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
#18651
Michelle Cliff
#18662
Overall Influence
1946 - 2016 (70 years)
Michelle Carla Cliff was a Jamaican-American author whose notable works included Abeng , No Telephone to Heaven , and Free Enterprise . In addition to novels, Cliff also wrote short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various complex identity problems that stem from the experience of post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic individual identity in the face of race and gender constructs. A historical revisionist, many of Cliff's works seek to advance an alternative view of history against established mainstream narratives....
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Peter Kenneth Dews
#18663
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Peter Kenneth Dews is a British philosopher, in the fields of critical theory and continental philosophy. He made his name with the Logics of Disintegration, on the limitations of post-structuralism. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex.
Go to Profile#18653
Jim Palmer
#18664
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
James Alvin Palmer is an American former professional baseball pitcher who played 19 years in Major League Baseball for the Baltimore Orioles . Palmer was the winningest MLB pitcher in the 1970s, totaling 186 wins. He also won at least 20 games in eight different seasons and won three Cy Young Awards and four Gold Glovess during the decade. His 268 Orioles victories are the most in team history. A six-time American League All-Star, he was also one of the rare pitchers who never allowed a grand slam in any major league contest.
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Helaman Ferguson
#18665
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Helaman Rolfe Pratt Ferguson is an American sculptor and a digital artist, specifically an algorist. He is also well known for his development of the PSLQ algorithm, an integer relation detection algorithm.
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Chuan Leekpai
#18666
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Chuan Leekpai is a Thai politician who is the former President of the National Assembly of Thailand as well as the Speaker of the Thai House of Representatives from 2019 to 2023. Previously he served as the Thai prime minister in 2 terms from 20 September 1992 to 19 May 1995 and again from 9 November 1997 to 9 February 2001.
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Edward Klima
#18667
Overall Influence
1931 - 2008 (77 years)
Edward S. Klima was an American eminent linguist who specialized in the study of sign languages. Klima's work was heavily influenced by Noam Chomsky's then-revolutionary theory of the biological basis of linguistics, and applied that analysis to sign languages.
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L. Stephen Coles
#18668
Overall Influence
1941 - 2014 (73 years)
Leslie Stephen Coles was an American biogerontologist who was the co-founder and executive director of the Gerontology Research Group where he conducted research on supercentenarians and aging. He was also a visiting scholar in the computer science department at the University of California, Los Angeles and an assistant researcher in the Department of Surgery, at the David Geffen School of Medicine.
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Camille Paglia
#18669
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Camille Anna Paglia is an American academic and social critic and feminist. Paglia has been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, since 1984. She is critical of many aspects of modern culture and is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson and other books. She is also a critic of contemporary American feminism and of post-structuralism, as well as a commentator on multiple aspects of American culture such as its visual art, music, and film history.
Go to Profile#18659
Magda Cordell McHale
#18670
Overall Influence
1921 - 2008 (87 years)
Magda Cordell McHale was a Hungarian artist, futurist, and educator. She was a founding member of the Independent Group which was a British movement that originated Pop Art which grew out of a fascination with American mass culture and post-WWII technologies. Later, she was a faculty member in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture & Planning.
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William Markowitz
#18671
Overall Influence
1907 - 1998 (91 years)
William Markowitz was an American astronomer, principally known for his work on the standardization of time. His mother was visiting Melč near Vítkov in Austrian Silesia when William was born. The Polish family emigrated to the U.S. in 1910 and settled in Chicago.
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Dick Gephardt
#18672
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Richard Andrew Gephardt is an American attorney, lobbyist, and politician who represented in the United States House of Representatives from 1977 to 2005. A member of the Democratic Party, he was House majority leader from 1989 to 1995 and minority leader from 1995 to 2003. He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in 1988 and 2004. Gephardt was mentioned as a possible vice presidential nominee in 1988, 1992, 2000, 2004, and 2008.
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Nancy Coover Andreasen
#18673
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Nancy Coover Andreasen is an American neuroscientist and neuropsychiatrist. She currently holds the Andrew H. Woods Chair of Psychiatry at the Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine at the University of Iowa.
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Todd Brewster
#18674
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Todd Brewster is an American author, journalist, and film producer. He is presently the senior visiting lecturer in journalism at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Career Brewster served as senior editorial producer for ABC News and co-authored three books with the late Peter Jennings: The Century, The Century for Young People, and In Search of America. The Century, a 600-page book on the history of the twentieth century, was originally designed as a companion book for ABC's 1999 documentary series of the same name, but months before the series debuted, the book had already topped the New York Times Best Seller List.
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Nancy Kerrigan
#18675
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Nancy Ann Kerrigan is an American former figure skater. She won bronze medals at the 1991 World Championships and the 1992 Winter Olympics, silver medals at the 1992 World Championships and the 1994 Winter Olympics, as well as the 1993 US National Figure Skating Championship. Kerrigan was inducted into the United States Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 2004.
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Jane M. Hawkins
#18676
Overall Influence
Jane Margaret Hawkins is an American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research concerns dynamical systems and complex dynamics, including cellular automata and Julia sets. More recent research has included work on cellular automata models for the spread of HIV, Hepatitis C and Ebola.
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Regis Philbin
#18677
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Regis Francis Xavier Philbin was an American television presenter, talk show host, game show host, comedian, actor, and singer. Once called "the hardest working man in show business", he held the Guinness World Record for the most hours spent on US television .
Go to Profile#18667
Olumbe Bassir
#18678
Overall Influence
1919 - 2001 (82 years)
Olumbe Bassir was a Nigerian scientist, author and academic. His primary contributions to research were in the areas of aflatoxins, nutrition, and peace research. Early life and education Born in Senegal to Sierra Leonean Oku parents in 1919, Olumbe Bassir was raised in Fourah Bay area, in the municipality of Freetown, by his parents Abdul and Isatu Bassir. He attended the Prince of Wales Secondary School where he passed the Senior Cambridge examination with exemption from London matriculation. In 1946, after a short teaching spell at the prestigious Bo Government Secondary School, he attended to Yaba College where he obtained the Higher National Diploma.
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John D. Ferry
#18679
Overall Influence
1912 - 2002 (90 years)
John Douglass Ferry was a Canadian-born American chemist and biochemist noted for development of surgical products from blood plasma and for studies of the chemistry of large molecules. Along with Williams and Landel, Ferry co-authored the work on time-temperature superposition in which the now famous WLF equation first appeared. The National Academy of Sciences called Ferry "a towering figure in polymer science". The University of Wisconsin said that he was "undoubtedly the most widely recognized research pioneer in the study of motional dynamics in macromolecular systems by viscoelastic t...
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Rodney Hilton
#18680
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
Rodney Howard Hilton was an English Marxist historian of the late medieval period and the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Biography Hilton was born in Middleton in Lancashire. He studied at Manchester Grammar School and arrived at Balliol College, Oxford in 1935. There he joined the student branch of the Communist Party. The influence of his tutors V. H. Galbraith and R. W. Southern drew him to medieval history. He acquired a first-class degree in modern history in 1938, was a Harmsworth Senior Scholar at Merton College, Oxford 1939-1940, and took his DPhil in 1940, writing his diss...
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Daniel Kolak
#18681
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Daniel Kolak is a Croatian-American philosopher who works primarily in philosophy of mind, personal identity, cognitive science, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic, philosophy of religion, and aesthetics. He is professor of philosophy at the William Paterson University of New Jersey and an Affiliate of the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science . Kolak is the founder of the philosophical therapy known as cognitive dynamics.
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Dick Thornburgh
#18682
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Richard Lewis Thornburgh was an American lawyer, author, and politician who served as the 76th United States attorney general from 1988 to 1991 under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. A Republican, he previously served as the 41st governor of Pennsylvania and as the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
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Sylvia Schmelkes
#18683
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Sylvia Schmelkes is a Mexican sociologist and education researcher, and current director of the Mexican National Institute of Educational Evaluation. She is best known for her work in intercultural education, and her book 'Toward better quality of our schools'. Schmelkes has also written over 100 academic texts and essays. She is a former General Coordinator of Intercultural and Bilingual Education at the Secretariat of Public Education in Mexico, and is currently heading the Research Institute for the Development of Education at the Iberoamerican University.
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Ahmed Benchemsi
#18684
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Ahmed Reda Benchemsi is a Moroccan journalist. He is the founder and was the publisher and editor of TelQuel and Nichane magazines. Biography Education Benchemsi attended high school in Casablanca. He spent his freshman years in Rabat's Mohammed V University, before joining Paris 8 University, from which he received a B.A in finance in 1994. He later received an M.A in development economics from the Sorbonne in 1995, and an MPhil in political science from Sciences Po in 1998.
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Sara Errani
#18685
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Sara Errani is an Italian professional tennis player. She is a former top five player in singles and former world No. 1 in doubles. With 9 singles titles and 28 doubles titles , she is the Italian tennis player with the highest number of WTA titles. She entered the Top 10 in doubles on 11 June 2012, remaining there for 94 straight weeks, and she reached her career-high singles ranking of world No. 5 on 20 May 2013. Errani became the world No. 1 in doubles for the first time on 10 September 2012. She was the year-end No. 1 doubles player in both 2013 and 2014, and has held the top ranking for ...
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Harold Lawson
#18686
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Harold W. "Bud" Lawson was a software engineer, computer architect and systems engineer. Lawson is credited with the 1964 invention of the pointer in high-level programming languages . In 2000, Lawson was presented the Computer Pioneer Award by the IEEE for his invention.
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Louis de Branges de Bourcia
#18687
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Louis de Branges de Bourcia is a French-American mathematician. He is the Edward C. Elliott Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He is best known for proving the long-standing Bieberbach conjecture in 1984, now called de Branges's theorem. He claims to have proved several important conjectures in mathematics, including the generalized Riemann hypothesis.
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James Tate
#18688
Overall Influence
1943 - 2015 (72 years)
James Vincent Tate was an American poet. His work earned him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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Peter Sanders
#18689
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Peter Sanders is a German computer scientist who works as a professor of computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. His research concerns the design, analysis, and implementation of algorithms and data structures, and he is particularly known for his research on suffix sorting finding shortest paths in road networks.
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Scott Boras
#18690
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Scott Dean Boras is an American sports agent, specializing in baseball. He is the founder, owner and president of the Boras Corporation, a sports agency based in Newport Beach, California, that represents roughly 175 professional baseball clients. Since 2013, Forbes magazine has named Boras the "Most Powerful Sports Agent in the World." In 2019 and 2022, contracts signed by his clients totaled more than $1 billion in the month of December.
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Edward Ginzton
#18691
Overall Influence
1915 - 1998 (83 years)
Edward Leonard Ginzton was a Ukrainian-American engineer. Education Ginzton completed his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1941.
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Ward Whitt
#18692
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Ward Whitt is an American professor of operations research and management sciences. He is the Wai T. Chang Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University. His research focuses on queueing theory, performance analysis, stochastic models of telecommunication systems, and numerical transform inversion. He is recognized for his contributions to the understanding and analyses of complex queues and queuing networks, which led to advances in the telecommunications system. As of November 2, 2015, his publications have been cited over 25,000 times, and he has an h-i...
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Edwin G. Burrows
#18693
Overall Influence
1943 - 2018 (75 years)
Edwin G. "Ted" Burrows was a Distinguished Professor of History at Brooklyn College. He is the co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 , and author of Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War, , which won the 2009 Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award.
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Joseph Schlessinger
#18694
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Joseph Schlessinger is a Yugoslav-born Israeli-American biochemist and biophysician. He is chair of the Pharmacology Department at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, as well as the founding director of the school's new Cancer Biology Institute. His area of research is signaling through tyrosine phosphorylation, which is important in many areas of cellular regulation, especially growth control and cancer. Schlessinger's work has led to an understanding of the mechanism of transmembrane signaling by receptor tyrosine kinases and how the resulting signals control cell...
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Philip Slater
#18695
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Philip Elliot Slater was an American sociologist and writer. He was the author of the bestselling 1970 book on American culture, The Pursuit of Loneliness and of numerous other books and articles. He had an A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard and taught sociology at Harvard, Brandeis, and University of California at Santa Cruz. He was Professor and Chairperson of the Brandeis Sociology Department in 1971 when he resigned to found, with Jacqueline Doyle and Morrie Schwartz, Greenhouse, a non-profit growth center, where he led encounter groups and personal growth workshops.
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Kenneth W. Thompson
#18696
Overall Influence
1921 - 2013 (92 years)
Kenneth W. Thompson was an American academic and author known for his contributions to normative theory in international relations. In 1978 he became director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He retired as director in 1998, but continued to head its Forum Program until 2004.
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J. Anthony Lukas
#18697
Overall Influence
1933 - 1997 (64 years)
Jay Anthony Lukas was an American journalist and author, best known for his 1985 book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. Common Ground is a classic study of race relations, class conflict, and school busing in Boston, Massachusetts, as seen through the eyes of three families: one upper-middle-class white, one working-class white, and one working-class African-American.
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Conrad Pepler
#18698
Overall Influence
1908 - 1993 (85 years)
Conrad Pepler, O.P. was an English Dominican priest, writer, editor, and publisher. He was the founding Warden of the first Catholic conference centre in the United Kingdom, at Spode House, Staffordshire.
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Gabriele Vezzosi
#18699
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Gabriele Vezzosi is an Italian mathematician, born in Florence . His main interest is algebraic geometry. Vezzosi earned an MS degree in Physics at the University of Florence, under the supervision of Alexandre M. Vinogradov, and a PhD in Mathematics at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, under the supervision of Angelo Vistoli. His first papers dealt with differential calculus over commutative rings, intersection theory, algebraic K-theory, motivic homotopy theory, and existence of vector bundles on singular algebraic surfaces.
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Robert Kirshner
#18700
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Robert P. Kirshner is an American astronomer, Chief Program Officer for Science for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Clownes Research Professor of Science at Harvard University. Kirshner has worked in several areas of astronomy including the physics of supernovae, supernova remnants, the large-scale structure of the cosmos, and the use of supernovae to measure the expansion of the universe.
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Hella Jongerius
#18701
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Hella Jongerius is a Dutch industrial designer. Biography Jongerius was born in De Meern, a village to the west of Utrecht in the Netherlands in 1963. From 1988 to 1993, she studied design at the Design Academy Eindhoven. After graduating, she worked for a few projects at Droog Design. She founded her own studio called Jongeriuslab in Rotterdam in 1993. She taught at the Design Academy Eindhoven as head of the department Living/Atelier . Her clients include Maharam , KLM , Vitra , IKEA , Camper , Nymphenburg and, Royal Tichelaar Makkum . Her designs have been exhibited at galleries and museu...
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Dana Moshkovitz
#18702
Overall Influence
Dana Moshkovitz Aaronson is an Israeli theoretical computer scientist whose research topics include approximation algorithms and probabilistically checkable proofs. She is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Charles M. Newman
#18703
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Charles Michael "Chuck" Newman is a mathematician and a physicist at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. He works in the fields of mathematical physics, statistical mechanics, and probability theory.
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Ann Lambton
#18704
Overall Influence
1912 - 2008 (96 years)
Ann Katharine Swynford Lambton, , usually known as A.K.S. Lambton or "Nancy" Lambton, was a British historian and expert on medieval and early modern Persian history, Persian language, Islamic political theory, and Persian social organisation. She was an acknowledged authority on land tenure and reform in Iran .
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T. J. Clark
#18705
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Timothy James "T. J." Clark is a British art historian and writer. He taught art history in a number of universities in England and the United States, including Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley.
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Pratibha Patil
#18706
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Prathibha Devisingh Patil is an Indian politician and lawyer who served as the 12th president of India from 2007 to 2012. She was the first woman to become the president of India. A member of the Indian National Congress, she previously served as the Governor of Rajasthan from 2004 to 2007, and was a member of the Lok Sabha from 1991 to 1996.
Go to Profile#18696
Ravindra K. Ahuja
#18707
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Ravindra K. Ahuja is an Indian-born American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is currently Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, and CEO of the automation and optimization solutions provider Optym, which he founded in 2000 as Innovative Scheduling, Inc.
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Robert L. Reymond
#18708
Overall Influence
1932 - 2013 (81 years)
Robert Lewis Reymond was an American Christian theologian of the Protestant Reformed tradition and the author of New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith . Reymond held B.A., M.A., and PhD degrees from Bob Jones University, was ordained into the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod in 1967, and taught at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri and Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Florida . While at Covenant, Reymond also served in a pastoral role, pastoring an RPCES congregation in Hazelwood, MO between 1968 and 1973 and serving as interim pastor at another RPCES congregation in Waterloo, IL, between 1981 and 1985.
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Kenneth Manning
#18709
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Kenneth R. Manning is an American academic professor and author. He is currently the Thomas Meloy Professor of Rhetoric and of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Early life and education Born in Dillon, South Carolina and educated in local schools, Manning eventually moved to North Haven, Connecticut, soon afterwards. Manning entered Harvard University in 1966 and completed his Bachelor of Arts in 1970, his Master of Arts in 1971, and his Ph.D. in 1974. His dissertation, The Emergence of the Weierstrassian Approach To Complex Analysis, was supervised by I....
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Yair Minsky
#18710
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Yair Nathan Minsky is an Israeli-American mathematician whose research concerns three-dimensional topology, differential geometry, group theory and holomorphic dynamics. He is a professor at Yale University. He is known for having proved Thurston's ending lamination conjecture and as a student of curve complex geometry.
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Tom Lehrer
#18711
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Thomas Andrew Lehrer is an American musician, singer-songwriter, satirist, and mathematician, who later taught mathematics and musical theater. He recorded pithy and humorous songs that became popular in the 1950s and 1960s. His songs often parodied popular musical forms, though they usually had original melodies. An exception is "The Elements", in which he set the names of the chemical elements to the tune of the "Major-General's Song" from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance.
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