Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most important people in 24 academic disciplines from 4000 BCE to today

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 proprietary AI program, we have ranked everyone in Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef based on the number of citations, publications, and academically relevant web presence.

Students and researchers now have the easiest and fastest way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you ever wanted to find famous medieval biologists, or influential engineers during the industrial revolution, now you can!

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List of the most influential people in Communications, for the years 4000 BC – 2022

Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure

#110

Overall Influence

1857 - 1913 (56 years)

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.

Noam Chomsky

#46

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (95 years)

Noam Chomsky currently holds joint appointments at MIT as Institute Professor Emeritus, and the University of Arizona as Laureate Professor. Chomsky completed his university studies between the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. The influence of Chomksy in both linguistics and political discourse cannot be overstated; regardless of what aspect of his work you are discussing, his name always perks a few ears. Depending on who is describing him, Chomsky is either one of the most important linguists in modern times, one of the most important political thinkers, or (most often) both. Chomsky began his career squarely in academia as a professor of linguistics at MIT.

Cicero

#26

Overall Influence

106 BC - 43 BC (63 years)

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, and academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises that led to the establishment of the Roman Empire. His extensive writings include treatises on rhetoric, philosophy and politics, and he is considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and served as consul in 63 BC.

Karl Marx

#5

Overall Influence

1818 - 1883 (65 years)

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the four-volume . Marx's political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history. His name has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory.

Pāṇini

#162

Overall Influence

500 BC - Present (2523 years)

was a Sanskrit philologist, grammarian, and revered scholar in ancient India, variously dated between the 6th and 4th century BCE. Since the discovery and publication of his work by European scholars in the nineteenth century, Pāṇini has been considered the "first descriptive linguist", and even labelled as “the father of linguistics”.

Roman Jakobson

#455

Overall Influence

1896 - 1982 (86 years)

Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian-American linguist and literary theorist. A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century. With Nikolai Trubetzkoy, he developed revolutionary new techniques for the analysis of linguistic sound systems, in effect founding the modern discipline of phonology. Jakobson went on to extend similar principles and techniques to the study of other aspects of language such as syntax, morphology and semantics. He made numerous contributions to Slavic linguistics, most notably two studies of Russian case and an analysis of the categories of the Russian verb.

George Lakoff

#371

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (82 years)

George Philip Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena.

Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite

#564

Overall Influence

1916 - 2009 (93 years)

Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. was an American broadcast journalist who served as anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years . During the 1960s and 1970s, he was often cited as "the most trusted man in America" after being so named in an opinion poll. Cronkite reported many events from 1937 to 1981, including bombings in World War II; the Nuremberg trials; combat in the Vietnam War; the Dawson's Field hijackings; Watergate; the Iran Hostage Crisis; and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, civil rights pioneer Martin Luther King Jr., and Beatles musician John Lennon. He was also known for his extensive coverage of the U.S.

Michael Halliday

Michael Halliday

#1614

Overall Influence

1925 - 2018 (93 years)

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday was a British linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistics model of language. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar. Halliday described language as a semiotic system, "not in the sense of a system of signs, but a systemic resource for meaning". For Halliday, language was a "meaning potential"; by extension, he defined linguistics as the study of "how people exchange meanings by 'languaging'". Halliday described himself as a generalist, meaning that he tried "to look at language ...

Quintilian

#955

Overall Influence

35 - 96 (61 years)

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus was a Roman educator and rhetorician from Hispania, widely referred to in medieval schools of rhetoric and in Renaissance writing. In English translation, he is usually referred to as Quintilian , although the alternate spellings of Quintillian and Quinctilian are occasionally seen, the latter in older texts.

Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald

#444

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (56 years)

Glenn Edward Greenwald is an American journalist, author and lawyer. In 2014, he cofounded The Intercept, of which he was an editor until he resigned in October 2020. Greenwald subsequently started publishing on Substack.

Louis Hjelmslev

#1839

Overall Influence

1899 - 1965 (66 years)

Louis Trolle Hjelmslev was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family , Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris . In 1931, he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. Together with Hans Jørgen Uldall he developed a structuralist theory of language which he called glossematics, which further developed the semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. Glossematics as a theory of language is characterized by a high degree of formalism. It is interested in describing the formal and semant...

Franz Boas

#146

Overall Influence

1858 - 1942 (84 years)

Franz Uri Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical particularism and cultural relativism.

Tom Wolfe

#972

Overall Influence

1930 - 2018 (88 years)

Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was an American author and journalist widely known for his association with New Journalism, a style of news writing and journalism developed in the 1960s and 1970s that incorporated literary techniques.

Julius Caesar

#54

Overall Influence

100 BC - 44 BC (56 years)

Gaius Julius Caesar , was a Roman general and statesman. A member of the First Triumvirate, Caesar led the Roman armies in the Gallic Wars before defeating his political rival Pompey in a civil war, and subsequently became dictator from 49 BC until his assassination in 44 BC. He played a critical role in the events that led to the demise of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire.

Lyle Campbell

#3514

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (81 years)

Lyle Richard Campbell is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of indigenous American languages, especially those of Central America, and on historical linguistics in general. Campbell is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Gay Talese

#3165

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (91 years)

Gaetano "Gay" Talese is an American writer. As a journalist for The New York Times and Esquire magazine during the 1960s, Talese helped to define contemporary literary journalism and is considered, along with Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson, one of the pioneers of New Journalism. Talese's most famous articles are about Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra.

Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce

#58

Overall Influence

1839 - 1914 (75 years)

Charles Sanders Peirce was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for thirty years, Peirce made major contributions to logic, a subject that, for him, encompassed much of what is now called epistemology and the philosophy of science. He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics, of which he is a founder, which foreshadowed the debate among logical positivists and proponents of philosophy of language that dominated 20th-century Western philosophy. Additionally, he d...

Dan Rather

#1016

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (92 years)

Daniel Irvin Rather Jr. is an American journalist, commentator, and former national evening news anchor. Rather began his career in Texas, becoming a national name after his reporting saved thousands of lives during Hurricane Carla in September 1961. Rather spontaneously created the first radar weather report by overlaying a transparent map over a radar image of Hurricane Carla. In his first national broadcast, he helped initiate the successful evacuation of 350,000 people. He reported on some of the most significant events of the modern age, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf war,...

Norman Mailer

#463

Overall Influence

1923 - 2007 (84 years)

Nachem Malech Mailer , known by his pen name Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, activist, filmmaker and actor. In a career spanning over six decades, Mailer had 11 best-selling books, at least one in each of the seven decades after World War II.

Tom Brokaw

#1000

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (83 years)

Thomas John Brokaw is an American retired network television journalist and author. He first served as the co-anchor of The Today Show from 1976 to 1981 with Jane Pauley, then as the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News for 22 years . At this position he was one of the "Big Three anchors" along with Dan Rather and Peter Jennings. In the previous decade he served as a weekend anchor for the program from 1973 to 1976. He is the only person to have hosted all three major NBC News programs: The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, and, briefly, Meet the Press. He formerly held a special correspondent post for NBC News.

Bob Woodward

#497

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (80 years)

Robert Upshur Woodward is an American investigative journalist. He started working for The Washington Post as a reporter in 1971 and now holds the title of associate editor. While a young reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, Woodward teamed up with Carl Bernstein, and the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal. These scandals led to numerous government investigations and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon. The work of Woodward and Bernstein was called "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time" by longtime journalism figure Gene...

Roland Barthes

#307

Overall Influence

1915 - 1980 (65 years)

Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism.

John Searle

#72

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (91 years)

John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley until 2019.

Morris Halle

#1820

Overall Influence

1923 - 2018 (95 years)

Morris Halle was a Latvian-born Jewish American linguist who was an Institute Professor, and later professor emeritus, of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The father of "modern phonology", he was best known for his pioneering work in generative phonology, having written "On Accent and Juncture in English" in 1956 with Noam Chomsky and Fred Lukoff and The Sound Pattern of English in 1968 with Chomsky. He also co-authored the earliest theory of generative metrics.

Edward Sapir

#1382

Overall Influence

1884 - 1939 (55 years)

Edward Sapir was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States. Sapir was born in German Pomerania, in what is now northern Poland. His family emigrated to the United States of America when he was a child. He studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia, where he came under the influence of Franz Boas, who inspired him to work on Native American languages. While finishing his Ph.D. he went to California to work with Alfred Kroeber documenting the indigenous languages there.

Joseph Greenberg

#3249

Overall Influence

1915 - 2001 (86 years)

Joseph Harold Greenberg was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages. Life Early life and education Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915, to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York. His first great interest was music. At the age of 14, he gave a piano concert in Steinway Hall. He continued to play the piano frequently throughout his life.

Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson

#2052

Overall Influence

1937 - 2005 (68 years)

Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author who founded the gonzo journalism movement. He rose to prominence with the publication of Hell's Angels , a book for which he spent a year living and riding with the Hells Angels motorcycle club to write a first-hand account of their lives and experiences.

Edward S. Herman

#1010

Overall Influence

1925 - 2017 (92 years)

Edward Samuel Herman was an American economist, media scholar and social critic. Herman is known for his media criticism, in particular the propaganda model hypothesis he developed with Noam Chomsky, a frequent co-writer. He held an appointment as Professor Emeritus of finance at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania and a media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy. He also taught at Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell

#9

Overall Influence

1872 - 1970 (98 years)

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.

Leon Trotsky

#42

Overall Influence

1879 - 1940 (61 years)

Lev Davidovich Bronstein , better known as Leon Trotsky , was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, political theorist and politician. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Trotskyism.

Zellig Harris

#1947

Overall Influence

1909 - 1992 (83 years)

Zellig Sabbettai Harris was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language. These developments from the first 10 years of his career were published within the first 25. His contributions in the subsequent 35 years of his career include transfer grammar, string analysis , elementary sentence-differences , algebraic structures in language, operator grammar, sublanguage grammar, a theory...

Edward R. Murrow

Edward R. Murrow

#1645

Overall Influence

1908 - 1965 (57 years)

Edward Roscoe Murrow was an American broadcast journalist and war correspondent. He first gained prominence during World War II with a series of live radio broadcasts from Europe for the news division of CBS. During the war he recruited and worked closely with a team of war correspondents who came to be known as the Murrow Boys.

Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan

#630

Overall Influence

1911 - 1980 (69 years)

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life.

William Labov

#2530

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (96 years)

William Labov is an American linguist widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics. He is a professor emeritus in the linguistics department of the University of Pennsylvania and pursues research in sociolinguistics, language change, and dialectology. He retired in 2015 but continues to publish research.

Mahatma Gandhi

#23

Overall Influence

1869 - 1948 (79 years)

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi , popularly known as Mahatma Gandhi, was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist and political ethicist who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule, and to later inspire movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahātmā , first applied to him in 1914 in South Africa, is now used throughout the world.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Wilhelm von Humboldt

#516

Overall Influence

1767 - 1835 (68 years)

Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt was a Prussian philosopher, linguist, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin, which was named after him in 1949 .

Dell Hymes

#1379

Overall Influence

1927 - 2009 (82 years)

Dell Hathaway Hymes was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist who established disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic study of language use. His research focused upon the languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics". The terminological shift draws attention to the field's grounding in anthropology rather than in what, by that time, had already become an autonomous discipline . In 1972 Hymes founded the journal Language in Society ...

Kenneth Burke

#1939

Overall Influence

1897 - 1993 (96 years)

Kenneth Duva Burke was an American literary theorist, as well as poet, essayist, and novelist, who wrote on 20th-century philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, and rhetorical theory. As a literary theorist, Burke was best known for his analyses based on the nature of knowledge. Further, he was one of the first individuals to stray from more traditional rhetoric and view literature as "symbolic action."

Walter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann

#984

Overall Influence

1889 - 1974 (85 years)

Walter Lippmann was an American writer, reporter and political commentator. With a career spanning 60 years, he is famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological meaning, as well as critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books, most notably his 1922 book Public Opinion.

Paul Sidwell

#6395

Overall Influence

Paul James Sidwell is an Australian linguist based in Canberra, Australia who has held research and lecturing positions at the Australian National University. Sidwell, who is also an expert and consultant in forensic linguistics, is most notable for his work on the historical linguistics of the Austroasiatic language family, and has published reconstructions of the Bahnaric, Katuic, Palaungic, Khasic, and Nicobaric proto-languages. Sidwell is currently the President of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society.

Charlie Rose

#893

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (81 years)

Charles Peete Rose Jr. is an American former television journalist and talk show host. From 1991 to 2017, he was the host and executive producer of the talk show Charlie Rose on PBS and Bloomberg LP.

James Bamford

#3166

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (77 years)

James Bamford is an American author, journalist and documentary producer noted for his writing about United States intelligence agencies, especially the National Security Agency . The New York Times has called him "the nation's premier journalist on the subject of the National Security Agency" and The New Yorker named him "the NSA's chief chronicler." Bamford has taught at the University of California, Berkeley as a distinguished visiting professor and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper's, and many other publications. In 2006, he won the National Magazine Award for Reporting for his writing on the war in Iraq published in Rolling Stone.

Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels

#35

Overall Influence

1820 - 1895 (75 years)

Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, critic of political economy, historian, political theorist and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman, journalist and political activist, whose father was an owner of large textile factories in Salford and Barmen, Prussia .

Roger Blench

#5029

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (70 years)

Roger Marsh Blench is a British linguist, ethnomusicologist and development anthropologist. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and is based in Cambridge, England. He researches, publishes, and works as a consultant.

Leonard Bloomfield

#3096

Overall Influence

1887 - 1949 (62 years)

Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He is considered to be the father of American distributionalism. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics. He made significant contributions to Indo-European historical linguistics, the description of Austronesian languages, and description of languages of the Algonquian family.

Isocrates

#2316

Overall Influence

436 BC - 338 BC (98 years)

Isocrates was an ancient Greek rhetorician, one of the ten Attic orators. Among the most influential Greek rhetoricians of his time, Isocrates made many contributions to rhetoric and education through his teaching and written works.

Bill Moyers

#623

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (89 years)

Bill Moyers is an American journalist and political commentator. Under the Johnson administration he served from 1965 to 1967 as the eleventh White House Press Secretary. He was a director of the Council on Foreign Relations, from 1967 to 1974. He also worked as a network TV news commentator for ten years. Moyers has been extensively involved with public broadcasting, producing documentaries and news journal programs, and has won numerous awards and honorary degrees for his investigative journalism and civic activities. He has become well known as a trenchant critic of the corporately structured U.S.

Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill

#176

Overall Influence

1874 - 1965 (91 years)

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955. Apart from two years between 1922 and 1924, he was a Member of Parliament from 1900 to 1964 and represented a total of five constituencies. Ideologically an economic liberal and imperialist, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955. He was a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924.

Henry Widdowson

#8892

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (88 years)

Henry George Widdowson is a British linguist and an authority in the field of applied linguistics and language teaching, specifically English language learning and teaching. Career He gained a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh in 1973.

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