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
#1651
Randy Pausch
#1653
Overall Influence
1960 - 2008 (48 years)
Randolph Frederick Pausch was an American educator, a professor of computer science, human–computer interaction, and design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pausch learned he had pancreatic cancer in September 2006. In August 2007, he was given a terminal diagnosis: "three to six months of good health left". He gave an upbeat lecture titled, "The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" on September 18, 2007 at Carnegie Mellon, which became a popular YouTube video and led to other media appearances. He co-authored a book of the same name, The Last Lect...
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Ervand Abrahamian
#1654
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Ervand Abrahamian is an Iranian-American historian of the Middle East. He is Distinguished Professor of History at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is widely regarded as one of the leading historians of modern Iran.
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Alexander Rosenberg
#1655
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Alexander Rosenberg is an American philosopher and novelist. He is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, well known for contributions to philosophy of biology and philosophy of economics.
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David Parnas
#1656
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
#1655
Ethel Kennedy
#1657
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Ethel Kennedy is an American human rights advocate. She is the widow of U.S. senator Robert F. Kennedy, a sister-in-law of President John F. Kennedy, and the sixth child of George and Ann Skakel. Shortly after her husband's 1968 assassination, Kennedy founded the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, a non-profit charity working to reach his goal of a just and peaceful world. In 2014, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. She is the oldest living member of the Kennedy Family.
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Amos Oz
#1658
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Amos Oz was an Israeli writer, novelist, journalist, and intellectual. He was also a professor of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. From 1967 onwards, Oz was a prominent advocate of a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
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Atul Gawande
#1659
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Atul Atmaram Gawande is an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In public health, he is executive director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit that works on reducing deaths in surgery globally. On June 20, 2018, Gawande was n...
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Max More
#1660
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Max More is a philosopher and futurist who writes, speaks, and consults on advanced decision-making about emerging technologies. He is the current Ambassador and President Emeritus after serving almost nine and a half years as president and CEO of Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
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Deborah Lipstadt
#1661
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Deborah Esther Lipstadt is an American historian and diplomat, best known as author of the books Denying the Holocaust , History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier , The Eichmann Trial , and Antisemitism: Here and Now . She has served as the United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism since May 3, 2022. Since 1993 she has been the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US.
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Emmanuel Macron
#1662
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron is a French politician who has been President of France since 2017. Macron is ex officio one of the two Co-Princes of Andorra. He previously was Minister of Economics, Industry and Digital Affairs under President François Hollande from 2014 to 2016, and as Deputy Secretary-General to the President from 2012 to 2014. He is a founding member of Renaissance.
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Cliff Shaw
#1663
Overall Influence
1922 - 1991 (69 years)
John Clifford Shaw was a systems programmer at the RAND Corporation. He is a coauthor of the first artificial intelligence program, the Logic Theorist, and was one of the developers of General Problem Solver and Information Processing Language . Information Processing Language is considered the true "father" of the JOSS language. One of the most significant events that occurred in the programming was the development of the concept of list processing by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon and Cliff Shaw during the development of the language IPL-V. He invented the linked list, which remains fundam...
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Michael Behe
#1664
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Michael Joseph Behe is an American biochemist and an advocate of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design . He serves as professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and as a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. Behe advocates for the validity of the argument for irreducible complexity , which claims that some biochemical structures are too complex to be explained by known evolutionary mechanisms and are therefore probably the result of intelligent design. Behe has testified in several court cases related to intelligent design, including the court case Kitzmiller v.
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John Dinges
#1665
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
John Dinges is an American journalist. He was special correspondent for Time, Washington Post and ABC Radio in Chile. With a group of Chilean journalists, he cofounded the Chilean magazine APSI. He is the Godfrey Lowell Cabot Professor of International Journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, a position he held from 1996 to 2016, currently with emeritus status.
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Mohamed M. Atalla
#1666
Overall Influence
1924 - 2009 (85 years)
Mohamed M. Atalla was an Egyptian-American engineer, physicist, cryptographer, inventor and entrepreneur. He was a semiconductor pioneer who made important contributions to modern electronics. He is best known for the inventing the MOSFET in 1959 , which along with Atalla's earlier surface passivation processes, had a significant impact on the development of the electronics industry. He is also known as the founder of the data security company Atalla Corporation , founded in 1972. He received the Stuart Ballantine Medal and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his impor...
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Bruce Swedien
#1667
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Bruce Swedien ; April 19, 1934 – November 16, 2020 Swedien first achieved widespread recognition as engineer with Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons' 1962 single "Big Girls Don't Cry" which sold over one million copies and stayed at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for five weeks.
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Walter J. Ong
#1668
Overall Influence
1912 - 2003 (91 years)
Walter Jackson Ong was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian, and philosopher. His major interest was in exploring how the transition from orality to literacy influenced culture and changed human consciousness. In 1978 he served as elected president of the Modern Language Association.
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Jeffrey Eugenides
#1669
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American author. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides , Middlesex , and The Marriage Plot . The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of a feature film, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.
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Ulrich Beck
#1670
Overall Influence
1944 - 2015 (71 years)
Ulrich Beck was a German sociologist, and one of the most cited social scientists in the world during his lifetime. His work focused on questions of uncontrollability, ignorance and uncertainty in the modern age, and he coined the terms "risk society" and "second modernity" or "reflexive modernization". He also tried to overturn national perspectives that predominated in sociological investigations with a cosmopolitanism that acknowledges the interconnectedness of the modern world. He was a professor at the University of Munich and also held appointments at the Fondation Maison des Sciences d...
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Anatoly Fomenko
#1671
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko is a mathematician, professor at Moscow State University, well-known as a topologist, and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is the author of a fictitious pseudoscientific history known as New Chronology, based on works of Russian-Soviet writer Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov. He is also a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences .
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Julian Bond
#1672
Overall Influence
1940 - 2015 (75 years)
Horace Julian Bond was an American social activist, leader of the civil rights movement, politician, professor, and writer. While he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during the early 1960s, he helped establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee . In 1971, he co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, and served as its first president for nearly a decade.
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Genichi Taguchi
#1673
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
Genichi Taguchi was an engineer and statistician. From the 1950s on, Taguchi developed a methodology for applying statistics to improve the quality of manufactured goods. Taguchi methods have been controversial among some conventional Western statisticians, but others have accepted many of the concepts introduced by him as valid extensions to the body of knowledge.
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Jake Tapper
#1674
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Jacob Paul Tapper is an American journalist, author, and cartoonist. He is the lead Washington anchor for CNN, hosts the weekday television news show The Lead with Jake Tapper, and co-hosts the Sunday morning public affairs program State of the Union.
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Claudia Schiffer
#1675
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Claudia Maria Schiffer is a German model and actress based in England. She rose to fame in the 1990s as one of the world's most successful models, attaining supermodel status. In her early career, she was compared to Brigitte Bardot.
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Ali Khamenei
#1676
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei , mostly known as Ali Khamenei , is a Twelver Shia marja' and the second and current supreme leader of Iran, in office since 1989. Previously, he was the third president of Iran from 1981 to 1989. Khamenei is the longest-serving head of state in the Middle East, as well as the second-longest-serving Iranian leader of the last century, after Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
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Samuel Rahbar
#1677
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Samuel Rahbar was an Iranian scientist who discovered the linkage between diabetes and HbA1C, a form of hemoglobin used primarily to identify plasma glucose concentration over time. Rahbar was born into a Jewish family in the Iranian city of Hamedan in 1929. He obtained his MD degree from the University of Tehran in 1953 and a PhD degree in immunology from the same university in 1963.
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Arsène Wenger
#1678
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Arsène Charles Ernest Wenger is a French former football manager and player who is currently serving as FIFA's Chief of Global Football Development. He was the manager of Arsenal from 1996 to 2018, where he was the longest-serving and most successful in the club's history. His contribution to English football through changes to scouting, players' training, and diet regimens revitalised Arsenal and aided the globalisation of the sport in the 21st century.
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Maulana Karenga
#1679
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga , previously known as Ron Karenga, is an American activist, author and professor of Africana studies, best known as the creator of the pan-African and African-American holiday of Kwanzaa.
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Robert Serber
#1680
Overall Influence
1909 - 1997 (88 years)
Robert Serber was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project. Serber's lectures explaining the basic principles and goals of the project were printed and supplied to all incoming scientific staff, and became known as The Los Alamos Primer. The New York Times called him “the intellectual midwife at the birth of the atomic bomb.”
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Peter T. Kirstein
#1681
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Peter Thomas Kirstein was a British computer scientist who played a role in the creation of the Internet. He made the first internetworking connection on the ARPANET in 1973, by providing a link to British academic networks, and was instrumental in defining and implementing TCP/IP alongside Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn.
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Jürgen Moltmann
#1682
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Jürgen Moltmann is a German Reformed theologian who is Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at the University of Tübingen and is known for his books such as the Theology of Hope, The Crucified God, God in Creation and other contributions to systematic theology. Jürgen Moltmann is the husband of Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, a notable feminist theologian. Jürgen Moltmann described his own theology as an extension of Karl Barth's theological works, especially the Church Dogmatics, and he has described his own work as Post-Barthian. He has received honorary doctorates from a number of institut...
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Jeffrey Toobin
#1683
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Jeffrey Ross Toobin is an American lawyer, author, blogger, and former legal analyst for CNN. During the Iran–Contra affair, Toobin served as an associate counsel on its investigation at the Department of Justice. He moved from government and the practice of law into full-time writing during the 1990s, when he published his first books. He wrote for The New Yorker from 1993 to 2020. He was fired that fall for masturbating on-camera during a Zoom video conference call with co-workers—according to him, believing that his camera was off. He continued to serve as legal analyst for CNN for two yea...
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Julian Rotter
#1684
Overall Influence
1916 - 2014 (98 years)
Julian B. Rotter was an American psychologist known for developing social learning theory and research into locus of control. He was a faculty member at Ohio State University and then the University of Connecticut. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Rotter as the 64th most eminent and 18th most widely cited psychologist of the 20th century. A 2014 study published in 2014 placed at #54 among psychologists whose careers spanned the post-World War II era.
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Theodore Schultz
#1685
Overall Influence
1902 - 1998 (96 years)
Theodore William Schultz was an American Agricultural economist and chairman of the University of Chicago Department of Economics. Schultz rose to national prominence after winning the 1979 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
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Jon Postel
#1686
Overall Influence
1943 - 1998 (55 years)
Jonathan Bruce Postel was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment document series, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol , and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority until his death. During his lifetime he was referred to as the "god of the Internet" for his comprehensive influence; Postel himself noted that this "compliment" came with a barb, the suggestion that he should be replaced by a "professio...
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Rudolf Nureyev
#1687
Overall Influence
1938 - 1993 (55 years)
Rudolf Khametovich Nureyev was a Soviet-born ballet dancer and choreographer. Nureyev is regarded by some as the greatest male ballet dancer of his generation. Nureyev was born on a Trans-Siberian train near Irkutsk, Siberia, Soviet Union, to a Tatar family. He began his early career with the company that in the Soviet era was called the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad. He defected from the Soviet Union to the West in 1961, despite KGB efforts to stop him. This was the first defection of a Soviet artist during the Cold War, and it created an international sensation. He went on to dance with The Royal Ballet in London and from 1983 to 1989 served as director of the Paris Opera Ballet.
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Elliott Sober
#1688
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Elliott R. Sober is Hans Reichenbach Professor and William F. Vilas Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at University of Wisconsin–Madison. Sober is noted for his work in philosophy of biology and general philosophy of science.
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Peter Sloterdijk
#1689
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher and cultural theorist. He is a professor of philosophy and media theory at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe. He co-hosted the German television show Im Glashaus: Das Philosophische Quartett from 2002 until 2012.
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Tetsuya Nomura
#1690
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Tetsuya Nomura is a Japanese video game artist, designer, producer and director working for Square Enix . He was hired by Square initially as a monster designer for Final Fantasy V , before being shifted towards secondary character designer alongside Yoshitaka Amano for Final Fantasy VI . Final Fantasy VII had him working in the original story alongside Hironobu Sakaguchi, and marked his debut as the lead character designer, a capacity he would retain for several future installments of the series, as well as other Square Enix titles such as The Bouncer and The World Ends with You.
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Grigory Margulis
#1691
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Grigory Aleksandrovich Margulis is a Russian-American mathematician known for his work on lattices in Lie groups, and the introduction of methods from ergodic theory into diophantine approximation. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1978, a Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 2005, and an Abel Prize in 2020, becoming the fifth mathematician to receive the three prizes. In 1991, he joined the faculty of Yale University, where he is currently the Erastus L. De Forest Professor of Mathematics.
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Robert D. Hare
#1692
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Robert D. Hare is a Canadian forensic psychologist, known for his research in the field of criminal psychology. He is a professor emeritus of the University of British Columbia where he specializes in psychopathology and psychophysiology.
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Harvey Mansfield
#1693
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Harvey Claflin Mansfield Jr. is an American political philosopher. He was the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he taught since 1962. He has held Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships and has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center; he also received the National Humanities Medal in 2004 and delivered the Jefferson Lecture in 2007. He is a Carol G. Simon Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is notable for his generally conservative stance on political issues in his writings.
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Jaakko Hintikka
#1694
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka was a Finnish philosopher and logician. Hintikka is regarded as the founder of formal epistemic logic and of game semantics for logic. Life and career Hintikka was born in Helsingin maalaiskunta .
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Frederick Reines
#1695
Overall Influence
1918 - 1998 (80 years)
Frederick Reines was an American physicist. He was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for his co-detection of the neutrino with Clyde Cowan in the neutrino experiment. He may be the only scientist in history "so intimately associated with the discovery of an elementary particle and the subsequent thorough investigation of its fundamental properties."
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Hendrik Casimir
#1696
Overall Influence
1909 - 2000 (91 years)
Hendrik Brugt Gerhard Casimir was a Dutch physicist who made significant contributions to the field of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He is best known for his work on the Casimir effect, which describes the attractive force between two uncharged plates in a vacuum due to quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field.
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H. Robert Horvitz
#1697
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
H. Robert Horvitz is a professor of biology and member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, chair of the Board of Trustees of the Society for Science & the Public, and a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival’s Advisory Board. He studied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University. He completed his postdoctoral studies at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Horvitz is best known for his work researching the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans.
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Stanley Norman Cohen
#1698
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Stanley Norman Cohen is an American geneticist and the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in the Stanford University School of Medicine. Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetical engineering. Thousands of products have been developed on the basis of their work, including human growth hormone and hepatitis B vaccine. According to immunologist Hugh McDevitt, "Cohen's DNA cloning technology has helped biologists in virtually every field". Without it, "the face of biomedicine and biotechnology woul...
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Paul Benacerraf
#1699
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Paul Joseph Salomon Benacerraf is a French-born American philosopher working in the field of the philosophy of mathematics who taught at Princeton University his entire career, from 1960 until his retirement in 2007. He was appointed Stuart Professor of Philosophy in 1974, and retired as the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy.
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Steven Novella
#1700
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Steven Paul Novella is an American clinical neurologist and associate professor at Yale University School of Medicine. Novella is best known for his involvement in the skeptical movement as a host of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast and as the president of the New England Skeptical Society. He is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry .
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David Spade
#1701
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
David Wayne Spade is an American actor, stand-up comedian, writer, producer, and television host. After several years as a stand-up comedian, Spade rose to prominence as a writer and cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 1990 to 1996. Following his departure from SNL, he began an acting career in both film and television, starring or co-starring in the films Tommy Boy , Black Sheep , Senseless , Joe Dirt , Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star , The Benchwarmers , Grown Ups and its 2013 sequel, The Ridiculous 6 , The Do-Over , and The Wrong Missy .
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Charles Bachman
#1702
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Charles William Bachman III was an American computer scientist, who spent his entire career as an industrial researcher, developer, and manager rather than in academia. He was particularly known for his work in the early development of database management systems. His techniques of layered architecture include his namesake Bachman diagrams.
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