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
#3351
Jack Nicklaus
#3356
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Jack William Nicklaus , nicknamed The Golden Bear, is a retired American professional golfer and golf course designer. He is widely considered to be either the greatest or one of the greatest golfers of all time. He won 117 professional tournaments in his career. Over a quarter-century, he won a record 18 major championships, three more than second-placed Tiger Woods. Nicklaus focused on the major championships—the Masters Tournament, U.S. Open, Open Championship and PGA Championship—and played a selective schedule of regular PGA Tour events. He competed in 164 major tournaments, more than any...
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John Piper
#3357
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John Stephen Piper is an American Reformed Baptist theologian, pastor, and chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Piper taught biblical studies at Bethel University for six years , before serving as pastor for preaching and vision of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis for 33 years .
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Eugen Weber
#3358
Overall Influence
1925 - 2007 (82 years)
Eugen Joseph Weber was a Romanian-born American historian with a special focus on Western civilization. Weber became a historian because of his interest in politics, an interest dating back to at least the age of 12. He described his political awakening as a realization of social injustices: "It was my vague dissatisfaction with social hierarchy, the subjection of servants and peasants, the diffuse violence of everyday life in relatively peaceful country amongst apparently gentle folk".
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Terry Brooks
#3359
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Terence Dean Brooks is an American writer of fantasy fiction. He writes mainly epic fantasy, and has also written two film novelizations. He has written 23 New York Times bestsellers during his writing career, and has sold over 25 million copies of his books in print. He is one of the most successful living fantasy writers.
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Linda Nochlin
#3360
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
Linda Nochlin was an American art historian, Lila Acheson Wallace Professor Emerita of Modern Art at New York University Institute of Fine Arts, and writer. As a prominent feminist art historian, she became well known for her pioneering 1971 article "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" published by ARTnews.
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Nobuhiro Kiyotaki
#3361
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Nobuhiro Kiyotaki FBA is a Japanese economist and the Harold H. Helms '20 Professor of Economics and Banking at Princeton University. He is especially known for proposing several models that provide deeper microeconomic foundations for macroeconomics, some of which play a prominent role in New Keynesian macroeconomics.
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Cokie Roberts
#3362
Overall Influence
1943 - 2019 (76 years)
Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne "Cokie" Roberts was an American journalist and author. Her career included decades as a political reporter and analyst for National Public Radio, PBS, and ABC News, with prominent positions on Morning Edition, The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, World News Tonight, and This Week. She was considered one of NPR's "Founding Mothers" along with Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer and Nina Totenberg.
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Harold Acton
#3363
Overall Influence
1904 - 1994 (90 years)
Sir Harold Mario Mitchell Acton was a British writer, scholar, and aesthete who was a prominent member of the Bright Young Things. He wrote fiction, biography, history and autobiography. During his stay in China, he studied the Chinese language, traditional drama, and poetry, some of which he translated.
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William G. Bowen
#3364
Overall Influence
1933 - 2016 (83 years)
William Gordon Bowen was an American academic who served as the president emeritus of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, serving as its president from 1988 to 2006. From 1972 until 1988, he was the president of Princeton University. Bowen founded the digital library, JSTOR.
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David Olive
#3365
Overall Influence
1937 - 2012 (75 years)
David Ian Olive was a British theoretical physicist. Olive made fundamental contributions to string theory and duality theory, he is particularly known for his work on the GSO projection and Montonen–Olive duality.
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Charles Arthur Willard
#3366
Overall Influence
1945 - 2021 (76 years)
Charles Arthur Willard is an American argumentation and rhetorical theorist. He is a retired Professor and University Scholar at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky, USA. Education He received his undergraduate degree at the Kansas State Teachers College, Emporia, Kansas. He received his master's degree and doctorate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana.
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Howard Fast
#3367
Overall Influence
1914 - 2003 (89 years)
Howard Melvin Fast was an American novelist and television writer. Fast also wrote under the pen names E.V. Cunningham and Walter Ericson. Biography Early life Fast was born in New York City. His mother, Ida , was a British Jewish immigrant, and his father, Barney Fast, was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who shortened his name from Fastovsky upon arrival in America. When his mother died in 1923 and his father became unemployed, Howard's youngest brother, Julius, went to live with relatives, while he and his older brother, Jerome, sold newspapers. Howard credited his early voracious reading to ...
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Ion Stoica
#3368
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Ion Stoica is a Romanian–American computer scientist specializing in distributed systems, cloud computing and computer networking. He is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and co-director of AMPLab. He co-founded Conviva and Databricks with other original developers of Apache Spark.
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John Cocke
#3369
Overall Influence
1925 - 2002 (77 years)
John Cocke was an American computer scientist recognized for his large contribution to computer architecture and optimizing compiler design. He is considered by many to be "the father of RISC architecture."
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Reinhard Genzel
#3370
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Reinhard Genzel is a German astrophysicist, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, a professor at LMU and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy", which he shared with Andrea Ghez and Roger Penrose. In a 2021 interview given to Federal University of Pará in Brazil, Genzel recalls his journey as a physicist; the influence of his father, ; his experiences working with Charles H. Townes; and more.
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James K. Galbraith
#3371
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
James Kenneth Galbraith is an American economist. He is currently a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and at the Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin. He is also a Senior Scholar with the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and part of the executive committee of the World Economics Association, created in 2011.
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C. L. Max Nikias
#3372
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Chrysostomos Loizos "Max" Nikias is a Cypriot-American academic, and served as the 11th University of Southern California president, a position he held from August 3, 2010, to August 7, 2018. He holds the Malcolm R. Currie Chair in Technology and the Humanities and is president emeritus of the university. He had been at USC since 1991, as a professor, director of national research centers, dean, provost, and president. He also served as chair of the College Football Playoff Board of Managers as chair of the board of the Keck Medical Center at USC , as member of the board of directors of the...
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Amal Clooney
#3373
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Amal Clooney is a Lebanese and British barrister. Notable clients of hers include former President of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, former Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko, Iraqi human rights activist Nadia Murad, and the journalists Maria Ressa, and Mohamed Fahmy.
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Brent Musburger
#3374
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Brent Woody Musburger is an American sportscaster, currently the lead broadcaster and managing editor at Vegas Stats and Information Network . With CBS Sports from 1973 until 1990, he was one of the original members of their program The NFL Today and is credited with coining the phrase "March Madness" to describe the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament while covering the Final Four. While at CBS, Musburger also covered the Super Bowl, NBA Finals, the World Series, U.S. Open tennis, and The Masters.
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Geoffrey Hartman
#3375
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Geoffrey H. Hartman was a German-born American literary theorist, sometimes identified with the Yale School of deconstruction, although he cannot be categorised by a single school or method. Hartman spent most of his career in the comparative literature department at Yale University, where he also founded the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.
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Maurice Bloch
#3376
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Maurice Bloch is Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics. He was born in France in 1939. After his father, serving in the French army, was killed by the Nazis, he moved with his mother and her new husband to England. He completed his undergraduate education at the London School of Economics and earned his Ph.D in anthropology at Fitzwilliam College of Cambridge University. Bloch has researched themes of kinship, politics, economics, and religion in two regions of Madagascar. His work has built a bridge between linguistics, psychology, and social anthropology. A writer of numerous books and articles about Madagascar, his work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
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C. E. M. Hansel
#3377
Overall Influence
1917 - 2011 (94 years)
Charles Edward Mark Hansel was a British psychologist most notable for his criticism of parapsychological studies. Early life and education Hansel was born in 1917 in Bedford, England and attended Bedford School as a child. He received a commission in the RAF Equipment branch as an acting pilot officer in April 1939, serving in England, Iraq, and Egypt. After his service, he attended Bournemouth Municipal College of Technology and Commerce, earning a BA, and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University, where he studied Moral Sciences, Part II Psychology and earned his MA.
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Yevgenia Albats
#3378
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Yevgenia Markovna Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, writer and radio host. In 1986—1992, Albats worked as a columnist for Moskovskie Novosti. Since 1995, she has worked with the newspapers Izvestia, Novaya Gazeta and Kommersant. From 2004 to February 2022, she was the host of the author's program "Full Albats" on Echo of Moscow radio station. As of 2022, she works as a chief editor of The New Times magazine.
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Victor Vroom
#3379
Overall Influence
1932 - 2023 (91 years)
Victor Harold Vroom was a Canadian psychologist and business school professor at the Yale School of Management. Life and career Vroom was born in Montreal, Quebec on August 9, 1932. He held a PhD from University of Michigan and an MS and BS from McGill University.
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Alan Cooper
#3380
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Alan Cooper is an American software designer and programmer. Widely recognized as the "Father of Visual Basic", Cooper is also known for his books About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. As founder of Cooper, a leading interaction design consultancy, he created the Goal-Directed design methodology and pioneered the use of personas as practical interaction design tools to create high-tech products. On April 28, 2017, Alan was inducted into the Computer History Museum's Hall of ...
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Carl Mitcham
#3381
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Carl Mitcham is a philosopher of engineering and technology, Professor Emeritus of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the Colorado School of Mines and Visiting International Professor of Philosophy of Technology at Renmin University of China.
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Simon Peyton Jones
#3382
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Simon Peyton Jones is a British computer scientist who researches the implementation and applications of functional programming languages, particularly lazy functional programming. Education Peyton Jones graduated from the University of Cambridge with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Sciences in 1979. During this time he was an undergraduate student of Trinity College, Cambridge, and subsequently went on to complete the Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science in 1980. He never did a PhD.
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Paul Fussell
#3383
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
Paul Fussell Jr. was an American cultural and literary historian, author and university professor. His writings cover a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentary on America's class system. Fussell served in the 103rd Infantry Division during World War II and was wounded in fighting in France. Returning to the US, Fussell wrote extensively and held several faculty positions, most prominently at Rutgers University and at the University of Pennsylvania . He is best known for his writings about World War I and II, which explore what he felt wa...
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Walter Kasper
#3384
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Walter Kasper is a German Catholic cardinal and theologian. He is President Emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, having served as its president from 2001 to 2010. Early life Born in Heidenheim an der Brenz, Germany, Kasper was ordained a priest on 6 April 1957 by Bishop Carl Leiprecht of Rottenburg.
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Helen Frankenthaler
#3385
Overall Influence
1928 - 2011 (83 years)
Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades , she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as color field.
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John Haugeland
#3386
Overall Influence
1945 - 2010 (65 years)
John Haugeland was a professor of philosophy, specializing in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, phenomenology, and Heidegger. He spent most of his career at the University of Pittsburgh, followed by the University of Chicago from 1999 until his death. He is featured in Tao Ruspoli's film Being in the World.
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Daniel Levitin
#3387
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Daniel Joseph Levitin, FRSC is an American-Canadian cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, writer, musician, and record producer. He is the author of four New York Times best-selling books, including This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, which has sold more than 1 million copies.
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Alan Shearer
#3388
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Alan Shearer CBE DL is an English football pundit and former professional player who played as a striker. Widely regarded as one of the best strikers of all time and one of the greatest players in Premier League history, he is the Premier League's record goalscorer with 260 goals. He was named Football Writers' Association Player of the Year in 1994 and won the PFA Player of the Year award in 1995. In 1996, he came third in both Ballon d'Or and FIFA World Player of the Year awards. In 2004, he was named by Pelé in the FIFA 100 list of the world's greatest living players. Shearer was one of th...
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Fabio Capello
#3389
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Fabio Capello is an Italian former professional football manager and player. As a player, Capello represented SPAL 1907, Roma, Milan and Juventus. He played as a midfielder and won several trophies during his career which lasted over 15 years. He won the Coppa Italia with Roma in 1969, though he was most successful with Juventus, winning three Serie A titles in 1972, 1973 and 1975. With Milan, he won the Coppa Italia again in 1977 and also won another Serie A in 1979. Capello also played internationally for Italy during his career, amassing 32 caps and scoring 8 goals.
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John Wayne Gacy
#3390
Overall Influence
1942 - 1994 (52 years)
John Wayne Gacy was an American serial killer and sex offender who raped, tortured, and murdered at least 33 young men and boys in Norwood Park Township, near Chicago, Illinois. He became known as the Killer Clown due to his public performances as a clown prior to the discovery of his crimes.
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Wolfgang Iser
#3391
Overall Influence
1926 - 2007 (81 years)
Wolfgang Iser was a German literary scholar. Biography Wolfgang Iser was born in Marienberg, Germany. His parents were Paul and Else Iser. He studied literature in the universities of Leipzig and Tübingen before receiving his PhD in English at Heidelberg with a dissertation on the world view of Henry Fielding . A year later, Iser was appointed as an instructor at Heidelberg and in 1952 as an assistant lecturer at the University of Glasgow. There, Iser began to explore contemporary philosophy and literature, which deepened his interest in inter-cultural exchange. He subsequently lectured in many other parts of the world, including Asia and Israel.
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Magdi Yacoub
#3392
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Sir Magdi Habib Yacoub , is an Egyptian retired professor of cardiothoracic surgery at Imperial College London, best known for his early work in repairing heart valves with surgeon Donald Ross, adapting the Ross procedure, where the diseased aortic valve is replaced with the person's own pulmonary valve, devising the arterial switch operation in transposition of the great arteries, and establishing the heart transplantation centre at Harefield Hospital in 1980 with a heart transplant for Derrick Morris, who at the time of his death was Europe's longest-surviving heart transplant recipient. Y...
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Ronald Inden
#3393
Overall Influence
Ronald B. Inden is a professor emeritus in the Departments of History and of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago and is a major scholar in South Asian and post-colonial studies. Inden has been a lifelong resident of Hyde Park, the Chicago community which contains the University.
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William Weaver
#3394
Overall Influence
1923 - 2013 (90 years)
William Fense Weaver was an English language translator of modern Italian literature. Weaver was best known for his translations of the work of Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, and Italo Calvino, but translated many other Italian authors over the course of a career that spanned more than fifty years. In addition to prose, he translated Italian poetry and opera libretti, and worked as a critic and commentator on the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts.
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Elias Canetti
#3395
Overall Influence
1905 - 1994 (89 years)
Elias Canetti was a German-language writer, born in Ruse, Bulgaria to a Sephardic family. They moved to Manchester, England, but his father died in 1912, and his mother took her three sons back to continental Europe. They settled in Vienna.
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Strobe Talbott
#3396
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Nelson Strobridge Talbott III is an American foreign policy analyst focused on Russia. He was associated with Time magazine, and a diplomat who served as the deputy secretary of state from 1994 to 2001. He was president of Brookings Institution from 2002 to 2017.
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Peter Dayan
#3397
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Peter Dayan is a British neuroscientist and computer scientist who is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, along with Ivan De Araujo. He is co-author of Theoretical Neuroscience, an influential textbook on computational neuroscience. He is known for applying Bayesian methods from machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand neural function and is particularly recognized for relating neurotransmitter levels to prediction errors and Bayesian uncertainties. He has pioneered the field of reinforcement learning where he helped develop...
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Valery Fabrikant
#3398
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Valery Iosifovich Fabrikant is a former associate professor of mechanical engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. On 24 August 1992, after years of increasingly disruptive behaviour at the university, he shot and killed four colleagues and wounded one staff member.
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Johann Baptist Metz
#3399
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Johann Baptist Metz was a German Catholic priest and theologian. He was Ordinary Professor of Fundamental Theology at the University of Münster, and a consultant to the synod of German dioceses. He is regarded as one of the most important German theologians after the Second Vatican Council, who influenced liberation theology and focused on compassion.
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Ujjwal Maulik
#3400
Overall Influence
Ujjwal Maulik is an Indian computer scientist and a professor. He is the former chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India. He also held the position of the principal-in-charge and the head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Kalyani Government Engineering College.
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Chris Wallace
#3401
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Christopher Wallace is an American broadcast journalist. He is known for his tough and wide-ranging interviews, for which he is often compared to his father, 60 Minutes journalist Mike Wallace. Over his 50-year career in journalism he has been a correspondent, moderator, or anchor on CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox News, and now CNN. In 2018 he was ranked one of America's most trusted TV news anchors. Wallace has won three Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, a George Polk Award, the duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton Award, and a Paul White lifetime achievement award.
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Derek Freeman
#3402
Overall Influence
1916 - 2001 (85 years)
John Derek Freeman was a New Zealand anthropologist known for his criticism of Margaret Mead's work on Samoan society, as described in her 1928 ethnography Coming of Age in Samoa. His attack "ignited controversy of a scale, visibility, and ferocity never before seen in anthropology."
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Achille Mbembe
#3403
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Joseph-Achille Mbembe, known as Achille Mbembe , is a Cameroonian historian, political theorist, and public intellectual who is a research professor in history and politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economy Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is well known for his writings on colonialism and its consequences and is a leading figure in new wave French critical theory.
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Roger Godement
#3404
Overall Influence
1921 - 2016 (95 years)
Roger Godement was a French mathematician, known for his work in functional analysis as well as his expository books. Biography Godement started as a student at the École normale supérieure in 1940, where he became a student of Henri Cartan. He started research into harmonic analysis on locally compact abelian groups, finding a number of major results; this work was in parallel but independent of similar investigations in the USSR and Japan. Work on the abstract theory of spherical functionss published in 1952 proved very influential in subsequent work, particularly that of Harish-Chandra. The isolation of the concept of square-integrable representation is attributed to him.
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F. Albert Cotton
#3405
Overall Influence
1930 - 2007 (77 years)
Frank Albert Cotton FRS was an American chemist. He was the W.T. Doherty-Welch Foundation Chair and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Texas A&M University. He authored over 1600 scientific articles. Cotton was recognized for his research on the chemistry of the transition metals.
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