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
#4351
Susan Dumais
#4358
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Susan Dumais is an American computer scientist who is a leader in the field of information retrieval, and has been a significant contributor to Microsoft's search technologies. According to Mary Jane Irwin, who heads the Athena Lecture awards committee, “Her sustained contributions have shaped the thinking and direction of human-computer interaction and information retrieval."
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Marcus du Sautoy
#4359
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
#4353
Donald Hall
#4360
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Donald Andrew Hall Jr. was an American poet, writer, editor, and literary critic. He was the author of over 50 books across several genres from children's literature, biography, memoir, essays, and including 22 volumes of verse. Hall was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard, and Oxford. Early in his career, he became the first poetry editor of The Paris Review , the quarterly literary journal, and was noted for interviewing poets and other authors on their craft.
Go to Profile#4354
Henry Steele Commager
#4361
Overall Influence
1902 - 1998 (96 years)
Henry Steele Commager was an American historian. As one of the most active and prolific liberal intellectuals of his time, with 40 books and 700 essays and reviews, he helped define modern liberalism in the United States.
Go to Profile#4355
Sarah Waters
#4362
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Sarah Ann Waters is a Welsh novelist. She is best known for her novels set in Victorian society and featuring lesbian protagonists, such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith. Life and education Early life Sarah Waters was born in Neyland, Pembrokeshire, Wales in 1966. She later moved to Middlesbrough, England, when she was eight years old. She grew up in a family that included her father Ron, mother Mary, and a "much older" sister. Her mother was a housewife and her father an engineer who worked on oil refineries. She describes her family as "pretty idyllic, very safe and nurturing". Her f...
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Shirley Ann Jackson
#4363
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
The Honorable Shirley Ann Jackson, PHD, is an American physicist, and was the 18th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is the first African-American woman to have earned a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Theoretical Elementary Particle Physics, and the first African-American woman to have earned a doctorate at MIT in any field. She is also the second African-American woman in the United States to earn a doctorate in physics.
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Giancarlo De Carlo
#4364
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
Giancarlo De Carlo was an Italian architect. Biography Giancarlo De Carlo was born in Genoa, Liguria, in 1919. He enrolled at the Milan Polytechnic in 1939 and graduated with a degree in engineering in 1943. He then enlisted as a naval officer in World War II. Following Italy's surrender to the Allied forces on September 8, 1943, he went into hiding, participating in the Italian Resistance through the Movement of Proletarian Unity alongside other Milanese architects such as Franco Albini. Later, De Carlo and fellow architect Giuseppe Pagano organized an anarchist-libertarian partisan group i...
Go to Profile#4358
Lynn Hunt
#4365
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Lynn Avery Hunt is the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her area of expertise is the French Revolution, but she is also well known for her work in European cultural history on such topics as gender. Her 2007 work, Inventing Human Rights, has been heralded as the most comprehensive analysis of the history of human rights. She served as president of the American Historical Association in 2002.
Go to Profile#4359
John R. Ross
#4366
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
John Robert "Haj" Ross is an American poet and linguist. He played a part in the development of generative semantics along with George Lakoff, James D. McCawley, and Paul Postal. He was a professor of linguistics at MIT from 1966 to 1985 and has worked in Brazil, Singapore and British Columbia, and until spring 2021, he taught at the University of North Texas.
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Henry M. Morris
#4367
Overall Influence
1918 - 2006 (88 years)
Henry Madison Morris was an American young Earth creationist, Christian apologist and engineer. He was one of the founders of the Creation Research Society and the Institute for Creation Research. He is considered by many to be "the father of modern creation science". He coauthored The Genesis Flood with John C. Whitcomb in 1961.
Go to Profile#4361
Agnes Martin
#4368
Overall Influence
1912 - 2004 (92 years)
Agnes Bernice Martin was an American abstract painter known for her minimalist style and abstract expressionism. Born in Canada, she moved to the United States in 1931, where she pursued higher education and eventually became a U.S. citizen in 1950. Martin's artistic journey began in New York City, where she immersed herself in modern art and developed a deep interest in abstraction. Despite often being labeled a minimalist, she identified more with abstract expressionism. Her work has been defined as an "essay in discretion on inward-ness and silence".
Go to Profile#4362
Daisy L. Hung
#4369
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Daisy Lan Hung is a Taiwanese psychologist. She is the founding director of the Institute of Neuroscience at the National Central University in Taiwan. Her research areas are involved with cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology and neurolinguistics. In addition to conducting research, Hung also translates scientific works, educates children on reading habits and lectures on her research topics.
Go to Profile#4363
Marshall Berman
#4370
Overall Influence
1940 - 2013 (73 years)
Marshall Howard Berman was an American philosopher and Marxist humanist writer. He was a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, teaching political philosophy and urbanism.
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Chris Cuomo
#4371
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Christopher Charles Cuomo is an American television journalist anchor at NewsNation, based in New York City. He has previously been the ABC News chief law and justice correspondent and the co-anchor for ABC's 20/20, news anchor for Good Morning America from 2006 to 2009, and an anchor at CNN, where he co-hosted its morning show New Day from 2013 through May 2018, before moving to Cuomo Prime Time in June 2018.
Go to Profile#4365
Amy Chua
#4372
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
#4366
Leslie H. Gelb
#4373
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Leslie Howard "Les" Gelb was an American academic, correspondent and columnist for The New York Times who served as a senior Defense and State Department official and later the President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Go to Profile#4367
Piper Kerman
#4374
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Piper Eressea Kerman is an American author. She was indicted in 1998 on charges of felonious money-laundering activities, and sentenced to 15 months' detention in a federal correctional facility, of which she eventually served 13 months. Her memoir of her prison experiences, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison , was adapted into the critically-acclaimed Netflix original comedy-drama series Orange Is the New Black . Since leaving prison, Kerman has spoken widely about women in prison and problems with the federal prison system. She now works as a communication strategist for n...
Go to Profile#4368
Leslie Green
#4375
Overall Influence
1918 - Present (108 years)
Leslie John Green is a Scottish-Canadian legal scholar specialising in jurisprudence. He is Professor of the Philosophy of Law and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford University, and Professor of Law and Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Queen's University, Kingston. A legal positivist, his research also focuses on political philosophy and constitutional theory.
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Robert Service
#4376
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Robert John Service is a post-revisionist British historian, academic, and author who has written extensively on the history of the Soviet Union, particularly the era from the October Revolution to Stalin's death. He was until 2013 a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is best known for his biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky. He has been a fellow of the British Academy since 1998.
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Gloria E. Anzaldúa
#4377
Overall Influence
1942 - 2004 (62 years)
Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa was an American scholar of Chicana feminism, cultural theory, and queer theory. She loosely based her best-known book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza , on her life growing up on the Mexico–Texas border and incorporated her lifelong experiences of social and cultural marginalization into her work. She also developed theories about the marginal, in-between, and mixed cultures that develop along borders, including on the concepts of Nepantla, Coyoxaulqui imperative, new tribalism, and spiritual activism. Her other notable publications include This Bridge Call...
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Michael W. McConnell
#4378
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Michael William McConnell is an American jurist who served as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit from 2002 to 2009. Since 2009, McConnell has been a professor and Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. He is also a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and Senior Of Counsel to the Litigation Practice Group at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. In May 2020, Facebook appointed him to its content oversight board. In 2020, McConnell published The President Who Would Not Be King: Executiv...
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Cathy Scott
#4379
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Cathleen "Cathy" Scott is a Los Angeles Times and New York Times bestselling American true crime author and investigative journalist who penned the biographies and true crime books The Killing of Tupac Shakur and The Murder of Biggie Smalls, both bestsellers in the United States and United Kingdom, and was the first to report Shakur's death. She grew up in La Mesa, California and later moved to Mission Beach, California, where she was a single parent to a son, Raymond Somers Jr. Her hip-hop books are based on the drive-by shootings that killed the rappers six months apart in the midst of what has been called the West Coast-East Coast war.
Go to Profile#4373
Arthur Hiller
#4380
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Arthur Hiller, was a Canadian-American television and film director with over 33 films to his credit during a 50-year career. He began his career directing television in Canada and later in the U.S. By the late 1950s he began directing films, most often comedies. He also directed dramas and romantic subjects, such as Love Story , which was nominated for seven Oscars.
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Julie Thompson Klein
#4381
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Julie Thompson Klein was a professor and scholar in the field of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University. Klein was widely known as a pioneer in interdisciplinary education, and had consulted widely in academic and other settings in the field. In 2016, she was a speaker at the Centennial Symposium of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. During her 36 years at Wayne state, her publications had been heavily cited.
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Suh Nam-pyo
#4382
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Suh Nam-pyo was the thirteenth president of KAIST from 2006 until 2013, succeeding Robert B. Laughlin and succeeded by Sung-Mo Kang. Personal life Suh was born in Korea on 22 April 1936. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1954 to join his father who was teaching at Harvard University. He completed his high school education at Browne & Nichols School before entering MIT as a freshman in 1955. He was naturalized in 1963 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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Gilbert Durand
#4383
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Gilbert Durand was a French academic known for his work on the imaginary, symbolic anthropology and mythology. According to Durand, Imagination and Reason can be complementary. He defended the status of the image, traditionally devalued in Western thought, particularly in French philosophy. He advocated a multidisciplinary approach.
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Bill Gosper
#4384
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Ralph William Gosper Jr. , known as Bill Gosper, is an American mathematician and programmer. Along with Richard Greenblatt, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and he holds a place of pride in the Lisp community. The Gosper curve and the Gosper's algorithm are named after him.
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Dominick Dunne
#4385
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
Dominick John Dunne was an American writer, investigative journalist, and producer. He began his career in film and television as a producer of the pioneering gay film The Boys in the Band and as the producer of the award-winning drug film The Panic in Needle Park . He turned to writing in the early 1970s. After the 1982 murder of his daughter Dominique, an actress, he began to write about the interaction of wealth and high society with the judicial system. Dunne was a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair, and, beginning in the 1980s, often appeared on television discussing crime.
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Fred Cohen
#4386
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Frederick B. Cohen is an American computer scientist and best known as the inventor of computer virus defense techniques. He gave the definition of "computer virus". Cohen is best known for his pioneering work on computer viruses, the invention of high integrity operating system mechanisms now in widespread use, and automation of protection management functions.
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Melvin Schwartz
#4387
Overall Influence
1932 - 2006 (74 years)
Melvin Schwartz was an American physicist. He shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon M. Lederman and Jack Steinberger for their development of the neutrino beam method and their demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino.
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Howard Raiffa
#4388
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Howard Raiffa was an American academic who was the Frank P. Ramsey Professor of Managerial Economics, a joint chair held by the Business School and Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University. He was an influential Bayesian decision theorist and pioneer in the field of decision analysis, with works in statistical decision theory, game theory, behavioral decision theory, risk analysis, and negotiation analysis. He helped found and was the first director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
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Nguyễn Văn Thiệu
#4389
Overall Influence
1923 - 2001 (78 years)
Nguyễn Văn Thiệu was a South Vietnamese military officer and politician who was the president of South Vietnam from 1967 to 1975. He was a general in the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces , became head of a military junta in 1965, and then president after winning an election in 1967. He established rule over South Vietnam until he resigned and left the nation and relocated to Taipei a few days before the fall of Saigon and the ultimate North Vietnamese victory.
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Kenneth Carpenter
#4390
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Kenneth Carpenter is a paleontologist. He is the former director of the USU Eastern Prehistoric Museum and author or co-author of books on dinosaurs and Mesozoic life. His main research interests are armored dinosaurs , as well as the Early Cretaceous dinosaurs from the Cedar Mountain Formation in eastern Utah.
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Rosabeth Moss Kanter
#4391
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Rosabeth Moss Kanter holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle professor of business at Harvard Business School. She co-founded the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative and served as Director and Founding Chair from 2008-2018. She was the top-ranking woman—No. 11 overall—in a 2002 study of Top Business Intellectuals by citation in several sources. She was named one of the "50 most powerful women in Boston" by Boston Magazine and one of the "125 women who changed our world" over the past 125 years by Good Housekeeping magazine in May 2010.
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Dita Von Teese
#4392
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Heather Renée Sweet , known professionally as Dita Von Teese, is an American vedette, burlesque dancer, model, and businesswoman. She is credited with re-popularizing burlesque performance, earning the moniker "Queen of Burlesque".
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John Patrick Shanley
#4393
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
John Patrick Shanley is an American playwright, screenwriter, and director. He won the 1988 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film Moonstruck. His play, Doubt: A Parable, won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2005 Tony Award for Best Play; he wrote and directed the film adaptation and earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
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Simon Mayo
#4394
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Simon Andrew Hicks Mayo is an English radio presenter and author who worked for BBC Radio from 1982 until 2022. Mayo has presented across three BBC stations for extended periods. From 1986 to 2001 he worked for Radio 1, including a five-year stint on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show. From 2001 he presented on BBC Radio 5 Live: from his debut until 2009 on a daily afternoon programme, and since then until 2022 with Kermode and Mayo's Film Review on Fridays. Between January 2010 to December 2018 he was the presenter of Simon Mayo Drivetime on BBC Radio 2, for the final six months with co-host Jo Whiley.
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Jodi Picoult
#4395
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Jodi Lynn Picoult is an American writer. Picoult has published 28 novels, as well as short stories, and has also written several issues of Wonder Woman. Approximately 40 million copies of her books are in print worldwide, translated into 34 languages. She was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for fiction in 2003.
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Graham Oppy
#4396
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Graham Robert Oppy is an Australian philosopher whose main area of research is the philosophy of religion. He currently holds the posts of Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean of Research at Monash University and serves as CEO of the Australasian Association of Philosophy, Chief Editor of the Australasian Philosophical Review, Associate Editor of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and serves on the editorial boards of Philo, Philosopher's Compass, Religious Studies, and Sophia. He was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2009.
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Pete Townshend
#4397
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend is an English musician. He is the co-founder, leader, guitarist, second lead vocalist and principal songwriter of the Who, one of the most influential rock bands of the 1960s and 1970s. His aggressive playing style and innovative songwriting techniques, with the Who and in other projects, have earned him critical acclaim.
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Leroy Hood
#4398
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Leroy "Lee" Edward Hood is an American biologist who has served on the faculties at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Washington. Hood has developed ground-breaking scientific instruments which made possible major advances in the biological sciences and the medical sciences. These include the first gas phase protein sequencer , for determining the sequence of amino acids in a given protein; a DNA synthesizer , to synthesize short sections of DNA; a peptide synthesizer , to combine amino acids into longer peptides and short proteins; the first automated DNA seque...
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Jane Fonda
#4399
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Jane Seymour Fonda is an American actress and activist. Recognized as a film icon, Fonda is the recipient of various accolades, including two Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, seven Golden Globe Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, the AFI Life Achievement Award, the Honorary Palme d'Or, and the Cecil B. DeMille Award.
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Chuck Todd
#4400
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Charles David Todd is an American television journalist who was the 12th moderator of NBC's Meet the Press. He also hosted Meet the Press Now, its daily edition on NBC News Now and is currently the Political Director for NBC News. Before taking the helm of Meet the Press, Todd was Chief White House correspondent for NBC as well as host of The Daily Rundown on MSNBC. He also serves as NBC News' on-air political analyst for NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt and Today.
Go to Profile#4394
Harry Wu
#4401
Overall Influence
1937 - 2016 (79 years)
Harry Wu was a Chinese-American human rights activist. Wu spent 19 years in Chinese labor camps, and he became a resident and citizen of the United States. In 1992, he founded the Laogai Research Foundation.
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Willie Mays
#4402
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Willie Howard Mays Jr. , nicknamed "the Say Hey Kid", is an American former center fielder in Major League Baseball . Regarded as one of the greatest players ever, Mays ranks second behind only Babe Ruth on most all-time lists, including those of The Sporting News and ESPN. Mays played in the National League between 1951 and 1973 for the New York / San Francisco Giants and New York Mets.
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Margaret Burbidge
#4403
Overall Influence
1919 - 2020 (101 years)
Eleanor Margaret Burbidge, FRS was a British-American observational astronomer and astrophysicist. In the 1950s, she was one of the founders of stellar nucleosynthesis and was first author of the influential B2FH paper. During the 1960s and 1970s she worked on galaxy rotation curves and quasars, discovering the most distant astronomical object then known. In the 1980s and 1990s she helped develop and utilise the Faint Object Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope. Burbidge was also well known for her work opposing discrimination against women in astronomy.
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Karl Sigmund
#4404
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Karl Sigmund is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Vienna and one of the pioneers of evolutionary game theory. Career Sigmund was schooled in the Lycée Francais de Vienne. From 1963 to 1968 he studied at the Institute of Mathematics at the University of Vienna, and obtained his Ph.D. under the supervision of Leopold Schmetterer. He spent his postdoctorate years at Manchester , the Institut des hautes études scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette near Paris , the Hebrew University in Jerusalem , the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences . In 1972 he received habil...
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Saul Steinberg
#4405
Overall Influence
1914 - 1999 (85 years)
Saul Steinberg was an American artist, best known for his work for The New Yorker, most notably View of the World from 9th Avenue. He described himself as "a writer who draws". Biography Steinberg was born in Râmnicu Sărat, Buzău County, Romania to a family of Jewish descent. In 1932, he entered the University of Bucharest. In 1933, he enrolled at the Polytechnic University of Milan to study architecture; he received his degree in 1940. In 1936, he began contributing cartoons to the humor newspaper Bertoldo. Two years later, the anti-Semitic racial laws promulgated by the Fascist government f...
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Satish Dhawan
#4406
Overall Influence
1920 - 2002 (82 years)
Satish Dhawan was an Indian mathematician and aerospace engineer, widely regarded as the father of experimental fluid dynamics research in India. Born in Srinagar, Dhawan was educated in India and further on in United States. Dhawan was one of the most eminent researchers in the field of turbulence and boundary layers, leading the successful and indigenous development of the Indian space programme. He succeeded M. G. K. Menon, as the third chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation in 1972.
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Ronald Harwood
#4407
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Sir Ronald Harwood was a South African-born British author, playwright, and screenwriter, best known for his plays for the British stage as well as the screenplays for The Dresser and The Pianist, for which he won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He was nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly .
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