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
#2601
Stan Lee
#2603
Overall Influence
1922 - 2018 (96 years)
Stan Lee was an American comic book writer, editor, publisher, and producer. He rose through the ranks of a family-run business called Timely Comics which would later become Marvel Comics. He was the primary creative leader for two decades, leading its expansion from a small division of a publishing house to a multimedia corporation that dominated the comics and film industries.
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Saskia Sassen
#2604
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
#2603
Juri Lotman
#2605
Overall Influence
1922 - 1993 (71 years)
Juri Lotman was a prominent Russian-Estonian literary scholar, semiotician, and historian of Russian culture, who worked at the University of Tartu. He was elected a member of the British Academy , Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters , Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Estonian Academy of Sciences . He was a founder of the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School. The number of his printed works exceeds 800 titles. His archive which includes his correspondence with a number of Russian and Western intellectuals, is immense.
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Barney Glaser
#2606
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Barney Galland Glaser was an American sociologist and one of the founders of the grounded theory methodology. Glaser was born on February 27, 1930, in San Francisco, California, and lived in nearby Mill Valley. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree at Stanford University in 1952. He pursued academic studies at the University of Paris where he studied contemporary literature. He also studied literature at University of Freiburg for two years during off-hours from his military service.
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Ian Wilmut
#2607
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Sir Ian Wilmut was a British embryologist and the chair of the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He is best known as the leader of the research group that in 1996 first cloned a mammal from an adult somatic cell, a Finnish Dorset lamb named Dolly.
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Robert L. Park
#2608
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Robert Lee Park was an American emeritus professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a former director of public information at the Washington office of the American Physical Society. Park was most noted for his critical commentaries on alternative medicine and pseudoscience, as well as his criticism of how legitimate science is distorted or ignored by the media, some scientists, and public policy advocates as expressed in his book Voodoo Science. He was also noted for his preference for robotic over crewed space exploration.
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Paolo Soleri
#2609
Overall Influence
1919 - 2013 (94 years)
Paolo Soleri was an Italian-born American architect. He established the educational Cosanti Foundation and Arcosanti. Soleri was a lecturer in the College of Architecture at Arizona State University and a National Design Award recipient in 2006. He coined the concept of 'arcology' – a synthesis of architecture and ecology as the philosophy of democratic society. He died at home of natural causes on 9 April 2013 at the age of 93.
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Simon Frith
#2610
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Simon Webster Frith is a British sociomusicologist and former rock critic who specializes in popular music culture. He is Professor Emeritus of Music at University of Edinburgh. Career As a student, he read PPE at Oxford and earned a doctorate in sociology from UC Berkeley. He is the author of many influential books, including The Sociology of Rock , Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock 'n' Roll , Art into Pop , Music for Pleasure: Essays on the Sociology of Pop , and Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music . He has also co-edited key anthologies in the interdiscip...
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Peter Agre
#2611
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Peter Agre is an American physician, Nobel Laureate, and molecular biologist, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute. In 2003, Agre and Roderick MacKinnon shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes." Agre was recognized for his discovery of aquaporin water channels. Aquaporins are water-channel proteins that move water molecules through the cell membrane. In 2009, Agre was elected president of ...
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Daniel Wegner
#2612
Overall Influence
1948 - 2013 (65 years)
Daniel Merton Wegner was an American social psychologist. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University and a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was known for applying experimental psychology to the topics of mental control and conscious will, and for originating the study of transactive memory and action identification. In The Illusion of Conscious Will and other works, he argued that the human sense of free will is an illusion.
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Michael Ondaatje
#2613
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Philip Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, fiction writer, essayist, novelist, editor, and filmmaker. Ondaatje's literary career began with his poetry in 1967, publishing The Dainty Monsters, and then in 1970 the critically acclaimed The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. His novel The English Patient , adapted into a film in 1996 won the 2018 Golden Man Booker Prize.
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Adolf Galland
#2614
Overall Influence
1912 - 1996 (84 years)
Adolf Josef Ferdinand Galland was a German Luftwaffe general and flying ace who served throughout the Second World War in Europe. He flew 705 combat missions, and fought on the Western Front and in the Defence of the Reich. On four occasions, he survived being shot down, and he was credited with 104 aerial victories, all of them against the Western Allies.
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Ali al-Sistani
#2615
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Ali al-Husayni al-Sistani , is a Twelver Shia Iranian–Iraqi Grand Ayatollah and marja'. One of the most senior scholars in Shia Islam, he has been described as the spiritual leader of Shia Muslims worldwide , "the undisputed leader of Iraq's Shias", included in top positions of "The Muslim 500: The World's Most Influential Muslims", from 2009 to 2023, and named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2004 and 2005.
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Irving Penn
#2616
Overall Influence
1917 - 2009 (92 years)
Irving Penn was an American photographer known for his fashion photography, portraits, and still lifes. Penn's career included work at Vogue magazine, and independent advertising work for clients including Issey Miyake and Clinique. His work has been exhibited internationally and continues to inform the art of photography.
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Russell M. Nelson
#2617
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (102 years)
Russell Marion Nelson Sr. is an American religious leader and retired surgeon who is the 17th and current president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . Nelson was a member of the LDS Church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles for nearly 34 years, and was the quorum president from 2015 to 2018. As church president, Nelson is recognized by the church as a prophet, seer, and revelator.
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Robert H. Dicke
#2618
Overall Influence
1916 - 1997 (81 years)
Robert Henry Dicke was an American astronomer and physicist who made important contributions to the fields of astrophysics, atomic physics, cosmology and gravity. He was the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University .
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Tshilidzi Marwala
#2619
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Tshilidzi Marwala is a South African artificial intelligence engineer, a computer scientist, a mechanical engineer and a university administrator. He is currently Rector of the United Nations University and UN Under-Secretary-General. In August 2023 Marwala was appointed to the United Nations scientific advisory council.
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Doug Sax
#2620
Overall Influence
1936 - 2015 (79 years)
Doug Sax was an American mastering engineer from Los Angeles, California. He mastered three of The Doors' albums, including their 1967 debut; six of Pink Floyd's albums, including The Wall; Ray Charles' multiple-Grammy winner Genius Loves Company in 2004, and Bob Dylan's 36th studio album Shadows in the Night in 2015.
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John Lindow
#2621
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John Frederick Lindow is an American philologist who is Professor Emeritus of Old Norse and Folklore at University of California, Berkeley. He is a well known authority on Old Norse religion and literature.
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Jacques Tits
#2622
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Jacques Tits was a Belgian-born French mathematician who worked on group theory and incidence geometry. He introduced Tits buildings, the Tits alternative, the Tits group, and the Tits metric. Life and career Tits was born in Uccle to Léon Tits, a professor, and Lousia André. Jacques attended the Athénée of Uccle and the Free University of Brussels. His thesis advisor was Paul Libois, and Tits graduated with his doctorate in 1950 with the dissertation Généralisation des groupes projectifs basés sur la notion de transitivité. His academic career includes professorships at the Free University ...
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Will Kymlicka
#2623
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
William Kymlicka is a Canadian political philosopher best known for his work on multiculturalism and animal ethics. He is currently Professor of Philosophy and Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University at Kingston, and Recurrent Visiting Professor in the Nationalism Studies program at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. For over 20 years, he has lived a vegan lifestyle, and he is married to the Canadian author and animal rights activist Sue Donaldson.
Go to Profile#2622
Alexander McCall Smith
#2624
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Alexander "Sandy" McCall Smith, CBE, FRSE , is a British legal scholar and author of fiction. He was raised in Southern Rhodesia and was formerly Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh. He became an expert on medical law and bioethics and served on related British and international committees. He has since become known as a fiction writer, with sales in English exceeding 40 million by 2010 and translations into 46 languages. He is known as the creator of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. The "McCall" derives from his great-great-grandmother Bethea McCall, who married...
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Michael Chabon
#2625
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Michael Chabon is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer. Born in Washington, D.C., he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 1984. He subsequently received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.
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Robert A. Brown
#2626
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Robert A. Brown is a chemical engineer and university administrator. He was the 10th president of Boston University and a former provost of Massachusetts Institute of Technology . In 1991, Brown was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for the application of computing techniques to fundamental and practical problems in fluid mechanics, rheology, and crystal growth.
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Chris Lattner
#2627
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Christopher Arthur Lattner is an American computer scientist, former Google and Tesla employee and co-founder of LLVM, Clang compiler, MLIR compiler infrastructure and the Swift programming language. He worked as the President of Platform Engineering, SiFive after two years at Google Brain. Prior to that, he briefly served as Vice President of Autopilot Software at Tesla, Inc. and worked at Apple Inc. as Senior Director of the Developer Tools department, leading the Xcode, Instruments, and compiler teams.
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Ada Louise Huxtable
#2628
Overall Influence
1921 - 2013 (92 years)
Ada Louise Huxtable was an American architecture critic and writer on architecture. Huxtable established architecture and urban design journalism in North America and raised the public's awareness of the urban environment. In 1970, she was awarded the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In 1981, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. Architecture critic Paul Goldberger, also a Pulitzer Prize-winner for architectural criticism, said in 1996: "Before Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture was not a part of the public dialogue." "She was a great lover of cities, a great preservationist and the central planet around which every other critic revolved," said architect Robert A.
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Arnold Harberger
#2629
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (102 years)
Arnold Carl Harberger is an American economist. His approach to the teaching and practice of economics is to emphasize the use of analytical tools that are directly applicable to real-world issues. His influence on academic economics is reflected in part by the widespread use of the term "Harberger triangle" to refer to the standard graphical depiction of the efficiency cost of distortions of competitive equilibrium. His influence on the practice of economic policy is manifested by the high positions attained by his followers in national agencies such as central banks and ministries of financ...
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Scott Soames
#2630
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
#2629
Raymond E. Brown
#2631
Overall Influence
1928 - 1998 (70 years)
Raymond Edward Brown was an American Sulpician priest and prominent biblical scholar. He was a specialist on the hypothetical Johannine community, which he speculated contributed to the authorship of the Gospel of John, and he also wrote studies on the birth and death of Jesus.
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PZ Myers
#2632
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Paul Zachary Myers is an American biologist who founded and writes the Pharyngula science blog. He is associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota Morris where he works in the field of developmental biology. He is a critic of intelligent design and the creationist movement and other pseudoscientific concepts.
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Michael Spivak
#2633
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Michael David Spivak was an American mathematician specializing in differential geometry, an expositor of mathematics, and the founder of Publish-or-Perish Press. Spivak was the author of the five-volume A Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry.
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Michael E. Brown
#2634
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Michael E. Brown is an American astronomer, who has been professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology since 2003. His team has discovered many trans-Neptunian objects , including the dwarf planet Eris, which was originally thought to be bigger than Pluto, triggering a debate on the definition of a planet.
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David Abram
#2635
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
David Abram is an American ecologist and philosopher best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with environmental and ecological issues. He is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World , for which he received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. Abram is founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics ; his essays on the cultural causes and consequences of ecological disarray have appeared often in such journals as the online magazine Emergence, Or...
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John M. Deutch
#2636
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
John Mark Deutch is an American physical chemist and civil servant. He was the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1994 to 1995 and Director of Central Intelligence from May 10, 1995, until December 15, 1996. He is an emeritus Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and serves on the boards of directors of Citigroup, Cummins, Raytheon, and Schlumberger Ltd. Deutch is also a member of the Trilateral Commission.
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Alex Kozinski
#2637
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Alex Kozinski is a Romanian-American jurist and lawyer who was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 1985 to 2017. He was a prominent and influential judge, and many of his law clerks went on to clerk for U.S. Supreme Court justices.
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Mark David Chapman
#2638
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Mark David Chapman is an American man who murdered English musician John Lennon in New York City on December 8, 1980. As Lennon walked into the archway of his apartment building The Dakota, Chapman fired five shots at Lennon from a few yards away with a Charter Arms Undercover .38 Special revolver. Lennon was hit four times from the back. He was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital and pronounced dead on arrival. Chapman remained at the scene following the shooting and made no attempt to flee or resist arrest.
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Poul Anderson
#2639
Overall Influence
1926 - 2001 (75 years)
Poul William Anderson was an American fantasy and science fiction author who was active from the 1940s until his death in 2001. Anderson also wrote historical novels. His awards include seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards.
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Jake Sullivan
#2640
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Jacob Jeremiah Sullivan is an American attorney who currently serves as the United States National Security Advisor, reporting directly to President Joe Biden. He previously served as Director of Policy to President Barack Obama, National Security Advisor to then Vice President Biden and Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary Hillary Clinton at the U.S. Department of State. Sullivan also served as senior advisor to the U.S. federal government at the Iran nuclear negotiations and senior policy advisor to Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, as well as visiting professor at Yale Law School.
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Arthur Caplan
#2641
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Arthur L. Caplan is an American ethicist and professor of bioethics at New York University Grossman School of Medicine. He is known for his contributions to the U.S. public policy, including: helping to found the National Marrow Donor Program; creating the policy of required request in cadaver organ donation adopted throughout the United States; helping to create the system for distributing organs in the U.S.; and advising on the content of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, rules governing living organ donation, and legislation and regulation in many other areas of health care includ...
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John Maeda
#2642
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
John Maeda is a Vice President of Design and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft. He is an American technologist and designer whose work explores where business, design, and technology merge to make space for the "humanist technologist."
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Dan Savage
#2643
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Daniel Keenan Savage is an American author, media pundit, journalist, and LGBT community activist. He writes Savage Love, an internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice column. In 2010, Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, began the It Gets Better Project to help prevent suicide among LGBT youth. He has also worked as a theater director, sometimes credited as Keenan Hollahan.
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Geoffrey Wilkinson
#2644
Overall Influence
1921 - 1996 (75 years)
Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson FRS was a Nobel laureate English chemist who pioneered inorganic chemistry and homogeneous transition metal catalysis. Education and early life Wilkinson was born at Springside, Todmorden, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His father, Henry Wilkinson, was a master house painter and decorator; his mother, Ruth, worked in a local cotton mill. One of his uncles, an organist and choirmaster, had married into a family that owned a small chemical company making Epsom and Glauber's salts for the pharmaceutical industry; this is where he first developed an interest in chemistry.
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Richard Wilbur
#2645
Overall Influence
1921 - 2017 (96 years)
Richard Purdy Wilbur was an American poet and literary translator. One of the foremost poets of his generation, Wilbur's work, often employing rhyme, and composed primarily in traditional forms, was marked by its wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, in 1957 and 1989.
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Arthur Jaffe
#2646
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Arthur Michael Jaffe is an American mathematical physicist at Harvard University, where in 1985 he succeeded George Mackey as the Landon T. Clay Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Science. Education and career After graduating from Pelham Memorial High School in 1955, Jaffe attended Princeton University as an undergraduate obtaining a degree in chemistry in 1959, and later Clare College, Cambridge, as a Marshall Scholar, obtaining a degree in mathematics in 1961. He then returned to Princeton, obtaining a doctorate in physics in 1966 with Arthur Wightman. His whole career has been spent teaching mathematical physics and pursuing research at Harvard University.
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Bruno Bosteels
#2647
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Bruno Bosteels is a professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He served until 2010 as the General Editor of diacritics. Bosteels is best known to the English-speaking world for his work on Latin American literature and culture and his translations of the work of Alain Badiou . Theory of the Subject appeared in 2009, Bosteels' translation of Badiou's Théorie du sujet .
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Jeremy Waldron
#2648
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
#2647
Joseph Agassi
#2650
Overall Influence
1927 - 2023 (96 years)
Joseph Agassi was an Israeli academic with contributions in logic, scientific method, and philosophy. He studied under Karl Popper and taught at the London School of Economics. Agassi taught in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Hong Kong from 1960 to 1963. He later taught at the University of Illinois, Boston University, and York University in Canada. He had dual appointments in the last positions with Tel Aviv University.
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Marcel Berger
#2651
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Marcel Berger was a French mathematician, doyen of French differential geometry, and a former director of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques , France. Formerly residing in Le Castera in Lasseube, Berger was instrumental in Mikhail Gromov's accepting positions both at the University of Paris and at the IHÉS.
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Toby Ord
#2652
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Toby David Godfrey Ord is an Australian philosopher. In 2009 he founded Giving What We Can, an international society whose members pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to effective charities, and is a key figure in the effective altruism movement, which promotes using reason and evidence to help the lives of others as much as possible.
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Milton Glaser
#2653
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
Milton Glaser was an American graphic designer. His designs include the I Love New York logo, a 1966 poster for Bob Dylan, and the logos for DC Comics, Stony Brook University, and Brooklyn Brewery. In 1954, he also co-founded Push Pin Studios, co-founded New York magazine with Clay Felker, and established Milton Glaser, Inc. In 1969, he produced and designed "Short Subject", commonly known as "Mickey Mouse in Vietnam", a short 16mm anti-war film directed by Whitney Lee Savage . His artwork has been featured in exhibits, and placed in permanent collections in many museums worldwide. Throughout his long career, he designed many posters, publications and architectural designs.
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