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
#26351
Miguel Anxo Bastos
#26362
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Miguel Anxo Bastos Boubeta is a Spanish economist of the Austrian School. He is a professor in the Faculty of Political Science and Administration at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Education and career Bastos has a doctorate in economic and business science from the University of Santiago de Compostela and a degree in political and social science from the National University of Distance Education .
Go to Profile#26352
Robert Rosenblum
#26363
Overall Influence
1927 - 2006 (79 years)
Robert Rosenblum was an American art historian and curator known for his influential and often irreverent scholarship on European and American art of the mid-eighteenth to 20th centuries. Biography Rosenblum was born in New York City and studied art history at Queens College and Yale University and, in 1956, received his Ph.D. from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.
Go to Profile#26353
Kelis
#26364
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Kelis Rogers , known mononymously as Kelis, is an American singer-songwriter and chef. She attended New York's Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, where she learned to play the saxophone and won a spot in the Girls Choir of Harlem. Upon graduation, Rogers soon landed a role as a backing vocalist for the hip hop group Gravediggaz. She then began working with music producers Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, collectively known as The Neptunes, who led her to sign with Virgin Records in 1998.
Go to Profile#26354
Robert McCormick Adams Jr.
#26365
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Robert McCormick Adams Jr. was an American anthropologist and secretary of the Smithsonian Institution . He worked in both the Near East and Mesoamerica. A long time professor of the University of Chicago, he was best known for his research in Iraq.
Go to Profile#26355
Cyril Hilsum
#26366
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (101 years)
Cyril Hilsum is a British physicist and academic. Hilsum was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1983 for the inventiveness and leadership in introducing III-V semiconductors into electronic technology.
Go to Profile#26356
Edmundo Paz Soldán
#26367
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
José Edmundo Paz-Soldán Ávila is a Bolivian writer. His work is a prominent example of the Latin American literary movement known as McOndo, in which the magical realism of previous Latin American authors is supplanted by modern realism, often with a technological focus. His work has won several awards. He has lived in the United States since 1991, and has taught literature at Cornell University since 1997.
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Brent Hayes Edwards
#26368
Overall Influence
Brent Hayes Edwards is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Early life Edwards attended Yale as an undergraduate, then completed an MA and PhD at Columbia. Career
Go to Profile#26358
Chalermek Intanagonwiwat
#26369
Overall Influence
Chalermek Intanagonwiwat is a computer scientist best known for his work on directed diffusion under the supervision of Deborah Estrin, Ramesh Govindan, and John Heidemann. In 2013 he moved to San Jose, California to work at Cisco Systems, Inc. Intanagonwiwat earned his bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang in Thailand and pursued his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science at the University of Southern California, USA. He worked as postdoc researcher at Rutgers University, USA. His research interests include computer networks and distributed systems .
Go to Profile#26359
S. Shankar
#26370
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Shankar Shanmugam , credited as S. Shankar or his mononym Shankar, is an Indian filmmaker who predominantly works in Tamil cinema. He is one of the most prolific and highest paid film directors in India. His films typically deal with the contemporary social issues, vigilante themes and the usage of state of the art technology and VFX. He has won one National Film Award, four Filmfare Award South and six Tamil Nadu State Film Awards in his career.
Go to Profile#26360
Bertram Schmitt
#26371
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Bertram Schmitt is a German jurist. He was a judge at the Bundesgerichtshof and has been a judge of the International Criminal Court since 2015. Career Early career Between 2005 and 2015, Schmitt served as judge at the Federal Court of Justice , Germany's supreme court for civil and criminal matters.
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David Williams
#26372
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
David Williams FRS is a Welsh mathematician who works in probability theory. Early life and education David Williams was born at Gorseinon, near Swansea, Wales. He was educated at Gowerton Grammar School, winning a mathematics scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford, and went on to obtain a DPhil under the supervision of David George Kendall and Gerd Edzard Harry Reuter, with a thesis titled Random time substitution in Markov chains.
Go to Profile#26362
Sven Voelpel
#26373
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Sven Constantin Voelpel is a German organizational theorist and Professor of Business Administration at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, known for his work in the field of strategic management, business models and knowledge management.
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Athol Williams
#26374
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Athol Williams is a South African poet, social philosopher and public intellectual based at Oxford University. Life Williams was born in Lansdowne, Cape Town, South Africa, and grew up in Mitchells Plain, the coloured township established under apartheid. Before becoming a professional writer and social philosopher, he worked in business for fifteen years, mainly as a strategy advisor.
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David R. Montgomery
#26375
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
David R. Montgomery is a professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he is a member of the Quaternary Research Center. Montgomery received his B.S. in geology from Stanford University in 1984, and his Ph.D. in geomorphology from University of California, Berkeley in 1991. His research addresses the evolution of topography and the influence of geomorphological processes on ecosystems and human societies. His published work includes studies of the role of topsoil in human civilization, the evolution and near-extirpation of salmon, geomorphological pro...
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David M. Malone
#26376
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
David M. Malone, born in 1954, is a Canadian author on international security and development, as well as a career diplomat. He is a former president of the International Peace Institute, and a frequently quoted expert on international affairs, especially on Indian Foreign Policy and the work of the UN Security Council. He became president of the International Development Research Centre in 2008 and served until 2013. On 1 March 2013, he took up the position of UN Under-Secretary-General, Rector of the United Nations University, which he fulfilled until 28 February 2023.
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John T. Lis
#26377
Overall Influence
John T. Lis is the Barbara McClintock Professor of Molecular Biology & Genetics at the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Dr. Lis was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000 for his research on protein templating in the propagation of gene activity.Harvey Lecture, 2018
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Neil Rudenstine
#26378
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Neil Leon Rudenstine is an American scholar, educator, and administrator. He served as president of Harvard University from 1991 to 2001. Early life and education Rudenstine was born in Danbury, Connecticut, the son of Mae and Harry Rudenstine, a prison guard. His father was a Ukrainian Jew who emigrated from Kyiv, his mother a Roman Catholic and the daughter of immigrants from Campobasso, Italy.
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Greg Louganis
#26379
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Gregory Efthimios Louganis is an American Olympic diver who won gold medals at the 1984 and 1988 Summer Olympics on the springboard and platform. He is the only man and the second diver in Olympic history to sweep the diving events in consecutive Olympic Games. He has been called both "the greatest American diver" and "probably the greatest diver in history".
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András Gyárfás
#26380
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
András Gyárfás is a Hungarian mathematician who specializes in the study of graph theory. He is famous for two conjectures:Together with Paul Erdős he conjectured what is now called the Erdős–Gyárfás conjecture which states that any graph with minimum degree 3 contains a simple cycle whose length is a power of two.He and David Sumner independently formulated the Gyárfás–Sumner conjecture according to which, for every tree T, the T-free graphs are χ-bounded.Gyárfás began working as a researcher for the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1968. He earned a candidate degree in 1980, and a doctorate in 1992.
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Peter Kolchin
#26381
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Peter Robert Kolchin is an American historian. He has specialized in slavery and labor in the American South before and after the Civil War, and in comparisons with Russian serfdom and other forms of labor. He won the Bancroft Prize in American History and the Avery O. Craven Award for his book Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom .
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Mircea Lucescu
#26382
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Mircea Lucescu is a Romanian professional football manager and former player. He is one of the most decorated managers of all time. Lucescu is also one of the most successful players of the Romanian league championship, having won all of his seven titles with Dinamo București. Apart from the latter club, he had spells at Știința București and Corvinul Hunedoara, and made 70 appearances for the Romania national team, which he captained in the 1970 FIFA World Cup.
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Maged N. Kamel Boulos
#26383
Overall Influence
Maged N. Kamel Boulos is a British health informatician, scientist and Full Professor of Digital Health with Sun Yat-sen University , having worked before that at the Alexander Graham Bell Centre of Digital Health, University of the Highlands and Islands, at the University of Plymouth, at the University of Bath and at City University London. Other held affiliations include Universidade de Lisboa . He is particularly known for his research into Geographic Information Systems applications in health and healthcare, which received wide news media coverage. He is credited with coining the phrases ...
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Yaser Abu-Mostafa
#26384
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Yaser Said Abu-Mostafa is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology, Chairman of Paraconic Technologies Ltd, and Chairman of Machine Learning Consultants LLC. He is known for his research and educational activities in the area of machine learning.
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Hans-Jörg Bullinger
#26385
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Hans-Jörg Bullinger is a German scientist and former president of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. The mechanical engineer with a doctoral degree was the Director of the Fraunhofer IAO , besides he is also Professor of Industrial Science and Technology Management at the University of Stuttgart. From 2002 to 2012 he was the President of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. He is also a member of the Scientific Board of AutoUni Wolfsburg.
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John Leckie
#26386
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
John William Leckie is an English record producer and recording engineer. His production credits include Magazine's Real Life ; XTC's White Music ; Dukes of Stratosphear's 25 O'Clock and The Fall's This Nation's Saving Grace ; the Stone Roses' The Stone Roses ; the Verve's A Storm in Heaven ; Radiohead's The Bends ; Cast's All Change ; Muse's Origin of Symmetry ; and the Levellers' We the Collective .
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Laura L. Kiessling
#26387
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Laura Lee Kiessling is an American chemist and the Novartis Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kiessling's research focuses on elucidating and exploiting interactions on the cell surface, especially those mediated by proteins binding to carbohydrates. Multivalent protein-carbohydrate interactions play roles in cell-cell recognition and signal transduction. Understanding and manipulating these interactions provides tools to study biological processes and design therapeutic treatments. Kiessling's interdisciplinary research combines organic synthesis, polymer c...
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Otto Kratky
#26388
Overall Influence
1902 - 1995 (93 years)
Otto Kratky was an Austrian physicist. He is best known for his contribution to the small-angle X-ray scattering method, for the Kratky plot, and for the invention of the density metering using the oscillating u-tube principle. The worm-like chain model in polymer physics, introduced with Günther Porod in a 1949 paper, is also named the Kratky–Porod model.
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Luke Tierney
#26389
Overall Influence
Luke Tierney is an American statistician and computer scientist. A fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics since 1988 and of the American Statistical Association since 1991, Tierney is currently a professor of statistics at the University of Iowa. Through his past work on programming languages such as R and Lisp, Tierney now holds a position on the developing team known as the R Core.
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M. Tamer Özsu
#26390
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
M. Tamer Özsu, FRSC is a Turkish Canadian computer scientist working in the area of distributed and parallel data management. He is a University Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.
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Linda B. Smith
#26391
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Linda B. Smith is an American developmental psychologist internationally recognized for her theoretical and empirical contributions to developmental psychology and cognitive science, proposing, through theoretical and empirical studies, a new way of understanding developmental processes. Smith's works are groundbreaking and illuminating for the field of perception, action, language, and categorization, showing the unique flexibility found in human behavior. She has shown how perception and action are ways of obtaining knowledge for cognitive development and word learning.
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Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin
#26392
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin is an Irish academic, teacher, broadcaster and high-profile science communicator. She also won the Rose of Tralee contest in 2005 and toured internationally as the lead singer of an Irish traditional music band. In 2022, she was appointed to chair a national forum on biodiversity loss, presenting its report to Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in April 2023, and presenting on the topic to a committee of the UN General Assembly later that month.
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Liana Burgess
#26393
Overall Influence
1929 - 2007 (78 years)
Liana Burgess was an Italian translator and literary agent who was the second wife of English writer Anthony Burgess. Burgess and Macellari had embarked on an affair while Burgess was married to his first wife, and Macellari gave birth to a son nine months after their meeting. The couple became tax exiles in the late 1960s, living in Malta and Italy, and spent several years in the United States. They finally settled in Monaco. Macellari played an important role in Burgess's later literary career, negotiating film rights and acting as his European literary agent, and translating his novels.
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Ryszard Horodecki
#26394
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Ryszard Horodecki is a Polish physicist and a professor of University of Gdańsk. He contributed largely to the field of quantum informatics. In his most widely cited paper, 'Separability of Mixed States: Necessary and Sufficient Conditions' written together with his sons, Michał and Paweł, he proposed the idea currently known as the Peres-Horodecki criterion. With over 12,000 citations, he is considered to be one of the leading Polish physicists .
Go to Profile#26384
Michael Waidner
#26395
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Michael Waidner is a German computer scientist. He is director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology and ATHENE, the largest research institute for IT security in Europe. He is also professor of security in information technology at the department of computer science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt.
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Jay Winter
#26396
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Jay Murray Winter is an American historian. He is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University, where he focuses his research on World War I and its impact on the 20th century. His other interests include remembrance of war in the 20th century, such as memorial and mourning sites, European population decline, the causes and institutions of war, British popular culture in the era of the First World War and the Armenian genocide of 1915. He is completing a biography of René Cassin.
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Leon Spinks
#26397
Overall Influence
1953 - 2021 (68 years)
Leon Spinks was an American professional boxer who competed from 1977 to 1995. In only his eighth professional fight, he won the undisputed heavyweight championship in 1978 after defeating Muhammad Ali in a split decision, in what is considered one of the biggest upsets in boxing history. Spinks was later stripped of the WBC title for facing Ali in an unapproved rematch seven months later, which he lost by a unanimous decision.
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Everett M. Rogers
#26398
Overall Influence
#26388
Mae-Wan Ho
#26399
Overall Influence
1941 - 2016 (75 years)
Mae-Wan Ho was a geneticist known for her critical views on genetic engineering and evolution. She authored or co-authored a number of publications, including 10 books, such as The Rainbow and the Worm, the Physics of Organisms , Genetic Engineering: Dream or Nightmare? , Living with the Fluid Genome and Living Rainbow H2O .
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Mikhail Elizarov
#26400
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Mikhail Yuryevich Elizarov – is a modern Russian writer and singer-songwriter, laureate of the Russian Booker Prize in 2008 for the novel The Librarian. Literary career In 2001, the Russian publishing house Ad Marginem issued a collection of short novels Fingernails, which immediately captured the attention of the media and critics. The collection includes 24 short stories and a novel of the same title, the main characters of which are two pupils who possess paranormal abilities studying in a boarding school for demented children. The story was shortlisted for the Andrei Bely literary prize. ...
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David Martin
#26401
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
David Alfred Martin, FBA was a British sociologist and Anglican priest who studied and wrote extensively about the sociology of religion. Early life and education David Martin was born on 30 June 1929 in Mortlake. He was the son of a "between-maid" from Dorset and a groom from Hertfordshire who became a chauffeur and then a black cab driver in London and preached regularly at Hyde Park. He was brought up in a revivalist family and attended Barnes Methodist Church. He won a scholarship to East Sheen Grammar School, which he attended from 1940 to 1947.
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Daniel Abebe
#26402
Overall Influence
Daniel Y. Abebe is an American lawyer and law professor. Abebe is Harold J. and Marion F. Green Professor of Law and Deputy Dean of the University of Chicago Law School and a Vice Provost of the University of Chicago. His research focuses on foreign relations law and public international law.
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William Brantley Aycock
#26403
Overall Influence
1915 - 2015 (100 years)
William Brantley Aycock was an American educator who served as chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1957 until 1964 and was the retired Kenan Professor of Law at the UNC School of Law. He was born in Lucama, North Carolina in 1915.
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Charles Rotimi
#26404
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Charles Nohuoma Rotimi is the Scientific Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute . He joined the National Institutes of Health in 2008 as the inaugural Director of the Trans-NIH Center for Research in Genomics and Global Health and was also the chief of the NHGRI's Metabolic, Cardiovascular, and Inflammatory Disease Genomics Branch. He works to ensure that population genetics include genomes from African populations and founded the African Society of Human Genetics in 2003 and was elected its first president. Rotimi was instrumental in the launch of the Human Heredity and Health in Africa with the NIH and the Wellcome Trust.
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Dennis C. Liotta
#26405
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Dennis Liotta is a chemistry professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. He is noted for his work on the development of antiviral drugs. Career Liotta's fields of research are organic synthesis and medicinal chemistry. Along with Dr. Raymond F. Schinazi and Dr. Woo-Baeg Choi of Emory, he invented Emtricitabine, which is a breakthrough HIV drug. Emory University sold its royalties on the drug to Royalty Pharma and Gilead Sciences in July 2005 for $525 million. It is currently marketed under the name Emtriva. Emtriva is a component of a number of combination therapies used ...
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Zdzisław Pawlak
#26406
Overall Influence
1926 - 2006 (80 years)
Zdzislaw I. Pawlak was a Polish mathematician and computer scientist. He was affiliated with several organization, including the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Warsaw School of Information Technology. He served as the Director of the Institute of Computer Science at the Warsaw University of Technology . Pawlak was known for his contribution to many branches of theoretical computer science. He was credited with introducing the rough set theory and also known for his fundamental works on it. He also introduced the Pawlak flow graphs, a graphical framework for reasoning from data. He was conferred with Order of Polonia Restituta in 1999.
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Peter Maxwell Davies
#26407
Overall Influence
1934 - 2016 (82 years)
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies was an English composer and conductor, who in 2004 was made Master of the Queen's Music. As a student at both the University of Manchester and the Royal Manchester College of Music, Davies formed a group dedicated to contemporary music called the New Music Manchester with fellow students Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Elgar Howarth and John Ogdon. Davies’s compositions include eight works for the stage—from the monodrama Eight Songs for a Mad King, which shocked the audience in 1969, to Kommilitonen!, first performed in 2011—and ten symphonies, written between...
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Robert Morris
#26408
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Robert Morris is a mathematician who works in combinatorics, probability, graph theory and Ramsey theory. He is a researcher at IMPA. He graduated with a Ph.D. from The University of Memphis in 2006 under the supervision of Béla Bollobás.
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Lil Baby
#26409
Overall Influence
1994 - Present (32 years)
Dominique Armani Jones , known professionally as Lil Baby, is an American rapper, singer, and songwriter. He rose to mainstream fame in 2017 following the release of his mixtape Harder than Hard, which included his first Billboard Hot 100 entry with its lead single "My Dawg". He followed up with his debut studio album Harder Than Ever , which peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 and spawned the Billboard Hot 100 top ten single "Yes Indeed" . He would release two additional retail projects within the same year: The collaborative mixtape Drip Harder with fellow Georgia-based rapper Gunna—...
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Clara Grima
#26410
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Clara Isabel Grima Ruiz is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Seville, specializing in computational geometry. She is known for her research on scutoids and for her popularization of mathematics.
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Virender Sehwag
#26411
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Virender Sehwag is a former Indian cricketer who represented India from 1999 to 2013. Widely regarded as one of the most destructive openers and one of the greatest batsman of his era, he played for Delhi Capitals in IPL and Delhi and Haryana in Indian domestic cricket. He played his first One Day International in 1999 and joined the Indian Test side in 2001. In April 2009, Sehwag became the first Indian to be honoured as the Wisden Leading Cricketer in the World for his performance in 2008, subsequently becoming the first player of any nationality to retain the award for 2009. He worked as s...
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