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
#19151
Luna Leopold
#19162
Overall Influence
1915 - 2006 (91 years)
Luna Bergere Leopold was a leading U.S. geomorphologist and hydrologist, and son of Aldo Leopold. He received a B.S. in civil engineering from the University of Wisconsin in 1936; an M.S. in physics-meteorology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1944; and a Ph.D. in geology from Harvard University in 1950.
Go to Profile#19152
Alexandru Balaban
#19163
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Alexandru T. Balaban is a Romanian chemist who made significant contributions to the fields of organic chemistry, theoretical chemistry, mathematical chemistry, and chemical graph theory. Early life and education Balaban was born in Timișoara, in the western part of Romania. His parents paid a lot of attention to Balaban's education, strongly encouraging his fascination with chemistry. In 1935 his family moved to Bucharest, where Balaban attended elementary school. After World War II, in 1945 they moved to Petroșani, where he finished high school. Alexandru Balaban enrolled the Politehnica University of Bucharest in 1949, where he was awarded a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#19153
Jeff Paris
#19164
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jeffrey Bruce Paris is a British mathematician and Professor of Logic in the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester. Education Paris gained his doctorate supervised by Robin Gandy at Manchester in 1969 with a dissertation on Large Cardinals and the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis.
Go to Profile#19154
Peter Conrad
#19165
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Peter Conrad is an Australian-born academic specialising in English literature, who taught at Christ Church at the University of Oxford. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Conrad was born in Hobart, Tasmania, and attended Hobart High School. After graduating from the University of Tasmania in 1968, Conrad went to Oxford University, UK, on a Rhodes Scholarship, studying at New College. He became a fellow of All Souls College from 1970 to 1973 before taking up his current post at Christ Church. There he taught English from 1973, and has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and at Williams College, and a guest lecturer throughout the United States.
Go to Profile#19155
Warwick Tucker
#19166
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Warwick Tucker is an Australian mathematician at Monash University who works on dynamical systems, chaos theory and computational mathematics. He is a recipient of the 2002 R. E. Moore Prize, and the 2004 EMS Prize.
Go to Profile#19156
Sirimavo Bandaranaike
#19167
Overall Influence
1916 - 2000 (84 years)
Sirima Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike , commonly known as Sirimavo Bandaranaike , was a Sri Lankan politician. She was the world's first female prime minister when she became Prime Minister of Sri Lanka in 1960. She chaired the Sri Lanka Freedom Party from 1960 to 1994 and served three terms as prime minister, two times as the chief executive, 1960 to 1965 and 1970 to 1977, and once again in a presidential system from 1994 to 2000, governing under the presidency of her daughter Chandrika Kumaratunga.
Go to Profile#19157
Andreas Albrecht
#19168
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Andreas J. Albrecht is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist who is a professor and chair of the physics department at the University of California, Davis. He is one of the founders of inflationary cosmology and studies the formation of the early universe, cosmic structure, and dark energy.
Go to Profile#19158
Aklilu Lemma
#19169
Overall Influence
1934 - 1997 (63 years)
Aklilu Lemma was an Ethiopian pathobiologist. In 1989, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award "for discovering and campaigning relentlessly for an affordable preventative against bilharzia." Education Lemma was educated at Addis Ababa University College and at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. where he obtained his D.Sc. in 1964. His dissertation was on sandfly-borne leishmaniasis.
Go to Profile#19159
Lance Morrow
#19170
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Lance Morrow is an American essayist and writer, chiefly for Time magazine, as well as the author of several books. He won the 1981 National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism and was a finalist for the same award in 1991. He has the distinction of writing more "Man of the Year" articles than any other writer in the magazine's history and has appeared on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and The O'Reilly Factor. He is a former professor of journalism and University Professor at Boston University.
Go to Profile#19160
David Heath
#19171
Overall Influence
1943 - 2011 (68 years)
David Clay Heath was an American probabilist known for co-inventing the Heath–Jarrow–Morton framework to model the evolution of the interest rate curve. Biography Early life He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, to W. Curtis and Margaret Wasson Heath. He graduated from Elkhart High School in 1960 and earned his bachelor's degree from Kalamazoo College in 1964.
Go to Profile#19161
Bootsy Collins
#19172
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
William Earl "Bootsy" Collins is an American bass guitarist, singer-songwriter, and record producer. Rising to prominence with James Brown in the early 1970s before joining the Parliament-Funkadelic collective, Collins established himself as one of the leading names and innovators in funk with his driving basslines and humorous vocals. He later formed his own P-Funk side project known as Bootsy's Rubber Band. He was a frequent collaborator with other musicians from a variety of genres, including dance music , electronic big beat , and alternative metal , among others. He is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted in 1997 with 15 other members of Parliament-Funkadelic.
Go to Profile#19162
Magnus Henrekson
#19173
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Magnus Henrekson, born 1958, is a professor of economics and between 2005 and 2020 he was president of the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm, Sweden. Between 2001 and 2009 he was Jacob Wallenberg Professor of Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics.
Go to Profile#19163
Harry Bouwman
#19174
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Willem Adriaan Gerrit Anton Bouwman is a Dutch Information systems researcher, and professor at the Åbo Akademi University, Institute for Advanced Management Systems Research, known for his work on mobile services, business models and business architecture.
Go to Profile#19164
Teng Biao
#19175
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Teng Biao is a Chinese lawyer and political activist. He is a lecturer at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing. He has been a vocal supporter of human rights activists such as Chen Guangcheng and Hu Jia. He has been arrested at least twice, in March 2008 and in February 2011. He was also a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School from and at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Go to Profile#19165
Ray Manzarek
#19176
Overall Influence
1939 - 2013 (74 years)
Raymond Daniel Manzarek Jr. was an American keyboardist. He is best known as a member of the rock band the Doors, co-founding the group in 1965 with fellow UCLA Film School student Jim Morrison. Manzarek is credited for his innovative playing and abilities on organ-style keyboard instruments.
Go to Profile#19166
Narada Michael Walden
#19177
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Narada Michael Walden is an American musician, singer, songwriter and record producer. He acquired the nickname Narada from Sri Chinmoy. He began his career as a drummer, working primarily in the jazz fusion realm, appearing with John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Chick Corea, Jaco Pastorius, Jeff Beck, Wayne Shorter and Weather Report, and Allan Holdsworth. After being mentored by Quincy Jones, he transitioned into a role as a songwriter and producer, working in the 1980s and 1990s with numerous R & B acts such as Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Mariah Carey, as well as other singers across a number of genres.
Go to Profile#19167
Juicy J
#19178
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Jordan Michael Houston III , known professionally as Juicy J, is an American rapper and record producer. Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, he is a founding member of the Southern hip hop group Three 6 Mafia, established in 1991. He released ten studio albums with the group, beginning as an underground act until attaining mainstream success and signing with Loud Records, an imprint of Columbia Records in 2000. In 2005, they reached their furthest commercial success with the single "Stay Fly", which peaked at number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100. The same year, the group recorded the song "It's ...
Go to Profile#19168
Ron Robin
#19179
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ron Theodore Robin is an Israeli scholar whose research focuses on the interface between culture and foreign policy in the United States. He is a senior faculty member at the University of Haifa, as well as a professor emeritus at New York University . Currently Robin serves as the 11th president of the University of Haifa.
Go to Profile#19169
Ibrahim Oweiss
#19180
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Ibrahim M. Oweiss is an Egyptian-born American economist, international economic advisor, and professor of economics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Biography Early life and education Oweiss received a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Alexandria University in Egypt, majoring in economics and political science, before moving to the United States to earn Masters and Ph.D. degrees in economics at the University of Minnesota.
Go to Profile#19170
Horace Barker
#19181
Overall Influence
1907 - 2000 (93 years)
Horace Albert "Nook" Barker was an American biochemist and microbiologist who studied the operation of biological and chemical processes in plants, humans and other animals, including using radioactive tracers to determine the role enzymes play in synthesizing sucrose. He was recognized with the National Medal of Science for his role in identifying an active form of Vitamin B12.
Go to Profile#19171
Pierre Cahuc
#19182
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Pierre Cahuc is a French economist who currently works as Professor of Economics at Sciences Po. He is Program Director for the IZA Institute of Labor Economics's programme "Labour Markets" and research fellow at CEPR. His research focuses mainly on labour economics and its relationship with macroeconomics. In 2001, he was awarded the Prize of the Best Young Economist of France for his contributions to economic research. He belongs to the most highly cited economists in France and Europe's leading labour economists.
Go to Profile#19172
Andrzej Buras
#19183
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Andrzej Jerzy Buras is a Polish-born Danish theoretical physicist, professor emeritus at the Technical University Munich . Scientific career He received his master's degree in theoretical physics at the Warsaw University in 1971, and emigrated to Denmark in the same year. One year later, he received his PhD at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. He then worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Niels Bohr Institute until 1975. After a fellowship in the CERN theory group from 1975–1977 he was first a visitor and then a staff member in the Fermilab theory group from 1977 till 1982. He then became staff member of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich .
Go to Profile#19173
Jarosław Kaczyński
#19184
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Jarosław Aleksander Kaczyński is a Polish politician. He has been the leader of the Law and Justice party since 2003. He served as Prime Minister of Poland from 2006 to 2007, and has twice held the post of Deputy Prime Minister of Poland, firstly from 2020 to 2022, and a second time from June 2023 to the present day.
Go to Profile#19174
George Wetherill
#19185
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
George Wetherill was a physicist and geologist and the director emeritus of the department of terrestrial magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, DC, US. In 2000, Wetherill received the J. Lawrence Smith Medal from the National Academy of Sciences "For his unique contributions to the cosmochronology of the planets and meteorites and to the orbital dynamics and formation of solar system bodies." In 2003, Wetherill received the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship, the highest honor bestowed by the American Astronomical Society, "For pioneering the application of modern physics and nu...
Go to Profile#19175
David C. Hilmers
#19186
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
David Carl Hilmers is a former NASA astronaut who flew four Space Shuttle missions. He was born in Clinton, Iowa, but considers DeWitt, Iowa, to be his hometown. He has two grown sons. His recreational interests include playing the piano, gardening, electronics, spending time with his family, and all types of sports. His parents are deceased. With five academic degrees, he is the second most formally educated U.S. astronaut, behind Story Musgrave with six.
Go to Profile#19176
Eleanor Maccoby
#19187
Overall Influence
1917 - 2018 (101 years)
Eleanor Emmons Maccoby was an American psychologist who was most recognized for her research and scholarly contributions to the fields of gender studies and developmental psychology. Throughout her career she studied sex differences, gender development, gender differentiation, parent-child relations, child development, and social development from the child perspective.
Go to Profile#19177
Robert W. Malone
#19188
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Robert Wallace Malone is an American physician and biochemist. His early work focused on mRNA technology, pharmaceuticals, and drug repurposing research. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Malone promoted misinformation about the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.
Go to Profile#19178
Isaac Namioka
#19189
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Isaac Namioka was a Japanese-American mathematician who worked in general topology and functional analysis. He was a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Washington. He died at home in Seattle on September 25, 2019.
Go to Profile#19179
Richard Shusterman
#19190
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Richard Shusterman is an American pragmatist philosopher. Known for his contributions to philosophical aesthetics and the emerging field of somaesthetics, currently he is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University.
Go to Profile#19180
Ben Wizner
#19191
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Ben Wizner is an American lawyer, writer, and civil liberties advocate with the American Civil Liberties Union. Since July 2013, he has been the lead attorney of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Education and personal life Wizner was born in 1971 in New Haven, Connecticut, and grew up on the campus of Yale University, where his father, Stephen Wizner, is a professor of law at Yale Law School and his mother is a dean. He has described being drawn to social justice work from at least as early as high school; after graduating Harvard College in 1993, he worked for an organization that provided legal assistance to homeless and near-homeless people.
Go to Profile#19181
Nedim Gürsel
#19192
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Nedim Gürsel is a Turkish writer. In the late 1960s, he published novellas and essays in Turkish magazines. After graduating from Galatasaray High School in 1970, he studied at the Sorbonne. In 1974, he graduated from the Sorbonne's Department of Modern French Literature. In 1979, he received his doctorate in comparative literature after completing his dissertation on Louis Aragon and Nazim Hikmet. He returned to Turkey, but the unrest there in 1980 persuaded him to go back to France.
Go to Profile#19182
Andreas Reckwitz
#19193
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Andreas Reckwitz is a German sociologist and cultural theorist. He is professor at the institute of social sciences at Humboldt University Berlin. Life Reckwitz studied sociology, Political science and philosophy in Bonn, Hamburg and Cambridge. He graduated 1994 in Cambridge, overseen by Anthony Giddens. He achieved his Dr. phil. in 1999 at Hamburg University. From 2001 to 2005 he worked there as assistant professor at the sociological faculty. In 2005 he became professor for sociology and sociology of culture at Konstanz University, 2010 professor for sociology of culture at the Viadrina European University in Frankfurt .
Go to Profile#19183
David Brown
#19194
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
David O'Neal Brown is an American police officer who served as the Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department from 2020 to 2023. He was the chief of the Dallas Police Department from 2010 to 2016. He has received praised by some for his reforms designed to reduce violent confrontations between police officers and the community and increase the department's accountability and transparency. He has also been criticized by the local police union for the methods of implementation of some of his policies.
Go to Profile#19184
Kim Nasmyth
#19195
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Kim Ashley Nasmyth is an English geneticist, the Whitley Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, former scientific director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology , and former head of the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford. He is best known for his work on the segregation of chromosomes during cell division.
Go to Profile#19185
Maria Luisa Spaziani
#19196
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Maria Luisa Spaziani was an Italian poet. Biography Spaziani was born in Turin. At nineteen, she founded the review Il dado, working with collaborators such as Vasco Pratolini, Sandro Penna and Vincenzo Ciaffi. Virginia Woolf sent her a chapter of her novel The Waves, autographed to Alla piccola direttrice . Spaziani did not contribute her own poems, however, feeling that they were not of sufficient quality.
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Jean-François Mertens
#19197
Overall Influence
1946 - 2012 (66 years)
Jean-François Mertens was a Belgian game theorist and mathematical economist. Mertens contributed to economic theory in regards to order-book of market games, cooperative games, noncooperative games, repeated games, epistemic models of strategic behavior, and refinements of Nash equilibrium . In cooperative game theory he contributed to the solution concepts called the core and the Shapley value.
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Souphanouvong
#19198
Overall Influence
1909 - 1995 (86 years)
Prince Souphanouvong , nicknamed the Red Prince, was along with his half-brother Prince Souvanna Phouma and Prince Boun Oum of Champasak, one of the "Three Princes" who represented respectively the communist , neutralist and royalist political factions in Laos. He was the President of Laos from December 1975 to August 1991.
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DJ Premier
#19199
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Christopher Edward Martin , known professionally as DJ Premier , is an American record producer and DJ. He is considered one of the greatest hip hop producers of all time. He was half of the hip hop duo Gang Starr—alongside the rapper Guru—and presently forms half of the hip hop duo PRhyme, together with Royce da 5'9".
Go to Profile#19189
Archibald Howie
#19200
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Archibald "Archie" Howie is a British physicist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Cambridge, known for his pioneering work on the interpretation of transmission electron microscope images of crystals. Born in 1934, he attended Kirkcaldy High School and the University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he subsequently took up a permanent post. He has been a fellow of Churchill College since its foundation, and was President of its Senior Combination Room until 2010.
Go to Profile#19190
Yuri Pines
#19201
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Yuri Pines is a Ukrainian-born Israeli sinologist and the Michael W. Lipson Professor of Chinese Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Pines was born in Kiev, Ukraine and immigrated to Israel as a child in 1979. He studied under Lothar von Falkenhausen at UCLA and under Liu Zehua at Nankai University in Tianjin, earning a PhD at Hebrew University in 1998.
Go to Profile#19191
Norman Zabusky
#19202
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Norman J. Zabusky was an American physicist, who is noted for the discovery of the soliton in the Korteweg–de Vries equation, in work completed with Martin Kruskal. This result early in his career was followed by an extensive body of work in computational fluid dynamics, which led him in the latter years of his career to an examination of the importance of visualization in this field. In fact, he coined the term visiometrics to describe the process of using computer-aided visualization to guide one towards quantitative results.
Go to Profile#19192
Oscar Peterson
#19203
Overall Influence
1925 - 2007 (82 years)
Oscar Emmanuel Peterson was a Canadian jazz pianist and composer. Considered a virtuoso and one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time, Peterson released more than 200 recordings, won eight Grammy Awards, as well as a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy, and received numerous other awards and honours. He played thousands of concerts worldwide in a career lasting more than 60 years. He was called the "Maharaja of the keyboard" by Duke Ellington, simply "O.P." by his friends, and informally in the jazz community, "the King of inside swing".
Go to Profile#19193
Roy Wagner
#19204
Overall Influence
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
Roy Wagner was an American cultural anthropologist who specialized in symbolic anthropology. Background Wagner received a B.A. in Medieval History from Harvard University , and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago , where he studied under David M. Schneider. He taught at Southern Illinois University and Northwestern University before accepting the chairmanship of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, where he taught until his death. He resided in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Go to Profile#19194
James Kasting
#19205
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
James Fraser Kasting is an American geoscientist and Distinguished Professor of Geosciences at Penn State University. Kasting is active in NASA's search for habitable extrasolar planets. He is considered a world leader in the field of planetary habitability, assessing habitable zones around stars. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018. Kasting also serves on the Advisory Council of METI .
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Ryan Adams
#19206
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
David Ryan Adams is an American rock and country singer-songwriter. He has released 24 studio albums and three as a former member of Whiskeytown. In 2000, Adams left Whiskeytown and released his debut solo album, Heartbreaker, to critical acclaim. The album was nominated for the Shortlist Music Prize. The following year, his profile increased with the release of the UK certified-gold Gold, which included the single, "New York, New York". During this time, Adams worked on several unreleased albums, which were consolidated into a third solo release, Demolition . Working at a prolific rate, Adam...
Go to Profile#19196
Alex Stein
#19207
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Alex Stein is an Israeli jurist who has served as a justice of the Israeli Supreme Court since 2018. Biography Alex Stein was born to a Jewish family in the Soviet Union. He immigratedtoto Israel with his family in 1973. He completed his high school studies at the Leo Baeck School in Haifa, and was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces in 1976, serving in the C4I Corps. He participated in Operation Litani and the 1982 Lebanon War. After being discharged, he studied law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, earning a Bachelor of Laws in 1983 and a Master of Laws in 1987. He later studied at ...
Go to Profile#19197
Yūko Tsushima
#19208
Overall Influence
1947 - 2016 (69 years)
Satoko Tsushima , known by her pen name Yūko Tsushima , was a Japanese fiction writer, essayist and critic. Tsushima won many of Japan's top literary prizes in her career, including the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature, the Noma Literary New Face Prize, the Noma Literary Prize, the Yomiuri Prize and the Tanizaki Prize. The New York Times called Tsushima "one of the most important writers of her generation." Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages.
Go to Profile#19198
Robert Weisberg
#19209
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Robert I. Weisberg is an American lawyer. He is an Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr. Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, and an expert on criminal law and criminal procedure, as well as a leading scholar in the law and literature movement.
Go to Profile#19199
Josh Freese
#19210
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Joshua Ryan Freese is an American drummer. A member of punk rock band the Vandals since 1989, Freese has also been a member of new wave band Devo since 1996 and rock band Foo Fighters since 2023. A prolific session and touring drummer, Freese has appeared on over 400 albums since 1986 and performed live with artists including Nine Inch Nails, Weezer, Sublime with Rome, Sting, 100 gecs, the Offspring and Danny Elfman. His considerable workload has earned him "the pristine reputation as one of the most in-demand session drummers in the business," according to Variety, while Freese jokingly dubb...
Go to Profile#19200
Alexander Etkind
#19211
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Alexander Etkind is a historian and cultural scientist. He is a professor of history and the Chair of Russia-Europe relations at the European University Institute. He is fellow of the European Institute for International Law and International Relations.
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