It is not the denim giant Levi Strauss the world is looking upon today; instead, journalists across the globe are paying homage to French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died on Friday at the age of 100. Following his death, which was announced this morning, we take a look at exactly how important this Frenchman's work was.

"There has been no comparable successor to him in France," Edward Rothstein of the New York Times wrote. Lévi-Strauss was a pioneer of structuralism, or the idea that universal characteristics form the foundations of societies that are different from one another on topical levels. That is, all societies share common traits and primitive societies are no less intelligent than the Western societies that had previously regarded themselves as more complex, or advanced. Lévi-Strauss and his ideas were remarkably forward-thinking and laid the groundwork for the majority of successive anthropological work.

What is interesting, following the death of such an influential thinker, is the discrepancy between how Lévi-Strauss was viewed several decades ago and how the world perceives him now. At the time that his research was being conducted, his critics outnumbered his supporters and "attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any direct connection or influence," according to the New York Times piece. But his work has been instrumental to almost all subsequent development of anthropological thought, exhibiting the manner in which a controversial intellect of one generation can often be the most important figure of later generations' research.

Today, Lévi-Strauss is universally regarded as one of the greatest philosophical, sociological and anthropological thinkers in all of history. "[He is] one of the greatest ethnologists of all time," French President Nicolas Sarkozy said.