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).
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List of the most influential people
#36551
Andrew Karpati Kennedy
#36563
Overall Influence
1931 - 2016 (85 years)
Andrew Edmund Karpati Kennedy was a Hungarian-born British author, literary critic and academic with a passionate interest in the language of drama. Biography Early years Born in Győr in the west of Hungary, Kennedy spent his early childhood in Debrecen, where his father was manager of the Credit Bank. He attended the Calvinist Gymnasium in Debrecen from September 1941 until the Nazi invasion of Hungary in March 1944.
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Dan Dungaciu
#36564
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Dan Gheorghe Dungaciu is a Romanian sociologist. Biography He was born in Târgu Mureș. He graduated from the University of Bucharest in 1995 and received his Ph.D. in 2002. He teaches at the University of Bucharest. He served as Secretary of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania.
Go to Profile#36553
Mano Menezes
#36565
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Luiz Antônio Venker de Menezes , known as Mano Menezes, is a Brazilian professional football coach, currently the head coach of Corinthians. He managed the Brazil national team from July 2010 until his sacking on November 2012. His nickname comes from his early childhood, when his sister used to call him "Mano", which is a popular slang term meaning "brother" in Portuguese.
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Gary Berntson
#36566
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Gary Berntson is an emeritus professor at Ohio State University with appointments in the departments of psychology, psychiatry and pediatrics. He is an expert in psychophysiology, neuroscience, biological psychology, and with his colleague John Cacioppo, a founding father of social neuroscience. His research attempts to elucidate the functional organization of brain mechanisms underlying behavioral and affective processes, with a special emphasis on social cognition.
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Leslie Ungerleider
#36567
Overall Influence
1946 - 2020 (74 years)
Leslie G. Ungerleider was an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist, previously Chief of the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the National Institute of Mental Health. Ungerleider was known for introducing the concepts of the dorsal and ventral streams, two pathways of information processing in the brain that specialize in visuospatial processing and object recognition, respectively.
Go to Profile#36556
Dianne Pinderhughes
#36568
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Dianne Marie Pinderhughes is Full Professor in the Departments of Africana Studies and Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, and former President of the American Political Science Association. Since 2021 she is the president of the International Political Science Association. She holds a B.A. from Albertus Magnus College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. Pinderhughes sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy. She was American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow of 2019.
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Gabriel Boric
#36569
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Gabriel Boric Font is a Chilean politician who has been serving as the president of Chile since 11 March 2022. Boric gained prominence as a student leader during his time studying law at the University of Chile. He was president of its influential student federation during the student protests that began in 2011.
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Robert Hariman
#36570
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Robert Hariman is an American scholar of rhetoric and public culture. He received his BA from Macalester College in 1973, and received his MA in 1975 and PhD in 1979 from the University of Minnesota. He was a member of the faculty at Drake University from 1979 to 2004, and since then has been a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He also served as department chair at both institutions.
Go to Profile#36559
Martha Albertson Fineman
#36571
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Martha Albertson Fineman is an American jurist, legal theorist and political philosopher. She is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. Fineman was previously the first holder of the Dorothea S. Clarke Professor of Feminist Jurisprudence at Cornell Law School. She held the Maurice T. Moore Professorship at Columbia Law School.
Go to Profile#36560
Nicole Tomczak-Jaegermann
#36572
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
Nicole Tomczak-Jaegermann FRSC was a Polish-Canadian mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of Alberta, and the holder of the Canada Research Chair in Geometric Analysis. Contributions Her research is in geometric functional analysis, and is unusual in combining asymptotic analysis with the theory of Banach spaces and infinite-dimensional convex bodies. It formed a key component of Fields medalist Timothy Gowers' solution to Stefan Banach's homogeneous space problem, posed in 1932. Her 1989 monograph on Banach–Mazur distances is also highly cited.
Go to Profile#36561
Patricia Adair Gowaty
#36573
Overall Influence
Patricia Adair Gowaty is an American evolutionary biologist. She received her B.A. in biology at Tulane University and her PhD in zoology at Clemson University in 1980. She is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Gabriel Heinze
#36574
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Gabriel Iván Heinze is an Argentine football coach and former player who was recently the manager of Newell's Old Boys. As a player, he operated as a defender, either as a left-back or a centre-back.
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Zhigang Suo
#36575
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Zhigang Suo is the Allen E. and Marilyn M. Puckett Professor of Mechanics and Materials in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His research centers on the mechanical behavior of materials and structures.
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Morten Andersen
#36576
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Morten Andersen , nicknamed "the Great Dane", is a Danish former football placekicker who played in the National Football League for 25 seasons, most notably with the New Orleans Saints and Atlanta Falcons. Following a career from 1982 to 2007, Andersen holds the NFL record for regular season games played at 382. He also ranks second in field goals and points scored . In addition to his league accomplishments, he is the Saints' all-time leading scorer at 1,318 points. Andersen was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2017. Along with Jan Stenerud, he is one of only two exclusive pl...
Go to Profile#36565
Tabu
#36577
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Tabassum Fatima Hashmi , credited as Tabu, is an Indian actress who works primarily in Hindi films. Regarded as one of the most accomplished actresses in Hindi cinema, she has often played troubled women, from fictional to literary, in both mainstream and independent cinema. She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including two National Film Awards, seven Filmfare Awards , and two Filmfare Awards South. In 2011, she was awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth highest Indian civilian honour.
Go to Profile#36566
Richard Polt
#36578
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Richard F. H. Polt is a professor of philosophy at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has written about and translated works by Martin Heidegger. Polt is a typewriter enthusiast active on the Typosphere and a former editor of the quarterly ETCetera publication about manual typewriters. He is the author of three books, and he also contributed to the 2016 documentary California Typewriter that features Tom Hanks.
Go to Profile#36567
Marla Shapiro
#36579
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Marla Shapiro CM, is a Canadian medical doctor, best known as a health journalist for CTV News Channel and formerlyThe Globe and Mail. Her reports on health and medical issues have also aired on Canada AM and on CTV's daytime talk show Balance: Television for Living Well. She is seen regularly on CTV News Channel.
Go to Profile#36568
Gustavo Piga
#36580
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Gustavo Piga , is an Italian economist. He is professor of Political economy at University of Rome Tor Vergata. In 1996 attained the PhD in Economics at Columbia University. In 1997-98 taught Accounting and Finance at the Department of Economics of Columbia University. He wrote the contentious Derivatives in Pulicc Debt Management in 2001. He edited Revisiting Keynes" with Lorenzo Pecchi for MIT Press and the "handbook of Procurement" with Nicola Dimitri and Giancarlo Spagnolo for Cambridge University Press. In 2002-2005 he was the president of Consip. He is currently member of the Scientific...
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Kalle Lyytinen
#36581
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Kalle Lyytinen is the Iris S. Wolstein Professor of Management Design at Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management, where he is also director of their Doctor of Management program. His research focuses on how organizations design and manage digital innovations. Lyytinen is notable for his breadth of scholarship and leadership in the field of Information Systems. In 2013, he received the Association for Information Systems Leo Award, which is the association's top honor.
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Bob Bryan
#36582
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Robert "Bob" Charles Bryan is an American former doubles world No. 1 tennis player. He won 23 major titles: 16 in men's doubles and 7 in mixed doubles. He turned professional in 1998. With his twin brother Mike, he was the world No. 1 doubles player for several years, first achieving the top ranking in September 2003. The brothers were named the ATP Team of the Decade for 2000–2009. They became the second men's doubles team to complete the career Golden Slam at the 2012 London Olympics.
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Jeff Hostetler
#36583
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
William Jeffrey Hostetler is an American former professional football player who was a quarterback in the National Football League for the New York Giants, Los Angeles/Oakland Raiders, and Washington Redskins. His nickname is "Hoss."
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Thomas D. Clark
#36584
Overall Influence
1903 - 2005 (102 years)
Thomas Dionysius Clark was an American historian. Clark saved from destruction a large portion of Kentucky's printed history, which later became a core body of documents in the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Often referred to as the "Dean of Historians" Clark is best known for his 1937 work, A History of Kentucky. Clark was named Historian Laureate of the Commonwealth of Kentucky in 1991.
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Galina Kofman
#36585
Overall Influence
Galina Kofman is a computer scientist and business executive. She was the author of the Kerberos protocol for various IBM systems. Kofman also authored FTP for IBM VM/CMS and OS/2. She received two IBM CEO Outstanding Technical Achievements awards and holds a patent on grid applications. Kofman is an executive at Recyclebank, a green company that rewards people for recycling.
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Tim Canova
#36586
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Timothy A. Canova is an American politician and law professor specializing in banking and finance. Canova was a candidate for Florida's 23rd congressional district, unsuccessfully challenging Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the 2016 Democratic primary, and again in the 2018 general election, where he ran as an independent candidate. He later supported President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Go to Profile#36575
Isaak Russman
#36587
Overall Influence
1938 - 2005 (67 years)
Isaak Borisovich Russman was a Russian mathematician and economist. He studied and worked at Voronezh State University. Isaak Borisovich Russman was born on March 7, 1938, in Voronezh. Although his childhood dream was studying astronomy, in 1955 he entered Voronezh State University where he studied in the Physics and Mathematics department. Starting in 1969 and until the end of his life, Russman conducted research in operations research at the same institution where he had studied.
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Gerald B. Appel
#36588
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Gerald B. Appel is an American medical doctor and kidney researcher known both for his celebrity patients and for his scholarly work on the renal manifestations of systemic lupus erythematosus and other diseases of the glomeruli . He has also published more than three hundred academic papers and book chapters on diseases of the glomeruli, several with his wife, Alice Sue Appel, Ph.D.
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Benjamin Becker
#36589
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Benjamin Becker is a German former professional tennis player. He is most known for defeating former world No. 1 Andre Agassi in the third round at the 2006 US Open, in Agassi's last match as a professional player.
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Robert Eisner
#36590
Overall Influence
1922 - 1998 (76 years)
Robert Eisner was an American author and William R. Kenan professor of economics at Northwestern University. He was recognized throughout the United States for his expertise and knowledge of macroeconomics and the economics of business cycles. He was a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and The Los Angeles Times, primarily covering national economic policy and reform.
Go to Profile#36579
Omar Lizardo
#36591
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
#36580
Santanu Bhattacharya
#36592
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Santanu Bhattacharya is an Indian chemical biologist and former professor at the Indian Institute of Science. At, present he is the Director of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Tirupati . He is known for his studies of unnatural amino acids, oligopeptides, designed and natural lipids and biologically active natural products and is an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy The World Academy of Sciences and the Indian Academy of Sciences The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, aw...
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Mark Nuckols
#36593
Overall Influence
Mark Nuckols is a writer and regular commentator on Russian television. He appears on various political talk shows. He also writes for various publications, including The New York Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor and others. He has taught at the Lomonosov Moscow State University Business School and at the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. He has a JD from Georgetown Law and an MBA from Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. He grew up in rural Virginia.
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Michael Kahn
#36594
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Michael Kahn is an American film editor known for his frequent collaboration with Steven Spielberg. His first collaboration with Spielberg was for his 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He has edited all of Spielberg's subsequent films except for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial , which was edited by Carol Littleton. Kahn has received eight Academy Award nominations for Best Film Editing, and has won three times—for Raiders of the Lost Ark , Schindler's List , and Saving Private Ryan , which were all Spielberg-directed films.
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Claude Fischler
#36595
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Claude Fischler is a French social scientist . He is a directeur de recherche of the French National Centre for Scientific Research and heads the Institut Interdisciplinaire d'Anthropologie du Contemporain , a research unit of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, in Paris.
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James C. Hathaway
#36596
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
James Hathaway is a Canadian-American scholar of international refugee law and related aspects of human rights and public international law. His work has been frequently cited by the most senior courts of the common law world, and has played a pivotal role in the evolution of refugee studies scholarship. Hathaway pioneered the understanding of refugee status as surrogate or substitute protection of human rights, authored the world's first comprehensive analysis of the human rights of refugees, merging doctrinal study of refugee and human rights law with empirical analysis of the state of refu...
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Anton Lehmden
#36597
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Anton Lehmden was an Austrian painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Lehmden was a co-founder, together with Ernst Fuchs, Maître Leherb , Rudolf Hausner, Arik Brauer, Fritz Janschka and Wolfgang Hutter, of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. He settled in Vienna after 1945 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Go to Profile#36586
Jay Belsky
#36598
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Jay Belsky is an American child psychologist and the Robert M. and Natalie Reid Dorn Professor of Human Development at the University of California, Davis. He is noted for his research in the fields of child development and family studies. He was a founding investigator of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development in the United States, and of the National Evaluation of Sure Start in the United Kingdom. He has been an ISI Highly Cited Researcher since 2002.
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Jay Macpherson
#36599
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Jean Jay Macpherson was a Canadian lyric poet and scholar. The Encyclopædia Britannica calls her "a member of 'the mythopoeic school of poetry,' who expressed serious religious and philosophical themes in symbolic verse that was often lyrical or comic."
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Katherine O'Brien
#36600
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Katherine "Kate" L. O'Brien is a Canadian American pediatric infectious disease physician, epidemiologist, and vaccinologist who specializes in the areas of pneumococcal epidemiology, pneumococcal vaccine trials and impact studies, and surveillance for pneumococcal disease. She is also known as an expert in infectious diseases in American Indian populations. O’Brien is currently the Director of the World Health Organization's Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals.
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Ivo Welch
#36601
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Ivo Welch, a German-born economist and finance academic. He is the J. Fred Weston Professor of Finance at UCLA Anderson School of Management. He completed his BA in computer science in 1985 at Columbia University, and both his MBA and PhD in finance at the University of Chicago.
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Nati Linial
#36602
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Nathan Linial is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist, a professor in the Rachel and Selim Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an ISI highly cited researcher.
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Joyce Tyldesley
#36603
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Joyce Ann Tyldesley is a British archaeologist and Egyptologist, academic, writer and broadcaster who specialises in the women of ancient Egypt. She was interviewed on the TV series 'Cunk on Earth', about Egypt's pyramids, in 2022.
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Olga Raggio
#36604
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
Olga Raggio was an art historian and curator who worked with the Metropolitan Museum of Art for over 60 years, and discovered the 'lost' bust of Cosimo I de' Medici by Bartolommeo Bandinelli. Early life Olga Raggio was born in Rome on 5 February 1926. Her father was Italian, while her mother was Russian.
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Paul Gertler
#36605
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Paul Gertler is an American economist and the Li Ka Shing Distinguished Professor of Economics in the Haas School of Business and the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. Gertler is considered an early pioneer in the randomized evaluation of social programs in developing countries. He co-led the impact evaluation of the Mexican government welfare program Oportunidades, as well as the Rwandan government's roll-out of results-based financing for health. As Chief Economist for the World Bank Human Development Network , he helped to establish a culture of rigorous impact evaluation.
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Robert Goss
#36606
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Robert E. Shore-Goss is a theologian and author. Goss was brought up in a devout Roman Catholic family and felt called to the priesthood, being ordained as a Jesuit in 1976. He left the Jesuits in 1978 going on to receive a Th.D. in Comparative Religion from Harvard University.
Go to Profile#36595
Shani Mootoo
#36607
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Shani Mootoo, writer, visual artist and video maker, was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1957 to Trinidadian parents. She grew up in Trinidad and relocated at the age of 19 to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She currently lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Go to Profile#36596
Nándor Balázs
#36608
Overall Influence
1926 - 2003 (77 years)
Nándor Balázs was a Hungarian-American physicist, external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences . Early life and education Balázs attended to the Rácz private primary school and was a classmate of Janos Kemeny. Nándor Balázs received a master's degree at the University of Budapest . Balázs left communist Hungary in 1949. He received a PhD at the University of Amsterdam .
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Ibrahim Warde
#36609
Overall Influence
Ibrahim A. Warde is a scholar and consultant in the fields of international finance and global political economy. He is an adjunct professor of international business at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he previously served as the director of the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies. Warde is a Carnegie Scholar and the author of several books, which include The Price of Fear: The Truth Behind the Financial War on Terror and Islamic Finance in the Global Economy. He is also a writer for Le Monde Diplomatique. Warde currently serves the academic dire...
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Meera Kosambi
#36610
Overall Influence
1939 - 2015 (76 years)
Meera Kosambi was an Indian sociologist. Biography She was the younger daughter of the illustrious intellectual, historian, linguist, statistician and mathematician, D.D. Kosambi, and granddaughter of Acharya Dharmananda Damodar Kosambi, a Buddhist scholar and a Pāli language expert. Her mother's name was Nalini Kosambi . She received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Stockholm. She is the author of several books and articles on urban sociology and women's studies in India.
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Beverly Mortensen
#36611
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Beverly P. Mortensen is a musician, composer, and scholar of ancient Jewish religion at Northwestern University. In 2006, she published the book The Priesthood in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan: Renewing the Profession , in which she strongly argues her thesis, that Targum Pseudo-Jonathan is a late 4th-century CE work and is meant as a manual for kohanim, Jewish priests.
Go to Profile#36600
William P. Gerberding
#36612
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
William Passavant Gerberding was an American educator. He served as president of the University of Washington, and as Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Biography Gerberding was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He was the youngest of four children born to Lutheran minister William Gerberding and his wife Esther Habighorst. He received his BA from Macalester College in 1951, and went on to earn an MA in 1956 and a Ph.D. in 1959 from the University of Chicago.
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