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
#24051
Marjolijn Verspoor
#24062
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Marjolijn Verspoor is a Dutch linguist. She is a professor of English language and English as a second language at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. She is known for her work on Complex Dynamic Systems Theory and the application of dynamical systems theory to study second language development. Her interest is also in second language writing.
Go to Profile#24052
Gabriel Carroll
#24063
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Gabriel Drew Carroll is a Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto. He was born to tech industry worker parents in Oakland. He graduated from Harvard University with B.A. in mathematics and linguistics in 2005 and received his doctorate in economics from MIT in 2012. He was recognized as a child prodigy and received numerous awards in mathematics while a student.
Go to Profile#24053
Jean-Michel Coron
#24064
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jean-Michel Coron is a French mathematician. He first studied at École Polytechnique, where he worked on his PhD thesis advised by Haïm Brezis. Since 1992, he has studied the control theory of partial differential equations, and which includes both control and stabilization. His results concern partial differential equations related to fluid dynamics, with emphasis on nonlinear phenomena, and part of them found applications to control channels.
Go to Profile#24054
Paul Draper
#24065
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Paul Robert Draper is an American philosopher, most known for his work in the philosophy of religion. His work on the evidential argument from evil has been widely influential. He is currently a professor at Purdue University. He is co-editor of topics in the philosophy of religion for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Go to Profile#24055
Melissa Hathaway
#24066
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Melissa Hathaway is a leading expert in cyberspace policy and cybersecurity. She served under two U.S. presidential administrations from 2007 to 2009, including more than 8 months at the White House, spearheading the Cyberspace Policy Review for President Barack Obama after leading the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative for President George W. Bush. She is President of Hathaway Global Strategies LLC, a Senior Fellow and member of the Board of Regents at Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Canada, and a non-resident Research Fellow at the Kosciuszko Institute in Poland.
Go to Profile#24056
Ard Louis
#24067
Overall Influence
Ard A. Louis is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford, where he leads an interdisciplinary research group that investigates scientific problems on the border between disciplines such as chemistry, physics, and biology, and is also director of graduate studies in theoretical physics.
Go to Profile#24057
Pearl Lang
#24068
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
Pearl Lang was an American dancer, choreographer and teacher renowned as an interpreter and propagator of the choreography style of Martha Graham, and also for her own longtime dance company, the Pearl Lang Dance Theater. She is known for Appalachian Spring , American Masters and Driven
Go to Profile#24058
Kiyoko Okabe
#24069
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
served as a Justice of the Supreme Court of Japan from 2010 to 2019. She was born on March 20, 1949. She attended Keio University and completed the master’s program at the university’s law school in 1974. In 1974, she was admitted as a legal apprentice, and would not begin her judicial career until 1976. From 1976-1985, Okabe worked as an Assistant Judge for various court systems including the Sapporo District Court. She thereafter worked as a judge for other district courts until entering private practice in 1993. On April 12, 2010, Okabe was appointed as a Justice of the Supreme Court of Japan.
Go to Profile#24059
Mriganka Sur
#24070
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Mriganka Sur is the Newton Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Simons Center for the Social Brain at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a Visiting Faculty Member in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and N.R. Narayana Murthy Distinguished Chair in Computational Brain Research at the Centre for Computational Brain Research, IIT Madras. He was on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2010 and has been serving as Jury Chair from 2018.
Go to Profile#24060
Oleksandr Usyk
#24071
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Oleksandr Oleksandrovych Usyk is a Ukrainian professional boxer. He has held multiple world championships in two weight classes, including the unified heavyweight titles since 2021, and the Ring magazine title since 2022. He has also held the International Boxing Organization title since 2021. Previously, he held the undisputed cruiserweight championship from 2018 to 2019, being the first boxer in that division to hold all four major world titles.
Go to Profile#24061
Stephanie B. Alexander
#24072
Overall Influence
Stephanie Brewster Brewer Taylor Alexander is an American mathematician, a professor emerita of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her research concerns differential geometry and metric spaces.
Go to Profile#24062
J. Abbott Miller
#24073
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
J. Abbott Miller or Abbott Miller is an American graphic designer and writer, and a partner at Pentagram, which he joined in 1999. Biography Abbott Miller was born in Indiana and studied at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York.
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Bram Dijkstra
#24074
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Bram Dijkstra is an American author, literary critic and former professor of English literature. Dijkstra wrote seven books on various literary and artistic subjects concerning writing. He also curates art exhibitions and writes catalog essays for San Diego art museums.
Go to Profile#24064
Camran Nezhat
#24075
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Camran Nezhat, FACOG, FACS is an American laparoscopic surgeon, reproductive endocrinology and infertility sub-specialist who has been teaching and practicing medicine and surgery as an adjunct clinical professor of surgery, and obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, California since 1993. Nezhat is also chair of the Association of the Adjunct Clinical Faculty, Stanford University School of Medicine, and a clinical professor of OB/GYN at the University of California, San Francisco.
Go to Profile#24065
Stan Kelly-Bootle
#24076
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Stanley Bootle, known as Stan Kelly-Bootle , was a British author, academic, singer-songwriter and computer scientist. He took his stage name Stan Kelly from the Irish folk song "Kelly, the boy from Killane". His best-known song is the "Liverpool Lullaby" or "The Mucky Kid" which was recorded in 1965 on the Three City Four LP and sung by Marian McKenzie. It was also sung by the Ian Campbell Folk Group on the Contemporary Campbells LP. It was later recorded by Judy Collins in 1966 for her album In My Life. Cilla Black recorded it three years later as the B-side to her pop hit "Conversations". ...
Go to Profile#24066
Horace Winchell Magoun
#24077
Overall Influence
1907 - 1991 (84 years)
Horace Winchell Magoun was a medical researcher. studied medicine first at the Rhode Island State College and the Syracuse University, graduating in medicine in 1931. In 1934 earned a Ph.D. in anatomy at the Faculty of Medicine Northwestern University, and remained in it first as a university assistant and then as professor of microscopic anatomy . In 1948, in collaboration with the Italian neurophysiologist Giuseppe Moruzzi, Magoun identified the brain center responsible for the state of sleep: electrical stimulation of the brain stem, by Moruzzi and Magoun found a link between the station cerebellum and motor cortex, producing EEG waves typical of a state of intense supervision.
Go to Profile#24067
Michael Kohlhase
#24078
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Michael Kohlhase is a German computer scientist and professor at University of Erlangen–Nuremberg, where he is head of the KWARC research group . Academic Positions Michael Kohlhase is president of the OpenMath Society and a trustee of the Interest Group for Mathematical Knowledge Management . He was a trustee of the Conference on Automated Deduction and the CALCULEMUS Interest Group. He has been Conference Chair of CADE-21 and Program Chair of the KI-2006, MKM-2005, and CALCULEMUS-2000 conferences and has served on the Programme Committees of more than three dozen international conferences. ...
Go to Profile#24068
Jack Sock
#24079
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Jack Sock is an American pickleball player and former professional tennis player. He won four career singles titles and 17 doubles titles on the ATP Tour, and had career-high tennis rankings of world No. 8 in singles and world No. 2 in doubles .
Go to Profile#24069
Stephen Nickell
#24080
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Sir Stephen John Nickell, is a British economist and former warden of Nuffield College, Oxford, noted for his work in labour economics with Richard Layard and Richard Jackman. Nickell and Layard hypothesised that the tendency for reduced unemployment to lead to inflation resulted from its effect on competitive bargaining in the labour market He is currently a member of the Office for Budget Responsibility's Budget Responsibility Committee.
Go to Profile#24070
Robert D. Bullard
#24081
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Robert Doyle Bullard is an American academic who is the former Dean of the Barbara Jordan - Mickey Leland School Of Public Affairs and currently Distinguished Professor at Texas Southern University. Previously Ware Professor of Sociology and Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, Bullard is known as the "father of environmental justice". He has been a leading campaigner against environmental racism, as well as the foremost scholar of the problem, and of the Environmental Justice Movement which sprung up in the United States in the 1980s.
Go to Profile#24071
Gerhard Kallmann
#24082
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Gerhard Michael Kallmann was a German-born American architect and academic. Together with Michael McKinnell, Kallman is best known as the lead designer of Boston City Hall, which was constructed in 1968 by their architectural design firm, Kallmann McKinnell & Wood.
Go to Profile#24072
Janet Currie
#24083
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Janet Currie is a Canadian-American economist and the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs, where she is Co-Director of the Center for Health and Wellbeing. She served as the Chair of the Department of Economics at Princeton from 2014–2018. She also served as the first female Chair of the Department of Economics at Columbia University from 2006–2009. Before Columbia, she taught at the University of California, Los Angeles and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was named one of the top 10 women in economics by the World Economic Forum in July 2015.
Go to Profile#24073
Rosalio José Castillo Lara
#24084
Overall Influence
1922 - 2007 (85 years)
Rosalio José Castillo Lara was a Venezuelan prelate of the Catholic Church. He worked in the Roman Curia for almost all of his career, first with responsibility for rewriting the code of canon law and then in administrative positions in the government of the Holy See. He was made a cardinal in 1985.
Go to Profile#24074
Rüdiger Frank
#24085
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Rüdiger Frank is a German economist and expert on North Korea and East Asia. He currently lives and works in Vienna, Austria, as a tenured full professor of East Asian economy and society at the University of Vienna. Frank also serves as the head of the Department of East Asian Studies in Vienna and is an adjunct professor at Korea University and at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.
Go to Profile#24075
Fereydoon Family
#24086
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Fereydoon Family is a leading Persian physicist in the field of nanotechnology and solid-state physics. He is currently Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Physics and a member of the Emerson Center for Scientific Computation at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He is an elected fellow of the American Physical Society, and a recipient of the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society's highest honor, the J.W. Beams Award.
Go to Profile#24076
Bob Coecke
#24087
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Bob Coecke is a Belgian theoretical physicist and logician who was professor of Quantum foundations, Logics and Structures at Oxford University until 2020, when he became Chief Scientist of Cambridge Quantum Computing, and after the merger with Honeywell Quantum Systems, Chief Scientist of Quantinuum. In January 2023 he also became Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He pioneered categorical quantum mechanics , Quantum Picturalism, ZX-calculus, DisCoCat model for natural language, and quantum natural language processing . He is a founder...
Go to Profile#24077
Qian Xuesen
#24088
Overall Influence
1911 - 2009 (98 years)
Qian Xuesen, or Hsue-shen Tsien , was a Chinese aerospace engineer and cyberneticist who made significant contributions to the field of aerodynamics and established engineering cybernetics. Qian received his undergraduate education in mechanical engineering at National Chiao Tung University in Shanghai in 1934 and took a pre-departure transitional year in aircraft design at National Tsinghua University in Beijing. He travelled to the United States in 1935 and attained a master's degree in aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. Afterward, he joined Theodo...
Go to Profile#24078
Vincent O'Keefe
#24089
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Father Vincent O'Keefe S.J. was the Vicar General of the Society of Jesus and a President of Fordham University. Biography In 1981 the order's superior general, Pedro Arrupe, suffered a stroke. O'Keefe was appointed Vicar General to guide the Jesuits as they began the process of selecting a new General. The pope, in a highly unusual and historic decision, intervened and appointed instead Jesuit Father Paolo Dezza as a special pontifical delegate to serve as the Jesuits' interim leader.
Go to Profile#24079
Vince Clarke
#24090
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Vincent John Martin , known professionally as Vince Clarke, is an English synth-pop musician and songwriter. Clarke has been the main composer and musician of the band Erasure since its inception in 1985, and was previously the main songwriter for several groups, including Depeche Mode, Yazoo, and the Assembly. In Erasure, he is known for his deadpan and low-key onstage demeanour, often remaining motionless over his keyboard, in sharp contrast to lead vocalist Andy Bell's animated and hyperactive frontman antics.
Go to Profile#24080
John A. Lynn
#24091
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
John Albert Lynn is a military historian who has written on a wide variety of topics in his field, with an emphasis on early modern Europe. Early life and education Born in Glenview, Illinois, in 1943, he received his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , his Master of Arts degree at the University of California, Davis , and his Ph.D. at UCLA .
Go to Profile#24081
Simon Schwartzman
#24092
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Simon Schwartzman is a Brazilian social scientist. He has published extensively, with many books, book chapters and academic articles in the areas of comparative politics, sociology of science, social policy, and education, with emphasis on Brazil and Latin America. He was the President of the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics and is a retired professor from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. He is member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, holder of the Grand Cross of the Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit . He is currently associate researcher at the Institute for...
Go to Profile#24082
Ray Bourque
#24093
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Raymond Jean Bourque is a Canadian former professional ice hockey player. He holds records for most career goals, assists, and points by a defenceman in the National Hockey League . He won the James Norris Memorial Trophy as the NHL's best defenceman five times, while finishing second for that trophy a further six times. He also twice finished second in the voting for the Hart Memorial Trophy, a rarity for a defenceman. He was named to the end-of-season All-Star teams 19 times, 13 on the first-team and six on the second-team.
Go to Profile#24083
Ben E. King
#24094
Overall Influence
1938 - 2015 (77 years)
Benjamin Earl King was an American soul and R&B singer and record producer. He rose to prominence as one of the principal lead singers of the R&B vocal group The Drifters, notably singing the lead vocals on three of their biggest hit singles "There Goes My Baby", "This Magic Moment", and "Save the Last Dance for Me" .
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Eugène Cremmer
#24095
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Eugène Cremmer was a French theoretical physicist. He was directeur de recherche at the CNRS working at the École Normale Supérieure. Cremmer was a postdoc at CERN from 1971–72. In 1978, together with Bernard Julia and Joël Scherk, he co-developed 11 dimensional supergravity theory and proposed a mechanism of spontaneous compactification in field theory.
Go to Profile#24085
Tomoyuki Nishita
#24096
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Tomoyuki Nishita is a professor at the University of Tokyo. Dr. Nishita received a research award for computer graphics from the Information Processing Society of Japan in 1987, and also received the Steven Anson Coons Award from the ACM SIGGRAPH in 2005.
Go to Profile#24086
Upamanyu Chatterjee
#24097
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Upamanyu Chatterjee is an author and a retired Indian civil servant. His works include the novel English, August: An Indian story, The Last Burden, The Mammaries of the Welfare State and Weight Loss. In 2008, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his contribution to literature.
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Gustav A. Hedlund
#24098
Overall Influence
1904 - 1993 (89 years)
Gustav Arnold Hedlund , an American mathematician, was one of the founders of symbolic and topological dynamics. Biography Hedlund was born May 7, 1904, in Somerville, Massachusetts. He did his undergraduate studies at Harvard University, earned a master's degree from Columbia University, and returned to Harvard for his doctoral studies. He was a student of Marston Morse, under whose supervision he received a Ph.D. in 1930 with thesis entitled "I. Geodesics on a Two-Dimensional Riemannian Manifold with Periodic Coefficients II. Poincare's Rotation Number and Morse's Type Number".
Go to Profile#24088
William R. Cline
#24099
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
William Richard Cline is an American economist and a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He graduated from Princeton University in 1963 and received a PhD in 1969 from Yale, and was deputy director of development and trade research at the office of the assistant secretary for international affairs at the United States Department of the Treasury from 1971 to 1973. He worked at the Brookings Institution from 1973 to 1981. He has been a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics since 1981, with a joint appointment at the Center for Global Development.
Go to Profile#24089
Peter Lyman
#24100
Overall Influence
1940 - 2007 (67 years)
George Peter Lyman was an American professor of information science who taught at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information, and was well known in U.S. academia for his research on online information and his leadership in remaking university library systems for the digital era.
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James Kennedy
#24101
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
James Kennedy is an American social psychologist, best known as an originator and researcher of particle swarm optimization. The first papers on the topic, by Kennedy and Russell C. Eberhart, were presented in 1995; since then tens of thousands of papers have been published on particle swarms. The Academic Press / Morgan Kaufmann book, Swarm Intelligence, by Kennedy and Eberhart with Yuhui Shi, was published in 2001.
Go to Profile#24091
Jonathan Wolff
#24102
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Jonathan Wolff is a British philosopher and academic. He was Professor of Philosophy and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College London in 2012–16. Life and career Wolff was born on 25 June 1959 to Herbert Wolff and Doris Wolff . He earned his Master of Philosophy from UCL under the direction of G.A. Cohen in 1985. Apart from one year as a Harkness Fellow at Harvard University, he has taught at UCL ever since. As of 1 September 2016, he holds the Blavatnik Chair in Public Policy in the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University.
Go to Profile#24092
Robert Dessaix
#24103
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Robert Dessaix, also known as Robert Jones, is an Australian novelist, essayist and journalist. Early life and education Robert Dessaix was born in Sydney, and adopted at an early age by Tom and Jean Jones, after which he was known as Robert Jones. Tom Jones, a merchant seaman, was already 55 when Robert was adopted.
Go to Profile#24093
Alan Budd
#24104
Overall Influence
1937 - 2023 (86 years)
Sir Alan Peter Budd was a British economist, who was a founding member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee in 1997. Budd left the MPC in May 1999, and between August 1999 and 2008 was Provost of The Queen's College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#24094
Nina Fefferman
#24105
Overall Influence
Nina H. Fefferman is an American evolutionary biologist, epidemiologist, and ecologist at the University of Tennessee for the Departments of Ecology and Evolution & Mathematics. Her research focuses on the mathematics of epidemiology, evolutionary & behavioral ecology, and conservation biology. She studies how individual behaviors can affect an entire population.
Go to Profile#24095
Chai Keong Toh
#24106
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Chai Keong Toh is a Singaporean computer scientist, engineer, industry director, former VP/CTO and university professor. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the University of California Berkeley, USA. He was formerly Assistant Chief Executive of Infocomm Development Authority Singapore. He has performed research on wireless ad hoc networks, mobile computing, Internet Protocols, and multimedia for over two decades. Toh's current research is focused on Internet-of-Things , architectures, platforms, and applications behind the development of smart cities.
Go to Profile#24096
Gernot Böhme
#24107
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
Gernot Böhme was a German philosopher and author, contributing to the philosophy of science, theory of time, aesthetics, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. He is the main pioneer of German ecocriticism, the study of the relationship between culture and the environment. He has been the director of the Institute for Practical Philosophy in Darmstadt, Hesse, since 2005. Despite being one of Germany's most acclaimed public intellectuals, very little of his work has so far been translated into English.
Go to Profile#24097
John S. Waugh
#24108
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
John Stewart Waugh was an American chemist and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for developing average hamiltonian theory and using it to extend NMR spectroscopy, previously limited to liquids, to the solid state. He is the author of ANTIOPE, a freeware general purpose Windows-based simulator of the spectra and dynamics of nuclear magnetic resonance . He has also used systems of a few coupled spinss to illustrate the general requirements for equilibrium and ergodicity in isolated systems.
Go to Profile#24098
P. Buford Price
#24109
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Paul Buford Price , usually known as P. Buford Price, was a professor in the graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His work had been wide-ranging over his career, but began with the study of physics and included cosmic rays, astrophysics, nuclear physics, glaciology, climatology, biology in extreme environments, and origins of life. He was born November 8, 1932, in Memphis, TN and died December 28, 2021.
Go to Profile#24099
Chushiro Hayashi
#24110
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
was a Japanese astrophysicist. Hayashi tracks on the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram are named after him. Hayashi was born in Kyoto and enrolled at the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1940, earning his BSc in Physics after 2½ years, in 1942. He was conscripted into the navy and, after the war ended, joined the group of Hideki Yukawa at Kyoto University. He was appointed a professor at Kyoto University in 1957.
Go to Profile#24100
Billy Donovan
#24111
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
William John Donovan Jr. is an American professional basketball coach and former player who is the head coach for the Chicago Bulls of the National Basketball Association . He coached previously for the Oklahoma City Thunder from 2015 to 2020. Before moving to the NBA, he served as the head basketball coach at the University of Florida from 1996 to 2015, and led his Florida Gator teams to back-to-back NCAA championships in 2006 and 2007, as well as an NCAA championship appearance in 2000.
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