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).
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List of the most influential people
#3101
Richard Schoen
#3106
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Richard Melvin Schoen is an American mathematician known for his work in differential geometry and geometric analysis. He is best known for the resolution of the Yamabe problem in 1984. Career Born in Celina, Ohio, and a 1968 graduate of Fort Recovery High School, he received his B.S. from the University of Dayton in mathematics. He then received his PhD in 1977 from Stanford University. After faculty positions at the Courant Institute, NYU, University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, San Diego, he was Professor at Stanford University from 1987–2014, as Bass Professor of Humanities and Sciences since 1992.
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Ludvig Faddeev
#3107
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Ludvig Dmitrievich Faddeev was a Soviet and Russian mathematical physicist. He is known for the discovery of the Faddeev equations in the theory of the quantum mechanical three-body problem and for the development of path integral methods in the quantization of non-abelian gauge field theories, including the introduction of Faddeev–Popov ghosts. He led the Leningrad School, in which he along with many of his students developed the quantum inverse scattering method for studying quantum integrable systems in one space and one time dimension. This work led to the invention of quantum groups b...
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Helen Vendler
#3108
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Helen Hennessy Vendler is an American literary critic and is Porter University Professor Emerita at Harvard University. Life and career Helen Hennessy Vendler was born on April 30, 1933, in Boston, Massachusetts, to George Hennessy and Helen Hennessy. She was the second of three children. Her parents encouraged her to read poems as a child. Vendler's father taught Spanish, French, and Italian at a high school, while her mother had taught in a primary school before marriage. Vendler attended Emmanuel College over the Boston Girls' Latin School and Radcliffe College because her parents would not let her enroll in "secular education".
Go to Profile#3104
J Strother Moore
#3109
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
J Strother Moore is a computer scientist. He is a co-developer of the Boyer–Moore string-search algorithm, Boyer–Moore majority vote algorithm, and the Boyer–Moore automated theorem prover, Nqthm. He made pioneering contributions to structure sharing including the piece table data structure and early logic programming. An example of the workings of the Boyer–Moore string search algorithm is given in Moore's website. Moore received his Bachelor of Science in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970 and his Doctor of Philosophy in computational logic at the University of E...
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Jack Zipes
#3110
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Jack David Zipes is a professor emeritus of German, comparative literature, and cultural studies, who has published and lectured on German literature, critical theory, German Jewish culture, children's literature, and folklore. In the latter part of his career he translated two major editions of the tales of the Brothers Grimm and focused on fairy tales, their evolution, and their social and political role in civilizing processes.
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R. C. T. Lee
#3111
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
R. C. T. Lee , also known as Richard C. T. Lee, received his B.Sc. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering of National Taiwan University and Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley.
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Peter Beinart
#3112
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Peter Alexander Beinart is an American liberal columnist, journalist, and political commentator. A former editor of The New Republic, he has also written for Time, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books among other periodicals. He is also the author of three books.
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Daniel Bovet
#3113
Overall Influence
1907 - 1992 (85 years)
Daniel Bovet was a Swiss-born Italian pharmacologist who won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of drugs that block the actions of specific neurotransmitters. He is best known for his discovery in 1937 of antihistamines, which block the neurotransmitter histamine and are used in allergy medication. His other research included work on chemotherapy, sulfa drugss, the sympathetic nervous system, the pharmacology of curare, and other neuropharmacological interests.
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Lyman Spitzer
#3114
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
Lyman Spitzer Jr. was an American theoretical physicist, astronomer and mountaineer. As a scientist, he carried out research into star formation, plasma physics, and in 1946, conceived the idea of telescopes operating in outer space. Spitzer invented the stellarator plasma device and is the namesake of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. As a mountaineer, he made the first ascent of Mount Thor, with Donald C. Morton.
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Tim LaHaye
#3115
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Timothy Francis LaHaye was an American Baptist evangelical Christian minister who wrote more than 85 books, both fiction and non-fiction, including the Left Behind series of apocalyptic fiction, which he co-authored with Jerry B. Jenkins.
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Theodor Meron
#3116
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Theodor Meron, is an American-Israeli lawyer and judge. He served as a judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia , International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda , and the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals . He served as President of the ICTY four times and inaugural President of the Mechanism for three terms .
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Quentin Smith
#3117
Overall Influence
1952 - 2020 (68 years)
Quentin Persifor Smith was an American philosopher. He was professor emeritus of philosophy at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He worked in the philosophy of time, philosophy of language, philosophy of physics and philosophy of religion.
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Edward Feser
#3118
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Edward Charles Feser is an American Catholic philosopher. He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California. Education Feser holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara, an M.A. in religion from the Claremont Graduate School, and a B.A. in philosophy and religious studies from the California State University at Fullerton. His thesis is titled "Russell, Hayek, and the Mind-Body Problem". He also went to Crespi High School in California.
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Carl Benedikt Frey
#3119
Overall Influence
Carl Benedikt Frey is a Swedish-German economist and economic historian. He is the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI & Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and a Fellow of Mansfield College, University of Oxford. He is also Director of the Future of Work Programme and Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at the Oxford Martin School.
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Rob Marshall
#3120
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Robert Doyle Marshall Jr. is an American film and theater director, producer, and choreographer. He is best known for directing the film version of the Broadway musical Chicago, which was based on the play of the same name by playwright Maurine Dallas Watkins. His work on the film earned him the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Feature Film, as well as nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director, the Golden Globe Award for Best Director, and the BAFTA Award for Best Direction.
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Jules A. Hoffmann
#3121
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Jules Alphonse Nicolas Hoffmann is a Luxembourg-born French biologist. During his youth, growing up in Luxembourg, he developed a strong interest in insects under the influence of his father, Jos Hoffmann. This eventually resulted in the younger Hoffmann's dedication to the field of biology using insects as model organisms. He currently holds a faculty position at the University of Strasbourg. He is a research director and member of the board of administrators of the National Center of Scientific Research in Strasbourg, France. He was elected to the positions of Vice-President and President of the French Academy of Sciences.
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Norman Abramson
#3122
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Norman Manuel Abramson was an American engineer and computer scientist, most known for developing the ALOHAnet system for wireless computer communication. Early life Abramson was born on April 1, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, to immigrant Jewish parents Edward and Esther. His father was born in Lithuania, and worked in commercial photography. His mother was born in Ukraine, and managed the house.
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Sidney Verba
#3123
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Sidney Verba was an American political scientist, librarian and library administrator. His academic interests were mainly American and comparative politics. He was the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University and also served Harvard as the director of the Harvard University Library from 1984 to 2007.
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Jeremy Scott
#3124
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Jeremy Scott is an American fashion designer. He is the sole owner of his namesake label, and from October 2013 to March 2023 was the creative director of the fashion house Moschino. Since launching his brand in Paris in 1997, Scott has built a reputation as "pop culture's most irreverent designer", and "fashion's last rebel".
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Masaki Kashiwara
#3125
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
is a Japanese mathematician. He was a student of Mikio Sato at the University of Tokyo. Kashiwara made leading contributions towards algebraic analysis, microlocal analysis, D-module theory, Hodge theory, sheaf theory and representation theory.
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William J. Rapaport
#3126
Overall Influence
William Joseph Rapaport is a North American philosopher who is an Associate Professor Emeritus of the University at Buffalo. Philosophical work Rapaport has done research and written extensively on intentionality and artificial intelligence. He has research interests in computer science, artificial intelligence , computational linguistics, cognitive science, logic and mathematics, and published many scientific articles on them.
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Heston Blumenthal
#3127
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Heston Marc Blumenthal is a British celebrity chef, TV personality and food writer. Blumenthal is regarded as a pioneer of multi-sensory cooking, food pairing and flavour encapsulation. He came to public attention with unusual recipes, such as bacon-and-egg ice cream and snail porridge. His recipes for triple-cooked chips and soft-centred Scotch eggs have been widely imitated. He has advocated a scientific approach to cooking, for which he has been awarded honorary degrees from the universities of Reading, Bristol and London and made an honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
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Jim Horn
#3128
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
James Ronald Horn is an American saxophonist, woodwind player, and session musician. Biography Horn was born in Los Angeles, and after replacing saxophonist Steve Douglas in 1959, he toured with member Duane Eddy for five years, playing sax and flute on the road, and in the recording studio. Along with Bobby Keys and Jim Price he became one of the most in-demand horn session players of the 1970s and 1980s.
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Klaus Roth
#3129
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Klaus Friedrich Roth was a German-born British mathematician who won the Fields Medal for proving Roth's theorem on the Diophantine approximation of algebraic numbers. He was also a winner of the De Morgan Medal and the Sylvester Medal, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
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Lynn Conway
#3130
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Lynn Ann Conway is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer and transgender activist. She worked at IBM in the 1960s and invented generalized dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by most modern computer processors to improve performance. She initiated the Mead–Conway VLSI chip design revolution in very large scale integrated microchip design. That revolution spread rapidly through the research universities and computing industries during the 1980s, incubating an emerging electronic design automation industry, spawning the modern 'foundry...
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Scott Turow
#3131
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Scott Frederick Turow is an American author and lawyer. Turow has written 13 fiction and three nonfiction books, which have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 30 million copies. Turow’s novels are set primarily among the legal community in the fictional Kindle County. Films have been based on several of his books.
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Haruhiko Kuroda
#3132
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
is a Japanese banker and a former Ministry of Finance government official who served as the 31st Governor of the Bank of Japan from March 2013 to April 2023 and is currently a Professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies . From 2003 Mr Kuroda served as Special Advisor to the Cabinet of Prime Minister Koizumi, while teaching economics and finance as a Professor at the Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of Economics. He was formerly the President of the Asian Development Bank from 1 February 2005 to 18 March 2013.
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Alberto Alesina
#3133
Overall Influence
1957 - 2020 (63 years)
Alberto Francesco Alesina was an Italian political economist. Considered one of the most cited supporters of austerity policies in the 2000s, he wrote about economics and political science. Background and professional life Alesina was born in Broni, Lombardy, Italy. He obtained his undergraduate degree in economics from Bocconi University.
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Dave Ramsey
#3134
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
David Lawrence Ramsey III is an American radio personality who offers financial advice. He hosts the nationally syndicated radio program The Ramsey Show. Ramsey has written several books, including The New York Times bestseller The Total Money Makeover, and hosted a television show on Fox Business from 2007 to 2010.
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Edward Luttwak
#3135
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Edward Nicolae Luttwak is an American author known for his works on grand strategy, military strategy, geoeconomics, military history, and international relations. He is best known for being the author of Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook. His book Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, also published in Chinese, Russian and ten other languages, is widely used at war colleges around the world. His books are currently published in 29 languages besides English.
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Geoffrey Robertson
#3136
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Geoffrey Ronald Robertson is an Australian-British barrister, academic, author and broadcaster. Robertson is a founder and joint head of Doughty Street Chambers. He serves as a Master of the Bench at the Middle Temple, a recorder, and visiting professor at Queen Mary University of London.
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Corazon Aquino
#3137
Overall Influence
1933 - 2009 (76 years)
Maria Corazon "Cory" Sumulong Cojuangco-Aquino was a Filipino politician who served as the eleventh president of the Philippines from 1986 to 1992. She was the most prominent figure of the 1986 People Power Revolution, which ended the two-decade rule of President Ferdinand Marcos and led to the establishment of the current democratic Fifth Philippine Republic.
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James Stirling
#3138
Overall Influence
1926 - 1992 (66 years)
Sir James Frazer Stirling was a British architect. Stirling worked in partnership with James Gowan from 1956 to 1963, then with Michael Wilford from 1971 until 1992. Early life and education Stirling was born in Glasgow. His year of birth is widely quoted as 1926 but his longstanding friend Sir Sandy Wilson later stated it was 1924. The family moved to Liverpool when James was an infant, where he attended Quarry Bank High School. During World War II, he joined the Black Watch before transferring to the Parachute Regiment. He was parachuted behind German enemy lines before D-Day and was wound...
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Philip Pettit
#3139
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Philip Noel Pettit is an Irish philosopher and political theorist. He is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University and also Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University.
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Ariel Salleh
#3140
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Ariel Salleh is an Australian sociologist who writes on humanity-nature relations, political ecology, social change movements, and ecofeminism. Background Salleh is a Founding Member of the Global University for Sustainability, Hong Kong; Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Humanities, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa; formerly Honorary Associate Professor in Political Economy, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney, Australia; and Senior Fellow in Post-Growth Societies, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. She taught in Social Ecology at the University o...
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Michael Hudson
#3141
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Michael Hudson is an American economist, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator and journalist. He is a contributor to The Hudson Report, a weekly economic and financial news podcast produced by Left Out.
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Jaak Panksepp
#3142
Overall Influence
1943 - 2017 (74 years)
Jaak Panksepp was an Estonian-American neuroscientist and psychobiologist who coined the term "affective neuroscience", the name for the field that studies the neural mechanisms of emotion. He was the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science for the Department of Veterinary and Comparative Anatomy, Pharmacology, and Physiology at Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, and Emeritus Professor of the Department of Psychology at Bowling Green State University. He was known in the popular press for his research on laughter in non-human animals.
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Esther Lederberg
#3143
Overall Influence
1922 - 2006 (84 years)
Esther Miriam Zimmer Lederberg was an American microbiologist and a pioneer of bacterial genetics. She discovered the bacterial virus λ and the bacterial fertility factor F, devised the first implementation of replica plating, and furthered the understanding of the transfer of genes between bacteria by specialized transduction.
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John Hospers
#3144
Overall Influence
1918 - 2011 (93 years)
John Hospers was an American philosopher and political activist. Hospers was interested in Objectivism, and was once a friend of the philosopher Ayn Rand, though she later broke with him. In 1972, Hospers became the first presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, and was the only minor party candidate to receive an electoral vote in that year's U.S. presidential election.
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Geoffrey Elton
#3145
Overall Influence
1921 - 1994 (73 years)
Sir Geoffrey Rudolph Elton was a German-born British political and constitutional historian, specialising in the Tudor period. He taught at Clare College, Cambridge, and was the Regius Professor of Modern History there from 1983 to 1988.
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Cherríe Moraga
#3146
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Cherríe Moraga is a Chicana feminist, writer, activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English. Moraga is also a founding member of the social justice activist group La Red Chicana Indígena, which is an organization of Chicanas fighting for education, culture rights, and Indigenous Rights.
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David Pearce
#3147
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
David Pearce is a British transhumanist philosopher. He is the co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, currently rebranded and incorporated as Humanity+. Pearce approaches ethical issues from a lexical negative utilitarian perspective.
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Kengo Kuma
#3148
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Kengo Kuma is a Japanese architect and emeritus professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Tokyo. Frequently compared to contemporaries Shigeru Ban and Kazuyo Sejima, Kuma is also noted for his prolific writings. He is the designer of the Japan National Stadium in Tokyo, which was built for the 2020 Summer Olympics. He is married to architect Satoko Shinohara, and they have one son, Taichi, also an architect. He is an advisor for Kitakyushu-city in Japan.
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Budd Schulberg
#3149
Overall Influence
1914 - 2009 (95 years)
Budd Schulberg was an American screenwriter, television producer, novelist and sports writer. He was known for his novels What Makes Sammy Run? and The Harder They Fall , as well as his screenplays for On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd , receiving an Academy Award for the former.
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Donald Judd
#3150
Overall Influence
1928 - 1994 (66 years)
Donald Clarence Judd was an American artist associated with minimalism . In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy. He is generally considered the leading international exponent of "minimalism", and its most important theoretician through such writings as "Specific Objects" . Judd voiced his unorthodox perception of minimalism in Arts Yearbook 8, where he says, "The new three dimensional work doesn't constitute a movement, school, or style. The common aspects are too general and too little common to define a movement.
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Hugh Urban
#3151
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Hugh Bayard Urban is a professor of religious studies at Ohio State University's Department of Comparative Studies and author of eight books and several academic articles, including a history of the Church of Scientology, published by Princeton University Press in 2012.
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James Grier Miller
#3152
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
James Grier Miller was an American biologist, a pioneer of systems science and academic administrator, who originated the modern use of the term "behavioral science", founded and directed the multi-disciplinary Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan, and originated the living systems theory.
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James Turrell
#3153
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
James Turrell is an American artist known for his work within the Light and Space movement. Much of Turrell's career has been devoted to a still-unfinished work, Roden Crater, a natural cinder cone crater located outside Flagstaff, Arizona, that he is turning into a massive naked-eye observatory; and for his series of skyspaces, enclosed spaces that frame the sky.
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Ninian Smart
#3154
Overall Influence
1927 - 2001 (74 years)
Roderick Ninian Smart was a Scottish writer and university educator. He was a pioneer in the field of secular religious studies. He is best known for his seven-dimensional definition of religion. In 1967 he established the first department of religious studies in the United Kingdom at the new University of Lancaster where he was also Pro-Vice-Chancellor, having already chaired one of the largest and most prestigious departments of theology in Britain at the University of Birmingham. In 1976, he became the first J.F. Rowny Professor in the Comparative Study of Religions at University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Ridley Scott
#3155
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Sir Ridley Scott is an English filmmaker. He is best known for directing films in the science fiction, crime, and historical drama genres. His work is known for its atmospheric and highly concentrated visual style. Scott has received many many accolades, including the BAFTA Fellowship for lifetime achievement in 2018, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Golden Globe Award. In 2003, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
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