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
#34701
Radu Bălescu
#34713
Overall Influence
1932 - 2006 (74 years)
Radu Bălescu was a Romanian and Belgian scientist and professor at the Statistical and Plasma Physics group of the Université Libre de Bruxelles . He studied at the Titu Maiorescu high school, in Bucharest and the Athénée Royal d'Ixelles . At the ULB he studied chemistry and obtained a PhD in 1958. He started his academic career in 1957 at the ULB as an assistant at the Service de Physique Théorique et Mathématique. He became a professor at the ULB in 1964. He worked on the statistical physics of charged particles and on the theory of transport of magnetically confined plasmas. Radu Bale...
Go to Profile#34702
Danny Thompson
#34714
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Daniel Henry Edward Thompson is an English multi-instrumentalist best known as a double bassist. He has had a long musical career playing with a large variety of other musicians, particularly Richard Thompson and John Martyn.
Go to Profile#34703
James Brooks
#34715
Overall Influence
1906 - 1992 (86 years)
James David Brooks was an American Abstract Expressionist, muralist, abstract painter, art teacher, and winner of the Logan Medal of the Arts. Life and career Brooks was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1906. He attended Southern Methodist University and the Dallas Art Institute. In 1926, he moved to New York, where he worked as a commercial letterer and display artist and attended night classes at the Art Students League.
Go to Profile#34704
Eric D. Green
#34716
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Eric D. Green is an American genomics researcher who had significant involvement in the Human Genome Project. He is the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health , a position he has held since 2009.
Go to Profile#34705
Stephen Schulhofer
#34717
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Stephen Joseph Schulhofer is the Robert B. McKay Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. His academic focus is criminal justice. Background Schulhofer completed his B.A. summa cum laude in 1964 at Princeton University, and his J.D. summa cum laude in 1967 at Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He then clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black for two years. He practiced for three years with the law firm Coudert Frères in Paris, from 1969 to 1972.
Go to Profile#34706
James A. Corbett
#34718
Overall Influence
1933 - 2001 (68 years)
James A. "Jim" Corbett was an American rancher, writer, Quaker, philosopher, and human rights activist and a co-founder of the Sanctuary movement. He was born in Casper, Wyoming, and died near Benson, Arizona.
Go to Profile#34707
Deidre Palmer
#34719
Overall Influence
Deidre Palmer was the President of the Uniting Church in Australia from 8 July 2018 until 17 July 2021. She is a counsellor, theologian, and social worker. She was the Moderator of the Uniting Church's Synod of South Australia from 2013 to 2016.
Go to Profile#34708
Emily Vermeule
#34720
Overall Influence
1928 - 2001 (73 years)
Emily Dickinson Townsend Vermeule was an American classical scholar and archaeologist. She was a professor of classical philology and archaeology at Harvard University. Early life and education Emily Dickinson Townsend was born on August 11, 1928, in New York City to Clinton Blake Townsend and Eleanor Mary Meneely. She was named for her grandmother, a relative of the poet Emily Dickinson.
Go to Profile#34709
Rebekka Habermas
#34721
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Rebekka Habermas is a German historian, professor of modern history at the University of Göttingen, in Germany. Habermas has made substantial contributions to German social and cultural history of the 19th century.
Go to Profile#34710
Willibald Sauerländer
#34722
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
Willibald Sauerländer was a German art historian specializing in Medieval French sculpture. From 1970 to 1989, he was director of the prestigious Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich. Life and work The son of a late-Impressionist painter who disliked art historians, Sauerländer grew up in a house with works of old and modern art. Notwithstanding, he began studying art history in 1946, at a time when Munich was in ruins, the intellectual situation extremely truncated, and the center of everything the study of medieval art, in a curious kind of secular, "aesthetic mystical" spiritualism, which he did not like.
Go to Profile#34711
Mark Blundell
#34723
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Mark Blundell is a British racing driver who competed in Formula One for four seasons, sports cars, and CART. He won the 1992 24 Hours of Le Mans. He was a Formula One presenter for the British broadcaster ITV until the end of the 2008 season when the TV broadcasting rights switched to the BBC. Blundell returned to the track in 2019, driving in the Kwik Fit British Touring Car Championship for the Trade Price Cars team. Blundell has returned to the series in a new role for 2020 helping to form the latest name to line the grid - MB Motorsport as Sporting Director working with Laser Tools Racing.
Go to Profile#34712
Branden Fitelson
#34724
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Branden Fitelson is an American philosopher and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University. He is known for his expertise on formal epistemology and philosophy of science. Bibliography Edward N. Zalta and Branden Fitelson, "Steps Toward a Computational Metaphysics", Journal of Philosophical Logic 36 : 227–247.
Go to Profile#34713
Ray Heffner
#34725
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Ray Lorenzo Heffner was an American educator and president of Brown University. He served in the United States Navy during World War II and graduated from Yale College in 1948, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the Elizabethan Club, and Scroll and Key. He earned his master's degree at Yale in 1950 and his Ph.D., also from Yale, in 1953 following the completion of a dissertation on the Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton.
Go to Profile#34714
Giuseppe Attardi
#34726
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Giuseppe Attardi was an American molecular biologist of Italian origin, a professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He made pioneering studies on the human mitochondrial structure and function.
Go to Profile#34715
Jay P. Sanford
#34727
Overall Influence
1928 - 1996 (68 years)
Jay Philip Sanford was a noted American military physician and infectious disease specialist. He held a chair in Tropical Medicine and was author of The Sanford Guide to Antimicrobial Therapy. From 1975 until 1990, he was dean, then president, of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. He received numerous lifetime honors, awards, and accolades.
Go to Profile#34716
Peter Hunt
#34728
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Peter Hunt is a British scholar who is Professor Emeritus in English and children's literature at Cardiff University, UK. Hunt was a pioneer of the academic study of children's literature as a literary, rather than educational, discipline at university level, and 'he has been instrumental in creating a world network of those whose research concerns are located in this domain'. The courses that he ran at Cardiff from 1985 were the first of their kind in the UK. He has lectured on children's literature at over 150 universities, colleges and to learned societies in 23 countries, and over the pas...
Go to Profile#34717
Jackie Joyner-Kersee
#34729
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Jacqueline Joyner-Kersee is a retired American track and field athlete, ranked among the all-time greatest athletes in the heptathlon as well as long jump. She won three gold, one silver, and two bronze Olympic medals in those two events at four different Olympic Games. Sports Illustrated for Women magazine voted Joyner-Kersee the Greatest Female Athlete of All-Time. She served on the board of directors for USA Track & Field , the national governing body of the sport.
Go to Profile#34718
Tsutomu Yanagida
#34730
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Tsutomu Yanagida is a Japanese physicist who first proposed the seesaw mechanism in 1979 and developed the model of leptogenesis. The name of the seesaw mechanism was given by him in a Tokyo conference in 1981. In 1994, he predicted, together with M. Fukugita, the nonzero cosmological constant Λ = 4 four years prior to the observation in order to resolve the age discrepancy between the Universe and some old stars.
Go to Profile#34719
Thomas Cromwell
#34731
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Thomas Albert Cromwell is a Canadian jurist and former Puisne Justice on the Supreme Court of Canada. After eleven years on the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal, Cromwell was nominated to succeed Michel Bastarache and occupy the seat traditionally reserved for Atlantic provinces on the Supreme Court of Canada by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and assumed office on December 22, 2008. Cromwell retired in September 2016, and was succeeded by Malcolm Rowe.
Go to Profile#34720
Frances Lannon
#34732
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Dame Frances Lannon DBE FRHistS is a retired British academic and educator. She was Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, she was educated at Lady Margaret Hall and at St Antony's College . After teaching at Queen Mary's College and holding a Fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, she was in 1977 appointed Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Lady Margaret Hall. She was Vice-Principal 1992–97 and became Principal in 2002. She retired on 30 September 2015.
Go to Profile#34721
A. K. Antony
#34733
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Arackaparambil Kurien Antony is an Indian politician and lawyer who served as the Minister of Defence of India from 2006 to 2014. He previously served as the 6th Chief Minister of Kerala from 1977 to 1978, 1995 to 1996 and again from 2001 to 2004. He currently serves as the Chairman of the Disciplinary Action Committee of the All India Congress Committee, Congress Working Committee, and member of the Congress Core Group and Central Election Committee.
Go to Profile#34722
Matthias Scheffler
#34734
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Matthias Scheffler is a German theoretical physicist whose research focuses on condensed matter theory, materials science, and artificial intelligence. He is particularly known for his contributions to density-functional theory and many-electron quantum mechanics and for his development of multiscale approaches. In the latter, he combines electronic-structure theory with thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, and also employs numerical methods from engineering. As summarized by his appeal "Get Real!" he introduced environmental factors into ab initio calculations. In recent years, he has ...
Go to Profile#34723
Brian Jacob
#34735
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Brian Aaron Jacob is an American economist and a professor of public policy, economics and education at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy of the University of Michigan. There, he also currently serves as co-director of the Education Policy Initiative and of the Youth Policy Lab. In 2008, Jacob's research on education policy was awarded the David N. Kershaw Award, which is given by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management and honours persons who have made a distinguished contribution to the field of public policy analysis and management before the age of 40. His doctor...
Go to Profile#34724
David F. Wells
#34736
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
David Falconer Wells is Distinguished Senior Research Professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is the author of several books in which his evangelical theology engages with the modern world. He has taught at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and has served as the Academic Dean at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary's Charlotte, North Carolina campus.
Go to Profile#34725
Thomas Bierschenk
#34737
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Thomas Bierschenk is a German ethnologist and sociologist. He is Professor of African Cultures and Societies at the Institute for Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Mainz. Biography Bierschenk passed his Abitur at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in 1970. In 1977 he completed his studies in history and sociology at the University Bielefeld and received his doctorate in sociology in 1983, also at this university. This was followed by his post-doctoral thesis at the Free University of Berlin . He studied at the University of Trier, St Peter's College, Oxford , the London Scho...
Go to Profile#34726
Eric Rimm
#34738
Overall Influence
Eric Bruce Rimm is an American nutrition scientist and epidemiologist. He is Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and director of the Harvard School of Public Health's Program in Cardiovascular Epidemiology. He has researched the relationship between diet and the risk of chronic diseases such as obesity.
Go to Profile#34727
Diosdado Cabello
#34739
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Diosdado Cabello Rondón is a Venezuelan politician and current member of the National Assembly of Venezuela, where he previously served as Speaker. He is also an active member of the Venezuelan armed forces, with the rank of captain.
Go to Profile#34728
Alan Stivell
#34740
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Alan Stivell is a Breton and Celtic musician and singer, songwriter, recording artist, and master of the Celtic harp. From the early 1970s, he revived global interest in the Celtic harp and Celtic music as part of world music. As a bagpiper and bombard player, he modernized traditional Breton music and singing in the Breton language. A precursor of Celtic rock, he is inspired by the union of the Celtic cultures and is a keeper of the Breton culture.
Go to Profile#34729
Lucien Castaing-Taylor
#34741
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Lucien Giles Castaing-Taylor is a British anthropologist and artist who works in film, video, and photography. Biography Castaing-Taylor received his B.A. at Cambridge University and his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley under Paul Rabinow. Since 2002 Castaing-Taylor has taught at Harvard University, where he is Director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab. His works include In and Out of Africa, which he made with Ilisa Barbash in 1992. It is an ethnographic video about issues of authenticity, taste, and racial politics in the African art market that won eight international awards. ...
Go to Profile#34730
Ingeborg Seynsche
#34742
Overall Influence
1905 - 1994 (89 years)
Martha Mechthild Ingeborg Seynsche was a German mathematician. She was one of the first women to be allowed to earn a doctorate on a mathematical topic in Göttingen. Life and work Her father Johannes Seynsche was a professor and senior teacher at the Unterbarmer Higher Girls' School. Her mother was Anna Seynsche , née Limbach. Ingeborg passed her Abitur in Unterbarmen in 1924. She then studied in Marburg and Göttingen, and in 1929 passed the state examination for teachers in pure and applied mathematics and physics. She went on to become an assistant at the Mathematical Institute in Göttingen.
Go to Profile#34731
Mary C. Meyer
#34743
Overall Influence
Mary C. Meyer is an American statistician. She is known for both theoretical and computational research in nonparametric statistics and density estimation, especially for densities with shape constraints such as convexity or monotonicity. She is a professor of statistics at Colorado State University.
Go to Profile#34732
Jon Secada
#34744
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Juan Francisco Secada Ramírez , better known as Jon Secada, is a Cuban-born American singer. He has won two Grammy Awards and sold 15 million records, making him one of the best-selling Latin music artists. His music fuses funk, soul music, pop, and Latin percussion.
Go to Profile#34733
Suehiro Tanemura
#34745
Overall Influence
1933 - 2004 (71 years)
Suehiro Tanemura was a translator and critic. Tanemura was born in Toshima, Tokyo in 1933. His mother died in 1946. He became interested in German while still a teenager, and entered the University of Tokyo in 1951. He first majored in aesthetics but switched to German literature, graduating in 1957 and for a short time thereafter working in Kōbunsha in editing the women's magazine Josei Jishin.
Go to Profile#34734
David Olivier
#34746
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
David Olivier Whittier is a French and British philosopher and antispeciesist activist. He is founder of the French journal Cahiers antispécistes , the annual event Veggie Pride and of the annual meeting Les Estivales de la question animale . Olivier is also the creator of the term "veggiephobia" and of numerous articles and conferences. He is an advocate of utilitarian and antinatauralist ethics, and defines himself politically as a progressive.
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Yvan Muller
#34747
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Yvan Muller is a French auto racing driver most noted for success in touring car racing. He is a four-time World Touring Car Champion, winning the title in 2008 with SEAT, in 2010 and 2011 with Chevrolet and in 2013 with RML. He was British Touring Car Champion in 2003 with Vauxhall.
Go to Profile#34736
Yutaka Nishiyama
#34748
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Yutaka Nishiyama is a Japanese mathematician and professor at the Osaka University of Economics, where he teaches mathematics and information. He is known as the "boomerang professor". He has written nine books about the mathematics in daily life. The most recent one, The mystery of five in nature, investigates, amongst other things, why many flowers have five petals.
Go to Profile#34737
Mark Romanek
#34749
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Mark Lee Romanek is an American filmmaker whose directing work includes feature films, television, music videos and commercials. Romanek is most known for having directed the films One Hour Photo and Never Let Me Go . His most notable music videos include "Hurt" , "Closer" , "Can't Stop" , "Rain" , "Bedtime Story" , "Scream" , "Criminal" , and "Shake It Off" . He also co-directed "Sandcastles" from Beyoncé's Lemonade album. Romanek's music videos have won 20 MTV Video Music Awards, including Best Direction for Jay-Z's "99 Problems" and the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award. He has also wo...
Go to Profile#34738
Sam Brown
#34750
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Sam W. Brown Jr. is a former political activist, the head of ACTION under President Jimmy Carter, and ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Early life and education Sam W. Brown Jr. was born July 27, 1943, in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He attended Abraham Lincoln High School in Council Bluffs where he was, in his own words, "the outstanding ROTC cadet." In his childhood, he wrote, "it never occurred to me that America could be wrong." Brown attended the University of Redlands in California, where he was first the president of the young Republicans and then the student body president.
Go to Profile#34739
Audrey Terras
#34751
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Audrey Anne Terras is an American mathematician who works primarily in number theory. Her research has focused on quantum chaos and on various types of zeta functions. Early life and education Audrey Terras was born September 10, 1942, in Washington, D.C. She received a BS degree in mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1964, and MA and PhD degrees from Yale University in 1966 and 1970 respectively. She was married to fellow UMD alumnus Riho Terras. She stated in a 2008 interview that she chose to study mathematics because "The U.S. government paid me! And not much! It...
Go to Profile#34740
Richard Slansky
#34752
Overall Influence
1940 - 1998 (58 years)
Richard C. Slansky was an American theoretical physicist. Slansky received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University and his PhD under Elliot Leader from the University of California, Berkeley. As a post-doc he was at Caltech and then for five years at Yale University, before he joined in 1974 the newly founded theory group for particle physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory under Peter A. Carruthers. In 1989 he became head of the theory group. He was also an adjunct professor at the University of California, Irvine. He died of a brain aneurysm.
Go to Profile#34741
Manfred Milinski
#34753
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Manfred Milinski is a German biologist who was Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology Career He was born in 1950 in Oldenburg. He studied biology and mathematics in Bielefeld and Bochum, went to Oxford University on a Heisenberg Scholarship and in 1987 became Professor of Zoology and Behavioural Ecology at University of Bern. From 1999 to 2018 he has been Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute of Limnology, which in 2007 became the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology. He has been an Honorary professor at Kiel University since 2000.
Go to Profile#34742
F.H. Buckley
#34754
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Francis "Frank" Herbert Buckley is a foundation professor at George Mason University School of Law where he has taught since 1989. Before then he was a visiting Olin fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. He has also taught at Panthéon-Assas University, Sciences Po in Paris and the McGill Faculty of Law in Montreal. He practiced law for three years in Toronto.
Go to Profile#34743
Alan L. Davis
#34755
Overall Influence
Alan "Al" Lynn Davis is an American computer scientist and researcher, a professor of computer science at the University of Utah, and served as the associate director of the University of Utah School of Computing.
Go to Profile#34744
Bob Gainey
#34756
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Robert Michael Gainey is a Canadian former professional ice hockey player who played for the Montreal Canadiens from 1973 until 1989. After retiring from active play, he became a hockey coach and later an executive with the Minnesota North Stars/Dallas Stars organization before returning to Montreal as general manager from 2003 to 2010. Currently, Gainey serves as a team consultant for the St. Louis Blues as well as a volunteer senior advisor for the Peterborough Petes of the Ontario Hockey League. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1992. In 2017 Gainey was named one of the '100 ...
Go to Profile#34745
Nir Shaviv
#34757
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Nir Joseph Shaviv is an Israeli‐American physics professor. He is professor at the Racah Institute of Physics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is known for his solar and cosmic-ray hypothesis of climate change which disagrees with the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. In 2002, Shaviv hypothesised that passages through the Milky Way's spiral arms appear to have been the cause behind the major ice-ages over the past billion years. In his later work, co-authored by Jan Veizer, a low upper limit was placed on the climatic effect of .
Go to Profile#34746
Patricia Millett
#34758
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Patricia Ann Millett is a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She formerly headed the Supreme Court practice at the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. Millett also was a longtime former assistant to the United States Solicitor General and served as an occasional blogger for SCOTUSblog. At the time of her confirmation to the D.C. Circuit, she had argued 32 cases before the United States Supreme Court. In February 2016 The New York Times identified her as a potential nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.
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Shirley Williams
#34759
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Shirley Vivian Teresa Brittain Williams, Baroness Williams of Crosby, was a British politician and academic. Originally a Labour Party Member of Parliament , she served in the Labour cabinet from 1974 to 1979. She was one of the "Gang of Four" rebels who founded the Social Democratic Party in 1981 and, at the time of her retirement from politics, was a Liberal Democrat.
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Mark Janse
#34760
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Mark Janse is BOF-ZAP research professor in Asia Minor and Ancient Greek at Ghent University, where he studied classics, Hebrew and linguistics. Before coming to Ghent, Janse has been editor of Linguistic Bibliography and professor of linguistics and classics and head of the Department of Arts & Humanities at University College Roosevelt, an international honours college of Utrecht University . He is a former visiting fellow of the University of Amsterdam , All Souls College in Oxford , the Onassis Foundation in Greece and the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University , a visiting p...
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Vinay Kumar
#34761
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Vinay Kumar is the Lowell T. Coggeshall Distinguished Service Professor of Pathology at the University of Chicago, where he was also the Chairman of the Department of Pathology. He is a recipient of Life Time Achievement Award by National Board of Examinations.
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Richard Fleischner
#34762
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Richard Fleischner is a Providence, RI–based environmental artist. Born in New York in 1944, he received a BFA and MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and began working in the 1960s. Installations
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