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
#21101
Ehud Gazit
#21112
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Ehud Gazit is an Israeli biochemist, biophysicist and nanotechnologist. He is Professor and Endowed Chair at Tel Aviv University and a member of the executive board of the university . In 2015, he was knighted by the Italian Republic for services to science and society. He was recently elected as the 2023 International Solvey Chair in Chemistry, a position that was previously held by 15 of the top world scientists including three Nobel laureates.
Go to Profile#21102
Jan Peter Balkenende
#21113
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jan Pieter "Jan Peter" Balkenende Jr. is a Dutch politician of the Christian Democratic Appeal party and jurist who served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 22 July 2002 to 14 October 2010.
Go to Profile#21103
Paul Le Guen
#21114
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Paul Joseph Marie Le Guen is a French professional football manager and former player. He was most recently the manager of Ligue 2 club Le Havre. During his playing career, Le Guen played as a midfielder, and enjoyed a successful stay with Paris Saint-Germain between 1991 and 1998, and won 17 caps for the France national team. As a manager, his most notable achievement has been winning the Ligue 1 title in each of his three seasons in charge of Lyon between 2002 and 2005.
Go to Profile#21104
Robert B. Stobaugh
#21115
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Robert Blair Stobaugh was an American educator noted for his research into energy economics and corporate governance. He earned a degree in chemical engineering from Louisiana State University, and went to work as an engineer at companies such as Esso, Caltex and Monsanto Chemical Company. After leaving Monsanto, he earned a doctorate degree in business administration from Harvard University. He spent 29 years as a professor at the Harvard Business School . He served as director of the HBS Energy Project from 1972 to 1983. According to Harvard Business School, Stobaugh focused his research interests in three areas: corporate governance, energy and international business.
Go to Profile#21105
Victor Popov
#21116
Overall Influence
1937 - 1994 (57 years)
Victor Nikolaevich Popov was a Russian theoretical physicist known for his contribution to the quantization of non-abelian gauge fields. His work with Ludvig Faddeev on that subject introduced the fundamental objects now known as Faddeev–Popov ghosts.
Go to Profile#21106
Garnett S. Stokes
#21117
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Garnett Sue Stokes is an American academic administrator serving as the 23rd president of the University of New Mexico. She assumed office on March 1, 2018. Early life and education Stokes was born in Washington, D.C. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from Carson–Newman University, followed by a Master of Science and PhD in industrial and organizational psychology from the University of Georgia.
Go to Profile#21107
Daniel C. Matt
#21118
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Daniel Chanan Matt is an author, teacher and scholar of Kabbalah. He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University and served as a professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley from 1979-2000. He has also taught at Stanford University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Matt is best known for his multi-volume annotated translation, The Zohar: Pritzker Edition. He composed the first nine volumes of this twelve-volume series , and was the General Editor of the remaining three volumes . His annotated translation has been hailed as "a monumental contribution to the history of Jewish th...
Go to Profile#21108
James Burke
#21119
Overall Influence
1931 - 1996 (65 years)
James Burke , also known as "Jimmy the Gent", was an American gangster and Lucchese crime family associate who is believed to have organized the 1978 Lufthansa heist, the largest cash robbery in American history at the time. He was believed to be responsible for the deaths of those involved in the months after the robbery.
Go to Profile#21109
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
#21120
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger is an historian of science who comes from Liechtenstein. He was director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin from 1997 to 2014. His focus areas within the history of science are the history and epistemology of the experiment, and further the history of molecular biology and protein biosynthesis. Additionally he writes and publicizes essays and poems.
Go to Profile#21110
Jon Magne Leinaas
#21121
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jon Magne Leinaas is a Norwegian theoretical physicist. He was born in Oslo. He took the cand.real. at the University of Oslo in 1970 and the dr.philos. degree at the same institution in 1980. He was a fellow at Nordita, and at CERN, and held a faculty position at the University of Stavanger, before he was appointed as a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oslo in 1989. He is a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#21111
Michael Driscoll
#21122
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Michael John Driscoll is an economist, sometime Chair of the Coalition of Modern Universities in the UK and from 1996 to 2015 was Vice-Chancellor of Middlesex University in London. In 2016, he was appointed President and Vice-Chancellor of Taylor's University in Malaysia.
Go to Profile#21112
Ernesto Pernia
#21123
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Ernesto del Mar Pernia is a Filipino economist, writer and professor emeritus at the University of the Philippines School of Economics. He formerly served as Director-General of the National Economic and Development Authority and Secretary of Socioeconomic Planning under the Duterte administration from 2016 to 2020.
Go to Profile#21113
Thomas Baldwin
#21124
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Thomas R. Baldwin is a British philosopher and has been a professor of philosophy at the University of York since 1995. He has written generally on 20th century analytic and Continental philosophy, as well as bioethics, the philosophy of language and of mind, particularly with regard to G. E. Moore, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Bertrand Russell.
Go to Profile#21114
Bill Ransom
#21125
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Bill Ransom is a science fiction writer . Early life and education He began full-time employment at the age of eleven as an agricultural worker. He attended Washington State University on track and boxing scholarships, and the University of Puget Sound on a track scholarship. He received his BA in Sociology and English Education from the University of Washington in 1970, and MA in English from Utah State University in 1997.
Go to Profile#21115
Jeremy Farrar
#21126
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Sir Jeremy James Farrar is a British medical researcher who serves as Chief Scientist at the World Health Organization since 2023. He was previously the director of The Wellcome Trust from 2013 to 2023 and a professor of tropical medicine at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#21116
Kathryn Moler
#21127
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Kathryn Ann Moler is an American physicist, and current dean of research at Stanford University. She received her BSc and Ph.D. from Stanford University. After working as a visiting scientist at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in 1995, she held a postdoctoral position at Princeton University from 1995 to 1998. She joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1998, and became an Associate in CIFAR's Superconductivity Program in 2000. She became an associate professor at Stanford in 2002 and is currently a professor of applied physics and of Physics at Stanford. She currently works in the ...
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Michael R. Licona
#21128
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Michael R. "Mike" Licona is an American New Testament scholar, author, and Christian apologist. He is Professor of New Testament Studies at Houston Christian University, Extraordinary Associate Professor of Theology at North-West University and the director of Risen Jesus, Inc. Licona specializes in the resurrection of Jesus, and in the literary analysis of the Gospels as Greco-Roman biographies.
Go to Profile#21118
Shinichi Kitaoka
#21129
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Shinichi Kitaoka is a Japanese political scientist. He has held many roles such as the president of the Japan International Cooperation Agency , president of the International University of Japan, professor at Japan's GRIPS-Tokyo School of Security and International Studies, and Japanese ambassador to the United Nations. His area of expertise is the history of Japanese politics and diplomacy, as a political scientist and a historian.
Go to Profile#21119
Babatunde Ogunnaike
#21130
Overall Influence
1956 - 2022 (66 years)
Babatunde Ayodeji Ogunnaike was an American chemical engineer of Nigerian descent and the William L. Friend Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware . He was the former dean of UD's college of engineering. He died on February 20, 2022. He had waged a long battle with cancer.
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Jack Hirschman
#21131
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Jack Hirschman was an American poet and social activist who wrote more than 100 volumes of poetry and essays. Biography Hirschman was born in New York City to a Russian Jewish family. He received a B.A. from the City College of New York in 1955 and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Indiana University. While attending City College, he worked as a copy boy for the Associated Press. When he was 19, he sent a story to Ernest Hemingway, who responded: "I can't help you, kid. You write better than I did when I was 19. But the hell of it is, you write like me. That is no sin. But you won't get anywhere wit...
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Martin van Bruinessen
#21132
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Martin van Bruinessen is a Dutch anthropologist and author, who has published a number of publications on the Kurdish, Indonesian, Turkish, Persian cultures, and also on aspects of Islam as a whole. He taught the sociology of religion at the State Institute of Islamic Studies of Yogyakarta, Indonesia and has been teaching Kurdish and Turkish studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands since 1994 as associate professor. He shifted his emphasis in 1998 to a broader scope, Islamic Studies, after becoming Professor of the Comparative Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies at Utrecht University.
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Mervin F. Verbit
#21133
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Mervin Feldman Verbit is an American sociologist whose work focuses on sociology of religion, American Jews and the American Jewish community. He is currently the chair of the Sociology Department at Touro College.
Go to Profile#21123
Rickey Henderson
#21134
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Rickey Nelson Henley Henderson is an American former professional baseball left fielder who played 25 seasons in Major League Baseball for nine teams from 1979 to 2003, including four separate tenures with his original team, the Oakland Athletics. Nicknamed "the Man of Steal", he is widely regarded as baseball's greatest leadoff hitter and baserunner. He holds MLB records for career stolen bases, runs, unintentional walks and leadoff home runs. At the time of his last major league game in 2003, the ten-time American League All-Star ranked among the sport's top 100 all-time home run hitters and was its all-time leader in walks.
Go to Profile#21124
Roberto Andorno
#21135
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Roberto Andorno is Privatdozent at the Faculty of Law, University of Zurich . He is also Research Fellow at the University's Institute of Biomedical Ethics and Medical History, where he also coordinates the PhD Program in biomedical ethics and law. Originally from Argentina, he holds doctoral degrees in law from the Universities of Buenos Aires and Paris XII , both on topics related to the ethical and legal aspects of assisted reproductive technologies. Between 1999 and 2005 he conducted various research projects relating to global bioethics, human dignity, and human rights at the Laval Unive...
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Masao Kotani
#21136
Overall Influence
1906 - 1993 (87 years)
was a Japanese theoretical physicist, known for molecular physics and biophysics. Kotani was born in Kyoto and spent his primary and middle school days in Osaka. He moved to Tokyo to enter the First Higher School and then the Imperial University of Tokyo. In 1929, he received his BSc degree in physics and was appointed as a lecturer at the faculty of engineering in the Imperial University of Tokyo. Three years later, he became an associate professor in the physics department. In 1943, he received the degree of DSc and was promoted to a full professor. In 1965, he moved to Osaka University as a professor in the faculty of engineering science.
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Rebecca Allen
#21137
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Rebecca Allen is an internationally recognized digital artist inspired by the aesthetics of motion, the study of perception and behavior and the potential of advanced technology. Her artwork, which spans four decades and takes the form of experimental video, large-scale performances, live simulations and virtual and augmented reality art installations, addresses issues of gender, identity and what it means to be human as technology redefines our sense of reality.
Go to Profile#21127
Kelly Cherry
#21138
Overall Influence
1940 - 2022 (82 years)
Kelly Cherry was a novelist, poet, essayist, professor, and literary critic and a former Poet Laureate of Virginia . She was the author of more than 30 books, including the poetry collections Songs for a Soviet Composer, Death and Transfiguration, Rising Venus and The Retreats of Thought. Her short fiction was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South, and won a number of awards.
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Victor Kanke
#21139
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Victor Andreyevich Kanke is a Russian philosopher born in the village of Nekrasovo, Slavgorod District, Altai Territory to a German family. He taught physics at school and philosophy at the Biysk State Teacher Training Institute and the Obninsk Institute for Nuclear Power Engineering .
Go to Profile#21129
Steven H. Miles
#21140
Overall Influence
Steven H. Miles is an American doctor, author, and professor of medicine who has published on ethically topics relating to medicine and the use of torture. Miles is a practicing physician and Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and is a member of its Center for Bioethics. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Service Award of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanistics. Miles is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution.
Go to Profile#21130
Dennis Eckersley
#21141
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Dennis Lee Eckersley , nicknamed "Eck", is an American former professional baseball pitcher and color commentator. Between 1975 and 1998, he pitched in Major League Baseball for the Cleveland Indians, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, Oakland Athletics, and St. Louis Cardinals. Eckersley had success as a starter, but gained his greatest fame as a closer, becoming the first of two pitchers in major league history to have both a 20-win season and a 50-save season in a career.
Go to Profile#21131
Chris Welty
#21142
Overall Influence
Christopher A. Welty is an American computer scientist, who works at Google Research in New York. He is best known for his work on ontologies, in the Semantic Web, and on IBM's Watson. While on sabbatical from Vassar College from 1999 to 2000, he collaborated with Nicola Guarino on OntoClean; he was co-chair of the W3C Rule Interchange Format working group from 2005 to 2009.
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Pamela E. Oliver
#21143
Overall Influence
Pamela E. Oliver is an American sociologist most well-known for her contributions to theories of social action and her studies of racial injustice in the legal system. She is a Conway-Bascom Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Go to Profile#21133
Bernard Roizman
#21144
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Bernard Roizman is an American scientist born in Romania. He is the Joseph Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Virology in the Departments of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#21134
Phil Donahue
#21145
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Phillip John Donahue is an American media personality, writer, film producer and the creator and host of The Phil Donahue Show. The television program, later known simply as Donahue, was the first talk show format that included audience participation. The show had a 29-year run on national television that began in Dayton, Ohio, in 1967 and ended in New York City in 1996. His shows have often focused on issues that divide liberals and conservatives in the United States, such as abortion, consumer protection, civil rights and war issues. His most frequent guest was Ralph Nader, for whom Donahue campaigned in 2000.
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Joseph Grieco
#21146
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Joseph M. Grieco is professor of political science at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina. Within international relations theory he is a neorealist and is a key figure in the debate between neorealists and neoliberals.
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Allen Curnow
#21147
Overall Influence
1911 - 2001 (90 years)
Thomas Allen Monro Curnow was a New Zealand poet and journalist. Life Curnow was born in Timaru, New Zealand, the son of a fourth generation New Zealander, an Anglican clergyman, and he grew up in a religious family. The family was of Cornish origin. During his early childhood they often moved, living in Canterbury, Belfast, Malvern, Lyttelton and New Brighton. He was educated at Christchurch Boys' High School, Canterbury University, and obtained a PhD from Auckland University in 1964.
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C. S. Song
#21148
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Choan-Seng Song is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Theology and Asian Cultures at the Pacific School of Religion. Biography Song was born into a Presbyterian family in Tainan, and received his early education while Taiwan was under Japanese rule. He studied at National Taiwan University , the University of Edinburgh and Union Theological Seminary, where he received his PhD in 1965. Song's dissertation was "The Relation of Divine Revelation and Man's Religion in the Theologies of Karl Barth and Paul Tillich." Song was principal of Tainan Theological College and, later, president of t...
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Clemencia Rodriguez
#21149
Overall Influence
Clemencia Rodriguez is a Colombian US-based media and communication scholar recognized for her role in establishing and promoting the field of alternative media studies in English language media studies, notably through her work on 'citizens' media,' a term she coined in her 2001 book Fissures in the Mediascape and through co-founding and facilitating OURMedia/NUESTROSMedios, a global network of researchers and practitioners of alternative media, community media and citizens' media, currently the biggest network of its kind with over 500 members in over 40 countries.
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Guy Rocher
#21150
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (102 years)
Guy Arthur Auguste Rocher is a Canadian academic and sociologist. Born in Berthierville, Quebec, he received a B.A. from the Université de Montréal in 1943, an M.A. in sociology from Université Laval in 1950, and a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University in 1958. From 1952 until 1960 he taught at Université Laval. From 1960 he has taught at the Université de Montréal.
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Paul Westhead
#21151
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Paul William Westhead is an American retired basketball coach. He was the head coach for three National Basketball Association teams and an assistant for four others, and also coached in the National Collegiate Athletic Association , Women's National Basketball Association , American Basketball Association , and Japan Basketball League . In his first year as an NBA head coach, he led a rookie Magic Johnson and the Los Angeles Lakers to the 1980 NBA Finals, which they won in six games for the team's first title in eight years. Westhead won titles in both the NBA and WNBA, and he is also remembered as the coach of the Loyola Marymount University men's basketball team.
Go to Profile#21141
Sirikit
#21152
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Sirikit is the Queen Mother of Thailand as the mother of King Vajiralongkorn . She was Queen of Thailand from 1950 to 2016 as the wife of King Bhumibol . She met Bhumibol in Paris, where her father was Thai ambassador. They married in 1950, shortly before Bhumibol's coronation. Sirikit was appointed queen regent in 1956, when the king entered the Buddhist monkhood for a period of time. Sirikit has one son and three daughters with the king. Consort of the monarch who was, at the time the world's longest-reigning head of state, she was also the world's longest-serving queen consort. Sirikit suf...
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Cesare Segre
#21153
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Cesare Segre was an Italian philologist, semiotician and literary critic of Jewish descent, and the Director of the Texts and Textual Traditions Research Centre of the Institute for Advanced Studies of Pavia .
Go to Profile#21143
Kosuke Koyama
#21154
Overall Influence
1929 - 2009 (80 years)
Kosuke Koyama was a Japanese Protestant Christian theologian. Biography Koyama was born in Tokyo in 1929, of Christian parents. He later moved to New Jersey in the United States, where he completed his B.D. at Drew Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. at Princeton Theological Seminary, the latter on the interpretation of the Psalms of Martin Luther in 1959.
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Zvonimir Janko
#21155
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
Zvonimir Janko was a Croatian mathematician who was the eponym of the Janko groups, sporadic simple groups in group theory. The first few sporadic simple groups were discovered by Émile Léonard Mathieu, which were then called the Mathieu groups. It was after 90 years of the discovery of the last Mathieu group that Zvonimir Janko constructed a new sporadic simple group in 1964. In his honour, this group is now called J1. This discovery launched the modern theory of sporadic groups and it was an important milestone in the classification of finite simple groups.
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Steven Bochco
#21156
Overall Influence
1943 - 2018 (75 years)
Steven Ronald Bochco was an American television writer and producer. He developed a number of television series, including Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, Doogie Howser, M.D., Cop Rock, and NYPD Blue. Early life Bochco was born to a Jewish family in New York City, the son of Mimi, a painter, and Rudolph Bochco, a concert violinist and Polish immigrant. He was educated in Manhattan at the High School of Music and Art. His elder sister is actress Joanna Frank.
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Phil Neville
#21157
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Philip John Neville is an English football manager and former player who is the current head coach of Major League Soccer club Portland Timbers. He is also the co-owner of Salford City F.C., along with several of his former Manchester United teammates.
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Jack Matthews
#21158
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Jack Matthews was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright and former professor. He published 7 novels, 11 story collections, a novella, and 8 volumes of essays. He was an avid book collector, and many of his book finds served as a basis for his essays and the historical topics he explored in his fiction. His 1972 novel The Charisma Campaigns was nominated by Walker Percy for the National Book Award. He has often made 19th century America and the Civil War period the setting for his fiction, starting with his 1981 novel Sassafras and most recently with the 2011 novel Gambler's Nephew and a 2015 story collection Soldier Boys: Tales of the Civil War.
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Trevor Brooking
#21159
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Sir Trevor David Brooking, is a former England international footballer, manager, pundit and football administrator; he now works as director of football development in England. He spent almost his entire career at West Ham United, making 647 appearances for the club. He won the 1975 FA Cup and the 1980 FA Cup in which he scored the only goal. He was also the club's player of the season on four occasions and caretaker manager on two occasions in 2003. Brooking played 47 times for England, scoring five times. He was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1981, elevated to Commander of same order in 1999, and knighted in 2004.
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John Deeble
#21160
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
John Stewart Deeble was an Australian academic, health economist and the architect of Medicare in Australia. Early life A native of Wimmera, Deeble grew up near Donald, Victoria, and left school aged 15. His first job was a clerical position at the Peter McCallum Institute in Melbourne. While working he completed a Commerce Degree at Melbourne University and a Diploma of Hospital Administration at the University of New South Wales.
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Lars Gule
#21161
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Lars Gule is a Norwegian philosopher. He has graduated with a doctorate in philosophy, and is an associate professor . From 2000 to 2005 he was secretary general of the Norwegian Humanist Association. Gule became known to the general public in 1977 when after having joined the DFLP group, Gule was arrested in Beirut, Lebanon with Semtex in his luggage intended for Israeli targets leading to a six-month conviction and subsequent deportation. He remains active as a anti-Israel activist. Gule is often used by Norwegian media as an authority on questions regarding the Middle East, Islam and extre...
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