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).
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List of the most influential people
#2551
Leigh Van Valen
#2553
Overall Influence
1935 - 2010 (75 years)
Leigh Van Valen was a U.S. evolutionary biologist. At the time of his death, he was professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. Research and interests Amongst other work, Van Valen's proposed "Law of Extinction", known as Van Valen's law, drew upon the apparent constant probability of extinction in families of related organisms, based on data compiled from existing literature on the duration of tens of thousands of genera throughout the fossil record. Van Valen proposed the Red Queen Hypothesis , as an explanatory tangent to the Law of Extinction.
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Simon Blackburn
#2554
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Simon Walter Blackburn is an English academic philosopher known for his work in metaethics, where he defends quasi-realism, and in the philosophy of language; more recently, he has gained a large general audience from his efforts to popularise philosophy. He has appeared in multiple episodes of the documentary series Closer to Truth. During his long career, he has taught at Oxford University, Cambridge University, and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
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Bert Hölldobler
#2555
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Berthold Karl Hölldobler BVO is a German zoologist, sociobiologist and evolutionary biologist who studies evolution and social organization in ants. He is the author of several books, including The Ants, for which he and his co-author, E. O. Wilson, received the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction writing in 1991.
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Tony Judt
#2556
Overall Influence
1948 - 2010 (62 years)
Tony Robert Judt was an English historian, essayist and university professor who specialized in European history. Judt moved to New York and served as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University and director of NYU's Erich Maria Remarque Institute. He was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. In 1996 Judt was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
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Karl H. Pribram
#2557
Overall Influence
1919 - 2015 (96 years)
Karl H. Pribram was a professor at Georgetown University, in the United States, an emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at Stanford University and distinguished professor at Radford University. Board-certified as a neurosurgeon, Pribram did pioneering work on the definition of the limbic system, the relationship of the frontal cortex to the limbic system, the sensory-specific "association" cortex of the parietal and temporal lobes, and the classical motor cortex of the human brain. He worked with Karl Lashley at the Yerkes Primate Center of which he was to become director later. He...
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Ted Honderich
#2558
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Ted Honderich is a Canadian-born British professor of philosophy, who was Grote Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College London. Biography Honderich was born Edgar Dawn Ross Honderich on 30 January 1933 in Baden, Ontario, Canada, the younger brother of Beland Honderich, who became publisher of the Toronto Star. An undergraduate at the University of Toronto, qualifying as B.A. in Philosophy and English Literature, he came to University College London to study under the logical positivist and Grote Professor A. J. Ayer, graduating with a PhD in 1968. He has since lived in England and become a British citizen.
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Ludo Rocher
#2559
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Ludo Rocher was an eminent Sanskrit scholar, and the W. Norman Brown Professor Emeritus of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Biography Ludo Rocher was born in Hemiksem in the province of Antwerp, Belgium on 25 April 1926. He became a U.S. citizen in 1972.
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Mitchell Feigenbaum
#2560
Overall Influence
1944 - 2019 (75 years)
Mitchell Jay Feigenbaum was an American mathematical physicist whose pioneering studies in chaos theory led to the discovery of the Feigenbaum constants. Early life Feigenbaum was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Jewish emigrants from Poland and Ukraine. He attended Samuel J. Tilden High School, in Brooklyn, New York, and the City College of New York. In 1964, he began his graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Enrolling for graduate study in electrical engineering, he changed his area of study to physics. He completed his doctorate in 1970 for a thesis on dispersion relations, under the supervision of Professor Francis E.
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Bob Bemer
#2561
Overall Influence
1920 - 2004 (84 years)
Robert William Bemer was a computer scientist best known for his work at IBM during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Early life and education Born in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, Bemer graduated from Cranbrook Kingswood School in 1936 and took a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics at Albion College in 1940. He earned a certificate in aeronautical engineering at Curtiss-Wright Technical Institute in 1941.
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Robert H. Grubbs
#2562
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
#2561
Andy Coulson
#2563
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Andrew Edward Coulson is an English journalist and political strategist. Coulson was the editor of the News of the World from 2003 to 2007, following the conviction of one of the newspaper's reporters in relation to illegal phone-hacking. He subsequently joined David Cameron's personnel as communications director, until announcing his departure on 21 January 2011 because of continued media coverage of the phone-hacking affair. The overall impact from his tenure came to be known as the "Coulson effect".
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John Stossel
#2564
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
John Frank Stossel is an American libertarian television presenter, author, consumer journalist, political activist, and pundit. He is known for his career as a host on ABC News, Fox Business Network, and Reason TV.
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Angus Maddison
#2565
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Angus Maddison was a distinguished British economist specialising in quantitative macro economic history, including the measurement and analysis of economic growth and development. Maddison lectured at several universities over the course of his career, including the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and Harvard University. In 1978, Maddison was appointed Historical Professor in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Groningen . He retired in 1996 and became Emeritus Professor.
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Dallin H. Oaks
#2566
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Dallin Harris Oaks is an American religious leader and former jurist and academic who since 2018 has been the first counselor in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . He was called as a member of the church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1984. Currently, he is the second most senior apostle by years of service and is the President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.
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Danielle Steel
#2567
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schuelein-Steel is an American writer, best known for her romance novels. She is the bestselling living author and one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time, with over 800 million copies sold. As of 2021, she has written 190 books, including over 140 novels.
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Tasuku Honjo
#2568
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
is a Japanese physician-scientist and immunologist. He won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and is best known for his identification of programmed cell death protein 1 . He is also known for his molecular identification of cytokines: IL-4 and IL-5, as well as the discovery of activation-induced cytidine deaminase that is essential for class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation.
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Alberto Toscano
#2569
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Alberto Toscano is an Italian cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher, and translator. He has translated the work of Alain Badiou, including Badiou's The Century and Logics of Worlds. He served as both editor and translator of Badiou's Theoretical Writings and On Beckett.
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Robert H. Frank
#2570
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Robert Harris Frank is the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and a professor of economics at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. He contributes to the "Economic View" column, which appears every fifth Sunday in The New York Times. Frank has published on the topic of wealth inequality in the United States.
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John Hagelin
#2571
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
John Samuel Hagelin is the leader of the Transcendental Meditation movement in the United States. He is president of Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa, and honorary chair of its board of trustees. The university was established in 1973 by the TM movement's founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, to deliver a "consciousness-based education".
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Olafur Eliasson
#2572
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Olafur Eliasson is an Icelandic–Danish artist known for sculptured and large-scaled installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer's experience.
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Lois McMaster Bujold
#2573
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Lois McMaster Bujold is an American speculative fiction writer. She is an acclaimed writer, having won the Hugo Award for best novel four times, matching Robert A. Heinlein's record . Her novella The Mountains of Mourning won both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. In the fantasy genre, The Curse of Chalion won the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature and was nominated for the 2002 World Fantasy Award for best novel, and both her fourth Hugo Award and second Nebula Award were for Paladin of Souls. In 2011 she was awarded the Skylark Award. She has won two Hugo Awards for Best Series, in 2017 for the Vorkosigan Saga and in 2018 for the World of the Five Gods.
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Tom M. Apostol
#2574
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Tom Mike Apostol was an American analytic number theorist and professor at the California Institute of Technology, best known as the author of widely used mathematical textbooks. Life and career Apostol was born in Helper, Utah. His parents, Emmanouil Apostolopoulos and Efrosini Papathanasopoulos, were Greek immigrants. Apostolopoulos's name was shortened to Mike Apostol when he obtained his United States citizenship, and Tom Apostol inherited this Americanized surname.
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Timothy Gowers
#2575
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#2574
Romulus Augustulus
#2576
Overall Influence
Romulus Augustus , nicknamed Augustulus, was Roman emperor of the West from 31 October 475 until 4 September 476. Romulus was placed on the imperial throne by his father, the magister militum Orestes, and, at that time still a minor, was little more than a figurehead for his father. After Romulus ruled for just ten months, the barbarian general Odoacer defeated and killed Orestes and deposed Romulus. As Odoacer did not proclaim any successor, Romulus is typically regarded as the last Western Roman emperor, his deposition marking the end of the Western Roman Empire as a political entity, despite the fact that Julius Nepos would continue to be recognised as the western emperor by the east.
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Elliot Aronson
#2577
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Elliot Aronson is an American psychologist who has carried out experiments on the theory of cognitive dissonance and invented the Jigsaw Classroom, a cooperative teaching technique that facilitates learning while reducing interethnic hostility and prejudice. In his 1972 social psychology textbook, The Social Animal, he stated Aronson's First Law: "People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy", thus asserting the importance of situational factors in bizarre behavior. He is the only person in the 120-year history of the American Psychological Association to have won all three of its major awards: for writing, for teaching, and for research.
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Jon Snow
#2578
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jonathan George Snow HonFRIBA is an English journalist and television presenter. He is best known as the longest-running presenter of Channel 4 News, which he presented from 1989 to 2021. On 29 April 2021, Snow announced his retirement from the role; his final programme aired on 23 December 2021. Although Channel 4's news programming is produced by ITN, Snow was employed directly by the broadcaster.
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John Maddox
#2579
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
Sir John Royden Maddox, FRS was a Welsh theoretical chemist, physicist, and science writer. He was an editor of Nature for 22 years, from 1966 to 1973 and 1980 to 1995. Education and early life John Royden Maddox was born on 27 November 1925, at Penllergaer near Swansea, Wales. He was the son of Arthur Jack Maddox, a furnaceman at an aluminium plant. He was educated at Gowerton Boys' County School. From there, aged 15, he won a state scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, where he read chemistry, and King's College London, where he studied physics.
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Paul Steinhardt
#2580
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Paul Joseph Steinhardt is an American theoretical physicist whose principal research is in cosmology and condensed matter physics. He is currently the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University, where he is on the faculty of both the Departments of Physics and of Astrophysical Sciences.
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Peter G. Neumann
#2581
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Peter Gabriel Neumann is a computer-science researcher who worked on the Multics operating system in the 1960s. He edits the RISKS Digest columns for ACM Software Engineering Notes and Communications of the ACM. He founded ACM SIGSOFT and is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS.
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Lisa Randall
#2582
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
#2581
Ashoke Sen
#2583
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Ashoke Sen FRS is an Indian theoretical physicist and distinguished professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences , Bangalore. A former distinguished professor at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad, He is also an honorary fellow in National Institute of Science Education and Research , Bhubaneswar, India he is also a Morningstar Visiting professor at MIT and a distinguished professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study. His main area of work is string theory. He was among the first recipients of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics "for opening th...
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Henri Theil
#2584
Overall Influence
1924 - 2000 (76 years)
Henri Theil was a Dutch econometrician and professor at the Netherlands School of Economics in Rotterdam, known for his contributions to the field of econometrics. Biography Born in Amsterdam, Theil started to study mathematics and physics at Utrecht University in 1942. Later in World War II he was arrested and was imprisoned in Vught. After the war he started to study economics at the Gemeente-Universiteit Amsterdam, where in 1951 he received his PhD under Pieter Hennipman.
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Louise Glück
#2585
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Louise Elisabeth Glück was an American poet and essayist. She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose judges praised "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal". Her other awards include the Pulitzer Prize, National Humanities Medal, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Bollingen Prize. From 2003 to 2004, she was Poet Laureate of the United States.
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Mary Barra
#2586
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Mary Teresa Barra is an American businesswoman who has been the chair and chief executive officer of General Motors since January 15, 2014. She is the first female CEO of a 'Big Three' automaker. In December 2013, GM named her to succeed Daniel Akerson as CEO. Prior to being named CEO, Barra was executive vice president of global product development, purchasing, and supply chain.
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Chuck Close
#2587
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Charles Thomas Close was an American painter, visual artist, and photographer who made massive-scale photorealist and abstract portraits of himself and others. Close also created photo portraits using a very large format camera. He adapted his painting style and working methods in 1988, after being paralyzed by an occlusion of the anterior spinal artery.
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Peter Temin
#2588
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Peter Temin is an economist and economic historian, currently Gray Professor Emeritus of Economics, MIT and former head of the Economics Department. Education Temin graduated from Swarthmore College in 1959 before earning his Ph.D. at MIT in 1964. Beginning in the 1960s and early 1970s he published on American economic history in the 19th century, including The Jacksonian Economy and Causal Factors in American Economic Growth in the Nineteenth Century , as well as Reckoning with Slavery , which was an examination of the slave economy and its effects. His papers of the 1960s would reflect in...
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Avie Tevanian
#2589
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Avadis "Avie" Tevanian is an American-Armenian software engineer. At Carnegie Mellon University, he was a principal designer and engineer of the Mach operating system . He leveraged that work at NeXT Inc. as the foundation of the NeXTSTEP operating system. He was senior vice president of software engineering at Apple from 1997 to 2003, and then chief software technology officer from 2003 to 2006. There, he redesigned NeXTSTEP to become macOS. Apple's macOS and iOS both incorporate the Mach Kernel, and iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS are all derived from iOS. He was a longtime friend of Steve Jobs.
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Richard Gombrich
#2590
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Richard Francis Gombrich is a British Indologist and scholar of Sanskrit, Pāli, and Buddhist studies. He was the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford from 1976 to 2004. He is currently Founder-President of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. He is a past president of the Pali Text Society and general editor emeritus of the Clay Sanskrit Library.
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James A. Yorke
#2591
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
James A. Yorke is a Distinguished University Research Professor of Mathematics and Physics and former chair of the Mathematics Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, United States, Yorke attended The Pingry School, then located in Hillside, New Jersey. Yorke is now a Distinguished University Research Professor of Mathematics and Physics with the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland. In June 2013, Dr. Yorke retired as chair of the University of Maryland's Math department. He devotes his university efforts t...
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David Satcher
#2592
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
David Satcher, is an American physician, and public health administrator. He was a four-star admiral in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and served as the 10th Assistant Secretary for Health, and the 16th Surgeon General of the United States.
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Jean Todt
#2593
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jean Henri Todt is a French motor racing executive and former rally co-driver. He was previously director of Peugeot Talbot Sport and then Scuderia Ferrari Formula 1 team principal, before being appointed chief executive officer of Ferrari from 2004 to 2008. From 2009 to 2021 he served as the ninth president of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile .
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Roger Revelle
#2594
Overall Influence
1909 - 1991 (82 years)
Roger Randall Dougan Revelle was a scientist and scholar who was instrumental in the formative years of the University of California, San Diego and was among the early scientists to study anthropogenic global warming, as well as the movement of Earth's tectonic plates. UC San Diego's first college is named Revelle College in his honor.
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Roger Blench
#2595
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Roger Marsh Blench is a British linguist, ethnomusicologist and development anthropologist. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and is based in Cambridge, England. He researches, publishes, and works as a consultant.
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Reinhold Messner
#2596
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Reinhold Andreas Messner is an Italian mountaineer, explorer, and author from South Tyrol. He made the first solo ascent of Mount Everest and, along with Peter Habeler, the first ascent of Everest without supplemental oxygen. He was the first climber to ascend all 14 peaks over above sea level and he also did it without supplementary oxygen. Messner was the first to cross Antarctica and Greenland with neither snowmobiles nor dog sleds and also crossed the Gobi Desert alone. He is widely considered as the greatest mountaineer of all time.
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David Peterson
#2597
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
David Robert Peterson is a Canadian lawyer and former politician who served as the 20th premier of Ontario from 1985 to 1990. He was the first Liberal officeholder in 42 years, ending the so-called Tory dynasty.
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Louis Menand
#2598
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Louis Menand is an American critic, essayist, and professor, who wrote the Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club , an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America.
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John C. Mather
#2599
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
John Cromwell Mather is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite with George Smoot. This work helped cement the big-bang theory of the universe. According to the Nobel Prize committee, "the COBE-project can also be regarded as the starting point for cosmology as a precision science."
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Telford Taylor
#2600
Overall Influence
1908 - 1998 (90 years)
Telford Taylor was an American lawyer and professor. Taylor was known for his role as lead counsel in the prosecution of war criminals after World War II, his opposition to McCarthyism in the 1950s, and his outspoken criticism of American actions during the Vietnam War.
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Willy Brandt
#2601
Overall Influence
1913 - 1992 (79 years)
Willy Brandt was a German politician and statesman who was leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany from 1964 to 1987 and served as the chancellor of West Germany from 1969 to 1974. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 for his efforts to strengthen cooperation in western Europe through the EEC and to achieve reconciliation between West Germany and the countries of Eastern Europe. He was the first Social Democratic chancellor since 1930.
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Jim Peebles
#2602
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Phillip James Edwin Peebles is a Canadian-American astrophysicist, astronomer, and theoretical cosmologist who is currently the Albert Einstein Professor in Science, emeritus, at Princeton University. He is widely regarded as one of the world's leading theoretical cosmologists in the period since 1970, with major theoretical contributions to primordial nucleosynthesis, dark matter, the cosmic microwave background, and structure formation.
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