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

#23651

Ernie Johnson Jr.

Ernie Johnson Jr.
#23662
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Ernest Thorwald Johnson Jr. is an American sportscaster for Warner Bros. Discovery Sports. Johnson is currently the television voice and a studio host for Major League Baseball on TBS, hosts Inside the NBA for TNT, and NBA TV and contributes to the joint coverage of the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament for Warner Bros. Discovery Sports and CBS Sports. His father was Ernie Johnson Sr., a Major League Baseball pitcher and Atlanta Braves play-by-play announcer.
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#23652

Firouz Partovi

#23663
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Firouz Partovi was born in 1936 in Tabriz, East Azerbaijan. He is an Iranian-American physicist and university professor. Partovi received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963, majoring in physics. He founded faculty of physics in the Sharif University of Technology and he is the second professor of employment after Mohammad Ali Mojtahedi in Sharif University. Ali Partovi and Hadi Partovi are the sons of Firouz Partovi. He taught at the Sharif University of Technology, Amirkabir University of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
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#23654

David P. Craig

#23665
Overall Influence
1919 - 2015 (96 years)
David Parker Craig , an Australian chemist, was the Foundation Professor of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry and later Emeritus Professor in the Research School of Chemistry at the Australian National University in Canberra.
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#23655

Themistocles M. Rassias

Themistocles M. Rassias
#23666
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Themistocles M. Rassias is a Greek mathematician, and a professor at the National Technical University of Athens , Greece. He has published more than 300 papers, 10 research books and 45 edited volumes in research Mathematics as well as 4 textbooks in Mathematics for university students. His research work has received more than 19,000 citations according to Google Scholar and more than 5,800 citations according to MathSciNet. His h-index is 49. He serves as a member of the Editorial Board of several international mathematical journals.
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#23656

Robert Laxalt

Robert Laxalt
#23667
Overall Influence
1923 - 2001 (78 years)
Robert Laxalt was a Basque-American writer from Nevada. Biography Robert Laxalt was born in 1923, a decade and a half after his father Dominique Laxalt and his mother Theresa Laxalt had emigrated to the United States in 1906 to herd sheep. His brother Paul Laxalt later became Governor of Nevada and then a United States senator . After graduating from Carson City High School, Robert Laxalt attended Santa Clara University and then the University of Nevada at Reno.
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#23657

Matthew T. Mason

#23668
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Matthew Thomas Mason is an American roboticist and the former Director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Mason is a researcher in the area of robotic manipulation, and is the author of two highly cited textbooks in the field.
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#23658

Glenn Branch

Glenn Branch
#23669
Overall Influence
Glenn Branch is the deputy director of the National Center for Science Education. He is a prominent critic of creationism and intelligent design and an activist against campaigns of suppressing teaching of evolution and climate change in school education. He is also a fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
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#23659

Anne Curzan

Anne Curzan
#23670
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Anne Curzan is a professor of English at the University of Michigan since 2012 and dean of its College of Literature, Science, and the Arts since 2019. Biography Curzan received a bachelor of arts in linguistics summa cum laude from Yale University in 1991. She received a master of arts and a doctor of philosophy in English language and literature from the University of Michigan in 1995 and 1998, respectively.
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#23660

Sergey Krasnikov

#23671
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Serguei Vladilenovich Krasnikov is a Russian physicist. Life Krasnikov obtained a doctorate in physics and mathematics from Saint Petersburg University. He is currently based at Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg, Russia.
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#23661

Boris Tadić

#23672
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Boris Tadić is a Serbian politician who served as the president of Serbia from 2004 to 2012. Born in Sarajevo, he graduated from the University of Belgrade with a degree in psychology. He later worked as a journalist, military psychologist, and teacher at the First Belgrade Gymnasium. Tadić joined the Democratic Party in 1990 and was elected to the National Assembly after the 1993 election. After the downfall of Slobodan Milošević in 2000, he was appointed as the minister of telecommunications in the government of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a role which he held until 2003, after which he was appointed minister of defence in the government of Serbia.
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#23662

Fawwaz T. Ulaby

#23673
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Fawwaz T. Ulaby is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and formerly the Founding Provost and Executive Vice President of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and R. Jamieson and Betty Williams Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan.
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#23663

Norval Morris

#23674
Overall Influence
1923 - 2004 (81 years)
Norval Ramsden Morris was an Australian-educated United States law professor, criminologist, and advocate for criminal justice and mental health reform. He was formerly Dean of the University of Chicago Law School.
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#23664

Erik Winfree

#23675
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Erik Winfree is an American applied computer scientist, bioengineer, and professor at California Institute of Technology. He is a leading researcher into DNA computing and DNA nanotechnology. In 1998, Winfree in collaboration with Nadrian Seeman published the creation of two-dimensional lattices of DNA tiles using the "double crossover" motif. These tile-based structures provided the capability to implement DNA computing, which was demonstrated by Winfree and Paul Rothemund in 2004, and for which they shared the 2006 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology.
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#23665

Bernard Shapiro

#23676
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Bernard Jack Shapiro, is a Canadian academic, civil servant, former Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University from 1994 to 2004, and the first Ethics Commissioner of Canada between May 17, 2004 and March 29, 2007.
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#23666

Sreenath Sreenivasan

Sreenath Sreenivasan
#23677
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Sreenath "Sree" Sreenivasan is an academic and practitioner in journalism and communications, serving as the inaugural Marshall R. Loeb visiting professor at Stony Brook University School of Journalism in New York. He was previously chief digital officer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and chief digital officer of Columbia University. He also served as chief digital officer of the City of New York from October 2016 through May 2017. He has been a technology journalist based in New York City and served as an academic administrator and professor in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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#23667

Caroline Humphrey

#23678
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Caroline Humphrey, Baroness Rees of Ludlow, is a British anthropologist and academic. Biography Humphrey's father was the biologist Conrad H. Waddington. Her mother was her father's second wife, architect Margaret Justin Blanco White ; she has a younger sister, the mathematician Dusa McDuff, and an elder half-brother, the physicist C. Jake Waddington, by her father's first marriage to Cecil Elizabeth Lascelles.
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#23668

Marie de Hennezel

Marie de Hennezel
#23679
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Marie de Hennezel is a French psychologist, psychotherapist and writer. She is known for her commitment to improving conditions at the end of life. Her books, her two reports to the government, and her speeches on the subject have contributed to the evolution of the image of aging and old age in society.
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#23669

Platon Kostiuk

Platon Kostiuk
#23680
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Platon Hryhorovych Kostiuk was a Soviet and Ukrainian physiologist, neurobiologist, electrophysiologist, and biophysicist. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was also a director of the Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology and the International Center of Molecular Physiology NAS of Ukraine; chair of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Kyiv branch, vice-president of the NAS of Ukraine, and chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR.
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#23670

Irena Peeva

#23681
Overall Influence
Irena Vassileva Peeva is a professor of mathematics at Cornell University, specializing in commutative algebra. She disproved the Eisenbud–Goto regularity conjecture jointly with Jason McCullough. Education and career Peeva did her graduate studies at Brandeis University, earning a Ph.D. in 1995 under the supervision of David Eisenbud with a thesis entitled Free Resolutions. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and a C. L. E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the Cornell Department of Mathematics faculty in 1998.
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#23671

Stephen Lee

Stephen Lee
#23682
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Stephen Lee is an American chemist. He is the son of Tsung-Dao Lee, the winner of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is currently a professor at Cornell University. Education Lee attended the International School of Geneva, Switzerland and Yale University, from which he graduated with a BA in 1978. He later received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1985.
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#23672

Steven Swanson

Steven Swanson
#23683
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Steven Roy Swanson is an American engineer and retired NASA astronaut. Swanson has flown two shuttle flights, STS-117 and STS-119, and one Soyuz flight, TMA-12M. All of the flights were to the International Space Station. He has logged over 195 days in space and completed five spacewalks totaling 28 hours and 5 minutes. Swanson has served in other roles at NASA, such as a CAPCOM for both International Space Station and Space Shuttle missions. His awards and honors include the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal and the JSC Certificate of Accommodation. Prior to becoming a NASA astronaut, Swanson worked for GTE in Phoenix, Arizona, as a software engineer.
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#23673

Søren Brunak

Søren Brunak
#23684
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Søren Brunak is a Danish biological and physical scientist working in bioinformatics, systems biology, and medical informatics. He is a professor of Disease Systems Biology at the University of Copenhagen and professor of bioinformatics at the Technical University of Denmark. As Research Director at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen Medical School, he leads a research effort where molecular-level systems biology data are combined with phenotypic data from the healthcare sector, such as electronic patient records, registry information, and biobank questionnaires.
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#23674

Arthur De Vany

#23685
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Arthur S. De Vany is an American economist who has studied the Hollywood film industry and developed theories of evolutionary fitness focusing on nutrition and exercise in the paleo manner. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California, Irvine.
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#23675

Ursula Niebuhr

#23686
Overall Influence
1907 - 1997 (90 years)
Ursula Mary Niebuhr was an English American academic and theologian. She was the founder and longtime head of the Department of Religion at Barnard College in New York City, USA. She was born in Southampton, England. After graduation from the University of Oxford with double Firsts in history and theology, she became the first woman to win a fellowship to the Union Theological Seminary in New York, USA.
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#23676

Renaud Sainsaulieu

#23687
Overall Influence
1935 - 2002 (67 years)
Renaud Sainsaulieu was a French sociologist specializing in the sociology of organizations. He was noted for promoting sociology outside academia. He was the director of the Centre d'Etudes Sociologiques at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique ; and founded the Laboratoire de Sociologie du Changement des Institutions .
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#23677

Leslie Alcock

#23688
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
Leslie Alcock was Professor of Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, and one of the leading archaeologists of Early Medieval Britain. His major excavations included Dinas Powys hill fort in Wales, Cadbury Castle in Somerset and a series of major hillforts in Scotland.
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#23678

Edward L. Wright

#23689
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Edward L. Wright is an American astrophysicist and cosmologist. He has worked on space missions including the Cosmic Background Explorer , Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer , and Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe projects.
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#23679

Sabrina P. Ramet

#23690
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Sabrina Petra Ramet is an American academic, educator, editor and journalist. She specializes in Eastern European history and politics and is a Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.
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#23680

Warren Spahn

#23691
Overall Influence
1921 - 2003 (82 years)
Warren Edward Spahn was an American professional baseball pitcher who played 21 seasons in Major League Baseball . A left-handed pitcher, Spahn played in 1942 and then from 1946 until 1965, most notably for the Boston Braves, who became the Milwaukee Braves after the team moved west before the season. His baseball career was interrupted by his military service in the United States Army during World War II.
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#23681

Paul Tseng

Paul Tseng
#23692
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Paul Tseng was a Chinese-American and Canadian applied mathematician and a professor at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Washington, in Seattle, Washington. Tseng was recognized by his peers to be one of the leading optimization researchers of his generation. On August 13, 2009, Paul Tseng went missing while kayaking in the Jinsha River in the Yunnan province of China and is presumed dead.
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#23682

Catherine Ashton

#23693
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Catherine Margaret Ashton, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, is a British Labour politician who served as the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and First Vice President of the European Commission in the Barroso Commission from 2009 to 2014.
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#23683

Jennifer Lawrence

Jennifer Lawrence
#23694
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (36 years)
Jennifer Shrader Lawrence is an American actress. She is known for starring in both action film franchises and independent dramas, and her films have grossed over $6 billion worldwide. The world's highest-paid actress in 2015 and 2016, she appeared in Times 100 most influential people in the world list in 2013 and the Forbes Celebrity 100 list from 2013 to 2016.
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#23684

Reuben Greenberg

#23695
Overall Influence
1943 - 2014 (71 years)
Reuben Morris Greenberg was the first black police chief of Charleston, South Carolina, and known for being an innovative criminologist. He was police chief there from 1982 until his retirement in 2005.
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#23685

Juliette Blevins

#23696
Overall Influence
Juliette Blevins is an American linguist whose work has contributed to the fields of phonology, phonetics, historical linguistics, and typology. She is currently professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
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#23686

BoA

#23697
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Kwon Bo-ah , known professionally as BoA, is a South Korean singer, songwriter, dancer, producer and actress. One of the most successful and influential Korean entertainers, she is widely known as the "Queen of K-pop".
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#23687

Hans-Jörg Uther

#23698
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Hans-Jörg Uther is a German literary scholar and folklorist. Biography Uther studied Folklore, Germanistik and History between 1969 and 1970 at the University of Munich and between 1970 and 1973 at the University of Göttingen. In his last academic year, he passed the first state examination for teaching at grammar schools. In 1971, he began a period of over 40 years working on the Enzyklopädie des Märchens, initially as a student assistant, from 1973 as an editor. In 1980 he became a PhD with the Dissertation "Behinderte in populären Erzählungen" in Göttingen.
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#23688

Goh Yihan

#23699
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Goh Yihan is a Judge of the Supreme Court of Singapore. He was previously a Judicial Commissioner, and, before that, the Dean of the Singapore Management University School of Law. Education Goh graduated from the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law with a first class honours LLB in 2006 as the valedictorian. He also topped his second-year examinations and was on the NUS Undergraduate Scholarship. At the 2004 B. A. Mallal Moot, he won both the best oralist and best memorial prizes.
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#23689

Eugene V. Rostow

Eugene V. Rostow
#23700
Overall Influence
1913 - 2002 (89 years)
Eugene Victor Debs Rostow was an American legal scholar and public servant. He was Dean of Yale Law School and served as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs under President Lyndon B. Johnson. In the 1970s Rostow was a leader of the movement against détente with Russia and in 1981, President Ronald Reagan appointed him director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
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#23690

Thulani Davis

#23701
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Thulani Davis is an American playwright, journalist, librettist, novelist, poet, and screenwriter. She is a graduate of Barnard College and attended graduate school at both the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University.
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#23691

Linton Freeman

Linton Freeman
#23702
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Linton Clarke Freeman was an American structuralist sociologist known for his pioneering work in social networks. He was an emeritus professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Freeman developed the first measure of betweenness centrality. He was the founding editor of the journal Social Networks which began publishing in 1979.
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#23692

Bhubaneswar Mishra

#23703
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Bhubaneswar Mishra is an Indian American computer scientist and professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. He is known for his applied contributions to bioinformatics, cybersecurity, and computational finance. Mishra is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher in Computer Science.
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#23693

Dana G. Hoyt

#23704
Overall Influence
Dana Gibson Hoyt was the thirteenth president of Sam Houston State University. She was appointed on September 1, 2010, following unanimous approval by The Texas State University System. She is the first female president in the university’s history.
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#23694

Allison Hedge Coke

#23705
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is an American poet and editor. Her debut book, Dog Road Woman, won the American Book Award and was the first finalist of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Diane DeCora Award. Since then, she has written five more books and edited eight anthologies. She is known for addressing issues of culture, prejudice, rights, the environment, peace, violence, abuse, and labor in her poetry and other creative works.
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#23695

Alexander Demandt

#23706
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Alexander Demandt is a German historian. He was professor of ancient history at the Free University of Berlin from 1974 to 2005. Demandt is an expert on the history of Rome, Late Antiquity, historiographical studies, and the links between philosophy and history.
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#23696

Michael Stoute

#23707
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Sir Michael Ronald Stoute is a Barbadian British Thoroughbred horse trainer in flat racing. Career Stoute, whose father was the Chief of Police for Barbados, left the island in 1964 at the age of 19 to become an assistant to trainer Pat Rohan and began training horses on his own in 1972. His first win as a trainer came on 28 April 1972 when Sandal, a horse owned by Stoute's father, won at Newmarket Racecourse in England. Since then, he has gone on to win races all over the globe, including victories in the Dubai World Cup, the Breeders Cup, the Japan Cup and the Hong Kong Vase.
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#23697

Robert Plonsey

#23708
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Robert Plonsey was the Pfizer-Pratt University Professor Emeritus of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. He is noted for his work on bioelectricity. Education Plonsey was born in New York City in 1924. He received the B.E.E. degree in electrical engineering from the Cooper Union School of Engineering in New York in 1943, and the M.E.E degree from New York University in 1948. He obtained his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1957. In addition, he completed the first year and a half of the MD curriculum and the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine .
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#23698

Fahd of Saudi Arabia

#23709
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud was King and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia from 13 June 1982 until his death in 2005. Prior to his ascension, he was Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia from 1975 to 1982. He was the eighth son of King Abdulaziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia.
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#23699

Anthony Clark Arend

#23710
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Anthony Clark Arend is an American academic on international laws and politics. He is currently the Professor of Government and Foreign Service and has been Chair of the Department of Government at Georgetown University since June 2020.
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#23700

David Paich

#23711
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
David Frank Paich is an American keyboardist, singer and songwriter, best known as the co-founder, principal songwriter, keyboardist and secondary vocalist of the rock band Toto since 1977. He wrote or co-wrote much of Toto's original material, including the band's three most popular songs: "Hold the Line", "Rosanna" and "Africa". With Toto, Paich has contributed to 17 albums and sold over 40 million records. He and guitarist and singer Steve Lukather are the only members to appear on every studio album.
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