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
#3901
Herta Müller
#3908
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Herta Müller is a Romanian-German novelist, poet, essayist and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born in Nițchidorf , Timiș County in Romania; her native language is German. Since the early 1990s, she has been internationally established, and her works have been translated into more than twenty languages.
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Alain de Botton
#3909
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Alain de Botton is a Swiss-born British author and public speaker. His books discuss various contemporary subjects and themes, emphasizing philosophy's relevance to everyday life. He published Essays in Love , which went on to sell two million copies. Other bestsellers include How Proust Can Change Your Life , Status Anxiety , and The Architecture of Happiness .
Go to Profile#3903
Peter Boghossian
#3910
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Peter Gregory Boghossian is an American philosopher and pedagogue. Born in Boston, he was a non-tenure track assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University for ten years, and his areas of academic focus include atheism, critical thinking, pedagogy, scientific skepticism, and the Socratic method. He is the author of A Manual for Creating Atheists and How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide.
Go to Profile#3904
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
#3911
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Valéry René Marie Georges Giscard d'Estaing , also known as Giscard or VGE, was a French politician who served as President of France from 1974 to 1981. After serving as Minister of Finance under prime ministers Jacques Chaban-Delmas and Pierre Messmer, Giscard d'Estaing won the presidential election of 1974 with 50.8% of the vote against François Mitterrand of the Socialist Party. His tenure was marked by a more liberal attitude on social issues—such as divorce, contraception and abortion—and by attempts to modernise the country and the office of the presidency, notably overseeing such far-re...
Go to Profile#3905
Alexei Sayle
#3912
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Alexei David Sayle is an English actor, author, stand-up comedian, television presenter and former recording artist. He was a leading figure in the British alternative comedy movement in the 1980s. He was voted the 18th greatest stand-up comic of all time on Channel 4's 100 Greatest Stand-Ups in 2007. In an updated 2010 poll he came 72nd.
Go to Profile#3906
Ali Smith
#3913
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Ali Smith CBE FRSL is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist. Sebastian Barry described her in 2016 as "Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting". Early life and education Smith was born in Inverness on 24 August 1962 to Ann and Donald Smith. Her parents were working-class and she was raised in a council house in Inverness. From 1967 to 1974 she attended St. Joseph's RC Primary school, then went on to Inverness High School, leaving in 1980.
Go to Profile#3907
Oded Galor
#3914
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Oded Galor is an Israeli-American economist who is currently Herbert H. Goldberger Professor of Economics at Brown University. He is the founder of unified growth theory. Galor has contributed to the understanding of development over the entire course of human history and prehistory, and the role of deep-rooted factors in the transition from stagnation to growth and in the emergence of global inequality. He also pioneered the exploration of the impact of human evolution, population diversity, and inequality on the process of development over most of human existence.
Go to Profile#3908
Hugh Downs
#3915
Overall Influence
1921 - 2020 (99 years)
Hugh Malcolm Downs was an American radio and television broadcaster, announcer and programmer; television host; news anchor; TV producer; author; game show host; talk show sidekick; and music composer. A regular television presence from the mid 1940s until the late 1990s, he had several successful roles on morning, prime-time, and late-night television. For several years, he held the certified Guinness World Record for the most hours on commercial network television before being surpassed by Regis Philbin.
Go to Profile#3909
Ric Flair
#3916
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Richard Morgan Fliehr , known professionally as Ric Flair, is an American professional wrestler currently signed to All Elite Wrestling. Regarded by multiple peers and journalists as the greatest professional wrestler of all time, Flair has had a career spanning over 50 years.
Go to Profile#3910
Geoffrey Hodgson
#3917
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Geoffrey Martin Hodgson is Emeritus Professor in Management at the London campus of Loughborough University, and also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics. Hodgson is recognised as one of the leading figures of modern critical institutionalism which carries forth the critical spirit and intellectual tradition of the founders of institutional economics, particularly that of Thorstein Veblen. His broad research interests span from evolutionary economics and history of economic thought to Marxism and theoretical biology. He first became known for his book Economics and ...
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Marcel Reich-Ranicki
#3918
Overall Influence
1920 - 2013 (93 years)
Marcel Reich-Ranicki was a Polish-born German literary critic and member of the informal literary association Gruppe 47. He was regarded as one of the most influential contemporary literary critics in the field of German literature and has often been called Literaturpapst in Germany.
Go to Profile#3912
David Sedaris
#3919
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
David Raymond Sedaris is an American humorist, comedian, author, and radio contributor. He was publicly recognized in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "Santaland Diaries”. He published his first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, in 1994. His next book, Naked , became his first of a series of New York Times Bestsellers, and his 2000 collection Me Talk Pretty One Day won the Thurber Prize for American Humor.
Go to Profile#3913
John Naisbitt
#3920
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
John Naisbitt was an American author and public speaker in the area of futures studies. His first book Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives was published in 1982. It was the result of almost ten years of research. It was on The New York Times Best Seller list for two years, mostly as No. 1. Megatrends was published in 57 countries and sold more than 14 million copies.
Go to Profile#3914
John L. Kelley
#3921
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
John L. Kelley was an American mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked in general topology and functional analysis. Kelley's 1955 text, General Topology, which eventually appeared in three editions and several translations, is a classic and widely cited graduate-level introduction to topology. An appendix sets out a new approach to axiomatic set theory, now called Morse–Kelley set theory, that builds on Von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel set theory. He introduced the first definition of a subnet.
Go to Profile#3915
S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan
#3922
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Sathamangalam Ranga Iyengar Srinivasa Varadhan, is an Indian American mathematician. He is known for his fundamental contributions to probability theory and in particular for creating a unified theory of large deviations. He is regarded as one of the fundamental contributors to the theory of diffusion processes with an orientation towards the refinement and further development of Itô’s stochastic calculus. In the year 2007, he became the first Asian to win the Abel Prize.
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Monica S. Lam
#3923
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Monica Sin-Ling Lam is an American computer scientist. She is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. Professional biography Monica Lam received a B.Sc. from University of British Columbia in 1980 and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1987.
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Nergis Mavalvala
#3924
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Nergis Mavalvala is a Pakistani-American astrophysicist. She is the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where she is also the dean of the university's school of science. She was previously the Associate Head of the university's Department of Physics. Mavalvala is best known for her work on the detection of gravitational waves in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory project, and for the exploration and experimental demonstration of macroscopic quantum effects such as squeezing in optomechanics. She was awarded ...
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Maarten Schmidt
#3925
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Maarten Schmidt was a Dutch-born American astronomer who first measured the distances of quasars. He was the first astronomer to identify a quasar, and so was pictured on the March cover of Time magazine in 1966.
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Jack Horner
#3926
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John Robert Horner is an American paleontologist most famous for describing Maiasaura, providing the first clear evidence that some dinosaurs cared for their young. In addition to his paleontological discoveries, Horner served as the technical advisor for the first five Jurassic Park films, had a cameo appearance in Jurassic World, and served as a partial inspiration for one of the lead characters of the franchise, Dr. Alan Grant. Horner studied at the University of Montana, although he did not complete his degree due to undiagnosed dyslexia, and was awarded a Doctorate in Science honoris causa.
Go to Profile#3920
Ariel Rechtshaid
#3927
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Ariel Rechtshaid is an American record producer, audio engineer, mixing engineer, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter. His accolades include three Grammy Awards for music production. Rechtshaid was the lead singer and guitarist of the ska/pop-punk band The Hippos, and the bassist and producer of indie folk-rock group Foreign Born. In 2006, he produced the Billboard Hot 100 number one-charting single "Hey There Delilah" by the Plain White T's. He co-wrote and produced Usher's 2012 single "Climax", which won the 2013 Grammy award for Best R&B Performance. Rechtshaid was nominated for the 2014 Grammy award for Producer of the Year.
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John Kricfalusi
#3928
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Michael John Kricfalusi , known professionally as John K., is a Canadian illustrator and blogger, as well as a former animator and voice actor. He is the creator of the animated television series The Ren & Stimpy Show, which was highly influential on televised animation during the 1990s. From 1989 to 1992, he was heavily involved with the first two seasons of the show in virtually every aspect of its production, including providing the voice of Ren Höek and other characters. In 2009, he won the Inkpot Award.
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Avinash Dixit
#3929
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Avinash Kamalakar Dixit is an Indian-American economist. He is the John J. F. Sherrerd '52 University Professor of Economics Emeritus at Princeton University, and has been Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Economics at Lingnan University , senior research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford and Sanjaya Lall Senior Visiting Research Fellow at Green Templeton College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#3923
James Merrill
#3930
Overall Influence
1926 - 1995 (69 years)
James Ingram Merrill was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1977 for Divine Comedies. His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic narrative of occult communication with spirits and angels, titled The Changing Light at Sandover , which dominated his later career. Although most of his published work was poetry, he also wrote essays, fiction, and plays.
Go to Profile#3924
Ronald Numbers
#3931
Overall Influence
1942 - 2023 (81 years)
Ronald Leslie Numbers was an American historian of science. He was awarded the 2008 George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society for "a lifetime of exceptional scholarly achievement by a distinguished scholar".
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Martin Gutzwiller
#3932
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Martin Charles Gutzwiller was a Swiss-American physicist, known for his work on field theory, quantum chaos, and complex systems. He spent most of his career at IBM Research, and was also an adjunct professor of physics at Yale University.
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Billie Jean King
#3933
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Billie Jean King also known as BJK, is an American former world No. 1 tennis player. King won 39 Grand Slam titles: 12 in singles, 16 in women's doubles, and 11 in mixed doubles. King was a member of the victorious United States team in seven Federation Cups and nine Wightman Cups. For three years, she was the U.S. captain in the Federation Cup.
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Jane Gallop
#3934
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Jane Anne Gallop is an American professor who since 1992 has served as Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she has taught since 1990.
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Ali Mazrui
#3935
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Ali Al'amin Mazrui , was a Kenyan-born American academic, professor, and political writer on African and Islamic studies, and North-South relations. He was born in Mombasa, Kenya. His positions included Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, and Director of the Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan. He produced the 1980s television documentary series The Africans: A Triple Heritage.
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Arif Zaman
#3936
Overall Influence
Arif Zaman is a Pakistani mathematician, academic scientist, and a retired professor of Statistics and Mathematics from Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, Lahore University of Management Sciences , Lahore, Pakistan. Before joining LUMS in 1994, he also served in the Statistics Department at Purdue University and at Florida State University.
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Laurence BonJour
#3937
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Laurence BonJour is an American philosopher and Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Washington. Education and career He received his bachelor's degrees in Philosophy and Political Science from Macalester College and his doctorate in 1969 from Princeton University with a dissertation directed by Richard Rorty. Before moving to UW he taught at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Christopher Ricks
#3938
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University , co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford from 2004 to 2009. In 2008, he served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers pretentious ; and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous .
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Jon Barwise
#3939
Overall Influence
1942 - 2000 (58 years)
Kenneth Jon Barwise was an American mathematician, philosopher and logician who proposed some fundamental revisions to the way that logic is understood and used. Education and career He was born in Independence, Missouri, to Kenneth T. and Evelyn Barwise.
Go to Profile#3933
Patrick Aebischer
#3940
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Patrick Aebischer has been the president of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne from 17 March 2000 to 31 December 2016. He is also a professor in neuroscience and head of the Neurodegenerative Disease Laboratory at the EPFL.
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Vyacheslav Ivanov
#3941
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov was a prominent Soviet/Russian philologist, semiotician and Indo-Europeanist probably best known for his glottalic theory of Indo-European consonantism and for placing the Indo-European urheimat in the area of the Armenian Highlands and Lake Urmia.
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Christopher Clark
#3942
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
<onlyinclude></onlyinclude> Education and academic positions Clark was educated at Sydney Grammar School from 1972 to 1978, the University of Sydney and the Freie Universität Berlin from 1985 to 1987.
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Don Patinkin
#3943
Overall Influence
1922 - 1995 (73 years)
Don Patinkin was an American-born Israeli monetary economist, and the President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Biography Don Patinkin was born January 8, 1922, in Chicago, to a family of Jewish emigrants from Poland. While doing his undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, he also studied the Talmud at the Hebrew Theological College in Chicago. He continued at Chicago for his graduate studies, earning a Ph.D. in 1947 under the supervision of Oskar R. Lange. Patinkin was a strong Zionist and, while doing his graduate studies, planned to immigrate to Palestine; in his gradu...
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Chester M. Southam
#3944
Overall Influence
1919 - 2002 (83 years)
Chester Milton Southam was an immunologist and oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Cornell University Medical College; he went to Thomas Jefferson University in 1971 and worked there until the end of his career. He ran many experiments involving the injection of live cancer cells into human subjects, without disclosing that they were cancer cells, and using subjects with questionable ability to consent, such as incarcerated people and senile patients in long-term care at a hospital. The New York State Attorney General encouraged the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York to take away Southam's medical license.
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Marcelo Gleiser
#3945
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Marcelo Gleiser is a Brazilian physicist and astronomer. He is currently Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College and was the 2019 recipient of the Templeton Prize. Early life and education Gleiser received his bachelor's degree in 1981 from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, his M.Sc. degree in 1982 from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and his Ph.D. in 1986 from King's College London. After this he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Fermilab until 1988 and from then until 1991 at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.
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Dallas Willard
#3946
Overall Influence
1935 - 2013 (78 years)
Dallas Albert Willard was an American philosopher also known for his writings on Christian spiritual formation. Much of his work in philosophy was related to phenomenology, particularly the work of Edmund Husserl, many of whose writings he translated into English for the first time.
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Jean Guitton
#3947
Overall Influence
1901 - 1999 (98 years)
Jean Guitton was a French Catholic philosopher and theologian. Le Monde called him "the last of the great Catholic philosophers." Biography Born in Saint-Étienne, Loire in August 1901, he was the son of an industrialist. He studied at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon and was accepted at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1920. His principal religious and intellectual influence was from a blind priest, Francois Pouget. He finished his philosophical studies in the early 1920s and taught in a number of secondary schools. Guitton was a disciple of philosopher Henri Bergson.
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Robert Herman
#3948
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
Robert Herman was an American scientist, best known for his work with Ralph Alpher in 1948–50, on estimating the temperature of cosmic microwave background radiation from the Big Bang explosion. Biography and career Born in the Bronx, New York City, Herman graduated cum laude with special honors in physics from the City College of New York in 1935, and in 1940 was awarded master's and doctoral degrees in physics from Princeton University in the area of molecular spectroscopy. As a graduate student, Herman already exhibited eclectic tendencies in diverse fields by also working in solid state physics, as well as straddling theory and experiment.
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Joseph Sifakis
#3949
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Joseph Sifakis is a Greek-French computer scientist. He received the 2007 Turing Award, along with Edmund M. Clarke and E. Allen Emerson, for his work on model checking. Biography Joseph Sifakis was born in Heraklion, Crete in 1946 and lives in France. He studied Electrical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens and Computer Science at the University of Grenoble under a French scholarship. He received his engineering doctorate in 1974 from the University of Grenoble, where he also received a state doctorate in 1979.
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Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn
#3950
Overall Influence
1918 - 2012 (94 years)
Nicolaas Govert "Dick" de Bruijn was a Dutch mathematician, noted for his many contributions in the fields of analysis, number theory, combinatorics and logic. Biography De Bruijn was born in The Hague where he attended elementary school between 1924 and 1930 and secondary school until 1934. He started studies in mathematics at Leiden University in 1936 but his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II in 1939. He became a full-time Assistant in the Department of Mathematics of the Technological University of Delft in September 1939 while continuing his studies. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Leiden in 1941.
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Wilt Chamberlain
#3951
Overall Influence
1936 - 1999 (63 years)
Wilton Norman Chamberlain was an American professional basketball player. Standing tall, he played center in the National Basketball Association for 14 seasons and is widely regarded as one of the sport's greatest players. Chamberlain was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1978 and elected to the NBA's 35th, 50th, and 75th anniversary teams. Following his professional basketball career, Chamberlain played volleyball in the short-lived International Volleyball Association . He served one term as league president and is enshrined in the IVA Hall of Fame. Renowned fo...
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Gérard Mourou
#3952
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Gérard Albert Mourou is a French scientist and pioneer in the field of electrical engineering and lasers. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, along with Donna Strickland, for the invention of chirped pulse amplification, a technique later used to create ultrashort-pulse, very high-intensity laser pulses.
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A.C. Grayling
#3953
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
#3947
William Daniel Phillips
#3954
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
William Daniel Phillips is an American physicist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1997, with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji. „Temperature is a measure of what we call kinetic energy, i.e. the energy of motion."
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Jean Houston
#3955
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Jean Houston is an American author involved in the human potential movement. Along with her husband, Robert Masters, she co-founded the Foundation for Mind Research. Biography Early life and education Houston was born in New York City to Mary Todaro Houston who was of Sicilian descent, and Jack Houston who was related to Sam Houston of Texas. Her father was a comedy writer who developed material for stage, television and the movies, including for comedians Bob Hope and George Burns. His work required him, and the family, to move frequently. After the breakup of her parents' marriage, she spe...
Go to Profile#3949
Adriana Lima
#3956
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Adriana Lima is a Brazilian model. She was a Victoria's Secret Angel from 1999 to 2018. She was the longest-running model and named "the most valuable Victoria's Secret Angel" in 2017. She is also known as a spokesmodel for Maybelline cosmetics since 2003, and for her Super Bowl and Kia Motors commercials. At age 15, Lima won Ford's "Supermodel of Brazil" competition, and took second place the following year in the Ford "Supermodel of the World" competition before signing with Elite Model Management in New York City.
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James Forman
#3957
Overall Influence
1928 - 2005 (77 years)
James Forman was a prominent African-American leader in the civil rights movement. He was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee , the Black Panther Party, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. As the executive secretary of SNCC from 1961 to 1966, Forman played a significant role in the Freedom Rides, the Albany movement, the Birmingham campaign, and the Selma to Montgomery marches.
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