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
#26451
Vsevolod Gantmakher
#26462
Overall Influence
1935 - 2015 (80 years)
Vsevolod Feliksovich Gantmakher , was a prominent Russian experimental physicist of Jewish origin, was born in Moscow as son of Felix Gantmacher, a prominent mathematician. He was a full Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and is known for his fundamental contributions to condensed matter physics especially for the Gantmakher effect and Gantmakher–Kaner oscillations.
Go to Profile#26452
Andy McCluskey
#26463
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
George Andrew McCluskey is an English singer, songwriter, musician and record producer. He is best known as the lead singer and bass guitarist of the electronic band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark , which he founded alongside keyboard player Paul Humphreys in 1978; McCluskey has been the group's sole constant member. He has sold over 40 million records with OMD, and is regarded as a pioneer of electronic music in the UK. Onstage, McCluskey is noted for his frenetic "Trainee Teacher Dance".
Go to Profile#26453
Coolio
#26464
Overall Influence
1963 - 2022 (59 years)
Artis Leon Ivey Jr. , known by his stage name Coolio, was an American rapper. He was best known for his single "Gangsta's Paradise" , which won a Grammy Award, and was credited for changing the course of hip hop by bringing it to a wider audience. Other singles included "Fantastic Voyage" , "1, 2, 3, 4 " , and "C U When U Get There" . He released nine albums, the first three of which achieved mainstream success: It Takes a Thief , Gangsta's Paradise , and My Soul . Coolio first achieved recognition as a member of the gangsta rap group WC and the Maad Circle. His nickname, originally "Coolio Iglesias", was a takeoff of Julio Iglesias.
Go to Profile#26454
Brian Norton
#26465
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Brian Norton is a solar energy applications researcher and technologist. As president of Dublin Institute of Technology from 2003 to 2018, he was an advocate for diversity of higher education in Ireland. He has also been associated with the relocation of DIT from a multiplicity of scattered buildings to a single city centre campus in the Grangegorman neighbourhood of Dublin and the creation of the Technological University Dublin, Ireland's first Technological University.
Go to Profile#26455
Tetsunari Iida
#26466
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Tetsunari Iida is director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies in Japan. Following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, he is calling for a decrease in Japan's reliance on nuclear power and an increase in renewable energy use.
Go to Profile#26456
Niyazi Öktem
#26467
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Niyazi Öktem is a Turkish academic. Born in Elazığ, he is a professor of Public Law, Philosophy of Law, and Sociology of Law in the Faculty of Law at Istanbul Bilgi University. He is president of the Intercultural Dialogue Platform, the most prominent inter-faith organisation in Turkey.
Go to Profile#26457
Michèle Perret
#26468
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Michèle Perret is a French linguist and novelist who was born in 1937 in Oran in Algeria. Background and education She lived in Algeria until 1955, first on a farm near to Sfissef , and then in Oran. Towards the end of her secondary education she settled in Paris. After qualifying as an agrégée in modern literature, she went on to a doctorate in literature and humanities.
Go to Profile#26458
Thrity Umrigar
#26469
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Thrity Umrigar is an Indian-American journalist, critic, and novelist. Early life Umrigar was born in Mumbai, India to a Parsi family, and relocated to the United States at the age of 21. Career Umrigar received a Bachelor of Science from Bombay University, an M.A. From Ohio State University, and a Ph.D. in English from Kent State University.
Go to Profile#26459
Pierre Jacquinot
#26470
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
Pierre Jacquinot was a French physicist. Jacquinot was a PhD student of Aimé Cotton. He was director of Laboratoire Aimé-Cotton during almost 20 years . From 1962 to 1969 he was appointed director general of CNRS.
Go to Profile#26460
Pierre Veltz
#26471
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Pierre Veltz is a French academic. Veltz holds an engineering degree from École Polytechnique and a PhD in social sciences from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. After beginning his career as an urban planner, he went into academic life and consulting. He founded and headed LATTS, an interdisciplinary research group, at the crossroads of technical and sociological research. From 1981 to 1991, he was the Dean of Research at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, one of the leading French Grandes écoles. From 1999 to 2004, he was the Director of this School. He also chaired Par...
Go to Profile#26461
Vladimir Keilis-Borok
#26472
Overall Influence
1921 - 2013 (92 years)
Vladimir Isaacovich Keilis-Borok was a Russian mathematical geophysicist and seismologist. Biography Keilis-Borok was born in Moscow, Russia. His father, Isaak Moiseevich Keilis, was a jeweler. His mother, Ksenia Ruvimovna Borok, was from Lithuania. Both were Jewish.
Go to Profile#26462
Maximilian Haider
#26473
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Maximilian Haider is an Austrian physicist. He studied Physics at the University of Kiel and the Technische Universität Darmstadt, where he received his doctoral degree with a thesis entitled "Design, construction and testing of a corrected electron energy loss spectrometer with large dispersion and a large acceptance angle" . In 1989 he became Group Leader within the Physical Instrumentation Program at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory where he had already performed some experiments during his doctoral studies.
Go to Profile#26463
Simon C. Dik
#26474
Overall Influence
1940 - 1995 (55 years)
Simon Cornelis Dik was a Dutch linguist, most famous for developing the theory of functional grammar. He occupied the chair of General Linguistics at University of Amsterdam between 1969 and 1994. During these 25 years he developed the theory of functional grammar, the foundations for which had been laid in his 1968 dissertation on coordination.
Go to Profile#26464
Monica Bellucci
#26475
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Monica Anna Maria Bellucci is an Italian actress and model. She began her career as a fashion model, modelling for Dolce & Gabbana, before transitioning to Italian and later American and French films. She has continued to be involved in modelling for Cartier, Dior and Dolce & Gabbana. In 2018, Forbes Italy named her one of the 100 most successful Italian women.
Go to Profile#26465
John Waters
#26476
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
John Augustine Waters is an Irish columnist and author. He started his career with music and politics magazine, Hot Press, and also wrote for the Sunday Tribune newspaper. He later edited the social magazine In Dublin, and the investigative and current affairs magazine Magill. He became a regular columnist at the Irish Times and then the Irish Independent, while authoring some works on non-fiction, and developed The Whoseday Book, which raised 3 million euros for charity. He has also been a member of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland.
Go to Profile#26466
Lily Kong
#26477
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Lily L.L. Kong is a Singaporean geographer currently serving as president of the Singapore Management University . She is the first female and Singaporean academic to helm a Singapore university. Prior joining SMU, she was a faculty member at the Department of Geography of the National University of Singapore and had held various senior managerial positions at NUS.
Go to Profile#26467
Xzibit
#26478
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Alvin Nathaniel Joiner , better known by his stage name Xzibit , is an American rapper, actor, television presenter, and radio personality. Xzibit began his musical career after the release of his debut studio album, At the Speed of Life, on October 15, 1996. The album was both critically and commercially successful, peaking at number 74 on the Billboard 200. It also contained the single "Paparazzi", which peaked at number 83 on the Billboard Hot 100. This success allowed Xzibit to secure a recording contract with Loud Records later that year.
Go to Profile#26468
Thomas Spencer
#26479
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Thomas C. Spencer is an American mathematical physicist, known in particular for important contributions to constructive quantum field theory, statistical mechanics, and spectral theory of random operators. He is an emeritus faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Go to Profile#26469
Roberto Luongo
#26480
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Roberto Luongo is a Canadian former professional ice hockey goaltender. He played 19 seasons in the National Hockey League for the New York Islanders, Florida Panthers and the Vancouver Canucks. In 2022, Luongo was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Luongo is a two-time NHL second team All-Star and a winner of the William M. Jennings Trophy for backstopping his team to the lowest goals against average in the league . He was a finalist for several awards, including the Vezina Trophy as the league's best goaltender , the Lester B. Pearson Award as the top player voted by his peers , and the Hart Memorial Trophy as the league's most valuable player .
Go to Profile#26470
Uğur Erdener
#26481
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Uğur Erdener is a Turkish physician specialized in ophthalmology and professor at the Hacettepe University, Ankara. He is currently a member of the International Olympic Committee and President of the National Olympic Committee of Turkey.
Go to Profile#26471
Naoyuki Agawa
#26482
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Naoyuki Agawa is a Japanese lawyer, diplomat, academic and author. He has been a professor of law at Keio University since 1999; and since 2009, he has served as the university's vice president for International Collaboration and Education.
Go to Profile#26472
Murdoch Mitchison
#26483
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
The Honourable John Murdoch Mitchison FRS, FRSE was a British zoologist. Background Family Mitchison was the son of the Labour politician Dick Mitchison and his wife, the writer Naomi . The biologist J.B.S. Haldane was his uncle, and the physiologist John Scott Haldane was his maternal grandfather. His elder brother is the bacteriologist Denis Mitchison, and his younger brother is the zoologist Avrion Mitchison. His wife was the historian Rosalind Mitchison.
Go to Profile#26473
Marion J. Lamb
#26484
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Marion Julia Lamb was Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, before her retirement. She studied the effect of environmental conditions such as heat, radiation and pollution on metabolic activity and genetic mutability in the fruit fly Drosophila. From the late 1980s, Lamb collaborated with Eva Jablonka, researching and writing on the inheritance of epigenetic variations, and in 2005 they co-authored the book Evolution in Four Dimensions, considered by some to be in the vanguard of an ongoing revolution within evolutionary biology.
Go to Profile#26474
Michael Neuberger
#26485
Overall Influence
1953 - 2013 (60 years)
Michael Samuel Neuberger FRS FMedSci was a British biochemist and immunologist. Biography Born in Kensington, Michael Samuel Neuberger was the fourth of five children of Albert Neuberger and Lilian Ida . He was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, from where he graduated with a first class honours degree in Natural Sciences in 1974. Neuberger then joined Brian Hartley at Imperial College to study for his PhD. During this time, and at Hartley’s suggestion, he visited the South African biologist Sydney Brenner at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Their...
Go to Profile#26475
David Epel
#26486
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
David Epel is a researcher at Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California, and a Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University. Epel earned his Ph.D. at University of California Berkeley under Daniel Mazia. He arrived at Hopkins Marine Station in 1965. Subsequently, Professor Epel spent seven years at University of California San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He completed a postdoc with Britton Chance at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Epel has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science...
Go to Profile#26476
Oscar Nierstrasz
#26487
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Oscar Marius Nierstrasz is a professor at the Computer Science Institute at the University of Berne, and a specialist in software engineering and programming languages. He is active in the field ofprogramming languages and mechanisms to support the flexible composition of high-level, component-based abstractions,tools and environments to support the understanding, analysis and transformation of software systems to more flexible, component-based designs,secure software engineering to understand the challenges current software systems face in terms of security and privacy, andrequirement engi...
Go to Profile#26477
Lise Getoor
#26488
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Lise Getoor is a professor in the computer science department, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her primary research interests are in machine learning and reasoning with uncertainty, applied to graphs and structured data. She also works in data integration, social network analysis and visual analytics. She has edited a book on Statistical relational learning that is a main reference in this domain. She has published many highly cited papers in academic journals and conference proceedings.
Go to Profile#26478
Peter G. Klein
#26489
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Peter Gordon Klein is an American economist who studies managerial and organizational issues. Klein holds the W. W. Caruth Endowed Chair and is a professor of entrepreneurship at Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business, where he is also Chair of the Department of Entrepreneurship and Corporate Innovation. Klein is Academic Director of the Baugh Center for Entrepreneurship and Free Enterprise, adjunct professor of strategy and management at the Norwegian School of Economics, and Carl Menger Research Fellow at the Mises Institute. He serves as associated editor for Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal and associate editor of The Independent Review.
Go to Profile#26479
Martin Pickford
#26490
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Martin Pickford is a lecturer in the Chair of Paleoanthropology and Prehistory at the Collège de France and honorary affiliate at the Département Histoire de la Terre in the Muséum national d'Histoire. In 2001, Martin Pickford together with Brigitte Senut and their team discovered Orrorin tugenensis, a hominid primate species dated between 5.8 and 6.2 million years ago and a potential ancestor of the genus Australopithecus.
Go to Profile#26480
Michel Brunet
#26491
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Michel Brunet is a French paleontologist and a professor at the Collège de France. In 2001 Brunet announced the discovery in Central Africa of the skull and jaw remains of a late Miocene hominid nicknamed Toumaï. These remains may predate the earliest previously known hominid remains, Lucy, by over three million years; however, this conclusion is the subject of a significant controversy.
Go to Profile#26481
Elliot Sperling
#26492
Overall Influence
1951 - 2017 (66 years)
Elliot Sperling was one of the world's leading historians of Tibet and Tibetan-Chinese relations, and a MacArthur Fellow. He spent most of his scholarly career as an associate professor at Indiana University's Department of Central Eurasian Studies, with seven years as the department's chair.
Go to Profile#26482
Valérie Pécresse
#26493
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Valérie Pécresse is a French politician who has served as President of the Regional Council of Île-de-France since 2015. A member of The Republicans, she previously served as Minister of Higher Education and Research from 2007 to 2011 and Minister of the Budget and Government Spokeswoman from 2011 to 2012 under Prime Minister François Fillon. Pécresse represented the 2nd constituency of Yvelines in the National Assembly from 2002 to 2007 and again from 2012 until 2016.
Go to Profile#26483
Preeta D. Bansal
#26494
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Preeta D. Bansal is an American lawyer who served as the General Counsel and Senior Policy Advisor to the federal Office of Management and Budget from 2009 until 2011. Prior to her work in the Obama administration, she served as a law partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and as the Solicitor General of New York during Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's first term. She also has been a member and past chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom . She is currently a lecturer at MIT and senior advisor at the Laboratory for Social Machines based at the MIT M...
Go to Profile#26484
Agneta Stark
#26495
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Agneta Stark , is the vice chancellor of Dalarna University in Sweden and was the president of the International Association for Feminist Economics from 2012 to 2013. She is also the vice chair of the Association of Swedish Higher Education.
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Jules Dassin
#26496
Overall Influence
1911 - 2008 (97 years)
Julius Dassin was an American film and theatre director, producer, writer and actor. A subject of the Hollywood blacklist, he subsequently moved to France, and later Greece, where he continued his career. He was a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Screen Directors' Guild.
Go to Profile#26486
Albert J. Solnit
#26497
Overall Influence
1919 - 2002 (83 years)
Albert Jay Solnit was an American psychoanalyst in the tradition of ego psychology He was an advocate of privileging children's needs in child custody cases. Solnit began teaching at the Yale School of Medicine in 1952 and was Sterling Professor of Psychiatry from 1970 to 1990. He was an editor of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child from 1980 to 2002.
Go to Profile#26487
Tekena Tamuno
#26498
Overall Influence
1932 - 2015 (83 years)
Tekena Nitonye Tamuno was a Nigerian historian and Vice-chancellor of the University of Ibadan. He was the President of the Board of Trustees of Bells University of Technology. Education and career Tamuno attended St Peter's School in his hometown of Okrika for primary education. Upon completion he attended Okrika Grammar School. From 1953 to 1958 he studied history at the University of Ibadan before leaving the country in 1960 to continue his studies at Birkbeck, University of London and Columbia University. In 1962 he joined the Department of History at the University of Ibadan where he rem...
Go to Profile#26488
Yoon Nung-min
#26499
Overall Influence
1927 - 2009 (82 years)
Yoon Nung-min is a South Korean chemist, known for his research in organic chemistry, specializing in metal hydrides. He received his B.A. at Seoul National University in chemistry in 1951 and went on to complete his Ph.D. at Purdue University, under Herbert Charles Brown. He was a postdoc at Purdue, then a researcher for the Ministry of National Defence. He then became an associate professor at the Catholic University of Korea. He later took up full professorship at Sogang University, a position he would hold until his retirement. He served as the president of the Korean Chemical Society in 1989, and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Korea in 2005.
Go to Profile#26489
Ari Rath
#26500
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Ari Rath was an Austrian-born Israeli journalist and writer. Biography Arnold Rath was born in Vienna and grew up there. After the Anschluss he came through a Kindertransport as a thirteen-year-old boy to Mandate Palestine.He arrived in Palestine together with his older brother. As one of the founders of Kibbutz Hamadia he lived there for 16 years and studied contemporary history and economics. Rath never married.
Go to Profile#26490
Zalman Usiskin
#26501
Overall Influence
Zalman Usiskin is an educator best known as the Director of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project. He was born to Nathan and Esther Usiskin. A faculty member since 1969, he also has taught junior and senior high-school mathematics and has authored and co-authored many textbooks, including a six-volume series used as part of the University School Mathematics Project secondary curriculum. In recognition of his work, he has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#26491
Joseph Katz
#26502
Overall Influence
Joseph Katz is an Israel-born American fluid dynamicist, known for his work on experimental fluid mechanics, cavitation phenomena and multiphase flow, turbulence, turbomachinery flows and oceanography flows, flow-induced vibrations and noise, and development of optical flow diagnostics techniques, including Particle Image Velocimetry and Holographic Particle Image Velocimetry . As of 2005, he is the William F. Ward Sr. Distinguished Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Whiting School of Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University.
Go to Profile#26492
Ty Law
#26503
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Tajuan Edward "Ty" Law is a former American football cornerback who played in the National Football League for 15 seasons, primarily with the New England Patriots. He played college football for the Michigan Wolverines and was selected by the Patriots in the first round of the 1995 NFL Draft. During his 10 seasons in New England, he received four Pro Bowl selections and two first-team All-Pro honors. A three-time Super Bowl winner with the Patriots, Law also holds the franchise record for interceptions. Law spent his final five seasons as a member of the New York Jets, Kansas City Chiefs, and Denver Broncos, earning a fifth Pro Bowl selection with the Jets.
Go to Profile#26493
Francesca Morvillo
#26504
Overall Influence
1945 - 1992 (47 years)
Francesca Laura Morvillo was an Italian magistrate, wife of Giovanni Falcone and victim of the Sicilian Mafia. On May 23, 1992, she and her husband were killed in a Capaci bombing. Biography Born in Palermo on 14 December 1945, on 26 June 1967 she graduated in Law at the University of Palermo, attaining the highest academic honours. Her thesis was entitled "Rule of Law and Security Measures", and it achieved the award "Giuseppe Maggiore" for the best thesis in criminal law for the academic year 1966/1967.
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Amy Gerstler
#26505
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Amy Gerstler is an American poet. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. Biography Amy Gerstler was born in 1956. She is a graduate of Pitzer College and holds an M.F.A. from Bennington College. She is now a professor in the MFA writing program at the University of California, Irvine. Previously, she taught in the Bennington Writing Seminars program, at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and the University of Southern California's Master of Professional Writing Program.
Go to Profile#26495
Gordon Wenham
#26506
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Gordon J. Wenham is a Reformed British Old Testament scholar and writer. He has authored several books about the Bible. Tremper Longman has called him "one of the finest evangelical commentators today."
Go to Profile#26496
Richard Anthony Parker
#26507
Overall Influence
1905 - 1993 (88 years)
Richard Anthony Parker was a prominent Egyptologist and professor of Egyptology. Originally from Chicago, he attended Mt. Carmel High School with acclaimed author James T. Farrell. He received an A.B. from Dartmouth College in 1930, and a Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Chicago in 1938. He then went to Luxor, Egypt to work as an epigrapher with the University of Chicago's Epigraphic and Architectural Survey, studying the mortuary temple of Ramses III. When World War II necessitated a temporary halt to the project, Parker came back to Chicago to teach Egyptology at the university. ...
Go to Profile#26497
Paul G. Richards
#26508
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Paul G. Richards is an English-born, American seismologist who has made fundamental contributions to the theory of seismic wave propagation and in methods to understand how the recorded shapes of seismic waves are affected by processes of diffraction, attenuation and scattering. He is the Mellon Professor of the Natural Sciences at Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
Go to Profile#26498
Jon Hamm
#26509
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Jonathan Daniel Hamm is an American actor. He is best known for his role as Don Draper in the period drama television series Mad Men , for which he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Television Series – Drama in 2008 and 2016, two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Ensemble in a Drama Series, and the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 2015. He received 16 Primetime Emmy Award nominations for acting in and producing Mad Men and for his guest appearances on 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
Go to Profile#26499
Tim Ball
#26510
Overall Influence
1938 - 2022 (84 years)
Timothy Francis Ball was a British-born Canadian public speaker and writer who was a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Winnipeg from 1971 until his retirement in 1996. Subsequently Ball became active in promoting rejection of the scientific consensus on global warming, giving public talks and writing opinion pieces and letters to the editor for Canadian newspapers.
Go to Profile#26500
Immanuel C. Y. Hsu
#26511
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Immanuel Chung-Yueh Hsü was a sinologist, a scholar of modern Chinese intellectual and diplomatic history, and a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Biography Born in Shanghai in 1923, he studied at Yenching University in Beijing, and the University of Minnesota. He held a Harvard-Yenching Fellowship at Harvard University from 1950 to 1954. After receiving his doctorate from Harvard, he spent the years 1955–1958 as a Research Fellow at Harvard's East Asian Research Center. He taught modern Chinese history at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1959 until his retirement in 1991, serving as Chair of the History department from 1970 to 1972.
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