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

#26851

Louis Chauvel

#26862
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Louis Chauvel is a French sociologist, full professor at University of Luxembourg, PhD Université de Lille , Habilitation Sciences Po . He is specialized in social generations, in the analysis of social structures, in cohort and generational change. Chauvel received some international media attention as an expert following the spring 2006 First Employment Contract protests in France, which underlined the déclassement of the young generations in France. His analyses on the declining leadership of the "new" middle classes on the French political system explain the 2007 success of Nicolas Sarkozy.
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#26852

Anind Dey

Anind Dey
#26863
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Anind Dey is a computer scientist. He is the Dean of the University of Washington Information School. Dey is formerly the director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests lie at the intersection of human–computer interaction and ubiquitous computing, focusing on how to make novel technologies more usable and useful. In particular, he builds tools that make it easier to build useful ubiquitous computing applications and supporting end users in controlling their ubiquitous computing systems.
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#26853

Elizabeth Nabel

Elizabeth Nabel
#26864
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Nabel is an American cardiologist and Executive Vice President of Strategy at ModeX Therapeutics and OPKO Health. Prior to this role, she served as President of Brigham Health and its Brigham and Women's Hospital, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Director of the NIH's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
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#26854

Chubby Checker

#26865
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Chubby Checker is an American singer and dancer. He is widely known for popularizing many dance styles, including the Twist dance style, with his 1960 hit cover of Hank Ballard & The Midnighters' R&B song "The Twist", and the pony dance style with the 1961 cover of the song "Pony Time". His biggest UK hit, "Let's Twist Again", was released one year later ; that year, he also popularized the song "Limbo Rock", originally a previous-year instrumental hit by the Champs to which he added lyrics, and its trademark Limbo dance, as well as other dance styles such as The Fly. In September 2008, "The ...
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#26855

Benny Peiser

#26866
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Benny Josef Peiser is a social anthropologist specialising in the environmental and socio-economic impact of physical activity on health. He was a senior lecturer in the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences at Liverpool John Moores University and is a visiting fellow at the University of Buckingham.
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#26856

Robert B. Sloan

#26867
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Robert Bryan Sloan Jr. is an American academic and theologian. He has been the president of Houston Christian University since 2006. Education and background Sloan was born in Coleman, Texas, and grew up in Abilene, Texas. He earned his B.A. from Baylor University in 1970, and his M.Div from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1973. After post-graduate research at the University of Bristol, he earned his D.Th., the Doktor der Theologie degree, from the University of Basel, Switzerland, in 1978.
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#26857

Luc Devroye

Luc Devroye
#26868
Overall Influence
Luc P. Devroye is a Belgian computer scientist and mathematician and a James McGill Professor in the School of Computer Science of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Devroye wrote around 300 mathematical articles, mostly on probabilistic analysis of algorithms, on the asymptotic analysis of combinatorial structures , and on random number generation .
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#26858

Mikhail Baryshnikov

Mikhail Baryshnikov
#26869
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Mikhail Nikolayevich Baryshnikov is a Latvian and American dancer, choreographer, and actor. He was the preeminent male classical dancer of the 1970s and 1980s. He subsequently became a noted dance director.
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#26859

Philiswa Nomngongo

#26870
Overall Influence
Philiswa Nomngongo is a South African professor of Analytical Chemistry and the South African Research Chair in nanotechnology for water. Her research focuses on environmental analytical chemistry and the use of nanomaterials for water treatment, water remediation, and water quality analysis and monitoring.
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#26860

Celso Costa

#26871
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Celso José da Costa is a Brazilian mathematician working in differential geometry. His research activity has focused in the construction and classification of minimal surfaces embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space. He is best known for his discovery of Costa's minimal surface, which was described in 1982.
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#26861

Valentin Afraimovich

#26872
Overall Influence
1945 - 2018 (73 years)
Valentin Afraimovich was a Soviet, Russian and Mexican mathematician. He made contributions to dynamical systems theory, qualitative theory of ordinary differential equations, bifurcation theory, concept of attractor, strange attractors, space-time chaos, mathematical models of non-equilibrium media and biological systems, travelling waves in lattices, complexity of orbits and dimension-like characteristics in dynamical systems.
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#26862

Raimo Hämäläinen

Raimo Hämäläinen
#26873
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Raimo P. Hämäläinen is a professor emeritus at the Aalto University School of Science , Finland. Hämäläinen founded Systems Analysis laboratory at Aalto SCI in 1984. His research interests include systems intelligence, multiple-criteria decision analysis, sequential games, simulation, and energy modeling.
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#26863

Béatrice Longuenesse

#26874
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Béatrice Longuenesse is a French philosopher and academic, who is the Silver Professor of Philosophy Emerita at New York University. Her work focuses on Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the philosophy of mind. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Longuenesse is one of the most prominent living Kant scholars, and her works have generated significant discussion around parts of Kant's corpus that were previously largely overlooked.
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#26864

Catherine Gallagher

#26875
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Catherine Gallagher is an American historicist, literary critic, and Victorianist, and is Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Gallagher is the author of Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 , which documented significant literary works that had previously been overlooked. Gallagher is also the author of The Body Economic : Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel and Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction . She is married to Martin Jay, a faculty member of the History department at UC Berkeley.
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#26865

David Bevington

David Bevington
#26876
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
David Martin Bevington was an American literary scholar. He was the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and in English Language & Literature, Comparative Literature, and the college at the University of Chicago, where he taught since 1967, as well as chair of Theatre and Performance Studies. "One of the most learned and devoted of Shakespeareans," so called by Harold Bloom, he specialized in British drama of the Renaissance, and edited and introduced the complete works of William Shakespeare in both the 29-volume, Bantam Classics paperback editions and the single-volume Longman edition.
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#26866

Dwight Bolinger

#26877
Overall Influence
1907 - 1992 (85 years)
Dwight Le Merton Bolinger was an American linguist and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He began his career as the first editor of the "Among the New Words" feature for American Speech. As an expert in Spanish, he was elected president of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese in 1960. He was known for the support and encouragement he gave younger scholars and for his hands-on approach to the analysis of human language. His work touched on a wide range of subjects, including semantics, intonation, phonesthesia, and the politics ...
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#26867

Naomi Baron

#26878
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Naomi S. Baron is a linguist and professor emerita of linguistics at the Department of World Languages and Cultures at American University in Washington, D.C. Education and career Baron earned a B.A. in 1968 in English and American Literature at Brandeis University, and, in 1973, a PhD in linguistics at Stanford University. Her dissertation is titled, "The Evolution of English Periphrastic Causatives: Contributions to a general theory of linguistic variation and change." She taught at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Emory University, and Southwestern University before com...
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#26868

Billy Gibbons

Billy Gibbons
#26879
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
William Frederick Gibbons is an American rock musician, best known as the guitarist and primary vocalist of ZZ Top. He began his career in the Moving Sidewalks, who recorded Flash and opened four dates for the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Gibbons formed ZZ Top in late 1969 and released ZZ Top's First Album in early 1971. He has also maintained a solo career in recent years, releasing three solo albums: Perfectamundo , The Big Bad Blues , and Hardware .
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#26869

Ronald S. Sullivan Jr.

#26880
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. is a law professor at Harvard Law School. Sullivan graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Morehouse College in 1989 and received his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1994. Prior to joining the Harvard Law School faculty, Sullivan served as the Director of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia.
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#26870

Thomas Weiland

#26881
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Thomas Weiland is a German physicist, engineer and entrepreneur. He is a professor of electrical engineering and headed the Institute of Electromagnetic Field Theory at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the Technical University of Darmstadt for many years. In 1988, Weiland was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. He was also named an IEEE Fellow in the year 2012, for development of the Finite Integration Technique and impact of the associated software on electromagnetic engineering.
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#26871

Hedi Turki

Hedi Turki
#26882
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Hedi Turki was a Tunisian artist of Turkish origin. He is considered to have been the pioneering force of abstract painting in Tunisia and was an influential member of the School of Tunis. His younger brother was Zoubeir Turki, who died in 2009.
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#26872

Masoud Nili

Masoud Nili
#26883
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Masoud Nili is an Iranian academic and economist. He was an economic advisor to President Hassan Rouhani since 2013 and was appointed as his aide in 2017. Early life and education He was born on 14 February 1955 in Hamedan, Iran. He is graduated from Sharif University of Technology with a degree in structural engineering. He is also a graduate of Isfahan University of Technology in economic systems design and of Manchester University in economics.
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#26873

Tom McCarthy

#26884
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Tom McCarthy is an English writer and artist. His debut novel, Remainder, was published in 2005 by Metronome. McCarthy has twice been nominated for the Man Booker, and was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Literature Prize by Yale University in 2013. He won a Believer Book Award for Remainder in 2008.
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#26874

Mark Dean

#26885
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Mark E. Dean is an American inventor and computer engineer. He developed the ISA bus, and he led a design team for making a one-gigahertz computer processor chip. He holds three of nine PC patents for being the co-creator of the IBM personal computer released in 1981. In 1995, Dean was named the first ever African-American IBM Fellow.
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#26875

Sakiko Fukuda-Parr

#26886
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr is a development economist who has gained recognition for her work with the United Nations Development Programme and for her writing in publications including the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, which she founded.
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#26876

Charles Pence Slichter

Charles Pence Slichter
#26887
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
Charles Pence Slichter was an American physicist, best known for his work on nuclear magnetic resonance and superconductivity. He was awarded the 2007 National Medal of Science "for establishing nuclear magnetic resonance as a powerful tool to reveal the fundamental molecular properties of liquids and solids. His inspired teaching has led generations of physicists and chemists to develop a host of modern technologies in condensed matter physics, chemistry, biology and medicine."
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#26877

Sanjay Mittal

#26888
Overall Influence
Sanjay Mittal is a Professor of computational fluid dynamics in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India. Early life and education After doing his B.Tech. from IIT Kanpur in 1988, he got enrolled at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities for M.S. program. He then received his Ph.D. and worked as a research associate under Tayfun Tezduyar.
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#26878

Kenneth Merchant

#26889
Overall Influence
Kenneth Merchant holds the Deloitte and Touche LLP Chair of Accountancy at the Leventhal School of Accounting, part of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. He is the former dean of the Leventhal School.
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#26879

Johan Auwerx

#26890
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Johan Auwerx is a Belgian biologist, and a professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne . His research in the fields of cellular metabolism has contributed to a better understanding of the regulation of mitochondrial function by signaling pathways.
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#26880

Gabriel Gorodetsky

Gabriel Gorodetsky
#26891
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Gabriel Gorodetsky is an Israeli academic who is the Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and emeritus professor of history at Tel Aviv University. Gorodetsky studied History and Russian Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and went on to obtain his Ph.D degree under the supervision of British historian E. H. Carr in Oxford. He was the director of the Cummings Center for Russian Studies at Tel Aviv University from 1991–2007. He has been a visiting fellow of St. Antony's College in Oxford in 1979 and in 1993, of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washingto...
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#26881

Catherine Belsey

#26892
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Catherine Belsey was a British literary critic and academic. Early life Belsey was born in Salisbury and attended Godolphin and Latymer School in London. She studied at Somerville College, Oxford, and subsequently as a postgraduate at the University of Warwick.
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#26882

Terence Horgan

#26893
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Terence Edward Horgan is an American philosopher and a professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson. His areas of expertise include philosophy of mind and metaethics. Horgan obtained his bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1970 from Stanford University. In 1974, he completed his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan under the supervision of Jaegwon Kim, with his dissertation titled "Microreduction and the Mind-Body Problem." After holding professorships in Illinois, Michigan, and Memphis, Horgan has been a professor in Tucson, Arizona since 2002.
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#26883

Roger Säljö

#26894
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Roger Säljö is a Swedish educational psychologist whose research presents a socio-cultural perspective on human learning and development. Säljö is a professor of education and educational psychology at Göteborg University and was president of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction between 2005 and 2007. Roger Säljö is the director of a national centre of excellence in research. In 2012, Roger Säljö co-founded the academic journal Learning, Culture and Social Interaction.
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#26884

Tony Richardson

Tony Richardson
#26895
Overall Influence
1928 - 1991 (63 years)
Cecil Antonio Richardson was an English theatre and film director and producer whose career spanned five decades. In 1964, he won the Academy Award for Best Director for the film Tom Jones. Early life Richardson was born in Shipley, West Riding of Yorkshire in 1928 to Clarence Albert Richardson, a chemist, and his wife, Elsie Evans . He was Head Boy at Ashville College, Harrogate and attended Wadham College, University of Oxford. His Oxford contemporaries included Rupert Murdoch, Margaret Thatcher, Kenneth Tynan, Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert. He had the unprecedented distinction of bein...
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#26885

Gérald Larose

Gérald Larose
#26896
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Gérald Larose is a Quebec activist, professor, and former President of the Confédération des syndicats nationaux labour union. He is currently head of the Conseil de la Souveraineté du Québec, a Quebec independence organization.
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#26886

Mike Aamodt

#26897
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Michael G. Aamodt is an American industrial and organizational psychology professor at Radford University who has published more than 50 professional journal articles and presented more than 100 papers at professional conferences.
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#26887

Joe Cole

#26898
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Joseph John Cole is an English football coach and former professional footballer who played as an attacking midfielder or winger. He is currently a pundit on TNT Sports. Cole started his career with West Ham United, where, after breaking into the first team in January 1999, he played more than 120 Premier League games over five seasons. He was one of a number of players who left West Ham in the summer of 2003, after the club had been relegated to the Football League First Division, with Cole signing for Chelsea. He spent seven seasons at Chelsea, playing over 280 games in all competitions and winning seven trophies, including three Premier League titles, two FA Cups and a League Cup.
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#26888

Rashida Manjoo

#26899
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Rashida Manjoo is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Cape Town in Cape Town and a social activist involved in the eradication of violence against women and gender-based violence. Manjoo was the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women from June 2009 to July 2015.
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#26889

Sangeeta N. Bhatia

Sangeeta N. Bhatia
#26900
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Sangeeta N. Bhatia is an American biological engineer and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor at MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Bhatia's research investigates applications of micro- and nano-technology for tissue repair and regeneration. She applies ideas from computer technology and engineering to the design of miniaturized biomedical tools for the study and treatment of diseases, in particular liver disease, hepatitis, malaria ...
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#26890

Nancy Cartwright

Nancy Cartwright
#26901
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Nancy Jean Cartwright is an American actress. She is the long-time voice of Bart Simpson on the animated television series The Simpsons, for which she has received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance and an Annie Award for Best Voice Acting in the Field of Animation. Cartwright also voices other characters for the show, including Nelson Muntz, Ralph Wiggum, Todd Flanders, Kearney, Database, and Maggie. She is also the voice of Chuckie Finster in the Nickelodeon series Rugrats and its spin-off All Grown Up!, succeeding Christine Cavanaugh.
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#26891

Leona E. Tyler

#26902
Overall Influence
1906 - 1993 (87 years)
Leona Elizabeth Tyler was an American psychologist and president of the American Psychological Association in 1973. Early years Leona Tyler was born in Chetek, Wisconsin on May 10, 1906. Her father, Leon M. Tyler was an accountant and house restoration contractor and her mother, Bessie J. Carver Tyler managed the home. Both her parents graduated high school, but neither attended college.
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#26892

Richard H. Ebright

#26903
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Richard High Ebright is an American molecular biologist. He is the Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University and Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology.
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#26893

William R. Dickinson

William R. Dickinson
#26904
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
William Richard Dickinson was a professor emeritus of geoscience at the University of Arizona and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Prior joining the University of Arizona, Dickinson was a professor at Stanford University. He joined the U of A faculty in 1979.
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#26894

David Frost, Baron Frost

#26905
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
David George Hamilton Frost, Baron Frost is a former British diplomat, civil servant and politician who served as a Minister of State at the Cabinet Office between March and December 2021. Frost was Chief Negotiator of Task Force Europe from January 2020 until his resignation in December 2021.
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#26895

Cécile DeWitt-Morette

Cécile DeWitt-Morette
#26906
Overall Influence
1922 - 2017 (95 years)
Cécile Andrée Paule DeWitt-Morette was a French mathematician and physicist. She founded a summer school at Les Houches in the French Alps. For this and her publications, she was awarded the American Society of the French Legion of Honour 2007 Medal for Distinguished Achievement. Attendees at the summer school included over twenty students who would go on to be Nobel Prize winners, including Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, Georges Charpak, and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, who identify the school for assisting in their success.
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#26896

Garrett G. Fagan

#26907
Overall Influence
1963 - 2017 (54 years)
Garrett George Fagan was an Irish American historian, singer and writer known for his research in the various areas of Roman history, as well as his critique of pseudoarchaeology. He was Professor of Ancient History at Penn State University.Fagan earned a BA with honors in Ancient History and Archaeology and Biblical Studies and an MLitt in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin, and a PhD from McMaster University . He was a visiting professor at Davidson College in 1993-94 and held a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia in 1995-96. He began teaching on a visi...
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#26897

Alan M. Taylor

Alan M. Taylor
#26908
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Alan M. Taylor is the C. Bryan Cameron Chair in International Economics and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of California, Davis. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. In February 2023, Columbia University announced that Taylor will join its faculty as a full professor in January 2024.
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#26898

Thomas N. Hibbard

#26909
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Thomas Nathaniel Hibbard was an American mathematician and computer scientist. Thomas N. Hibbard received the B.S. degree in physics from Pacific University, Forest Grove, OR, in 1951, the M.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1954, and the Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1966.
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#26899

Brian Gill, Lord Gill

#26910
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Brian Gill, Lord Gill, is a retired Scottish judge and legal academic. He served as Lord President and Lord Justice General from June 2012 until May 2015. Gill previously served as Lord Justice Clerk from 2001 to 2012, and as Chairman of the Scottish Law Commission from 1996 to 2001. As an advocate, he practised principally in agricultural law and is the author of The Law of Agricultural Holdings in Scotland. In 2007–2009, Gill undertook a far-reaching review of the civil courts system in Scotland, recommending a shift of much of the workload of the Court of Session to Scotland's local sheri...
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#26900

Robert Jaworski

#26911
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Robert Vincent Salazar Jaworski Sr. , also known by his nicknames Sonny, Big J, and Jawo , is a Filipino former professional basketball player, head coach and politician who served as a Senator of the Philippines from 1998 to 2004. He played 23 seasons in the Philippine Basketball Association. He is widely regarded as one of the best and most popular PBA players of all-time. He was named part of the PBA's 40 Greatest Players and was inducted into the PBA Hall of Fame in 2005.
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