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).
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List of the most influential female people in Communications,
#1251
Julie Fowlis
#86456
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
Julie Fowlis is a Scottish folk singer and multi-instrumentalist who sings primarily in Scottish Gaelic. Early life Fowlis grew up on North Uist, an island in the Outer Hebrides, in a Gaelic-speaking community. Her mother was a Gaelic-speaking islander from a family of fishermen and crofters which originated on the remote island of Heisgeir, while her father hailed originally from Pitlochry on mainland Scotland. Her parents ran a hotel for many years on North Uist. She moved with her parents to Ross-shire on the mainland when she was 15 years old after her father took a new job. The family lived in Strathpeffer and Fowlis finished her secondary education at Dingwall Academy.
Go to Profile#1252
Syreeta Wright
#67755
Overall Influence
1946 - 2004 (58 years)
Syreeta Wright , who recorded professionally under the mononym Syreeta, was an American singer-songwriter, best known for her music during the early 1970s through the early 1980s. Wright's career heights were songs in collaboration with her ex-husband Stevie Wonder and musical artist Billy Preston.
Go to Profile#1253
Kim Medcalf
#95585
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Kim Louise Medcalf is an English actress and singer. She is known for portraying the role of Sam Mitchell in the BBC soap opera EastEnders between 2002 and 2005 and from 2022 onwards. Career EastEnders In late 2001, Medcalf took over the role of Sam Mitchell from recovering-addict Danniella Westbrook. She filmed her first scenes with Barbara Windsor in Spain, which aired on 29 January 2002. She won the best newcomer award at The National Television Awards in 2002 and was nominated for the sexiest female award at The British Soap Awards in 2003. Medcalf opted to leave EastEnders in 2005 along with co-star Michelle Ryan, who played Zoe Slater.
Go to Profile#1254
Joyce Friedman
#67825
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Joyce Barbara Friedman was an American mathematician, operations researcher, computer scientist, and computational linguist who worked as a professor at the University of Michigan and Boston University and served as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Go to Profile#1255
Nadine George-Graves
#127137
Overall Influence
Nadine George-Graves is an academic who works at the intersection of African American studies, gender studies, and dance and theater history. She holds the Naomi Willie Pollard Endowed Chair at Northwestern University with appointments in the Department of Performance Studies and Deaprtment of Theatre . She is also the executive co-editor of Dance Research Journal. She has a PhD in Theater and Drama from Northwestern University, and a BA in Philosophy and Theater Studies from Yale University.
Go to Profile#1256
Pamela Cytrynbaum
#104128
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Pamela Cytrynbaum is an American journalist who teaches and specializes in investigative reporting and restorative justice. She is the executive director of the Chicago Innocence Center and a restorative justice practitioner.
Go to Profile#1257
France Martineau
#138665
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
France Martineau is a professor and a Canadian linguist. Martineau is an expert in Canadian French linguistics and considered a leader in historical sociolinguistics as well as a pioneer in the digital humanities. Martineau presently holds the University of Ottawa Research Chair Le français en mouvement: Frontières, réseaux et contacts en Amérique française.
Go to Profile#1258
Marta Casals Istomin
#91570
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Marta Casals Istomin , who uses the surnames of her first husband, Pablo Casals, and her second husband, Eugene Istomin, is a musician from Puerto Rico, and the former president of the Manhattan School of Music. She served as artistic director of the Kennedy Center from 1980 to 1990.
Go to Profile#1259
Inez De Florio-Hansen
#113012
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Inez De Florio is a German applied linguist and educational psychologist whose work focuses on science-oriented teaching and learning with particular reference to multilingualism and intercultural competence. She is a proponent of empirical research. Above all, her critical view of evidence-based education leads her to a particular focus on individual aspects of teachers, learners and their learning contexts.
Go to Profile#1260
Evangelia Adamou
#112620
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Evangelia Adamou is a senior researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, specializing in language contact and endangered languages. Biography Adamou studied at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Paris Descartes University . After working as a teaching assistant and then lecturer at Paris Descartes University, she became a junior researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in 2005, and was promoted to senior researcher in 2015.
Go to Profile#1261
Amalia Arvaniti
#135449
Overall Influence
Amalia Arvaniti is a Greek linguist and Professor and Chair of English Language and Linguistics at Radboud University. She is known for her works on phonetics, phonology, and prosody, particularly intonation and speech rhythm.
Go to Profile#1262
Elizabeth A. Mannix
#79848
Overall Influence
Elizabeth A. Mannix is the professor of Management and Organizations at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management, and the Director of the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University. She obtained her PhD from the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#1263
Edith Mathis
#110816
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Edith Mathis is a Swiss soprano and a leading exponent of the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart worldwide. She is known for parts in Mozart operas, but also took part in premieres of operas such as Henze's Der junge Lord.
Go to Profile#1264
Lorna Cooke deVaron
#102525
Overall Influence
1921 - 2018 (97 years)
Lorna Cooke deVaron was an American choral conductor. She was one of the pre-eminent choral conductors of the 20th century, having given the world premiere or American premiere of many important works by Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Irving Fine, Gunther Schuller, Daniel Pinkham, and others. DeVaron founded the New England Conservatory Chorus, which she directed from 1947 to 1988.
Go to Profile#1265
Catherine Best
#139814
Overall Influence
Catherine Best is an American psycholinguist and Chair in Psycholinguistic Research at Western Sydney University. She is known for her works on speech perception and production.
Go to Profile#1266
Margery J. Turner
#117143
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Margery J. Turner was an American dancer, choreographer and author. Turner earned a B.S. degree from Chicago Teachers College in 1943, an M.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1947, and a Doctoral degree from New York University in 1957.
Go to Profile#1267
Simone Young
#100250
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Simone Margaret Young AM is an Australian conductor. She is currently chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Biography and career Young was born in Sydney, of Irish ancestry on her father's side and Croatian ancestry on her mother's. Young was educated at the Monte Sant'Angelo Mercy College in North Sydney. She studied composition, piano and conducting at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
Go to Profile#1268
Toshiko Akiyoshi
#69102
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (96 years)
Toshiko Akiyoshi is an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and bandleader. Akiyoshi received fourteen Grammy Award nominations and was the first woman to win Best Arranger and Composer awards in Down Beat magazine's annual Readers' Poll. In 1984, she was the subject of the documentary Jazz Is My Native Language. In 1996, she published her autobiography, Life with Jazz, and in 2007 she was named an NEA Jazz Master by the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts.
Go to Profile#1269
Jo Joyner
#96438
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (48 years)
Joanne Mary Joyner is an English actress. She is known for her roles as Tanya Branning in the BBC soap opera EastEnders and Mandy Carter in Channel 4 drama Ackley Bridge. From 2018, she has starred as Luella Shakespeare in the BBC crime drama series Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators.
Go to Profile#1270
Bethany McLean
#32839
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Bethany Lee McLean is an American journalist and contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine. She is known for her writing on the Enron scandal and the 2008 financial crisis. Previous assignments include editor-at-large, columnist for Fortune, and a contributor to Slate.
Go to Profile#1271
Cindy Walker
#94738
Overall Influence
1918 - 2006 (88 years)
Cindy Walker was an American songwriter, as well as a country music singer and dancer. She wrote many popular and enduring songs recorded by many artists. She adopted a craftsman-like approach to her songwriting, often tailoring particular songs to specific artists. She produced a large body of songs that have been described as “direct, honest and unpretentious”. She had Top 10 hits spread over five decades.
Go to Profile#1272
Barbara Funkhouser
#93679
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Barbara Funkhouser was an American journalist, newspaper editor, and writer. Funkhouser was the first woman to serve as editor of the El Paso Times, a position she held from 1980 until 1986. Early life She was born on March 1, 1930, at the Hotel Dieu hospital in El Paso, Texas. She was raised on her family's farm in Fairacres, New Mexico, which her parents had purchased in 1924. Her father died when she was just six-years old, leaving her mother to run the family farm with hired farm workers. She graduated from Las Cruces Union High School in nearby Las Cruces, New Mexico, and received her bachelor's degree in 1952 from New Mexico State University.
Go to Profile#1273
Patricia Bosworth
#96243
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Patricia Bosworth was an American journalist, biographer, memoirist, and actress. She was a faculty member of Columbia University’s school of journalism as well as Barnard College, and was a winner of the Front Page Award for her journalistic achievement in writing about the Hollywood Blacklist.
Go to Profile#1274
Natalia Gutman
#113692
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Natalia Grigoryevna Gutman , PAU, is a Russian cellist. She began to study cello at the Moscow Music School with R. Sapozhnikov. She was later admitted to the Moscow Conservatory. She later studied with Mstislav Rostropovich.
Go to Profile#1275
Shirley Temple
#86693
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Shirley Temple Black was an American actress, singer, dancer, and diplomat, who was Hollywood's number-one box-office draw as a child actress from 1934 to 1938. Later, she was named United States Ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia, and also served as Chief of Protocol of the United States.
Go to Profile#1276
Lisa Cheng
#106771
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Lisa Cheng is a linguist with specialisation in theoretical syntax. She is a Chair Professor of Linguistics and Language at the Department of Linguistics, Leiden University, and one of the founding members of the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition.
Go to Profile#1277
Madeleine Peyroux
#81392
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Madeleine Peyroux is an American jazz singer and songwriter who began her career as a teenager on the streets of Paris. She sang vintage jazz and blues songs before finding mainstream success in 2004 when her album Careless Love sold half a million copies.
Go to Profile#1278
Koko Taylor
#87662
Overall Influence
1928 - 2009 (81 years)
Koko Taylor was an American singer whose style encompassed Chicago blues, electric blues, rhythm and blues and soul blues. Sometimes called "The Queen of the Blues", she was known for her rough, powerful vocals. Over the course of her career, she was nominated for 11 Grammy Awards, winning 1985's Best Traditional Blues Album for her appearance on Blues Explosion.
Go to Profile#1279
Nancy Wilson
#56336
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Nancy L. Wilson is an American cleric who served as the moderator of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches. Under Wilson's leadership, the denomination became known as "The Human Rights Church" in many parts of the world for its commitment to same-sex marriage, employment and housing non-discrimination laws.
Go to Profile#1280
Maren Morris
#47608
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (35 years)
Maren Larae Morris is an American singer and songwriter. Rooted in the country genre, her music also blends elements of pop, R&B, and hip hop. Morris has won multiple accolades including a Grammy Award, an American Music Award and five Academy of Country Music Awards.
Go to Profile#1281
Elisabet Engdahl
#99109
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Elisabet Britt Engdahl is a Swedish linguist and professor emerita of Swedish at the University of Gothenburg. She was the first linguist to investigate parasitic gaps in detail. Education After having completed an MA at Uppsala University, she was awarded a studentship from the Sweden-America Foundation and pursued graduate studies in general linguistics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She received her PhD in 1980 for her dissertation on the Syntax and Semantics of Questions in Swedish, supervised by Barbara Partee.
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Rachel Podger
#132199
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Rachel Podger FLSW is a British violinist and conductor specialising in the performance of Baroque music. Career Podger was born to a British father and a German mother. She was educated at a German Rudolf Steiner school then returned to study first with Perry Hart, then at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with David Takeno, Pauline Scott, and Micaela Comberti. During her studies, she co-founded Baroque chamber groups The Palladian Ensemble and Florilegium, and worked with period instrument ensembles such as the New London Consort and London Baroque.
Go to Profile#1283
Fanny Rubio
#89755
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Francisca Rubio Gámez , better known by the pseudonym Fanny Rubio, is a Spanish professor, researcher, and writer, an expert in contemporary Spanish poetry. Biography Born in Linares on 18 October 1949, Fanny Rubio began her university studies in Granada, then graduated in Hispanic Philology from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1971. She earned a PhD in Romance Philology from the University of Granada in December 1975, with a doctoral thesis about poetry magazines in Francoist Spain. Linked to the University of Granada since 1971 as a research fellow, she went to Fez, Morocco with her husband, Bernabé López García, a specialist in Arab History and Culture, in 1974.
Go to Profile#1284
Marceline Day
#108678
Overall Influence
1908 - 2000 (92 years)
Marceline Day was an American motion picture actress whose career began as a child in the 1910s and ended in the 1930s. Early life Marceline Newlin was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, the daughter of Frank and Irene Newlin and the younger sister of film actress Alice Day. She attended Venice High School.
Go to Profile#1285
Denise Bernot
#106370
Overall Influence
1922 - 2016 (94 years)
Denise Bernot was a French academic who was professor of Burmese at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales from 1960 to 1989. She was the widow of who was professor at the Collège de France in the chair 'Sociographie de l'Asie du Sud-Est'. She was an alumna of the École des Chartes.
Go to Profile#1286
Amanda Petrusich
#65306
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (124 years)
Amanda Petrusich is an American music journalist. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of three books: Pink Moon , It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music , and Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records .
Go to Profile#1287
Sherrie Tucker
#42620
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Sherrie Jean Tucker is a musicologist, music historian, book author, professor, and journal editor. Tucker is co-editor-in-chief of American Studies, peer-reviewed academic journal. Education Tucker holds three degrees from San Francisco State University, including: a BA in Creative Writing, graduating summa cum laude in 1991, an MA in Creative Writing in 1992, and an MA in Women's Studies in 1994. Tucker earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in History of Consciousness in 1999.
Go to Profile#1288
Mia Brownell
#56906
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Mia Brownell is an American painter whose work has been described by the Boston Globe art critic Cate McQuaid as "a 21st-century take on the 17th-century genre, pulled off with thrilling technique -- a postmodern fruit cocktail that marries today's fascination with genetics and the building blocks of life with old-style painterly seduction."
Go to Profile#1289
Sonia
#96792
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Sonia Evans , known mononymously as Sonia, is an English pop singer from Liverpool. She had a 1989 UK number one hit with "You'll Never Stop Me Loving You" and became the first female UK artist to achieve five top 20 hit singles from one album. She represented the United Kingdom in the 1993 Eurovision Song Contest, where she finished second with the song "Better the Devil You Know". Between 1989 and 1993, she had 11 UK top 30 hits, including "Listen to Your Heart" , "Counting Every Minute" and "Only Fools " . In 1994, she starred as Sandy in a West End revival of the musical Grease, while on ...
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Celia Pearce
#51598
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Celia Pearce is an American game designer currently teaching at Northeastern University as a full professor. She is a co-founder and current Festival Chair of IndieCade, an international festival of independent games. She is currently a professor at Northeastern University and occasionally talks and shows games at art and game events such as Different Games and Incubate Arcade.
Go to Profile#1291
Mónica de Miranda
#93887
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Mónica de Miranda is a Portuguese visual artist, photographer, filmmaker, and researcher of Angolan ancestry known for her artwork on socially inspired themes, including postcolonial issues of geography, history, and subjectivity related to Africa and its diaspora. Her media include photography, mixed media and video. De Miranda first became known for her photographic records of the ruins of modern hotels in post-war Angola, and their surrounding sociopolitical circumstances. Her photographic series, videos, short films, and installations have been internationally exhibited at art biennales, galleries, and museums, some of which keep her work in their permanent art collections.
Go to Profile#1292
Muriel Porter
#96812
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Muriel Lylie Porter is an Australian journalist based in Melbourne, Victoria. She is a frequent contributor to The Age newspaper and The Melbourne Anglican diocesan newspaper, for which she mostly writes about issues concerning the Anglican Church of Australia in which she is a prominent layperson. Porter is a representative of the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne on the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia.
Go to Profile#1293
Diana Maynard
#125315
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Diana Maynard is a British computer scientist and computational linguist who works as a senior research fellow in the Natural Language Processing Group of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield.
Go to Profile#1294
Holly Hughes
#39273
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Holly Hughes is an American lesbian performance artist. She began as a feminist painter in New York City but is best known for her connection with the NEA Four, with whom she was denied funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, and for her work with the Women's One World Cafe. Her plays explore sexuality, body images and the female mind. She is the recipient of several awards including the Lambda Book Award and an Obie Award. She is a professor of art and design as well as theater and drama at the University of Michigan School of Art & Design.
Go to Profile#1295
Jennifer Bolande
#82863
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Jennifer Bolande is an American postconceptual artist whose work employs various media—primarily photography, sculpture, film and site-specific installations in which she explores affinities between particular sets of objects and images and the mercurial meanings they manufacture.
Go to Profile#1296
Belle Adler
#143116
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (124 years)
Belle Adler is an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University School of Journalism. Adler specializes in television news. Before teaching at the university, Adler was a local television news executive where she was an investigative producer and tape editor. She had previously been employed by several broadcasting stations like KGO-TV, WCBS-TV, and KQED and cable stations like CNN, A&E, Discovery Channel, and Animal Planet. Adler has won two Northern California Emmy’s for her work.
Go to Profile#1297
Alison Hennegan
#76661
Overall Influence
Alison Hennegan is a lecturer at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. She is also a prominent campaigner for gay and lesbian rights in the UK and a journalist. Hennegan's academic work focuses on lesbian and gay themes in English literature, particularly in British Modernism. She began writing her PhD thesis, “Literature and the Homosexual Cult, 1890–1920” in Cambridge in 1970, but her heavy involvement in gay activism forced her to put her research on hold. She returned to the academy in the 1980s and has published articles on the lesbian reader, Oscar Wilde and the Symbolist and decadent movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Go to Profile#1298
Maria Burmaka
#92749
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Maria Burmaka is a Ukrainian singer, TV personality, musician, and songwriter in the genres of rock, pop, folk, and world music. She also holds the title of People's Artist of Ukraine. Biography and education Burmaka was born into a family of teachers. She began singing Ukrainian songs while studying in guitar class in a musical school. She graduated from that school, specializing in guitar. In 1987, she entered the faculty of philology of Kharkiv University of Karazin. As a student, she began to write original songs.
Go to Profile#1299
Kelly Reichardt
#74241
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Kelly Reichardt is an American film director and screenwriter. She is known for her minimalist films closely associated with slow cinema, many of which deal with working-class characters in small, rural communities.
Go to Profile#1300
Gazbia Sirry
#48407
Overall Influence
1925 - 2021 (96 years)
Gazbia Sirry was an Egyptian painter. Born in Cairo, Gazbia Sirry studied fine arts at the Higher Institute of Art Education for Women Teachers in 1950 , where her dissertation traced Egypt's political history. She later became a professor there, and also at the American University in Cairo. She has had more than 50 personal exhibitions, official purchases by international museums, international prizes, scholarships and university chairs. The paintings of Sirry capture the relationship between social reform, feminist consciousness and advocacy of women. Because of their eclecticism and heter...
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