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
#2301
Derek Taylor
#2303
Overall Influence
1932 - 1997 (65 years)
Derek Taylor was an English journalist, writer, publicist and record producer. He is best known for his role as press officer to the Beatles, with whom he worked in 1964 and then from 1968 to 1970, and was one of several associates to earn the moniker "the Fifth Beatle". Before returning to London to head the publicity for the Beatles' Apple Corps organisation in 1968, he worked as the publicist for California-based bands such as the Byrds, the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas. Taylor was known for his forward-thinking and extravagant promotional campaigns, exemplified in taglines such as "The Beatles Are Coming" and "Brian Wilson Is a Genius".
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Thomas H. Davenport
#2304
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Thomas Hayes "Tom" Davenport, Jr. is an American academic and author specializing in analytics, business process innovation, knowledge management, and artificial intelligence. He is currently the President’s Distinguished Professor in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, a Fellow of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, Co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics, and a Senior Advisor to Deloitte Analytics.
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Stanley Mandelstam
#2305
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Stanley Mandelstam was a South African theoretical physicist. He introduced the relativistically invariant Mandelstam variables into particle physics in 1958 as a convenient coordinate system for formulating his double dispersion relations. The double dispersion relations were a central tool in the bootstrap program which sought to formulate a consistent theory of infinitely many particle types of increasing spin.
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Friz Freleng
#2306
Overall Influence
1906 - 1995 (89 years)
Isadore "Friz" Freleng , credited as I. Freleng early in his career, was an American animator, cartoonist, director, producer, and composer known for his work at Warner Bros. Cartoons on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. In total he created more than 300 cartoons.
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Hiawatha
#2307
Overall Influence
Hiawatha , also known as Ayenwatha or Aiionwatha, was a precolonial Native American leader and cofounder of the Iroquois Confederacy. He was a leader of the Onondaga people, the Mohawk people, or both. According to some accounts, he was born an Onondaga but adopted into the Mohawks.
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Rafael Moneo
#2308
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
José Rafael Moneo Vallés is a Spanish architect. He won the Pritzker Prize for architecture in 1996, the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2003, and La Biennale's Golden Lion in 2021. Biography Born in Tudela, Spain, Moneo studied at the ETSAM, Technical University of Madrid from which he received his architectural degree in 1961.
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Robert Heilbroner
#2309
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
Robert L. Heilbroner was an American economist and historian of economic thought. The author of some 20 books, Heilbroner was best known for The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers , a survey of the lives and contributions of famous economists, notably Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.
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Frank Kermode
#2310
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Sir John Frank Kermode, FBA was a British literary critic best known for his 1967 work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction and for his extensive book-reviewing and editing. He was the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University.
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Norman Geisler
#2311
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Norman Leo Geisler was an American Christian systematic theologian, philosopher, and apologist. He was the co-founder of two non-denominational evangelical seminaries . He held a Ph.D. in philosophy from Loyola University and made scholarly contributions to the subjects of classical Christian apologetics, systematic theology, the history of philosophy, philosophy of religion, Calvinism, Roman Catholicism, Biblical inerrancy, Bible difficulties, ethics, and more. He was the author, coauthor, or editor of over 90 books and hundreds of articles.
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Greg Calbi
#2312
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Gregory Calbi is an American mastering engineer at Sterling Sound, New Jersey. Biography Greg Calbi was born on April 3, 1949, in Yonkers, New York, and raised in Bayside, Queens, New York. He graduated in 1966 from Bishop Reilly High School in Fresh Meadows. Calbi earned his bachelor's degree in Mass Communications at Fordham University where he studied with Marshall McLuhan and his staff for 3 of those years. He then earned his master's degree in Political Media Studies at the University of Massachusetts. During these college years, Calbi drove a NYC cab and sold ladies shoes, and was intent on becoming a documentary filmmaker.
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Simon Baron-Cohen
#2313
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Sir Simon Philip Baron-Cohen is a British clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. He is the director of the university's Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College.
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Martin Bashir
#2314
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Martin Henry Bashir is a British former journalist. He was a presenter on British and American television and for the BBC's Panorama programme, for which he gained an interview with Diana, Princess of Wales under false pretences in 1995. Although the interview was much heralded at the time, it was later determined that he used forgery and deception to gain it.
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Terrence McNally
#2315
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Terrence McNally was an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. Described as "the bard of American theater" and "one of the greatest contemporary playwrights the theater world has yet produced," McNally was the recipient of five Tony Awards. He won the Tony Award for Best Play for Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class and the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime, and received the 2019 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1996, and he also received the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 and the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award.
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Fred Armisen
#2316
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Fereydun Robert Armisen is an American comedian and actor. With his comedy partner Carrie Brownstein, Armisen was the co-creator and co-star of the IFC sketch comedy series Portlandia. He also co-created and stars in the mockumentary IFC series Documentary Now! alongside Bill Hader and Seth Meyers as well as the Showtime comedy series Moonbase 8, alongside John C. Reilly and Tim Heidecker. He also voiced Speedy Gonzales on The Looney Tunes Show.
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Frederick Forsyth
#2317
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Frederick McCarthy Forsyth is an English novelist and journalist. He is best known for thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Fourth Protocol, The Dogs of War, The Devil's Alternative, The Fist of God, Icon, The Veteran, Avenger, The Afghan, The Cobra and The Kill List. Forsyth's works frequently appear on best-sellers lists and more than a dozen of his titles have been adapted to film. By 2006, he had sold more than 70 million books in more than 30 languages.
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Vyacheslav Volodin
#2318
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Vyacheslav Viktorovich Volodin is a Russian politician who currently serves as the 10th Chairman of the State Duma . He is a former aide to President Vladimir Putin. The former Secretary-General of the United Russia party, he was a deputy in the State Duma from 1999 until 2011 and from 2016 to present day. From 2010 until 2012, he was Deputy Prime Minister of Russia. He is also a former first deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration of Russia. He has the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation. Volodin engineered Putin's conservative turn in his third term.
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Mary Quant
#2319
Overall Influence
1934 - 2023 (89 years)
Dame Barbara Mary Quant was a British fashion designer and fashion icon. She became an instrumental figure in the 1960s London-based Mod and youth fashion movements, and played a prominent role in London's Swinging Sixties culture. She was one of the designers who took credit for the miniskirt and hotpants. Ernestine Carter wrote: "It is given to a fortunate few to be born at the right time, in the right place, with the right talents. In recent fashion there are three: Chanel, Dior, and Mary Quant."
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Jerome Powell
#2320
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Jerome Hayden "Jay" Powell is an American attorney and investment banker who has served since 2018 as the 16th chair of the Federal Reserve. After earning a degree in politics from Princeton University in 1975 and a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center in 1979, he moved to investment banking in 1984, and worked for several financial institutions, including as a partner of The Carlyle Group. In 1992, Powell briefly served as under secretary of the Treasury for domestic finance under President George H. W. Bush. Powell left Carlyle Group in 2005 and founded Severn Capital Partners, a private investment firm.
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Stanley Hauerwas
#2321
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Stanley Martin Hauerwas is an American theologian, ethicist, and public intellectual. Hauerwas originally taught at the University of Notre Dame before moving to Duke University. Hauerwas was a longtime professor at Duke University, serving as the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School with a joint appointment at the Duke University School of Law. In the fall of 2014, he also assumed a chair in theological ethics at the University of Aberdeen. Hauerwas is considered by many to be one of the world's most influential living theologians and was named "America's Best Theologian" by Time magazine in 2001.
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Michel Mayor
#2322
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Michel Gustave Édouard Mayor is a Swiss astrophysicist and professor emeritus at the University of Geneva's Department of Astronomy. He formally retired in 2007, but remains active as a researcher at the Observatory of Geneva. He is co-laureate of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Jim Peebles and Didier Queloz, and the winner of the 2010 Viktor Ambartsumian International Prize and the 2015 Kyoto Prize.
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Gordon Plotkin
#2323
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Gordon David Plotkin, is a theoretical computer scientist in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Plotkin is probably best known for his introduction of structural operational semantics and his work on denotational semantics. In particular, his notes on A Structural Approach to Operational Semantics were very influential. He has contributed to many other areas of computer science.
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Donna Brazile
#2324
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Donna Lease Brazile is an American political strategist, campaign manager and political analyst who served twice as acting Chair of the Democratic National Committee . She is currently an ABC News contributor, and was previously a Fox News contributor until her resignation in May 2021. Brazile was also previously a CNN contributor, but resigned in October 2016, after WikiLeaks revealed that she shared two debate questions with Hillary Clinton's campaign during the 2016 United States presidential election.
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Douglas Comer
#2325
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Douglas Earl Comer is a professor of computer science at Purdue University, where he teaches courses on operating systems and computer networks. He has written numerous research papers and textbooks, and currently heads several networking research projects. He has been involved in TCP/IP and internetworking since the late 1970s, and is an internationally recognized authority. He designed and implemented X25NET and Cypress networks, and the Xinu operating system. He is director of the Internetworking Research Group at Purdue, editor of Software - Practice and Experience, and a former member of the Internet Architecture Board.
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Isamu Akasaki
#2326
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
was a Japanese engineer and physicist, specializing in the field of semiconductor technology and Nobel Prize laureate, best known for inventing the bright gallium nitride p-n junction blue LED in 1989 and subsequently the high-brightness GaN blue LED as well.
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Robin Hanson
#2327
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Robin Dale Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He is known for his work on idea futures and markets, and he was involved in the creation of the Foresight Institute's Foresight Exchange and DARPA's FutureMAP project. He invented market scoring rules like LMSR used by prediction markets such as Consensus Point , and has conducted research on signalling.
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Sepp Blatter
#2328
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Joseph "Sepp" Blatter is a Swiss former football administrator who served as the eighth President of FIFA from 1998 to 2015. He has been banned from participating in FIFA activities since 2015 as a result of the FIFA corruption case made public that year, and will remain banned until 2027.
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Heinz-Otto Peitgen
#2329
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Heinz-Otto Peitgen is a German mathematician and was President of Jacobs University from January 1, 2013 to December 31, 2013. Peitgen contributed to the study of fractals, chaos theory, and medical image computing, as well as helping to introduce fractals to the broader public.
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David Berkowitz
#2330
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
David Richard Berkowitz , also known as the Son of Sam and the .44 Caliber Killer, is an American serial killer who pled guilty to eight shootings that began in New York City on July 29, 1976. Berkowitz grew up in New York City and served in the United States Army. Using a .44 Special caliber Bulldog revolver, he killed six people and wounded seven others by July 1977, terrorizing New Yorkers and gaining worldwide notoriety. Berkowitz eluded the biggest police manhunt in the city's history while leaving letters that mocked the police and promised further crimes, which were highly publicized by...
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Elliott H. Lieb
#2331
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Elliott Hershel Lieb is an American mathematical physicist and professor of mathematics and physics at Princeton University who specializes in statistical mechanics, condensed matter theory, and functional analysis.
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Greg Daniels
#2332
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Gregory Martin Daniels is an American screenwriter, television producer, and director. He has worked on several television series, including writing for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons, adapting The Office for the United States, and co-creating Parks and Recreation and King of the Hill. Daniels attended Harvard University, where he befriended and began collaborating with Conan O'Brien. His first writing credit was for Not Necessarily the News, before he was laid off because of budget cuts.
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Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov
#2333
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov is a Russian theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist. Novikov put forward the idea of white holes in 1964. He also formulated the Novikov self-consistency principle in the mid-1980s, a contribution to the theory of time travel.
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Paul Gilroy
#2334
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Paul Gilroy is an English sociologist and cultural studies scholar who is the founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at University College London . Gilroy is the 2019 winner of the €660,000 Holberg Prize, for "his outstanding contributions to a number of academic fields, including cultural studies, critical race studies, sociology, history, anthropology and African-American studies".
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Rafael Alberti
#2335
Overall Influence
1902 - 1999 (97 years)
Rafael Alberti Merello was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27. He is considered one of the greatest literary figures of the so-called Silver Age of Spanish Literature, and he won numerous prizes and awards. He died aged 96. After the Spanish Civil War, he went into exile because of his Marxist beliefs. On his return to Spain after the death of Franco, he was named Hijo Predilecto de Andalucía in 1983 and Doctor Honoris Causa by the Universidad de Cádiz in 1985.
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Barry Marshall
#2336
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Barry James Marshall is an Australian physician, Nobel Prize Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, Professor of Clinical Microbiology and Co-Director of the Marshall Centre at the University of Western Australia. Marshall and Robin Warren showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori plays a major role in causing many peptic ulcers, challenging decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused primarily by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid. This discovery has allowed for a breakthrough in understanding a causative link between Helicobacter pylori infection and stomach cancer.
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David E. Shaw
#2337
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
David Elliot Shaw is an American billionaire scientist and former hedge fund manager. He founded D. E. Shaw & Co., a hedge fund company which was once described by Fortune magazine as "the most intriguing and mysterious force on Wall Street". A former assistant professor in the computer science department at Columbia University, Shaw made his fortune exploiting inefficiencies in financial markets with the help of state-of-the-art high speed computer networks. In 1996, Fortune magazine referred to him as "King Quant" because of his firm's pioneering role in high-speed quantitative trading. In ...
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Derek Bok
#2338
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Derek Curtis Bok is an American lawyer and educator, and the former president of Harvard University. Life and career Bok was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Following his parents' divorce, he, his mother, brother and sister moved several times, ultimately to Los Angeles, where he spent much of his childhood. He graduated from Stanford University , Harvard Law School , attended Sciences Po, and George Washington University .
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Dana Carvey
#2339
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Dana Thomas Carvey is an American comedian, actor, screenwriter, and producer. Carvey is best known for his seven seasons on Saturday Night Live, from 1986 to 1993, which earned him five consecutive Primetime Emmy Award nominations.
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Max Mathews
#2340
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Max Vernon Mathews was an American pioneer of computer music. Biography Max Vernon Mathews was born in Columbus, Nebraska, by two science schoolteachers. His father in particular taught physics, chemistry and biology in the Peru High School of Nebraska, where he was also the principal. His father allowed him to learn and play in the physics, biology and chemistry laboratories, where he enjoyed making lots of things from motors to mercury barometers. At the age of 9, when students are usually introduced to algebra, he started to study by himself the subject with few other students. That was ...
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Irving Segal
#2341
Overall Influence
1918 - 1998 (80 years)
Irving Ezra Segal was an American mathematician known for work on theoretical quantum mechanics. He shares credit for what is often referred to as the Segal–Shale–Weil representation. Early in his career Segal became known for his developments in quantum field theory and in functional and harmonic analysis, in particular his innovation of the algebraic axioms known as C*-algebra.
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William Kahan
#2342
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
William "Velvel" Morton Kahan is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist, who received the Turing Award in 1989 for "his fundamental contributions to numerical analysis", was named an ACM Fellow in 1994, and inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2005.
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Neil Sloane
#2343
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Neil James Alexander Sloane FLSW is a British-American mathematician. His major contributions are in the fields of combinatorics, error-correcting codes, and sphere packing. Sloane is best known for being the creator and maintainer of the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences .
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Bill Kristol
#2344
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
William Kristol is an American neoconservative writer. A frequent commentator on several networks including CNN, he was the founder and editor-at-large of the political magazine The Weekly Standard. Kristol is now editor-at-large of the center-right publication The Bulwark.
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Robert Zubrin
#2345
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Robert Zubrin is an American aerospace engineer, author, and advocate for human exploration of Mars. He and his colleague at Martin Marietta, David Baker, were the driving force behind Mars Direct, a proposal in a 1990 research paper intended to produce significant reductions in the cost and complexity of such a mission. The key idea was to use the Martian atmosphere to produce oxygen, water, and rocket propellant for the surface stay and return journey. A modified version of the plan was subsequently adopted by NASA as their "design reference mission". He questions the delay and cost-to-ben...
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Harry Kroto
#2346
Overall Influence
1939 - 2016 (77 years)
Sir Harold Walter Kroto was an English chemist. He shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for their discovery of fullerenes. He was the recipient of many other honors and awards.
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Matthew Meselson
#2347
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Matthew Stanley Meselson is a geneticist and molecular biologist currently at Harvard University, known for his demonstration, with Franklin Stahl, of semi-conservative DNA replication. After completing his Ph.D. under Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology, Meselson became a Professor at Harvard University in 1960, where he has remained, today, as Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences.
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Gordon Gould
#2348
Overall Influence
1920 - 2005 (85 years)
Richard Gordon Gould was an American physicist who is sometimes credited with the invention of the laser and the optical amplifier. . Gould is best known for his thirty-year fight with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to obtain patents for the laser and related technologies. He also fought with laser manufacturers in court battles to enforce the patents he subsequently did obtain.
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Leonard Hayflick
#2349
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Leonard Hayflick is a Professor of Anatomy at the UCSF School of Medicine, and was Professor of Medical Microbiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is a past president of the Gerontological Society of America and was a founding member of the council of the National Institute on Aging . The recipient of a number of research prizes and awards, including the 1991 Sandoz Prize for Gerontological Research, he has studied the aging process for more than fifty years. He is known for discovering that normal human cells divide for a limited number of times in vitro . This is known as the Hayflick limit.
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John E. Mack
#2350
Overall Influence
1929 - 2004 (75 years)
John Edward Mack was an American psychiatrist, writer, and professor of psychiatry. He served as the head of the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School from 1977 to 2004. In 1977, Mack won the Pulitzer Prize for his book A Prince of Our Disorder on T.E. Lawrence.
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Harper Lee
#2351
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Nelle Harper Lee was an American novelist who wrote the 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird that won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and became a classic of modern American literature. She assisted her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood . Her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, has been confirmed to be an earlier draft of Mockingbird but was published in July 2015 as a sequel.
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Igor Ansoff
#2352
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
Harry Igor Ansoff was a Russian American applied mathematician and business manager. He is known as one of the fathers of strategic management. Biography Early life Igor Ansoff was born in Vladivostok, Russia, on December 12, 1918. His father was an American-born Russian from Evansville, Indiana and his mother was a Russian from Moscow.
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