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
#3001
David Grossman
#3005
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
David Grossman is an Israeli author. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages. In 2018, he was awarded the Israel Prize for literature. Biography David Grossman was born in Jerusalem. He is the elder of two brothers. His mother, Michaella, was born in Mandatory Palestine; his father, Yitzhak, emigrated from Dynów in Poland with his widowed mother at the age of nine. His mother's family was Labor Zionist and poor. His grandfather paved roads in the Galilee and supplemented his income by buying and selling rugs. His maternal grandmother, a manicurist, left Poland after police harassment.
Go to Profile#3002
Christopher Bishop
#3006
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Christopher Michael Bishop is a British computer scientist. He is a Microsoft Technical Fellow and Director of Microsoft Research AI4Science. He is also Honorary Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. Chris was a founding member of the UK AI Council, and in 2019 he was appointed to the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology.
Go to Profile#3003
Watts Humphrey
#3007
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Watts S. Humphrey was an American pioneer in software engineering who was called the "father of software quality." Biography Watts Humphrey was born in Battle Creek, Michigan on July 4, 1927. His uncle was US Secretary of the Treasury George M. Humphrey. In 1944, he graduated from high school and served in the United States Navy. Despite dyslexia, he received a bachelor of science in physics from the University of Chicago, a master of science in physics from Illinois Institute of Technology physics department, and a master of business administration from the University of Chicago Graduate Sc...
Go to Profile#3004
Mark Strand
#3008
Overall Influence
1934 - 2014 (80 years)
Mark Strand was a Canadian-born American poet, essayist and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990 and received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004. Strand was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until his death in 2014.
Go to Profile#3005
Richard Levins
#3009
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Richard Levins was a Marxist biologist, a population geneticist, biomathematician, mathematical ecologist, and philosopher of science who researched diversity in human populations. Until his death, Levins was a university professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a long-time political activist. He was best known for his work on evolution and complexity in changing environments and on metapopulations.
Go to Profile#3006
Jonathan Franzen
#3010
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
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Yves Bonnefoy
#3011
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Yves Jean Bonnefoy was a French poet and art historian. He also published a number of translations, most notably the plays of William Shakespeare which are considered among the best in French. He was professor at the Collège de France from 1981 to 1993 and is the author of several works on art, art history, and artists including Miró and Giacometti, and a monograph on Paris-based Iranian artist Farhad Ostovani. The Encyclopædia Britannica states that Bonnefoy was ″perhaps the most important French poet of the latter half of the 20th century.″
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Colin Camerer
#3013
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Colin Farrell Camerer is an American behavioral economist, and Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Finance and Economics at the California Institute of Technology . Background A former child prodigy, Camerer received a B.A. in quantitative studies from Johns Hopkins University in 1977 , followed by an M.B.A. in finance from the University of Chicago in 1979 and a Ph.D. in behavioral decision theory from that same institution in 1981 for thesis titled The Validity and Utility of Expert Judgment under the supervision of Hillel Einhorn and Robin Hogarth. Camerer worked at Kellogg, Wharton, an...
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Stansfield Turner
#3014
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Stansfield Turner was an admiral in the United States Navy who served as President of the Naval War College , commander of the United States Second Fleet , Supreme Allied Commander NATO Southern Europe , and was Director of Central Intelligence under the Carter administration. A graduate of Exeter College, Oxford and the United States Naval Academy, Turner served for more than 30 years in the Navy, commanding warships, a carrier group, and NATO's military forces in southern Europe, among other commands.
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Shigeru Ban
#3015
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Shigeru Ban is a Japanese architect, known for his innovative work with paper, particularly recycled cardboard tubes used to quickly and efficiently house disaster victims. Many of his notable designs are structures which are temporary, prefabricated, or incorporate inexpensive and unconventional materials in innovative ways. He was profiled by Time magazine in their projection of 21st-century innovators in the field of architecture and design.
Go to Profile#3011
Gerhard Weinberg
#3016
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Gerhard Ludwig Weinberg is a German-born American diplomatic and military historian noted for his studies in the history of Nazi Germany and World War II. Weinberg is the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been a member of the history faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill since 1974. Previously he served on the faculties of the University of Michigan and the University of Kentucky .
Go to Profile#3012
Eric Schlosser
#3017
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Eric Matthew Schlosser is an American journalist and author known for his investigative journalism, such as in his books Fast Food Nation , Reefer Madness , and Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety .
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Dimitri Bertsekas
#3018
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Dimitri Panteli Bertsekas is an applied mathematician, electrical engineer, and computer scientist, a McAfee Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also a Fulton Professor of Computational Decision Making at Arizona State University, Tempe.
Go to Profile#3014
Margarita Salas
#3019
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Margarita Salas Falgueras, 1st Marchioness of Canero was a Spanish scientist, medical researcher, and author in the fields of biochemistry and molecular genetics. She started developing molecular biology in Spain and also worked as an honorary associate professor of CSIC, at the Severo Ochoa Biology Center . In 2016 she became the first women ever to receive the Echegaray Medal, that was given to her by the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences .
Go to Profile#3015
Arati Prabhakar
#3020
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Arati Prabhakar is an American engineer and public official. Since October 3, 2022, she has served as the 12th director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Science Advisor to the President.
Go to Profile#3016
Bjørn Lomborg
#3021
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish author and the president of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is the former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen. He became internationally known for his best-selling book The Skeptical Environmentalist .
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James Lapine
#3022
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
James Elliot Lapine is an American stage director, playwright, screenwriter, and librettist. He has won the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical three times, for Into the Woods, Falsettos, and Passion. He has frequently collaborated with Stephen Sondheim and William Finn.
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John Clauser
#3023
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
John Francis Clauser is an American theoretical and experimental physicist known for contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics, in particular the Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt inequality. Clauser was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science".
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Dan Shechtman
#3024
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Dan Shechtman is the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, an Associate of the US Department of Energy's Ames National Laboratory, and Professor of Materials Science at Iowa State University. On April 8, 1982, while on sabbatical at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., Shechtman discovered the icosahedral phase, which opened the new field of quasiperiodic crystals.
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Robert Ressler
#3025
Overall Influence
1937 - 2013 (76 years)
Robert K. Ressler was an FBI agent and author. He played a significant role in the psychological profiling of violent offenders in the 1970s and is often credited with coining the term "serial killer", though the term is a direct translation of the German term "Serienmörder" coined in 1930 by Berlin investigator Ernst Gennat. After retiring from the FBI, he authored a number of books on serial murders, and often gave lectures on criminology.
Go to Profile#3021
Christophe Jaffrelot
#3026
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Christophe Jaffrelot is a French political scientist and Indologist specialising in South Asia, particularly India and Pakistan. He is a professor of South Asian politics and history the Centre d'études et de recherches internationales at Sciences Po , a professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King's India Institute , and a Research Director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique .
Go to Profile#3022
Roman Polanski
#3027
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Raymond Roman Thierry Polański is a French and Polish film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. He is the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, two British Academy Film Awards, ten César Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, as well as the Golden Bear and a .
Go to Profile#3023
Zoubin Ghahramani
#3028
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Zoubin Ghahramani FRS is a British-Iranian researcher and Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He holds joint appointments at University College London and the Alan Turing Institute. and has been a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge since 2009. He was Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science from 2003–2012. He was also the Chief Scientist of Uber from 2016 until 2020. He joined Google Brain in 2020 as senior research director. He is also Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.
Go to Profile#3024
Sting
#3029
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner , known as Sting, is an English musician and actor. He was the frontman, songwriter and bassist for new wave band the Police from 1977 until their breakup in 1986. He launched a solo career in 1985 and has included elements of rock, jazz, reggae, classical, new-age, and worldbeat in his music.
Go to Profile#3025
David Harel
#3030
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
David Harel is a computer scientist, currently serving as President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He has been on the faculty of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel since 1980, and holds the William Sussman Professorial Chair of Mathematics. Born in London, England, he was Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the institute for seven years.
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Robert J. Sawyer
#3031
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Robert James Sawyer is a Canadian and American science fiction writer. He has had 24 novels published and his short fiction has appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Amazing Stories, On Spec, Nature, and numerous anthologies. He has won many writing awards, including the best-novel Nebula Award , the best-novel Hugo Award , the John W. Campbell Memorial Award , the Robert A. Heinlein Award , and more Aurora Awards than anyone else in history.
Go to Profile#3027
Evel Knievel
#3032
Overall Influence
1938 - 2007 (69 years)
Robert Craig Knievel , known professionally as Evel Knievel , was an American stunt performer and entertainer. Throughout his career, he attempted more than 75 ramp-to-ramp motorcycle jumps. Knievel was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 1999. He died of pulmonary disease in Clearwater, Florida, in 2007, aged69.
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Robert Mugabe
#3033
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
Robert Gabriel Mugabe was a Zimbabwean revolutionary and politician who served as Prime Minister of Zimbabwe from 1980 to 1987 and then as President from 1987 to 2017. He served as Leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union from 1975 to 1980 and led its successor political party, the ZANU – Patriotic Front , from 1980 to 2017. Ideologically an African nationalist, during the 1970s and 1980s he identified as a Marxist–Leninist, and as a socialist after the 1990s.
Go to Profile#3029
Eric W. Weisstein
#3034
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Eric Wolfgang Weisstein is an American mathematician and encyclopedist who created and maintains the encyclopedias MathWorld and ScienceWorld. In addition, he is the author of the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics. He works for Wolfram Research.
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Robert Creeley
#3035
Overall Influence
1926 - 2005 (79 years)
Robert White Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1991, he joined colleagues Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Robert Bertholf, and Dennis Tedlock in founding the Poetics Program at Buffalo. Creeley lived in Waldoboro, Buffalo, and Providence, where he taught at Brown University.
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Kendall Jenner
#3036
Overall Influence
1995 - Present (31 years)
Kendall Nicole Jenner is an American model, media personality, socialite and businesswoman. She is a daughter of Kris Jenner and Caitlyn Jenner, and rose to fame in the reality television show Keeping Up with the Kardashians, in which she starred for 20 seasons and nearly 15 years from 2007 to 2021. The success of the show led to the creation of multiple spin-off series including Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami , Kourtney and Kim Take New York , Khloe & Lamar , Rob & Chyna and Life of Kylie . Following the decision to end their reality show, in 2022 she and her family starred in the reality t...
Go to Profile#3032
Joxe Azurmendi
#3037
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Joxe Azurmendi Otaegi is a Basque writer, philosopher, essayist and poet. He has published numerous articles and books on ethics, politics, the philosophy of language, technique, Basque literature and philosophy in general.
Go to Profile#3033
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#3038
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jon Kabat-Zinn is an American professor emeritus of medicine and the creator of the 'Stress Reduction Clinic' and the 'Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society' at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Kabat-Zinn was a student of Zen Buddhist teachers such as Philip Kapleau, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Seung Sahn, and a founding member of Cambridge Zen Center. His practice of hatha yoga, Vipassanā and appreciation of the teachings of Soto Zen and Advaita Vedanta led him to integrate their teachings with scientific findings. He teaches mindfulness, which he says can help people cope with stress, anxiety, pain, and illness.
Go to Profile#3034
Maurice Béjart
#3039
Overall Influence
1927 - 2007 (80 years)
Maurice Béjart was a French-born dancer, choreographer and opera director who ran the Béjart Ballet Lausanne in Switzerland. He developed a popular expressionistic form of modern ballet, talking vast themes. He was awarded Swiss citizenship posthumously.
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Theodore Levitt
#3040
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
Theodore Levitt was a German-born American economist and a professor at the Harvard Business School. He was editor of the Harvard Business Review, noted for increasing the Review's circulation and popularizing the term globalization. In 1983, he proposed a definition for corporate purpose: "Rather than merely making money, it is to create and keep a customer".
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Kamsa
#3041
Overall Influence
Kamsa was the tyrant ruler of the Vrishni kingdom, with its capital at Mathura. He is variously described in Hindu literature as either a human or an asura; The Puranas describe him as an asura, while the Harivamśa describes him as an asura reborn in the body of a man. His royal house was called Bhoja; thus, another of his names was Bhojapati. He was the cousin of Devaki, the mother of the deity Krishna; Krishna ultimately fulfilled a prophecy by slaying Kamsa.
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Christopher J. Date
#3042
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Chris Date is an independent author, lecturer, researcher, and consultant, specializing in relational database theory. Biography Chris Date attended High Wycombe Royal Grammar School from 1951 to 1958 and received his BA in Mathematics from Cambridge University in 1962. He entered the computer business as a mathematical programmer at Leo Computers Ltd. , where he quickly moved into education and training. In 1966, he earned his master's degree at Cambridge, and, in 1967, he joined IBM Hursley as a computer programming instructor. Between 1969 and 1974, he was a principal instructor in IBM'...
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The Undertaker
#3043
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Mark William Calaway , better known by the ring name The Undertaker, is an American retired professional wrestler. Widely regarded as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time, Calaway spent the vast majority of his career wrestling for WWF/E, and is best known for his critically acclaimed "Deadman" Undertaker gimmick, for which he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2022.
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William Lawvere
#3044
Overall Influence
1937 - 2023 (86 years)
Francis William Lawvere was an American mathematician known for his work in category theory, topos theory and the philosophy of mathematics. Biography Lawvere studied continuum mechanics as an undergraduate with Clifford Truesdell. He learned of category theory while teaching a course on functional analysis for Truesdell, specifically from a problem in John L. Kelley's textbook General Topology. Lawvere found it a promising framework for simple rigorous axioms for the physical ideas of Truesdell and Walter Noll. Truesdell supported Lawvere's application to study further with Samuel Eilenberg,...
Go to Profile#3040
Burton Malkiel
#3045
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Burton Gordon Malkiel is an American economist, financial executive, and writer most noted for his classic finance book A Random Walk Down Wall Street . Malkiel is the Chemical Bank chairman's professor of economics at Princeton University, and is a two-time chairman of the economics department there. He served as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers , president of the American Finance Association , and dean of the Yale School of Management . He also spent 28 years as a director of the Vanguard Group. He currently serves as Chief Investment Officer to software-based financial advisor, Wealthfront Inc.
Go to Profile#3041
Pedro Arrupe
#3046
Overall Influence
1907 - 1991 (84 years)
Pedro Arrupe Gondra, SJ was a Spanish Basque priest who served as the 28th Superior General of the Society of Jesus from 1965 to 1983. He has been called a second founder of the Society, as he led the Jesuits in the implementation of the Second Vatican Council, especially with regard to faith that does justice and preferential option for the poor.
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Mike Reiss
#3047
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Michael L. Reiss is an American television comedy writer. He served as a showrunner, writer, and producer for the animated series The Simpsons and co-created the animated series The Critic. He created and wrote the webtoon Queer Duck; he has also written screenplays including: Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, The Simpsons Movie and My Life in Ruins.
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David Cox
#3048
Overall Influence
1924 - 2022 (98 years)
Sir David Roxbee Cox was a British statistician and educator. His wide-ranging contributions to the field of statistics included introducing logistic regression, the proportional hazards model and the Cox process, a point process named after him.
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Wolf Vostell
#3049
Overall Influence
1932 - 1998 (66 years)
Wolf Vostell was a German painter and sculptor, considered one of the early adopters of video art and installation art and pioneer of Happenings and Fluxus. Techniques such as blurring and Dé-coll/age are characteristic of his work, as is embedding objects in concrete and the use of television sets in his works. Wolf Vostell was married to the Spanish writer Mercedes Vostell and has two sons, David Vostell and Rafael Vostell.
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Werner Vogels
#3050
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Werner Hans Peter Vogels is the chief technology officer and vice president of Amazon in charge of driving technology innovation within the company. Vogels has broad internal and external responsibilities.
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Neil Wallace
#3051
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Neil Wallace is an American economist and professor of economics at Penn State University. He is considered one of the main proponents of new classical macroeconomics in the field of economics. Education Wallace earned his BA in economics from Columbia University in 1960 and his Ph.D in economics from the University of Chicago in 1964, where he studied under Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman.
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Brian Massumi
#3052
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Brian Massumi is a Canadian philosopher and social theorist. Massumi's research spans the fields of art, architecture, cultural studies, political theory and philosophy. His work explores the intersection between power, perception, and creativity to develop an approach to thought and social action bridging the aesthetic and political domains. He is a retired professor in the Communications Department of the Université de Montréal.
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Edmund White
#3053
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Edmund Valentine White III is an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer and an essayist on literary and social topics. Since 1999 he has been a professor at Princeton University. France made him de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.
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Albert Ghiorso
#3054
Overall Influence
1915 - 2010 (95 years)
Albert Ghiorso was an American nuclear scientist and co-discoverer of a record 12 chemical elements on the periodic table. His research career spanned six decades, from the early 1940s to the late 1990s.
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Richard Tarnas
#3055
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Richard Theodore Tarnas is a cultural historian and astrologer known for his books The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View and Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. Tarnas is professor of philosophy and psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and is the founding director of its graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness.
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