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
#2951
Michael McFaul
#2955
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Michael Anthony McFaul is an American academic and diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. McFaul is currently the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor in International Studies in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, where he is the Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also a Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. Prior to his nomination to the ambassadorial position, McFaul worked for the U.S. National S...
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Andrew Gelman
#2956
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
#2953
Gilbert Gottfried
#2957
Overall Influence
1955 - 2022 (67 years)
Gilbert Jeremy Gottfried was an American stand-up comedian and actor, best known for his exaggerated shrill voice, strong New York accent, and his edgy, often controversial, sense of humor. His numerous roles in film and television include voicing Iago in the Aladdin animated franchise, Mr. Mxyzptlk in Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League Action, Digit LeBoid in Cyberchase, Kraang and Subprime in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles He also played Mr. Peabody in the Problem Child film series.
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Hilary Koprowski
#2958
Overall Influence
1916 - 2013 (97 years)
Hilary Koprowski was a Polish virologist and immunologist active in the United States who demonstrated the world's first effective live polio vaccine. He authored or co-authored over 875 scientific papers and co-edited several scientific journals.
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Charles Brenton Huggins
#2959
Overall Influence
1901 - 1997 (96 years)
Charles Brenton Huggins was a Canadian-American physician, physiologist and cancer researcher at the University of Chicago specializing in prostate cancer. He was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering in 1941 that hormones could be used to control the spread of some cancers. This was the first discovery that showed that cancer could be controlled by chemicals.
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Juris Hartmanis
#2960
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Juris Hartmanis was a Latvian-born American computer scientist and computational theorist who, with Richard E. Stearns, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award "in recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory".
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Jean-Yves Girard
#2961
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Jean-Yves Girard is a French logician working in proof theory. He is a research director at the mathematical institute of University of Aix-Marseille, at Luminy. Biography Jean-Yves Girard is an alumnus of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud.
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George Martin
#2962
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Sir George Henry Martin was an English record producer, arranger, composer, conductor, and musician. He was commonly referred to as the "Fifth Beatle" because of his extensive involvement in each of the Beatles' original albums. Martin's formal musical expertise and interest in novel recording practices facilitated the group's rudimentary musical education and desire for new musical sounds to record. Most of their orchestral arrangements and instrumentation were written or performed by Martin, and he played piano or keyboards on a number of their records. Their collaborations resulted in popular, highly acclaimed records with innovative sounds, such as the 1967 album Sgt.
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Vito Acconci
#2963
Overall Influence
1940 - 2017 (77 years)
Vito Acconci was an American performance, video and installation artist, whose diverse practice eventually included sculpture, architectural design, and landscape design. His performance and video art was characterized by "existential unease," exhibitionism, discomfort, transgression and provocation, as well as wit and audacity, and often involved crossing boundaries such as public–private, consensual–nonconsensual, and real world–art world. His work is considered to have influenced artists including Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, Bruce Nauman, and Tracey Emin, among others.
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David Benatar
#2964
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
David Benatar is a South African philosopher, academic, and author. He is best known for his advocacy of antinatalism in his book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, in which he argues that coming into existence is serious harm, regardless of the feelings of the existing being once brought into existence, and that, as a consequence, it is always morally wrong to create more sentient beings.
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Tim Flannery
#2965
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Timothy Fridtjof Flannery is an Australian mammalogist, palaeontologist, environmentalist, conservationist, explorer, author, science communicator, activist and public scientist. He was awarded Australian of the Year in 2007 for his work and advocacy on environmental issues.
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David Gergen
#2966
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
David Richmond Gergen is an American political commentator and former presidential adviser who served during the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. He is currently a senior political analyst for CNN and a professor of public service and the founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. Gergen is also the former editor at large of U.S. News & World Report and a contributor to CNN.com and Parade Magazine. He has twice been a member of election coverage teams that won Peabody awards—in 1988 with MacNeil–Lehrer, a...
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R. L. Stine
#2967
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Robert Lawrence Stine , sometimes known as Jovial Bob Stine and Eric Affabee, is an American novelist, short story writer, television producer, screenwriter, and executive editor. Stine has been referred to as the "Stephen King of children's literature" and is the author of hundreds of horror fiction novels, including the books in the Fear Street, Goosebumps, Rotten School, Mostly Ghostly and The Nightmare Room series. Some of his other works include a Space Cadets trilogy, two Hark gamebooks, and dozens of joke books. As of 2008, Stine's books have sold over 400 million copies.
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Walter Everett
#2968
Overall Influence
Walter Everett is a music theorist specializing in popular music who teaches at the University of Michigan. His books include The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology , which has been called "the most important work to appear on the Beatles thus far", and its follow-up volume, The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul . He also wrote The Foundations of Rock: From 'Blue Suede Shoes' to 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes and has contributed to titles in the Cambridge Companions to Music series.
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Tim Ingold
#2969
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Tim Ingold is Chair of Social Anthropology at University of Aberdeen. He earned his B.A. and Ph.D from Churchill College at University of Cambridge. His research interests are diverse and include creativity, environmental perception, human-animal relations, technology, and many others. His earliest research was an examination of the hunting peoples living in the arctic, dependent on caribou or reindeer. As a result of that experience, he became more curious about interactions between reindeer and humans and ecological anthropology. He has also explored the evolution of language and technology and cultural transmission.
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Michael Smith
#2970
Overall Influence
1932 - 2000 (68 years)
Michael Smith was a British-born Canadian biochemist and businessman. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kary Mullis for his work in developing site-directed mutagenesis. Following a PhD in 1956 from the University of Manchester, he undertook postdoctoral research with Har Gobind Khorana at the British Columbia Research Council in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Subsequently, Smith worked at the Fisheries Research Board of Canada Laboratory in Vancouver before being appointed a professor of biochemistry in the UBC Faculty of Medicine in 1966. Smith's career included roles...
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Leo Kadanoff
#2971
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
Leo Philip Kadanoff was an American physicist. He was a professor of physics at the University of Chicago and a former president of the American Physical Society . He contributed to the fields of statistical physics, chaos theory, and theoretical condensed matter physics.
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Marilyn vos Savant
#2972
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Marilyn vos Savant is an American magazine columnist who has the highest recorded intelligence quotient in the Guinness Book of Records, a competitive category the publication has since retired. Since 1986, she has written "Ask Marilyn", a Parade magazine Sunday column wherein she solves puzzles and answers questions on various subjects, and which popularized the Monty Hall problem in 1990.
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David A. Huffman
#2973
Overall Influence
1925 - 1999 (74 years)
David Albert Huffman was an American pioneer in computer science, known for his Huffman coding. He was also one of the pioneers in the field of mathematical origami. Education Huffman earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Ohio State University in 1944. Then, he served two years as an officer in the United States Navy. He returned to Ohio State to earn his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1949. In 1953, he earned his Doctor of Science in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , with the thesis The Synthesis of Sequential Switching Circuits, advised by Samuel H.
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Sam Donaldson
#2974
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Samuel Andrew Donaldson Jr. is an American former reporter and news anchor, serving with ABC News from 1967 to 2009. He is best known as the network's White House Correspondent and as a panelist and later co-anchor of the network's Sunday program, This Week.
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Elias Zerhouni
#2975
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Elias Zerhouni is an Algerian-born American scientist, radiologist and biomedical engineer. He spent much of his career on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, serving as its executive vice-dean from 1995 to 2002. He was the 15th Director of the National Institutes of Health from May 2, 2002, to October 31, 2008, under the George W. Bush administration. In 2009, under the Obama administration he served as one of the country's first presidential science envoys to foster scientific and technologic collaboration with other nations. He also served as a senior fellow for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from 2009 through 2010.
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Tim Hunt
#2976
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Sir Richard Timothy Hunt, is a British biochemist and molecular physiologist. He was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Nurse and Leland H. Hartwell for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division of cells. While studying fertilized sea urchin eggs in the early 1980s, Hunt discovered cyclin, a protein that cyclically aggregates and is depleted during cell division cycles.
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Marie Jahoda
#2977
Overall Influence
1907 - 2001 (94 years)
Marie Jahoda was an Austrian-British social psychologist. Biography Jahoda was born in Vienna to a Jewish merchant's family, and like many other psychologists of her time, grew up in Austria where political oppression against socialists was rampant henceforward Engelbert Dollfuss claimed power. Starting in her adolescent years she became engaged in the Austrian Social Democratic Party in ″Red Vienna.″ This was a major influence on her life. She is considered as Grande Dame of European socialism. In 1928, she earned her teaching diploma from the Pedagogical Academy of Vienna, and in 1933 earned her Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology from the University of Vienna.
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Mark Russinovich
#2978
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Mark Eugene Russinovich is a Spanish-born American software engineer and author who serves as CTO of Microsoft Azure. He was a cofounder of software producers Winternals before Microsoft acquired it in 2006.
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Michael Dirda
#2979
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Michael Dirda is a book critic for the Washington Post. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Career Having studied at Oberlin College for his undergraduate degree in 1970, Dirda took an M.A. in 1974 and PhD in 1977 from Cornell University in comparative literature. In 1978 Dirda started writing for the Washington Post; in 1993 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his criticism. Currently, he is a book columnist for the Post.
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Joseph L. Doob
#2980
Overall Influence
1910 - 2004 (94 years)
Joseph Leo Doob was an American mathematician, specializing in analysis and probability theory. The theory of martingaless was developed by Doob. Early life and education Doob was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, February 27, 1910, the son of a Jewish couple, Leo Doob and Mollie Doerfler Doob. The family moved to New York City before he was three years old. The parents felt that he was underachieving in grade school and placed him in the Ethical Culture School, from which he graduated in 1926. He then went on to Harvard where he received a BA in 1930, an MA in 1931, and a PhD in 1932. After postdo...
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John Howard
#2981
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
John Winston Howard is an Australian former politician who served as the 25th prime minister of Australia from 1996 to 2007. He held office as leader of the Liberal Party of Australia, having previously served as the treasurer of Australia from 1977 to 1983 under Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. His eleven-year tenure as prime minister is the second-longest in Australian history, behind only Sir Robert Menzies. Howard has also been the oldest living Australian former prime minister since the death of Bob Hawke in May 2019.
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Ted Chiang
#2982
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Ted Chiang is an American science fiction writer. His work has won four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and six Locus awards. His short story "Story of Your Life" was the basis of the film Arrival . He was an artist in residence at the University of Notre Dame in 2020–2021. Chiang is also a frequent non-fiction contributor to the New Yorker Magazine, most recently on topics related to computer technology, such as artificial intelligence.
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Mort Sahl
#2983
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Morton Lyon Sahl was a Canadian-born American comedian, actor, and social satirist, considered the first modern comedian. He pioneered a style of social satire that pokes fun at political and current event topics using improvised monologues and only a newspaper as a prop.
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Astrid Lindgren
#2984
Overall Influence
1907 - 2002 (95 years)
Astrid Anna Emilia Lindgren was a Swedish writer of fiction and screenplays. She is best known for several children's book series, featuring Pippi Longstocking, Emil of Lönneberga, Karlsson-on-the-Roof, and the Six Bullerby Children , and for the children's fantasy novels Mio, My Son, Ronia the Robber's Daughter, and The Brothers Lionheart. Lindgren worked on the Children's Literature Editorial Board at the Rabén & Sjögren publishing house in Stockholm and wrote more than 30 books for children. In 2017, she was calculated to be the world's 18th most translated author. Lindgren had by 2010 sold roughly 167 million books worldwide.
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Steve Mann
#2985
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
William Stephen George Mann is a Canadian engineer, professor, and inventor who works in augmented reality, computational photography, particularly wearable computing, and high-dynamic-range imaging. Mann is sometimes labeled the "Father of Wearable Computing" for early inventions and continuing contributions to the field. He cofounded InteraXon, makers of the Muse brain-sensing headband, and is also a founding member of the IEEE Council on Extended Intelligence . Mann is currently CTO and cofounder at Blueberry X Technologies and Chairman of MannLab. Mann was born in Canada, and currently lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife and two children.
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Maurice Benayoun
#2986
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Maurice Benayoun is a French new-media artist, curator, and theorist based in Paris and Hong Kong. His work employs various media, including video, computer graphics, immersive virtual reality, the Internet, performance, EEG, 3D Printing, large-scale urban media art, robotics, NFTs, and Blockchain based artworks, installations and interactive exhibitions.
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Robert Morris
#2987
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Robert Morris was an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer. He was regarded as having been one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism along with Donald Judd, but also made important contributions to the development of performance art, land art, the Process Art movement, and installation art. Morris lived and worked in New York. In 2013 as part of the October Files, MIT Press published a volume on Morris, examining his work and influence, edited by Julia Bryan-Wilson.
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Ruby Wax
#2988
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Ruby Wax is an American-British actress, comedian, writer, television personality, and mental health campaigner. A classically-trained actress, Wax was with the Royal Shakespeare Company for five years and co-starred on the ITV sitcom Girls on Top .
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Karl Dietrich Bracher
#2989
Overall Influence
1922 - 2016 (94 years)
Karl Dietrich Bracher was a German political scientist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Born in Stuttgart, Bracher was awarded a Ph.D. in the classics by the University of Tübingen in 1948 and subsequently studied at Harvard University from 1949 to 1950. During World War II, he served in the Wehrmacht and was captured by the Americans while serving in Tunisia in 1943. Bracher taught at the Free University of Berlin from 1950 to 1958 and at the University of Bonn since 1959. In 1951, Bracher married Dorothee Schleicher, the niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They had two chil...
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Tina Turner
#2990
Overall Influence
1939 - 2023 (84 years)
Tina Turner was a singer, songwriter and actress. Known as the "Queen of Rock 'n' Roll", she rose to prominence as the lead singer of the husband-wife duo Ike & Tina Turner before launching a successful career as a solo performer. She was recognized for her "swagger, sensuality, powerful gravelly vocals and unstoppable energy." In 1994 she began living in Küsnacht, Switzerland, and relinquished her American citizenship after obtaining Swiss citizenship in 2013.
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André Lichnerowicz
#2991
Overall Influence
1915 - 1998 (83 years)
André Lichnerowicz was a French differential geometer and mathematical physicist. He is considered the founder of modern Poisson geometry. Biography His grandfather Jan fought in the Polish resistance against the Prussians. Forced to flee Poland in 1860, he finally settled in France, where he married a woman from Auvergne, Justine Faure. Lichnerowicz's father, Jean, held agrégation in classics and was secretary of the Alliance française, while his mother, a descendant of paper makers, was one of the first women to earn the agrégation in mathematics. Lichnerowicz's paternal aunt, Jeanne, was a...
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Marina Warner
#2992
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Dame Marina Sarah Warner, is an English historian, mythographer, art critic, novelist and short story writer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. She has written for many publications, including The London Review of Books, the New Statesman, Sunday Times and Vogue. She has been a visiting professor, given lectures and taught on the faculties of many universities.
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Juan Maldacena
#2993
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Juan Martín Maldacena is an Argentine theoretical physicist and the Carl P. Feinberg Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He has made significant contributions to the foundations of string theory and quantum gravity. His most famous discovery is the AdS/CFT correspondence, a realization of the holographic principle in string theory.
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Alexander Rich
#2994
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Alexander Rich was an American biologist and biophysicist. He was the William Thompson Sedgwick Professor of Biophysics at MIT and Harvard Medical School. Rich earned an A.B. and an M.D. from Harvard University. He was a post-doc of Linus Pauling. During this time he was a member of the RNA Tie Club, a social and discussion group which attacked the question of how DNA encodes proteins. He had over 600 publications to his name.
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Reinhold Zippelius
#2995
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Reinhold Zippelius is a German jurist and law scholar. Now retired, he was formerly the professor of the Philosophy of law and Public law at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Life and career Reinhold Walter Zippelius was born in Ansbach , the son of Hans Zippelius and Marie Zippelius. He embarked on his study of jurisprudence in 1947 at Würzburg and then at Erlangen. In 1949 he switched to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich where between 1949 and 1961 he was supported by a scholarship-bursary. He received his doctorate in 1953. His habilitation , also from Munich, and supervi...
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Jack Goldsmith
#2996
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
#2993
John Silber
#2997
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
John Robert Silber was an American academician and candidate for public office. From 1971 to 1996, he was President of Boston University and, from 1996 to 2002, Chancellor. From 2002 to 2003, he again served as President ; and, from 2003 until his death, he held the title of President Emeritus.
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Bruce Alberts
#2998
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Bruce Michael Alberts is an American biochemist and the Chancellor’s Leadership Chair in Biochemistry and Biophysics for Science and Education, emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco. He has done important work studying the protein complexes which enable chromosome replication when living cells divide. He is known as an original author of the "canonical, influential, and best-selling scientific textbook" Molecular Biology of the Cell, and as Editor-in-Chief of Science magazine.
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Gertrude B. Elion
#2999
Overall Influence
1918 - 1999 (81 years)
Gertrude "Trudy" Belle Elion was an American biochemist and pharmacologist, who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with George H. Hitchings and Sir James Black for their use of innovative methods of rational drug design for the development of new drugs. This new method focused on understanding the target of the drug rather than simply using trial-and-error. Her work led to the creation of the anti-retroviral drug AZT, which was the first drug widely used against AIDS. Her well known works also include the development of the first immunosuppressive drug, azathioprine, used t...
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David Patterson
#3000
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
David Andrew Patterson is an American computer pioneer and academic who has held the position of professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1976. He announced retirement in 2016 after serving nearly forty years, becoming a distinguished software engineer at Google. He currently is vice chair of the board of directors of the RISC-V Foundation, and the Pardee Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at UC Berkeley.
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Ellsworth Kelly
#3001
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.
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Yoshitaka Amano
#3002
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Yoshitaka Amano is a Japanese visual artist, character designer, illustrator, a scenic designer for theatre and film, and a costume designer. He first came into prominence in the late 1960s working on the anime adaptation of Speed Racer. Amano later became the creator of iconic and influential characters such as Gatchaman, Tekkaman, Honeybee Hutch, and Casshern. In 1982 he went independent and became a freelance artist, finding success as an illustrator for numerous authors, and worked on best-selling novel series, such as The Guin Saga and Vampire Hunter D. He is also known for his commission...
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Jamal Nazrul Islam
#3003
Overall Influence
1939 - 2013 (74 years)
Jamal Nazrul Islam was a Bangladeshi mathematical physicist and cosmologist. He was a professor at University of Chittagong, served as a member of the advisory board at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology and member of the syndicate at Chittagong University of Engineering & Technology until his death. He also served as the director of the Research Center for Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Chittagong. He was awarded Ekushey Padak in 2000 by the Government of Bangladesh.
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Elizabeth S. Anderson
#3004
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Elizabeth Secor Anderson is an American philosopher. She is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan and specializes in political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy.
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