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

#3301

Simona Bordoni

#174056
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Simona Bordoni is an Italian climatologist and professor of environmental science and engineering who runs the Simona Bordoni Research Group at California Institute of Technology. She studies atmospheric dynamics, with a special emphasis on understanding the coupling between larger-scale circulations and the hydrological cycle.
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#3302

Mary Bishai

#174144
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Mary R. M. Bishai is an American physicist who is a Distinguished Scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 2023, she was elected spokesperson of Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, and was made responsible for the 1,400 person collaboration. She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015.
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#3303

David W. Wood

#174268
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
David W. Wood is an American chemical engineer who is Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Ohio State University. Wood is also associated with the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics Training Program.
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#3304

C. Nataraj

#174285
Overall Influence
Chandrashekar Nataraj , an American-Indian scientist, holds the Mr. and Mrs. Robert F. Moritz, Sr. Endowed Chair in Engineered Systems in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Villanova University:.
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#3305

Lisa Rohan

#174314
Overall Influence
Lisa Cencia Rohan is an American chemist and pharmaceutical scientist. Biography She obtained a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering from West Virginia University and a Ph.D. in pharmaceutics from the University of Pittsburgh, School of Pharmacy. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the department of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences in the area of mucosal immunology at the University of Pittsburgh. So far, Rohan has 169 publications with over 3,000 citations. Prior to her academic career, Rohan held leadership positions in the pharmaceutical industry.
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#3306

Richard M. Thorne

#174485
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Richard Mansergh Thorne was an American physicist and a distinguished professor in the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UCLA. He was known for his contributions to space plasma physics. He was a fellow of the American Geophysical Union.
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#3307

Scott Pratt

#174679
Overall Influence
Scott Pratt is an American physicist. After completing a Bachelor of Science degree in physics at the University of Kansas in 1980, Pratt pursued a doctorate in the subject at the University of Minnesota, which he earned in 1985. He began working at Michigan State University's National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory in 1992. Pratt was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2011, "[f]or seminal contributions to the theory of pion interferometry and the phenomenology of heavy ion collisions."
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#3308

Susan Blessing

#174782
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Susan K. Blessing is an American physicist who is currently a professor at Florida State University and an elected fellow of the American Physical Society. Early life and education Blessing was born on April 10, 1961. She earned her B.S. at Illinois Institute of Technology in 1982 and her Ph.D at Indiana University in 1989. After earning her Ph.D., she was a research associate at Northwestern University from 1989-1993.
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#3309

Suzanne Bart

#174909
Overall Influence
Suzanne Cathleen Bart an American chemist who is a professor of inorganic chemistry at Purdue University. Her group's research focuses on actinide organometallic chemistry, and especially the characterization of low-valent organouranium complexes, actinide complexes with redox-active ligands, and discovery of new reactions that utilize these compounds. Bart's research has applications in the development of carbon-neutral fuel sources and the remediation of polluted sites.
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#3310

Jeanne Hardebeck

#174947
Overall Influence
Jeanne L. Hardebeck is an American research geophysicist studying earthquakes and seismology who has worked at the United States Geological Survey since 2004. Hardebeck studies the state of stress and the strength of faults.
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#3311

Mehmet Burak Erdoğan

#175046
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Mehmet Burak Erdoğan is a Turkish mathematician, scientist, and professor of mathematics. He is a member of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Mathematics Department. Education Burak Erdoğan was born in 1972. He attended the high school Kayseri Fen Lisesi in Kayseri, Turkey, for two years before moving to İzmir, Turkey where he finished the high school Atatürk Lisesi in 1989. He ranked third in the country-wide university entrance exams. He graduated from Bilkent University Electrical and Electronics Engineering in Ankara in 1994. He finished his MSc in Mathematics department of the same university under the supervision of Iossif Vladimirovich Ostrovskii in 1996.
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#3312

Stanley E. Whitcomb

#175055
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Stanley Ernest Whitcomb is an American physicist and was the chief scientist at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory project when the first direct detection of gravitational waves was made in September 2015.
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#3313

Christopher Glein

#175059
Overall Influence
Christopher R. Glein is an American geochemist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, TX.  He studies planetary science, astrobiology, and organic geochemistry.  Glein was the first to describe how Saturn's moon Enceladus is the only known body, besides Earth, that has all of the requirements necessary for life.  Glein has been involved in multiple spacecraft missions, leading to significant findings about Pluto, Enceladus, and Titan. In 2017, he was recognized for Outstanding Contributions to the ESA Rosetta Mission by the European Space Agency.
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#3314

Carlo Carraro

#175125
Overall Influence
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#3315

David Sudarsky

#175190
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
David Sudarsky is an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona. He is primarily known for producing the first exoplanet classification system, which is based on a series of theoretical gas-giant-atmosphere models. By modeling the physical characteristics and chemistry of their atmospheres, the appearance of gas giants is predicted.
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#3316

Regina Murphy

#175356
Overall Influence
Regina Mary Murphy is an American chemical engineer. She is the Robert Byron Bird Department Chair in Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2010, Murphy was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering for "pioneering discoveries on protein aggregation in neurodegenerative disease."
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#3317

Sergey Bezrukov

#175485
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Sergey M. Bezrukov is a Russian born biophysicist notable for his work on ion channels and stochastic resonance. Education He received his MS in Electronics and Theoretical Physics from Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University, 1973; and he obtained his PhD under Giliary Moiseevich Drabkin in Physics and Mathematics from Moscow State University, Russia, 1981.
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#3318

Mehtap Oezaslan

#175583
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Mehtap Oezaslan is a full professor for technical electrocatalysis at TU Braunschweig. Education and professional life Oezaslan studied Chemistry at TU Berlin and finished her diploma in the group of R. Schomäcker. From January 2008 to February 2012, she did her PhD in the group of P. Strasser at TU Berlin. From November 2012 to July 2014, she was a scientist at the Paul Scherrer Institute. In August 2014, she became a junior professor for Electrochemistry at Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. Since June 2019, she is a full professor at TU Braunschweig.
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#3319

Michael J. Solomon

#175622
Overall Influence
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#3320

William F. Hoffmann

#175654
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
William F. Hoffmann is a physicist in the University of Arizona who was awarded the status of Fellow from the American Physical Society after they were nominated by their Division of Astrophysics in 1997, for his pioneering work in the field of balloon-borne far-infrared astronomy and discovery of far-infrared radiation from Galactic Center; successful construction of the Multi Mirror Telescope and application of infrared array technology to astronomy.
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#3321

Vitaly Kocharovsky

#175657
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Vitaly Kocharovsky is a Russian-American physicist, academic and researcher. He is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University. Kocharovsky has focused his research on topics in theoretical physics, including quantum gravity, critical phenomena, superradiance, quantum optics, laser physics, semiconductor optoelectronics, wave propagation and mode coupling in inhomogeneous media, magnetospheric physics, plasma astrophysics, gamma- and radio-astronomy, and high-energy cosmic rays.
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#3322

Thurmon E. Lockhart

Thurmon E. Lockhart
#175734
Overall Influence
Thurmon E. Lockhart is an American biomedical engineer, researcher and educator. He is the Inaugural MORE Foundation Professor of Life in Motion at Arizona State University, a guest professor at Ghent University in Belgium and, serves as a research affiliate faculty at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science. He is an associate editor of Annals of Biomedical Engineering and academic and guest editor of the Sensors journal He has worked significantly to bring research to practice with various businesses to reduce falls.
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#3323

Dawn K. Erb

#175950
Overall Influence
Dawn K. Erb is an American physicist. She is an associate professor in the department of physics at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Early life and education Erb completed her PhD in astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology in 2005 and accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian.
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#3324

Robert Bruce Wallace

#175993
Overall Influence
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#3325

Olivier Doré

#176008
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Olivier Doré is a cosmologist, who is currently working as research scientist in Jet Propulsion Laboratory and visiting associate faculty at the California Institute of Technology. Awards Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, December 2017UC Irvine, Distinguished Visiting Professor, 2017, dateLaboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille , Aix-Marseille Universit´e, France, Visiting Professor, 2017, 1 monthJPL Voyager award, May 2016JPL Team award for outstanding contribution to the SPHEREx Proposal Team, February 2015JPL Mariner award, May 2013Gruber 2012 Cosmology Prize awarded to Charles Be...
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#3326

Tom Otis

#176038
Overall Influence
Tom Otis is an American researcher, academic and author. He is the Chief Scientific Officer at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour and holds a Professorship in Neuroscience at University College London.
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#3327

Lisa Stein

#176066
Overall Influence
Lisa Y. Stein is an American biologist who is a professor at the University of Alberta. Her research considers the microbiology of climate change. She was awarded the 2022 University of Alberta Killam Award for Excellence in Mentoring.
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#3328

John Markert

#176075
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
John T. Markert is a professor in The University of Texas at Austin physics department and was department chair from 2005 to 2009. His group has done extensive research on high temperature superconducting materials, high-q oscillator experiments, dynamics of ferromagnets, nuclear magnetic resonance microscopy and spectroscopy, and optically switchable metal hydride films. A textbook written by Dr. Markert and Hans Ohanian, Physics for Engineers and Scientists, was released in 2008 by Norton Publishers. The book is for a calculus-based introductory course. As of 2008 his H index is 30..
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#3329

Jennifer Waters

#176141
Overall Influence
Jennifer Waters is an American scientist who is a Lecturer on Cell Biology, the Director of the Nikon Imaging Center, and the Director of the Cell Biology Microscopy Facility at Harvard Medical School. She is an imaging expert and educator whose efforts to educate life scientists about microscopy and to systemize the education of microscopists in microscopy facilities serve as a blueprint for similar efforts worldwide.
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#3330

Feng Wang

#176168
Overall Influence
Feng Wang is an American physicist, currently at University of California, Berkeley and an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. Education Wang received a B.A. from Fudan University, Shanghai, in 1999 and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2004.
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#3331

Elizabeth Donley

#176225
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Elizabeth Ann Donley is an American physicist. She is a researcher in the time and frequency division at the Physical Measurement Laboratory. Donley's research areas include the operation and development of atomic fountain clocks and chip scale atomic devices and instruments.
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#3332

Scott Crooker

#176320
Overall Influence
Scott Crooker is a research scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory pulsed field facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara and his B.A. in physics from Cornell University. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, a fellow of Los Alamos National Laboratory, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a fellow of the American Physical Society. He received a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow's Prize in 2007 for his outstanding research in the development of...
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#3333

Steven Jay Schwartz

#176477
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Steven Jay Schwartz is a professor of space physics at Imperial College London. He was awarded the Chapman Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2006 "in recognition of his pioneering work in solar terrestrial physics and space plasma physics". In 2009, he became the head of the Space and Atmospheric Physics Group at Imperial College London.
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#3334

Arthur F. Kip

#176480
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
Arthur Frederic Kip was an American experimental physicist, specializing in solid-state physics. He was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 1958–1959. Biography After secondary education in San Diego, Kip matriculated at the University of California, Berkeley , where he graduated with A.B. in 1935 and Ph.D. in 1939. His doctoral advisor was Leonard B. Loeb.
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#3335

Jose Boedo

#176494
Overall Influence
Jose A. Boedo is a Spanish plasma physicist and a researcher at University of California, San Diego. He is an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, which was awarded in 2016 for "his ground-breaking contributions to the studies of plasma drifts and intermittent plasma transport in the peripheral region of tokamaks".
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#3336

Barbara Cohen

#176544
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Barbara Cohen is a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The asteroid 6816 Barbcohen is named after her. Education Cohen is from upstate New York. She earned a bachelor's degree in geology from State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1993. She joined Phi Beta Kappa during her studies. She moved to the University of Arizona for her doctoral studies, where she received a University of Arizona Graduate College Fellowship and NASA Graduate Student Research Program Fellowship, and graduated in 2000. Here Cohen looked to understand impact rates on the moon using microbeam analysis and Argon–argon dating of lunar meteorites.
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#3337

Nitzan Rosenfeld

#176629
Overall Influence
Nitzan Rosenfeld is a professor of Cancer Diagnostics at the University of Cambridge. He is a Senior Group Leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and co-founder of Inivata, a clinical cancer genomics company.
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#3338

Guoping Zhang

#176682
Overall Influence
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#3339

Margaret A. Phillips

#176807
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Margaret A. Phillips is an American biologist who is the Sam G. Winstead and F. Andrew Bell Distinguished Chair in Biochemistry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. She was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.
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#3340

Heather Patrick

#176928
Overall Influence
Heather Jean Patrick is an American physicist. She is a researcher and project lead at National Institute of Standards and Technology. Patrick's research focuses on applications of scattering and reflectance measurements, advanced light sources, and robotics to the characterization and metrology of optical materials.
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#3341

Mercedes López-Morales

#176931
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Mercedes López-Morales is a Spanish-American astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who works on detection and characterization of exoplanet atmospheres.
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#3342

David Bruce Davidson

#176997
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
David Bruce Davidson is a London-born South African electrical engineer at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia whose work started in the field of Computational Electromagnetics focussed on the underlying theory and engineering applications of, in particular, finite element methods. In 2012 he was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for contributions to computational electromagnetics. He currently leads the engineering team at the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy, part of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research . His current research ...
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#3343

Mirit I. Aladjem

#177056
Overall Influence
Mirit I. Aladjem is an Israeli-American biologist researching cellular signaling pathways that regulate DNA synthesis. She is a senior investigator in the National Cancer Institute's developmental therapeutics branch and head of the DNA replication group.
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#3344

Chiao-Min Chu

#177327
Overall Influence
1919 - 1996 (77 years)
Chiao-Min Chu was a Chinese-American engineer. He was born on 3 March 1919. Chu received his bachelor's degree in engineering from National Wuhan University in 1939, and completed his subsequent education in the United States. He became a fellow of the University of Michigan in 1945, one year before he earned a master's degree in engineering. Upon the completion of his doctorate in 1952, Chu taught at the Detroit Institute of Technology as assistant and associate professor. In 1955, Chu returned to the University of Michigan as an associate research engineer. The following year, Chu began teaching at his alma mater as an assistant professor.
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#3345

Karen McNally

#177329
Overall Influence
1940 - 2014 (74 years)
Karen Cook McNally was an American seismologist. She was born in Clovis, California and received bachelor's and master's degrees and a PhD in geophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. McNally worked at the California Institute of Technology with Charles Francis Richter, creator of the Richter magnitude scale, and became part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1981. She was director of the Richter Seismological Laboratory there and their instruments were able to capture high-quality recordings of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. She founded the Insti...
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#3346

Stephen Shuster

#177436
Overall Influence
Stephen M. Shuster is an American biologist currently Professor of Invertebrate Zoology at Northern Arizona University and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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#3347

David Pommerenke

#177540
Overall Influence
David Pommerenke is an electrical engineer from the Graz University of Technology. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for his work with system-level electrostatic discharge technology.
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#3348

Kevin Bassler

#177814
Overall Influence
Kevin E. Bassler is an American physicist, currently the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Physics and Mathematics at the University of Houston. In 2014, Bassler was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society "for seminal and sustained contributions to the understanding of the dynamics of complex systems, particularly concerning non-equilibrium phase transitions, emergent behavior, and dynamics in adaptive networks."
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#3349

William Karl

#177875
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
William Clem Karl is an ECE Department Chair and Professor at Boston University who was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 for contributions to statistical signal processing and image reconstruction and in 2018 was inducted into the Medical and Biological Engineering Elite of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Karl is a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology from which he got his Ph.D. in 1991.
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#3350

Elizabeth R. Cantwell

#178058
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Elizabeth R. Cantwell is the president of Utah State University, a role she began on August 1, 2023. Education Cantwell has a B.A. in Human Behavior from the University of Chicago . In 1992, she received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2003, she earned an MBA in Finance & Entrepreneurship from the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School.
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