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
#25651
Gillian Rose
#25662
Overall Influence
1947 - 1995 (48 years)
Gillian Rosemary Rose was a British philosopher and writer. Rose held the chair of social and political thought at the University of Warwick until 1995. Rose began her teaching career at the University of Sussex. She worked in the fields of philosophy and sociology. Her writings include The Melancholy Science, Hegel Contra Sociology, Dialectic of Nihilism, Mourning Becomes the Law, and Paradiso, amongst others.
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Stefanie Stantcheva
#25663
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Stéfanie Stantcheva is a Bulgarian-born French economist who is the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. She is a member of the French Council of Economic Analysis. Her research focuses on public finance—in particular questions of optimal taxation. In 2018, she was selected by The Economist as one of the 8 best young economists of the decade. In 2020, she was awarded the Elaine Bennett Research Prize. In 2021, she received the Prix Maurice Allais.
Go to Profile#25653
Nitasha Kaul
#25664
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Nitasha Kaul is a British academic, writer and poet based in London. In addition to fiction, she writes and speaks about topics that cover the political economy, Bhutan, Kashmir, nationalism in India, gender and identity.
Go to Profile#25654
Margie Profet
#25665
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Margaret J. "Margie" Profet is an American evolutionary biologist with no formal biology training who created a decade-long controversy when she published her findings on the role of Darwinian evolution in menstruation, allergies and morning sickness. She argued that these three processes had evolved to eliminate pathogens, carcinogens and other toxins from the body.
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Daryl Dawson
#25666
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Sir Daryl Michael Dawson, is a former Australian judge who served as a Justice of the High Court of Australia from 1982 to 1997. Before being appointed to the High Court, he served for periods as a legal officer in the Royal Australian Navy and as Solicitor-General of Victoria.
Go to Profile#25656
Mark Miodownik
#25667
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Mark Andrew Miodownik is a British materials scientist, engineer, broadcaster and writer at University College London. Previously, he was the head of the Materials Research Group at King's College London, and a co-founder of Materials Library.
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A. E. Dyson
#25668
Overall Influence
1928 - 2002 (74 years)
Anthony Edward Dyson, aka Tony Dyson was a British literary critic, university lecturer, educational activist and gay rights campaigner. Biography Educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, Dyson began his academic career in 1955, when he was appointed Assistant Lecturer in English Literature at the University of North Wales, Bangor. From there, he went to the University of East Anglia, where he was later appointed Reader. He took early retirement in the 1980s.
Go to Profile#25658
Elder Olson
#25669
Overall Influence
1909 - 1992 (83 years)
Elder James Olson was an American poet, teacher and literary critic. He was born in Chicago, Illinois and attended Carl Schurz High School. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, he published a volume of poetry. Thereafter, he published multiple volumes of poetry and literary criticism during his career, for which he received multiple awards. After graduating with a BA in 1934, he was awarded an MA from the University of Chicago in 1935. The same year he received a Friends of Literature award. In 1937, he married Ann Elisabeth Jones and the couple had two children . He was awarded a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#25659
Jean-Louis Colliot-Thélène
#25670
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Jean-Louis Colliot-Thélène is a French mathematician. He is a Directeur de Recherches at CNRS at the Université Paris-Saclay in Orsay. He studies mainly number theory and arithmetic geometry. Awards Prize of the French Academy of Sciences "Charles Louis de Saulces de Freycine" Invited Speaker to the International Congress of Mathematicians Fermat Prize for mathematical research Grand prize of the French Academy of Sciences "Léonid Frank" Fellow of the American Mathematical Society
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Mark Aguirre
#25671
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Mark Anthony Aguirre is an American former basketball player in the National Basketball Association . Aguirre was chosen as the first overall pick of the 1981 NBA draft by the Dallas Mavericks after playing three years at DePaul University. Aguirre played in the NBA from 1981 until 1994 and won two championships with the Detroit Pistons after being traded to Detroit from Dallas in exchange for Adrian Dantley. Aguirre was a three-time All-Star for Dallas. Aguirre was inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2016.
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Edward M. McCreight
#25672
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Edward Meyers McCreight is an American computer scientist. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1969, advised by Albert R. Meyer. He co-invented the B-tree with Rudolf Bayer while at Boeing, and improved Weiner's algorithm to compute the suffix tree of a string. He also co-designed the Xerox Alto workstation, and, with Severo Ornstein, co-led the design and construction of the Xerox Dorado computer while at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. He also worked at Adobe Systems.
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Ted Gayer
#25673
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Ted Gayer is an American economist and the president of the Niskanen Center. He is formerly the executive vice president of the Brookings Institution, where he also once served as the vice president and director of the Economic Studies Program and the Joseph A. Pechman Senior Fellow. On June 12, 2022, Gayer was appointed acting president of the Brookings Institution following the resignation of John R. Allen that same day.
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Peter J. Aspinall
#25674
Overall Influence
Peter J. Aspinall is a social scientist whose research focuses on health services, the terminology and classification of ethnicity, and the relationship between ethnicity and health. Career He is Emeritus Reader in Population Health at the Centre for Health Services Studies at the University of Kent. Aspinall is an Honorary Special Advisor to the London Health Observatory, now part of Public Health England, and advises the Office for National Statistics on the cultural questions included in the United Kingdom Census. He acts as a director and trustee of the charity People in Harmony, with focu...
Go to Profile#25664
Michael Cimino
#25675
Overall Influence
1939 - 2016 (77 years)
Michael Antonio Cimino was an American film director, screenwriter, producer and author. Notorious for his obsessive attention to detail and determination for perfection, Cimino achieved fame with The Deer Hunter , which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Go to Profile#25665
Horace Grant
#25676
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Horace Junior Grant Sr. is an American former professional basketball player who is a special advisor for Michael Reinsdorf, the president and chief operating officer of the Chicago Bulls. He played college basketball at Clemson University before playing professionally in the National Basketball Association , where he became a four-time champion; winning three championships with the Chicago Bulls and one championship with the Los Angeles Lakers. Horace is the twin brother of former NBA player Harvey Grant.
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Arie W. Kruglanski
#25677
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Arie W. Kruglanski is a social psychologist known for his work on goal systems, regulatory mode, and cognitive closure. He is currently a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park.
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Reinhard Wilhelm
#25678
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Reinhard Wilhelm is a German computer scientist. Life and work Wilhelm was born in , today part of the municipality of Finnentrop, Westphalia. He studied math, physics and mathematical logic at University of Münster and computer science at Technical University Munich and Stanford University. He finished his PhD at TU Munich in 1977. In 1978, he obtained a professorship at Saarland University, where he led the chair for programming languages and compiler construction until his retirement in 2014. In addition, Wilhelm has held the post of scientific director of the Leibniz Center for Informatics at Schloss Dagstuhl from its inception in 1990 until 2014.
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Marisol Aguilera
#25679
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Marisol Aguilera Meneses is a Venezuelan biologist whose research involves the ecology of vertebrates. She is the president of the Venezuelan Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Organization Interciencia, which brings together associations for the advancement of science from all over the Americas.
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J. Harvie Wilkinson III
#25680
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
James Harvie Wilkinson III is an American jurist who serves as a United States circuit judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. His name has been raised at several junctures in the past as a possible nominee to the United States Supreme Court.
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Igor Sibaldi
#25681
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Igor Sibaldi , born from Russian mother and Italian father, is an Italian writer, scholar of theology and history of religion. Biography Igor Sibaldi is the author of numerous works on the Scripture and shamanism. He regularly holds conferences and seminars in Italy and abroad about mythology, exegesis and depth psychology. He worked for a long time on angelology in Jewish tradition, equalizing it to an ancient form of psychology.
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Semion Braude
#25682
Overall Influence
1911 - 2003 (92 years)
Semion Yakovlevich Braude was a Soviet and Ukrainian physicist and radio astronomer. Of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, Braude was born in Poltava, Ukraine, and pursued his higher education at the National University of Kharkiv, receiving his undergraduate degree from the Physics and Mathematics Department in 1932. He then joined the staff of the Laboratory of Electromagnetic Oscillations at the Ukrainian Physico-Technical Institute , and also began graduate work at KU. His mentor was Abram A. Slutskin, professor at KU as well as head of the LEMO.
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Korkut Boratav
#25683
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Korkut Boratav is a Turkish Marxian economist. Career Boratav was born in Konya. After his graduation from Ankara Gazi Lycee in 1955, he continued his studies at Ankara University, Law School. In 1960 he became a lecturer and researcher in that university in Finance and Economics, by getting a postgraduate degree on Public Finances. He was granted a doctoral degree in 1964 with his thesis about “income distribution and public finance”.
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Yoshiki Kuramoto
#25684
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Yoshiki Kuramoto is a Japanese physicist in the Nonlinear Dynamics group at Kyoto University who formulated the Kuramoto model and is also known for the Kuramoto–Sivashinsky equation. He is also the discoverer of so-called chimera states in networks of coupled oscillators.
Go to Profile#25674
Clifford Lynch
#25685
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Clifford Lynch is the director of the Coalition for Networked Information , where he has been since 1997. He is also an adjunct professor at Berkeley's School of Information. Career and awards Prior to joining CNI, Lynch spent eighteen years at the University of California Office of the President, the last ten as Director of Library Automation. He is both a past president and recipient of the 2008 Award of Merit of the American Society for Information Science and Technology , and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Information Standards Organization.
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Sidney Fine
#25686
Overall Influence
1920 - 2009 (89 years)
Sidney Fine was a professor of history at the University of Michigan. He authored books on Frank Murphy, who served successively as Mayor of Detroit, Governor of Michigan, United States Attorney General, and Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Fine was a Guggenheim Fellow and twice the winner of the University of Michigan Press Award. He received the University of Michigan's Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award in 1969.
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Gerhard Hirschfeld
#25687
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Gerhard Hirschfeld is a German historian and author. From 1989 to 2011, he was director of the Stuttgart-based Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte / Library of Contemporary History, and has been a professor at the Institute of History of the University of Stuttgart since 1997. In 2016 he also became a visiting professor at the Institute for International Studies, University of Wuhan/China.
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Brian Bond
#25688
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Brian James Bond is a British military historian and professor emeritus of military history at King's College London. Early life and education The son of Edward Herbert Bond and his wife, Olive Bessie Sartin, Bond was born in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, where he attended Sir William Borlase's Grammar School from 1947 to 1954. He was raised in Buckinghamshire where his father was the gardener for the military historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart. Hart took a great interest in the boy and encouraged his academic interests. From 1952 to 1954, Bond served in the Royal Artillery, being commissioned a second lieutenant in the British Army.
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Prem Tinsulanonda
#25689
Overall Influence
1920 - 2019 (99 years)
Prem Tinsulanonda was a Thai military officer, politician, and statesman who served as the Prime Minister of Thailand from 3 March 1980 to 4 August 1988, during which time he was credited with ending a communist insurgency and presiding over accelerating economic growth. As president of the Privy Council, he served as Regent of Thailand from the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej on 13 October 2016 until 1 December 2016, when Vajiralongkorn was proclaimed King. At the age of 98, Prem was the longest-living Thai Prime Minister. He is also the oldest regent of any country, surpassing Bavarian Pri...
Go to Profile#25679
Isabel Hubard Escalera
#25690
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Isabel Alicia Hubard Escalera is a Mexican mathematician in the Institute of Mathematics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico . Early life and education As a child, Isabel Alicia Hubard wanted to be a bullfighter. She has said of her family, "My mother is an engineer and my father an accountant. My brother is a mathematician and my sister a physicist. I never thought that I would like math. I simply found it easy and fun, but nothing more. However, my mathematics teacher in junior high and high school, Óscar Chávez, inspired me."
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Raymond Allchin
#25691
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Frank Raymond Allchin, FBA was a British archaeologist and Indologist. He and his wife, Bridget Allchin, formed one of the most influential British partnerships in the post-Independence study of South Asian archaeology. Producing a large body of scholarship ranging from archaeological excavations, ethnoarchaeology as well as epigraphy and linguistics, the Allchins made their work and that of others accessible through a series of sole, joint and edited publications. Seminal works include The Birth of Indian Civilisation , which was later superseded by their books The Rise of Indian Civilisatio...
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Erich Neuwirth
#25692
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Erich Neuwirth is a professor emeritus of statistics and computer science at the University of Vienna. Research Neuwirth studied Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Vienna and received the doctorate in 1974. He started teaching at the University of Vienna in 1969 and was promoted to professor in 1987. He was employed at the Department for Statistics and Decision Support Systems at the faculty of mathematics and the faculty of computer science.
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Naomi Pierce
#25693
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Naomi E. Pierce is an American entomologist and evolutionary biologist who studies plant-herbivore coevolution and is a world authority on butterflies. She is the Hessel Professor of Biology and Curator of Lepidoptera in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#25683
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
#25694
Overall Influence
1909 - 1993 (84 years)
Joseph Leo Mankiewicz was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. Mankiewicz had a long Hollywood career, and won both the Academy Award for Best Director and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in consecutive years for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve , the latter of which was nominated for 14 Academy Awards and won six.
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Kumiko Haba
#25695
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
is a Japanese Professor of International Politics at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. Her research is International Relations, International Politics, International Sociology, Power Shift and National Anxiety, Immigrants-Refugee questions, Nationalism and Xenophobia in the European Union. She wrote a book, Division and Integration in Europe, Nationalism and Border in the Enlarged EU—Inclusion or Exclusion, Chuokoronshinsya, 2016.
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Don Imus
#25696
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
John Donald Imus Jr. , also known as Imus, was an American radio personality, television show host, recording artist, and author. His radio show Imus in the Morning was aired on various stations and digital platforms nationwide until 2018.
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Terry Cline
#25697
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Terry L. Cline is an American psychologist and public health policy specialist from Oklahoma. Cline resigned on October 30, 2017 from the Oklahoma State Department of Health. He has served in various positions under Governors of Oklahoma Frank Keating , Brad Henry , and Mary Fallin . Cline resigned his position after financial mismanagement was discovered within the Oklahoma State Department of Health.
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Tabaré Vázquez
#25698
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Tabaré Ramón Vázquez Rosas was a Uruguayan politician who served as the 39th and 41st president of Uruguay from 2005 to 2010 and from 2015 to 2020. A physician , he was a member of the leftist Broad Front coalition.
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Barbara Uehling
#25699
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Barbara Uehling Charlton was an American educator and university administrator. She served as the 3rd chancellor and 17th chief executive officer of the University of Missouri campus in Columbia, Missouri. She was the first woman in the United States to lead a land-grant university. Before coming to Missouri, Uehling served as provost for the University of Oklahoma. After leaving the University of Missouri, she served as a senior visiting fellow on the American Council of Education in Washington D.C., and later served as chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Uehling and Rosemary S.
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C. Warren Hollister
#25700
Overall Influence
1930 - 1997 (67 years)
Charles Warren Hollister was an American author and historian. He was one of the founding members of the University of California Santa Barbara history department. He specialized in English medieval history, especially studies that emphasized the interrelationship of England within the Anglo-Norman realm and the development of administrative kingship. His colleague Jeffrey Burton Russell called Hollister "one of the best medieval generalists in the world."
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Ron English
#25701
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ron English is an American contemporary artist who explores brand imagery, street art, and advertising. Career English has produced images on the street, in museums, in movies, books and television. He coined the term POPaganda to describe a mash-up of high and low cultural touchstones, from superhero mythology to totems of art history, populated with his original characters, including MC Supersized, the obese fast-food mascot featured in the movie Super Size Me, and Abraham Obama, the fusion of America's 16th and 44th Presidents. Other characters in English's paintings, billboards, and sculp...
Go to Profile#25691
Robert Zemsky
#25702
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Robert M. Zemsky is a Professor of Education, the Chair of the Learning Alliance for Higher Education, and the founding director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. He pioneered the use of prospective student market analyses in higher education.
Go to Profile#25692
LaMarcus Aldridge
#25703
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
LaMarcus Nurae Aldridge is an American former professional basketball player. He played college basketball for two seasons with the Texas Longhorns. Aldridge was selected second overall in the 2006 NBA draft. After spending nine seasons with the Portland Trail Blazers, he signed with the San Antonio Spurs in 2015. In March 2021, he signed with the Brooklyn Nets after the Spurs bought out his contract. He retired after two weeks due to an irregular heartbeat, but returned to the Nets the following season after receiving medical clearance.
Go to Profile#25693
Maurice Cheeks
#25704
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Maurice Edward Cheeks is an American professional basketball coach and former player who serves as assistant coach for the Chicago Bulls of the National Basketball Association . He has also served as head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, Philadelphia 76ers, and Detroit Pistons. Cheeks was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a player in 2018.
Go to Profile#25694
Wallace E. Oates
#25705
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
Wallace E. Oates was a Distinguished University Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. He taught in the fields of public economics and environmental economics, and was considered a major international figure in both fields. His first book was Fiscal Federalism and he authored numerous other books and articles, including The Theory of Environmental Policy , coauthored with William J. Baumol. A Festschrift, Environmental and public economics : essays in honor of Wallace E. Oates, was published in his honor in 1999, and an additional volume of his selected essays in 2004. Anoth...
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Ronald T. Raines
#25706
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Ronald T. Raines is an American chemical biologist. He is the Roger and Georges Firmenich Professor of Natural Products Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for using ideas and methods of physical organic chemistry to solve important problems in biology.
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Nicolas Roeg
#25707
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Nicolas Jack Roeg was an English film director and cinematographer, best known for directing Performance , Walkabout , Don't Look Now , The Man Who Fell to Earth , Bad Timing and The Witches . Making his directorial debut 23 years after his entry into the film business, Roeg quickly became known for an idiosyncratic visual and narrative style, characterised by the use of disjointed and disorienting editing. For this reason, he is considered a highly influential filmmaker, cited as an inspiration by such directors as Steven Soderbergh, Christopher Nolan and Danny Boyle.
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Carmel McCaffrey
#25708
Overall Influence
Carmel McCaffrey is an Irish author of books and lecturer on Irish history, literature, culture, and language at Johns Hopkins University and at the Smithsonian Institution. Biography McCaffrey was born in Dublin, Ireland, and teaches Irish history and Irish literature at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She is also a frequent lecturer at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. She founded and edited the literary review Wild About Wilde dedicated to the works of the 19th-century Irish writer, Oscar Wilde. She was the series historical consultant for the three part PBS/RTÉ program In Search of Ancient Ireland and co-author of the book of the same title.
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Daniel G. Nocera
#25709
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Daniel George Nocera is an American chemist, currently the Patterson Rockwood Professor of Energy in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006 he was described as a "major force in the field of inorganic photochemistry and photophysics". Time magazine included him in its 2009 list of the 100 most influential people.
Go to Profile#25699
John F. Kurtzke
#25710
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
John Francis Kurtzke was a neuroepidemiologist and Professor of Neurology at Georgetown University who is best known for his creation of the Expanded Disability Status Scale and for his research on multiple sclerosis . After graduating from Cornell University Medical College in 1952, Dr. Kurtzke started his career in the field of Neurology as Chief of the Neurology Service at the Veteran's Affairs Medical Centers in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, from 1956 to 1963, and then in Washington, DC, from 1963 to 1995, where he became Professor of Neurology at Georgetown University. At the time of his ...
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Brendan Fraser
#25711
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Brendan James Fraser is a Canadian-American actor. Fraser had his breakthrough in 1992 with the comedy Encino Man and the drama School Ties. He gained further prominence for his starring roles in the comedies With Honors and George of the Jungle and emerged as a star playing Rick O'Connell in The Mummy trilogy . He took on dramatic roles in Gods and Monsters , The Quiet American , and Crash , and further fantasy roles in Bedazzled and Journey to the Center of the Earth .
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