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
#39351
Luis Tiant
#39363
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Luis Clemente Tiant Vega is a Cuban former Major League Baseball right-handed starting pitcher. He pitched in MLB for 19 years, primarily for the Cleveland Indians and the Boston Red Sox. Tiant compiled a 229–172 record with 2416 strikeouts, a 3.30 earned run average , 187 complete games, and 49 shutouts in innings. He was an All-Star for three seasons and 20-game winner for four seasons. He was the American League ERA leader in 1968 and 1972. He also was the AL leader in strikeouts per nine innings pitched in 1967 and the AL leader in shutouts in 1966, 1968, and 1974.
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Phil Klay
#39364
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Phil Klay is an American writer. He won the National Book Award for fiction in 2014 for his first book-length publication, a collection of short stories, Redeployment. In 2014 the National Book Foundation named him a 5 under 35 honoree. His 2020 novel, Missionaries, was named as one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year as well as one of The Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Books of the Year.
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Thomas S. Kidd
#39365
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Thomas S. Kidd is an American historian, currently a Distinguished Professor at Baylor University and Distinguished professor of Church History at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Before becoming a professor, Kidd studied at the University of Notre Dame. He is a notable historian and author of such books as George Whitefield, a biography on the 18th-century Anglo-American preacher. Kidd credits George Whitefield as being "profoundly influential on the American nation's founding."
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James Harder
#39366
Overall Influence
1926 - 2006 (80 years)
James Albert Harder, Ph.D., was a professor of civil and hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a professor emeritus there. Harder also had interest in ufology. Engineering Harder taught in civil engineering at several levels, including practical aspects like lab experiments relating to the field and model testing. He produced few papers but was known for their quality.
Go to Profile#39355
Pamela Cook
#39367
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Leslie Pamela Cook-Ioannidis is an American mathematician, the Unidel Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware. She was the president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for 2015–2016. Her research concerns fluid dynamics.
Go to Profile#39356
Jeannette Littlemore
#39368
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Jeannette Littlemore is a British scholar of English and applied linguistics whose work focuses on the interpretation of figurative language, including metaphor and metonymy, as it relates to second language learning and teaching. Her research examines the ways that metaphor is misunderstood by learners of English.
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Stanley Fields
#39369
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Stanley Fields is an American biologist best known for developing the yeast two hybrid method for identifying protein–protein interactions. He is currently a professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and serves as chair of the Department of Genome Sciences.
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Tom Verlaine
#39370
Overall Influence
1949 - 2023 (74 years)
Thomas Joseph Miller , known professionally as Tom Verlaine, was an American singer, guitarist, and songwriter, best known as the frontman of the New York City rock band Television. Biography Verlaine was born Thomas Joseph Miller in Denville, New Jersey on December 13, 1949. His father, Victor Andrew Miller , was of Lithuanian heritage , but born in Coatbridge, Scotland. His mother, Lillian Barbara Dopko was originally from Pennsylvania and of Polish gentile heritage. Tom's father worked first as a maintenance man and later as a sales manager. Tom had a twin brother, John Peter Miller , who...
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Victor Zarnowitz
#39371
Overall Influence
1919 - 2009 (90 years)
Victor Zarnowitz was a leading scholar on business cycles, indicators, and forecast evaluation. Zarnowitz was Senior Fellow and Economic Counselor to The Conference Board. He was Professor Emeritus of Economics and Finance, Graduate School of Business, The University of Chicago, and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research .
Go to Profile#39360
Robert van de Geijn
#39372
Overall Influence
Robert A. van de Geijn is a Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park. His areas of interest include numerical analysis and parallel processing.
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George I. Fujimoto
#39373
Overall Influence
1920 - Present (106 years)
George Iwao Fujimoto was an American chemist of Japanese descent. Life and career Fujimoto was born in Seattle, Washington on July 1, 1920. During his studies at Harvard his family was imprisoned in an American internment camp Minidoka in Idaho. He discovered the Fujimoto-Belleau reaction, which is named after him and Bernard Belleau.
Go to Profile#39362
Bonnie Steinbock
#39374
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Bonnie Steinbock is a professor emerita of philosophy at the University at Albany and a specialist in bioethics who has written on topics such as abortion, end of life issues, and animal rights. Biography Steinbock received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution. She now lives in Oakland, CA, with her husband, Paul Menzel. In retirement, she has been a Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. In retirement, she continues to publi...
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Juan Pablo Paz
#39375
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Juan Pablo Paz is an Argentinian physicist that works in the field of quantum computing. A research scientist currently working at the University of Buenos Aires, he has also worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States.
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Meg Urry
#39376
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Claudia Megan Urry is an American astrophysicist, who has served as the President of the American Astronomical Society, as chair of the Department of Physics at Yale University, and as part of the Hubble Space Telescope faculty. She is currently the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University and Director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. Urry is notable not only for her contributions to astronomy and astrophysics, including work on black holes and multiwavelength surveys, but also for her work addressing sexism and sex equality in astronomy, science, a...
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Steve Smith
#39377
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Steven Delano Smith is an American former professional basketball player who is a basketball analyst for Turner Sports. After a collegiate career with Michigan State, he played with several teams in his 14-season National Basketball Association career, including the Miami Heat, the Portland Trail Blazers and the San Antonio Spurs, but is perhaps best known for his five-year stint with the Atlanta Hawks which included an All-Star Game appearance in 1998. He won a championship with the Spurs in 2003. Smith was widely regarded as an excellent three-point shooter, and is one of three players to m...
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Mary K. Rothbart
#39378
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Mary Klevjord Rothbart is professor emerita of psychology at the University of Oregon. She is known for her research in the fields of temperament and social development, emotional development, and development of attention. She was a co-founder of Birth to Three, a parent support and education program. She has written over 159 articles related to educational psychology, developmental psychology, developmental cognitive neuroscience and biological psychology. Rothbart has also authored and co-authored many books, including Becoming Who We Are, for which she received the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award from the American Psychological Association.
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Pete Johnson
#39379
Overall Influence
Pete Johnson was a music critic for the Los Angeles Times in the 1960s before being replaced by Robert Hilburn in 1970. In 1969, he wrote The History of Rock and Roll and appeared in another rockumentary, the Pop Chronicles.
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Philip Appleman
#39380
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Philip D. Appleman was an American poet and writer. He was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. He published seven volumes of poetry, the first of which was Summer Love and Surf and the latest of which is Perfidious Proverbs ; three novels, including Apes and Angels ; and half a dozen nonfiction books, including the widely used Norton Critical Edition, Darwin and the Norton Critical Edition of Malthus' Essay on Population. His poetry and fiction have won many awards, including a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the...
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Daniel Auteuil
#39381
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Daniel Auteuil is a French actor and director who has appeared in a wide range of film genres, including period dramas, romantic comedies, and crime thrillers. In 1996 he won the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival together with Belgian actor Pascal Duquenne. He is also the winner of two César Awards for Best Actor, one in 1987 as Ugolin Soubeyran in Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources and one for his role in Girl on the Bridge. For his role in Jean de Florette he also won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. Auteuil is considered one of France's most respected act...
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Joe Zawinul
#39382
Overall Influence
1932 - 2007 (75 years)
Josef Erich Zawinul was an Austrian jazz and jazz fusion keyboardist and composer. First coming to prominence with saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, Zawinul went on to play with Miles Davis and to become one of the creators of jazz fusion, a musical genre that combined jazz with rock. He co-founded the groups Weather Report and The Zawinul Syndicate. He pioneered the use of electric piano and synthesizer, and was named "Best Electric Keyboardist" twenty-eight times by the readers of DownBeat magazine.
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James Gill
#39383
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
James Francis Gill is an American artist and one of the protagonists of the Pop art movement. In 1962, the Museum of Modern Art included his Marilyn Tryptych into its permanent collection. At the peak of his career, Gill retired. He returned to the art scene around 30 years later.
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Cyd Charisse
#39384
Overall Influence
1921 - 2008 (87 years)
Cyd Charisse was an American dancer and actress. After recovering from polio as a child and studying ballet, Charisse entered films in the 1940s. Her roles usually featured her abilities as a dancer, and she was paired with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly; her films include Singin' in the Rain , The Band Wagon , Brigadoon with Gene Kelly and Van Johnson , and Silk Stockings . She stopped dancing in films in the late 1950s, but continued acting in film and television, and in 1991 made her Broadway debut. In her later years, she discussed the history of the Hollywood musical in documentaries, and was featured in That's Entertainment! III in 1994.
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Robert Barsky
#39385
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Robert Franklin Barsky is Canada Research Chair in Law, Narrative, and Border Crossing. He is a Professor in the College of Arts and Science and Associate Faculty in the School of Law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He is an expert on Noam Chomsky, literary theory, convention refugees, immigration and refugee law, borders, work through the Americas, and Montreal. His biography of Chomsky titled Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent was published in 1997 by MIT Press, followed in 2007 by The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower, and in 2011 by a biography of Chomsky's teacher: Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism.
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Kenan Thompson
#39386
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Kenan Thompson is an American comedian and actor. Thompson has been a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live since 2003, making him the longest-tenured cast member in the show's history. He was also the first regular cast member born after the show's premiere in 1975. Outside of SNL, Thompson starred on NBC's sitcom Kenan from 2021 to 2022.
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József Solymosi
#39387
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
József Solymosi is a Hungarian-Canadian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia. His main research interests are arithmetic combinatorics, discrete geometry, graph theory, and combinatorial number theory.
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Jin-Yi Cai
#39388
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Jin-Yi Cai is a Chinese American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science, and also the Steenbock Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research is in theoretical computer science, especially computational complexity theory. In recent years he has concentrated on the classification of computational counting problems, especially counting graph homomorphisms, counting constraint satisfaction problems, and Holant problems as related to holographic algorithms.
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Stephen I. Katz
#39389
Overall Influence
1941 - 2018 (77 years)
Stephen Ira Katz was an American immunodermatologist who served as the director of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases from 1995 to 2018. He was the Marion B. Sulzberger Professor of Dermatology at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences from 1989 to 1995.
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Stanislavs Ladusãns
#39390
Overall Influence
1912 - 1993 (81 years)
Stanislavs Ladusãns was a Latvian-Brazilian professor of philosophy, a member of the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy, and a Jesuit priest who arrived in Brazil on 17 February 1947. He also lived in Poland and Italy.
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David Huebner
#39391
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
David Huebner is an international arbitrator based in Southern California. He previously served as the United States Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. He was the first openly gay ambassador in the Obama administration and the third openly gay ambassador in United States history. His tenure was marked by significant improvement in bilateral relations, with commentators observing that relations are stronger and closer than they have been in decades. Called an “excellent public face for the United States,” he has been widely praised as a successful Ambassador including for his accessible, in...
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Steven Jack Land
#39392
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Steven Jack Land is a Canadian renewal theologian within the Pentecostal movement who began serving as the president of the Church of God Theological Seminary, now Pentecostal Theological Seminary, in 2002. He is the first president of the institution to have been selected from the seminary faculty. He began teaching full-time in 1979 and is currently Distinguished Professor of Pentecostal Theology. Land received the B. A. in psychology from Birmingham-Southern College in 1968, the M.Div. from Candler School of Theology, Emory University in 1973 and a Ph.D. in theological studies from Em...
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Tom Robinson
#39393
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Thomas Giles Robinson is a British singer, bassist, radio presenter and long-time LGBT rights activist, best known for the hits "Glad to Be Gay", "2-4-6-8 Motorway", and "Don't Take No for an Answer", with his Tom Robinson Band. He later peaked at No. 6 in the UK Singles Chart with his solo single "War Baby".
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Hans Bielenstein
#39394
Overall Influence
1920 - 2015 (95 years)
Hans Henrik August Bielenstein was a Swedish sinologist and Dean Lung Professor Emeritus from Columbia University specialising in the history of the Han Dynasty. Life Hans Henrik August Bielenstein was born on 8 April 1920 in Stockholm, Sweden. He attended private school in Stockholm and took the matriculation exam in 1939. After the outbreak of the Winter War, 1939–40, he joined the Swedish Voluntary Corps as a commando and fought the Russians in Finnish Lapland. After his return, he entered the Guards Regiment.
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Arif Alvi
#39395
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Arif-ur-Rehman Alvi is a Pakistani politician currently serving as the 13th President of Pakistan, in office since 9 September 2018. He was a member of the National Assembly of Pakistan from June 2013 to May 2018 and again from August to September 2018. A founding member of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf , Alvi was elected as President of Pakistan on 4 September 2018 following the 2018 Pakistani presidential election.
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Hanna Suchocka
#39396
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Hanna Stanisława Suchocka is a Polish political figure, lawyer, professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and Chair of the Constitutional Law Department, former First Vice-President and Honorary President of the Venice Commission.
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Luis Fernando Alday
#39397
Overall Influence
Luis Fernando Alday is presently Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Head of the Mathematical Physics Group. His research interests are bootstrap approach to conformal field theories and string theory, several aspects of the AdS/CFT duality, four-dimensional N=2 super-symmetric theories and their relation to conformal field theories and exact computation of observables in super-symmetric gauge theories.
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Hubert Schleichert
#39398
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Hubert Schleichert was an Austrian emeritus philosopher . His works have emphasized political philosophy, theory of argument and non-European philosophy, especially Chinese philosophy. Working with Urs Egli, Schleichert contributed to erotetics by assembling an annotated bibliography of works in philosophy, linguistics, automatic answering, and psychology/pedagogy.
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Mayim Bialik
#39399
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Mayim Chaya Bialik is an American actress, game show host, and author. From 1991 to 1995, she played the title character of the NBC sitcom Blossom. From 2010 to 2019, she played neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler on the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, for which she was nominated four times for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series and won the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2015 and 2017.
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Mimi Rocah
#39400
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Miriam Elizabeth "Mimi" Rocah is an American attorney currently serving as District Attorney for Westchester County, New York. In 2020, Rocah defeated incumbent Democrat Anthony Scarpino in a primary challenge and went on to win in the General election.
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Alison Harcourt
#39401
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Alison Grant Harcourt is an Australian mathematician and statistician most well-known for co-defining the branch and bound algorithm along with Ailsa Land whilst carrying out research at the London School of Economics. She was also part of the team which developed a poverty line as part of the Henderson Inquiry into poverty in Australia and helped to introduce the double randomisation method of ordering candidates used in Australian elections.
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Andrew McCann
#39402
Overall Influence
Andrew McCann is an Australian professor and fiction writer. He used the pen name "A. L. McCann" for his first book, The White Body of Evening, to avoid confusion with fellow Australian writer Andrew McGahan. His second fiction book, Subtopia, is a coming-of-age novel that takes place in "south-eastern suburbs in the 1970s, St Kilda in the 1980s and Berlin in the 1990s." He is an Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College. He has been called a post-grunge lit writer, a reference to an Australian literary genre from the 2000s which emerged following the 1990s grunge lit genre.
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Jonathan M. Gregory
#39403
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Jonathan Michael Gregory is a climate modeller working on mechanisms of global and large-scale change in climate and sea level on multidecadal and longer timescales at the Met Office and the University of Reading.
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Richard Crenna
#39404
Overall Influence
1926 - 2003 (77 years)
Richard Donald Crenna was an American film, television and radio actor. Crenna starred in such motion pictures as The Sand Pebbles, Wait Until Dark, Un Flic, Body Heat, the first three Rambo films, Hot Shots! Part Deux, and The Flamingo Kid. His first success came on radio in 1948 as high school student Walter Denton co-starring with Eve Arden and Gale Gordon in the series Our Miss Brooks. Crenna continued with the comedy in its 1952 move into television. He also starred as Luke McCoy in the television series The Real McCoys . In 1985, he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Acto...
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John Fabian Witt
#39405
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
John Fabian Witt is Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He is the author of Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History, which won the 2013 Bancroft Prize in history of the Americas and, in 2020, American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19.
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Anurag Agrawal
#39406
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Anurag Agrawal is an Indian pulmonologist, medical researcher, Dean of the Trivedi School of Biosciences at Ashoka University, and the former director of the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, a CSIR institution. Known for his studies on lung diseases, Agrawal has been a senior fellow of the DBT-Wellcome Trust. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Medical Sciences in 2014.
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Peter N. Peregrine
#39407
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Peter N. Peregrine is an American anthropologist, registered professional archaeologist, and academic. He is well known for his promotion of the use of science in anthropology, and for his popular textbook Anthropology . Peregrine did dissertation research on the evolution of the Mississippian culture of North America, and conducted fieldwork on Bronze Age cities in Syria. He is currently Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies at Lawrence University and Research Associate of the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University. From 2012 to 2018 he was an External Professor at the Santa F...
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Michael Sprinker
#39408
Overall Influence
1950 - 1999 (49 years)
Michael Sprinker was a literary critic known for his writings on Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, among others, as well as for his editorial work at Verso, Cambridge University Press, the New Left Review and The Minnesota Review. With Mike Davis, Sprinker co-founded Verso's Haymarket series and was said to have guided it until his death. He also taught at Oregon State University and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
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Marcel van Meerhaeghe
#39409
Overall Influence
1921 - 2014 (93 years)
Marcel Alfons Gilbert van Meerhaeghe was a Belgian economist, professor, publicist and columnist. Marcel van Meerhaeghe was Professor of International Economic Relations at the State University of Ghent.
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Catherine Goldstein
#39410
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Catherine Goldstein is a French number theorist and historian of mathematics who works as a director of research at the . She was president of L'association femmes et mathématiques in 1991. Education and career Goldstein studied at the Ecole normale supérieure from 1976 to 1980, earning an agrégation in mathematics in 1978. She completed a doctorate of the third cycle in 1981, with a dissertation on p-adic L-functions and Iwasawa theory supervised by John H. Coates.
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Norma Mendoza-Denton
#39411
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Norma Catalina Mendoza-Denton is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She specializes in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, including work in sociophonetics, language and identity, ethnography and visual anthropology.
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Mark Kelly
#39412
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Major General Mark Andrew Kelly, is a former senior officer in the Australian Army. He served as Commander Joint Task Force 633 commanding all Australian Forces in the Middle East Area of Operations and Afghanistan from 12 January 2009 until 14 January 2010, and as Land Commander Australia from July 2005 to December 2008. He was appointed as the Repatriation Commissioner on 1 July 2010 and served in that role until 30 June 2019.
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