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
#1701
Hugo Chávez
#1703
Overall Influence
1954 - 2013 (59 years)
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías was a Venezuelan politician and military officer who served as president of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, except for a brief period of forty-seven hours in 2002. Chávez was also leader of the Fifth Republic Movement political party from its foundation in 1997 until 2007, when it merged with several other parties to form the United Socialist Party of Venezuela , which he led until 2012.
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Abhay Ashtekar
#1704
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Abhay Vasant Ashtekar is an Indian theoretical physicist who created Ashtekar variables and is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity and its subfield loop quantum cosmology. Ashtekar has also written a number of descriptions of loop quantum gravity that are accessible to non-physicists. He is an Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Physics and former Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University.
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Rod Rosenstein
#1705
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Rod Jay Rosenstein is an American attorney who served as the 37th United States deputy attorney general from April 2017 until May 2019. Prior to his appointment, he served as a United States attorney for the District of Maryland. At the time of his confirmation as deputy attorney general in April 2017, he was the longest-serving U.S. attorney. Rosenstein had also been nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 2007, but his nomination was never considered by the U.S. Senate.
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Bill Hayden
#1706
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
William George Hayden was an Australian politician who served as the 21st governor-general of Australia from 1989 to 1996. He was Leader of the Labor Party and Leader of the Opposition from 1977 to 1983, and served as Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade from 1983 to 1988 under Bob Hawke and as Treasurer of Australia in 1975 under Gough Whitlam.
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Robert Wilson
#1707
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robert Wilson is an American experimental theater stage director and playwright who has been described by The New York Times as "[America]'s – or even the world's – foremost vanguard 'theater artist. He has also worked as a choreographer, performer, painter, sculptor, video artist, and sound and lighting designer.
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Takashi Murakami
#1708
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
is a Japanese contemporary artist. He works in fine arts as well as commercial media and is known for blurring the line between high and low arts. His influential work draws from the aesthetic characteristics of the Japanese artistic tradition and the nature of postwar Japanese culture.
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Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex
#1709
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, is a member of the British royal family. As the younger son of King Charles III and Diana, Princess of Wales, Harry is fifth in the line of succession to the British throne.
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Adrienne Clarkson
#1710
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Adrienne Louise Clarkson is a Hong Kong-born Canadian journalist who served from 1999 to 2005 as Governor General of Canada, the 26th since Canadian Confederation. Clarkson arrived in Canada with her family in 1941, as a refugee from Japanese-occupied Hong Kong, and was raised in Ottawa. After receiving a number of university degrees, Clarkson worked as a producer and broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and a journalist for various magazines. Her first diplomatic posting came in the early 1980s, when she promoted Ontarian culture in France and other European countries. In ...
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Michael Barkun
#1711
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Michael Barkun is an American academic who serves as Professor Emeritus of political science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, specializing in political and religious extremism and the relationship between religion and violence. He has authored a number of books on the subject, including Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement , A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America , and Chasing Phantoms: Reality, Imagination, and Homeland Security Since 9/11 .
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John E. Douglas
#1712
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
John Edward Douglas is an American retired special agent and unit chief in the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation . He was one of the first criminal profilers and has written and co-written books on criminal psychology, true crime novels, and his biography.
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Finn E. Kydland
#1713
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Finn Erling Kydland is a Norwegian economist known for his contributions to business cycle theory. He is the Henley Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He also holds the Richard P. Simmons Distinguished Professorship at the Tepper School of Business of Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned his PhD, and a part-time position at the Norwegian School of Economics . Kydland was a co-recipient of the 2004 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, with Edward C. Prescott, "for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and...
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Preet Bharara
#1714
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
#1713
Robert Cailliau
#1715
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Robert Cailliau is a Belgian informatics engineer who proposed the first hypertext system for CERN in 1987 and collaborated with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web from before it got its name. He designed the historical logo of the WWW, organized the first International World Wide Web Conference at CERN in 1994 and helped transfer Web development from CERN to the global Web consortium in 1995. He is listed as co-author of How the Web Was Born by James Gillies, the first book-length account of the origins of the World Wide Web.
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Richard Wollheim
#1716
Overall Influence
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
Richard Arthur Wollheim was a British philosopher noted for original work on mind and emotions, especially as related to the visual arts, specifically, painting. Wollheim served as the president of the British Society of Aesthetics from 1992 onwards until his death in 2003.
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John O'Keefe
#1717
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
John O'Keefe, is an American-British neuroscientist, psychologist and a professor at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour and the Research Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at University College London. He discovered place cells in the hippocampus, and that they show a specific kind of temporal coding in the form of theta phase precession. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014, together with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser; he has received several other awards. He has worked at University College London for his entire career, but a...
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John Kalodner
#1718
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
John David Kalodner is a retired American A&R executive. History John David Kalodner was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was a writer and photographer at Concert magazine. He went on to be a photographer for various record labels by 1972, as well as being a freelance music writer and photographer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He wanted to be in the record industry and was first noticed and hired as a publicist in 1974 by Atlantic Records executive Earl McGrath. His initial role at Atlantic was as a writer and photographer, while he continued to review concerts on the weekend for the ...
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Peter Hacker
#1719
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Peter Michael Stephan Hacker is a British philosopher. His principal expertise is in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophical anthropology. He is known for his detailed exegesis and interpretation of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, his critique of cognitive neuroscience, and for his comprehensive studies of human nature.
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George E. P. Box
#1720
Overall Influence
1919 - 2013 (94 years)
George Edward Pelham Box was a British statistician, who worked in the areas of quality control, time-series analysis, design of experiments, and Bayesian inference. He has been called "one of the great statistical minds of the 20th century".
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Harry Frankfurt
#1721
Overall Influence
1929 - 2023 (94 years)
Harry Gordon Frankfurt was an American philosopher. He was a professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, where he taught from 1990 until 2002. Frankfurt also taught at Yale University, Rockefeller University, and Ohio State University.
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O. J. Simpson
#1722
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Orenthal James Simpson is an American former football running back, actor, and broadcaster. He played in the National Football League for 11 seasons, primarily with the Buffalo Bills, and is regarded as one of the greatest running backs of all time. Once a popular figure with the American public, Simpson's professional success was overshadowed by his trial and controversial acquittal for the murders of his former wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman.
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Noga Alon
#1723
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Noga Alon is an Israeli mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Princeton University noted for his contributions to combinatorics and theoretical computer science, having authored hundreds of papers.
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Philip Candelas
#1724
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Philip Candelas, is a British physicist and mathematician. After 20 years at the University of Texas at Austin, he served as Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford until 2020 and is a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford.
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Stanley G. Payne
#1725
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Stanley George Payne is an American historian of modern Spain and European Fascism at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He retired from full-time teaching in 2004 and is currently Professor Emeritus at its Department of History.
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William Colby
#1726
Overall Influence
1920 - 1996 (76 years)
William Egan Colby was an American intelligence officer who served as Director of Central Intelligence from September 1973 to January 1976. During World War II, Colby served with the Office of Strategic Services. After the war, he joined the newly created Central Intelligence Agency . Before and during the Vietnam War, Colby served as chief of station in Saigon, chief of the CIA's Far East Division, and head of the Civil Operations and Rural Development effort and oversaw the Phoenix Program. After the war, Colby became Director of Central Intelligence and during his tenure, under intense p...
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Frank J. Tipler
#1727
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Frank Jennings Tipler is an American mathematical physicist and cosmologist, holding a joint appointment in the Departments of Mathematics and Physics at Tulane University. Tipler has written books and papers on the Omega Point based on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's religious ideas, which he claims is a mechanism for the resurrection of the dead. He is also known for his theories on the Tipler cylinder time machine. His work has attracted criticism, most notably from Quaker and systems theorist George Ellis who has argued that his theories are largely pseudoscience.
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William M. Bass
#1728
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Areas of Specialization: Forensic Anthropology William M. Bass is a forensic anthropologist, famous for his work on the study of human decomposition. He earned his B.A. from the University of Virginia, his MS from the University of Kentucky, and his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. He founded the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research, also known as “The Body Farm”. The Body Farm is a facility where researchers can study the decomposition of the human body under a variety of conditions. This research helps law enforcement and scientists to better understand...
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Steven Levitt
#1729
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Steven David Levitt is an American economist and co-author of the best-selling book Freakonomics and its sequels . Levitt was the winner of the 2003 John Bates Clark Medal for his work in the field of crime, and is currently the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago as well as the Faculty Director and Co-Founder of the Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change at the University of Chicago which incubates the Data Science for Everyone coalition. He was co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy published by the University of Chicago Press until December 2007.
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Hillel Furstenberg
#1730
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Hillel "Harry" Furstenberg is a German-born American-Israeli mathematician and professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a laureate of the Abel Prize and the Wolf Prize in Mathematics. He is known for his application of probability theory and ergodic theory methods to other areas of mathematics, including number theory and Lie groups.
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Grover Norquist
#1731
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Grover Glenn Norquist is an American political activist and tax reduction advocate who is founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, an organization that opposes all tax increases. A Republican, he is the primary promoter of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, a pledge signed by lawmakers who agree to oppose increases in marginal income tax rates for individuals and businesses, and net reductions or eliminations of deductions and credits without a matching reduced tax rate. Prior to the November 2012 election, the pledge was signed by 95% of all Republican members of Congress and all but ...
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Temple Grandin
#1732
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Mary Temple Grandin is an American academic and animal behaviorist. She is a prominent proponent for the humane treatment of livestock for slaughter and the author of more than 60 scientific papers on animal behavior. Grandin is a consultant to the livestock industry, where she offers advice on animal behavior, and is also an autism spokesperson.
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Erwin Chemerinsky
#1733
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#1732
Clive Granger
#1734
Overall Influence
1934 - 2009 (75 years)
Sir Clive William John Granger was a British econometrician known for his contributions to nonlinear time series analysis. He taught in Britain, at the University of Nottingham and in the United States, at the University of California, San Diego. Granger was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2003 in recognition of the contributions that he and his co-winner, Robert F. Engle, had made to the analysis of time series data. This work fundamentally changed the way in which economists analyse financial and macroeconomic data.
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Robert Tappan Morris
#1735
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Robert Tappan Morris is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is best known for creating the Morris worm in 1988, considered the first computer worm on the Internet. Morris was prosecuted for releasing the worm, and became the first person convicted under the then-new Computer Fraud and Abuse Act . He went on to cofound the online store Viaweb, one of the first web applications, and later the venture capital funding firm Y Combinator, both with Paul Graham.
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Captain Charles Johnson
#1736
Overall Influence
Captain Charles Johnson was the British author of the 1724 book A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, whose identity remains a mystery. No record exists of a captain by this name, and "Captain Charles Johnson" is generally considered a pen name for one of London's writer-publishers. Some scholars have suggested that the author was actually Daniel Defoe, but this is disputed.
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Stanley Karnow
#1737
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Stanley Abram Karnow was an American journalist and historian. He is best known for his writings on East Asia and the Vietnam War. Education and career Karnow was born in Brooklyn in 1925, and had a middle-class, secular Jewish upbringing. His father was a machinery salesman; his mother, an immigrant from Hungary, a homemaker. Interested in writing from a young age, at James Madison High School in Brooklyn he wrote radio plays and was a sports writer and an editor of the school paper.
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John Robert Anderson
#1738
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
John Robert Anderson is a Canadian-born American psychologist. He is currently professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Biography Anderson obtained a B.A. from the University of British Columbia in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford in 1972. He became an assistant professor at Yale in 1972. He moved to the University of Michigan in 1973 as a Junior Fellow and returned to Yale in 1976 with tenure. He was promoted to full professor at Yale in 1977 but moved to Carnegie Mellon University in 1978. From 1988 to 1989, he served as president of the Cognitive Science Society.
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Werner Arber
#1739
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Areas of Specialization: Microbiology Werner Arber is a geneticist and microbiologist. He studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the University of Geneva. His doctorate was completed at the University of Geneva, where he studied electron microscopy and lambda bacteriophages. Arber has worked with students, scientists and researchers at the University of Southern California, the University of Geneva, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Basel. He was among the first to work in the University of Basel’s new interdisciplinary research center, the Biozentrum.
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Frei Otto
#1740
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Frei Paul Otto was a German architect and structural engineer noted for his use of lightweight structures, in particular tensile and membrane structures, including the roof of the Olympic Stadium in Munich for the 1972 Summer Olympics.
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Tony Wilson
#1741
Overall Influence
1950 - 2007 (57 years)
Anthony Howard Wilson was a British record label owner, radio and television presenter, nightclub manager and impresario, and a journalist for Granada Television, the BBC and Channel 4. As a co-founder of the independent label Factory Records and founder-manager of the Haçienda nightclub, Wilson was behind some of Manchester's most successful bands, including Joy Division, New Order, and Happy Mondays. Wilson was known as "Mr Manchester", dubbed as such for his work in promoting the culture of Manchester throughout his career.
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Boris Johnson
#1742
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is a British politician and writer who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 2019 to 2022. He previously was Foreign Secretary from 2016 to 2018 and Mayor of London from 2008 to 2016. He was Member of Parliament for Uxbridge and South Ruislip from 2015 to 2023, having previously been MP for Henley from 2001 to 2008.
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William F. Buckley Jr.
#1743
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
William Frank Buckley Jr. was an American conservative writer, public intellectual, and political commentator. In 1955, he founded National Review, the magazine that stimulated the conservative movement in the mid-20th century United States. Buckley hosted 1,429 episodes of the public affairs television show Firing Line , the longest-running public affairs show with a single host in American television history, where he became known for his distinctive Transatlantic accent and wide vocabulary.
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Graham Priest
#1744
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#1743
Hamilton O. Smith
#1745
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Areas of Specialization: Microbiology Hamilton Smith, M. D., is a microbiologist, distinguished professor and scientific director of Synthetic Biology & Bioenergy at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in San Diego, California. He earned a B.A. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1952 and a M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1956. He interned at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis and completed a Medical Residency at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan. From 1962 to 1967 he did a fellowship in the Human Genetics department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. F...
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Louis Theroux
#1746
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Louis Sebastian Theroux is a British-American documentarian, journalist, broadcaster, and author. He has received three British Academy Television Awards and a Royal Television Society Television Award.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson
#1747
Overall Influence
1908 - 2004 (96 years)
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French artist and humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment.
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Richard Matheson
#1748
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Richard Burton Matheson was an American author and screenwriter, primarily in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres. He is best known as the author of I Am Legend, a 1954 science fiction horror novel that has been adapted for the screen three times. Matheson himself was co-writer of the first film version, The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price, which was released in 1964. The other two adaptations were The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend, with Will Smith. Matheson also wrote 16 television episodes of The Twilight Zone, including "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet...
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Crispin Wright
#1749
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Crispin James Garth Wright is a British philosopher, who has written on neo-Fregean philosophy of mathematics, Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and on issues related to truth, realism, cognitivism, skepticism, knowledge, and objectivity. He is Professor of Philosophical Research at the University of Stirling, and taught previously at the University of St Andrews, University of Aberdeen, New York University, Princeton University and University of Michigan.
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John C. Reynolds
#1750
Overall Influence
1935 - 2013 (78 years)
John Charles Reynolds was an American computer scientist. Education and affiliations John Reynolds studied at Purdue University and then earned a Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical physics from Harvard University in 1961. He was a professor of information science at Syracuse University from 1970 to 1986. From then until his death, he was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. He also held visiting positions at Aarhus University , The University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, Microsoft Research and Queen Mary University of London.
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Larry Zicklin
#1751
Overall Influence
Larry Zicklin is an American professor and businessperson. He is a former chairman of the Board of investment management firm, Neuberger Berman and a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University and Baruch College, a CUNY school.
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Walter E. Williams
#1752
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Walter Edward Williams was an American economist, commentator, and academic. Williams was the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, as well as a syndicated columnist and author. Known for his classical liberal and libertarian views, Williams's writings frequently appeared in Townhall, WND, and Jewish World Review. Williams was also a popular guest host of the Rush Limbaugh radio show when Limbaugh was unavailable.
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