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
#2451
David Brin
#2453
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Glen David Brin is an American science fiction author. He has won the Hugo, Locus, Campbell and Nebula Awards. His novel The Postman was adapted into a 1997 feature film starring Kevin Costner. Early life and education Brin was born in Glendale, California, in 1950 to Selma and Herb Brin. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science in astronomy, in 1973. At the University of California, San Diego, he earned a Master of Science in electrical engineering in 1978 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in astronomy in 1981.
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Eugen Drewermann
#2454
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Eugen Drewermann is a German church critic, theologian, peace activist and former Catholic priest. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Drewermann was born in Bergkamen near Dortmund. He is best known in Germany for his work toward a non-violent form of Christianity, which, he believes, requires an integration of Depth psychology into Exegesis and Theology. Trained in philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, and comparative religious studies, he criticized the Roman Catholic Church's literal and biologistic interpretations of miracles, the virgin birth, Ascension, and Resurrection as superstitious and medieval.
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Lance Armstrong
#2455
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Lance Edward Armstrong is an American former professional road racing cyclist. He achieved international fame for winning the Tour de France a record seven consecutive times from 1999 to 2005, but was stripped of his titles after an investigation into doping allegations, called the Lance Armstrong doping case, found he used performance-enhancing drugs over his career. He is currently banned for life from all sanctioned bicycling events.
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Cas Mudde
#2456
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Cas Mudde is a Dutch political scientist who focuses on political extremism and populism in Europe and the United States. His research includes the areas of political parties, extremism, democracy, civil society and European politics. Mudde identifies himself as a political leftist.
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Mark Bowden
#2457
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Mark Bowden is an American journalist and writer. He is a former national correspondent and longtime contributor to The Atlantic. He is best known for his book Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War about the 1993 U.S. military raid in Mogadishu, Somalia. It was adapted as a motion picture of the same name that received two Academy Awards.
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Stefan Hell
#2458
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Stefan Walter Hell HonFRMS is a Romanian-German physicist and one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014 "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy", together with Eric Betzig and William Moerner.
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Gough Whitlam
#2459
Overall Influence
1916 - 2014 (98 years)
Edward Gough Whitlam was the 21st prime minister of Australia, serving from 1972 to 1975. He held office as the leader of the Australian Labor Party , of which he was the longest-serving. He was notable for being the head of a reformist and socially progressive administration that extraordinarily ended with his removal as prime minister after controversially being dismissed by the governor-general of Australia, Sir John Kerr, at the climax of the 1975 constitutional crisis. Whitlam is the only Australian prime minister ever to have been removed from office against his will.
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Cory Doctorow
#2460
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of its licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.
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William Safire
#2461
Overall Influence
1929 - 2009 (80 years)
William Lewis Safire was an American author, columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter. He was a long-time syndicated political columnist for The New York Times and wrote the "On Language" column in The New York Times Magazine about popular etymology, new or unusual usages, and other language-related topics.
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Yitang Zhang
#2462
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Yitang Zhang is a Chinese-American mathematician primarily working on number theory and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 2015. Previously working at the University of New Hampshire as a lecturer, Zhang submitted a paper to the Annals of Mathematics in 2013 which established the first finite bound on the least gap between consecutive primes that is attained infinitely often. This work led to a 2013 Ostrowski Prize, a 2014 Cole Prize, a 2014 Rolf Schock Prize, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. Zhang became a professor of mathematics at the Universit...
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Wayne C. Booth
#2463
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Wayne Clayson Booth was an American literary critic and rhetorician. He was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in English Language & Literature and the College at the University of Chicago. His work followed largely from the Chicago school of literary criticism.
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Matthew Sands
#2464
Overall Influence
1919 - 2014 (95 years)
Matthew Linzee Sands was an American physicist and educator best known as a co-author of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. A graduate of Rice University, Sands served with the Naval Ordnance Laboratory and the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.
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Donald Rubin
#2465
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Donald Bruce Rubin is an Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Harvard University, where he chaired the department of Statistics for 13 years. He also works at Tsinghua University in China and at Temple University in Philadelphia.
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Gérard Prunier
#2466
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Gérard Prunier is a French academic, historian, and consultant. He specializes in African history and affairs —particularly the Horn of Africa and the African Great Lakes regions. Biography Prunier received a PhD in African History in 1981 from the University of Paris, spending a year at Harvard University and a stay in Caracas, Venezuela. In 1984, he joined the CNRS scientific institution in Paris as a researcher. He later also became Director of the French Centre for Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa.
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Thomas Kailath
#2467
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Thomas Kailath is an Indian born American electrical engineer, information theorist, control engineer, entrepreneur and the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering emeritus at Stanford University. Professor Kailath has authored several books, including the well-known book Linear Systems, which ranks as one of the most referenced books in the field of linear systems.
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J. Michael Bishop
#2468
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
John Michael Bishop is an American immunologist and microbiologist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Harold E. Varmus and was co-winner of 1984 Alfred P. Sloan Prize. He serves as an active faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco , where he also served as chancellor from 1998 to 2009.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
#2469
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates is an American author, journalist, and activist. He gained a wide readership during his time as national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he wrote about cultural, social, and political issues, particularly regarding African Americans and white supremacy.
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Max Jammer
#2470
Overall Influence
1915 - 2010 (95 years)
Max Jammer , was an Israeli physicist and philosopher of physics. He was born in Berlin, Germany. He was Rector and Acting President at Bar-Ilan University from 1967 to 1977. Biography Jammer studied physics, philosophy and history of science, first at the University of Vienna, and then from 1935 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he received a PhD in experimental physics in 1942. He served in the British Army for the rest of the war.
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Andrew Lo
#2471
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Andrew Wen-Chuan Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Lo is the author of many academic articles in finance and financial economics. He founded AlphaSimplex Group in 1999 and served as chairman and chief investment strategist until 2018 when he transitioned to his current role as chairman emeritus and senior advisor.
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Joachim Frank
#2472
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Joachim Frank ; born September 12, 1940cryo-EM Life and career Frank was born in Siegen in the borough of Weidenau. After completing his Vordiplom degree in physics at the University of Freiburg and his Diplom under Walter Rollwagen's mentorship at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich with the thesis "Untersuchung der Sekundärelektronen-Emission von Gold am Schmelzpunkt" , Frank obtained his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Munich for graduate studies in Walter Hoppe's lab at the Max Planck Institut für Eiweiss- und Lederforschung with the dissertation Untersuchungen von elektronenmikroskopischen Aufnahmen hoher Auflösung mit Bilddifferenz- und Rekonstruktionsverfahren .
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Philip J. Davis
#2473
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Philip J. Davis was an American academic applied mathematician. Davis was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was known for his work in numerical analysis and approximation theory, as well as his investigations in the history and philosophy of mathematics. He earned his degrees in mathematics from Harvard University , and his final position was Professor Emeritus at the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University.
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Ozzy Osbourne
#2474
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
John Michael "Ozzy" Osbourne is an English singer, songwriter, and television personality. He rose to prominence during the 1970s as the lead vocalist of the heavy metal band Black Sabbath, during which period he adopted the nickname "Prince of Darkness".
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Maria Ressa
#2475
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Maria Angelita Ressa is a Filipino-American journalist. She is the co-founder and CEO of Rappler. She previously spent nearly two decades working as a lead investigative reporter in Southeast Asia for CNN. She will become Professor of Professional Practice in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University on July 1, 2024, and will be a Distinguished Fellow at Columbia's new Institute of Global Politics beginning in the fall of 2023.
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John McPhee
#2476
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
John Angus McPhee is an American writer. He is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction, and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World . In 2008, he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career". Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.
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Prince
#2477
Overall Influence
1958 - 2016 (58 years)
Prince Rogers Nelson , known mononymously as Prince, was an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. The recipient of numerous awards and nominations, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest musicians of his generation. He was known for his flamboyant, androgynous persona; his wide vocal range, which included a far-reaching falsetto and high-pitched screams; and his skill as a multi-instrumentalist, often preferring to play all or most of the instruments on his recordings. His music incorporated a wide variety of styles, including funk, R&B, rock, new wave, soul, synth-pop, pop, jazz, blues, and hip hop.
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William Golding
#2478
Overall Influence
1911 - 1993 (82 years)
Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies , he published another twelve volumes of fiction in his lifetime. In 1980, he was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first novel in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth. He was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Georges Duby
#2479
Overall Influence
1919 - 1996 (77 years)
Georges Duby was a French historian who specialised in the social and economic history of the Middle Ages. He ranks among the most influential medieval historians of the twentieth century and was one of France's most prominent public intellectuals from the 1970s to his death.
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Gilles Kepel
#2480
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Gilles Kepel, is a French political scientist and Arabist, specialized in the contemporary Middle East and Muslims in the West. Considered as one of the world’s leading authorities on Political Islam and the Middle East, he is Professor at Sciences Po Paris, the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres and director of the Middle East and Mediterranean Program at PSL, based at Ecole Normale Supérieure. His latest english-translated book, Away from Chaos. The Middle East and the Challenge to the West was reviewed by The New York Times as “an excellent primer for anyone wanting to get up to speed on the region”.
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John H. Flavell
#2481
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
John H. Flavell is an American developmental psychologist specializing in children's cognitive development. Education After serving in The United States Army for two years from 1945 to 1947, John H. Flavell enrolled at Northeastern University where he earned his bachelor's degree in psychology. After graduation, he was admitted into the clinical psychology program at Clark University and Harvard University. John H. Flavell earned his MA from Clark University in 1952 and in 1955 he earned his Ph.D. Through the discovery of new developmental phenomena and analysis of the theories of Jean Piage...
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David D. Clark
#2482
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
David Dana "Dave" Clark is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer who has been involved with Internet developments since the mid-1970s. He currently works as a senior research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory .
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Hartry Field
#2483
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Hartry H. Field is an American philosopher. He is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University; he is a notable contributor to philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind.
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Peter Scholze
#2484
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
#2483
George E. Smith
#2485
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
George Elwood Smith is an American scientist, applied physicist, and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device . He was awarded a one-quarter share in the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for "the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit—the CCD sensor, which has become an electronic eye in almost all areas of photography".
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David Hackett Fischer
#2486
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
David Hackett Fischer is University Professor of History Emeritus at Brandeis University. Fischer's major works have covered topics ranging from large macroeconomic and cultural trends to narrative histories of significant events to explorations of historiography .
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E. P. Sanders
#2487
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
Ed Parish Sanders was an American New Testament scholar and a principal proponent of the "New Perspective on Paul". He was a major scholar in the scholarship on the historical Jesus and contributed to the view that Jesus was part of a renewal movement within Judaism. Sanders identified himself as a "liberal, modern, secularized Protestant" in his book Jesus and Judaism; fellow scholar John P. Meier called him a postliberal Protestant. He was Arts and Sciences Professor of Religion at Duke University, North Carolina from 1990 until his retirement in 2005.
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Philip Mirowski
#2488
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Philip Mirowski is a historian and philosopher of economic thought at the University of Notre Dame. He received a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan in 1979. Career In his 1989 book More Heat than Light, Mirowski reveals a history of how physics has drawn inspiration from economics and how economics has sought to emulate physics, especially with regard to the theory of value. He traces the development of the energy concept in Western physics and its subsequent effect on the invention and promulgation of neoclassical economics, the modern orthodox theory. Mirowski's thesis has been challenged by Hal Varian and defended, with some reservations, by D.
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Christopher A. Pissarides
#2489
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Sir Christopher Antoniou Pissarides is a Cypriot economist. He is the School Professor of Economics and Political Science, Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, and Professor of European Studies at the University of Cyprus. His research focuses on topics of macroeconomics, notably labour, economic growth, and economic policy. In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, jointly with Peter A. Diamond and Dale Mortensen, "for their analysis of markets with theory of search frictions."
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Clyde Snow
#2490
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Clyde Snow was an American forensic anthropologist. Some of his skeletal confirmations include John F. Kennedy, victims of John Wayne Gacy, King Tutankhamun, victims of the Oklahoma City bombing, and Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.
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John Keegan
#2491
Overall Influence
1934 - 2012 (78 years)
Sir John Desmond Patrick Keegan was an English military historian, lecturer, author and journalist. He wrote many published works on the nature of combat between prehistory and the 21st century, covering land, air, maritime, intelligence warfare and the psychology of battle.
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Bernard Coard
#2492
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Winston Bernard Coard is a Grenadian politician who was Deputy Prime Minister in the People's Revolutionary Government of the New Jewel Movement. Coard launched a coup within the revolutionary government and took power for three days until he was himself deposed by General Hudson Austin.
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Erik Olin Wright
#2493
Overall Influence
1947 - 2019 (72 years)
Erik Olin Wright was an American analytical Marxist sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, specializing in social stratification and in egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism. He was known for diverging from classical Marxism in his breakdown of the working class into subgroups of diversely held power and therefore varying degrees of class consciousness. Wright introduced novel concepts to adapt to this change of perspective including deep democracy and interstitial revolution.
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Bob Sproull
#2494
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Robert Fletcher "Bob" Sproull is an American computer scientist, who worked for Oracle Corporation where he was director of Oracle Labs in Burlington, Massachusetts. He is currently an adjunct professor at the College of Information and Computer Sciences, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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Pierre Nora
#2495
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Pierre Nora is a French historian elected to the Académie française on 7 June 2001. He is known for his work on French identity and memory. His name is associated with the study of new history. He is the brother of the late Simon Nora, a former senior French administrative professional.
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William C. Campbell
#2496
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
William Cecil Campbell is an Irish biologist and parasitologist with United States citizenship, known for his work in discovering a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworms, for which he was jointly awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He helped to discover a class of drugs called avermectins, whose derivatives have been shown to have "extraordinary efficacy" in treating River blindness and Lymphatic filariasis, among other parasitic diseases affecting animals and humans. Campbell worked at the Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research 1957–1990, and is currentl...
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Martin Shubik
#2497
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Martin Shubik was an American mathematical economist who specialized in game theory, defense analysis, and the theory of money and financial institutions. The latter was his main research interest and he coined the term "mathematical institutional economics" in 1959 to describe it and referred to it as his "white whale" . He spent the majority of his career at Yale University, where he was heavily involved with the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, and launched the virtual Museum of Money and Financial Institutions.
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Michael Connelly
#2498
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Michael Joseph Connelly is an American author of detective novels and other crime fiction, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. Connelly is the bestselling author of 38 novels and one work of non-fiction, with over 74 million copies of his books sold worldwide and translated into 40 languages. His first novel, The Black Echo, won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992. In 2002, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the movie adaptation of Connelly's 1997 novel, Blood Work. In March 201...
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Bruce Ames
#2499
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Bruce Nathan Ames is an American biochemist. He is a professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and was a senior scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute . He is the inventor of the Ames test, a system for easily and cheaply testing the mutagenicity of compounds.
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Kitty Empire
#2500
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Kitty Empire is the pen name of a British writer and music critic, currently writing for The Observer. Early life Empire says that she was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1970 and brought up in Canada, Italy and Egypt before arriving in Britain in 1988. She studied at Wadham College, Oxford and Thames Valley University before working as a stage door-keeper for the Royal Shakespeare Company and London's Barbican Theatre. Empire describes herself as a feminist.
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Fraser Stoddart
#2501
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Sir James Fraser Stoddart is a British-American chemist who is Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry and head of the Stoddart Mechanostereochemistry Group in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University in the United States. He works in the area of supramolecular chemistry and nanotechnology. Stoddart has developed highly efficient syntheses of mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures such as molecular Borromean rings, catenanes and rotaxanes utilising molecular recognition and molecular self-assembly processes. He has demonstrated that these topologies can be employed as molecular switches.
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Jonah Goldberg
#2502
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Jonah Jacob Goldberg is an American neoconservative syndicated columnist, author, political analyst, and commentator. The founding editor of National Review Online, from 1998 until 2019, he was an editor at National Review. Goldberg writes a weekly column about politics and culture for the Los Angeles Times. In October 2019, Goldberg became the founding editor of the online opinion and news publication The Dispatch. Goldberg has authored the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Liberal Fascism, released in January 2008; The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, released in 20...
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