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
#32651
Ming Cho Lee
#32663
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Ming Cho Lee was a Chinese-American theatrical set designer and professor at the Yale School of Drama. Personal life Lee was born on Oct. 3, 1930, in Shanghai, China to Lee Tsu Fa and Tang Ing. Lee, whose father was a Yale University graduate , moved to the United States in 1949 and attended Occidental College.
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Muhammad Shahrur
#32664
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Muhammad Shahrour was a Syrian philosopher and author. He was an Emeritus Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Damascus who wrote extensively about Islam. Shahrour was trained as an engineer in Syria, the former Soviet Union and Ireland. He referred to the book of the Islamic prophet Muhammad as "The Book", not the Quran; which casts him in direct contradiction with other Islamic thinkers and traditional scholars. Yet similar to Quraniyoon Muslims, he did not consider Hadith as a divine source; however, he did not belong to the same school as Ahmed Subhy Mansour.
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Maureen Howard
#32665
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Maureen Theresa Howard was an American novelist, memoirist, and editor. Her award-winning novels feature women protagonists and are known for formal innovation and a focus on the Irish-American experience.
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Jim DeMint
#32666
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
James Warren DeMint is an American businessman, author, and retired politician who served as a United States Senator from South Carolina and as president of The Heritage Foundation. DeMint is a member of the Republican Party and a leading figure in the Tea Party movement; he is also the founder of the Senate Conservatives Fund.
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Robert Everett
#32667
Overall Influence
1921 - 2018 (97 years)
Robert Rivers Everett was an American computer scientist. He was an honorary board member of the MITRE Corporation. He was born in Yonkers, New York. In 1945 he worked with Jay Forrester on the Whirlwind project, one of the first real time electronic computers. In 1958 he was a founding member of the MITRE Corporation, and was its president from 1969 to 1986.
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Brandi Carlile
#32668
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Brandi Marie Carlile is an American singer-songwriter. Her music spans many genres, including folk rock, alternative country, Americana, and classic rock. Born in Ravensdale, Washington, a rural town southeast of Seattle, Carlile dropped out of high school to pursue a career in music. , Carlile has released seven studio albums. Her debut major label album, Brandi Carlile , was released to critical acclaim. Carlile garnered wider recognition with her 2007 single, "The Story", from her album of the same name. Carlile later released Give Up the Ghost , Bear Creek , The Firewatcher's Daughter , B...
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Dawood Ibrahim
#32669
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Dawood Ibrahim is an Indian mob boss, drug lord, and terrorist from Dongri, Mumbai, who is wanted by the Indian government. He reportedly heads the Indian organised crime syndicate D-Company, which he founded in Mumbai in the 1970s. Ibrahim is wanted on charges including murder, extortion, targeted killing, drug trafficking, and terrorism.
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Maithripala Sirisena
#32670
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Maithripala Yapa Sirisena is a Sri Lankan politician who served as the seventh President of Sri Lanka from 9 January 2015 to 18 November 2019. Sirisena is Sri Lanka's first president from the North Central Province of the country and does not belong to the traditional Sri Lankan political elite. He is currently a member of parliament from Polonnaruwa.
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Egon Börger
#32671
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Egon Börger is a German-born computer scientist based in Italy. Life and work Börger was born in Bad Laer, Westphalia, Lower Saxony, Germany. Between 1965 and 1971 he studied at the Sorbonne, Paris , Université Catholique de Louvain, Institut Supérieur de Philosophie de Louvain and University of Münster . Between 1972 and 1976, he was at the Università di Salerno in Italy, where he taught the first courses in the newborn Computer Science Degree. Since 1985 he has held a Chair in computer science at the University of Pisa, Italy. Since September 2010, he has been an elected member of the Acad...
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Lance Henriksen
#32672
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Lance James Henriksen is an American actor. He is known for his works in various science fiction, action and horror films, such as that of Bishop in the Alien film franchise, and Frank Black in Fox television series Millennium and The X-Files . He has also done extensive voice work, as Kerchak the gorilla in the 1999 Disney film Tarzan , General Shepherd in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Fleet Admiral Steven Hackett in BioWare's Mass Effect video game trilogy . He also appeared as Vukovich in The Terminator , Ed Harley in the cult horror film Pumpkinhead , Chains Cooper in Stone Cold ,...
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Mitri Raheb
#32673
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Mitri Raheb is a Palestinian Christian, the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem , and the founder and president of the Diyar Consortium, a group of Lutheran-based, ecumenically-oriented institutions serving the Bethlehem area.
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William James Reddin
#32674
Overall Influence
1930 - 1999 (69 years)
William James Reddin also known as Bill Reddin was a British-born management behavioralist, theorist, writer, and consultant. His published works examined and explained how managers in profit and non-profit organizations behaved under certain situations and conditions. The focus of his work was to understand to what extent managers were effective in their role and successful in managing situations to have the right impact on the organization's objectives.
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John Lynch
#32675
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
John Lynch was Professor of Latin American History at the University of London. He spent most of his academic career at University College, and then from 1974 to 1987 as Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies. The main focus of his work was Spanish America in the period 1750–1850.
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Simmie Knox
#32676
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Simmie Lee Knox is an American painter who painted the official White House portrait of former United States President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton. He was the first black American artist to receive a presidential portrait commission.
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Javed Ashraf
#32677
Overall Influence
Javed Ashraf is an academic and economist who has led two of Pakistan's most distinguished academic institutions. He served as the Vice-Chancellor of Quaid-i-Azam University from 13 October 2014 until October 12, 2018.
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Jessica Watkins
#32678
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Jessica Andrea Watkins is an American NASA astronaut, geologist, aquanaut and former international rugby player. Watkins was announced as the first Black woman who completed an International Space Station long-term mission in April 2022. On June 9, 2022, at 7:38 UTC, she became the African American woman with the most time in space, surpassing Stephanie Wilson's 42 day, 23 hour and 46 minute record.
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Deborah Bial
#32679
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Deborah Bial is an education strategist, the founder and president of the Posse Foundation and a trustee of Brandeis University. Bial is known for the concept of her foundation, which is to send groups of around ten students to collaborating colleges so that they can support each other and achieve a greater success rate. She is also known for the Bial–Dale College Adaptability Index, an activity-based test of college readiness that incorporates Lego play.
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Alan Hawley
#32680
Overall Influence
Major General Alan Hawley is a British doctor and academic. He was a medical officer in the British Army and served as Director General of the Army Medical Services from 2006 to 2009. He is currently Professor of Disaster Management at the University of Glamorgan.
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Leontine T. Kelly
#32681
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Leontine Turpeau Current Kelly was an American bishop of the United Methodist Church. She was the second woman elevated to the position of bishop within the United Methodist Church, and the first African American woman.
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Paul Tholey
#32682
Overall Influence
1937 - 1998 (61 years)
Paul Tholey was a German Gestalt psychologist, and a professor of psychology and sports science at the University of Frankfurt and the Technical University of Braunschweig. Tholey started the study of oneirology in an attempt to prove that dreams occur in color. Given the unreliability of dream memories and following the critical realism approach, he used lucid dreaming as an epistemological tool for investigating dreams, in a similar fashion to Stephen LaBerge. He devised the reflection technique for inducing lucid dreams, consisting in continuously suspecting waking life to be a dream, in t...
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William Jencks
#32683
Overall Influence
1927 - 2007 (80 years)
William Platt Jencks was an American biochemist. He was noted particularly for his work on enzymes, using concepts drawn from organic chemistry to understand their mechanisms. Career Jencks graduated from Harvard College in 1947 with a degree in English, and earned a Doctor of Medicine from Harvard University in 1951. He interned at the Peter Bent Brigham hospital. Jencks conducted his first postdoctoral research for two years with Fritz Lipmann at Harvard Medical School. Jencks was drafted into the Army Medical Corps and was assigned to the Army Medical Service Graduate School at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, DC.
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Thomas Elsaesser
#32684
Overall Influence
1943 - 2019 (76 years)
Thomas Elsaesser was a German film historian and professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He was also the writer and director of The Sun Island, a documentary essay film about his grandfather, the architect Martin Elsaesser. He was married to scholar Silvia Vega-Llona.
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Wolfgang Franke
#32685
Overall Influence
1912 - 2007 (95 years)
Wolfgang Leopold Friedrich Franke was a German sinologist whose research was focused on the history of the Ming dynasty and of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. He served as Chair of Sinology at the University of Hamburg for 27 years. His father Otto Franke, also a sinologist, had set up the chair in 1910.
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Carlos Taibo
#32686
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Carlos Taibo Arias is a writer, editor, and retired professor of political science at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Ideology Carlos Taibo is a staunch advocate of the anti-globalization movement, the degrowth movement, direct democracy and of anarchism. Taibo coined the phrase La globalización avanza hacia un caos que escapa a todo control. He has harshly criticized the idea that because economic growth impacts all spheres , it is associated with progress and welfare. This claim, that economic growth is related to progress and social welfare, is commonly questioned by critics of capi...
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Louis Jourdan
#32687
Overall Influence
1921 - 2015 (94 years)
Louis Jourdan was a French film and television actor. He was known for his suave roles in several Hollywood films, including Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case , Letter from an Unknown Woman , Gigi , The Best of Everything , The V.I.P.s and Octopussy . He played Dracula in the 1977 BBC television production Count Dracula.
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Heinz Arndt
#32688
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
Heinz Wolfgang Arndt was a German-born Australian economist. Biography Heinz Wolfgang Arndt was born in Breslau, Germany, in 1915, the eldest son of Fritz Georg Arndt and Julia . Arndt gained two degrees at Oxford and taught at the London School of Economics and University of Manchester before settling in Australia in 1946. While studying in England, he married his wife Ruth with whom he later lived in Canberra until her death in 2001. In 1950, Arndt took up a chairmanship in economics at the then Canberra University College. He became head of the department at the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University in 1963.
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Mark McGhee
#32689
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Mark Edward McGhee is a Scottish former professional football player and coach. McGhee started his career at Greenock Morton in 1975 and had spells at clubs including Newcastle United, Aberdeen, Hamburg, Celtic, IK Brage and Reading. McGhee was part of the Aberdeen side which won the 1983 European Cup Winners' Cup and 1983 UEFA Super Cup, as well as three Scottish league titles. McGhee has since managed several clubs in both England and Scotland, including Reading, Millwall, Aberdeen and Brighton & Hove Albion.
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Bill Snyder
#32690
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
William D. Snyder is a retired college football coach and former player. He served as the head football coach at Kansas State University from 1989 to 2005 and again from 2009 to 2018. Snyder initially retired from the position from 2006 to 2008 before being rehired. Snyder retired for the second time on December 2, 2018 and is serving as a special ambassador for the athletics department.
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Łukasz Kamiński
#32691
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Łukasz Andrzej Kamiński is a Polish historian, specializing in the history of Poland after 1945, particularly the period of Soviet occupation and the Polish People's Republic. He is the President of the European Union's Platform of European Memory and Conscience and formerly served as President of the Institute of National Remembrance from 2011 to 2016.
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Sergio Busquets
#32692
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Sergio Busquets Burgos is a Spanish professional footballer who plays as a defensive midfielder for Major League Soccer club Inter Miami. A deep-lying playmaker capable of directing gameplay through short and calm passes and his singular reading of the game, he is regarded as one of the greatest defensive midfielders of all time.
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George W. Clark
#32693
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
George Whipple Clark was an American astronomer and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When he retired, M.I.T. described him as "a central figure in the development of high-energy astrophysics, particularly in the design, analysis, and interpretation of experiments for the study of high-energy cosmic ray particles and the celestial sources of gamma rays and X-rays."
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Peter Wadhams
#32694
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Peter Wadhams ScD , is emeritus professor of Ocean Physics, and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge. He is best known for his work on sea ice.
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Ann Louise Bardach
#32695
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ann Louise Bardach [A.L. Bardach] is an American journalist and non-fiction author. Bardach is best known for her work on Cuba and Miami and was called "the go-to journalist on all things Cuban and Miami," by the Columbia Journalism Review, having interviewed dozens of key players including Fidel Castro, sister Juanita Castro, anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles, CIA and Watergate plumber E. Howard Hunt, anti-Castro militant Orlando Bosch and CIA operative Felix Rodriguez, who was present for the assassination of Che Guevara.
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Daniel Heartz
#32696
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Daniel Heartz was an American musicologist and professor emeritus of music at the University of California, Berkeley. Heartz studied at Harvard University. He lived in Berkeley, California. Honors Recipient of Guggenheim FellowshipsASCAP–Deems Taylor AwardsKinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society.
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Jonathan Bartley
#32697
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Jonathan Charles Bartley is a British politician and was Co-Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, a position he shared with Caroline Lucas from 2016 to 2018, and then, from 2018 to 2021, with Siân Berry. He was the Green Party's national Work and Pensions spokesperson and the party's Parliamentary candidate for Streatham in the 2015 general election. He was the Unite to Remain candidate for Dulwich and West Norwood at the 2019 general election.
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Patrick Hillery
#32698
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Patrick John Hillery was an Irish Fianna Fáil politician who served as the sixth President of Ireland from December 1976 to December 1990. He also served as Vice-President of the European Commission and European Commissioner for Social Affairs from 1973 to 1976, Minister for External Affairs from 1969 to 1973, Minister for Labour from 1966 to 1969, Minister for Industry and Commerce from 1965 to 1969 and Minister for Education from 1959 to 1965. He served as a Teachta Dála for the Clare constituency from 1951 to 1973.
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Bruce Babbitt
#32699
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Bruce Edward Babbitt is an American attorney and politician who served as the 47th United States Secretary of the Interior from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. He previously served as the 16th governor of Arizona from 1978 to 1987 and was a candidate for President of the United States in the 1988 Democratic primaries.
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Carlos Montemayor
#32700
Overall Influence
1947 - 2010 (63 years)
Carlos Montemayor was a Mexican novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, tenor, political analyst, and promoter of contemporary literature written in indigenous languages. He was a Member of the Mexican Academy of the Language.
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Bobby Thomson
#32701
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Robert Brown Thomson was a Scottish-born American professional baseball player, nicknamed "the Staten Island Scot". He was an outfielder and right-handed batter for the New York Giants , Milwaukee Braves , Chicago Cubs , Boston Red Sox , and Baltimore Orioles . His pennant-winning three-run home run for the Giants in 1951 is popularly known as the "Shot Heard 'Round the World", and is one of the most famous moments in baseball history. It overshadowed his other accomplishments, including eight 20-home-run seasons and three All-Star selections. "It was the best thing that ever happened to me", he said.
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Ahmar Mahboob
#32702
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Ahmar Mahboob is a Pakistani linguist. Currently he is an associate professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. He has worked in the fields of language policy development, pidgin and creole languages, NNEST studies, English language acquisition, English language teaching and teacher education, World Englishes, pragmatics, and minority languages in South Asia. Ahmar earned his PhD from Indiana University Bloomington in 2003, and has published extensively. He was the co-editor of TESOL Quarterly, alongside Brian Paltridge, for several years. He was also the Associate ...
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Luigi Pascale
#32703
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Luigi Pascale was an Italian engineer designer of light aircraft. He was the founder of the aircraft manufacturers Partenavia and Tecnam, the latter a company he started with his brother Giovanni. Biography Luigi "Gino" Pascale was born in Naples, Italy in 1923. He teamed with his brother Giovanni to design and construct several light aircraft. The first completed design was the Partenavia Astore in 1948.
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Slaviša Jokanović
#32704
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Slaviša Jokanović is a Serbian professional football manager and former player. A physical player considered strong in the air, he impressed at Partizan, before spending seven seasons in La Liga at the service of three clubs, appearing in 208 matches and scoring 31 goals, mainly for Tenerife. He also played for two years with Chelsea towards the end of his career, and represented Yugoslavia at the 1998 World Cup and Euro 2000, earning 64 caps and scoring ten goals in an eleven-year international career.
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Jennifer Connelly
#32705
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Jennifer Lynn Connelly is an American actress. She began her career as a child model before making her acting debut in the 1984 crime film Once Upon a Time in America. After a few more years of modeling, she began to concentrate on acting, starring in a variety of films including the horror film Phenomena , the musical fantasy film Labyrinth , the romantic comedy Career Opportunities , and the period superhero film The Rocketeer . She received praise for her performance in the science fiction film Dark City and playing a drug addict in Darren Aronofsky's drama film Requiem for a Dream .
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John Woodland Hastings
#32706
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
John Woodland "Woody" Hastings, was a leader in the field of photobiology, especially bioluminescence, and was one of the founders of the field of circadian biology . He was the Paul C. Mangelsdorf Professor of Natural Sciences and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. He published over 400 papers and co-edited three books.
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Jean-loup Gailly
#32707
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jean-loup Gailly is a French computer scientist and an author of gzip. He wrote the compression code of the portable archiver of the Info-ZIP and the tools compatible with the PKZIP archiver for MS-DOS. He worked over zlib in collaboration with Mark Adler. He prefers to write his hyphenated first name with only the J but not the L capitalized.
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Carl Neumann Degler
#32708
Overall Influence
1921 - 2014 (93 years)
Carl Neumann Degler was an American historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. He was the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History Emeritus at Stanford University. Early life and education Degler was born on February 6, 1921, in Newark, New Jersey. He served in the U.S. Army Air Force from 1942 to 1945. He earned a BA in history from Upsala College, and master's and doctoral degrees from Columbia University. His 1952 PhD dissertation in political science was "Labor in the Economy and Politics of New York City, 1850–1860: A Study of the Impact of Early Industrialism." It was never publ...
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Colin McLarty
#32709
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Colin McLarty is an American logician whose publications have ranged widely in philosophy and the foundations of mathematics, as well as in the history of science and of mathematics. Research Category theory He has written papers about Saunders Mac Lane, one of the founders of category theory.
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Sandra Thompson
#32710
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Sandra Annear Thompson is an American linguist specializing in discourse analysis, typology, and interactional linguistics. She is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara . She has published numerous books, her research has appeared in many linguistics journals, and she serves on the editorial board of several prominent linguistics journals.
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Carlos Alomar
#32711
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Carlos Alomar is a Puerto Rican guitarist. He is best known for his work with David Bowie from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s, having played on more Bowie albums than any other musician. History The son of a Pentecostal minister, Alomar was raised in New York. From the age of ten he taught himself to play the guitar, and started playing professionally at age sixteen. In the 1960s he performed during "Amateur Hour" at the Apollo Theater, eventually joining the house band, backing Chuck Berry and many leading soul artists. Around 1968–69 he toured for eight months in James Brown's live band, eventually quitting after being docked wages for missing a musical cue.
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Robert Evans
#32712
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Robert Evans was an American film producer, studio executive, and actor, best known for his work on Rosemary's Baby , Love Story , The Godfather , and Chinatown . Evans began his career in a successful business venture with his brother, selling women's apparel. In 1956, while on a business trip, he was by chance spotted by actress Norma Shearer, who thought he would be right to play the role of her late husband Irving Thalberg in Man of a Thousand Faces . Thus he began a brief film acting career. In 1962, Evans went into film producing instead, using his accumulated wealth from the clothing business, and began a meteoric rise in the industry.
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