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
#17551
La Monte Young
#17562
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
La Monte Thornton Young is an American composer, musician, and performance artist recognized as one of the first American minimalist composers and a central figure in Fluxus and post-war avant-garde music. He is best known for his exploration of sustained tones, beginning with his 1958 composition Trio for Strings. His compositions have called into question the nature and definition of music, most prominently in the text scores of his Compositions 1960. While few of his recordings remain in print, his work has inspired prominent musicians across various genres, including avant-garde, rock, an...
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Thomas Gordon
#17563
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
Thomas Gordon was an American clinical psychologist and colleague of Carl Rogers. He is widely recognized as a pioneer in teaching communication skills and conflict resolution methods to parents, teachers, leaders, women, youth and salespeople. The model he developed came to be known as the Gordon Model or the Gordon Method, a complete and integrated system for building and maintaining effective relationships.
Go to Profile#17553
Kevin DeYoung
#17564
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Kevin Lee DeYoung is an American Reformed theologian, pastor and author. He is currently the senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church, in Matthews, North Carolina. The church he previously pastored, University Reformed Church , shifted to the Presbyterian Church in America in March 2015 after having been a member of the Reformed Church in America.
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Guy Doumeingts
#17565
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Guy Doumeingts is a French engineer, Emeritus professor at the University of Bordeaux 1 and former Director of "Laboratoire d’Automatique, Productique Signal et Image" control theory, known for the development of the GRAI method and his contributions to the field of Enterprise modelling.
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John Stachel
#17566
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
John Stachel is an American physicist and philosopher of science. Biography Stachel earned his PhD at Stevens Institute of Technology in Physics about a topic in General relativity in 1958. After holding different teaching positions at Lehigh University and the University of Pittsburgh, he went 1964 to Boston University where he was professor of physics until his emeritation.
Go to Profile#17556
Charles A. S. Hall
#17567
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Charles A. S. Hall is an American systems ecologist and ESF Foundation Distinguished Professor at State University of New York in the College of Environmental Science & Forestry. Biography Hall was born near Boston, and received a B.A. in biology from Colgate University, and an M.A. from Penn State University. He trained as systems ecologist by Howard Odum at the University of North Carolina, where he received a PhD.
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Eric Sheppard
#17568
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Eric Sheppard is a British and American geographer, and Professor of Economic geography at UCLA. Background Sheppard grew up in Cambridge, England, and studied geography at the University of Bristol under Peter Haggett before moving to Canada and completing his Ph.D in Geography in 1976 at the University of Toronto. He taught for most of his career at the University of Minnesota before moving to UCLA. He served as president of the Association of American Geographers .
Go to Profile#17558
Jonny Greenwood
#17569
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Jonathan Richard Guy Greenwood is an English musician. He is the lead guitarist and keyboardist of the rock band Radiohead, and has composed numerous film scores. He has been named one of the greatest guitarists by numerous publications, including Rolling Stone.
Go to Profile#17559
Chuck Ainlay
#17570
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Chuck Ainlay is an American record producer and audio engineer. He has worked with Mark Knopfler on much of Knopfler's solo work, in addition to some Dire Straits material. He has 4 Grammy Awards and 5 nominations.
Go to Profile#17560
David E. Kendall
#17571
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
David Evan Kendall is an American attorney, a graduate of Wabash College, Yale Law School, and Worcester College, Oxford, who clerked with Supreme Court Justice Byron White, worked as associate counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and has been a partner at Williams & Connolly LLP of Washington, DC since 1981, where he has provided legal counsel to individuals and corporations on high-profile business and political matters.
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Kiefer Sutherland
#17572
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Kiefer William Frederick Dempsey George Rufus Sutherland is a Canadian actor and musician. He is best known for his starring role as Jack Bauer in the Fox drama series 24 , for which he won an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and two Satellite Awards.
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Avraham Trahtman
#17573
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Avraham Naumovich Trahtman is a mathematician at Bar-Ilan University . In 2007, Trahtman solved a problem in combinatorics that had been open for 37 years, the Road Coloring Conjecture posed in 1970.
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Obioma Nnaemeka
#17574
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Obioma Nnaemeka is a Nigerian-American academic. She is the Chancellor’s Professor of French at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. Education Born in Agulu, Nigeria, Nnaemeka earned her BA from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where she studied African Studies, French and German. In 1989 she obtained her PhD in French and Francophone studies from the University of Minnesota.
Go to Profile#17564
Jedediah Purdy
#17575
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Jedediah Spenser Purdy is an American legal scholar and cultural commentator. In 2022 he became the Raphael Lemkin Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law, where he teaches courses on Property and Past and Future of Capitalist Democracy. From 2018 to 2022 he was William S. Beinecke Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, teaching courses on American Constitutional Law, Constitutional Law and Democracy and its Crisis. He previously taught at Duke University School of Law from 2004 to 2018.
Go to Profile#17565
John Russell Taylor
#17576
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
John Russell Taylor is an English critic and author. He is the author of critical studies of British theatre; of critical biographies of such figures in film as Alfred Hitchcock, Alec Guinness, Orson Welles, Vivien Leigh, and Ingrid Bergman; of Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres 1933–1950 ; and several books on art.
Go to Profile#17566
Michael Georgeff
#17577
Overall Influence
Michael Peter Georgeff is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who has made contributions in the areas of Intelligent Software Agents and eHealth. Georgeff is a former program director in the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International, Menlo Park, California, and former director of the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute Ltd., at the University of Melbourne. Georgeff is Founder and chief executive officer of Precedence Health Care and Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University.
Go to Profile#17567
Brian Regal
#17578
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Brian Regal is an American historian of science, skeptic and writer. He is an associate professor of the history of science at Kean University in New Jersey. Regal is the author of an encyclopedia of pseudoscience, as well as Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads and Cryptozoology, a scholarly study on cryptozoology. He has also written on the history of the Jersey Devil.
Go to Profile#17568
Carolyn S. Shoemaker
#17579
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Carolyn Jean Spellmann Shoemaker was an American astronomer and a co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9. She discovered 32 comets and more than 500 asteroids. Having earned degrees in history, political science, and English literature, she had little interest in science until she met and married geologist Eugene Merle Shoemaker. Her career in astronomy began when she demonstrated good stereoscopic vision, a particularly valuable quality for looking for objects in near-Earth space. Despite the fact that her degrees were not in science, having that visual ability motivated the California Institute of Technology to hire her as a research assistant on a team led by her husband.
Go to Profile#17569
Chan Heng Chee
#17580
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Chan Heng Chee is a Singaporean academic and diplomat who has been serving as Ambassador-at-Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 2012, Chairwoman of the National Arts Council and Member of the Presidential Council for Minority Rights. She had also served as Singapore Ambassador to the United States between 1996 and 2012.
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Carolyn Kizer
#17581
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Carolyn Ashley Kizer was an American poet of the Pacific Northwest whose works reflect her feminism. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. According to an article at the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, "Kizer reach[ed] into mythology in poems like Semele Recycled; into politics, into feminism, especially in her series of poems called "Pro Femina"; into science, the natural world, music, and translations and commentaries on Japanese and Chinese literatures".
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Adrian Searle
#17582
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Adrian Searle is the chief art critic of The Guardian newspaper in Britain, and has been writing for the paper since 1996. Previously he was a painter. Life and career Searle studied at the St Albans School of Art , Trent Polytechnic and the Winchester School of Art . He has taught at Central St Martins College of Art , Chelsea College of Art and Goldsmiths College , De Ateliers, Amsterdam . From 2007 to 2012 he was Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art, London.
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Warren E. Dixon
#17583
Overall Influence
Warren E. Dixon is a control theorist and a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida. He has served as the chair of the department since 2021. Bibliography
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Lee Breuer
#17584
Overall Influence
1937 - 2021 (84 years)
Esser Leopold "Lee" Breuer was an Obie Award-winning and Pulitzer-, Grammy-, Emmy- and Tony-nominated American playwright, theater director, academic, educator, filmmaker, poet, and lyricist. Breuer taught and directed on six continents.
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John Garcia
#17585
Overall Influence
1917 - 2012 (95 years)
John Garcia was an American psychologist, most known for his research on conditioned taste aversion. Garcia studied at the University of California-Berkeley, where he received his A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in 1955 in his late forties. At his death, he was professor emeritus at University of California, Los Angeles. Previously, he was an assistant professor at California State University at Long Beach, a lecturer in the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, professor and chairman of the Psychology Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Professor of Psychology at the University of Utah.
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James van Hoften
#17586
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
James Dougal Adrianus "Ox" van Hoften is an American civil and hydraulic engineer, retired U.S. Navy officer and aviator, and a former astronaut for NASA. Personal data Van Hoften was born June 11, 1944, in Fresno, California. He was active in the Boy Scouts of America where he achieved its second-highest rank, Life Scout. He considers Burlingame, California, to be his hometown. He is of Dutch descent. Van Hoften is married to the former Vallarie Davis of Pasadena, with three children: Jennifer Lyn , Jamie Juliana , and Victoria Jane . He enjoys skiing, playing handball and racquetball, and jogging.
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Phil Steele
#17587
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Phil Steele is an American sportswriter and analyst who focuses exclusively on college and professional football. He is considered a "highly respected prognosticator" within the sports media. His company, Phil Steele Publications, produces the annual preseason magazine Phil Steele's College Football Preview, which he personally writes in almost its entirety. The first edition was published in 1995. In a comparison of the major preseason college football magazines, ESPN writer Pat Forde said:All the mags have their merits . . . But Phil Steele owns the genre . . . The 46-year-old uses a cookie-cutter layout for every team, and his writing will never be nominated for a Pulitzer.
Go to Profile#17577
Charles Forgy
#17588
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Charles L. Forgy is an American computer scientist, known for developing the Rete algorithm used in his OPS5 and other production system languages used to build expert systems. Early life and education Forgy attended Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas, Texas, and then advanced to Arlington State College graduating with a degree in mathematics in 1972. From there he went to Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, a renowned center for study of artificial intelligence. While studying at Carnegie he met his future wife, Diana, whom he married in 1977.
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Jakob Yngvason
#17589
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Jakob Yngvason is an Icelandic/Austrian physicist and emeritus professor of mathematical physics at the University of Vienna. He has made important contributions to local quantum field theory, thermodynamics, and the quantum theory of many-body systems, in particular cold atomic gases and Bose–Einstein condensation. He is co-author, together with Elliott H. Lieb, Jan Philip Solovej and Robert Seiringer, of a monograph on Bose gases.
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Usha Haley
#17590
Overall Influence
Usha C. V. Haley is an American author and academic, currently W. Frank Barton Distinguished Chair of International Business and Professor of Management at the W. Frank Barton School of Business at Wichita State University in the U.S. state of Kansas. She is also Director of the Center for International Business Advancement at Wichita State University and elected Chair of the independent World Trade Council of Wichita. Prior to this, she was at other universities including West Virginia University, Massey University in New Zealand and at Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University. Haley is cr...
Go to Profile#17580
Lawrence Landweber
#17591
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Lawrence Hugh Landweber is John P. Morgridge Professor Emeritus of computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He received his bachelor's degree in 1963 at Brooklyn College and his Ph.D. at Purdue University in 1967. His doctoral thesis was "A design algorithm for sequential machines and definability in monadic second-order arithmetic."
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Thomas Ulen
#17592
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Thomas Shahan Ulen is an American law and economics professor, currently serving as Swanlund Chair Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . Education Tom Ulen studied at Dartmouth College, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts in 1968. After serving in the Peace Corps for two years, he returned to school, receiving a postgraduate degree from Oxford University in 1972. In 1979 he obtained a Ph.D from Stanford University.
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Alexei Abrikosov
#17593
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov was a Soviet, Russian and American theoretical physicist whose main contributions are in the field of condensed matter physics. He was the co-recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics, with Vitaly Ginzburg and Anthony James Leggett, for theories about how matter can behave at extremely low temperatures.
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Peter Frankopan
#17594
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Peter Frankopan is a British historian, writer, and hotelier. He is a professor of global history at Worcester College, Oxford and the Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. He is best known for his 2015 book The Silk Roads.
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Rachel Adler
#17595
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Rachel Adler is Professor Emerita of Modern Jewish Thought and Judaism and Gender at Hebrew Union College, at the Los Angeles campus. Adler was one of the first theologians to integrate feminist perspectives and concerns into Jewish texts and the renewal of Jewish law and ethics. Her approach to God is Levinasian and her approach to gender is constructivist.
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William Alonso
#17596
Overall Influence
1933 - 1999 (66 years)
William Alonso was an Argentinian-born American planner and economist. He was born in Buenos Aires but moved to the United States in 1946 during the Perón regime with his father Amado Alonso, a leading Spanish philologist, who was then appointed at Harvard. He earned a bachelor's degree in architectural science from Harvard in 1954 and a master's degree in city planning from Harvard University's Graduate School of Public Administration in 1956. In 1960 he received a doctorate in regional science from the University of Pennsylvania.
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Peter Eigen
#17597
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Peter Eigen is a lawyer, development economist and civil society leader. Over a period of 12 years, Eigen founded and chaired Transparency International , a non-governmental organization with National Chapters in over 100 countries. Founded in 1993, TI promotes transparency and accountability in government, business and international development.
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Tom Dillehay
#17598
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Tom Dillehay is an American anthropologist currently serving as the Rebecca Webb Wilson University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Religion, and Culture, as well as a Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. He has previously held teaching positions at the Universidad Austral de Chile and the University of Kentucky. Since 1977, Dillehay has been actively involved in the excavations at Monte Verde, a site in Chile where an early human settlement was discovered in 1975. Based on calibrated carbon 14 dates, Dillehay proposes that the remains found at Monte Verde are approximately 14,800 years old.
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Wes Welker
#17599
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Wesley Carter Welker is an American football coach and former wide receiver who is the wide receivers coach for the Miami Dolphins of the National Football League . He previously played in the NFL for 12 seasons, most notably with the New England Patriots. Regarded as one of the greatest undrafted players of all time, he holds the NFL record for receptions by an undrafted player. Welker played college football at Texas Tech University, where he won the Mosi Tatupu Award and was a first-team All-Big 12 as a senior.
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Roy Mackal
#17600
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Roy P. Mackal was a University of Chicago biologist best known to the general public for his interest in cryptozoology. Academic background Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1925, Mackal served in the United States Marine Corps during World War II before attending the University of Chicago, where he received his B.S. in 1949 and his Ph.D under the direction of Lloyd Kozloff. in 1953. He spent the rest of his academic career with Chicago as an educator and researcher. Much of his early research with the university was in biochemistry and virology, and during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, he cont...
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Alija Izetbegović
#17601
Overall Influence
1925 - 2003 (78 years)
Alija Izetbegović was a Bosnian politician, lawyer, Islamic philosopher and author, who in 1992 became the first president of the Presidency of the newly independent Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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Jan Philipp Reemtsma
#17602
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Jan Philipp Fürchtegott Reemtsma is a German literary scholar, author, and patron who founded and was the long-term director of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. Reemtsma lives and works mainly in Hamburg.
Go to Profile#17592
Olga Kryshtanovskaya
#17603
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Olga Viktorovna Kryshtanovskaya is a Russian sociologist, activist and State Duma deputy from the United Russia party. Education and career Kryshtanovskaya works for since 1989. In 2003 she discovered that majority of former KGB officials and military personnel are heading the government. In 2005 she published her research under a title of Putin's Elite and since 1991 have published 34 studies. In 2007 she estimated that only 26% of the military personnel that are currently in Kremlin belong to the Siloviki group though this rises to 78% if all those with some connection to military or security services are counted.
Go to Profile#17593
Joel Primack
#17604
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Joel R. Primack is a professor of physics and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is a member of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics. Primack received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1966 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1970. His fields of study are relativistic quantum field theory, cosmology, and particle astrophysics. He is also involved in supercomputer simulations of dark matter models. He directs the University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center . Primack is best known for his co-authorship with George Blumenthal, Sandra Moore Faber, and Martin Rees of the theory of cold dark matter in 1984.
Go to Profile#17594
Khaled Mattawa
#17605
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Khaled Mattawa is a Libyan poet, and a renowned Arab-American writer, he is also a leading literary translator, focusing on translating Arabic poetry into English. He works as an Assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States, where he currently lives and writes.
Go to Profile#17595
Ken Norton
#17606
Overall Influence
1943 - 2013 (70 years)
Kenneth Howard Norton Sr. was an American professional boxer who competed from 1967 to 1981. He is often considered one of the greatest Heavyweight boxers of all time. He was awarded the WBC world heavyweight championship in 1978, after winning a close split decision over Jimmy Young in a title eliminator bout and Leon Spinks refused to fight with him.
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Penny Hardaway
#17607
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Anfernee Deon "Penny" Hardaway is an American college basketball coach and former professional player who is the head coach of the Memphis Tigers men's team in the American Athletic Conference . Hardaway played college basketball at Memphis and 14 seasons in the National Basketball Association , where he was a four-time NBA All-Star and a two-time All-NBA First Team member.
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Douglas Stenton
#17608
Overall Influence
Douglas Stenton is a Canadian archaeologist, educator and civil servant. He served as Director of Heritage for the Nunavut Department of Culture and Heritage and played an important role in the finding of from Franklin's lost expedition of 1845.
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Emmerson Mnangagwa
#17609
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa is a Zimbabwean politician who has served as President of Zimbabwe since 24 November 2017. A member of ZANU–PF and a longtime ally of former President Robert Mugabe, he held a series of cabinet portfolios and was Mugabe's Vice-President until November 2017, when he was dismissed before coming to power in a coup d'état. He secured his first full term as president in the disputed 2018 general election. Mnangagwa was re-elected in August 2023 general elections with 52.6% of the votes.
Go to Profile#17599
Smilja Avramov
#17610
Overall Influence
1918 - 2018 (100 years)
Smilja Avramov was a Serbian academician, legal scholar, social activist and educator in international law. She was a member of the Senate of Republika Srpska from 1996 to 2009. Before she retired she was a Professor of International law at the Law Faculty at Belgrade University.
Go to Profile#17600
Wright Morris
#17611
Overall Influence
1910 - 1998 (88 years)
Wright Marion Morris was an American novelist, photographer, and essayist. He is known for his portrayals of the people and artifacts of the Great Plains in words and pictures, as well as for experimenting with narrative forms.
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