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
#28501
Martin Green
#28512
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Martin Andrew Green is an Australian engineer and professor at the University of New South Wales who works on solar energy. He was awarded the 2021 Japan Prize for his achievements in the "Development of High-Efficiency Silicon Photovoltaic Devices". He is editor-in-chief of the academic journal Progress in Photovoltaics.
Go to Profile#28502
Sema Salur
#28513
Overall Influence
Sema Salur is a Turkish-American mathematician, currently serving as a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Rochester. She was awarded the Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize for 2014–2015, a prize intended to give a recently promoted associate professor a year-long fellowship at Cornell University; and has been the recipient of a National Science Foundation Research Award beginning in 2017. She specialises in the "geometry and topology of the moduli spaces of calibrated submanifolds inside Calabi–Yau, G2 and Spin manifolds", which are important to certain aspects of string theory and M-th...
Go to Profile#28503
Pavel Datsyuk
#28514
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Pavel Valerievich Datsyuk is a Russian former professional ice hockey player. Datsyuk was nicknamed the "Magic Man" honoring his incredible stickhandling and creativity with the puck. From 2001 to 2016, he played for the Detroit Red Wings of the National Hockey League . In 2017, Datsyuk was named one of the "100 Greatest NHL Players" in history, and was the only active player outside of the NHL at the time of announcement.
Go to Profile#28504
Ion N. Petrovici
#28515
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Ion N. Petrovici was a German neurologist, professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Cologne. Petrovici completed his secondary education in 1947 at his native city's Saints Peter and Paul High School. After studying at the Bucharest Faculty of Medicine, he received an MD degree from the University of Bucharest. He trained in neurology under Arthur Kreindler and at the Department of Clinical Neurology of the Institute for Neurological Research of the Romanian Academy of Sciences. In 1959, he became a specialist in neurology.
Go to Profile#28505
Nicolas Véron
#28516
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Nicolas Véron is a French economist. He is a senior fellow at Bruegel in Brussels, which he co-founded in 2002–05, and at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC, which he joined in 2009. In 2012, he was included in the global 50 Most Influential list of Bloomberg Markets Magazine.
Go to Profile#28506
Adriaan Blaauw
#28517
Overall Influence
1914 - 2010 (96 years)
Adriaan Blaauw was a Dutch astronomer. Blaauw was born in Amsterdam to Cornelis Blaauw and Gesina Clasina Zwart, and studied at Leiden University and the University of Groningen, obtaining his doctorate at the latter in 1946. In 1948, he was appointed an associate professor at Leiden. In the 1950s he worked a few years at the Yerkes Observatory, before returning to Europe in 1957 to become director of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in Groningen. Blaauw was closely involved in the founding of the European Southern Observatory, and was its general director from 1970 to 1975. In 1975, he returned to the Netherlands, becoming a full professor at Leiden, until his retirement in 1981.
Go to Profile#28507
Lee Kyoung-jun
#28518
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Kyoung Jun Lee is a South Korean management professor. He is a professor of the School of Management at Kyung Hee University. He was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley from February to August 2010 and a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from September 2009 to January 2010.
Go to Profile#28508
Heidrun E. Mader
#28519
Overall Influence
Heidrun E. Mader is a German Protestant theologian and historian of early Christianity and its literature, and a professor at the University of Cologne, Germany, holding a chair of Biblical Literature and its Reception History.
Go to Profile#28509
Malcolm Schofield
#28520
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Malcolm Schofield, is a British classicist and academic, specialising in ancient philosophy. Having taught at Cornell University and the University of Oxford, he joined the University of Cambridge in 1972 as a lecturer in classics and a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He was promoted to Reader in Ancient Philosophy in 1989, and made Professor of Ancient Philosophy 1998. Since retiring in 2009, he has been an emeritus professor at Cambridge.
Go to Profile#28510
Mac Miller
#28521
Overall Influence
1992 - 2018 (26 years)
Malcolm James McCormick , known professionally as Mac Miller, was an American rapper and record producer. Miller began his career in Pittsburgh's local hip hop scene in 2007, at the age of fifteen. In 2010, he signed a record deal with independent label Rostrum Records and released his breakthrough mixtapes K.I.D.S. and Best Day Ever . Miller's debut studio album, Blue Slide Park , became the first independently distributed debut album to top the US Billboard 200 since 1995.
Go to Profile#28511
Orlando Bloom
#28522
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Orlando Jonathan Blanchard Copeland Bloom is an English actor. He made his breakthrough as the character Legolas in The Lord of the Rings film series. He reprised his role in The Hobbit film series. Considered by some to be the Errol Flynn of his time, he gained further notice appearing in epic fantasy, historical, and adventure films, notably as Will Turner in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series, Paris in Troy , Balian de Ibelin in Kingdom of Heaven , and the Duke of Buckingham in The Three Musketeers .
Go to Profile#28512
Tony Kouzarides
#28523
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Tony Kouzarides , FMedSci, FRS is a senior group leader Gurdon Institute, a founding non-executive director of Abcam and a Professor of Cancer Biology at the University of Cambridge. Education Tony did his PhD at the University of Cambridge and postdoctoral work at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and New York University Medical Center. His research group at the Gurdon Institute is focused on epigenetic modifications and their involvement in cancer.
Go to Profile#28513
Sean O'Brien
#28524
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Sean O'Brien FRSL is a British poet, critic and playwright. Prizes he has won include the Eric Gregory Award , the Somerset Maugham Award , the Cholmondeley Award , the Forward Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize . He is one of only three poets to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same collection of poems .
Go to Profile#28514
Ron Appel
#28525
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ron David Appel is a Swiss bioinformatician, professor of proteomics and bioinformatics at the University of Geneva and executive director of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. Education Ron Appel graduated in Computer Sciences at the University of Geneva, where he also received his Ph.D in 1987, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#28515
Lance Strate
#28526
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Lance A. Strate is an American writer and professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University. He was the 2015 Margaret E. and Paul F. Harron Endowed Chair in Communication at Villanova University, and in 2016 lectured at the School of Journalism and Communication at Henan University, in Kaifeng China.
Go to Profile#28516
John R. Isbell
#28527
Overall Influence
1930 - 2005 (75 years)
John Rolfe Isbell was an American mathematician, for many years a professor of mathematics at the University at Buffalo . Biography Isbell was born in Portland, Oregon, the son of an army officer from Isbell, a town in Franklin County, Alabama. He attended several undergraduate institutions, including the University of Chicago, where professor Saunders Mac Lane was a source of inspiration. He began his graduate studies in mathematics at Chicago, briefly studied at Oklahoma A&M University and the University of Kansas, and eventually completed a Ph.D. in game theory at Princeton University in 1954 under the supervision of Albert W.
Go to Profile#28517
Thomas S. Ferguson
#28528
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Thomas Shelburne Ferguson is an American mathematician and statistician. He is a professor emeritus of mathematics and statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Education and career Ferguson was born in Oakland, California and was raised nearby in Alameda, California. He majored in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and completed his Ph.D. there in 1956. His dissertation had two separately-titled parts, On Existence of Linear Regression in Linear Structural Relations and A Method of Generating Best Asymptotically Normal Estimates with Application to the Esti...
Go to Profile#28518
Yves Colin de Verdière
#28529
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Yves Colin de Verdière is a French mathematician. Life He studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in the late 1960s, obtained his Ph.D. in 1973, and then spent the bulk of his working life as faculty at Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble. He retired in December 2005.
Go to Profile#28519
Muhamed Filipović
#28530
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
Muhamed Filipović was a Bosnian academic, writer, essayist, theorist and philosopher. As a young man he took part in the communist takeover of power and Yugoslav Partisans in 1945. He worked as a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Sarajevo.
Go to Profile#28520
Mike Sager
#28531
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Mike Sager is an American author, journalist, and educator. A former Washington Post staff writer, Rolling Stone contributing editor, and writer at large for GQ, Sager has been a contributing writer for Esquire for more than three decades. In 2010 he received the American Society of Magazine Editors' National Magazine award for profile writing for his story "The Man Who Never Was," which appeared in Esquire. He is the author of more than a dozen books, and has served as an editor on several journalism text books. Sager has read and lectured at American schools of journalism. In 2012 he founde...
Go to Profile#28521
Paul Silas
#28532
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Paul Theron Silas was an American professional basketball player and head coach in the National Basketball Association . As a player, he was a two-time NBA All-Star and earned five selections to the NBA All-Defensive Team, including twice on the first team. He won three NBA championships: two with the Boston Celtics and one with the Seattle SuperSonics.
Go to Profile#28522
Jeff Hornacek
#28533
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Jeffrey John Hornacek is an American professional basketball coach and a former player who is a coaching consultant for the Utah Jazz of the National Basketball Association . He previously was the head coach for both the Phoenix Suns and the New York Knicks . He was also an assistant coach for the Houston Rockets. He played shooting guard in the NBA from 1986 through 2000 and played collegiately at Iowa State University.
Go to Profile#28523
Vladimir Rvachev
#28534
Overall Influence
1926 - 2005 (79 years)
Vladimir Logvinovich Rvachev, ; 21 October, 1926 - 26 April, 2005 was a Soviet and Ukrainian applied mathematician and engineering scientist. Early life and education Rvachev, the son of a teacher, began studying at the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute in 1943, but the occupation of his home town by the German armed forces forced him to flee and sign up for military service. After the war Rvachev was able to resume his studies at the University of Lviv, from where he graduated in 1952 and where, three years later, attained his first doctorate with a work on elastic theory. Thereafter, he was in charge of the Department of Higher Mathematics at the Berdyansk Pedagogic Institute until 1963.
Go to Profile#28524
Pascal Godefroit
#28535
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Pascal Godefroit is a Belgian paleontologist. He discovered dinosaurs like Olorotitan in 2003. Godefroit is the director of earth and life sciences at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences.
Go to Profile#28525
Marvin Zuckerman
#28536
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Marvin Zuckerman was Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Delaware. Zuckerman is best known for his research into the psychobiological basis of human personality, sensory deprivation, mood state measurement, and sensation seeking. His work was particularly inspired by eminent research psychologists, Hans Eysenck and Arnold Buss.
Go to Profile#28526
Igor Ternov
#28537
Overall Influence
1921 - 1996 (75 years)
Igor Mikhailovich Ternov was a Russian theoretical physicist, known for discovery of new quantum effects in microscopic particle motion such as Dynamic Character of the Electron Anomalous Magnetic Moment, the Effect of Radiative Polarization of Electrons and Positrons in a Magnetic Field, and Quantum Fluctuations of Electron Trajectories in Accelerators.
Go to Profile#28527
Paul Bowles
#28538
Overall Influence
1910 - 1999 (89 years)
Paul Frederic Bowles was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with the Moroccan city of Tangier, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his life.
Go to Profile#28528
Hugh Haughton
#28539
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Hugh Haughton is an academic, author, editor and specialist in Irish literature and the literature of nonsense. Born in Cork, Ireland and educated at Leighton Park School and then Cambridge and Oxford, Haughton is a professor at the University of York.
Go to Profile#28529
Everett C. Olson
#28540
Overall Influence
1910 - 1993 (83 years)
Everett Claire Olson was an American zoologist, paleontologist, and geologist noted for his seminal research of origin and evolution of vertebrate animals. Through his research studying terrestrial vertebrate fossils he identified intervals of extinction in the Permian and Triassic. He developed the concept of chronofauna, which he defined as "a geographically restricted, natural assemblage of interacting animal populations that has maintained its basic structure over a geologically significant period of time". He also proposed stratigraphic correlations between North American and Russian vertebrate-bearing strata for which additional support was found much later.
Go to Profile#28530
Nina Auerbach
#28541
Overall Influence
1943 - 2017 (74 years)
Nina Auerbach was the John Welsh Centennial Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. Her special area of concentration was nineteenth-century England. She published, lectured, and reviewed widely in the fields of Victorian literature, theater, cultural history, and horror fiction and film.
Go to Profile#28531
Peter Linneman
#28542
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Peter Linneman is an American academic who is the principal of Linneman Associates, the CEO and founder of American Land Fund and of KL Realty. He previously served as the Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate, Finance, and Public Policy at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, retiring in December 2010. Linneman served as the founding chairman of Wharton's Real Estate Department, and was the Director of Wharton's Samuel Zell and Robert Lurie Real Estate Center for 13 years. He is also the founding co-editor of the Wharton Real Estate Review. Li...
Go to Profile#28532
Anastasios of Albania
#28543
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Archbishop Anastasios of Tirana, Durrës and All Albania is the Archbishop of Tirana, Durrës and All Albania and as such the primate and Head of the Holy Synod of the Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Albania. He was elected in June 1992. Professor Emeritus of the National University of Athens. Honorary Member of the Academy of Athens. Anastasios is one of the presidents of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches. He is also the honorary president of the World Conference of Religions for Peace.
Go to Profile#28533
Joan Sutherland
#28544
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, was an Australian dramatic coloratura soprano known for her contribution to the renaissance of the bel canto repertoire from the late 1950s to the 1980s. She possessed a voice combining agility, accurate intonation, pinpoint staccatos, a trill and a strong upper register, although music critics complained about her poor diction.
Go to Profile#28534
Leonhard Harding
#28545
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Leonhard Harding is a German historian and scholar in African studies. Biography Leonhard Harding attended elementary school in Paderborn for four years. From 1948 to 1956 he attended high schools in Rietberg and Großkrotzenburg. In 1956 the matriculation examination followed. He studied philosophy for four semesters at the philosophical college of the White Fathers in Trier. From 1959 to 1963 he studied Catholic theology and history of missions in Leuven. In 1963 he began studying history at the Saarland University. In 1965 he passed the secondary school teacher examination for history. Then he went to Cologne.
Go to Profile#28535
David Campbell
#28546
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
David Richard Campbell is a Canadian-American arranger, composer, and conductor. He has composed and arranged music for many films, including North Country , Brokeback Mountain , August: Osage County , Annie , Foxcatcher , Rock of Ages , Dreamgirls , and Joy . He has also worked on over 450 gold and platinum albums by artists of a wide range of genres, including The Rolling Stones, Metallica, Radiohead, Evanescence, Rush, Beyoncé, Muse, Michael Jackson, Aaliyah, Ariana Grande, Harry Styles, Aerosmith, Garth Brooks, and various albums by his son Beck.
Go to Profile#28536
Marty Schottenheimer
#28547
Overall Influence
1943 - 2021 (78 years)
Martin Edward Schottenheimer was an American football linebacker and coach who served as a head coach in the National Football League from 1984 to 2006. He was the head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs for 10 seasons, the Cleveland Browns and the San Diego Chargers for five each, and the Washington Commanders for one. Eighth in career wins at 205 and seventh in regular season wins at 200, Schottenheimer has the most wins of an NFL head coach to not win a championship. After coaching in the NFL, he won a 2011 championship in his one season with the Virginia Destroyers of the United Football League .
Go to Profile#28537
Nadezhda Troyan
#28548
Overall Influence
1921 - 2011 (90 years)
Nadezhda Viktorovna Troyan was a Soviet Belarusian intelligence officer who also served as a nurse in a partisan unit. She is most known for her role in the assassination of Wilhelm Kube, for which she and her fellow co-conspirators were honored with the title Hero of the Soviet Union on 29 October 1943.
Go to Profile#28538
André Villas-Boas
#28549
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Luís André de Pina Cabral e Villas-Boas is a Portuguese football manager. He is one of a growing number of top-level managers who have never played football professionally and one of the few managers to have never played beyond youth football.
Go to Profile#28539
George Woltman
#28550
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
George Woltman is the founder of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search , a distributed computing project researching Mersenne prime numbers using his software Prime95. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in computer science. He lives in North Carolina. His mathematical libraries created for the GIMPS project are the fastest known for multiplication of large integers, and are used by other distributed computing projects as well, such as Seventeen or Bust.
Go to Profile#28540
Mireille Mathieu
#28551
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Mireille Mathieu is a French singer. She has recorded over 1200 songs in eleven languages, with more than 122 million records sold worldwide. Biography and career Early years Mireille Mathieu was born on 22 July 1946 in Avignon, France, as the eldest daughter of a family of fourteen children; the youngest brother was born after she moved to Paris. Her father Roger and his family were native to Avignon, while her mother Marcelle-Sophie was from Dunkirk. She arrived in Avignon in 1944 as a refugee from World War II after her grandmother had died, and her mother went missing. Roger, with his father Arcade, ran the family stonemason shop just outside the Saint-Véran cemetery main gate.
Go to Profile#28541
Wolfgang Wickler
#28552
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Wolfgang Wickler is a German zoologist, behavioral researcher and author. He led the ethological department of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology from 1974, and he took over as director of the institute in 1975. Even after he was given emeritus status, he remained closely associated to the institute in Seewiesen and ensured its smooth transition under the newly created Max Planck Institute for Ornithology.
Go to Profile#28542
Minnie Bruce Pratt
#28553
Overall Influence
1946 - 2023 (77 years)
Minnie Bruce Pratt was an American poet, educator, activist, and essayist. She retired in 2015 from her position as Professor of Writing and Women's Studies at Syracuse University where she was invited to help develop the university's first LGBT studies program.
Go to Profile#28543
Mary Susan McIntosh
#28554
Overall Influence
1936 - 2013 (77 years)
Mary Susan McIntosh was a British sociologist, feminist, political activist and campaigner for lesbian and gay rights in the United Kingdom. Early life and education Mary Susan McIntosh was born on 13 March 1936 in Hampstead, North London, to Helena Agnes Britton and her husband Albert William McIntosh, a Jedburgh-born businessman and graduate of the University of Edinburgh, who went on to become the first Professor of Marketing at the London Business School. Both parents were socialists, members of the 1917 Club and later the Communist Party. Her elder brother, Andrew Robert McIntosh, was a...
Go to Profile#28544
Adrian Dantley
#28555
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Adrian Delano Dantley is an American former professional basketball player and coach who played 15 seasons in the National Basketball Association . Dantley is a six-time NBA All-Star, a two-time All-NBA selection and a two-time NBA scoring champion. Dantley finished ninth on the all-time NBA scoring list at the time of his retirement and was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008. He served as an assistant coach for the Denver Nuggets of the NBA from 2003 to 2011. He played college basketball for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.
Go to Profile#28545
Audrey Niffenegger
#28556
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Audrey Niffenegger is an American writer, artist and academic. Her debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, published in 2003, was a bestseller. Biography Audrey Niffenegger was born in 1963 in South Haven, Michigan. Then she moved to Evanston, Illinois and has since spent a majority of her life in Chicago. Niffenegger started writing books when she was six years old. Niffenegger completed her undergraduate degree at the Art Institute of Chicago where she worked on becoming a visual artist. After completing her undergraduate degree, she got her M.F.A at Northwestern University. Niffenegger is ...
Go to Profile#28546
Malcolm Green
#28557
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Malcolm Leslie Hodder Green was Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oxford. He made many contributions to organometallic chemistry. Education Born in Eastleigh, Hampshire, he was educated at Denstone College and received his Bachelor of Science degree from Acton Technical College in 1956 and his PhD from Imperial College of Science and Technology in 1959 for research carried out under the supervision of Geoffrey Wilkinson.
Go to Profile#28547
Herb Pardes
#28558
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Herbert Pardes is an American physician, psychiatrist, and the executive vice-chairman of NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital. He was the Dean of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons when he was selected to be the inaugural CEO of the merged Presbyterian Hospital and New York Hospital. Dr Pardes retired in 2011 as CEO of the combined entity, NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital and assumed his current post. He is a national figure in psychiatry and academic medicine.
Go to Profile#28548
Antoine Picon
#28559
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Antoine Picon is a 20th-/21st-century French professor of the History of Architecture and technology and co-director of Doctoral Programs at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He teaches courses in the history and theory of architecture and technology. He is member of the scientific committee of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Versailles -ENSAV-
Go to Profile#28549
Pietro Trifone
#28560
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Pietro Trifone , is an Italian linguist. Biography Trifone lectures History of Italian language at the department of Philology, linguistics and literature of the University of Rome Tor Vergata. He has also led research work at the Sapienza Università di Roma, D'Annunzio University of Chieti–Pescara and Foreigners University of Siena.
Go to Profile#28550
Brian Williams
#28561
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Brian James Williams is a Canadian sportscaster who is best known for his coverage of the Olympic Games. Early life Williams' father was a physician. His father's work caused the Williams family to relocate to such places as Invermere, British Columbia; New Haven, Connecticut; Edmonton, Alberta; Hamilton, Ontario ; Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan and Grand Rapids, Michigan . After graduating, he spent a year as a teacher at a Grand Rapids school.
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