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
#2851
Sebastian Faulks
#2855
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Sebastian Charles Faulks is a British novelist, journalist and broadcaster. He is best known for his historical novels set in France – The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. He has also published novels with a contemporary setting, most recently A Week in December and Paris Echo, and a James Bond continuation novel, Devil May Care , as well as a continuation of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves series, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells . He was a team captain on BBC Radio 4 literary quiz The Write Stuff.
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Irving Howe
#2856
Overall Influence
1920 - 1993 (73 years)
Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America. Early years Howe was born as Irving Horenstein in The Bronx, New York. He was the son of Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia, Nettie and David Horenstein, who ran a small grocery store that went out of business during the Great Depression. His father became a peddler and eventually a presser in a dress factory. His mother was an operator in the dress trade.
Go to Profile#2853
Allen Ginsberg
#2857
Overall Influence
1926 - 1997 (71 years)
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.
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Adam Riess
#2858
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Adam Guy Riess is an American astrophysicist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. Riess shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
Go to Profile#2855
Michel Platini
#2859
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Michel François Platini is a French football administrator and former player and manager. Regarded as one of the greatest footballers of all time, Platini won the Ballon d'Or three times in a row, in 1983, 1984 and 1985, and came seventh in the FIFA Player of the Century vote. In recognition of his achievements, he was named a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1985 and became an Officier in 1998. As the president of UEFA in 2015 he was banned from involvement in football under FIFA's organisation, over ethics violations. The ban will last until 2023.
Go to Profile#2856
Irwin Rose
#2860
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Irwin Allan Rose was an American biologist. Along with Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.
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Khaled Abou El Fadl
#2861
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Khaled Abou el Fadl is the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law where he has taught courses on International Human Rights, Islamic jurisprudence, National Security Law, Law and Terrorism, Islam and Human Rights, Political Asylum, and Political Crimes and Legal Systems. He is also the founder of the Usuli Institute, a non-profit public charity dedicated to research and education to promote humanistic interpretations of Islam, as well as the Chair of the Islamic Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has lectured on and ta...
Go to Profile#2858
Triple H
#2862
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Paul Michael Levesque , better known by the ring name Triple H, is an American business executive, actor, and retired professional wrestler. Regarded as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time, he currently serves as the chief content officer and head of creative for WWE.
Go to Profile#2859
Joseph Margolis
#2863
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Joseph Zalman Margolis was an American philosopher. A radical historicist, he authored many books critical of the central assumptions of Western philosophy, and elaborated a robust form of relativism.
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Jacob Neusner
#2864
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Jacob Neusner was an American academic scholar of Judaism. He was named as one of the most published authors in history, having written or edited more than 900 books. Neusner's application of form criticism—a methodology derived from scholars of the New Testament—to Rabbinic texts was influential, but subject to criticism. Neusner's grasp of Rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic has been challenged within academia.
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Wolfgang Ketterle
#2865
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Wolfgang Ketterle is a German physicist and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . His research has focused on experiments that trap and cool atoms to temperatures close to absolute zero, and he led one of the first groups to realize Bose–Einstein condensation in these systems in 1995. For this achievement, as well as early fundamental studies of condensates, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, together with Eric Allin Cornell and Carl Wieman.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin
#2866
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Doris Helen Kearns Goodwin is an American biographer, historian, former sports journalist, and political commentator. She has written biographies of numerous U.S. presidents. Goodwin's book No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995. Goodwin produced the American television miniseries Washington. She was also executive producer of 'Abraham Lincoln,' a 2022 docudrama on the History Channel. This latter series was based on Goodwin's Leadership in Turbulent Times.
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Elon Lages Lima
#2867
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Elon Lages Lima was a Brazilian mathematician whose research concerned differential topology, algebraic topology, and differential geometry. Lima was an influential figure in the development of mathematics in Brazil.
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Kevin Shirley
#2868
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Kevin Shirley, also known as The Caveman, is a South African–born music producer, engineer and audio mixer for many artists, including Aerosmith, The Black Crowes, Silverchair, Journey, Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin, Rush, Joe Bonamassa, Beth Hart, Dream Theater, Jimmy Barnes, Cold Chisel, Joanne Shaw Taylor, The Springbok Nude Girls, All Night Radio, Steve Louw & Big Sky, HIM, Mr. Big, and Europe.
Go to Profile#2865
John Warwick Montgomery
#2869
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
John Warwick Montgomery is a lawyer, professor, Lutheran theologian, and author living in France. He was born in Warsaw, New York, United States. Montgomery maintains multiple citizenship in the United States, United Kingdom and France. From 2014 to 2017, he was Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University, Wisconsin. He is currently Professor-At-Large, 1517: The Legacy Project. He is named Avocat honoraire, Barreau de Paris , after 20 years in French legal practise. He continues to work as a barrister specializing in religious freedom cases in international Human Ri...
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Daniel Yergin
#2870
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Daniel Howard Yergin is an American author and consultant. Yergin is vice chairman of S&P Global. He was formerly vice chairman of IHS Markit, which merged with S&P in 2022. He founded Cambridge Energy Research Associates, which IHS Markit acquired in 2004. He has authored or co-authored several books on energy and world economics, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World , and The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations .
Go to Profile#2867
Richard Perry
#2871
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Richard Van Perry is an American record producer. He began as a performer in his adolescence while attending Poly Prep, his high school in Brooklyn. After graduating from college he rose through the late 1960s and early 1970s to become a successful and popular record producer with more than 12 gold records to his credit by 1982. From 1978 to 1983, he ran his own record label, Planet Records, which scored a string of hits with the main act on its roster, pop/R&B group The Pointer Sisters. After Planet's sale to RCA Records, Perry continued his work in the music industry as an independent producer.
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James Rachels
#2872
Overall Influence
1941 - 2003 (62 years)
James Webster Rachels was an American philosopher who specialized in ethics and animal rights. Biography Rachels was born in Columbus, Georgia, and graduated from Mercer University in 1962. He received his Ph.D. in 1967 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying under W. D. Falk and E. M. Adams. He taught at the University of Richmond, New York University, the University of Miami, Duke University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he spent the last twenty-six years of his career. He married Carol Williams in 1962, and they had two sons, David and Stuart.
Go to Profile#2869
Polykarp Kusch
#2873
Overall Influence
1911 - 1993 (82 years)
Polykarp Kusch was a German-born American physicist. In 1955, the Nobel Committee gave a divided Nobel Prize for Physics, with one half going to Kusch for his accurate determination that the magnetic moment of the electron was greater than its theoretical value, thus leading to reconsideration of—and innovations in—quantum electrodynamics.
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Alexander Vilenkin
#2874
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Alexander Vilenkin is the Leonard Jane Holmes Bernstein Professor of Evolutionary Science and Director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University. A theoretical physicist who has been working in the field of cosmology for 25 years, Vilenkin has written over 260 publications.
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Ira Glass
#2875
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ira Jeffrey Glass is an American public radio personality. He is the host and producer of the radio and television series This American Life and has participated in other NPR programs, including Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Talk of the Nation. His work in radio and television has won him awards, such as the Edward R. Murrow Award for Outstanding Contributions to Public Radio and the George Polk Award in Radio Reporting.
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Konrad Emil Bloch
#2876
Overall Influence
1912 - 2000 (88 years)
Konrad Emil Bloch was a German-American biochemist. Bloch received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1964 for discoveries concerning the mechanism and regulation of the cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism.
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Herrlee G. Creel
#2877
Overall Influence
1905 - 1994 (89 years)
Herrlee Glessner Creel was an American Sinologist and philosopher who specialized in Chinese philosophy and history, and was a professor of Chinese at the University of Chicago for nearly 40 years. On his retirement, Creel was praised by his colleagues as an innovative pioneer on early Chinese civilization and as one who could write both for specialists and for the interested general public with cogency, lucidity, and grace.
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Fred Phelps
#2878
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Fred Waldron Phelps Sr. was an American minister and disbarred lawyer who served as the pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church, worked as a civil rights attorney, and ran for statewide election in Kansas. A divisive and controversial figure, he gained national attention for his homophobic views and protests near the funerals of gay people, AIDS victims, military veterans, and disaster victims who he believed were killed as a result of God punishing the U.S. for having "bankrupt values" and tolerating homosexuality.
Go to Profile#2875
H. Eugene Stanley
#2879
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Harry Eugene Stanley is an American physicist and University Professor at Boston University. He has made seminal contributions to statistical physics and is one of the pioneers of interdisciplinary science. His current research focuses on understanding the anomalous behavior of liquid water, but he had made fundamental contributions to complex systems, such as quantifying correlations among the constituents of the Alzheimer brain, and quantifying fluctuations in noncoding and coding DNA sequences, interbeat intervals of the healthy and diseased heart. He is one of the founding fathers of econ...
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Don Cupitt
#2880
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Don Cupitt is an English philosopher of religion and scholar of Christian theology. He has been an Anglican priest and a lecturer in the University of Cambridge, though is better known as a popular writer, broadcaster and commentator. He has been described as a "radical theologian", noted for his ideas about "non-realist" philosophy of religion.
Go to Profile#2877
Walter Mondale
#2881
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Walter Frederick "Fritz" Mondale was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 42nd vice president of the United States from 1977 to 1981 under President Jimmy Carter. A U.S. senator from Minnesota from 1964 to 1976, he was the Democratic Party's nominee in the 1984 presidential election, but lost to incumbent Ronald Reagan in an Electoral College and popular vote landslide. Reagan won 49 states while Mondale carried his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. His vice presidential nominee, U.S. Representative Geraldine Ferraro from New York, was the first female vice-presidential nominee of any major party in U.S.
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Daniel McFadden
#2882
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Daniel Little McFadden is an American econometrician who shared the 2000 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with James Heckman. McFadden's share of the prize was "for his development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choice". He is the Presidential Professor of Health Economics at the University of Southern California and Professor of the Graduate School at University of California, Berkeley.
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Michael McClure
#2883
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Michael McClure was an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955, which was rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. He soon became a key member of the Beat Generation and was immortalized as Pat McLear in Kerouac's Big Sur.
Go to Profile#2880
Kishore Mahbubani
#2884
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Kishore Mahbubani is a Singaporean diplomat and geopolitical consultant who served as Singapore Permanent Representative to the United Nations between 1984 and 1989, and again between 1998 and 2004, and President of the United Nations Security Council between 2001 and 2002.
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James H. Billington
#2885
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
James Hadley Billington was an American academic and author who taught history at Harvard and Princeton before serving for 42 years as CEO of four federal cultural institutions. He served as the 13th Librarian of Congress after being nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, and his appointment was approved unanimously by the U.S. Senate. He retired as Librarian on September 30, 2015.
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Michael Oren
#2886
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Michael Bornstein Oren is an American-Israeli diplomat, essayist, historian, novelist, and politician. He is a former Israeli ambassador to the United States , former member of the Knesset for the Kulanu party and a former Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister's Office.
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Art Buchwald
#2887
Overall Influence
1925 - 2007 (82 years)
Arthur Buchwald was an American humorist best known for his column in The Washington Post. At the height of his popularity, it was published nationwide as a syndicated column in more than 500 newspapers. His column focused on political satire and commentary.
Go to Profile#2884
Peter Duesberg
#2888
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Peter H. Duesberg is a German-American molecular biologist and a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his early research into the genetic aspects of cancer. He is a proponent of AIDS denialism, the claim that HIV does not cause AIDS.
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James Alcock
#2889
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
#2886
Philip Morrison
#2890
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
Philip Morrison was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He is known for his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II, and for his later work in quantum physics, nuclear physics high energy astrophysics, and SETI.
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Bruce L. Benson
#2891
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Bruce L. Benson is an American academic economist who is recognized as an authority on law and economics and a major exponent of anarcho-capitalist legal theory. He is chair of the department of economics, DeVoe L. Moore Professor, distinguished research professor and courtesy professor of law at Florida State University and the recipient of the 2006 Adam Smith Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Association of Private Enterprise Education. He is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and has recently been a Fulbright Senior Specialist in the Czech Republic, visiting professor at t...
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Eric Ambler
#2892
Overall Influence
1909 - 1998 (89 years)
Eric Clifford Ambler OBE was an English author of thrillers, in particular spy novelss, who introduced a new realism to the genre. Also working as a screenwriter, Ambler used the pseudonym Eliot Reed for books co-written with Charles Rodda.
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Rolf Hochhuth
#2893
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Rolf Hochhuth was a German author and playwright, best known for his 1963 drama The Deputy, which insinuates Pope Pius XII's indifference to Hitler's extermination of the Jews, and he remained a controversial figure both for his plays and other public comments and for his 2005 defense of British Holocaust denier David Irving.
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Greg Bahnsen
#2894
Overall Influence
1948 - 1995 (47 years)
Greg L. Bahnsen was an American Reformed philosopher, apologist, and debater. He was a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and a full-time Scholar in Residence for the Southern California Center for Christian Studies . He is also considered a contributor to the field of Christian apologetics, as he popularized the presuppositional method of Cornelius Van Til. He is the father of David L. Bahnsen, an American portfolio manager, author, and television commentator.
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Bill Russell
#2895
Overall Influence
1934 - 2022 (88 years)
William Felton Russell was an American professional basketball player who played center for the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association from 1956 to 1969. He was the centerpiece of the Celtics dynasty that won 11 NBA championships during his 13-year career. Russell is widely considered to be one of the greatest basketball players of all time.
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Stephen Shenker
#2896
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Stephen Hart Shenker is an American theoretical physicist who works on string theory. He is a professor at Stanford University and former director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His brother Scott Shenker is a computer scientist.
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Daniel Snyder
#2897
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Daniel Marc Snyder is an American businessman who formerly owned the Washington Commanders, an American football franchise belonging to the National Football League . He bought the team, then known as the Washington Redskins, from the estate of former owner Jack Kent Cooke in 1999. In 2023, he sold the franchise to a group led by Josh Harris for $6.05 billion, the highest price ever paid for a sports team.
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Patricia Crone
#2898
Overall Influence
1945 - 2015 (70 years)
Patricia Crone was a Danish historian specialised in early Islamic history. Crone was a member of the Revisionist school of Islamic studies and questioned the historicity of the Islamic traditions about the beginnings of Islam.
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Edwin Hutchins
#2899
Overall Influence
Edwin Hutchins is a professor and former department head of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. Hutchins is one of the main developers of distributed cognition. Hutchins was a student of the cognitive anthropologist Roy D'Andrade and has been a strong advocate of the use of anthropological methods in cognitive science. He is considered the father of modern cognitive ethnography. His early work involved studies of logic in legal discourse among people of the Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea.
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Adam Hochschild
#2900
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Adam Hochschild is an American author, journalist, historian and lecturer. His best-known works include King Leopold's Ghost , To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 , Bury the Chains , The Mirror at Midnight , The Unquiet Ghost , and Spain in Our Hearts . American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis .
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Helena Christensen
#2901
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Helena Christensen is a Danish model and photographer. She is a former Victoria's Secret Angel, clothing designer and beauty queen. Christensen was also the co-founder and original creative director for Nylon magazine, and she is a supporter of funding for breast cancer organizations and other philanthropic charities.
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Jen Psaki
#2902
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Jennifer "Jen" Psaki is an American television political analyst and former government official. A political advisor who served under both the Obama and Biden administrations, she served the Biden administration as the 34th White House press secretary until May 2022. A member of the Democratic Party, she previously served in the Obama administration as the White House deputy press secretary ; the White House deputy communications director ; the spokesperson for the United States Department of State ; and the White House communications director . Psaki was a political contributor for CNN from 2017 to 2020.
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Denny Chin
#2903
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Denny Chin is a senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, based in New York City. He was a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York before joining the federal appeals bench. President Bill Clinton nominated Chin to the district court on March 24, 1994, and Chin was confirmed August 9 of that same year. On October 6, 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Chin to the Second Circuit. He was confirmed on April 22, 2010, by the United States Senate, filling the vacancy created by Judge Robert D.
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Jimmy Page
#2904
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
James Patrick Page is an English musician and producer who achieved international success as the guitarist and founder of the rock band Led Zeppelin. Prolific in creating guitar riffs, Page’s style involves various alternative guitar tunings and melodic solos, coupled with aggressive, distorted guitar tones. It is also characterized by his folk and eastern-influenced acoustic work. He is notable for occasionally playing his guitar with a cello bow to create a droning sound texture to the music.
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