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
#29651
Kirsten Flipkens
#29663
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Kirsten "Flipper" Flipkens is a Belgian former professional tennis player and coach. She reached a career-high ranking of No. 13 by the Women's Tennis Association . Flipkens has won one singles title on the WTA Tour, winning the 2012 Tournoi de Québec, as well as seven doubles titles. She also won 13 singles and two doubles titles on the ITF Women's Circuit, and one singles title on the WTA Challenger Tour.
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Jeffrey Dean Morgan
#29664
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Jeffrey Dean Morgan is an American actor of television and film, best known for playing the character Negan in the AMC horror drama series The Walking Dead , a role he reprised in The Walking Dead: Dead City , for which he has received critical acclaim. He has also appeared in such television roles as John Winchester in the CW fantasy horror series Supernatural , Denny Duquette in the ABC medical drama series Grey's Anatomy , Jason Crouse in the CBS political drama series The Good Wife , the Comedian in the superhero film Watchmen , as well as film roles including William Gallagher in P.S. I Love You , Clay in The Losers , Sgt.
Go to Profile#29653
Kate Hudson
#29665
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Katharine Jane Hudson is a British left-wing political activist and academic who is the General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Media Officer of Left Unity. She served as Chair of CND from 2003 to 2010 and has been an officer of the Stop the War Coalition since 2002.
Go to Profile#29654
Sally Shuttleworth
#29666
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Sally Ann Shuttleworth is a British academic specialising in Victorian literature. She is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. From 2006 to 2011, she was Head of the Humanities Division, University of Oxford. From 2014 to 2019 she was a principal investigator on the Diseases of Modern Life project, a multidisciplinary research initiative exploring nineteenth century scientific and cultural ideas related to stress and information overload.
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Steve Redgrave
#29667
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Sir Steven Geoffrey Redgrave is a British retired rower who won gold medals at five consecutive Olympic Games from 1984 to 2000. He has also won three Commonwealth Games gold medals and nine World Rowing Championships golds. He is the most successful male rower in Olympic history, and the only man to have won gold medals at five Olympic Games in an endurance sport.
Go to Profile#29656
GZA
#29668
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Gary Grice , better known by his stage names GZA and The Genius, is an American rapper. A founding member of the hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan, GZA is the group's "spiritual head", being both the first member in the group to receive a record deal and being the oldest member. He has appeared on his fellow Wu-Tang members' solo projects, and has maintained a successful solo career starting with Liquid Swords .
Go to Profile#29657
Iosif Khriplovich
#29669
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Iosif Benzionovich Khriplovich is a Russian theoretical physicist who has made deep contributions in quantum field theory, atomic physics, and general relativity. He is a Chief Researcher at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, Novosibirsk, and holds a Chair of Theoretical Physics at Novosibirsk State University. Dr. Khriplovich was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2000, and remains a Corresponding Member. He was awarded the 2004 Silver Dirac Medal for the Advancement of Theoretical Physics by University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and shared the 2005 Pomeranchuk ...
Go to Profile#29658
Loretta Devine
#29670
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Loretta Devine is an American actress and singer. She is known for numerous roles across stage and screen. Her most high profile roles include Lorrell Robinson in the original Broadway production of Dreamgirls, the long-suffering Gloria Matthews in the film Waiting to Exhale, and her recurring role as Adele Webber on the medical drama Grey's Anatomy, for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series in 2011.
Go to Profile#29659
Leslie A. Geddes
#29671
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
Leslie Alexander Geddes was an electrical engineer and physiologist. He conducted research in electromyography, cardiac output, cardiac pacing, ventricular defibrillation, and blood pressure. He discovered and demonstrated precisely the optimal sites on the chest for defibrillation or pacing.
Go to Profile#29660
David Stronach
#29672
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
David Brian Stronach was a British archaeologist of ancient Iran and Iraq who became an expert on the city of Pasargadae and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in June 1931, Stronach was the son of Ian David Stronach FRCSE and his wife Marjorie Jessie Duncan Minto, and was educated at Gordonstoun School and St John's College, Cambridge, from which he graduated Master of Arts in 1958. In the 1960s and 1970s he was director of the British Institute of Persian Studies in Tehran. In the 1990s, he excavated several parts of Nineveh. His scholarship earned him s...
Go to Profile#29661
Sam Smith
#29673
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Samuel Frederick Smith is an English singer and songwriter. In October 2012, they performed on Disclosure's breakthrough single "Latch", which peaked at number eleven on the UK Singles Chart. The following year, they performed on Naughty Boy's 2013 single "La La La", which became a number one single on the chart.
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Billy Dee Williams
#29674
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
William December Williams Jr. is an American actor, novelist and painter. He appeared as Lando Calrissian in the Star Wars franchise, first in the early 1980s for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi , and 36 years later in The Rise of Skywalker , marking one of the longest intervals between onscreen portrayals of a character by the same actor in American film history.
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Ralph Keeling
#29675
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ralph Franklin Keeling is a professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He is the Principal Investigator for the Atmospheric Oxygen Research Group at Scripps and is the director of the Scripps Program, the measurement program behind the Keeling curve, which was started by his father Charles David Keeling in 1958. Ralph Keeling has developed precise instruments and techniques for the measurement of atmospheric oxygen and anthropogenic in the ocean, and for the analysis of land and ocean carbon sinks.
Go to Profile#29664
Adele Cutler
#29676
Overall Influence
Adele Cutler is a statistician known as one of the developers of archetypal analysis and of the random forest technique for ensemble learning. She is a professor of mathematics and statistics at Utah State University.
Go to Profile#29665
Deborah Mowshowitz
#29677
Overall Influence
Deborah Mowshowitz is an American biochemist and a Professor of Biology and Director of Undergraduate Programs and Lab Operations at Columbia University. Mowshowitz was trained in pure biochemistry and has done research in RNA processing. In her early work she focused on pedagogy and biology education.
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Sean Elliott
#29678
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Sean Michael Elliott is an American former professional basketball player who starred as a small forward in both the college and professional ranks. He attended the University of Arizona, where he had a standout career as a two-time All-American, winner of the 1989 John R. Wooden Award, the 1989 Adolph Rupp Trophy, the 1989 NABC Player of the Year, 1989 AP Player of the Year, and two time Pac-12 Player of the Year .
Go to Profile#29667
Terunobu Fujimori
#29679
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Terunobu Fujimori is a Japanese architect and architectural historian. During the 1970s and 1980s he made studies of the city about early Western buildings and unusual occurrences, and did not turn to architecture until he was in his forties. His work is considered by many to be eccentric but is characterised by his use of natural materials.
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Ralph Louis Cohen
#29680
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Ralph Louis Cohen is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic topology and differential topology. Career Cohen received his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1973 and his Ph.D. in 1978 from Brandeis University where he worked under the supervision of Edgar H. Brown, Jr. His thesis was titled On Odd Primary Stable Homotopy Theory. He did his postdoctoral training as an L.E. Dickson Instructor at the University Chicago, and then became an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University in 1980. In 1983, he became an Associate Professor and was promoted to Full Professor in 1987.
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X. J. Kennedy
#29681
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
X. J. Kennedy is an American poet, translator, anthologist, editor, and author of children's literature and textbooks on English literature and poetry. He was long known as Joe Kennedy; but, wishing to distinguish himself from Joseph P. Kennedy, he added an "X" as his first initial.
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David Silva
#29682
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
David Josué Jiménez Silva is a Spanish former professional footballer who played mainly as a central or an attacking midfielder but also played as a winger or second striker. His passing ability and possession-retaining qualities earned him the nicknames Merlin and El Mago from his teammates and fans. He is considered one of the greatest midfielders of his generation and one of Manchester City's greatest ever players.
Go to Profile#29671
Pol Antràs
#29683
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Pol Antràs Puchal is a Spanish economist. He is Robert G. Ory Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he has taught since 2003. He received his BA and MSc in economics in 1998 and 1999, respectively, from Pompeu Fabra University Barcelona and his PhD in economics from MIT in 2003. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research , where he served as director of the International Trade and Organization Working Group. He is also a research affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and is a member of CESifo’s Research Network. Since 2015, he has ser...
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Ullica Segerstråle
#29684
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Ullica Christina Olofsdotter Segerstråle is a Finnish sociologist and historian of science who is professor of sociology at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Segerstråle’s published nonfiction books include Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond and Nature’s Oracle: The Life and Work of W. D. Hamilton , the latter of which is the first biography of evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton.
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Hubert Kennedy
#29685
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Hubert Collings Kennedy is an American author and mathematician. Kennedy was born in Florida and studied mathematics at several universities. From 1961 he was professor of mathematics, with research interest in the history of mathematics, at Providence College , He spent three sabbatical years doing research in Italy and Germany. He published a definitive biography of Giuseppe Peano who conceived modern mathematical notation.
Go to Profile#29674
Claire Horwell
#29686
Overall Influence
Claire Judith Horwell is a professor of Geohealth in the Department of Earth Sciences and Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience at Durham University and the founding Director of the International Volcanic Health Hazard Network . She studies the health hazards of natural and industrial mineral dusts and community protection.
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Willi A. Kalender
#29687
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Willi A. Kalender is a German medical physicist and professor and former chairman of the Institute of Medical Physics of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Kalender has produced several new technologies in the field of diagnostic radiology imaging.
Go to Profile#29676
Murray Krieger
#29688
Overall Influence
1923 - 2000 (77 years)
Murray Krieger was an American literary critic and theorist. He was a professor at the University of Minnesota, the University of Iowa from 1963, and then the University of California, Irvine. In 1999, the University of California, Irvine dedicated a building, Murray Krieger Hall, to Krieger in recognition of his contributions to the school.
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Randolph Chitwood
#29689
Overall Influence
Walter Randolph "Ranny" Chitwood Jr. is known for his work as a cardiothoracic surgeon at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University located in Greenville, North Carolina. Chitwood is recognized as the first heart surgeon to perform robot-assisted heart valve surgery in the US.
Go to Profile#29678
Gunnar Beck
#29690
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Gunnar Beck is a German politician, academic and lawyer. He is Member of the European Parliament for the Alternative for Germany party and currently hold the position of deputy leader of the AfD in the European Parliament and Vice-President of the Identity & Democracy Group. He previously was, and currently remains, a reader in law at the SOAS, University of London.
Go to Profile#29679
Henry E. Kyburg Jr.
#29691
Overall Influence
1928 - 2007 (79 years)
Henry E. Kyburg Jr. was Gideon Burbank Professor of Moral Philosophy and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, New York, and Pace Eminent Scholar at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pensacola, Florida. His first faculty posts were at Rockefeller Institute, University of Denver, Wesleyan College, and Wayne State University.
Go to Profile#29680
Lucien Engelen
#29692
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Lucien Engelen is the CEO of Transform.health, Edge Fellow Center for the Edge Deloitte, and a LinkedIn influencer. Biography Lucien Engelen has worked at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre since 2007 as Head of the Regional Emergency Healthcare Network. He is the founder and director of the Radboudumc REshape Innovation Center 2010-2018. He left Radboudumc as of December 2018. and via his company Transform.health he became one of the Edge Fellows at Deloitte Center for the Edge . He is an international speaker on healthcare innovation and as of December 2020 joined Erasmus Universi...
Go to Profile#29681
Sebastian Kurz
#29693
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Sebastian Kurz is an Austrian former politician who served twice as the chancellor of Austria, initially from December 2017 to May 2019 and then a second time from January 2020 to October 2021. Kurz was born and raised in Meidling, Vienna. He entered politics by joining the Young People's Party in 2003 and rose through the ranks there over the following years. As a result of a cabinet reshuffle in 2011, Kurz received his first government mandate as state secretary responsible for socially integrating refugees. After the 2013 legislative election, Kurz became the country's foreign minister an...
Go to Profile#29682
Richard H. Fallon Jr.
#29694
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Richard Henry Fallon Jr. is an American legal scholar and the Story Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Early life and education Fallon was born in Augusta, Maine, on 4 January 1952, and attended Yale College, graduating in 1975 with a bachelor of arts degree. He then accepted a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford, where he completed an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree in philosophy, politics and economics in 1977. Fallon returned to the United States and earned a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School in 1980. Fallon subsequently served as a law clerk for J. Skelly Wright and Lewis F.
Go to Profile#29683
Ken P. Chong
#29695
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Ken P. Chong Chong grew up and obtained high school education at the Queen Elizabeth School, Hong Kong. He pursued higher education for the B.S. degree in Civil Engineering with major in Structures at the Taiwan National Cheng Kung University, and M.S. degree for Structural Mechanics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He also obtained advanced degrees at Princeton University: M.A., M.S. in Engineering, and completed the Ph.D. in Mechanics, 1969. After that he received post-doctoral management training at the Federal Executive Institute, for senior federal executives, Class 221, 1996....
Go to Profile#29684
Frank Wilson Warner
#29696
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Frank Wilson Warner III is an American mathematician, specializing in differential geometry. Education and career Warner graduated in 1959 with a bachelor's degree from Pennsylvania State University and in 1963 with a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His thesis, written under the supervision of Isadore M. Singer, is entitled Conjugate Locus of a Riemannian Manifold. At the University of California, Berkeley, Warner was an assistant professor from 1965 to 1968. At the University of Pennsylvania, he became an associate professor in 1968 and a full professor in 1973.
Go to Profile#29685
Emily Blunt
#29697
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Emily Olivia Laura Blunt is a British actress. She is the recipient of several accolades, including a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award, in addition to nominations for three British Academy Film Awards. Forbes ranked her as one of the highest-paid actresses in the world in 2020.
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Robert Griffin III
#29698
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (36 years)
Robert Lee Griffin III , nicknamed RGIII, is a former American football quarterback who played in the National Football League for eight seasons, most notably with the Washington Redskins. He played college football at Baylor University, winning the Heisman Trophy as a senior, and was selected second overall by the Redskins in the 2012 NFL Draft.
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Alberto Kornblihtt
#29699
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Alberto Kornblihtt is an Argentine molecular biologist who specializes in alternative ribonucleic acid splicing. During his postdoctoral training with Francisco Baralle in Oxford, Kornblihtt documented one of the first cases of alternative splicing, explaining how a single transcribed gene can generate multiple protein variants. Kornblihtt was elected as a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States in 2011, received the Diamond Award for the most relevant scientist of Argentina of the decade, alongside physicist Juan Martin Maldacena, in 2013., and was incorpor...
Go to Profile#29688
William Dickens
#29700
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
William T. Dickens is an American economist. He is a University Distinguished Professor of Economics and Social Policy at Northeastern University. Career Dickens was on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley from 1980 until 1995. While on leave he served as a senior economist with the President of the United States' Council of Economic Advisers, in 1993-94 where he worked for Laura Tyson. He was a Faculty Research Fellow and then a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1982 to 1998. He was a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Inst...
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Bruce Bowen
#29701
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Bruce Eric Bowen Jr. is an American former professional basketball player. Bowen played small forward and graduated from Edison High School and Cal State Fullerton. He went on to play for the National Basketball Association's Miami Heat, Boston Celtics, Philadelphia 76ers, San Antonio Spurs and the Continental Basketball Association's Rockford Lightning, and also played abroad in France.
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Larry the Cable Guy
#29702
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Daniel Lawrence Whitney , known professionally as Larry the Cable Guy, is an American stand-up comedian, actor, and former radio personality. He was one of the members of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, a comedy troupe which included Bill Engvall, Ron White, and Jeff Foxworthy .
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Trevor Pearcey
#29703
Overall Influence
1919 - 1998 (79 years)
Trevor Pearcey was a British-born Australian scientist, who created CSIRAC, one of the first stored-program electronic computers in the world. Born in Woolwich, London, he graduated from Imperial College in 1940 with first class honours in physics and mathematics. He emigrated to Australia in 1945.
Go to Profile#29692
Denis Duboule
#29704
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Denis Duboule is a Swiss-French biologist. He earned his PhD in Biology in 1984 and is currently Professor of Developmental Genetics and Genomics at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne and at the Department of Genetics and Evolution of the University of Geneva. Since 2001, he is the Director of the Swiss National Research Center "Frontiers in Genetics" and since 2017, he is also a professor at the Collège de France. He has notably worked on Hox genes, a group of genes involved in the formation of the body plan and of the limbs.
Go to Profile#29693
Andrea Musacchio
#29705
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Andrea Musacchio is an Italian structural biologist. He is Max Planck director at the Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund. He is also Honorary Professor at the Center for Medical Biotechnology at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He was named European Molecular Biology Organization member in 2009.
Go to Profile#29694
Bill Mazeroski
#29706
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
William Stanley Mazeroski , nicknamed "Maz" and "the Glove", is an American former second baseman in Major League Baseball who played his entire career for the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1956 to 1972. A seven-time All-Star known during his career primarily for his spectacular defensive play, he has come to be better known for perhaps the most memorable home run in baseball history, a dramatic ninth-inning drive in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series that beat the favored New York Yankees. It was the first time that the major league season ended with a home run, and remains the only walk-off home run to clinch a World Series championship in Game 7.
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Shaggy
#29707
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Orville Richard Burrell , better known by his stage name Shaggy, is a Jamaican-American reggae rapper, singer, and songwriter who scored hits with the songs "It Wasn't Me", "Boombastic", "In The Summertime", "Oh Carolina", and "Angel". He has been nominated for seven Grammy Awards, winning twice for Best Reggae Album with Boombastic in 1996 and 44/876 with Sting in 2019, and has won the Brit Award for International Male Solo Artist in 2002.
Go to Profile#29696
Mel Collins
#29708
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Melvyn Desmond Collins is a British saxophonist, flautist and session musician. Collins has played in several progressive rock groups, having been a member of King Crimson on two occasions and having played with Camel, the Alan Parsons Project, Roger Waters and Chris Squire. He has also worked in a wide variety of contexts ranging from R&B and blues rock to jazz.
Go to Profile#29697
Anna Ogino
#29709
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Anna Ogino is a Japanese author and emeritus professor of literature at Keio University. She has won the Akutagawa Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, and the Itō Sei Literature Prize. Early years Ogino was born as Anna Gaillard in Naka-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, to a Japanese mother and a French-American father. Her mother, Kinuko Emi, was a prominent abstract painter. Ogino was naturalized during elementary school, and received her undergraduate and master's degree in French literature from Keio University, as well as receiving a scholarship to Paris-Sorbonne University to study Rabelais. In 2...
Go to Profile#29698
Wojciech Polak
#29710
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Wojciech Polak is the Roman Catholic archbishop of Gniezno, Poland, since his appointment on 17 May 2014. He previously served as an auxiliary bishop of Gniezno. Biography Early life Polak was born in 1964 in Inowrocław, within the territory of the archdiocese. After passing his exams in 1983, he was admitted to the Major Seminary of Gniezno and on 13 May 1989 he was ordained to the priesthood. In the years 1989–1991 was an assistant priest at St. Martin and Nicholas' Church in Bydgoszcz.
Go to Profile#29699
Emil Draitser
#29711
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Emil Draitser is an author and professor of Russian at Hunter College in New York City. Besides seventeen books of artistic and scholarly prose, his essays and short stories have been published in the Los Angeles Times, Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, San Francisco Chronicle, World Literature Today, and many other American and Canadian periodicals. His fiction has also appeared in Russian, Polish, and Israeli journals. A three-time recipient of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowships in writing and the prestigious Mark Aldanov International Literary Award, he has also received numerous grants for writing both fiction and non-fiction from the City University of New York.
Go to Profile#29700
Antti Revonsuo
#29712
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Antti Revonsuo is a Finnish cognitive neuroscientist, psychologist, and philosopher of mind. His work seeks to understand consciousness as a biological phenomenon. He is one of a small number of philosophers running their own laboratories.
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