cincinnati Bengals. He was selected in the second round of the 1984 NFL Draft by the Bengals, where he spent 10 non-consecutive seasons. Esiason was also a member of the New York Jets and Arizona Cardinals.
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Sara Ruddick
#16506
Overall Influence
1935 - 2011 (76 years)
Sara Ruddick was a feminist philosopher and the author of Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Education and career Ruddick earned a B.A. at Vassar College in 1957 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1964. She taught philosophy and women's studies at the New School of Social Research for forty years. She was awarded the Distinguished Woman Philosopher of the Year Award by the Society for Women in Philosophy in 2002. A panel celebrating her work was held at the American Philosophical Association meeting in San Diego in 2012. She participated in the oral history project, Femini...
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Kenji Kosaka
#16507
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
was a Japanese psychiatrist, known for his pioneer research on Dementia with Lewy bodies , which he first described. Life and career Kosaka was born in Ise, Mie, and completed his M.D. in 1965 from Kanazawa University. He was appointed a professor of psychiatry at Yokohama City University School of Medicine in 1991, before becoming a director of Yokohama City University Medical Center in 1995. He was a director of Medical Care Court Clinic in Yokohama since 2011.
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Janet Taylor Spence
#16508
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Janet Allison Taylor Spence was an American psychologist who worked in the field of the psychology of anxiety and in gender studies. Early life Spence was born on August 29, 1923, in Toledo, Ohio. She was the older of two daughters. Her sister was born in 1927. Her father, John Chrichton, and her mother, Helen Taylor, were both active members of their community. Janet Taylor Spence's parents met in New York where John was working as a reporter and Helen was studying for a master's degree in economics at Columbia University. John joined the school board after running for governor, and Helen w...
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Karen L. Carr
#16509
Overall Influence
Karen Leslie Carr is an American scholar and McNaughton Rosebush Professor of Liberal Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at Lawrence University. She is known for her works on nihilism and philosophy of religion.
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Robert S. Strauss
#16510
Overall Influence
1918 - 2014 (96 years)
Robert Schwarz Strauss was an influential figure in American politics, diplomacy, and law whose service dated back to future President Lyndon Johnson's first congressional campaign in 1937. By the 1950s, he was associated in Texas politics with the faction of the Democratic Party that was led by Johnson and John Connally. He served as the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee between 1972 and 1977 and served under President Jimmy Carter as the U.S. Trade Representative and special envoy to the Middle East. He later served as the Ambassador to Russia under President George H.W. Bush. S...
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Peter Donnelly
#16511
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Sir Peter James Donnelly is an Australian-British mathematician and Professor of Statistical Science at the University of Oxford, and the CEO of Genomics PLC. He is a specialist in applied probability and has made contributions to coalescent theory. His research group at Oxford has an international reputation for the development of statistical methodology to analyze genetic data.
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