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
#3401
Henry Paulson
#3406
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Henry "Hank" Merritt Paulson Jr. is an American banker and financier who served as the 74th United States Secretary of the Treasury from 2006 to 2009. Prior to his role in the Department of the Treasury, Paulson was the chairman and chief executive officer of major investment bank Goldman Sachs.
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Francis Ford Coppola
#3407
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Francis Ford Coppola is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is considered one of the major figures of the New Hollywood filmmaking movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Coppola is the recipient of five Academy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, two Palmes d'Or and a British Academy Film Award .
Go to Profile#3403
Marlon Brando
#3408
Overall Influence
1924 - 2004 (80 years)
Marlon Brando Jr. was an American actor and activist. Considered one of the greatest actors of the 20th century, he received numerous accolades throughout his career, which spanned six decades, including two Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, one Cannes Film Festival Award, and three British Academy Film Awards. Brando is credited with being one of the first actors to bring the Stanislavski system of acting and method acting to mainstream audiences.
Go to Profile#3404
Richard E. Mayer
#3409
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Richard E. Mayer is an American educational psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he has served since 1975. He received a PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan , and served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology at Indiana University .
Go to Profile#3405
William Frankena
#3410
Overall Influence
1908 - 1994 (86 years)
William Klaas Frankena was an American moral philosopher. He was a member of the University of Michigan's department of philosophy for 41 years , and chair of the department for 14 years . Life Frankena's father and mother immigrated to the U.S. as teenagers, in 1892 and 1896 respectively, from Friesland, a province in the north of the Netherlands. William Frankena was the middle one of three children. He was born in Manhattan, Montana, grew up in small Dutch communities in Montana and western Michigan, and spoke West Frisian and Dutch. In primary school, his given name, Wiebe, was Anglicized to William.
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Federico Lombardi
#3411
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Federico Lombardi is an Italian Catholic priest and the former director of the Holy See Press Office. He succeeded Joaquín Navarro-Valls and was succeeded by Greg Burke. Lombardi also serves as the postulator for the sainthood cause of Fr Bernardo Mattio.
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Peter Navarro
#3412
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Peter Kent Navarro is an American political figure who served in the Trump administration as the Assistant to the President, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and the national Defense Production Act policy coordinator. He previously served as a Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the White House National Trade Council, a newly created entity in the White House Office, until it was folded into the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, a new role established by executive order in April 2017. He is also a professor emeritus of economics and public policy at the Paul M...
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Theodore Dalrymple
#3413
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Anthony Malcolm Daniels , also known by the pen name Theodore Dalrymple , is a conservative English cultural critic, prison physician and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the East End of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England.
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Frederick Buechner
#3414
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Carl Frederick Buechner was an American author, Presbyterian minister, preacher, and theologian. The author of thirty-nine published books, his career spanned more than six decades and encompassed many different genres. He wrote novels, including Godric , A Long Day's Dying and The Book of Bebb, his memoirs, including The Sacred Journey, and theological works, such as Secrets in the Dark, The Magnificent Defeat, and Telling the Truth.
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Irving Louis Horowitz
#3415
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Irving Louis Horowitz was an American sociologist, author, and college professor who wrote and lectured extensively in his field, and his later years came to fear that it risked being seized by left-wing ideologues. He proposed a quantitative index for measuring a country's quality of life, and helped to popularize "Third World" as a term for the poorer nations of the Non-Aligned Movement. He was considered by many to be a neoconservative, although he maintained that he had no political adherence.
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Vaughan Pratt
#3416
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Vaughan Pratt is a Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, who was an early pioneer in the field of computer science. Since 1969, Pratt has made several contributions to foundational areas such as search algorithms, sorting algorithms, and primality testing. More recently, his research has focused on formal modeling of concurrent systems and Chu spaces.
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Walter Mignolo
#3417
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Walter D. Mignolo is an Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as decoloniality, global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality. He is one of the founders of the modernity/coloniality critical school of thought.
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Bill Belichick
#3418
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
William Stephen Belichick is an American football coach who is the head coach and general manager of the New England Patriots of the National Football League . Widely regarded as one of the greatest head coaches of all time, he holds numerous coaching records, including the record of most Super Bowl wins as a head coach, all with the Patriots, along with two more during his time as the defensive coordinator of the New York Giants, for the record of eight combined total Super Bowl victories as coach and coordinator. Belichick is often referred to as a "student of the game", with a deep knowl...
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Doris Duke
#3419
Overall Influence
1912 - 1993 (81 years)
Doris Duke was an American billionaire tobacco heiress, philanthropist, and socialite. She was often called "the richest girl in the world". Her great wealth, luxurious lifestyle, and love life attracted significant press coverage, both during her life and after her death.
Go to Profile#3415
George Carey
#3420
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
George Leonard Carey, Baron Carey of Clifton is a retired Anglican bishop who was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002, having previously been the Bishop of Bath and Wells. During his time as archbishop the Church of England ordained its first women priests and the debate over attitudes to homosexuality became more prominent, especially at the 1998 Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops.
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William J. Brennan Jr.
#3421
Overall Influence
1906 - 1997 (91 years)
William Joseph Brennan Jr. was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1956 to 1990. He was the seventh-longest serving justice in Supreme Court history, and was known for being a leader of the Court's liberal wing.
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Leon O. Chua
#3422
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Leon Ong Chua is an American electrical engineer and computer scientist. He is a professor in the electrical engineering and computer sciences department at the University of California, Berkeley, which he joined in 1971. He has contributed to nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural network theory.
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Twyla Tharp
#3423
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Twyla Tharp is an American dancer, choreographer, and author who lives and works in New York City. In 1966 she formed the company Twyla Tharp Dance. Her work often uses classical music, jazz, and contemporary pop music.
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Ken Liu
#3424
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Ken Liu is an American author of science fiction and fantasy. Liu has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards for his short fiction, which has appeared in F&SF, Asimov's, Analog, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and multiple "Year's Best" anthologies.
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Balthus
#3425
Overall Influence
1908 - 2001 (93 years)
Balthasar Klossowski de Rola , known as Balthus, was a Polish-French modern artist. He is known for his erotically charged images of pubescent girls, but also for the refined, dreamlike quality of his imagery.
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Donald Woods
#3426
Overall Influence
1933 - 2001 (68 years)
Donald James Woods was a South African journalist and anti-apartheid activist. As editor of the Daily Dispatch, he was known for befriending fellow activist Steve Biko, who was killed by police after being detained by the South African government. Woods continued his campaign against apartheid in London, and in 1978 became the first private citizen to address the United Nations Security Council.
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John H. Cochrane
#3427
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
John Howland Cochrane is an American economist specializing in financial economics and macroeconomics. Formerly a professor of economics and finance at the University of Chicago, Cochrane serves full-time as the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
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Frank McCourt
#3428
Overall Influence
1930 - 2009 (79 years)
Francis McCourt was an Irish-American teacher and writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Angela's Ashes, a tragicomic memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood. Early life and education Frank McCourt was born in New York City's Brooklyn borough, on August 19, 1930, the eldest child of Irish Catholic immigrants Malachy Gerald McCourt, Sr. , of Toome, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, who was aligned with the IRA during the Irish War of Independence, and Angela Sheehan from Limerick. Frank McCourt lived in New York with his parents and four younger siblings: Malachy, born in 1931;...
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Clifford A. Pickover
#3429
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Clifford Alan Pickover is an American author, editor, and columnist in the fields of science, mathematics, science fiction, innovation, and creativity. For many years, he was employed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York, where he was editor-in-chief of the IBM Journal of Research and Development. He has been granted more than 700 U.S. patents, is an elected Fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and is author of more than 50 books, translated into more than a dozen languages.
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Luis Caffarelli
#3430
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Luis Ángel Caffarelli is an Argentine-American mathematician. He studies partial differential equations and their applications. Career Caffarelli was born and grew up in Buenos Aires. He obtained his Masters of Science and Ph.D. at the University of Buenos Aires. His Ph.D. advisor was Calixto Calderón. He currently holds the Sid Richardson Chair at the University of Texas at Austin and is core faculty at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. He also has been a professor at the University of Minnesota, the University of Chicago, and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.
Go to Profile#3426
Charles H. Moore
#3431
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Charles Havice Moore II , better known as Chuck Moore, is an American computer engineer and programmer, best known for inventing the Forth programming language in 1968. He cofounded FORTH, Inc., with Elizabeth Rather in 1971 and continued to evolve the language with an emphasis on simplicity. Beginning in the early 1980s, he shifted focus to designing stack machines in hardware conjoined with Forth-like languages to run on them. He developed the Novix NC4000 and Sh-Boom, then the minimal instruction set MuP21, and i21. In the 2000s he created a series of low-power chips containing up to 144 individual stack processors.
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Timothy Ferris
#3432
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Timothy Ferris is an American science writer and the best-selling author of twelve books, including The Science of Liberty and Coming of Age in the Milky Way , for which he was awarded the American Institute of Physics Prize and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe Report , a popular science book on the study of the universe. Ferris has produced three PBS documentaries: The Creation of the Universe, Life Beyond Earth, and Seeing in the Dark.
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Derek Bickerton
#3433
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Derek Bickerton was an English-born linguist and professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Based on his work in creole languages in Guyana and Hawaii, he has proposed that the features of creole languages provide powerful insights into the development of language both by individuals and as a feature of the human species. He is the originator and main proponent of the language bioprogram hypothesis according to which the similarity of creoles is due to their being formed from a prior pidgin by children who all share a universal human innate grammar capacity.
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Clay Shirky
#3434
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Clay Shirky is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies and journalism. In 2017 he was appointed Vice Provost of Educational Technologies of New York University , after serving as Chief Information Officer at NYU Shanghai from 2014 to 2017. He also is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Associate Arts Professor at the Tisch School of the Arts' Interactive Telecommunications Program. His courses address, among other things, the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technologi...
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Rian Johnson
#3435
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Rian Craig Johnson is an American filmmaker. He made his directorial debut with the neo-noir mystery film Brick , which received positive reviews and grossed nearly $4 million on a $450,000 budget. Transitioning to higher-profile films, Johnson achieved mainstream recognition for writing and directing the science-fiction thriller Looper to critical and commercial success. Johnson landed his largest project when he wrote and directed the space opera Star Wars: The Last Jedi , which grossed over $1 billion. He returned to the mystery genre with Knives Out and its sequel Glass Onion , both of ...
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Phil Tan
#3436
Overall Influence
Phil Tan is a Malaysian-American music and audio engineer. Early life and education Tan was born in Malaysia. He attended Full Sail University in Florida in the U.S., where he attained a degree in Recording Arts in 1990. Afterwards he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where he embarked on a career as a recording engineer.
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Peter Hilton
#3437
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Peter John Hilton was a British mathematician, noted for his contributions to homotopy theory and for code-breaking during World War II. Early life He was born in Brondesbury, London, the son Mortimer Jacob Hilton, a Jewish physician who was in general practice in Peckham, and his wife Elizabeth Amelia Freedman, and was brought up in Kilburn. The physiologist Sidney Montague Hilton of the University of Birmingham Medical School was his elder brother.
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Joseph Mercola
#3438
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Joseph Michael Mercola is an American alternative medicine proponent, osteopathic physician, and Internet business personality. He markets largely unproven dietary supplements and medical devices. On his website, Mercola and colleagues advocate unproven and pseudoscientific alternative health notions including homeopathy and opposition to vaccination. These positions have received persistent criticism. Mercola is a member of several alternative medicine organizations as well as the political advocacy group Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which promotes scientifically discredited views about medicine and disease.
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Kazuo Ishiguro
#3439
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and praised contemporary fiction authors writing in English, having been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy described Ishiguro as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".
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John Polanyi
#3440
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
John Charles Polanyi is a German-born Canadian chemist. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research in chemical kinetics. Polanyi was born into the prominent Hungarian Polányi family in Berlin, Germany, prior to emigrating in 1933 to the United Kingdom where he was subsequently educated at the University of Manchester, and did postdoctoral research at the National Research Council in Canada and Princeton University in New Jersey. Polanyi's first academic appointment was at the University of Toronto, and he remains there .
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Miles Davis
#3441
Overall Influence
1929 - 1991 (62 years)
Miles Dewey Davis III was an American jazz musician, trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. Davis adopted a variety of musical directions in a roughly five-decade career that kept him at the forefront of many major stylistic developments in jazz.
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Richard Duffin
#3442
Overall Influence
1909 - 1996 (87 years)
Richard James Duffin was an American physicist, known for his contributions to electrical transmission theory and to the development of geometric programming and other areas within operations research.
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Harold Shipman
#3443
Overall Influence
1946 - 2004 (58 years)
Harold Frederick Shipman , known to acquaintances as Fred Shipman, was an English general practitioner and serial killer. He is considered to be one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history, with an estimated 250 victims. On 31 January 2000, Shipman was found guilty of murdering fifteen patients under his care. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order. Shipman hanged himself in his cell at HM Prison Wakefield, West Yorkshire, on 13 January 2004, aged 57.
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George H. Smith
#3444
Overall Influence
1949 - 2022 (73 years)
George Hamilton Smith was an American author, editor, educator, and speaker, known for his writings on atheism and libertarianism. Biography Smith grew up mostly in Tucson, Arizona, and attended the University of Arizona for several years before leaving without a degree; he relocated to Los Angeles during 1971. With the help of libertarian editor Roy A. Childs, Jr., he secured a contract from Nash Publishing to produce a book on atheism. The finished product was his first book, Atheism: The Case Against God .
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Victor Farías
#3445
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Víctor Ernesto Farías Soto is a Chilean historian. Farías is best known for his controversial book Heidegger and Nazism . Education Farías was born in Santiago in 1940. He graduated from the Catholic University of Chile in 1961 and continued his studies in Freiburg, Germany, where he obtained a doctorate in Philosophy. During his stay in Germany, Farías studied under such German thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Rainer Marten, and Eugen Fink. Farías returned to Chile in 1971 but fled back to Germany after the 1973 coup which deposed President Allende. Farías became an investigator and professor...
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Jim Steranko
#3446
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
James F. Steranko is an American graphic artist, comic book writer/artist, comics historian, magician, publisher and film production illustrator. His most famous comic book work was with the 1960s superspy feature "Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D." in Marvel Comics' Strange Tales and in the subsequent eponymous series. Steranko earned lasting acclaim for his innovations in sequential art during the Silver Age of Comic Books, particularly his infusion of surrealism, pop art, and graphic design into the medium. His work has been published in many countries and his influence on the field has remained strong since his comics heyday.
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Zadie Smith
#3447
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth , immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
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Manfred Nowak
#3448
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Manfred Nowak is an Austrian human rights expert, who served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture from 2004 to 2010. He is Secretary General of the Global Campus of Human Rights in Venice, Italy, Professor of International Human Rights, and Scientific Director of the Vienna Master of Arts in Applied Human Rights at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He is also co-founder and former Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights and a former judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2016, he was appointed Independent Expert leading the ...
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Mary Leakey
#3449
Overall Influence
1913 - 1996 (83 years)
Mary Douglas Leakey, FBA was a British paleoanthropologist who discovered the first fossilised Proconsul skull, an extinct ape which is now believed to be ancestral to humans. She also discovered the robust Zinjanthropus skull at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, eastern Africa. For much of her career she worked with her husband, Louis Leakey, at Olduvai Gorge, where they uncovered fossils of ancient hominines and the earliest hominins, as well as the stone tools produced by the latter group. Mary Leakey developed a system for classifying the stone tools found at Olduvai. She discovered the Laetol...
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Roy Porter
#3450
Overall Influence
1946 - 2002 (56 years)
Roy Sydney Porter, FBA was a British historian known for his work on the history of medicine. He retired in 2001 from the director of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine at University College London .
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Jerome Karle
#3451
Overall Influence
1918 - 2013 (95 years)
Jerome Karle was an American physical chemist. Jointly with Herbert A. Hauptman, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985, for the direct analysis of crystal structures using X-ray scattering techniques.
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Paul Seymour
#3452
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Paul D. Seymour is a British mathematician known for his work in discrete mathematics, especially graph theory. He was responsible for important progress on regular matroids and totally unimodular matrices, the four colour theorem, linkless embeddings, graph minors and structure, the perfect graph conjecture, the Hadwiger conjecture, claw-free graphs, χ-boundedness, and the Erdős–Hajnal conjecture. Many of his recent papers are available from his website.
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Lewis Goldberg
#3453
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Lewis R. Goldberg is an American personality psychologist and a professor emeritus at the University of Oregon. He is closely associated with the lexical hypothesis that any culturally important personality characteristic will be represented in the language of that culture. This hypothesis led to a five factor structure of personality trait adjectives . When applied to personality items this structure is also known as the five-factor model of personality. He is the creator of the International Personality Item Pool, a website that provides public-domain personality measures.
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Nick Knight
#3454
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Nicholas David Gordon Knight is a British fashion photographer and founder and director of SHOWstudio.com. He is an honorary professor at University of the Arts London and was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by the same university. He has produced books of his work including retrospectives Nicknight and Nick Knight . In 2016, Knight's 1992 campaign photograph for fashion brand Jil Sander was sold by Phillips auction house at the record-breaking price of HKD 2,360,000.
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Donella Meadows
#3455
Overall Influence
1941 - 2001 (60 years)
Donella Hager "Dana" Meadows was an American environmental scientist, educator, and writer. She is best known as lead author of the books The Limits to Growth and Thinking In Systems: A Primer. Early life and education Born in Elgin, Illinois, Meadows was educated in science, receiving a B.A. in chemistry from Carleton College in 1963 and a PhD in biophysics from Harvard in 1968. After a yearlong trip from England to Sri Lanka and back, she became a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a member of a team in the department created by Jay Forrester, the inventor of sy...
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