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

#22351

Lars Ernster

#22362
Overall Influence
1920 - 1998 (78 years)
Lars Ernster was a professor of biochemistry, and a member of the Board of the Nobel Foundation. Biography Lars Ernster was born in Hungary and came to Sweden in 1946. He played a prominent role in the scientific community. He took his PhD degree at the Stockholm University in 1956. Until 1967 he was the head of the division for Physiological Chemistry at the Wenner-Gren Institute . From 1967 to 1986 he was a professor of biochemistry. He was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences from 1974. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 19...
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#22352

Gisela Bock

#22363
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Gisela Bock is a German historian. She studied in Freiburg, Berlin, Paris and Rome. She took her doctorate at the Free University Berlin in 1971 and her Habilitation at the Technical University Berlin in 1984. She has taught at the Free University Berlin and was professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, at the University of Bielefeld and then at the Free University Berlin. She retired in 2007.
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#22353

Philip Lutgendorf

#22364
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Philip Lutgendorf is an American Indologist. He is Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa. His areas of work and interest include the epic poem Ramcharitmanas, the life and works of Hindu poet Tulsidas, the worship of Hanuman, Indian popular cinema, and the Indian tea culture. He is currently translating the Ramcharitmanas into English: this translation will be published by the Murty Classical Library of India in seven volumes. He serves as the President of American Institute of Indian Studies.
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#22354

Roland Mousnier

Roland Mousnier
#22365
Overall Influence
1907 - 1993 (86 years)
Roland Émile Mousnier was a French historian of the early modern period in France and of the comparative studies of different civilizations. Life Mousnier was born in Paris and received his education at the École pratique des hautes études. Between 1932 and 1947, he worked as a school teacher in Rouen and Paris. During the Second World War, Mousnier was a member of the French Resistance. In 1947, he was appointed as a professor at Strasbourg University, before moving to the Sorbonne in 1955, where he remained until 1977. Keenly interested in social history, Mousnier went to the United States to learn sociology and anthropology.
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#22355

Fumihito, Crown Prince of Japan

Fumihito, Crown Prince of Japan
#22366
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Fumihito, Crown Prince Akishino is the younger brother and heir presumptive of the emperor of Japan and the younger son of the emperor emeritus and the empress emerita. Since his marriage in June 1990, he has had the title Prince Akishino and has headed his own branch of the imperial family.
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#22356

Abhishek Bachchan

Abhishek Bachchan
#22367
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Abhishek Bachchan is an Indian actor and film producer known for his work in Hindi films. Part of the Bachchan family, he is the son of actors Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bachchan and the grandson of poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan and social activist Teji Bachchan.
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#22357

Peter W. Huber

#22368
Overall Influence
1952 - 2021 (69 years)
Peter William Huber was a Canadian-American lawyer and author who served as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and was a founding partner at the law firm of Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel. He is credited with popularizing the term "junk science" in 1991, and articulating a conservative approach to environmentalism in his 2000 book, Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists.
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#22358

Quintin McKellar

#22369
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Quintin McKellar is a British veterinary surgeon and academic. In the 2011 New Year Honours list, he was appointed a CBE for services to science during his tenure as principal of the Royal Veterinary College. Since January 2011 he has been vice-chancellor of the University of Hertfordshire.
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#22359

Timothy J. McGrew

#22370
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Timothy Joel McGrew is a professor of philosophy at Western Michigan University, and the chair of the department of philosophy there. His research interests include epistemology, the history and philosophy of science, and the philosophy of religion. He is a specialist in the philosophical applications of probability theory.
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#22360

Nikita Moiseyev

#22371
Overall Influence
1917 - 2000 (83 years)
Nikita Nikolayevich Moiseyev was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, full member of the Soviet and Russian Academies of Sciences and of the International Academy of Science, Munich. Biography Moiseyev studied in Moscow State University, and received his doctor's degree from the Steklov Institute. He taught in Bauman Moscow State Technical University and Rostov State University after the war, and was appointed professor in Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and became its dean in the department of applied mathematics. His fields of study included applied mathematics, solid state dyna...
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#22361

Georges-Henri Lévesque

Georges-Henri Lévesque
#22372
Overall Influence
1903 - 2000 (97 years)
Georges-Henri Lévesque was a Canadian Dominican priest and sociologist and a liberal figure during the conservative Duplessis era in Quebec. Biography Born in Roberval, Quebec, the son of Georges Lévesque and Laura Richard, he was ordained into the priesthood in 1928. He studied philosophy and theology at the Dominican College in Ottawa and social sciences at the School of Social Sciences of the Université Catholique de Lille .
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#22362

Simon Soloveychik

Simon Soloveychik
#22373
Overall Influence
1930 - 1996 (66 years)
Simon L'vovich Soloveychik was a Russian publicist, educator and social philosopher. Brief biography Simon Soloveychik was born in a Jewish family. His father, Lev I. Soloveychik, was editor, writer and administrator at the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper, and later managed the Moscow-based Voienizdat publishing house. After graduating from the Philology Department of Moscow State University in 1953 Simon worked as a boys and girls scouts leader, a secondary school teacher, and a correspondent of Pioneer magazine. In 1960 he worked for the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, where he launched a wide t...
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#22363

Wangari Maathai

#22374
Overall Influence
1940 - 2011 (71 years)
Wangarĩ Muta Maathai was a Kenyan social, environmentalal, and political activist who founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women's rights. In 2004 she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
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#22364

Ihor Pavlyuk

Ihor Pavlyuk
#22375
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Ihor Pavlyuk is a Ukrainian writer, translator and research worker. Named People's Poet of Ukraine in 2020. He is the winner of a 2013 English PEN Award, and the winner of the Switzerland Literary Prize 2021. He also holds a doctorate in Social Communication.
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#22365

Andrew Sarris

#22376
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Andrew Sarris was an American film critic. He was a leading proponent of the auteur theory of film criticism. Early life Sarris was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Greek immigrant parents, Themis and George Andrew Sarris, and grew up in Ozone Park, Queens. After attending John Adams High School in South Ozone Park , he graduated from Columbia University in 1951 and then served for three years in the Army Signal Corps before moving to Paris for a year, where he became a friend of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Upon returning to New York's Lower East Side, Sarris briefly pursued graduat...
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#22366

João Gilberto Noll

#22377
Overall Influence
1946 - 2017 (71 years)
João Gilberto Noll was a Brazilian writer, born in Porto Alegre, in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. His early years were spent studying at the Catholic Colégio São Pedro. In 1967 he began university coursework in literature at the UFRGS , but in 1969 interrupted his studies to pursue a career as a journalist in Rio de Janeiro, working for the newspapers Folha da Manhã and Última Hora. In 1970, Noll spent a year in São Paulo working as a copy editor at the publishing house Editora Nacional, but a year later moved back to Rio and resumed both his work in journalism at Última...
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#22367

Sergey Khristianovich

#22378
Overall Influence
1908 - 2000 (92 years)
Sergey Alekseyevich Khristianovich was a mechanics scientist from the Soviet Union. Academician of AS USSR since 1943 , Hero of Soc. Labour . Sergey Khristianovich graduated from Leningrad State University in 1930. He has made a huge contribution into development of mechanics in Russia and is well known for his studies in aerodynamics.
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#22368

Henk van der Vorst

#22379
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Hendrik "Henk" Albertus van der Vorst is a Dutch mathematician and Emeritus Professor of Numerical Analysis at Utrecht University. According to the Institute for Scientific Information , his paper on the BiCGSTAB method was the most cited paper in the field of mathematics in the 1990s. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2002 and the Netherlands Academy of Technology and Innovation. In 2006 he was awarded a knighthood of the Order of the Netherlands Lion. Henk van der Vorst is a Fellow of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics .
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#22369

Thomas Ferguson

#22380
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Thomas Ferguson is an American political scientist and author who writes on politics and economics, often within a historical perspective. He is best known for his Investment Theory of Party Competition, described in detail in his 1995 book Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-driven Political Systems.
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#22370

Frederic M. Richards

Frederic M. Richards
#22381
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
Frederic Middlebrook Richards , commonly referred to as Fred Richards, was an American biochemist and biophysicist known for solving the pioneering crystal structure of the ribonuclease S enzyme in 1967 and for defining the concept of solvent-accessible surface. He contributed many key experimental and theoretical results and developed new methods, garnering over 20,000 journal citations in several quite distinct research areas. In addition to the protein crystallography and biochemistry of ribonuclease S, these included solvent accessibility and internal packing of proteins, the first side-c...
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#22371

Valerie Taylor

Valerie Taylor
#22382
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Valerie Elaine Taylor is an American computer scientist who is the director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Her research includes topics such as performance analysis, power analysis, and resiliency. She is known for her work on "Prophesy," described as "a database used to collect and analyze data to predict the performance on different applications on parallel systems."
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#22372

Nathaniel Mackey

Nathaniel Mackey
#22383
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Nathaniel Mackey is an American poet, novelist, anthologist, literary critic and editor. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Mackey is currently teaching a poetry workshop at Duke University.
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#22373

Yuliy Sannikov

#22384
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Yuliy Sannikov is a Ukrainian economist known for his contributions to mathematical economics, game theory, and corporate finance. He is an economics professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and won both the 2015 Fischer Black Prize and 2016 John Bates Clark Medal.
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#22374

Liu Guosong

Liu Guosong
#22385
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Liu Kuo-sung is a Chineseese artist based in Taipei, Taiwan. Liu is widely regarded as one of the earliest and most important advocates and practitioners of modernist Chinese painting. He is also a writer on contemporary Chinese art.
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#22375

Herbert Enderton

#22386
Overall Influence
1936 - 2010 (74 years)
Herbert Bruce Enderton was an American mathematician. He was a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at UCLA and a former member of the faculties of Mathematics and of Logic and the Methodology of Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
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#22376

Kenneth Clarke

#22387
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Kenneth Harry Clarke, Baron Clarke of Nottingham, , is a British politician who served as Home Secretary from 1992 to 1993 and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1993 to 1997. A member of the Conservative Party, he was Member of Parliament for Rushcliffe from 1970 to 2019 and was Father of the House of Commons between 2017 and 2019. The President of the Tory Reform Group since 1997, he is a one-nation conservative who identifies with economically and socially liberal views.
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#22377

Joe Castiglione

#22388
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Joseph John Castiglione is an American radio announcer for the Boston Red Sox of Major League Baseball, an author and lecturer. Early life and career Castiglione was born in Hamden, Connecticut, and graduated from Colgate University with a BA in Liberal Arts. He was the radio voice of Colgate football and baseball while a student. He then received an MA in radio/TV from Syracuse University's S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications in 1970. He also worked on the WAER-FM staff at SU. While at Syracuse, he worked a variety of on-air jobs for WSYR-TV . He began his career in Youngstown, Oh...
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#22378

Mitchell Reiss

#22389
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Mitchell B. Reiss is an American diplomat, academic, and business leader who served as the 8th President and CEO of The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the 27th president of Washington College and in the United States Department of State.
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#22379

Edwin E. Salpeter

#22390
Overall Influence
1924 - 2008 (84 years)
Edwin Ernest Salpeter was an Austrian–Australian–American astrophysicist. Life Born in Vienna to a Jewish family, Salpeter emigrated from Austria to Australia while in his teens to escape the Nazis. He attended Sydney Boys High School and Sydney University, where he obtained his bachelor's degree in 1944 and his master's degree in 1945. In the same year he was awarded an overseas scholarship and attended the University of Birmingham, England, where he earned his doctorate in 1948 under the supervision of Sir Rudolf Peierls. He spent the remainder of his career at Cornell University, where he was the James Gilbert White Distinguished Professor of the Physical Sciences.
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#22380

James F. McGrath

James F. McGrath
#22391
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
James Frank McGrath is the Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University and is known for his work on Early Christianity, Mandaeism, criticism of the Christ myth theory, and the analysis of religion in science fiction. He received his Ph.D. from Durham University in 1998.
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#22381

Angelos Chaniotis

#22392
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Angelos Chaniotis is a Greek historian and Classics scholar, known for original and wide-ranging research in the cultural, religious, legal and economic history of the Hellenistic period and the Byzantine Empire. His research interests also include the history of Crete and Greek epigraphy. Chaniotis is a Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
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#22382

Mian Saqib Nisar

#22393
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Mian Saqib Nisar is a Pakistani jurist who served as the 25th Chief Justice of Pakistan from 31 December 2016 till 17 January 2019. He has previously served as the Law Secretary. He also served as a visiting professor of law at the University of the Punjab, where he provided instructions on constitutional law.
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#22383

Chin Liew Ten

#22394
Overall Influence
Chin Liew Ten , also known as C. L. Ten, is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and former Head of the Philosophy Department at the National University of Singapore. Before that, he was Professor of Philosophy and Acting Head of the School of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Bioethics at Monash University, Australia.
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#22384

Ann Dowling

Ann Dowling
#22395
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
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#22385

Ádám Nádasdy

Ádám Nádasdy
#22396
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Ádám Nádasdy is a Hungarian linguist and poet. He is professor emeritus at the School of English and American Studies of the Faculty of Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. He specializes in post-generative phonological theory, morphophonology, English and Germanic historical linguistics, varieties and dialects of English, as well as English medieval studies and Yiddish philology.
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#22386

Shahar Pe'er

Shahar Pe'er
#22397
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Shahar Pe'er is an Israeli retired tennis player. Pe'er won five singles and three doubles titles on the WTA Tour, as well as four singles and three doubles titles on the ITF circuit in her career. She reached her best singles ranking of world number 11, the highest of any Israeli tennis player in history, in January 2011. She peaked at number 14 in the doubles rankings in May 2008.
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#22387

Maurice LaMarche

Maurice LaMarche
#22398
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Maurice LaMarche is an American-Canadian voice actor and comedian. He has voiced The Brain in Animaniacs as well as its spin-off Pinky and the Brain, Big Bob in Hey Arnold! , the titular character from Inspector Gadget, and a variety of characters in Futurama, including Kif Kroker. He also voiced Egon Spengler in The Real Ghostbusters and its follow-up Extreme Ghostbusters.
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#22388

James Caan

James Caan
#22399
Overall Influence
1940 - 2022 (82 years)
James Edmund Caan was an American actor. He came to prominence playing Sonny Corleone in The Godfather – a performance which earned him Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actor. He reprised his role in The Godfather Part II . He received a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1978.
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#22389

Scott Baker

#22400
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Sir Thomas Scott Gillespie Baker, PC is a retired English Court of Appeal judge. Scott Baker is the eldest son of Sir George Baker, a former High Court judge who was President of the Family Division from 1971 to 1979. One of his brothers, Judge Michael Baker, KC, was the Resident judge at St Albans Crown Court.
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#22390

Keith Kellogg

Keith Kellogg
#22401
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Joseph Keith Kellogg Jr. is a former United States government official and a retired lieutenant general in the United States Army. He previously served as the National Security Advisor to Vice President Mike Pence, and as the Executive Secretary and Chief of Staff of the United States National Security Council in the Trump administration. He served as National Security Advisor on an acting basis following the resignation of Michael T. Flynn.
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#22391

Tim McCarver

#22402
Overall Influence
1941 - 2023 (82 years)
James Timothy McCarver was an American professional baseball catcher, television sports commentator, and singer. He played in Major League Baseball from to for four teams, spending almost all of his career with the St. Louis Cardinals and Philadelphia Phillies. A two-time All-Star, he helped the Cardinals to the 1964 World Series title, batting .478 in the Series, including a three-run home run in the tenth inning to win Game 5. In 1966, he became the first catcher since the 19th century to lead the National League in triples with 13. McCarver was runner-up for the NL Most Valuable Playe...
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#22392

Michael E. Soulé

#22403
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Michael Ellman Soulé was an American biologist, known for his work in promoting the idea of conservation biology. Soulé was born in San Diego, California, the son of Berenice and Herman Herzoff. His father died when he was two, and he was adopted by his stepfather Alan Soulé. He earned a Ph.D. in 1964 at Stanford University in Biology under Paul R. Ehrlich, and later became Research Professor in Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz. His Ph.D. thesis of 167 pages was entitled: Evolution and population phenetics of the side-blotched lizards on the islands in the Gul...
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#22393

Sou Fujimoto

#22404
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
is a Japanese architect. Born in Hokkaido in 1971, he graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1994, and established his own office, Sou Fujimoto Architects, in 2000. Noted for delicate light structures and permeable enclosures, Fujimoto designed several houses, and in 2013, was selected to design the temporary Serpentine Gallery pavilion in London. In 2021, Fujimoto received the master's degree from l’École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris.
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#22394

E. Randol Schoenberg

#22405
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Eric Randol Schoenberg is an American lawyer and genealogist, based in Los Angeles, California, specializing in legal cases related to the recovery of looted or stolen artworks, particularly those by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust.
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#22395

Philip Campbell

Philip Campbell
#22406
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Sir Philip Henry Montgomery Campbell is a British astrophysicist. He served as editor-in-chief of the peer reviewed scientific journal Nature from 1995 to 2018. From 2018 he was the Editor-in-Chief of the publishing company Springer Nature until his retirement in May 2023.
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#22396

Cuthbert Hurd

#22407
Overall Influence
1911 - 1996 (85 years)
Cuthbert Corwin Hurd was an American computer scientist and entrepreneur, who was instrumental in helping the International Business Machines Corporation develop its first general-purpose computers.
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#22397

Jocelyn Benson

#22408
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Jocelyn Benson is an American democracy advocate, politician, and former academic administrator. Since 2019, she has been the 43rd Secretary of State of Michigan. She is a former dean of Wayne State University Law School, a co-founder of the Military Spouses of Michigan, and a board member of the Ross Initiative in Sports for Equality. Benson is the author of State Secretaries of State: Guardians of the Democratic Process.
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#22398

George Woodcock

George Woodcock
#22409
Overall Influence
1912 - 1995 (83 years)
George Woodcock was a Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, a philosopher, an essayist and literary critic. He was also a poet and published several volumes of travel writing. In 1959 he was the founding editor of the journal Canadian Literature which was the first academic journal specifically dedicated to Canadian writing. He is most commonly known outside Canada for his book Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements .
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#22399

John Latham

#22410
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
John Aubrey Clarendon Latham, was a Northern Rhodesian-born British conceptual artist. Life and work Latham was born in Northern Rhodesia to the cricketer and colonial administrator Geoffrey Latham. He was educated in England at Winchester College. In the Second World War he commanded a motor torpedo boat in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. After the war he studied art, first at the Regent Street Polytechnic and then at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. He married fellow artist and collaborator Barbara Steveni in Westminster in 1951.
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#22400

D. L. Ashliman

#22411
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Dee L. Ashliman , who writes professionally as D. L. Ashliman, is an American folklorist and writer. He is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Pittsburgh and is considered to be a leading expert on folklore and fairytales. He has published a number of works on the genre.
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