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).
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List of the most influential people
#1851
Roderick MacKinnon
#1853
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Roderick MacKinnon is an American biophysicist, neuroscientist, and businessman. He is a professor of molecular neurobiology and biophysics at Rockefeller University who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Peter Agre in 2003 for his work on the structure and operation of ion channels.
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Michael Hayden
#1854
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Michael Vincent Hayden is a retired United States Air Force four-star general and former Director of the National Security Agency, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He also serves as a professor at the George Mason University – Schar School of Policy and Government. Hayden currently co-chairs the Bipartisan Policy Center's Electric Grid Cyber Security Initiative. In 2017, Hayden became a national security analyst for CNN.
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Arlie Russell Hochschild
#1855
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
#1854
Elaine Chao
#1856
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Elaine Lan Chao is an American businesswoman and former government official who served as United States secretary of labor in the administration of George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009 and as United States secretary of transportation in the administration of Donald Trump from 2017 to 2021. A member of the Republican Party, Chao was the first Asian Pacific American woman to serve in a presidential cabinet or as secretary of transportation.
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Paul Tibbets
#1857
Overall Influence
1915 - 2007 (92 years)
Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. was a brigadier general in the United States Air Force. He is best known as the aircraft captain who flew the B-29 Superfortress known as the Enola Gay when it dropped a Little Boy, the first of two atomic bombs used in warfare, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
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Nigel Hitchin
#1858
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Nigel James Hitchin FRS is a British mathematician working in the fields of differential geometry, gauge theory, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics. He is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Oxford.
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Walter Mischel
#1859
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Walter Mischel was an Austrian-born American psychologist specializing in personality theory and social psychology. He was the Robert Johnston Niven Professor of Humane Letters in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Mischel as the 25th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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Paul D. MacLean
#1860
Overall Influence
1913 - 2007 (94 years)
Paul Donald MacLean was an American physician and neuroscientist who made significant contributions in the fields of physiology, psychiatry, and brain research through his work at Yale Medical School and the National Institute of Mental Health. MacLean's evolutionary triune brain theory proposed that the human brain was in reality three brains in one: the reptilian complex, the limbic system, and the neocortex.
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Józef Maria Bocheński
#1861
Overall Influence
1902 - 1995 (93 years)
Józef Maria Bocheński or Innocentius Bochenski was a Polish Dominican, logician and philosopher. Biography Born on 30 August 1902 in Czuszów, then part of the Russian Empire, to a family with patriotic and pro-independence traditions. His predecessors had fought in the Napoleonic wars and various national uprisings. His father, Adolf Józef Bocheński , who greatly developed the family estate, was a landowning activist, volunteer in the 1920 war and a doctor of agricultural sciences; his interest in economic history influenced Józef’s own reflections on economic doctrine and his personal aversion to Marxism.
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Sendhil Mullainathan
#1862
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Sendhil Mullainathan is an American professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much . He was hired with tenure by Harvard in 2004 after having spent six years at MIT.
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Dan Sperber
#1863
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist and philosopher. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, psychology of reasoning, and philosophy of the social sciences. He has developed: an approach to cultural evolution known as the epidemiology of representations or cultural attraction theory as part of a naturalistic reconceptualization of the social; relevance theory; the argumentative theory of reasoning. Sperber formerly Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is Professor in the Depar...
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Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
#1864
Overall Influence
1950 - 2009 (59 years)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was an American academic scholar in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, and critical theory. Sedgwick published several books considered groundbreaking in the field of queer theory, and her critical writings helped create the field of queer studies, in which she was one of the most influential figures. Sedgwick's essays became the framework for critics of poststructuralism, multiculturalism, and gay studies.
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Cherie Blair
#1865
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Cherie, Lady Blair , also known professionally as Cherie Booth, is an English barrister and writer. She is married to former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair. Early life and education Booth was born on 23 September 1954 at Fairfield General Hospital, Bury, Lancashire, England, and brought up in Ferndale Road, Waterloo, Merseyside, just north of Liverpool. Although her birth was registered as 'Cherie', owing to her maternal grandmother's influence, she was christened 'Theresa Cara' in deference to the requirement that she be given a saint's name. Her father, British actor Tony Booth, left her mother, actress Gale Howard , when Cherie was 8 years old.
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Aziz Sancar
#1866
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Aziz Sancar is a Turkish-American molecular biologist specializing in DNA repair, cell cycle checkpoints, and circadian clock. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Tomas Lindahl and Paul L. Modrich for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair. He has made contributions on photolyase and nucleotide excision repair in bacteria that have changed his field.
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Peter Mansfield
#1867
Overall Influence
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
Sir Peter Mansfield was a British physicist who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Paul Lauterbur, for discoveries concerning Magnetic Resonance Imaging . Mansfield was a professor at the University of Nottingham.
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Malachi
#1868
Overall Influence
Malachi , also known as Malachias, is the name used by the author of the Book of Malachi, the last book of the Nevi'im section of the Tanakh. According to the 1897 Easton's Bible Dictionary, it is possible that Malachi is not a proper name; because it simply means "messenger", many assume it to be a pseudonym. Jewish tradition claims that the real identity of Malachi is Ezra the scribe.
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Peter Grünberg
#1869
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Peter Andreas Grünberg was a German physicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his discovery with Albert Fert of giant magnetoresistance which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disk drives.
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John G. Kemeny
#1870
Overall Influence
1926 - 1992 (66 years)
John George Kemeny was a Hungarian-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator best known for co-developing the BASIC programming language in 1964 with Thomas E. Kurtz. Kemeny served as the 13th President of Dartmouth College from 1970 to 1981 and pioneered the use of computers in college education. Kemeny chaired the presidential commission that investigated the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. According to György Marx he was one of The Martians.
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Philippe Sollers
#1871
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Philippe Sollers was a French writer and critic. In 1960 he founded the avant garde literary journal Tel Quel , which was published by Le Seuil and ran until 1982. Sollers then created the journal L'Infini, published first by Denoel, then by Gallimard with Sollers remaining as sole editor.
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Scott Pruitt
#1872
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Edward Scott Pruitt is an American attorney, lobbyist and Republican politician from the state of Oklahoma. He served as the 14th Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from February 17, 2017, to July 9, 2018, during the Donald Trump presidency, resigning while under at least 14 federal investigations. Pruitt denies the scientific consensus on climate change.
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John C. Wells
#1873
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
John Christopher Wells is a British phonetician and Esperantist. Wells is a professor emeritus at University College London, where until his retirement in 2006 he held the departmental chair in phonetics. He is known for his work on the Esperanto language and his invention of the standard lexical sets and the X-SAMPA phonetic script system.
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Robert P. George
#1874
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#1873
Brian Friel
#1875
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Brian Patrick Friel was an Irish dramatist, short story writer and founder of the Field Day Theatre Company. He had been considered one of the greatest living English-language dramatists. He has been likened to an "Irish Chekhov" and described as "the universally accented voice of Ireland". His plays have been compared favourably to those of contemporaries such as Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams.
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Julie Payette
#1876
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Julie Payette is a Canadian engineer, scientist and former astronaut who served from 2017 to 2021 as Governor General of Canada, the 29th since Canadian Confederation. Payette holds engineering degrees from McGill University and the University of Toronto. She worked as a research scientist before joining the Canadian Space Agency in 1992 as a member of the Canadian Astronaut Corps. She completed two spaceflights, STS-96 and STS-127, and has logged more than 25 days in space. She also served as capsule communicator at NASA Mission Control Center in Houston and from 2000 to 2007 as CSA's chie...
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Bernard Tschumi
#1877
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Bernard Tschumi is an architect, writer, and educator, commonly associated with deconstructivism. Son of the well-known Swiss architect Jean Tschumi and a French mother, Tschumi is a dual French-Swiss national who works and lives in New York City and Paris. He studied in Paris and at ETH in Zurich, where he received his degree in architecture in 1969.
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Damon Knight
#1878
Overall Influence
1922 - 2002 (80 years)
Damon Francis Knight was an American science fiction author, editor, and critic. He is the author of "To Serve Man", a 1950 short story adapted for The Twilight Zone. He was married to fellow writer Kate Wilhelm.
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Raymond Kelly
#1879
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Raymond Walter Kelly is the longest-serving Commissioner in the history of the New York City Police Department and the first person to hold the post for two non-consecutive tenures. According to its website, Kelly, a lifelong New Yorker, had spent 45 years in the NYPD, serving in 25 different commands and as Police Commissioner from 1992 to 1994 and again from 2002 until 2013. Kelly was the first man to rise from Police Cadet to Police Commissioner, holding all of the department's ranks, except for Three-Star Bureau Chief, Chief of Department and Deputy Commissioner, having been promoted directly from Two-Star Chief to First Deputy Commissioner in 1990.
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Burton Richter
#1880
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Burton Richter was an American physicist. He led the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center team which co-discovered the J/ψ meson in 1974, alongside the Brookhaven National Laboratory team led by Samuel Ting for which they won Nobel Prize for Physics in 1976. This discovery was part of the November Revolution of particle physics. He was the SLAC director from 1984 to 1999.
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Susan Brownmiller
#1881
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Susan Brownmiller is an American journalist, author and feminist activist best known for her 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, which was selected by The New York Public Library as one of 100 most important books of the 20th century.
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M. K. Stalin
#1882
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Muthuvel Karunanidhi Stalin is an Indian politician serving as the 8th and current Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. The son of the former Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi, Stalin has been the president of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party since 28 August 2018. He served as the 45th Mayor of Chennai from 1996 to 2002 and 1st Deputy Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu from 2009 to 2011. Stalin was placed 24th on the list of India's Most Powerful Personalities in 2022 by The Indian Express.
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Bernardine Dohrn
#1883
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Bernardine Rae Dohrn is a retired American law professor and a former leader of the far-left militant organization Weather Underground in the United States. As a leader of the Weather Underground in the early 1970s, Dohrn was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list for several years. She remained a fugitive, even though she was removed from the list. After coming out of hiding in 1980, Dohrn pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of aggravated battery and bail jumping.
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Martin Chalfie
#1884
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Martin Lee Chalfie is an American scientist. He is University Professor at Columbia University. He shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP". He holds a PhD in neurobiology from Harvard University.
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Theodore Millon
#1885
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Theodore Millon was an American psychologist known for his work on personality disorders. He founded the Journal of Personality Disorders and was the inaugural president of the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders. In 2008 he was awarded the Gold Medal Award For Life Achievement in the Application of Psychology by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Foundation named the "Theodore Millon Award in Personality Psychology" after him. Millon developed the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory, worked on the diagnostic criteria for passive-agg...
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William L. Rowe
#1886
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
William Leonard Rowe was a professor of philosophy at Purdue University who specialized in the philosophy of religion. His work played a leading role in the "remarkable revival of analytic philosophy of religion since the 1970s". He was noted for his formulation of the evidential argument from evil.
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Yuri Oganessian
#1887
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Yuri Tsolakovich Oganessian is a Russian-Armenian nuclear physicist who is best known as a researcher of superheavy chemical elementss. He participated with the discovery of multiple elements of the periodic table. He succeeded Georgy Flyorov as director of the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in 1989 and is now its scientific director. The heaviest element known of the periodic table, oganesson, is named after him, only the second time that an element was named after a living person .
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Wayne Gretzky
#1888
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Wayne Douglas Gretzky is a Canadian former professional ice hockey player and former head coach. He played 20 seasons in the National Hockey League for four teams from 1979 to 1999. Nicknamed "the Great One", he has been called the greatest ice hockey player ever by many sportswriters, players, The Hockey News, and the NHL itself, based on extensive surveys of hockey writers, ex-players, general managers and coaches. Gretzky is the leading goal scorer, assist producer and point scorer in NHL history, and has more career assists than any other player has total points. He is the only NHL player to total over 200 points in one season, a feat he accomplished four times.
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Andy Wallace
#1889
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Andy Wallace is an American music studio producer and audio and mixing engineer with a long track record of productions. Over the years, he focused exclusively on mixing. Wallace is known for his "sonically influential presence on the current music scene", and has "helped to make some of the most brutal, aggressive music released and also some of the most beautiful".
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Angela Carter
#1890
Overall Influence
1940 - 1992 (52 years)
Angela Olive Pearce , who published under the name Angela Carter, was an English novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. She is mainly known for her book The Bloody Chamber . In 1984, her short story "The Company of Wolves" was adapted into a film of the same name. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". In 2012, Nights at the Circus was selected as the best ever winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
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Gerd Gigerenzer
#1891
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Gerd Gigerenzer is a German psychologist who has studied the use of bounded rationality and heuristics in decision making. Gigerenzer is director emeritus of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy, both in Berlin.
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Stevan Harnad
#1892
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Stevan Robert Harnad is a Canadian cognitive scientist based in Montreal. Early life and education Harnad was born in Budapest, Hungary. He did his undergraduate work at McGill University and his graduate work at Princeton University's Department of Psychology. Harnad completed his Master of Arts degree in Psychology from McGill University in 1969, his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Princeton University in 1992. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by University of Liège in 2013.
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Gunther von Hagens
#1893
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Gunther von Hagens is a German anatomist, businessman and lecturer. He developed the technique for preserving biological tissue specimens called plastination. Von Hagens has organized numerous Body Worlds public exhibitions and occasional live demonstrations of his and his colleagues' work, and has traveled worldwide to promote its educational value. The sourcing of biological specimens for and the commercial background of his exhibits has been controversial.
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Eugenie Scott
#1894
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Eugenie Carol Scott is an American physical anthropologist, a former university professor and educator who has been active in opposing the teaching of young Earth creationism and intelligent design in schools. She coined the term "Gish gallop" to describe a fallacious rhetorical technique of overwhelming an interlocutor with as many individually weak arguments as possible, in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument.
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R. C. Sproul
#1895
Overall Influence
1939 - 2017 (78 years)
Robert Charles Sproul was an American Reformed theologian and ordained pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America. He was the founder and chairman of Ligonier Ministries and could be heard daily on the Renewing Your Mind radio broadcast in the United States and internationally. Under Sproul's direction, Ligonier Ministries produced the Ligonier Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which would eventually grow into the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. Along with Norman Geisler, Sproul was one of the chief architects of the statement. Sproul has been described as "the greatest and mo...
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Richard Wolin
#1896
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Richard Wolin is an American intellectual historian who writes on 20th Century European philosophy, particularly German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the group of thinkers known collectively as the Frankfurt School.
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Ajit Pai
#1897
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Ajit Varadaraj Pai is an American lawyer who served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 2017 to 2021. He has been a partner at the private-equity firm Searchlight Capital since April 2021.
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Brandon Carter
#1898
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Brandon Carter, is an Australian theoretical physicist who explores the properties of black holes, and was the first to name and employ the anthropic principle in its contemporary form. He is a researcher at the Meudon campus of the Laboratoire Univers et Théories, part of the CNRS.
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Larry Fink
#1899
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Laurence Douglas Fink is an American billionaire businessman. He is the current chairman and CEO of BlackRock, an American multinational investment management corporation. BlackRock is the largest money-management firm in the world with more than trillion in assets under management. In April 2022, Fink's net worth was estimated at billion according to Forbes Magazine. He sits on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations and World Economic Forum.
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Cy Twombly
#1900
Overall Influence
1928 - 2011 (83 years)
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. was an American painter, sculptor and photographer. Twombly is said to have influenced younger artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat. His best-known works are typically large-scale, freely-scribbled, calligraphic and graffiti-like works on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. His later paintings and works on paper shifted toward "romantic symbolism", and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words. Twombly often quoted poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke and John Keats, as well as classical myths and allegories, in his works.
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Hideki Shirakawa
#1901
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
is a Japanese chemist, engineer, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Tsukuba and Zhejiang University. He is best known for his discovery of conductive polymers. He was co-recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Alan MacDiarmid and Alan Heeger.
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David Suzuki
#1902
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
David Takayoshi Suzuki is a Canadian academic, science broadcaster, and environmental activist. Suzuki earned a PhD in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961, and was a professor in the genetics department at the University of British Columbia from 1963 until his retirement in 2001. Since the mid-1970s, Suzuki has been known for his television and radio series, documentaries and books about nature and the environment. He is best known as host and narrator of the popular and long-running CBC Television science program The Nature of Things, seen in over 40 countries. He is also well kn...
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