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
#4701
David Williamson
#4708
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
David Keith Williamson is an Australian playwright. He has also written screenplays and teleplays. Early life David Williamson was born in Melbourne, Victoria, on 24 February 1942, and was brought up in Bairnsdale. He initially studied mechanical engineering at the University of Melbourne from 1960, but left and graduated from Monash University with a Bachelor of Engineering degree in 1965. His early forays into the theatre were as an actor and writer of skits for the Engineers' Revue at Melbourne University's Union Theatre at lunchtime during the early 1960s, and as a satirical sketch writ...
Go to Profile#4702
David Dimbleby
#4709
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
David Dimbleby is an English journalist and former presenter of current affairs and political programmes, best known for having presented the BBC topical debate programme Question Time. He is the son of broadcaster Richard Dimbleby and elder brother of Jonathan Dimbleby, of the Dimbleby family. Long involved in the coverage of national events, Dimbleby hosted the BBC Election Night coverage from 1979 to 2017, as well as United States presidential elections on the BBC until 2016. He has also presented and narrated documentary series on architecture and history.
Go to Profile#4703
Viktor Sadovnichiy
#4710
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Viktor Antonovich Sadovnichiy is a Russian mathematician, winner of the 1989 USSR State Prize, and since 1992 the rector of Moscow State University. One of the main opinion leaders in Russia, Sadovnichiy has significant political and social influence.
Go to Profile#4704
Kevin M. Murphy
#4711
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Kevin Miles Murphy is the George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. In 1997 Murphy was awarded the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association, given once every two years to the most outstanding American economist under the age of forty, and widely considered to be the second most prestigious prize in economics . Murphy was cited for his study of the causes of growing income inequality between white-collar and blue-collar workers in the United ...
Go to Profile#4705
Ricardo Legorreta
#4712
Overall Influence
1931 - 2011 (80 years)
Ricardo Legorreta Vilchis was a Mexican architect. He was a prolific designer of private houses, public buildings and master plans in Mexico, the United States and some other countries. He was awarded the prestigious UIA Gold Medal in 1999, the AIA Gold Medal in 2000, and the Praemium Imperiale in 2011.
Go to Profile#4706
James Tabor
#4713
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
James Daniel Tabor is a Biblical scholar and Professor of Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he has taught since 1989 and served as Chair from 2004–14. He previously held positions at Ambassador College , the University of Notre Dame , and the College of William and Mary . Tabor is the founder and director of the Original Bible Project, a non-profit organisation aimed to produce a re-ordered new translation of the Bible in English. He retired in 2022.
Go to Profile#4707
Andrew Zisserman
#4714
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Andrew Zisserman is a British computer scientist and a professor at the University of Oxford, and a researcher in computer vision. As of 2014 he is affiliated with DeepMind. Education Zisserman received the Part III of the Mathematical Tripos, and his PhD in theoretical physics from the Sunderland Polytechnic.
Go to Profile#4708
Bipan Chandra
#4715
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Bipan Chandra was an Indian historian, specialising in economic and political history of modern India. An emeritus professor of modern history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, he specialized on the Indian independence movement and is considered a leading scholar on Mahatma Gandhi. He authored several books, including The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism.
Go to Profile#4709
Lester Thurow
#4716
Overall Influence
1938 - 2016 (78 years)
Lester Carl Thurow was an American political economist, former dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, and author of books on economic topics. Education Born in Livingston, Montana, Thurow received his B.A. in political economy from Williams College in 1960, where he was in Theta Delta Chi and Phi Beta Kappa as a junior, and a Tyng Scholar. After he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, he went to Balliol College, Oxford to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, graduating in 1962 with first class honors. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1964.
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David Autor
#4717
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
David H. Autor is an American economist, public policy scholar, and professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he also acts as co-director of the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative. Although Autor has contributed to a variety of fields in economics his research generally focuses on topics from labor economics.
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Cynthia Barnhart
#4718
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Cynthia Barnhart is an American civil engineer and academic, serving as the current Provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She previously served as the University's Chancellor, the first woman to hold that position.
Go to Profile#4712
P. D. James
#4719
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, , known professionally as P. D. James, was an English novelist and life peer. Her rise to fame came with her series of detective novels featuring the police commander and poet, Adam Dalgliesh.
Go to Profile#4713
David X. Li
#4720
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
David X. Li is a Chinese-born Canadian quantitative analyst and actuary who pioneered the use of Gaussian copula models for the pricing of collateralized debt obligations in the early 2000s. The Financial Times has called him "the world’s most influential actuary", while in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, to which Li's model has been partly credited to blame, his model has been called a "recipe for disaster" in the hands of those who did not fully understand his research and misapplied it. Widespread application of simplified Gaussian copula models to financial products such as securities may have contributed to the global financial crisis of 2008–2009.
Go to Profile#4714
Vairamuthu
#4721
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Vairamuthu Ramasamy is an Indian lyricist, poet, and novelist working in the Tamil film industry. He is a prominent figure in the Tamil literary world. A master's graduate from the Pachaiyappa's College in Chennai, he first worked as a translator, while also being a published poet. He entered the Tamil film industry in the year 1980, with the film Nizhalgal, an Ilaiyaraaja musical, directed by Bharathiraja. During the course of his 40-year film career, he has written over 7,500 songs and poems which have won him seven National Awards, the most for any Indian lyricist. He has also been honored...
Go to Profile#4715
Idries Shah
#4722
Overall Influence
1924 - 1996 (72 years)
Idries Shah , also known as Idris Shah, né Sayed Idries el-Hashimi and by the pen name Arkon Daraul, was an Afghan author, thinker and teacher in the Sufi tradition. Shah wrote over three dozen books on topics ranging from psychology and spirituality to travelogues and culture studies.
Go to Profile#4716
Masatoshi Nei
#4723
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Areas of Specialization: Evolutionary Biology Masatoshi Nei is a Carnell Professor with the department of biology at Temple University. An evolutionary biologist, he studied at both Kyoto University and the University of Miyazaki. He has been prolific in the development of the statistical theory of molecular evolution, developing new theories as new discoveries in molecular biology emerge. He has worked at institutions such as Brown University, National Institute of Radiological Sciences and Kyoto University, advancing his understanding of how mutations can drive evolution. He is famous for ma...
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Bill T. Jones
#4724
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
William Tass Jones, known as Bill T. Jones , is an American choreographer, director, author and dancer. He is the co-founder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. The company's home in Manhattan. Jones is Artistic Director of New York Live Arts, whose activities encompass an annual presenting season together with allied education programming and services for artists. Independently of New York Live Arts and his dance company, Jones has choreographed for major performing arts ensembles, contributed to Broadway and other theatrical productions, and collaborated on projects with a range of fellow artists.
Go to Profile#4718
William K. Black
#4725
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
William Kurt Black is an American lawyer, academic, author, and a former bank regulator. Black's expertise is in white-collar crime, public finance, regulation, and other topics in law and economics. He developed the concept of "control fraud", in which a business or national executive uses the entity he or she controls as a "weapon" to commit fraud.
Go to Profile#4719
L. Peter Deutsch
#4726
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
L Peter Deutsch is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and PDF interpreter. Deutsch's other work includes the Smalltalk implementation that inspired Java just-in-time compilation technology about 15 years later.
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Scott Lilienfeld
#4727
Overall Influence
1960 - 2020 (60 years)
Scott O. Lilienfeld was a professor of psychology at Emory University and advocate for evidence-based treatments and methods within the field. He is known for his books 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology, Brainwashed, and others that explore and sometimes debunk psychological claims that appear in the popular press. Along with having his work featured in major U.S. newspapers and journals such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Scientific American, Lilienfeld made television appearances on 20/20, CNN and the CBS Evening News.
Go to Profile#4721
David J. Farber
#4728
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
David J. Farber is a professor of computer science, noted for his major contributions to programming languages and computer networking who is currently the distinguished professor and co-director of Cyber Civilization Research Center at Keio University in Japan. He has been called the "grandfather of the Internet".
Go to Profile#4722
Michio Morishima
#4729
Overall Influence
1923 - 2004 (81 years)
Michio Morishima was a Japanese heterodox economist and public intellectual who was the Sir John Hicks Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics from 1970 to 1988. He was also professor at Osaka University and member of the British Academy. In 1976 he won the Order of Culture .
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Billy Collins
#4730
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
William James Collins is an American poet who served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He was a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, retiring in 2016. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As of 2020, he is a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.
Go to Profile#4724
Margot Fonteyn
#4731
Overall Influence
1919 - 1991 (72 years)
Dame Margaret Evelyn de Arias DBE , known by the stage name Margot Fonteyn, was an English ballerina. She spent her entire career as a dancer with the Royal Ballet , eventually being appointed prima ballerina assoluta of the company by Queen Elizabeth II. Beginning ballet lessons at the age of four, she studied in England and China, where her father was transferred for his work. Her training in Shanghai was with Russian expatriate dancer Georgy Goncharov, contributing to her continuing interest in Russian ballet. Returning to London at the age of 14, she was invited to join the Vic-Wells Ballet School by Ninette de Valois.
Go to Profile#4725
Anthony Atala
#4732
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Anthony Atala is an American bioengineer, urologist, and pediatric surgeon. He is the W.H. Boyce professor of urology, the founding director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and the chair of the Department of Urology at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina. His work focuses on the science of regenerative medicine: "a practice that aims to refurbish diseased or damaged tissue using the body's own healthy cells".
Go to Profile#4726
Douglas Crockford
#4733
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Douglas Crockford is an American computer programmer who is involved in the development of the JavaScript language. He specified the data format JSON , and has developed various JavaScript related tools such as the static code analyzer JSLint and minifier JSMin. He wrote the book JavaScript: The Good Parts, published in 2008, followed by How JavaScript Works in 2018. He was a senior JavaScript architect at PayPal until 2019, and is also a writer and speaker on JavaScript, JSON, and related web technologies.
Go to Profile#4727
Marshall Kirk McKusick
#4734
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Marshall Kirk McKusick is a computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD UNIX, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He was president of the USENIX Association from 1990 to 1992 and again from 2002 to 2004, and still serves on the board. He is on the editorial board of ACM Queue Magazine. He is known to friends and colleagues as "Kirk".
Go to Profile#4728
Richard Foltz
#4735
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Richard Foltz is a Canadian scholar of American origin. He is a specialist in the history of Iranian civilization—what is sometimes referred to as "Greater Iran". He has also been active in the areas of environmental ethics and animal rights.
Go to Profile#4729
Peter Marshall
#4736
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Peter Hugh Marshall is an English author of over a dozen works of philosophy, history, biography, travel writing, and poetry. He is best known for his 1991 history of anarchism, Demanding the Impossible, and his 1984 biography of William Godwin.
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Bret Weinstein
#4737
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Bret Samuel Weinstein is an American podcaster, author, and former professor of evolutionary biology. He served on the faculty of Evergreen State College from 2002 until 2017, when he resigned in the aftermath of a series of campus protests about racial equity at Evergreen, which brought Weinstein to national attention. Along with his brother Eric Weinstein, he is considered part of the intellectual dark web. Weinstein has been criticized for making false statements about COVID-19 treatments and vaccines.
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Aldo van Eyck
#4738
Overall Influence
1918 - 1999 (81 years)
Aldo van Eyck was a Dutch architect. He was one of the most influential protagonists of the architectural movement Structuralism. Family He was born in Driebergen, Utrecht, a son of poet, critic, essayist and philosopher Pieter Nicolaas van Eyck or van Eijk and wife Nelly Estelle Benjamins, a woman of Sephardic origin born and raised in Suriname.
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Dominique Lecourt
#4739
Overall Influence
1944 - 2022 (78 years)
Dominique Lecourt was a French philosopher. He is known in the Anglophone world primarily for his work developing a materialist interpretation of the philosophy of science of Gaston Bachelard. Biography Lecourt was born in Paris. A former student at the École normale supérieure , an agrégé in philosophy , and a Docteur d'État ès lettres , he was professor at the Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7 and, until 2011, was director of the Centre Georges Canguilhem .
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Raphael Mechoulam
#4740
Overall Influence
1930 - 2023 (93 years)
Raphael Mechoulam was a Bulgarian-born Israeli organic chemist and a professor in the Department of Natural Materials at the School of Pharmacy in the Faculty of Medicine of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Mechoulam served as Rector of the university from 1979-1982. He was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1994 and served as its scientific chair from 2007-2013. He was a recipient of the Israel Prize for Chemistry Research in 2000 and the Harvey Prize for 2019-2020.
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David Leonhardt
#4742
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
David Leonhardt is an American journalist and columnist. Since April 30, 2020, he has written the daily "The Morning" newsletter for The New York Times. He also contributes to the paper's Sunday Review section. His column previously appeared weekly in The New York Times. He previously wrote the paper's daily e-mail newsletter, which bore his own name. As of October 2018, he also co-hosted "The Argument", a weekly opinion podcast with Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg.
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Hanna Damasio
#4743
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Hanna Damasio is a scientist in the field of cognitive neuroscience. Using computerized tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, she has developed methods of investigating human brain structure and studied functions such as language, memory, and emotion, using both the lesion method and functional neuroimaging. She is currently a Dana Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center at the University of Southern California.
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Rick Dees
#4744
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Rigdon Osmond Dees III , best known as Rick Dees, is an American entertainer, radio personality, comedian, actor, and voice artist, best known for his internationally syndicated radio show The Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 Countdown and for the 1976 satirical novelty song "Disco Duck".
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Eric Allin Cornell
#4745
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Eric Allin Cornell is an American physicist who, along with Carl E. Wieman, was able to synthesize the first Bose–Einstein condensate in 1995. For their efforts, Cornell, Wieman, and Wolfgang Ketterle shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001.
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Howard Rachlin
#4746
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Howard Rachlin was an American psychologist and the founder of teleological behaviorism. He was Emeritus Research Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology at Stony Brook University in New York. His initial work was in the quantitative analysis of operant behavior in pigeons, on which he worked with William M. Baum, developing ideas from Richard Herrnstein's matching law. He subsequently became one of the founders of Behavioral Economics.
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Ferenc Krausz
#4747
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Ferenc Krausz is a Hungarian physicist working in attosecond science. He is a director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and a professor of experimental physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. His research team has generated and measured the first attosecond light pulse and used it for capturing electrons' motion inside atoms, marking the birth of attophysics. In 2023, jointly with Pierre Agostini and Anne L'Huillier, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Wolfgang Smith
#4748
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Wolfgang Smith is a mathematician, physicist, philosopher of science, metaphysician, Roman Catholic and member of the Traditionalist School. He has written extensively in the field of differential geometry, as a critic of scientism and as a proponent of a new interpretation of quantum mechanics that draws heavily from premodern ontology and realism.
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Alan Lee
#4749
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Alan Lee is an English book illustrator and film conceptual designer. He is best known for his artwork inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy novels, and for his work on the conceptual design of Peter Jackson's film adaptations of Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film series.
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Mohammad Ali Mojtahedi
#4750
Overall Influence
1908 - 1997 (89 years)
Dr. Mohammad Ali Modjtahedi Gilani was an Iranian University professor and lifetime principal of the highly prestigious Alborz High School in Tehran, Iran. Founder of Sharif University of Technology and dean of Tehran Polytechnic University . Memoirs of Mohammad-Ali Modjtahedi 2000 were published as part of Harvard University's Iranian Oral History Project, editor Habib Ladjevardi.
Go to Profile#4743
Hans Haacke
#4751
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Hans Haacke is a German-born artist who lives and works in New York City. Haacke is considered a "leading exponent" of Institutional Critique. Early life Haacke was born in Cologne, Germany. He studied at the Staatliche Werkakademie in Kassel, Germany, from 1956 to 1960. In 1959, Haacke was hired to assist with the second documenta, working as a guard and tour guide. He was a student of Stanley William Hayter, a well-known and influential English printmaker, draftsman, and painter. From 1961 to 1962, he studied on a Fulbright grant at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia.
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Peter D. Mitchell
#4752
Overall Influence
1920 - 1992 (72 years)
Peter Dennis Mitchell FRS was a British biochemist who was awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his theory of the chemiosmotic mechanism of ATP synthesis. Education and early life Mitchell was born in Mitcham, Surrey on 29 September 1920. His parents were Christopher Gibbs Mitchell, a civil servant, and Kate Beatrice Dorothy Taplin. His uncle was Sir Godfrey Way Mitchell, chairman of George Wimpey. He was educated at Queen's College, Taunton and Jesus College, Cambridge where he studied the Natural Sciences Tripos specialising in Biochemistry.
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Bhikhu Parekh
#4753
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Bhikhu Chotalal Parekh, Baron Parekh, is a British political theorist, academic, and life peer. He is a Labour Party member of the House of Lords. He was Professor of Political Theory at the University of Hull from 1982 to 2001, and Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Westminster from 2001 to 2009. He served as president of the Academy of Social Sciences from 2003 to 2008.
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Vijay Tendulkar
#4754
Overall Influence
1928 - 2008 (80 years)
Vijay Dhondopant Tendulkar was a leading Indian playwright, movie and television writer, literary essayist, political journalist, and social commentator primarily in Marāthi. His Marathi plays established him as a writer of plays with contemporary, unconventional themes. He is best known for his plays Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe , Ghāshirām Kotwāl , and Sakhārām Binder . Many of Tendulkar's plays derived inspiration from real-life incidents or social upheavals, which provide clear light on harsh realities. He has provided guidance to students studying "play writing" in US universities. Tendulk...
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Nancy MacLean
#4755
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Nancy K. MacLean is an American historian. She is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University. MacLean's research focuses on race, gender, labor history and social movements in 20th-century U.S. history, with particular attention to the U.S. South.
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Stephen Law
#4756
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Stephen Law is an English philosopher. He is currently Director of the Certificate in Higher and Education and Director of Philosophy at The Department of Continuing Education, University of Oxford. Law was previously Reader in Philosophy and Head of Department of Philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London, until its closure in June 2018. He also edits the philosophical journal Think, which is sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy and published by the Cambridge University Press. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts and Commerce and in 2008 became the provost of the...
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James V. Neel
#4757
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
James Van Gundia Neel was an American geneticist who played a key role in the development of human genetics as a field of research in the United States. He made important contributions to the emergence of genetic epidemiology and pursued an understanding of the influence of environment on genes. In his early work, he studied sickle-cell disease and thalassemia conducted research on the effects of radiation on survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bombing.
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Silvia Federici
#4758
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher, and feminist activist based in New York. She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor. She also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria. In 1972, with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the campaign for Wages for Housework. In 1990, Federici co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa , and, with Ousseina Alidou, was the editor of the CAFA bulletin for over a decade.
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