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
#36651
Buck Williams
#36663
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Charles Linwood "Buck" Williams is an American former professional basketball player and former assistant coach for the Portland Trail Blazers. He was well known for his rebounding ability and trademark goggles.
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Gáspár Miklós Tamás
#36664
Overall Influence
1948 - 2023 (75 years)
Gáspár Miklós Tamás , often referred to as TGM, was a Romanian-born Hungarian political philosopher and public intellectual, influenced by Marxism and libertarian socialism. He was a contributor to online newspaper Mérce and to OpenDemocracy, where he wrote primarily about political and aesthetic questions. He was the father of British poet and writer Rebecca Tamás.
Go to Profile#36653
Nikolai Timkov
#36665
Overall Influence
1912 - 1993 (81 years)
Nikolai Efimovich Timkov was a Soviet Russian painter, Honored Artist of Russian Federation, and a member of the Saint Petersburg Union of Artists . He lived and worked in Leningrad and is regarded as one of the leading representatives of the Leningrad School of Painting, worldwide known for his landscape paintings.
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Kelle Cruz
#36666
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Kelle Cruz is an astrophysicist who specializes in studying brown dwarfs. She currently works as an associate professor at Hunter College in New York City. With her study of brown dwarfs, Cruz hopes to better understand planets outside the Solar System and map out the universe, saying, "I hope that what I’m doing in our little bit of the galaxy is similar to what the explorers did by discovering and mapping the New World and North America."
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Charles A. Agemian
#36667
Overall Influence
1909 - 1996 (87 years)
Charles A. Agemian was an Armenian-American banker who took early retirement from Chase Manhattan Bank, where he was executive vice president of operations, to become chairman and chief executive officer of the Hackensack Trust Co., which later was renamed Garden State National Bank.
Go to Profile#36656
Edward Tryon
#36668
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
Edward P. Tryon was an American scientist and a professor emeritus of physics at Hunter College of the City University of New York . He was the first physicist to propose that our universe originated as a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum.
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Edward Benjamin Shils
#36669
Overall Influence
1915 - 2004 (89 years)
Edward Benjamin Shils was a noted and innovative management professor, who received six degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, an institution at which he taught for over five decades. Shils most significant contribution to Penn was the 1973 founding of the Wharton Entrepreneurial Center, renamed in 1985 to the Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Center, at Penn's Wharton School of Business. While entrepreneurship is widely accepted as an academic discipline today, the Center was the first of its kind in the world. Shils served as the Center's director until 1986.
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Antonia Handler Chayes
#36670
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Antonia "Toni" Handler Chayes is a United States lawyer and educator who served as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force from 1977 to 1979 and as United States Under Secretary of the Air Force from 1979 to 1981.
Go to Profile#36659
Marc Lewis
#36671
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Marc Lewis is a Canadian clinical psychologist, neuroscientist, academic, and author from Toronto, Ontario. He was a professor at the University of Toronto from 1989 to 2010 and Radboud University Nijmegen in Nijmegen, the Netherlands from 2010 to 2016. He is particularly focused on the study of addiction. His work is informed by his own experience of drug addiction, and is notable for its focus on neuroscience and the changes addiction causes in the brain. His books include Memoirs of an Addicted Brain and The Biology of Desire, which Damian Thompson of The Spectator called "the most import...
Go to Profile#36660
Tara J. Yosso
#36672
Overall Influence
Tara J. Yosso is a professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside. Yosso's research and teaching apply the frameworks of critical race theory and critical media literacy to examine educational access and opportunity. Yosso is specifically interested in understanding the ways Communities of Color have historically utilized an array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities, and networks to breakthrough the structures racial discrimination built in pursuit of educational equality. She has authored numerous collaborative and interdisciplinary chapters and...
Go to Profile#36661
Dragoslav Srejović
#36673
Overall Influence
1931 - 1996 (65 years)
Dragoslav Srejović was a Serbian archaeologist, cultural anthropologist and historian. He was the main contributor to the exploration of the Lepenski Vir archaeological site. Biography Srejović had a broad range of interests, and his fields of research range from paleolithic and mesolithic sites in Yugoslavia, through the late Roman period, to Greco-Roman mythology. He was a prolific author, having published more than 200 papers, over 20 monographs and a dozen guides and catalogs. He became a subscribing member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1974, and a regular member in 1983,...
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Clarke Fraser
#36674
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
Frank Clarke Fraser was a Canadian medical geneticist. Spanning the fields of science and medicine, he was Canada's first medical geneticist, one of the creators of the discipline of medical genetics in North America, and laid the foundations in the field of Genetic Counselling, which has enhanced the lives of patients worldwide. Among his many accomplishments, Fraser pioneered work in the genetics of cleft palate and popularized the concept of multifactorial disease.
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Dan Chaon
#36675
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Dan Chaon is an American writer. Formerly a creative writing professor, he is the author of three short story collections and four novels. Early life and education Chaon was born June 11, 1964, in either Sidney, Nebraska or Omaha, Nebraska, and was the adopted son of Earl D. Chaon and Teresa N. Chaon. His father was a construction worker and his mother a stay-at-home mom, neither of whom graduated from high school. He was the oldest of three siblings. He grew up in a village of 20 people outside of Sidney, Nebraska.
Go to Profile#36664
Andrew Scull
#36676
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Andrew T. Scull is a British-born sociologist who researches the social history of medicine and the history of psychiatry. He is a distinguished professor of sociology and science studies at University of California, San Diego, and recipient of the Roy Porter Medal for lifetime contributions to the history of medicine. His books include Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, and Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness.
Go to Profile#36665
Jean Paelinck
#36677
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Jean Henri Paul Paelinck is a Belgian economist and Distinguished Service Professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is known for his work in econometrics, and he coined the term "spatial econometrics" in his address to the Dutch Statistical Association on 2 May 1974.
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Jonathan Faull
#36678
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Sir Jonathan Michael Howard Faull KCMG is a former British official in the European Commission. Biography He joined the European Commission in 1978, becoming Director for Competition Policy at the Directorate-General for Competition in 1995, Deputy Director-General in 1999 and Spokesman and Director-General of Press and Communication in 1999. He was Director-General of Justice and Home Affairs from 2003 to 2010.
Go to Profile#36667
Eric Henry Monkkonen
#36679
Overall Influence
1942 - 2005 (63 years)
Eric Henry Monkkonen was an American urban and social science historian who conducted authoritative studies on the history of crime as well as urban development. His work produced evidence that countered and overturned many assumptions, such as that crime rates are higher in urban areas, and increased during post-war periods and economic downturns. His works on the history of crime in several cities were extensive, cataloging close to every recorded homicide in New York City since 1798, and every homicide in Los Angeles since 1827, and conducting extensive studies on several more cities, primarily in the Western world.
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John Ruiz
#36680
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
John Ruiz is an American former professional boxer who competed from 1992 to 2010, and held the WBA heavyweight title twice between 2001 and 2005. Ruiz is of Puerto Rican descent, and is the first Latino boxer to win a world heavyweight title.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie
#36681
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Buffy Sainte-Marie, is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and social activist. While working in these areas, her work has focused on issues facing Indigenous peoples of the United States and Canada. Since the early1960s, Sainte-Marie has claimed to have Indigenous Canadian ancestry, but a 2023 investigation by CBC News concluded that she was born in the United States and is of Italian and English descent. Some Indigenous musicians and organizations have since called for awards she won while falsely claiming an Indigenous identity to be rescinded, including her 2018 Juno Award for Indig...
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Sally Temple
#36682
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Sally Temple is an American developmental neuroscientist in Albany, New York. She is a co-founder and scientific director for The Neural Stem Cell Institute and is a professor of Neuroscience and Neuropharmacology at Albany Medical College Temple is also the principal investigator in her laboratory that focuses on neural stem cells and therapies for neurological-related disorders
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Sherine Gabriel
#36683
Overall Influence
Sherine E. Gabriel is an Egyptian–Canadian rheumatologist and administrator. She is the fourth president of Rush University and James A. Campbell, MD, Distinguished Service Professor, having formally served as Dean of Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. In 2020, Gabriel was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Medicine for "her leadership in academic medicine and recognition for being an inspiring thought leader in research, clinical business development and educational innovation."
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Josh Lerner
#36684
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Josh Lerner is an American economist known for his research in venture capital, private equity, and innovation and entrepreneurship. He is the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at the Harvard Business School. According to Web of Science on June 16, 2023, he has 165 indexed publications and a Hirsch index of 66, which puts him in top 5% of economics researchers in the USA. His research encompasses investments, startups, venture capital and private equity.
Go to Profile#36673
Wayne Newton
#36685
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Carson Wayne Newton is an American singer and actor. One of the most popular singers in the United States from the mid-to-late 20th century, Newton remains one of the best-known entertainers in Las Vegas and has performed there since 1963. He is known by the nicknames "The Midnight Idol", "Mr. Las Vegas" and "Mr. Entertainment".
Go to Profile#36674
Chandrajit Bajaj
#36686
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Chandrajit Bajaj is an American computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin holding the Computational Applied Mathematics Chair in Visualization and is the director of the Computational Visualization Center, in the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences .
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Anne Edwards
#36687
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Anne Edwards is an American writer best known for her biographies of celebrities that include Princess Diana, Maria Callas, Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn, Vivien Leigh, Margaret Mitchell, Ronald Reagan, Barbra Streisand, Shirley Temple and Countess Sonya Tolstoy.
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Marianne Elliott
#36688
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Marianne Phoebe Elliott is a British theatre director and producer who works on the West End and Broadway. She has received numerous accolades including three Laurence Olivier Awards and four Tony Awards.
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Gerard A. Hauser
#36689
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Gerard Alan Hauser is an author and academic, and professor emeritus of communication and college professor emeritus of distinction in rhetoric at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on the interaction between formal and vernacular rhetorics in the public sphere. He has authored several books and numerous articles on the subject, and his writings have helped shaped the field of modern rhetoric.
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Émile Lahoud
#36690
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Émile Jamil Lahoud is a Lebanese politician who served as the 16th president of Lebanon from 1998 to 2007. His main foreign policy achievement was to end the Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon in May 2000, which had been occupied since 1982. He downplayed sectarianism and rearmed the Lebanese army, with help from Syria. However, factionalism and Lebanon's politics undermined his strength.
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Royce Gracie
#36691
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Royce Gracie is a Brazilian retired professional mixed martial artist. Gracie gained fame for his success in the Ultimate Fighting Championship . He is a member of the Gracie jiu-jitsu family, a UFC Hall of Famer, and is considered to be one of the most influential figures in the history of mixed martial arts . He also competed in PRIDE Fighting Championships, K-1's MMA events, and Bellator.
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Shaheen Sardar Ali
#36692
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Shaheen Sardar Ali is a British Pakistani law professor and an author who formerly served chair of the National Commission on the Status of Women of Pakistan. She is a professor of law at the University of Warwick.
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Wing Hung Wong
#36693
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Wing Hung Wong is a Chinese-American statistician, computational biologist, and Stanford University professor. Biography Wong graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976 with a bachelor's degree. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he studied under renowned statistician Grace Wahba, and was awarded a PhD in Statistics in 1980. After graduation, he taught at the University of Chicago, served as an assistant professor, associate professor, and professor. In 1994 he joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong Department of Statistics. Since 1997, he taught and led his lab at the University of California, Los Angeles and Harvard University.
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Sonny Jurgensen
#36694
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Christian Adolph "Sonny" Jurgensen III is an American former professional football player who was a quarterback in the National Football League for 18 seasons, playing for the Philadelphia Eagles and Washington Redskins. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1983. Jurgensen was also a longtime color commentator for Washington's radio broadcast crew.
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Alexi Lalas
#36695
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Panayotis Alexander Lalas is an American retired soccer player who played mostly as a defender. Lalas is best known for his participation with the United States men's national soccer team in the 1994 FIFA World Cup, where his appearance made him a standout player on the team with his distinctive long beard and hair. After the World Cup, Lalas went on to become the first American in Italy's Serie A as a member of Calcio Padova.
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Steve Alpern
#36696
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Steve Alpern is a professor of Operational Research at the University of Warwick, where he recently moved after working for many years at the London School of Economics. His early work was mainly in the area of dynamical systems and ergodic theory, but his more recent research has been concentrated in the fields of search games and rendezvous. He informally introduced the rendezvous problem as early as 1976. His collaborators include Shmuel Gal, Vic Baston and Robbert Fokkink.
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Jon Pertwee
#36697
Overall Influence
1919 - 1996 (77 years)
John Devon Roland Pertwee was an English actor. Born into a theatrical family, he became nationally known as a comedy actor, playing Chief Petty Officer Pertwee in the BBC Radio sitcom The Navy Lark and appearing in four films in the Carry On series. On television, Pertwee starred as the third incarnation of the Doctor in the long-running British science fiction series Doctor Who , hosted the game show Whodunnit? and played the title character in Worzel Gummidge . Towards the end of his life he maintained a close association with Doctor Who by appearing at many fan conventions related to t...
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Stephen Balch
#36698
Overall Influence
Stephen H. Balch is an American conservative scholar and higher education reformer. He was the founding president of the National Association of Scholars from 1987 to 2009. Biography Early life Balch was born on January 31, 1944, into a Jewish family and grew up in Brooklyn, New York City. In 1979 he married Maria Schelz, and they have two children: Leah and Daniel.
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Radomir Konstantinović
#36699
Overall Influence
1928 - 2011 (83 years)
Radomir Konstantinović was Serbian writer and philosopher. His most famous work is a philosophical treatise "Filosofija palanke" . He won the prestigious literary NIN Award in 1960 for the novel "Izlazak" .
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Nicholas Economides
#36700
Overall Influence
Nicholas Economides is an internationally recognized academic authority on network economics, electronic commerce and public policy. His fields of specialization and research include the economics of networks, especially of telecommunications, computers, and information, the economics of technical compatibility and standardization, industrial organization, the structure and organization of financial markets and payment systems, antitrust, application of public policy to network industries, strategic analysis of markets and law and economics.
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Ann S. Almgren
#36701
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Ann S. Almgren is an American applied mathematician who works as a senior scientist and group leader of the Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her primary research interests are in computational algorithms for solving PDE's for fluid dynamics in a variety of application areas. Her current projects include the development and implementation of new multiphysics algorithms in high-resolution adaptive mesh codes that are designed for the latest multicore architectures.
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Laila Soueif
#36702
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Laila Soueif is an Egyptian human and women's rights activist, a mathematician and professor at Cairo University. Al Jazeera has called her "an Egyptian revolutionary". She is the widow of fellow activist Ahmed Seif El-Islam, and all three of their children are noted activists: Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Sanaa Seif, and Mona Seif. Her sister is the novelist Ahdaf Soueif.
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Jaan Valsiner
#36703
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Jaan Valsiner is an Estonian-American professor of developmental and cultural psychology, the recipient of Alexander von Humboldt Prize for his interdisciplinary work on human development and 2017 Hans-Kilian-Award winner, the Foreign Member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences and the former Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology , currently, a professor at Aalborg University, Denmark.
Go to Profile#36692
Charles Andrew Myers
#36704
Overall Influence
1913 - 2000 (87 years)
Charles Andrew Myers was an American labor economist, and Professor of Labor Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known from his study on "Management in the industrial world," published in 1959 and his work on labor and management.
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Hellmuth Stachel
#36705
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Hellmuth Stachel is an Austrian mathematician, a professor of geometry at the Technical University of Vienna, who is known due to his contributions to geometry, kinematics and computer-aided design.
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Vernon R. Young
#36706
Overall Influence
1937 - 2004 (67 years)
Vernon Robert Young was an expert on protein and amino acid requirements and researched how the human body processes nutrients into protein. Young was a principal organizer of amino acid Workshops sponsored by the International Council of Amino Acid Science and was the Chairman of the Council's Scientific Advisory Board.
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Rod Argent
#36707
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Rodney Terence Argent is an English musician. In a career spanning more than 50 years, Argent came to prominence in the mid-1960s as the keyboardist, founder and leader of the rock band the Zombies, and went on to form the band Argent after the first break-up of the Zombies.
Go to Profile#36696
George de la Peña
#36708
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
George de la Peña is an American ballet dancer, musical theatre performer, choreographer, actor, and teacher. He was born in 1955 in New York City, New York. Originally trained as a concert pianist, de la Peña switched to ballet while studying at the High School for the Performing Arts in New York City. He graduated from George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet. He joined American Ballet Theatre in the 1970s, rapidly rising to soloist. While at ABT, de la Peña danced in works choreographed by Mikhail Baryshnikov, Agnes de Mille, Kenneth MacMillan, and Jerome Robbins. By 1985, de la Peña and his then-wife, ballerina Rebecca Wright had both left ABT and moved to California.
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Emil L. Smith
#36709
Overall Influence
1911 - 2009 (98 years)
Emil L. Smith was an American biochemist who studied protein structure and function as well as biochemical evolution. Initially intending to go into medicine, Smith became interested in biology and organic chemistry during his second year at Columbia University. He earned a B.S. in 1931 and stayed at Columbia to study photosynthesis under Selig Hecht, completing a Ph.D. in biophysics in 1936. In 1938, he went to Cambridge University on a Guggenheim Fellowship to work with David Keilin on the chlorophyll-protein complex. Upon returning to the U.S. during World War II, he took a position at Yale University's Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station to work with Hubert Bradford Vickery.
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Evelyn Torton Beck
#36710
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Evelyn Torton Beck has been described as "a scholar, a teacher, a feminist, and an outspoken Jew and lesbian". Until her retirement in 2002 she specialized in women's studies, Jewish women's studies and lesbian studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.
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Nasaruddin Umar
#36711
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Nasaruddin Umar is the founder of the Indonesian interfaith organization Masyarakat Dialog antar Umat Beragama and was vice minister in the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs. He is also a member of the UK-Indonesia Advisory Team, founded by UK prime minister Tony Blair.
Go to Profile#36700
Paul Wellstone
#36712
Overall Influence
1944 - 2002 (58 years)
Paul David Wellstone was an American academic, author, and politician who represented Minnesota in the United States Senate from 1991 until he was killed in a plane crash near Eveleth, Minnesota, in 2002. A member of the Democratic Party , Wellstone was a leader of the populist and progressive wings of the party.
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