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

#40701

Mark Johnston

#40714
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Mark Johnston is an Australian-born philosopher working at Princeton University. Biography and career In 1980, after his undergraduate degree at the University of Melbourne, Johnston came to Princeton University to work with Saul Kripke and David Lewis, arguably the two most influential anglophone philosophers in the late 20th century. Under their supervision he completed his dissertation Particulars and Persistence in 1984. He became an assistant professor at Princeton in 1984, received tenure there in 1987, and became a full professor in 1991. From 2005-2015 he was the Walter Cerf Professor of Philosophy.
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#40702

Amita Baviskar

#40715
Overall Influence
Amita Baviskar is a sociologist and Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology & Anthropology at Ashoka University, India. Previously, she was Professor at the Sociology Unit, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, India. She received the 2005 Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies, the 2008 VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research and, in 2010, was awarded the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences – Sociology in recognition of her analysis of social and environmental movements in modern India. Baviskar studies the cultural politics of environment and...
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#40703

Stanisław Łojasiewicz

#40716
Overall Influence
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Stanisław Łojasiewicz was a Polish mathematician. Biography At the end of the 1950s, he solved the problem of distribution division by analytic functions, introducing the %C5%81ojasiewicz inequality. Its solution opened the road to important results in the new theory of partial differential equations. The method established by Łojasiewicz led him to advance the theory of semianalytic sets, which opened an important chapter in modern analysis.
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#40704

Edward McCaffery

#40717
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Edward McCaffery is an American tax law professor at the University of Southern California Law School and also a visiting professor of Law and Economics at the California Institute of Technology . An internationally recognized expert in tax law, McCaffery studies tax policy, tax structures, public finance theory, including behavioral public finance, as well as property law and theory, intellectual property, and law and economics.
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#40705

L. Pearce Williams

#40718
Overall Influence
1927 - 2015 (88 years)
Leslie Pearce Williams was a chaired professor at Cornell University's Department of History who also chaired the department for many years. He was the founder, in the mid-1980s, of Cornell's program in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, which later became part of the Department of Science and Technology Studies.
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#40706

Marc Wadsworth

#40719
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Marc Wadsworth is a British black rights campaigner, broadcast and print journalist and BBC filmmaker and radio producer. He founded the Anti-Racist Alliance in 1991 and helped set up the justice campaign for murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence two years later. Wadsworth launched an early citizen-journalism news portal, The-Latest.com. In 2008 Wadsworth's reporting triggered the resignation of Mayor of London Boris Johnson's spokesman.
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#40707

Michael Hout

#40720
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Michael Hout is a Professor of Sociology at New York University. His contributions to sociology include using demographic methods to study social change in inequality, religion, and politics. His current work used the General Social Survey to estimate the social standing of occupations introduced into the census classification since 1990. He digitized all occupational information in the GSS and coded it all to the 2010 standard. Other recent projects used the GSS panel to study Americans' changing perceptions of class, religion, and happiness. In 2006, Mike and Claude Fischer published Century of Difference, a book on twentieth-century social and cultural trends in the United States.
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#40708

Keith Krause

#40721
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Keith Krause is a Canadian political scientist known for his work on international security and armed violence. Background Krause was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford where he got his MPhil and DPhil. Since 1994, Krause is Professor of political science at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Since 1999, Krause is also the Director of the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding at that same institution.
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#40709

Jeffrey Flier

#40722
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Jeffrey Flier is an American physician, endocrinologist; widely cited scientist; the Higginson Professor of Medicine and Physiology at Harvard Medical School; and a Distinguished Service Professor at the same institution. He was the 21st Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University from 2007 to 2016.
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#40710

Tim Palmer

Tim Palmer
#40723
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Timothy Noel Palmer CBE FRS is a mathematical physicist by training. He has spent most of his career working on the dynamics and predictability of weather and climate. Among various research achievements, he pioneered the development of probabilistic ensemble forecasting techniques for weather and climate prediction . These techniques are now standard in operational weather and climate prediction around the world, and are central for reliable decision making for many commercial and humanitarian applications.
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#40711

Pamela Hieronymi

Pamela Hieronymi
#40724
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Pamela Hieronymi is an American philosopher who is professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is mainly known for her work in moral psychology. Education and career Hieronymi earned her A.B. from Princeton University in 1992 and earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2000. She has worked at UCLA since July 2000, where she was awarded tenure in 2007. She has presented her research widely, both nationally and internationally. In addition, she has appeared on Philosophy Talk public radio and her thoughts on technology and teaching were published by the Chroni...
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#40712

Roger Williams

#40725
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Roger Bevan Williams, MBE is a Welsh organist and musicologist. In 2010, he retired as Master of Ceremonial Music and Organist to the University of Aberdeen, a music department in which he had been a member for over 30 years.
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#40713

Mel Lipman

#40726
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Melvin S. Lipman, aka Mel Lipman was an attorney, civil libertarian and humanist activist. He was a retired bank auditor, arbitrator, mediator and college instructor, having taught Constitutional Law and US History at several Las Vegas colleges.
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#40714

Tímea Babos

Tímea Babos
#40727
Overall Influence
1993 - Present (33 years)
Tímea Babos is a Hungarian professional tennis player who is a former world No. 1 in doubles. She is a four-time Grand Slam champion in women's doubles, having won the 2018 and 2020 Australian Opens, as well as the French Open in 2019 and 2020, all alongside Kristina Mladenovic. The pair also finished runners-up at the 2014 Wimbledon Championships, 2018 US Open and 2019 Australian Open, and Babos reached the final of the 2016 Wimbledon Championships with Yaroslava Shvedova. In mixed doubles, she has reached two major finals, at the 2015 Wimbledon Championships with Alexander Peya, and the 2018 Australian Open partnering Rohan Bopanna.
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#40715

Neil Greenberg

Neil Greenberg
#40728
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Neil Greenberg is an academic psychiatrist, who is a specialist in the understanding and management of psychological trauma, occupational mental ill-health and post traumatic stress disorder. Greenberg works with King's College London and served as the President of the UK Psychological Trauma Society from 2014 to 2017. He also runs the psychological health consultancy March on Stress. During the 2020 COVID pandemic, Greenberg was part of the NHS England and Improvement Wellbeing Team and contributed to the national response to protect the mental health of NHS workers.
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#40716

Paul Kelly

#40729
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Paul Maurice Kelly is an Australian rock music singer-songwriter and guitarist. He has performed solo, and has led numerous groups, including the Dots, the Coloured Girls, and the Messengers. He has worked with other artists and groups, including associated projects Professor Ratbaggy and Stardust Five. Kelly's music style has ranged from bluegrass to studio-oriented dub reggae, but his core output straddles folk, rock and country. His lyrics capture the vastness of the culture and landscape of Australia by chronicling life about him for over 30 years. David Fricke from Rolling Stone calls Kelly "one of the finest songwriters I have ever heard, Australian or otherwise".
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#40717

Slava Gerovitch

Slava Gerovitch
#40730
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Vyacheslav Alexandrovich Gerovitch is an American historian of science of Russian origin, considered a leading scholar on Soviet space program history in the US and Cybernetics in the Soviet Union.
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#40718

Timothy Osborn

#40731
Overall Influence
Timothy John Osborn is a climatologist and Professor of Climate Science at the University of East Anglia. In January 2017 he replaced Phil Jones as the Research Director of the Climatic Research Unit.
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#40719

Marcus Byrne

#40732
Overall Influence
Professor Marcus Byrne won the 2013 Ig Nobel Prize for Biology/Astronomy along with: Marie Dacke, Emily Baird, Clarke Scholtz, and Eric Warrant, for discovering that when dung beetles get lost, they can navigate their way home by looking at the Milky Way. This research has practical applications, for example helping how to develop complex visual systems.
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#40720

Chia-Shun Yih

#40733
Overall Influence
1918 - 1997 (79 years)
Chia-Shun Yih was the Stephen P. Timoshenko Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. He made many significant contributions to fluid mechanics. Yih was also a seal artist.
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#40721

Sanford Kadish

#40734
Overall Influence
1921 - 2014 (93 years)
Sanford "Sandy" H. Kadish was an American criminal law scholar and theorist. He specialised in criminology and criminal law theory, and was one of the drafters of the American Model Penal Code. Biography Sanford Harold Kadish was born in 1921 in New York City, and grew up in the Bronx. He graduated from City College of New York, Phi Beta Kappa, and then attended a Japanese language school in Colorado.
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#40722

Catharine R. Stimpson

#40735
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Catharine R. Stimpson is a feminist scholar, University Professor, professor of English, and dean emerita of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University. Academic career Stimpson did her undergraduate studies at Bryn Mawr College and earned graduate degrees from Cambridge University and Columbia University. She was the founding editor in 1975 of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
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#40723

Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon

#40736
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon, was a British photographer and filmmaker. He is best known for his portraits of world notables, many of them published in Vogue, Vanity Fair, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, and other major venues; more than 280 of his photographs are in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery.
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#40724

José María Valverde

José María Valverde
#40737
Overall Influence
1926 - 1996 (70 years)
José María Valverde Pacheco was a Spanish poet, essayist, literary critic, philosophy historian, and Spanish translator. Biography Valverde was born in Extremadura, but spent his childhood and teenage years in Madrid. While still a student at the Instituto Ramiro de Maeztu he published his first book, Man of God: Psalms, elegies and prayers, which was funded by the Institute. Although Damaso Alonso tempted him to study philology, Valverde pursued Philosophy; his doctorate included a thesis on Wilhelm von Humboldt's philosophy of language. That same year he married Pilar Gefaell, with whom he ...
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#40725

Lyndley Craven

#40738
Overall Influence
1945 - 2014 (69 years)
Lyndley Alan Craven was a botanist who became the Principal Research Scientist of the Australian National Herbarium. Lyndley Craven worked for the CSIRO plant taxonomy unit of the New Guinea Survey Group, Division of Land Research and Regional Survey from 1964 to 1967. This was part of a unit that became the Australian National Herbarium, Centre for Australian National Biodiversity Research. Craven's duties included botanical support for land resources surveys.
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#40726

Jean-Bernard Zuber

#40739
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Jean-Bernard Zuber is a French theoretical physicist. Education Zuber studied at the École polytechnique from 1966 to 1968 and then as a CNRS researcher at the theoretical physics department of the Nuclear Research Center in Saclay. In 1974, he received his doctorate from Jean Zinn-Justin at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay.
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#40727

Willy Russell

#40740
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
William "Willy" Russell is an English dramatist, lyricist and composer. His best known works are Educating Rita, Shirley Valentine, Blood Brothers and Our Day Out. Early life Russell was born in Whiston, Lancashire . On leaving school, aged 15, he became a women's hairdresser, eventually running his own salon, until the age of 20 when he decided to go back to college. This led to him qualifying as a teacher. During these years, Russell also worked as a semi-professional singer, writing and performing his own songs in folk clubs.
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#40728

Barbara Sicherman

#40741
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Barbara Sicherman is an American historian and academic who specializes in women's history. She is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Institutions and Values Emerita at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
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#40729

Roman Reigns

Roman Reigns
#40742
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Leati Joseph Anoaʻi is an American professional wrestler and former American football player. He is currently signed to WWE, where he performs on the SmackDown brand under the ring name Roman Reigns. He is the current and longest-reigning WWE Universal Champion in his second reign and the current WWE Champion in his fourth reign—with both championships, he is referred to as the Undisputed WWE Universal Champion. He is also the leader of The Bloodline stable and a member of wrestling's renowned Anoa'i family. Reigns is generally regarded as one of the best professional wrestlers active in the ...
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#40730

John Anthony Allan

#40743
Overall Influence
1937 - 2021 (84 years)
John Anthony Allan , sometime cited as Tony Allan, was a British geographer. He was awarded the Stockholm Water Prize in 2008 for his revolutionary virtual water concept. Although being an emeritus of the School of Oriental and African Studies and King's College London of the University of London, he still acted as a teaching Professor at King's College London.
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#40731

Ruth Nussinov

Ruth Nussinov
#40744
Overall Influence
Ruth Nussinov is an Israeli-American biologist born in Rehovot who works as a Professor in the Department of Human Genetics, School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University and is the Senior Principal Scientist and Principal Investigator at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health. Nussinov is also the Editor in Chief of the Current Opinion in Structural Biology and formerly of the journal PLOS Computational Biology.
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#40732

Andrea Dutton

Andrea Dutton
#40745
Overall Influence
Andrea Dutton, a 2019 MacArthur Fellow, is a Professor of Geology in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where she studies paleoclimate, sedimentology, carbonate geochemistry, and paleoceonagraphy. Her primary research investigates sea level changes during interglacial periods to predict future sea level rise.
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#40733

Andrei Konchalovsky

Andrei Konchalovsky
#40746
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Andrei Sergeyevich Konchalovsky is a Russian filmmaker. He has worked in Soviet, Hollywood, and contemporary Russian cinema. He is a laureate of the Order "For Merit to the Fatherland", a National Order of the Legion of Honour, an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters, a Cavalier of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic and a People's Artist of the RSFSR. He is the son of writer Sergey Mikhalkov, and the brother of filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov.
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#40734

Russell J. Hemley

#40747
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Russell Julian Hemley is an American geophysicist, solid-state physicist, and physical chemist. Hemley grew up in California, Colorado and Utah. He studied chemistry and philosophy at Wesleyan University with bachelor's degree in 1977 and then physical chemistry at Harvard University with master's degree in 1980 and Ph.D. in 1983. As a postdoc he was at Harvard University and was from 1984 to 1987 a Carnegie fellow at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution in Washington D.C. From 1987 to 2016 he was a staff member of the Geophysical Laboratory, where he was from 2007 to 2013 t...
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#40735

Richard Catlow

#40748
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Sir Charles Richard Arthur Catlow FLSW is a British chemist and professor at University College London and Cardiff University. Previously, he was Director of the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory , and Wolfson Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution. Since 2016, he has served as the foreign secretary of the Royal Society., and since 2021 as President of the InterAcademy Partnership .
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#40736

Antonio Peña Díaz

#40749
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Antonio Peña Díaz is a Mexican biochemist who received the Carlos J. Finlay Prize for Microbiology and chaired both the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the Mexican Society of Biochemistry . Peña Díaz holds a bachelor's degree in Medicine and both a master's and a doctorate degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico . He is currently an emeritus professor of the Institute for Cellular Physiology of the same university and has worked as a visiting scholar at the University of Rochester.
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#40737

Amy S. Bruckman

Amy S. Bruckman
#40750
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Amy Susan Bruckman is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology affiliated with the School of Interactive Computing and the GVU Center. She is best known for her pioneering research in the fields of online communities and the learning sciences. In 1999, she was selected as one of MIT Technology Reviews TR100 awardees, honoring 100 remarkable innovators under the age of 35.
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#40738

João de Pina-Cabral

#40751
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
João de Pina-Cabral is a Portuguese anthropologist and a senior researcher at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais of the University of Lisbon, where he was President of the Scientific Council . At present he is professor of social anthropology at the University of Kent.
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#40739

Albert Streckeisen

#40752
Overall Influence
1901 - 1998 (97 years)
Albert Streckeisen was a Swiss petrographer and petrologist, the son of Basel forensic scientist Adolf Streckeisen. Biography He studied geology, mineralogy and petrology in Basel, Zürich and Bern. He submitted his doctoral thesis on the geology and petrology of the Flüela group in 1927. In the same year, aged 26, he was called as Professor in Mineralogy and Petrology to the Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania. As a member of the Romanian Geological Service, he was active in the geological mapping of the Carpathians.
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#40740

Donnchadh Ó Corráin

#40753
Overall Influence
1942 - 2017 (75 years)
Donnchadh Ó Corráin was an Irish historian and Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at University College Cork. He earned his BA in history and Irish from that institution, graduating in 1964. He was an early Irish and mediaeval historian and published on the Viking Wars, Ireland in the pre-Hiberno-Norman period and the origin of Irish language names. In addition to his position at UCC, he held academic positions at University College Dublin, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Cambridge University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Oslo and Oxford University, where he was a Visi...
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#40741

Christina Eubanks-Turner

#40754
Overall Influence
Christina Eubanks-Turner is a professor of mathematics in the Seaver College of Science and Engineering at Loyola Marymount University . Her academic areas of interest include graph theory, commutative algebra, mathematics education, and mathematical sciences diversification. She is also the Director of the Master's Program in Teaching Mathematics at LMU.
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#40742

Bryan Murray

Bryan Murray
#40755
Overall Influence
1942 - 2017 (75 years)
Bryan Clarence Murray was a Canadian professional ice hockey executive and coach. He served as general manager of the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League from 2007 to 2016. He had previously been general manager of the NHL's Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, Florida Panthers, and Detroit Red Wings. He was also the head coach for the Washington Capitals, Detroit Red Wings, Florida Panthers, Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, and Ottawa Senators, for a total of 17 full or partial seasons.
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#40743

Toshio Murashige

#40756
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Toshio Murashige is a professor emeritus of University of California Riverside in plant biology. He is most widely known for his efforts in creating the plant tissue culture medium known as Murashige and Skoog medium.
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#40744

Reginald Cline-Cole

#40757
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Reginald Akindele Cline-Cole , is a retired University Senior Lecturer and scholar of Developmental Geography. Upon his formal retirement in May 2021, he is now seconded as a Senior Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham. This is an attestation of his wealth of experience and specialism in the area of African development.
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#40745

James Hyman

#40758
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
James Macklin "Mac" Hyman is an applied mathematician formerly at Los Alamos National Laboratory and currently at Tulane University in the United States. He received his undergraduate degree from Tulane University and his PhD in 1976 from NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences under Peter Lax with thesis The method of lines solution of partial differential equations.
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#40746

Rodger Kamenetz

#40759
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Rodger Kamenetz is an American poet and author best known for The Jew in the Lotus , an account of the historic dialogue between rabbis and the XIV Dalai Lama. His poetry explores the Jewish experience and in recent years, dream consciousness. Since 2003 he's been instrumental in developing Natural Dreamwork, a practice that focuses on the sacred encounters in dreams.
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#40747

Mark Davis

#40760
Overall Influence
Mark Davis is an Australian investigative journalist and lawyer, best known for his work on Dateline for SBS TV, where he is currently a co-presenter and video journalist. Davis was educated at Warrandyte Primary School and then St Kevin's College in Melbourne.
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#40748

Larissa Adler Lomnitz

#40761
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Larissa Adler Lomnitz was a French-born Chilean-Mexican social anthropologist, researcher, professor, and academic. After living in France, Colombia, and Israel, she received Chilean nationality by marriage and Mexican nationality by residence. She conducted research and studies regarding the way in which marginalized classes survive in Latin America. She pioneered the study of social networks and the study of the importance of trust for the economy and politics. Her first study in this regard focused on the exchange of favors in the Chilean middle class. Lomnitz completed her doctoral thesis about the importance of exchanging favors and confidence in the informal economy in Mexico City.
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#40749

Harry Secombe

Harry Secombe
#40762
Overall Influence
1921 - 2001 (80 years)
Sir Harry Donald Secombe was a Welsh actor, comedian, singer and television presenter. Secombe was a member of the British radio comedy programme The Goon Show , playing many characters, most notably Neddie Seagoon. An accomplished tenor, he also appeared in musicals and films – notably as Mr Bumble in Oliver! – and, in his later years, was a presenter of television shows incorporating hymns and other devotional songs.
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#40750

David Sachs

#40763
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
David Howard Sachs is an American immunologist. He is best known for his discovery of MHC class II and for his seminal studies in the fields of transplant immune tolerance and xenotransplantation. Education David Sachs graduated summa cum laude in organic chemistry from Harvard College in 1963, and pursued a master's degree equivalent at the University of Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1964. He then matriculated to Harvard Medical School, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1968.
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