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
#21551
Kazimierz Urbanik
#21562
Overall Influence
1930 - 2005 (75 years)
Kazimierz Urbanik was a prominent member of the Polish School of Mathematics. He founded the journal Probability and Mathematical Statistics and served as rector of the University of Wrocław. Early life and education Urbanik was born in Krzemieniec and studied at the lyceum there. During World War II the town came under Soviet control, and was annexed by Ukraine; after the war, Urbanik's family moved to Brzeg, which remained Polish. Beginning in 1948, Urbanik studied mathematics and physics at the University of Wrocław, where he was mentored by Hugo Steinhaus and Edward Marczewski. He complet...
Go to Profile#21552
Noreena Hertz
#21563
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Noreena Hertz is an English academic, economist and bestselling author, who sits on the boards of Mattel, Warner Music Group and Workhuman. She has been Honorary Professor at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London since 2014.
Go to Profile#21553
Toshikazu Kase
#21564
Overall Influence
1903 - 2004 (101 years)
Toshikazu Kase was a Japanese civil servant and career diplomat. During World War II he was a high-ranking Foreign Ministry official. Hideaki Kase is his son and Yoko Ono is his niece. Biography Kase was born in Chiba, Japan, from a family of upper-class landowners. After passing his Foreign Service Examination in 1925 he left Tokyo Higher Commercial College and attended Amherst College and Harvard as a Research Fellow, graduating in 1927.
Go to Profile#21554
Donald Trelford
#21565
Overall Influence
1937 - 2023 (86 years)
Donald Gilchrist Trelford was a British journalist and academic who was editor of The Observer newspaper from 1975 to 1993. He was also a director of The Observer from 1975 to 1993 and chief executive from 1992 to 1993.
Go to Profile#21555
Katherine McKittrick
#21566
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Katherine McKittrick is a Canadian professor and academic, writer, and editor. She is a professor in Gender studies at Queen's University. She is an academic and writer whose work focuses on black studies, cultural geography, anti-colonial and diaspora studies, with an emphasis on the ways in which liberation emerges in black creative texts . While many scholars have researched the areas of North American, European, Caribbean, and African black geographies, McKittrick was the first scholar to put forth the interdisciplinary possibilities of black and black feminist geography, with an emphasis ...
Go to Profile#21556
Yasuo Tanaka
#21567
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
was a Japanese astrophysicist and a member of the Japan Academy. He was professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo and Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Kanagawa, Japan and guest scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany.
Go to Profile#21557
James DePreist
#21568
Overall Influence
1936 - 2013 (77 years)
James Anderson DePreist was an American conductor. DePreist was one of the first African-American conductors on the world stage. He was the director emeritus of conducting and orchestral studies at The Juilliard School and laureate music director of the Oregon Symphony at the time of his death.
Go to Profile#21558
Kevin Folta
#21569
Overall Influence
Kevin M. Folta is a professor of the horticultural sciences department at the University of Florida. From 2007 to 2010 he helped lead the project to sequence the strawberry genome, and continues to research photomorphogenesis in plants and compounds responsible for flavor in strawberries. Folta has been active as a science communicator since 2002, especially relating to biotechnology. He has faced controversy over what his critics say are his industry connections. In 2017 he was elected as a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
Go to Profile#21559
Brooke Magnanti
#21570
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Brooke Magnanti is an American-born naturalised British former research scientist, blogger, and writer, who, until her identity was revealed in November 2009, was known by the pen name Belle de Jour. While completing her doctoral studies, between 2003 and 2004, Magnanti supplemented her income by working as a London call girl known by the working name Taro.
Go to Profile#21560
Werner Kutzelnigg
#21571
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Werner Kutzelnigg was a prominent Austrian-born theoretical chemist and professor in the Chemistry Faculty, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. Kutzelnigg was born in Vienna. His most significant contributions were in the following fields: relativistic quantum chemistry, coupled cluster methods, theoretical calculation of NMR chemical shifts, explicitly correlated wavefunctions. He was a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.
Go to Profile#21561
Joseph Pérez
#21572
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Joseph Pérez was a French historian specializing in Spanish history. Pérez specialized in the births of the modern Spanish state and the Latin American nations. Among his books, he examined the independence movements of Hispanic America; Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs; Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and Philip II of Spain.
Go to Profile#21562
Michael Carrick
#21573
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Michael Carrick is an English professional football coach and former player who is currently the head coach of Championship club Middlesbrough. He is one of the most decorated English footballers of all time and is best known for his 12-year playing career with Manchester United, whom he also captained. Carrick was a central midfielder, but he was used as an emergency centre-back under Alex Ferguson, David Moyes, Louis van Gaal and José Mourinho. His playing style was grounded in his passing ability.
Go to Profile#21563
Anselm Jappe
#21574
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Anselm Jappe is a German professor of philosophy. Jappe currently resides in France. Jappe has authored several works in German, French, and Italian. Jappe has lectured at several institutions in within higher education.
Go to Profile#21564
Jesper Mogensen
#21575
Overall Influence
Jesper Mogensen was a Danish neuroscientist who worked as a professor at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Psychology, and was the founder and head of The Unit for Cognitive Neuroscience and director of the Research Centre for Brain Injury Rehabilitation .
Go to Profile#21565
Peter May
#21576
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Peter May is a Scottish television screenwriter, novelist, and crime writer. He is the recipient of writing awards in Europe and America. The Blackhouse won the U.S. Barry Award for Crime Novel of the Year and the national literature award in France, the CEZAM Prix Litteraire. The Lewis Man won the French daily newspaper Le Télégrammes 10,000-euro Grand Prix des Lecteurs. In 2014, Entry Island won both the Deanston's Scottish Crime Novel of the Year and the UK's ITV Crime Thriller Book Club Best Read of the Year Award. May's books have sold more than two million copies in the UK and several m...
Go to Profile#21566
David Phillips
#21577
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
David Phillips, is a British chemist specialising in photochemistry and lasers, and was president of the Royal Society of Chemistry from 2010 to 2012. Education and early life Phillips was born 3 December 1939 in Kendal, lived in South Shields and attended the Grammar School. He studied at the University of Birmingham attaining a BSc and PhD.
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David Hirsh
#21578
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
David Hirsh is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-founder of Engage, a campaign against the academic boycott of Israel. Early life and education Hirsh was raised in a Jewish family in Highgate, London and attended Highgate School until he was 15, when he persuaded his parents to allow him to transfer to Woodhouse Grammar School. For several years, he was a member of the Trotskyist Alliance for Workers' Liberty and, during the 1980s, a leading activist in the National Organisation of Labour Students. He briefly studied Physics at Sheffield University, then worked as a driver for several years.
Go to Profile#21568
Enrique Laguerre
#21579
Overall Influence
1905 - 2005 (100 years)
Enrique Arturo Laguerre Vélez was a teacher, novelist, playwright, critic, and newspaper columnist from Moca, Puerto Rico. He is the author of the 1935 novel La Llamarada , which has been for many years obligatory reading in many literature courses in Puerto Rico.
Go to Profile#21569
Donald J. Sobol
#21580
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
Donald J. Sobol was an American writer best known for his children's books, especially the Encyclopedia Brown mystery series. Early life and education Donald Sobol was born in The Bronx, New York City, to Ira J. and Ida Sobol. Ira Sobol owned a few gas stations that eventually were sold. Donald attended the NYC Ethical Culture Fieldston School and then served for two years during World War II with the Army Corps of Engineers in the Pacific Theatre. After the War Sobol graduated from Oberlin College with a degree in English literature in 1948.
Go to Profile#21570
Kurt Koch
#21581
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Kurt Koch is a Swiss prelate of the Catholic Church. He has been a cardinal since November 2010 and president of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity since 1 July 2010. He was the bishop of Basel from 1996 until 2010.
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Michael M. C. Lai
#21582
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Michael Ming-Chiao Lai is a Taiwanese virologist. A native of Tainan born on 8 September 1942, Lai graduated from National Tainan First Senior High School and studied medicine at National Taiwan University. After completing his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley in 1973, Lai joined the University of Southern California faculty, where he remained until 2003. While teaching at USC, Lai was elected a member of Academia Sinica in 1992 and a fellow of the American College of Microbiology in 2002. From 1990, Lai was a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator. Upon his return to Taiwan in 2003, Lai was named a distinguished fellow of Academia Sinica.
Go to Profile#21572
A. O. L. Atkin
#21583
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Arthur Oliver Lonsdale Atkin , who published under the name A. O. L. Atkin, was a British mathematician. As an undergraduate during World War II, Atkin worked at Bletchley Park cracking German codes. He received his Ph.D. in 1952 from the University of Cambridge, where he was one of John Littlewood's research students. During 1964–1970, he worked at the Atlas Computer Laboratory at Chilton, computing modular functions. Toward the end of his life, he was Professor Emeritus of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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Yvonne Maldonado
#21584
Overall Influence
Yvonne "Bonnie" Maldonado is an American physician, pediatrician, and Professor of Pediatrics and of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University, with a focus on Infectious Diseases. She founded Stanford's pediatric HIV Clinic and now serves as Stanford University School of Medicine's Senior Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Diversity.
Go to Profile#21574
Jenna Ellis
#21585
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Jenna Lynn Ellis is an American conservative lawyer known for her work as a member of Donald Trump's 2020 re-election campaign's legal team. She is a former deputy district attorney in Weld County, Colorado. Since 2018, Ellis has presented herself as a "constitutional law attorney" during cable news appearances, though The New York Times reported her background did not reflect such expertise and The Wall Street Journal reported she had no history in any federal cases.
Go to Profile#21575
Buckethead
#21586
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Brian Patrick Carroll , known professionally as Buckethead, is an American musician, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. He has received critical acclaim for his innovative virtuose electric guitar playing. His music spans several genres, including progressive metal, funk, blues, bluegrass, ambient, and avant-garde music. He performs primarily as a solo artist, although he has collaborated with a wide variety of artists such as Bill Laswell, Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrell, Iggy Pop, Les Claypool, Serj Tankian, Bill Moseley, Mike Patton, Viggo Mortensen, That 1 Guy, Bassnectar, and Skating Polly.
Go to Profile#21576
Jean-Claude Duvalier
#21587
Overall Influence
1951 - 2014 (63 years)
Jean-Claude Duvalier , nicknamed "Baby Doc" , was a Haitian politician who was the President of Haiti from 1971 until he was overthrown by a popular uprising in February 1986. He succeeded his father François "Papa Doc" Duvalier as the ruler of Haiti after his death in 1971. After assuming power, he introduced cosmetic changes to his father's regime and delegated much authority to his advisors. Thousands of Haitians were killed or tortured, and hundreds of thousands fled the country during his presidency. He maintained a notoriously lavish lifestyle while poverty among his people remained the...
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Juvénal Habyarimana
#21588
Overall Influence
1937 - 1994 (57 years)
Juvénal Habyarimana was a politician and military officer who served as the second president of Rwanda, from 1973 until his assassination in 1994. He was nicknamed Kinani, a Kinyarwanda word meaning "invincible". An ethnic Hutu, Habyarimana served in several security positions including minister of defense under Rwanda's first president, Grégoire Kayibanda. After overthrowing Kayibanda in a coup in 1973, he became the country's new president and eventually continued his predecessor's pro-Hutu policies. He was a dictator, and electoral fraud was suspected for his unopposed re-elections: 98.9...
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Stanisław Bereś
#21589
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Stanisław Bereś is a Polish poet, literary critic, translator and literary historian. He is professor at the University of Wroclaw, both at the Institute of Polish Philology and the Department of Journalism and Social Communication. In 1987-1993 he taught at the University of Charles de Gaulle in Lille, France.
Go to Profile#21579
Justine Cassell
#21590
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Justine M. Cassell is an American professor and researcher interested in human-human conversation, human-computer interaction, and storytelling. Since August 2010 she has been on the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute and the Language Technologies Institute, with courtesy appointments in Psychology, and the Center for Neural Bases of Cognition.
Go to Profile#21580
Ian Sneddon
#21591
Overall Influence
1919 - 2000 (81 years)
Prof Ian Naismith Sneddon FRS FRSE FIMA OBE was a Scottish mathematician who worked on analysis and applied mathematics. Life Sneddon was born in Glasgow on 8 December 1919, the son of Mary Ann Cameron and Naismith Sneddon. He was educated at Hyndland School in Glasgow.
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Janet Ritterman
#21592
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Dame Janet Elizabeth Ritterman is the Australian-educated former Director of the Royal College of Music in London, from 1993 to 2005. Ritterman was educated at North Sydney Girls High School, the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music , the University of Durham, and King's College, London. She held academic positions in England from 1975 when she was Senior Lecturer in Music at the Middlesex Polytechnic . Ritterman became the third Chancellor of Middlesex University on 3 July 2013.
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Fabrizio Marrella
#21593
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Fabrizio Marrella, born in Venice, Italy, is Professor of International Law and of International Business Law at the University of Venice. In 2008, he was appointed as the E.MA Programme Director at the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratisation where he was a member of the Board of Directors.
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Joan Mahoney
#21594
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Joan Mahoney is a legal scholar and former dean of two law schools. She served as Dean at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, Michigan, from 1998 to 2003, the first woman law school dean in Michigan and one of the very few women in the United States to have held the deanship at two different law schools. Prior to her tenure as Dean at Wayne State, she served from 1994 to 1996 as Dean of Western New England College School of Law in Springfield, Massachusetts. .
Go to Profile#21584
Ian Shapiro
#21595
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Ian Shapiro is an American legal scholar and political scientist who serves as the Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He served as the Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center at Yale University from 2004 to 2019. He is known primarily for interventions in debates on democracy and on methods of conducting social science research.
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Ellen Hildreth
#21596
Overall Influence
Ellen Catherine Hildreth is a professor of computer science at Wellesley College. Her fields are visual perception and computer vision. She co-invented the Marr-Hildreth algorithm along with David Marr.
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John E. Cort
#21597
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
John E. Cort is an American indologist. He is a professor of Asian and Comparative Religions at Denison University, where he is also Chair of the Department of Religion. He has studied Jainism and the history of Jain society over four decades, authored several books on Jainism, and is one of the editors of the forthcoming Brill Encyclopedia of Jainism. According to a review published in 2006 by Peter Flügel, the influence of the studies and publications of Cort on Jainism "have been immense", and in some respects dominated the field of Jain studies.
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Peter Culicover
#21598
Overall Influence
Peter W. Culicover is Professor of Linguistics at Ohio State University. He works in the areas of syntactic theory , language learnability and computational modelling of language acquisition and language change.
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John Tower
#21599
Overall Influence
1925 - 1991 (66 years)
John Goodwin Tower was an American politician and military officer who represented Texas in the United States Senate from 1961 to 1985. He was the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Texas since Reconstruction. Tower is known for leading the Tower Commission, which investigated the Iran-Contra Affair in the Reagan administration.
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Frank Pooler
#21600
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Frank Mairich Pooler was an American choirmaster and the director of choral studies at California State University, Long Beach. He also collaborated with pop music group The Carpenters. Professional career Known in both academic and professional music circles for his mastery of contemporary choral repertoire, Pooler served as a guest conductor, clinician, lecturer and adjudicator throughout the continental United States, Canada, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hawaii, and Alaska. He published over 500 compositions, arrangements and editions which have been performed in Europe and North America.
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Michael L. Littman
#21601
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Michael Lederman Littman is a computer scientist, researcher, educator, and author. His research interests focus on reinforcement learning. He is currently a University Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, where he has taught since 2012.
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Ivo Daalder
#21602
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Ivo H. Daalder , is President of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and has served since July, 2013. He was the U.S. Permanent Representative on the Council of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from May 2009 to July 2013. He is a specialist in European security. He was a member of the staff of United States National Security Council during the administration of President Bill Clinton, and was one of the foreign policy advisers to President Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign.
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Patricia Dove
#21603
Overall Influence
Patricia Martin Dove is an American geochemist. She is a university distinguished professor and the C.P. Miles Professor of Science at Virginia Tech with appointments in the department of geosciences and department of chemistry. Her research focuses on the kinetics and thermodynamics of mineral reactions with aqueous solutions in biogeochemical systems. Much of her work is on crystal nucleation and growth during biomineralization and biomaterial synthesis. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and currently serves as chair of Class I, Physical and Mathematical S...
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The Game
#21604
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Jayceon Terrell Taylor , better known by his stage name the Game or simply Game, is an American rapper. Born in Compton, California, he initially released a series of mixtapes under the wing of fellow West Coast rapper JT the Bigga Figga. After releasing his debut album Untold Story independently in 2004, he was eventually discovered by record producer Dr. Dre and signed to his Aftermath Records label imprint. The Game rose to fame in 2005 following the success of his major-label debut album The Documentary, and found continued success with its 2006 follow-up Doctor's Advocate. The former albu...
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Benjamin I. Schwartz
#21605
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Benjamin Isadore Schwartz was an American academic, political scientist, and sinologist who wrote on a wide range of topics in Chinese politics and intellectual history. He taught at Harvard his entire career, starting in 1950 as an instructor in the departments of history and government. He held the Leroy B. Williams Chair in History and Government from 1975 until he retired in 1987. He was president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1979.
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Annette Baker Fox
#21606
Overall Influence
1912 - 2011 (99 years)
Annette May Baker Fox was an American international relations scholar, who spent much of her career at Columbia University's Institute of War and Peace Studies. She was a pioneer in the academic study of small powers and middle powers and the books and articles she wrote on that subject are highly regarded in the field. She was director of the institute's Canadian Studies Program from 1977 to 1984.
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Robert R. Davila
#21607
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Dr. Robert Davila served as the ninth president of Gallaudet University, the world's only university in which all programs and services are specifically designed to accommodate deaf and hard of hearing students. His appointment came after the wake of the Unity for Gallaudet Movement protests of 2006, when many students, staff, and alumni objected to the initial choice of Jane Fernandes as the intended next president. It was originally intended that he serve only 18–24 months as an interim president, but the Board dropped the interim designation and then extended his contract to 36 months.
Go to Profile#21597
Michael Oppenheimer
#21608
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Michael Oppenheimer is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, the Department of Geosciences, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. He is the director of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and Faculty Associate of the Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences Program and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.
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William L. Lane
#21609
Overall Influence
1931 - 1999 (68 years)
William L. Lane was an American New Testament theologian and professor of biblical studies. Background and education Lane earned his B.A. from Wesleyan University, his M.Div. from Gordon Divinity School , his Th.M. from Westminster Theological Seminary , and his Th.D. from Harvard Divinity School.
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Arnaud Beauville
#21610
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Arnaud Beauville is a French mathematician, whose research interest is algebraic geometry. Beauville earned his doctorate from Paris Diderot University in 1977, with a thesis regarding Prym varieties and the Schottky problem, under supervision of Jean-Louis Verdier.
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Curt Michel
#21611
Overall Influence
1934 - 2015 (81 years)
Frank Curtis "Curt" Michel was an American astrophysicist; a professor of astrophysics at Rice University in Houston, Texas; a United States Air Force pilot; and a NASA astronaut. Personal life Michel was born June 5, 1934, to parents to Frank and Viola Michel. He was married to Bonnie Hausman, a web technical specialist. He had two children, Alice and Jeff with his first wife Beverly, who preceded him in death, and three grandchildren. His hobbies were photography, tennis, handball, and baseball. Michel died at the age of 80 on February 26, 2015. He was buried with full military honors at t...
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