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
#36351
Prashastapada
#36363
Overall Influence
was an ancient Indian philosopher. He wrote the Padārtha-dharma-saṅgraha and a commentary, titled Praśastapāda Bhāṣya, on the Vaisheshika Sutrass of Kanada ; both texts are comprehensive books in physics. In these texts Prashastapada discusses the properties of motion. Ganganath Jha had translated Praśastapāda Bhāṣya which was published in 1916. Prashasta or Praśasta means praised or praiseworthy, lauded or laudable, commended or commendable or eulogized.
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Nate Dogg
#36364
Overall Influence
1969 - 2011 (42 years)
Nathaniel Dwayne Hale , known professionally as Nate Dogg, was an American singer and rapper. He gained recognition for providing guest vocals for a multitude of hit rap songs between 1992 and 2008, earning the nickname "King of Hooks".
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Rick Derringer
#36365
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Rick Derringer is an American musician, producer and songwriter. He achieved success during the 1960s with his then band, the McCoys. Their debut single, "Hang on Sloopy", was a number-one hit in 1965 and became a classic track of the garage rock era. The McCoys then had seven songs that charted in the top 100, including versions of "Fever" and "Come on Let’s Go".
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Iwao Taka
#36366
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Iwao Taka is a professor of business administration and noted scholar of business ethics in Japan. He was born in 1956 in Ōita Prefecture, Japan. Taka graduated the College of Foreign Language, Reitaku University and completed a Ph.D. in 1985 at the Graduate School of Commerce, Waseda University. He taught at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from 1991 to 1994, and is now a professor at Reitaku University and guest professor at the Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University. He is also a member of the Business Ethics and Compliance Research Center at Reitaku. Taka, who ...
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Ian Nepomniachtchi
#36367
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (36 years)
Ian Alexandrovich Nepomniachtchi is a Russian chess grandmaster. Nepomniachtchi won the 2010 and 2020 Russian Superfinal and the 2010 European Individual titles. He also won the 2016 Tal Memorial and both the 2008 and 2015 Aeroflot Open events. He won the World Team Chess Championship as a member of the Russian team in Antalya and Astana . Nepomniachtchi won the 2015 European Team Chess Championship in Reykjavík with the Russian team. In October 2016, Nepomniachtchi was ranked fourth in the world in both rapid chess and blitz chess. He has won two silver medals in the World Rapid Championship and a silver medal at the World Blitz Championship, as well as winning the 2008 Ordix Open.
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Pierre Pica
#36368
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Pierre Pica , is a research associate at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. Associated Professor with the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, he is a specialist in theoretical linguistics and more specifically of comparative syntax.
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Hans C. Clevers
#36369
Overall Influence
#36358
Karsten Nohl
#36370
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Karsten Nohl is a German cryptography expert and hacker. His areas of research include Global System for Mobile Communications security, radio-frequency identification security, and privacy protection.
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Kevin Sabet
#36371
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Kevin Abraham Sabet is a former three-time White House Office of National Drug Control Policy advisor, having been the only person appointed to that office by both a Republican and Democrat . He is also an assistant professor adjunct at Yale University Medical School, a fellow at Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and a columnist at Newsweek.
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Danielle George
#36372
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Danielle Amanda George is a Professor of Radio frequency engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning at the University of Manchester in the UK. George became the 139th President of the Institution of Engineering and Technology in October 2020.
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Meral Akşener
#36373
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Meral Akşener is a Turkish politician, teacher, historian and academic who is the founder and current leader of the Good Party . Akşener first entered parliament as a deputy of the True Path Party in the 1995 and 1999 general election, and served as the interior minister in the coalition government established by Necmettin Erbakan between 1996 and 1997. Distrustful of her coalition partner, she played a key role in the downfall of her own government in the 1997 military memorandum.
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Teri Manolio
#36374
Overall Influence
Teri Ann Manolio is an American physician, epidemiologist, and geneticist. She is director of the Division of Genomic Medicine at the National Human Genome Research Institute , as well as Professor of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. She is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and of the American Heart Association's Council on Epidemiology. She also has a clinical appointment at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Before joining the NHGRI, she worked on large cohort studies, such as the Cardiovascular Health Stu...
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John Gatenby Bolton
#36375
Overall Influence
1922 - 1993 (71 years)
John Gatenby Bolton was a British-Australian astronomer who was fundamental to the development of radio astronomy. In particular, Bolton was integral in establishing that discrete radio sources were either galaxies or the remnants of supernovae, rather than stars. He also played a significant role in the discovery of quasars and the centre of the Milky Way. Bolton served as the inaugural director of the Parkes radio telescope in Australia and established the Owens Valley Radio Observatory in California. Bolton's students held directorships at most of the radio observatories in the world and one was a Nobel Prize winner.
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Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh
#36376
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh is an Iranian-American physician doing research in nephrology, kidney dialysis, nutrition, and epidemiology. He is best known as a specialist in kidney disease nutrition and chronic kidney disease and for his hypothesis about the longevity of individuals with chronic disease states, also known as reverse epidemiology including obesity paradox. According to this hypothesis, obesity or hypercholesterolemia may counterintuitively be protective and associated with greater survival in certain groups of people, such as elderly individuals, dialysis patients, or those with chro...
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Darryl Sutter
#36377
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Darryl John Sutter is a Canadian ice hockey coach and former player. He most recently served as head coach of the Calgary Flames of the National Hockey League . He is one of seven Sutter brothers, six of whom made the NHL ; all but Rich and Gary worked alongside Darryl in some capacity during his first tenure with the Flames.
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Mary P. Koss
#36378
Overall Influence
Mary P. Koss is an American Regents' Professor at the University of Arizona, Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health in Tucson, Arizona. Her best known works have been in the areas of gender-based violence and restorative justice.
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Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff
#36379
Overall Influence
1944 - 2013 (69 years)
Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff was a German art historian and professor with particular research interest in the fields of gender studies and postcolonial studies. Early life and education Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff was born on 21 August 1944 in Cottbus.
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Harry Kemelman
#36380
Overall Influence
1908 - 1996 (88 years)
Harry Kemelman was an American mystery writer and a professor of English. He was the creator of the fictitious religious sleuth Rabbi David Small. Early life Harry Kemelman was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1908.
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Damien Lewis
#36381
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Damien Gavin Lewis is a British author and filmmaker who has spent over twenty years reporting from and writing about conflict zones in many countries. He has produced about twenty films. He has written more than fifteen books, some of which have been published in over thirty languages. His books have appeared on bestseller lists in many countries. He is a Fellow of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
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Chris Eubank
#36382
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Christopher Livingstone Eubank is a British former professional boxer who competed from 1985 to 1998. He held the World Boxing Organization middleweight and super-middleweight titles between 1990 and 1995, and is ranked by BoxRec as the third best British super-middleweight boxer of all time.
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Avshalom Caspi
#36383
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Avshalom Caspi is an Israeli-American psychologist and the Edward M. Arnett Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University, as well as Professor of Personality Development at King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. He is known for his research on mental health and human development, much of which he has conducted with his wife and longtime research partner, Terrie Moffitt. The two first met when they presented adjacent posters at a 1987 conference in St. Louis, Missouri entitled "Deviant Pathways from Childhood to Adulthood".
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James Barber
#36384
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
James Barber was a British senior research investigator and emeritus Ernst Chain professor of biochemistry at Imperial College London, Visiting Professor at the Polytechnic University of Turin and Visiting Canon Professor to Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
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Mason Peck
#36385
Overall Influence
Mason Peck is an associate professor at Cornell University and former NASA Chief Technologist. His immediate predecessor in the NASA position was Bobby Braun. Peck has published in various aerospace sub-disciplines including; air-bearing spacecraft simulation, low-power space robotics, hopping rovers, and Lorentz-augmented orbits.
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R. Tudur Jones
#36386
Overall Influence
1921 - 1998 (77 years)
Robert Tudur Jones , better known as R. Tudur Jones, was a Welsh nationalist and one of the country's leading theologianss. His nationalistic stance, combined with Calvinist doctrine, created an integrated vision that was significant to the religious life of Christian Wales in the later half of the 20th century.
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John Buster
#36387
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
John Edmond Buster is an American physician who, while working at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine, directed the research team that performed the first embryo transfer from one woman to another resulting in a live birth. It was performed at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, reported in July 1983, and culminated in the announcement of the birth on February 3, 1984. In the procedure, an embryo that was just beginning to develop was transferred from the woman in whom it had been conceived by artificial insemination to another woman who gave birth to the infant 38 weeks later.
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Thomas Johansson
#36388
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Karl Thomas Conny Johansson is a Swedish retired professional tennis player and coach. He reached a career-high Association of Tennis Professionals world No. 7 singles ranking on 10 May 2002. His career highlights in singles include a Grand Slam title at the Australian Open in 2002, and an ATP Masters Series title at the 1999 Canada Masters. He also won a silver medal at the 2008 Summer Olympics in men's doubles, partnering Simon Aspelin.
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Iain R. Edgar
#36389
Overall Influence
1948 - 2021 (73 years)
Iain Edgar was a social anthropologist at Durham University. He was an expert in the field of dreams and dreaming, and a specialist in altered states of consciousness and mental health. Starting his career in social work, Edgar received a PhD from the University of Keele, where he studied under Ronnie Frankenberg. His thesis Dreamwork, Anthropology and the Caring Professions: A Cultural Approach to Dreamwork discusses a wide range of psychodynamic possibilities and develops a method to work with dreams within a professional care environment.
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Kurt A. Md Jellinger
#36390
Overall Influence
#36379
Margot Singer
#36391
Overall Influence
Margot Singer is an American short story writer and novelist. Her book The Pale of Settlement won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction in 2006 and her novel Underground Fugue was listed as "one of the most anticipated books by women in 2017" by Elle Magazine.
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Eliyahu Winograd
#36392
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Eliyahu Winograd was an Israeli acting Supreme Court judge and former president of the Tel Aviv District Court. Between September 11, 2006 and April 30, 2007 he chaired the Winograd Commission to investigate the failures experienced by Israel during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict.
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David W. Bates
#36393
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
David Bates is an American-born physician, biomedical informatician, and professor, who is internationally renowned for his work regarding the use of health information technology to improve the safety and quality of healthcare, in particular by using clinical decision support. Bates has done work in the area of medication safety. He began by describing the epidemiology of harm caused by medications, first in hospitalized patients and then in other settings such as the home and nursing homes. Subsequently, he demonstrated that by implementing computerized physician order entry , medication safety could be dramatically improved in hospitals.
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Frances Kissling
#36394
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Frances Kissling is an activist in the fields of religion, reproduction, and women's rights. She is the president of the Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy. She was president of Catholics for Choice from 1982 until 2007, when she turned over the reins to Jon O'Brien. She is now a visiting scholar at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, and at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas at UNAM, Mexico City. She regularly contributes pieces to The Nation and The Huffington Post. She contributed the piece "Dancing Against the Vatican" to the 2003 anthology Sist...
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Juncheng Wei
#36395
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Juncheng Wei is a Chinese mathematician working in the area of nonlinear partial differential equations, nonlinear analysis and mathematical biology. Since 1994, he has over 470 published articles in top journals, including Annals of Mathematics, Inventiones Mathematicae, Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, and Duke Mathematical Journal.
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Stephen W. Pacala
#36396
Overall Influence
Stephen W. Pacala is the Frederick D. Petrie Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. He has worked on climate change, population ecology, and global interactions between the biosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere. Since 2021, he has been a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology .
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Feist
#36397
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Leslie Feist , known mononymously as Feist, is a Canadian indie pop singer-songwriter and guitarist, performing both as a solo artist and as a member of the indie rock group Broken Social Scene. Feist launched her solo music career in 1999 with the release of Monarch. Her subsequent studio albums, Let It Die, released in 2004, and The Reminder, released in 2007, were critically acclaimed and commercially successful, selling over 2.5 million copies. The Reminder earned Feist four Grammy nominations, including a nomination for Best New Artist. She has received 11 Juno Awards, including two Artist of the Year.
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Shunmyō Masuno
#36398
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
is a Japanese monk and garden designer. He is chief priest of the Sōtō Zen temple Kenkō-ji , professor at Tama Art University, and president of a design firm that has completed numerous projects in Japan and overseas. He has been called "Japan's leading garden designer".
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Nancy Ammerman
#36399
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Nancy Tatom Ammerman is an American professor of sociology of religion at Boston University School of Theology. Life In 1984, Ammerman joined the faculty of Emory University. Her book, Baptist Battles, won the 1992 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. In 1995, Ammerman left Emory University to teach at Hartford Seminary. Since 2003, she has been at Boston University. In 2020 she became an honorary doctor at Uppsala University.
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Abolhassan Najafi
#36400
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Abolhassan Najafi was an Iranian writer and translator. Najafi was born in Najaf, Iraq, into a family from Isfahan. He began his literary activities in the 1960s and translated several books from French into Persian. He co-published a successful literary periodical entitled Jong-e Isfahan . After the Iranian revolution, he published a controversial book on Persian usage entitled Let's Avoid Mistakes .
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Joseph Tyree Sneed III
#36401
Overall Influence
1920 - 2008 (88 years)
Joseph Tyree Sneed III was an American jurist who served as United States Deputy Attorney General and then as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for nearly 35 years until his death. He was the father of Carly Fiorina, a former CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
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Gábor Domokos
#36402
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Gábor Domokos is a Hungarian mathematician and engineer. He is best known for his 2006 discovery of the Gömböc, a class of three-dimensional convex bodies that have one stable and one unstable point of balance. Their shape helped to relate the body structure of some tortoises and their ability to recover after being placed upside down.
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Ronald Smelser
#36403
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Ronald Smelser is an American historian, author, and former professor of history at the University of Utah. He specializes in modern European history, including the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and has written several books on these topics. Smelser is the author, together with fellow historian Edward J. Davies, of the 2008 book The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture.
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Charles Miller Leslie
#36404
Overall Influence
1923 - 2009 (86 years)
Charles Miller Leslie was an American medical anthropologist, who was an avid contributor of published works in his branch of anthropology. Leslie’s career was influential to the shaping of medical anthropology, as his works have inspired other medical anthropologists to further research and popularize anthropological concepts which includes medical pluralism, social relations of therapy management, the relationship between state and medical systems, and health discourse. Leslie’s main focus within medical anthropology has been the study of Asian medical systems, specifically Ayurvedic, Unani...
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Joan Ferrini-Mundy
#36405
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Joan Ferrini-Mundy is a mathematics educator. Her research interests include calculus teaching and learning, mathematics teacher learning, and STEM education policy. She is currently the president of the University of Maine.
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Carey Mulligan
#36406
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Carey Hannah Mulligan is an English actress. She has received various accolades, including a British Academy Film Award, in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and a Tony Award.
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David Cingranelli
#36407
Overall Influence
David Cingranelli is a professor of Political Science at Binghamton University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977. He conducts global, comparative, econometric research examining the causes and consequences of variation in government respect for various human rights. His 2007 book with Rodwan Abouharb, Human Rights and Structural Adjustment, demonstrated the negative human rights impacts of World Bank and IMF program lending in developing countries. His current research examines how constitutional design and other factors can provide incentives to politicians to enact policies protecting human rights including labor rights.
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Teri Hatcher
#36408
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Teri Hatcher is an American actress and singer best known for her portrayals of Lois Lane on the television series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman , Paris Carver in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies , Mel Jones and the Beldam in Coraline , and Susan Mayer on the television series Desperate Housewives , for which she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy and three Screen Actors Guild Awards , and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.
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Otto S. Wolfbeis
#36409
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Otto S. Wolfbeis was a professor of analytical chemistry and Interface chemistry at the University of Regensburg in Germany until his retirement in 2013. Biography Wolfbeis studied chemistry at the University of Graz and in 1972 received a PhD in organic chemistry. He then was a post-doctoral fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for Radiation Chemistry in the group of Prof. Koerner von Gustorf. In 1974 he became an assistant professor at the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the University of Graz. In 1978 he was a visiting scientist at the Technical University of Berlin in the group of Prof.
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Micah Altman
#36410
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Micah Altman is an American social scientist who conducts research in social science informatics. Since 2012, he has worked as the head research scientist in the MIT Libraries, first as director of the Program on Information Science and subsequently as director of research for the libraries' Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship. Altman previously worked at Harvard University. He is known for his work on redistricting, scholarly communication, privacy and open science. Altman is a co-founder of Public Mapping Project, which develops DistrictBuilder, an open-source software.
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David Yates
#36411
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
David Yates is an English filmmaker, who has directed feature films, short films, and television productions. He is best known for directing the final four films in the Harry Potter series and the three films of its prequel series, Fantastic Beasts. His work on the Harry Potter series brought him critical and commercial success along with accolades, such as the British Academy Britannia Award for Excellence in Directing.
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Sasagu Arai
#36412
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Sasagu Arai is a Japanese researcher of early Christianity and Gnosticism. Arai is a Doctor of Theology Professor emeritus of University of Tokyo and Keisen University, and a member of the Japan Academy. He graduated at Erlangen-Nürnberg University in Germany.
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