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 female people in Communications,
#1201
Matrena Vakhrusheva
#91240
Overall Influence
1918 - 2000 (82 years)
Matrena Vakhrusheva 12 April 1918 – 1 January 2000 Early life Matrena Pankratjevna Vakhrusheva was born on 12 April 1918 in in the Kondinsky District of the Ostyak–Vogul National Okrug of Soviet Russia to Ekaterina Semenovna and Pankratia Mikhailovich Vakhrushev. The family of six children were raised on their ancestral lands, where their father engaged in farming, raising cattle, horses, and Siberian huskies. Prior to her marriage, Vakhrusheva's mother had worked in domestic service to the merchant Popov family in Nakhrachi. At 9, Vakhrusheva began attending school at the public school. The teacher, Kapitolina Andreevna taught in a one-room school with children of a broad range of ages.
Go to Profile#1202
Lisa Lopes
#39978
Overall Influence
1971 - 2002 (31 years)
Lisa Nicole Lopes , better known by her stage name Left Eye, was an American rapper and singer. She was a member of the R&B girl group TLC, alongside Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins and Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas. Besides rapping and singing backing vocals on TLC recordings, Lopes was the creative force behind the group, receiving more co-writing credits than the other members. She also designed some of their outfits and the stage for their FanMail Tour and contributed to the group's image, album titles, artworks, and music videos. Through her work with TLC, Lopes won four Grammy Awards.
Go to Profile#1203
Alice Louise Davison
#88951
Overall Influence
1940 - 2017 (77 years)
Alice Davison was an American linguist who specialized in the syntax of South Asian languages, in particular Hindustani. Early life and education Davison grew up in Washington, D.C. She graduated from the Potomac School in McLean, Virginia in 1955, and the Madeira School in McLean in 1958. She then went to Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1962. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1972, writing her dissertation on performative verbs.
Go to Profile#1204
Annette Lemieux
#68784
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Annette Lemieux is an American artist who emerged in the early 1980s along with the "picture theory" artists . Lemieux brought to the studio a discipline equally based on introspection, and the manifestations of an ideological minimalism. Process is a key component in the execution of her works over the past three decades, creating the lure to the confrontation of issues of social and historical urgency. Lemieux has been the recipient of awards from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Keiser Wilhelm Museum, Germany and an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Monserrat College of Art....
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Heidrun Gerzymisch
#87205
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Heidrun Gerzymisch is a German Translation scholar and emeritus professor at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, where she held the Chair for "English Linguistics and Translation Science" from 1993 to 2009. She is in 2014 responsible for the international PhD prep school "MuTra" at Saarland University’s Graduate Center GradUS and lectures Translation at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences .
Go to Profile#1206
Liz Anderson
#89428
Overall Influence
1927 - 2011 (84 years)
Elizabeth Jane Anderson was an American country music singer-songwriter who was one in a wave of new-generation female vocalists in the genre during the 1960s to write and record her own songs on a regular basis. Writing in The New York Times Bill Friskics-Warren noted, "Like her contemporary Loretta Lynn, Ms. Anderson gave voice to female survivors; inhabiting their struggles in a soprano at times alluring, at times sassy."
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Helen Forrest
#85120
Overall Influence
1917 - 1999 (82 years)
Helen Forrest was an American singer of traditional pop and swing music. She served as the "girl singer" for three of the most popular big bands of the Swing Era , thereby earning a reputation as "the voice of the name bands."
Go to Profile#1208
Anna Chancellor
#97256
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Anna Theodora Chancellor is a British actress who has received nominations for BAFTA and Olivier Awards. Background and early life Chancellor was born in Richmond, England to barrister John Paget Chancellor, eldest son of Sir Christopher Chancellor, and Mary Jolliffe, a daughter of Lord Hylton. The Chancellor family were Scottish gentry who had owned land at Quothquan since 1432.
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Rosanne Somerson
#69315
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Rosanne Somerson is an American-born woodworker, furniture designer/maker, educator, and former President of Rhode Island School of Design . An artist connected with the early years of the Studio Furniture, her work and career have been influential to the field.
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Alicia de Larrocha
#87584
Overall Influence
1923 - 2009 (86 years)
Alicia de Larrocha y de la Calle was a Spanish pianist and composer. She was considered one of the great piano legends of the 20th century. Reuters called her "the greatest Spanish pianist in history", Time "one of the world's most outstanding pianists", and The Guardian "the leading Spanish pianist of her time".
Go to Profile#1211
Elizabeth Pisani
#48908
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Elizabeth Pisani is a British-American epidemiologist, public health consultant, author and journalist. She is an academic researcher and the director of Ternyata Ltd., a public health consultancy based in London, UK. Her research investigates the ways in which politics, economics and culture influence public health. This has included markets for substandard and falsified medicines and HIV. Before this, Pisani was a journalist who worked as a correspondent for Reuters in several Asian countries.
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Doris Dörrie
#76576
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Doris Dörrie is a German film director, producer and author. Early life and education Born in Hanover, Dörrie completed her secondary education there in 1973. The same year, she began a two-year attendance in film studies in the drama department of the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. She then studied at the New School of Social Research in New York. She worked odd jobs in cafés and as a film presenter in New York's Goethe-Institut.
Go to Profile#1213
Chiharu Shiota
#53525
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
is a Japanese performance and installation artist. Educated in Japan, Australia, and Germany, Shiota interweaves materiality and the psychic perception of the space to explore ideas around the body and flesh, personal narratives that engage with memory, territory, and alienation. Her signature installations, which consist of dazzling, intricate networks of threads stretching across gallery rooms, made the artist rise to fame in the 2000s. Shiota has exhibited worldwide and represented Japan in the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.
Go to Profile#1214
Marilyn Mason
#85399
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
Marilyn Mason was an American concert organist, recording artist, and professor. Mason joined the staff of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1947, became chair of the organ department in 1962, and was named a professor in 1965.
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Emily McVarish
#103827
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Emily McVarish is an American writer, designer, book artist and professor at California College of the Arts. She lives and works in San Francisco and her work primarily takes the form of books. Clifton Meador says "she uses the form of the book to explore things that cannot be explored any other way".
Go to Profile#1216
Cecile Reynaud
#117454
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Cecile Reynaud is an American volleyball educator and retired coach of the Florida State Lady Seminoles volleyball team. After her retirement from coaching she was an associate professor with the sport management program at Florida State University until August, 2015. She also served as an interim assistant athletic director and senior women's administrator at Florida State University from 1994-95. She has served as a television color analyst for collegiate volleyball matches on ACCN, Fox Sports Net South, Sunshine Network and ESPN.
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Kim Witte
#116161
Overall Influence
Kim Witte is a communications scholar with an emphasis on the area of fear appeals called “scare tactics”. In 2015 Witte is a professor who teaches graduate courses at Michigan State University. Early life and education Witte received her Ph.D. at the University of California.
Go to Profile#1218
Jana Boušková
#97521
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Jana Boušková is a Czech harpist and pedagogue. She has been the principal harpist of the Czech Philharmonic since 2005. Boušková is also a professor at the Royal College of Music in London since 2019, the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague since 2007, and she was the harp teacher at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels from 2005 to 2020.
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Carmel O'Shannessy
#120886
Overall Influence
Carmel O'Shannessy is an Australian linguistics professor at the Australian National University. She is particularly known for her work on language contact in Australia, having described and documented what is now known as Light Warlpiri. Her research combines her expertise in linguistics with a teaching background. She worked as a teacher in Indigenous schools in Australia's Northern Territory in the 1990s. Since 2017, she has been Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University.
Go to Profile#1220
Dawn Upshaw
#76461
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Dawn Upshaw is an American soprano. She is the recipient of several Grammy Awardss and has released a number of Edison Award-winning discs; she performs both opera and art song, and her repertoire spans Baroque to contemporary. Many composers, including Henri Dutilleux, Osvaldo Golijov, John Harbison, Esa-Pekka Salonen, John Adams, and Kaija Saariaho, have written for her. In 2007, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
Go to Profile#1221
Terri Te Tau
#95223
Overall Influence
Terri Te Tau is a New Zealand contemporary artist and writer. She is a member of the Mata Aho Collective. In 2017, the collective represented New Zealand at documenta, a quinquennial contemporary-art exhibition held in Kassel, Germany. This was the first time New Zealand artists had been invited to present their work at the event.
Go to Profile#1222
Izumi Hoshi
#114471
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
is a Japanese scholar of Tibetan linguistics at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Born in Chiba, she is the daughter of the equally noted Tibetan linguist Michiyo Hoshi. Education 1991 University of Tokyo Faculty of Letters graduation1993 The University of Tokyo Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences Graduate Degree1997 PhD in the "descriptive study of the meaning of the predicate in Lhasa Tibetan"
Go to Profile#1223
M. S. Subbulakshmi
#64483
Overall Influence
1916 - 2004 (88 years)
Madurai Shanmukhavadivu Subbulakshmi was an Indian Carnatic singer from Madurai, Tamil Nadu. She was the first musician ever to be awarded the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour and the first Indian musician to receive the Ramon Magsaysay award.
Go to Profile#1224
Irina Blok
#27283
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (48 years)
Irina Blok is a graphic designer and an artist. She is best known for the creation of the Android logo including its green robot icon. Irina Blok has appeared on ABC's Reality Show Shark Tank as one of the contestants, and her designs were featured in NBC NY, USA today, SF weekly, the French Edition of Elle Magazine and multiple publications around the world.
Go to Profile#1225
Valentina Polukhina
#105794
Overall Influence
1936 - 2022 (86 years)
Valentina Platonovna Polukhina was a British-Russian scholar, Emeritus Professor at Keele University, and the widow of Daniel Weissbort. She was the recipient of the A. C. Benson Medal and the Medal of Pushkin.
Go to Profile#1226
Li Pei
#57580
Overall Influence
1917 - 2017 (100 years)
Li Pei , was a Chinese linguist and professor of English. Biography Born in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu, She majored in economics at Peking University in 1936. In 1947, she studied at Cornell University in the U.S. where, she met and married Guo Yonghuai who became later one of the founding fathers of China's nuclear bomb. Li and Guo returned to China from the U.S. in 1956.
Go to Profile#1227
Kellie Bright
#92612
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Kellie Denise Bright is an English actress. Her roles include Linda Carter in the BBC soap opera EastEnders, for which she won the 2015 British Soap Award for Best Actress and Best Dramatic Performance, Julie in Ali G Indahouse, Joanna Burrows in The Upper Hand , Cassie Tyler in Bad Girls and Joan Trotter in Rock & Chips . In 2015, she was the runner-up in the 13th series of the BBC One show Strictly Come Dancing.
Go to Profile#1228
Helen Worth
#77043
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Helen Worth is an English actress. She is best known for portraying the role of Gail Platt in the ITV soap opera Coronation Street, a role that she has played since 1974. In 2014, she received the British Soap Award for Outstanding Achievement.
Go to Profile#1229
Pilar Vergara
#128279
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Pilar Vergara is a Chilean journalist, winner of the National Prize for Journalism in 1993. Career Pilar Vergara is the daughter of Ruperto Vergara Santa Cruz, a publicist and farmer from La Calera, and Olga Tagle. She is the granddaughter of distinguished jurist and diplomat Ruperto Vergara Bulnes. She studied at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile , graduating in 1968.
Go to Profile#1230
Betsy Jolas
#111861
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (99 years)
Elizabeth Jolas is a Franco-American composer. Biography Jolas was born in Paris in 1926. Her mother, the American translator Maria McDonald, was a singer. Her father, the poet and journalist Eugene Jolas, founded and edited the magazine transition, which published over ten years most of the great names of the interwar period.
Go to Profile#1231
Jennifer Mercieca
#103856
Overall Influence
Jennifer Mercieca is an American scholar of rhetoric. She is a professor of communication at Texas A&M University. She has written about the rhetorical style of Donald Trump, and the founding narratives that informed the political culture of the United States.
Go to Profile#1232
Fontella Bass
#75759
Overall Influence
1940 - 2012 (72 years)
Fontella Marie Bass was an American R&B and soul singer-songwriter best known for her number-one R&B hit "Rescue Me" in 1965. She has been nominated for a Grammy Award twice. Early life Fontella Bass was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She was the daughter of gospel singer Martha Bass, who was a member of the Clara Ward Singers, and the older sister of R&B singer David Peaston. At an early age, Fontella showed great musical talent. At the age of five, she provided the piano accompaniment for her grandmother's singing at funeral services, she sang in her church's choir at six, and by the time she...
Go to Profile#1233
Anne M. Thompson
#92538
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Anne Mee Thompson is an American scientist, who specializes in atmospheric chemistry and climate change. Her work focuses on how human activities have changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, climate forcing, and the Earth's oxidizing capacity. Thompson is an elected fellow of the American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, and AAAS.
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Susan Tsu
#59095
Overall Influence
Susan Tsu is an American costume designer who, as of 2017, was the Bessie F. Anathan Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and is featured in Who’s Who in Fine Arts Higher Education and Who’s Who of American Women.
Go to Profile#1235
Colleen Fitzgerald
#122083
Overall Influence
Colleen M. Fitzgerald is an American linguist who specializes in phonology, as well as language documentation and revitalization, especially with Native American languages. Career and research She earned her doctorate in linguistics in 1997 at the University of Arizona. Her dissertation focused on prosody in Tohono O'odham, an Uto-Aztecan language. She has published on Tohono O'odham, as well as other languages. Her other publications are on the topic of service learning in linguistics, including in indigenous language revitalization courses.
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La India
#79112
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Linda Viera Caballero , better known as La India, is a Puerto Rican singer and songwriter of salsa, house music and Latin pop. La India has been nominated for both Grammy and Latin Grammy Awards, winning the Latin Grammy Award for Best Salsa Album for the Intensamente La India Con Canciones De Juan Gabriel album.
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Ayesha Kidwai
#101217
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Ayesha Kidwai is an Indian theoretical linguist. She is a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, and an awardee of the Infosys Prize for Humanities in 2013. Biography She is the grand-daughter of Anis Kidwai. Kidwai obtained a master's and doctoral degree in linguistics from the Jawaharlal Nehru University.
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Susan Hilferty
#71611
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Susan Hilferty is an American costume designer for theatre, opera, and film. Biography Early life and education Hilferty grew up in a big family in Arlington, Massachusetts, where her greatest source of joy was the library. "We didn’t have a television," she says. "Reading was my entertainment." says Hilferty, whose interest in art and designing clothing led to her making all of her own clothes by the age of 12.
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Bette Otto-Bliesner
#116290
Overall Influence
Bette Otto-Bliesner is an earth scientist known for her modeling of Earth's past climate and its changes over different geological eras. Education and career Otto-Bliesner graduated from William Fremd High School in Palatine, Illinois in 1968. She has a B.S. in meteorology from the University of Madison-Wisconsin . In 1974, she earned her M.S. from University of Wisconsin - Madison with a thesis titled "Isentropically time-averaged mass circulations in the Northern Hemisphere". She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980, and was an associate scientist there from 1980 to 1986.
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Andrea Ackerman
#52904
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Andrea Ackerman is an American artist, theorist and writer best known for her New Media artworks. She lives and works in New York. Biography At Yale, Ackerman studied physics and biophysics; afterward, she graduated from Harvard Medical School and practiced as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. She has used digital technology since the mid-1990s in order to fabricate her work, which dabbles in the realms concerning technology, nature, aesthetics, and ethics. She imbues objects with qualities not ordinarily occurring in nature, and in doing so fabricates a “synthetic” nature. Specific aspects o...
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Candy Reid
#67869
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (48 years)
Candida Reid is a British journalist who was a sports anchor for CNN International based in Atlanta, GA. She has since returned to the United Kingdom where she coaches youth tennis and serves as a tennis commentator on television video world feeds of Association of Tennis Professionals lower tier tournaments such as ATP 250 events, as well as world feeds of Women's Tennis Association events.
Go to Profile#1242
Jacquelyn Ford Morie
#83290
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Jacquelyn Ford Morie is an artist, scientist and educator working in the areas of immersive worlds, games and social networks. Until 2013 she was a senior research scientist at the Institute for Creative Technologies. In 2013 she started a spin-off company called All These Worlds, to take her work in virtual worlds and avatars to a broader audience.
Go to Profile#1243
Tamsyn Imison
#104072
Overall Influence
1937 - 2017 (80 years)
Dame Tamsyn Imison, DBE was a prominent British educator and "educational strategist" whose first career was as a scientific illustrator. Imison was educated at Somerville College, Oxford. After having a family of three, she went into teaching science in 1972 and taught for nearly 30 years. Between 1984 and 2000, she was Headteacher of the Hampstead School in north London. Imison wrote, researched and lectured on numerous topics related to academia, including Leadership, ICT, Comprehensive Schooling, Creativity, Learning, Schools of the Future, Post 16 and Women Leaders.
Go to Profile#1244
Jodi Forlizzi
#88851
Overall Influence
Jodi L. Forlizzi is a professor and Geschke Director, as well as an interaction designer and researcher, at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. On August 29, 2022, Forlizzi was named a Herbert A. Simon Professor at Carnegie Mellon. Her research ranges from understanding the limits of human attention to understanding how products and services evoke social behavior. Current research interests include interaction design, assistive, social, and aesthetic technology projects and systems, and notification systems. In 2014, Forlizzi was inducted into the CHI Academ...
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Vivian E. Browne
#35182
Overall Influence
1929 - 1993 (64 years)
Vivian E. Browne was an American artist. Born in Laurel, Florida, Browne was mostly known for her African-American protest paintings, and linking abstraction to nature. She has received multiple awards for her work, been an activist, professor and a founder of many galleries. According to her mother, Browne died at 64 from bladder cancer.
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Ai
#77076
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (44 years)
, known mononymously as Ai , is a Japanese-American singer-songwriter, rapper, record producer, spokeswoman, and actress. Born in Los Angeles, California, Ai moved to Kagoshima, at age 4. Motivated to become a singer, Ai returned to Los Angeles during her adolescence, attending the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. While in Los Angeles, Ai performed as part of a gospel choir at a Mary J. Blige concert and appeared as a backup dancer in Janet Jackson's music video, "Go Deep". She briefly joined the Asian girl group SX4 in 1999 until she graduated high school.
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Gillian Wigglesworth
#118434
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Professor Gillian Wigglesworth is an Australian linguist, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, and former Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Arts at The University of Melbourne.
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Anne Storch
#51638
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Anne Storch is a German linguist and professor of African studies at the University of Cologne. Career Storch studied African linguistics, ethnology, and history at Frankfurt am Main. From 1995 to 1999, she worked as a researcher at the University of Frankfurt. As a doctoral student, she documented the Hõne language during several research trips to Nigeria. In 1999, she completed her PhD in African linguistics. From 2000 to 2004, she held a junior professorship position at the Institute for African Linguistics at the University of Frankfurt. Since 2004, she has been a full professor and membe...
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Johnette Napolitano
#81634
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Johnette Napolitano is an American musician best known as the lead vocalist, songwriter, and bassist for the alternative rock group Concrete Blonde. Early life Johnette Napolitano was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, the eldest of five children in an Italian American family.
Go to Profile#1250
Tracey Weldon
#109296
Overall Influence
Tracey Weldon is an American linguist who studies variationist sociolinguistics, Gullah, Quantitative Sociolinguistics, and African American English. Education Weldon received her BA in English and French from Furman University in 1991 and her PhD in Linguistics from Ohio State University in 1998 with her dissertation Exploring the AAVE-Gullah connection: A comparative study of copula variability.
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