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

#17451

Christian Reus-Smit

#17462
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Christian Reus-Smit is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, in Brisbane Australia. He is an internationally renowned scholar in the field of IR. Reus-Smit's research focuses on the institutional nature and evolution of international orders, and he has published on widely on issues of international relations theory, international law, multilateralism, human rights, American power, and most recently, cultural diversity and international order. He is long-time editor of the Cambridge Studies in International Relations book series, and was a Founding Editor with Duncan Snidal and Alexander Wendt of the leading journal International Theory.
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#17452

Lubaina Himid

#17463
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Lubaina Himid is a British artist and curator. She is a professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire. Her art focuses on themes of cultural history and reclaiming identities.
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#17453

William L. Jorgensen

William L. Jorgensen
#17464
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
William L. Jorgensen is a Sterling Professor of Chemistry at Yale University. He is considered a pioneer in the field of computational chemistry. Some of his contributions include the TIP3P, TIP4P, and TIP5P water models, the OPLS force field, and his work on free-energy perturbation theory for modeling reactions in solution, protein-ligand binding, and drug design; he has over 400 publications in the field. Jorgensen has been the Editor of the ACS Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation since its founding in 2005.
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#17454

Paul Russell

#17465
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Paul Russell is a professor in philosophy at Lund University, where he is Director of the Lund/Gothenburg Responsibility Project [LGRP]. His position at Lund is a half-time research position and has been made possible thanks to a major grant from the Swedish Research Council for "the international recruitment of leading researchers" . Prior to his current position at Lund University he has held positions as Professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and at Gothenburg University.
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#17455

Rivka Galchen

Rivka Galchen
#17466
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Rivka Galchen is a Canadian-American writer. Her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, was published in 2008 and was awarded the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She is the author of five books and a contributor of journalism and essays to The New Yorker magazine.
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#17456

Harry Crews

#17467
Overall Influence
1935 - 2012 (77 years)
Harry Eugene Crews was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He often made use of violent, grotesque characters and set them in regions of the Deep South. Life Harry Crews was born June 7, 1935, during the Great Depression to two poor tenant farmers in Bacon County, Georgia. His father died while he was still a baby, and his mother soon remarried to his father's brother. Crews was unaware that this man was not his biological father until years later.
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#17457

Wilfred Watson

#17468
Overall Influence
1911 - 1998 (87 years)
Wilfred Watson was professor emeritus of English at Canada's University of Alberta for many years. He was also an experimental Canadian poet and dramatist, whose innovative plays had a considerable influence in the 1960s. The Dictionary of Literary Biography says that "Watson ushered in an avant-garde in Canadian theater years before the rear guard had fully emerged."
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#17458

William Andrew Goddard III

#17469
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
William Andrew Goddard III is the Charles and Mary Ferkel Professor of Chemistry and Applied Physics, and director of the Materials and Process Simulation Center at the California Institute of Technology.
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#17459

Jorge Alcocer Varela

#17470
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jorge Alcocer Varela is a Mexican immunologist, researcher, teacher and healthcare professional. Since 1 December 2018 he has served as the head of Secretariat of Health of Mexico, appointed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. As a physician and emeritus researcher at the Salvador Zubirán National Institute of Health Sciences and Nutrition, Alcocer Varela has served Mexican public health in various capacities for more than 30 years.
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#17460

Neal Amundson

Neal Amundson
#17471
Overall Influence
1916 - 2011 (95 years)
Neal Russell Amundson was an American chemical engineer and applied mathematician. He was the chair of the department of chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota for over 25 years. Later, he was the Cullen Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and Mathematics at the University of Houston. Amundson was considered one of the most prominent chemical engineering educators and researchers in the United States. The Chemical Engineering and Materials Science building at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities bears his name.
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#17461

Kiyoo Wadati

Kiyoo Wadati
#17472
Overall Influence
1902 - 1995 (93 years)
Kiyoo Wadati was an early seismologist at the Central Meteorological Observatory of Japan , researching deep earthquakes. His name is attached to the Wadati–Benioff zone. It was Wadati's 1928 paper on shallow and deep earthquakes, comparing maximum below surface displacement against distance from the epicentre, which led Charles Richter to develop his earthquake magnitude scale in 1935.
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#17462

Stanley Marion Garn

#17473
Overall Influence
1922 - 2007 (85 years)
Stanley Marion Garn Ph.D. was a human biologist and educator. He was Professor of Anthropology at the College for Literature, Science and Arts and Professor of Nutrition at the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. He joined the University of Michigan in 1968.
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#17463

Hugo Sánchez

#17474
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Hugo Sánchez Márquez is a Mexican former professional footballer and manager, who played as a forward. A prolific goalscorer known for his spectacular strikes and volleys, he is widely regarded as the greatest Mexican footballer of all time. In 1999, the International Federation of Football History and Statistics voted Sánchez the 26th best footballer of the 20th century, and the best footballer from the CONCACAF region. In 2004, Sánchez was named in the FIFA 100 list of the world's greatest living players. He is the fifth highest scorer in the history of La Liga, the fourth highest scoring f...
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#17464

Hamish Henderson

#17475
Overall Influence
1919 - 2002 (83 years)
Hamish Scott Henderson was a Scottish poet, songwriter, communist, intellectual and soldier. He was a catalyst for the folk revival in Scotland. He was also an accomplished folk song collector and discovered such notable performers as Jeannie Robertson, Flora MacNeil and Calum Johnston.
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#17465

Justin Verlander

#17476
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Justin Brooks Verlander is an American professional baseball pitcher for the Houston Astros of Major League Baseball . He has previously played in MLB for the Detroit Tigers and New York Mets. From Manakin-Sabot, Virginia, Verlander attended Old Dominion University and played college baseball for the Monarchs. He broke the Monarchs' and Colonial Athletic Association's career records for strikeouts. At the 2003 Pan American Games, Verlander helped lead the United States national team to a silver medal.
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#17466

David C. Jewitt

David C. Jewitt
#17477
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
David Clifford Jewitt is a British-American astronomer who studies the Solar System, especially its minor bodies. He is based at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is a Member of the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics, the Director of the Institute for Planets and Exoplanets, Professor of Astronomy in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Professor of Astronomy in the Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences. He is best known for being the first person to discover a body beyond Pluto and Charon in the Kuiper belt.
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#17467

Michel Goemans

Michel Goemans
#17478
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Michel Xavier Goemans is a Belgian-American professor of applied mathematics and the RSA Professor of Mathematics at MIT working in discrete mathematics and combinatorial optimization at CSAIL and MIT Operations Research Center.
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#17468

Yuri Zhdanov

Yuri Zhdanov
#17479
Overall Influence
1919 - 2006 (87 years)
Yuri Andreyevich Zhdanov was a Soviet and Russian chemistry professor and rector of the University of Rostov. He was the son of Soviet politician Andrei Zhdanov and a former husband of Joseph Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva.
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#17469

Gui Bonsiepe

#17480
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Gui Bonsiepe [ˈgɪː ˈbo˘nsɪːpe˘] is a German designer, teacher and writer. Especially in South America and Germany, his publications are considered standards of design theory. Life Gui Bonsiepe was born in Glücksburg, and studied Graphics and Architecture until 1955 at Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste, Munich and at TU München. Until 1959, he studied at Ulm School of Design in the Information Department. Between 1960 and 1968, he worked as an assistant professor at Ulm School of Design. After closure of the Ulm School of Design in 1968, Bonsiepe relocated to South America, working as a design consultant.
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#17470

Edward D. Lazowska

Edward D. Lazowska
#17481
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Edward D. "Ed" Lazowska is an American computer scientist. He is a Professor, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair emeritus, in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.
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#17471

Pantur Silaban

#17482
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
Pantur Silaban was an Indonesian physicist, regarded as one of the foremost in his profession in Indonesia, especially in the field of theoretical physics. He was also one of the earliest physicists from ASEAN countries who studied Einstein's general relativity theories in depth.
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#17472

Lois Graham

Lois Graham
#17483
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Lois Graham was a professor of thermodynamics and cryogenics. She was the first woman to earn a mechanical engineering PhD in the United States. Graham is remembered for her lifelong work recruiting young women into careers in science and engineering. She taught for nearly 40 years in the Illinois Institute of Technology's Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering program. Graham founded IIT's Women in Science and Engineering program, which recruited female high school students into science and engineering careers.
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#17473

Joshua Landis

#17484
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Joshua M. Landis is an American academic who specializes in the Middle East and is an expert on Syria. He is the head of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and since 2004, he has published the blog Syria Comment. He is married to Manar Kachour and has two sons, Kendall and Jonah Landis.
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#17474

Donna Alvermann

#17485
Overall Influence
Donna Alvermann is an American educator and researcher in the field of Language and Literacy Education whose work focuses on adolescent literacy in and out of school, inclusive of new media and digital literacies. Her most recent research interest involves developing historical-autobiographical methods for uncovering silences in scholarly writing that mask more than they disclose. She is the Omer Clyde and Elizabeth Parr Aderhold Professor in Education in the Mary Frances Early College of Education at the University of Georgia . She is also a UGA-appointed Distinguished Research Professor in t...
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#17475

Tim Roughgarden

#17486
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Timothy Avelin Roughgarden is an American computer scientist and a professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Roughgarden's work deals primarily with game theoretic questions in computer science.
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#17476

David Marshall Lang

#17487
Overall Influence
1924 - 1991 (67 years)
David Marshall Lang , was a Professor of Caucasian Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was one of the most productive British scholars who specialized in Georgian, Armenian and ancient Bulgarian history.
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#17477

Peter E. Hodgson

#17488
Overall Influence
1928 - 2008 (80 years)
Peter E. Hodgson was a British physicist, who also wrote about the philosophy of physics and social issues, and was an active Roman Catholic. Early life Peter E. Hodgson was born on 27 November 1928 in London. He graduated in 1948 with a BSc in physics from Imperial College London. He began experimental research under George Paget Thomson, and was one of the first to identify the K meson and its decay into three pions, giving the most accurate, as of that time, estimate of its mass. In 1951, he was awarded the PhD for this work. In the 1960s, the University of London awarded him the D.Sc.
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#17478

Chip Kelly

#17489
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Charles Edward Kelly is an American football coach who is the head coach of the UCLA Bruins. He came to prominence as the head coach of the Oregon Ducks from 2009 to 2012, whom he led to four consecutive BCS bowl game appearances, including the 2011 BCS National Championship Game. This success led to him serving as a head coach in the National Football League for four seasons, three with the Philadelphia Eagles and one with the San Francisco 49ers . Kelly only made the playoffs in his first season with Philadelphia, and he was fired from both teams. After leaving the NFL, Kelly returned to ...
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#17479

Shabbir Akhtar

#17490
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Shabbir Akhtar was a British Muslim philosopher, poet, researcher, writer and multilingual scholar. He was on the Faculty of Theology and Religions at the University of Oxford. His interests included political Islam, Quranic exegesis, revival of philosophical discourse in Islam, Islamophobia, extremism, terrorism and Christian-Muslim relations as well as Islamic readings of the New Testament. Shabbir Akhtar was also a Søren Kierkegaard scholar. Akhtar's articles have appeared both in academic journals and in the UK press. Several of his books have been translated into the major Islamic langua...
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#17480

Ron Eglash

Ron Eglash
#17491
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Ron Eglash is an American who works in cybernetics, professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan with a secondary appointment in the School of Design, and an author widely known for his work in the field of ethnomathematics, which aims to study the diverse relationships between mathematics and culture.
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#17481

Eve Sweetser

#17492
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Eve Eliot Sweetser is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from UC Berkeley in 1984, and has been a member of the Berkeley faculty since that time. She has served as Director of Berkeley's undergraduate Cognitive Science Program and is currently Director of the Celtic Studies Program.
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#17482

Sergey Radchenko

#17493
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Sergey S. Radchenko is a Soviet-born British historian. He is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and visiting professor at Cardiff University. He has served as a Global Fellow and a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre and as the Zi Jiang Distinguished Professor at East China Normal University .
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#17483

James E. Humphreys

#17494
Overall Influence
1939 - 2020 (81 years)
James Edward Humphreys was an American mathematician who worked in algebraic groups, Lie groups, and Lie algebras and applications of these mathematical structures. He is known as the author of several mathematical texts, such as Introduction to Lie Algebras and Representation Theory and Reflection Groups and Coxeter Groups.
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#17484

Lawrence Weiskrantz

#17495
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Lawrence Weiskrantz was a British neuropsychologist. Weiskrantz is credited with discovering the phenomenon of blindsight, and with establishing the role of the amygdala in emotional learning and emotional behavior. Blindsight is when a person with a brain injury causing blindness can nevertheless detect, point accurately at, and discriminate visually presented objects.
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#17485

Luka Modrić

#17496
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Luka Modrić is a Croatian professional footballer who plays as a midfielder for La Liga club Real Madrid and captains the Croatia national team. He plays mainly as a central midfielder, but can also play as an attacking midfielder or as a defensive midfielder. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest midfielders of all time, and as the greatest Croatian footballer ever.
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#17486

Sanjaya Lall

#17497
Overall Influence
1940 - 2005 (65 years)
Sanjaya Lall was a development economist and Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford. Lall's research interests included the impact of foreign direct investment in developing countries, the economics of multi-national corporations, and the development of technological capability and industrial competitiveness in developing countries. One of the world's pre-eminent development economists, Lall was also one of the founding editors of the journal Oxford Development Studies and a senior economist at the World Bank .
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#17487

Martin Brodeur

Martin Brodeur
#17498
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Martin Pierre Brodeur is a Canadian–American former professional ice hockey goaltender and current team executive. He played 22 seasons in the National Hockey League , 21 of them for the New Jersey Devils, with whom he won three Stanley Cup championships and five Eastern Conference championships in 17 postseason campaigns. He also won two Olympic gold medalss with Team Canada in the 2002 and 2010 Winter Olympic Games, as well as several other medals with Team Canada in other international competitions. Brodeur is widely regarded as one of the greatest goaltenders of all time. In 2017, he was ...
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#17488

Jillian Banfield

Jillian Banfield
#17499
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Jillian Fiona Banfield is professor at the University of California, Berkeley with appointments in the Earth Science, Ecosystem Science and Materials Science and Engineering departments. She leads the Microbial Research initiative within the Innovative Genomics Institute, is affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and has a position at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Some of her most noted work includes publications on the structure and functioning of microbial communities and the nature, properties and reactivity of nanomaterials.
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#17489

Pratiwi Sudarmono

Pratiwi Sudarmono
#17500
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Pratiwi Pujilestari Sudarmono is an Indonesian scientist. She is currently a professor of microbiology at the University of Indonesia, Jakarta. Early life and education Pratiwi Sudarmono received a master's degree from the University of Indonesia in 1977, and the Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Osaka, Japan, in 1984.
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#17490

Larry Stockmeyer

#17501
Overall Influence
1948 - 2004 (56 years)
Larry Joseph Stockmeyer was an American computer scientist. He was one of the pioneers in the field of computational complexity theory, and he also worked in the field of distributed computing. He died of pancreatic cancer.
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#17491

Joan Dye Gussow

#17502
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Joan Dye Gussow is an American professor, author, food policy expert, environmentalist and gardener. The New York Times has called her the "matriarch of the eat-locally-think-globally food movement."
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#17492

Tom Shakespeare

Tom Shakespeare
#17503
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Sir Thomas William Shakespeare, 3rd Baronet, is an English sociologist and bioethicist. He has achondroplasia and uses a wheelchair. Early life and education Son of Sir William Geoffrey Shakespeare, 2nd Baronet, and Susan Mary, daughter of A. Douglas Raffel, of Colombo, Sri Lanka, his grandfather, Sir Geoffrey Shakespeare, was made a baronet following long service as a Member of Parliament and in various senior government roles. While still a student, Tom was featured in a television documentary by Lord Snowdon connected to his 1976 report 'Integrating the Disabled' about his restricted growth, along with his father, a prominent medical practitioner, who was also born with achondroplasia.
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#17493

Greg Lake

Greg Lake
#17504
Overall Influence
1947 - 2016 (69 years)
Gregory Stewart Lake was an English bassist, guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He gained prominence as a founding member of the progressive rock bands King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer . Born and brought up in Dorset, Lake began to play the guitar at the age of 12 and wrote his first song, "Lucky Man", at the same age. He became a full-time musician at 17, playing in several rock bands until his friend and fellow Dorset guitarist Robert Fripp invited him to join King Crimson as lead singer and bassist. They found commercial success with their influential debut album, In the Court of th...
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#17494

Faye Wattleton

Faye Wattleton
#17505
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Faye Wattleton is an American reproductive rights activist who was the first African American and the youngest president ever elected of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the first woman since Margaret Sanger to hold the position. She is currently Co-founder & Director at EeroQ, a quantum computing company. She is best known for her contributions to family planning and reproductive health, and the reproductive rights movement.
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#17495

Diane Marie Amann

#17506
Overall Influence
Diane Marie Amann is Regents' Professor of International Law and holds the Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law at the University of Georgia School of Law. She has served since mid-2017 as a faculty co-director of the law school's Dean Rusk International Law Center, a position she took up after completing a two-and-a-half-year term as Associate Dean for International Programs & Strategic Initiatives. Additionally, she serves as Professor of International Affairs at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs and as an Affiliated Faculty Member at the Uni...
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#17496

Alan Tucker

#17507
Overall Influence
Alan Curtiss Tucker is an American mathematician. He is a professor of applied mathematics at Stony Brook University, and the author of a widely used textbook on combinatorics; he has also made research contributions to graph theory and coding theory. He has had four children, Katie, Lisa, Edward, and James.
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#17497

John McManners

John McManners
#17508
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
John McManners was a British clergyman and historian of religion who specialized in the history of the church and other aspects of religious life in 18th-century France. He was Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford from 1972 to 1984. He also served as Fellow and Chaplain of All Souls College, Oxford, from 1964 to 2001.
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#17498

Geraint Rees

Geraint Rees
#17509
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Geraint Ellis Rees is Vice-Provost of research, innovation & global engagement at University College London . Previously he served as Dean of the UCL Faculty of Life Sciences, UCL Pro-Provost , Pro-Vice-Provost and a Professor of Cognitive Neurology at University College London. He is also a Director of UCL Business and a trustee of the Guarantors of Brain.
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#17499

Harold Stassen

#17510
Overall Influence
1907 - 2001 (94 years)
Harold Edward Stassen was an American politician, military officer, attorney, and member of the Republican Party who was the 25th governor of Minnesota from 1939 to 1943. He was a leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president of the United States in 1948, considered for a time to be the front-runner, but came second to New York governor Thomas Dewey. He thereafter regularly continued to run for that and other offices, such that his name became most identified with his status as a perennial candidate.
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#17500

Anne Coughlin

#17511
Overall Influence
Anne M. Coughlin is the Lewis F. Powell Jr., Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. Early life and education Coughlin graduated from Tufts University with a B.A. in English in 1978. She then completed her M.A. in English at Columbia University in 1979 before entering law school. She earned her J.D. at the New York University School of Law, graduating in 1984. At NYU, Coughlin served as managing editor of the New York University Law Review.
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