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
#25551
Nicholas B. Suntzeff
#25562
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Nicholas B. Suntzeff is an American astronomer and cosmologist. He is a University Distinguished Professor and holds the Mitchell/Heep/Munnerlyn Chair of Observational Astronomy in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Texas A&M University where he is Director of the Astronomy Program. He is an observational astronomer specializing in cosmology, supernovae, stellar populations, and astronomical instrumentation. With Brian Schmidt he founded the High-z Supernova Search Team, which was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 to Schmidt and Adam Riess.
Go to Profile#25552
Wolfgang Harich
#25563
Overall Influence
1923 - 1995 (72 years)
Wolfgang Harich was a philosopher and journalist in East Germany. A deserter from the German army in World War II and a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, Harich became a professor of philosophy at Humboldt University in 1949. He was arrested in 1956 and sentenced to ten years in prison for the "establishment of a conspiratorial counterrevolutionary group." He was released in 1964, after eight years, and rehabilitated in 1990. In 1994 he joined the Party of Democratic Socialism.
Go to Profile#25553
Denis Wirtz
#25564
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Denis Wirtz is the vice provost for research and Theophilus Halley Smoot Professor of Engineering Science at Johns Hopkins University. He is an expert in the molecular and biophysical mechanisms of cell motility and adhesion and nuclear dynamics in health and disease.
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Bernard Cecil Cohen
#25565
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Bernard Cecil Cohen is an American political scientist and educator who was acting Chancellor of University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1987. Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, Cohen received his bachelors, masters, and doctorate degrees in political science from Yale University. Cohen became an original member of Princeton University's Center of International Studies and taught at Princeton from 1951 to 1959. Then, in 1959, Cohen taught at University of Wisconsin–Madison. He became chair of the political science department, dean of the graduate school, and then vice chancellor. In 1987, Cohen was acting chancellor of University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Go to Profile#25555
Jan van der Lans
#25566
Overall Influence
1933 - 2002 (69 years)
Johannes Maria van der Lans was a Dutch professor in the psychology of religion at the Catholic University of Nijmegen . Education Van der Lans was born in The Hague. After his secondary education he studied from 1953 until 1960 philosophy and theology at the abbey of Berne in Heeswijk. He was a member of this monastery until 1968. He started studying psychology at the Catholic University of Nijmegen in 1961. One of his teachers was Han Fortmann. In 1967 he was accepted as a full-time employee of the university. In 1978 he received his doctorate for his dissertation on Religious experienc...
Go to Profile#25556
Colin Hay
#25567
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Colin Hay is Professor of Political Sciences at Sciences Po, Paris and Affiliate Professor of Political Analysis at the University of Sheffield, joint editor-in-chief of the journal Comparative European Politics. and Managing Editor of the journal New Political Economy.
Go to Profile#25557
Werner Stumm
#25568
Overall Influence
1924 - 1999 (75 years)
Werner Stumm was a Swiss chemist. After earning his doctorate in inorganic chemistry at the University of Zürich in 1952 he moved to the U.S. where he was active as a professor at Harvard University until 1969. From 1970 until 1992 he was head of the Swiss Federal Water Resources Centre EAWAG.
Go to Profile#25558
Desmond Howard
#25569
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Desmond Kevin Howard is an American former football wide receiver and return specialist who played in the National Football League for 11 seasons. He played college football for the Michigan Wolverines, where he won the Heisman Trophy as a senior, and was selected fourth overall in the 1992 NFL Draft by the Washington Redskins. Howard spent most of his career on special teams as a return specialist and holds the NFL single season record for punt return yardage. With the Green Bay Packers, Howard was named Most Valuable Player of Super Bowl XXXI after returning a kickoff for a 99-yard touchdown, the longest return in Super Bowl history at the time.
Go to Profile#25559
Jennifer Seberry
#25570
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jennifer Roma Seberry is an Australian cryptographer, mathematician, and computer scientist, currently a professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She was formerly the head of the Department of Computer Science and director of the Centre for Computer Security Research at the university.
Go to Profile#25560
P. J. Narayanan
#25571
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
P. J. Narayanan is a professor at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, and the institute's current director since April 2013. He is known for his work in computer vision , computer graphics , and parallel computing on the GPU .
Go to Profile#25561
Evelynn M. Hammonds
#25572
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Evelynn Maxine Hammonds is an American feminist and scholar. She is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, and former Dean of Harvard College. The intersections of race, gender, science and medicine are prominent research topics across her published works. Hammonds received degrees in engineering and physics. Before getting her PhD in the History of Science at Harvard, she was a computer programmer. She began her teaching career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later moving to Harvard.
Go to Profile#25562
Jeff Bhasker
#25573
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Jeff Bhasker is an American record producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist based in Los Angeles. He was awarded the Grammy Award for Producer of the Year in 2016 and nominated in 2013. An accomplished producer, he came to prominence as one of the primary producers of Kanye West's influential 808s & Heartbreak and closely collaborated with West during the late 2000s on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Watch the Throne, his tours, and, later, Donda. In the following decade, Bhasker would go on to produce the albums Some Nights by Fun, Uptown Special with Mark Ronson, and Harry Styles'...
Go to Profile#25563
Rafiq Azad
#25574
Overall Influence
1943 - 2016 (73 years)
Rafiq Azad was a Bangladeshi poet, editor and writer. He is credited with 45 collections of poetry including Prakriti O Premer Kabita, Asambhaber Paye, Sahasra Sundar, Haturir Nichae Jiban, Khub Beshi Durea Noy, Khamakaro Bahaman Hey Udar Amiyo Batas and others. He is most well known for his poem "Bhaat De Haramjada" which was written during the famine of 1974. The poet participated in the war against the Pakistani occupation forces in 1971 Liberation War and was awarded ‘Notable Freedom Fighter Award” in 1997. He received Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1984 and national award Ekushey Pada...
Go to Profile#25564
Michael Brooks
#25575
Overall Influence
1983 - 2020 (37 years)
Michael Jamal Brooks was an American talk show host, writer, political commentator, and comedian. While co-hosting The Majority Report with Sam Seder, he launched The Michael Brooks Show in August 2017 and provided commentary for media outlets, making regular appearances on shows such as The Young Turks. Brooks contributed to various publications, including HuffPost, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, openDemocracy, and Jacobin. His book Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right was published by Zero Books in April 2020.
Go to Profile#25565
Fred Kaplan
#25576
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Fred Kaplan is distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Biography He was born in 1937 in The Bronx, New York, and attended Lafayette High School and Brooklyn College.
Go to Profile#25566
Jaqueline Goés de Jesus
#25577
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Jaqueline Góes de Jesus is a Brazilian scientist and researcher. She was part of the team which sequenced the Zika virus. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she was a member of the team responsible for sequencing the first genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in Brazil.
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Robert Koegel
#25578
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Robert Koegel is a senior research scientist at Stanford University School of Medicine. He was formerly a distinguished professor and the director of the Koegel Autism Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He moved to Stanford in 2017.
Go to Profile#25568
Yiqun Lisa Yin
#25579
Overall Influence
Yiqun Lisa Yin is a Chinese-American cryptographer and independent security consultant. Yin is known for breaking the SHA-1 cryptographic hash function, for developing the RC6 block cipher, and for her service as editor of the IEEE P1363 project for the standardization of public-key cryptography.
Go to Profile#25569
Mihalis Dafermos
#25580
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Mihalis Dafermos is a Greek mathematician. He is Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University and holds the Lowndean Chair of Astronomy and Geometry at the University of Cambridge. He studied mathematics at Harvard University and was awarded a BA in 1997. His PhD thesis titled Stability and Instability of the Cauchy Horizon for the Spherically Symmetric Einstein-Maxwell-Scalar Field Equations was written under the supervision of Demetrios Christodoulou at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#25570
Jack Irons
#25581
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Jack Steven Irons is an American drummer. He is the founding drummer of the rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers and is a former member of Pearl Jam and Eleven. Alongside his work with Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam, Irons has been a member of Eleven, The Wallflowers and Mark Lanegan Band. He has worked with Joe Strummer and The Latino Rockabilly War, Redd Kross, Raging Slab, Spinnerette and The Les Claypool Frog Brigade. In 1995 Irons and the other members of Pearl Jam recorded and toured the Mirror Ball album with Neil Young. Irons has released two solo albums, Attention Dimension and No ...
Go to Profile#25571
Eugene Mallove
#25582
Overall Influence
1947 - 2004 (57 years)
Eugene Franklin Mallove was an American scientist, science writer, editor, and publisher of Infinite Energy magazine, and founder of the nonprofit organization New Energy Foundation. He was a proponent of cold fusion, and a supporter of its research and related exploratory alternative energy topics, several of which are sometimes characterised as "fringe science".
Go to Profile#25572
Nicholas Southwood
#25583
Overall Influence
Nicholas Southwood is an Australian philosopher and associate professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He is a co-editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Moral, Social and Political Theory. Southwood is known for his research on contractualism and social philosophy.
Go to Profile#25573
David Himmelstein
#25584
Overall Influence
David U. Himmelstein is an American academic physician specializing in internal medicine. He is a distinguished professor of public health and health policy in the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College, an adjunct clinical professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School. He is the co-founder with Steffie Woolhandler of Physicians for a National Health Program, an organization advocating for single-payer healthcare in the United States.
Go to Profile#25574
Justin McCarthy
#25585
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Justin A. McCarthy is an American demographer, former professor of history at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. He holds an honorary doctorate from Boğaziçi University , was awarded the Order of Merit of Turkey , and is a board member of the Institute of Turkish Studies and the Center for Eurasian Studies . His area of expertise is the history of the late Ottoman Empire.
Go to Profile#25575
Carol Harter
#25586
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Carol Clancey Harter was an American academic administrator who was the 7th president of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas . She is the longest-serving president in UNLV history, at 11 years. From New York, she held B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Binghamton University as well as three honorary doctorates. She was succeeded as president of UNLV by David B. Ashley on July 1, 2006. Prior to her tenure at UNLV, Harter was the 11th president of SUNY Geneseo, where she was succeeded by Christopher Dahl. She served as a faculty member and in two vice presidential roles at Ohio University and is the author of numerous articles and co-author of two books.
Go to Profile#25576
Michèle Lamont
#25587
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
#25577
Edmund Happold
#25588
Overall Influence
1930 - 1996 (66 years)
Sir Edmund "Ted" Happold was a structural engineer and founder of Buro Happold. Career Happold was the son of Frank Happold, Professor of Biochemistry at Leeds University. After an unpleasant time at Leeds Grammar School, , he was sent to Bootham School, York. He studied geology at the University of Leeds. His mother was a lifelong socialist. A lifelong Quaker, he registered as a conscientious objector when called to do National Service, and was directed to work as an agricultural labourer and then truck driver and dragline operator. This aroused his interest in construction, so he returned to Leeds University, where he achieved a BSc in Civil Engineering in 1957.
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Michael Redhead
#25589
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
Michael Logan Gonne Redhead was a British academic and philosopher of physics. Biography Redhead was born on 30 December 1929 in London and educated there at Westminster School. Redhead was Centennial Professor in CPNSS at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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Mehdi Bahadori
#25590
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Mehdi N. Bahadori is a professor of mechanical engineering at Sharif University of Technology. His research specialties include solar energy applications and passive cooling of buildings. Education Bahadori got his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Tehran in 1956; his Master of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1959; and his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1964.
Go to Profile#25580
John Armleder
#25591
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
John Armleder is a Swiss performance artist, painter, sculptor, critic, and curator. His work is based on his involvement with Fluxus in the 1960s and 1970s, when he created performance art pieces, installations, and collective art activities that were strongly influenced by John Cage. However, Armleder's position throughout his career has been to avoid associating his artistic practice with any type of manifesto.
Go to Profile#25581
Emilio Bizzi
#25592
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Emilio Bizzi is a neuroscientist and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is an investigator of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and a faculty member in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He received his MD from the University of Rome in 1958 and his PhD from the University of Pisa in 1968. In Pisa, he performed seminal measurements of brain waves during sleep.
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Hans Günther Aach
#25593
Overall Influence
1919 - 1999 (80 years)
Hans Günther Aach was a German botanist. Life Aach was born in Oldenburg. He gained his doctorate in March 1952 in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the University of Göttingen. In July 1961 he presented his professorial thesis at the University of Cologne. He spent several months as visiting faculty at University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University. On 31 December 1962 he was appointed Extraordinary Professor of Botany at the RWTH Aachen University. From 12 January 1965 he was appointed to the Chair of Botany in the same place and made director of the Botanical Institute.
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Pat Dodson
#25594
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Patrick Lionel Djargun Dodson is an Australian politician and activist. He was appointed as a replacement to fill a casual vacancy in the Australian Senate for Western Australia. He is a member of the Australian Labor Party. He is a Yawuru elder from Broome, Western Australia. He has been chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and a Commissioner into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. He was briefly a Roman Catholic priest. He was the winner of the 2008 Sydney Peace Prize and the 2009 John Curtin Medallist. He is the brother of Mick Dodson.
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Kent E. Calder
#25595
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Kent E. Calder was the interim dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies , serves as the director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies, and is also the Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of East Asian Studies at SAIS. Calder previously served as the vice dean for faculty affairs and international research cooperation at SAIS.
Go to Profile#25585
Jan Myrheim
#25596
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Jan Myrheim is a Norwegian physicist. He was born in Røyrvik. He took the cand.real. at the University of Oslo in 1972 and took the dr.philos. degree at the University of Trondheim in 1994. He was then appointed as a professor of theoretical physics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He had then worked at the Norwegian Institute of Technology since 1985, except the years 1987 to 1990.
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Elémire Zolla
#25597
Overall Influence
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Elémire Zolla was an Italian essayist, philosopher and historian of religion. He was a connoisseur of esoteric doctrines and a scholar of Eastern and Western mysticism. Biography Zolla was born in Turin to a cosmopolitan family. His father was the painter Venanzio Zolla , born in England of Lombard father and an Alsatian mother. His mother was Blanche Smith a British musician, originally of Kent. Zolla spent his childhood between Paris, London, and Turin, speaking English, French, and Italian, while studying German and Spanish.
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Jeff Fisher
#25598
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Jeffrey Michael Fisher is an American football coach and former cornerback and return specialist. He served as a head coach in the National Football League for 22 seasons, primarily with the Houston / Tennessee Oilers / Titans franchise. Fisher coached the Oilers / Titans from 1994 to 2010 and the St. Louis / Los Angeles Rams from 2012 to 2016. He is currently serving as the chief advisor for the Nashville Kats of the Arena Football League .
Go to Profile#25588
David Abrahamsen
#25599
Overall Influence
1903 - 2002 (99 years)
David Abrahamsen was a Norwegian forensic psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and author who wrote analyses of Richard M. Nixon and David Berkowitz. He was the father of Inger McCabe Elliott. Early life and education Abrahamsen was born in Trondheim, Norway in 1903. He studied medical science at the Royal Frederick University in Oslo and graduated in 1929. He eventually relocated to England, taking positions at the Tavistock Clinic and the London School of Economics.
Go to Profile#25589
Cleveland Sellers
#25600
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Cleveland "Cleve" Sellers Jr. is an American educator and civil rights activist. During the Civil Rights Movement, Sellers helped lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was the only person convicted and jailed for events at the Orangeburg Massacre, a 1968 civil rights protest in which three students were killed by state troopers. Sellers' conviction and the acquittal of the other nine defendants was believed to be motivated by racism, and Sellers received a full pardon 25 years after the incident.
Go to Profile#25590
Peter Doran
#25601
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Peter T. Doran is an Americana earth scientist who is Professor of Geology and Geophysics and John Franks Endowed Chair at Louisiana State University. Prior to 2015, he was faculty in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Go to Profile#25591
Josh Hamilton
#25602
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Joshua Holt Hamilton is an American former professional baseball player. He played in Major League Baseball as an outfielder from 2007 to 2015, most prominently as a member of the Texas Rangers teams that won consecutive American League pennants in 2010 and 2011. A five-time All-Star, Hamilton won three Silver Slugger Awards and was named the American League Most Valuable Player in 2010. He also won an AL batting championship along with an AL RBI title. During his major league tenure, he also played for the Cincinnati Reds and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
Go to Profile#25592
K. R. Narayanan
#25603
Overall Influence
1920 - 2005 (85 years)
Kocheril Raman Narayanan was an Indian statesman, diplomat, academic, and politician who served as the ninth vice president of India from 1992 to 1997 and tenth president of India from 1997 to 2002.
Go to Profile#25593
Wolfram Wette
#25604
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Wolfram Wette is a German military historian and peace researcher. He is an author or editor of over 40 books on the history of Nazi Germany, including the seminal Germany and the Second World War series from the German Military History Research Office .
Go to Profile#25594
Paul Waldau
#25605
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Paul Francis Waldau is an American ethicist and former professor at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, where he headed the graduate program on anthrozoology, which he founded. He has several times served as Barker Lecturer in animal law at Harvard Law School, and is the author of a number of books on animal rights and speciesism.
Go to Profile#25595
Linda Schele
#25606
Overall Influence
1942 - 1998 (56 years)
Linda Schele was an American Mesoamerican archaeologist who was an expert in the field of Maya epigraphy and iconography. She played an invaluable role in the decipherment of much of the Maya hieroglyphs. She produced a massive volume of drawings of stelae and inscriptions, which, following her wishes, are free for use to scholars. In 1978, she founded the annual Maya Meetings at The University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#25596
Peter Tippett
#25607
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Peter S. Tippett is an American physician, researcher, and inventor known for contributions to information security, clinical medicine, and technology. These contributions include the development of the anti-virus program "Corporate Vaccine". Tippett was Vice President of Verizon's Innovations Incubator and Chief Medical Officer for Verizon Enterprise Services from 2009 to 2015. He is currently the Founder and CEO of careMESH Inc.
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François Bovon
#25608
Overall Influence
1938 - 2013 (75 years)
François Bovon was a Swiss biblical scholar and historian of early Christianity. He was the Frothingham Professor Emeritus of the History of Religion at Harvard Divinity School. Bovon was a graduate of the University of Lausanne and held a doctorate in theology from the University of Basel . From 1967 to 1993, he taught in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Geneva. Bovon was an honorary professor at the University of Geneva and in 1993 he received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Theology at Uppsala University, Sweden. He was president of the Swiss Society of Theology from...
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Katherine Ann Dettwyler
#25609
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Katherine Ann Dettwyler is an American anthropologist and advocate of breastfeeding. She was an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware. In 2017, she gained media attention for her comments regarding Otto Warmbier, a 22-year-old college student who received fatal brain damage while imprisoned in North Korea.
Go to Profile#25599
Dermot Shea
#25610
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Dermot Francis Shea is an American police officer who was the 44th New York City Police Commissioner. He assumed the position on December 1, 2019, and was sworn in by Mayor Bill de Blasio in a public ceremony on December 2.
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Lee "Scratch" Perry
#25611
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Lee "Scratch" Perry was a Jamaican record producer, composer and singer noted for his innovative studio techniques and production style. Perry was a pioneer in the 1970s development of dub music with his early adoption of remixing and studio effects to create new instrumental or vocal versions of existing reggae tracks. He worked with and produced for a wide variety of artists, including Bob Marley and the Wailers, Junior Murvin, The Congos, Max Romeo, Adrian Sherwood, Beastie Boys, Ari Up, The Clash, The Orb, and many others.
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