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,
#2851
Frida Richard
1873 - 1946 (73 years)
Frida Richard was an Austrian actress. Selected filmography The Sin of Helga Arndt The Queen's Love Letter The Marriage of Luise Rohrbach The Diamond Foundation The Ringwall Family Waves of Fate The Ghost Hunt The Pied Piper of Hamelin Intoxication Baccarat The Dancer Superstition The Teahouse of the Ten Lotus Flowers Temperamental Artist The Black Count Christian Wahnschaffe Judith Trachtenberg The Graveyard of the Living The Last Witness The Hunt for the Truth The New Paradise The Stranger from Alster Street About the Son Alfred von Ingelheim's Dramatic Life Wandering Souls The Shadow of Ga...
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Suzanne Perrottet
1889 - 1983 (94 years)
Suzanne Perrottet was a Swiss dancer, musician, and movement teacher. Trained in music and dance, Perrottet ran the Bewegungsschule Suzanne Perrottet and was a member of the faculty at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and the Zürcher Bühnenstudio. She was active in the Dada art movement as a musician, performing at the Kaufleuten. In 1939 she co-founded the Swiss Professional Association of Dance and Movement. Along with Mary Wigman and Rudolf von Laban, she is considered one of the co-founders of modern Expressionist dance.
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Irma Beilke
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Irma Beilke was a German operatic soprano, concert singer and academic voice teacher. A member of the Städtische Oper Berlin for decades, and also a member of the Vienna State Opera, she appeared in leading roles of the coloratura soprano and lyric soprano repertoire at major opera houses and festivals internationally, such as Mozart's Blonde and Verdi's La traviata. She took part in world premieres, including Capriccio by Richard Strauss. In 1945, she appeared in the first opera performance in Berlin after World War II, as Marzelline in Beethoven's Fidelio.
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Barbara Giuranna
1899 - 1998 (99 years)
Elena Barbara Giuranna was an Italian pianist and composer. Life Barbara Giuranna was born in Palermo, Italy and studied piano at the Palermo Conservatory with Guido Alberto Fano. She also studied composition at the Naples Conservatory with Camillo De Nardis and Antonio Savasta. She continued her education in composition at the Milan Conservatory with Giorgio Federico Ghedini.
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Kate Sara Chittenden
1856 - 1949 (93 years)
Kate Sara Chittenden was an American professor of music, music school founder, and piano teacher. Early life and education Chittenden was born in Hamilton, Canada West, the daughter of Curtis Strong Chittenden and Caroline Young Peterson Chittenden. Her parents were American; her father was a dentist born in Shelburne, Vermont. One of her paternal ancestors, William Chittenden , was one of six founders of Guilford, Connecticut, in 1639. Another ancestor, Thomas Chittenden , was the first Governor of Vermont. Her cousin Charles Curtis Chittenden was president of the American Dental Associatio...
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Caroline Burke
1913 - 1964 (51 years)
Caroline Flora Burke was an American actress, theater producer, television producer, writer, and art collector. She appeared in several films in the early 1940s before becoming a theater producer in New York City, notably producing several stage productions of Harold Pinter plays and Broadway productions. She also worked as a producer for NBC in the 1950s, and at the time was the company's only female producer.
Go to Profile#2857
Myrtle Stedman
1883 - 1938 (55 years)
Myrtle Stedman was an American leading lady and later character actress in motion pictures who began in silent films in 1910. Biography Stedman was born Myrtle Lincoln in Chicago, Illinois, and educated at Mrs. Starett's School there and at the Chicago School of Acting. She and her family moved to Colorado because of her father's mining interests there.
Go to Profile#2858
Ruth Etting
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Ruth Etting was an American singer and actress of the 1920s and 1930s, who had over 60 hit recordings and worked in stage, radio, and film. Known as "America's sweetheart of song", her signature tunes were "Shine On, Harvest Moon", "Ten Cents a Dance" and "Love Me or Leave Me".
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Maria Winetzkaja
1889 - 1956 (67 years)
Maria Winetzkaja , also seen as Maria Winetskaja, was an American mezzo-soprano opera singer born in Kishinev, in present-day Moldova. Early life Winetzkaja was born in Kishinev, in the Bessarabia Governorate of Imperial Russia, the daughter of Wolf Kleiner and Naomi Nemeroff Kleiner. She attended the Imperial Conservatory of Music at Kishinev on a scholarship as a girl, but interrupted her studies in March 1904 to move to the United States with her family. In 1913 she earned a degree at the Institute of Musical Arts in New York.
Go to Profile#2860
Lynne Roberts
1922 - 1978 (56 years)
Lynne Roberts, also credited as Mary Hart, born Theda May Roberts was an American film actress during the Golden Age of Hollywood. She appeared exclusively in what were referred to as B movies. Early years Born in El Paso, Texas, Roberts was the daughter of Hobart M. Roberts, a bookkeeper, and May Holland. The family moved to Los Angeles in the 1920s.
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Florica Musicescu
1887 - 1969 (82 years)
Florica Musicescu was a renowned Romanian pianist and musical pedagogue, daughter of the renowned composer, conductor and musicologist Gavriil Musicescu. She taught piano music for many decades at the Bucharest Conservatory . For her masterful guidance and mentorship, she is considered to be one of the founders of the Romanian School of Piano Music. Many of the famous pianists of the 20th century emerged from this school: Mihai Brediceanu, Paul Dan, Dan Grigore, Mindru Katz, Dinu Lipatti, Myriam Marbe, Radu Lupu, Svetla Protich, Madeleine Cantacuzene, Sorin Enăchescu, Maria Fotino, Corneliu G...
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Maria Korchinska
1895 - 1979 (84 years)
Maria Korchinska was a distinguished 20th-century Russian harpist and one of the leading 20th-century harpists in Great Britain. Early life Korchinska entered the Moscow Conservatory to study both piano and harp in 1903 but on the advice of her father decided to concentrate on the harp from 1907 on. Her father believed that Russia was entering a time of great change and that given the relatively high number of pianists in Russia it would be easier for his daughter to find work as a harpist than as a pianist. In 1911 she won the first Gold Medal given to a harpist by the Moscow Conservatory.
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Shovkat Mammadova
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Shovkat Hasan qizi Mammadova was an Azerbaijani opera singer and music instructor. People's Artist of the USSR . Early life and musical career Mammadova was born in Tiflis to the low-class Azeri family of Hasan Mammadov and Khurshid . She had a younger brother named Mugbil. Her father, a shoemaker who hailed from the village of Goshakilsa , noticed her musical gift when Shovkat was six years old.
Go to Profile#2864
Lucia Sturdza-Bulandra
1873 - 1961 (88 years)
Lucia Sturdza-Bulandra was a Romanian actress and acting teacher. She is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of Romanian theater. In addition to her acting career, she played an important role in shaping an entire generation of Romanian actors and directors, her students including the likes of George Calboreanu, Dina Cocea, Haig Acterian, Radu Beligan and Victor Rebengiuc. She is the namesake of the Bulandra Theatre in Bucharest.
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Elisabeth Karg-Gasterstädt
1886 - 1964 (78 years)
Klara Elisabeth Karg-Gasterstädt was a German medievalist, professor of German philology at the University of Leipzig and head of the effort to publish the Old High German Dictionary. Biography Karg-Gasterstädt was the daughter of Karl Gasterstädt, a factory director from Swabia, and his wife, Sophie, née Schönleber. Klara attended a teachers' college in Stuttgart from 1909 to 1912, and after graduation she was allowed to teach middle and higher grades. From there she went on to work as a substitute teacher at the Königin-Katharina-Stift, and then became a full-time teacher at the Prieser Hig...
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Queena Mario
1896 - 1951 (55 years)
Queena Marian Tillotson , known professionally as Queena Mario, was an American soprano opera singer, newspaper columnist, voice teacher, and fiction writer. Early life Queena Marian Tillotson was born in Akron, Ohio, the daughter of James Knox Tillotson and Rose Tillotson. Queena was raised in Plainfield, New Jersey, where she graduated from Plainfield High School. She studied voice with Marcella Sembrich, who advised her name change. She paid for voice lessons by writing newspaper advice columns under the name Florence Bryant, including childrearing advice; "You know a lot when you're 16, y...
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Lois Towles
1912 - 1983 (71 years)
Lois Towles was an American classical pianist, music educator, and community activist. Born in Texarkana, Arkansas, she grew up in the town straddling the Arkansas and Texas line. From an early age, she was interested in music and began piano lessons at age 9. After graduating as valedictorian of her high school class, she obtained a bachelor's degree from Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and worked as a high school teacher from 1936 to 1941. In 1942, Towles enrolled in the University of Iowa and earned two master's degrees in 1943. She went on to further her education at Juilliard, the Univ...
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Gertrude Foster Brown
1867 - 1956 (89 years)
Gertrude Foster Brown was a concert pianist, teacher, and suffragist. Following the passage of women suffrage in New York State in 1917, and pending passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Brown wrote Your Vote and How to Use It, published in 1918. She was Director-General of the Women's Overseas Hospitals in France, founded by suffragists, in 1918. In addition to her work in the New York suffrage movement, she helped to found the National League of Women Voters. She was the Managing Director of the Woman's Journal from 1921-1931.
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Lil Johnson
1950 - 1950 (0 years)
#2870
Dorothy James
1901 - 1982 (81 years)
Dorothy James was an American music educator and composer. James was born in Chicago, Illinois, and graduated from the Chicago Musical College and the American Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Louis Gruenberg for composition and Adolph Weidig for counterpoint. She continued her studies with Howard Hanson at Eastman School of Music, Healey Willan at the Toronto Conservatory, and Ernst Krenek at the University of Michigan. After completing her studies, she took a position in 1927 teaching music at Eastern Michigan University, then Michigan State Normal College, where she worked until retiring in 1968.
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Ilse Fromm-Michaels
1888 - 1986 (98 years)
Ilse Fromm-Michaels was a German pianist and composer. Life Ilse Fromm-Michaels was born in Hamburg and showed musical talent at an early age. She studied music in Berlin, first at the Hochschule fur Musik with Heinrich van Eyken for composition and with Marie Bender for piano. In 1905 she began study at the Sternsche Conservatory of Hans Pfitzner and James Kwast and completed her studies in 1913 with conductor and composer Fritz Steinbach and pianist Carl Friedberg in Cologne.
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Emiliana de Zubeldia
1888 - 1987 (99 years)
Emiliana de Zubeldía Inda was a Spanish pianist and composer. She is known for her piano, choral, and solo voice compositions. Biography Emiliana de Zubeldia was born in Salinas de Oro, Navarre, in Northern Spain, and emigrated to Latin America prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. She began her musical studies at Pamplona and in 1904 continued at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, where she studied composition with Vincent d'Indy and piano with Blanche Selva.
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Roslyn Brogue
1919 - 1981 (62 years)
Roslyn Brogue was an American pianist, violinist, music educator, classics scholar, poet, author and composer. She was born in Chicago, Illinois, and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1937, from Radcliffe College in 1943 and from Harvard University in 1947 with a Ph.D.
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Maria Rodrigo
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
María Rodrigo was a Spanish pianist and composer. She was the daughter of Pantaléon Rodrigo, and studied music at the Madrid Conservatorium under José Tragó for piano, Valentín Arín for harmony and Emilio Serrano for composition. Maria was the first woman to have her opera performed in Spain. Her sister Mercedes Rodrigo was equally intelligent, being the first woman from Spain to obtain a degree in psychology from the Rousseau Institute in Geneva. The two left Spain for Switzerland during the Spanish Civil War, moved in 1939 to Bogota, Colombia, at the invitation of rector Agustín Nieto Caballero, and in 1950 to Puerto Rico at the invitation of José María García Madrid.
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Caroline Hatchard
1883 - 1970 (87 years)
Caroline Gertrude Hatchard was a British lyric soprano, musical theatre and opera singer of the 20th-century who was the first English-born and trained soprano to be engaged by the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden where she played Sophie in the British premiere of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier on 29 January 1913 with Thomas Beecham conducting.
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Margaret Masterman
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Margaret Masterman was a British linguist and philosopher, most known for her pioneering work in the field of computational linguistics and especially machine translation. She founded the Cambridge Language Research Unit.
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Elizabeth Wiskemann
1899 - 1971 (72 years)
Elizabeth Meta Wiskemann was an English journalist and historian of Anglo-German ancestry. She was an intelligence officer in World War II, and the Montagu Burton Chair in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh.
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Mandy Simons
Mandy Simons is a linguist and professor in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University . She researches semantics and pragmatics, in particular phenomena like presupposition and projection.
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Margaret H'Doubler
1889 - 1982 (93 years)
Margaret Newell H'Doubler was a dance instructor who created the first dance major at the University of Wisconsin. Her dance pedagogy was a blend of expressing emotions and scientific description. She used her knowledge about the body to help create movement to express what the dancers were feeling. She wrote five books about her pedagogy and about the importance of dance in education. Among H'Doubler's students was Anna Halprin, a post-modern dance pioneer.
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Elise Riesel
1906 - 1989 (83 years)
Elise Riesel or also Eliza Genrichovna Rizel , was an Austrian linguist. Life Riesel was born to medical doctor Heinrich Grün and music teacher Matilde Grün, née Goldstein. Riesel was Jewish. In 1932 she married Josef Riesel, an engineer.
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Anna Paues
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
Anna Carolina Paues , was a Swedish philologist, mainly active in England. Life Her father was the senior master sergeant Johan Wilhelm Paues and her mother was Gustava Anderson. Paues most well-known siblings were Johan , a business man and diplomat and Erik , head of the central organization for the Swedish textile industry.
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Sarah T. Barrows
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Sarah Tracy Barrows was an American phonetician. She was best known for her pioneering work on the phonetics of American English pronunciation and her many applied phonetics publications aimed at public school teachers , speech therapists , actors and immigrants learning English .
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Pura Belpré
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Pura Teresa Belpré y Nogueras was an Afro-Puerto Rican educator who served as the first Puerto Rican librarian in New York City. She was also a writer, collector of folktales, and puppeteer. Life Belpré was born in Cidra, Puerto Rico. There is some dispute as to the date of her birth which has been given as February 2, 1899, December 2, 1901 and February 2, 1903. Belpré graduated from Central High School in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1919 and enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, where she originally planned on becoming a teacher. But, in 1920, Belpré interrupted her studies...
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Esther Ballou
1915 - 1973 (58 years)
Esther Williamson Ballou was an American music educator, organist and composer. She was born in Elmira, New York, began organ lessons at age 13, and began composing in her twenties. She studied at Bennington College, Mills College and The Juilliard School of Music in 1943.
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Gladys Turquet-Milnes
1889 - 1977 (88 years)
Gladys Rosaleen Turquet-Milnes was a British academic and author. She was Professor of French Language and Literature at Bedford College, University of London, from 1934 to 1952, having been Head of the French Department at Westfield College from 1916 to 1934.
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Saint Cecilia
180 - 230 (50 years)
Saint Cecilia , also spelled Cecelia, was a Roman virgin martyr and is venerated in Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and some Lutheran churches, such as the Church of Sweden. She became the patroness of music and musicians, it being written that, as the musicians played at her wedding, Cecilia "sang in her heart to the Lord". Musical compositions are dedicated to her, and her feast, on 22 November, is the occasion of concerts and musical festivals. She is also known as Cecilia of Rome.
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Ulrike Meinhof
1934 - 1976 (42 years)
Ulrike Marie Meinhof was a German left-wing journalist and founding member of the Red Army Faction in West Germany, commonly referred to in the press as the "Baader-Meinhof gang". She is the reputed author of The Urban Guerilla Concept . The manifesto acknowledges the RAF's "roots in the history of the student movement"; condemns "reformism" as "a brake on the anti-capitalist struggle"; and invokes Mao Zedong to define "armed struggle" as "the highest form of Marxism-Leninism".
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Marina Abramović
1946 - Present (80 years)
Marina Abramović is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist. Her work explores body art, endurance art, the relationship between the performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Being active for over four decades, Abramović refers to herself as the "grandmother of performance art". She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body". In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute , a non-profit foundation for performance art.
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Sarah Bernhardt
1844 - 1923 (79 years)
Sarah Bernhardt was a French stage actress who starred in some of the more popular French plays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including by Alexandre Dumas fils, Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo, Fédora and La Tosca by Victorien Sardou, and L'Aiglon by Edmond Rostand. She also played male roles, including Shakespeare's Hamlet. Rostand called her "the queen of the pose and the princess of the gesture", and Hugo praised her "golden voice". She made several theatrical tours around the world, and she was one of the early prominent actresses to make sound recordings and to act in motion pictur...
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Aleksandra Ekster
1882 - 1949 (67 years)
Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Ekster , also known as Alexandra Exter, was a Russian and French painter and designer. As a young woman, her studio in Kiev attracted all the city's creative luminaries, and she became a figure of the Paris salons, mixing with Picasso, Braque and others. She is identified with the Russian/Ukrainian avant-garde, as a Cubo-futurist, Constructivist, and influencer of the Art Deco movement.
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Margaret Mitchell
1900 - 1949 (49 years)
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American novelist and journalist. Mitchell wrote only one novel, published during her lifetime, the American Civil War-era novel Gone with the Wind, for which she won the National Book Award for Fiction for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. Long after her death, a collection of Mitchell's girlhood writings and a novella she wrote as a teenager, titled Lost Laysen, were published. A collection of newspaper articles written by Mitchell for The Atlanta Journal was republished in book form.
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Fatima Jinnah
1893 - 1967 (74 years)
Fatima Jinnah was a Pakistani politician and stateswoman. She was the younger sister of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder and the first governor-general of Pakistan. She was the Leader of the Opposition of Pakistan from 1960 until her death in 1967.
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Rita Hayworth
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Rita Hayworth was an American actress. She achieved fame during the 1940s as one of the era's top stars, appearing in 61 films over 37 years. The press coined the term "The Love Goddess" to describe Hayworth after she had become the most glamorous screen idol of the 1940s. She was the top pin-up girl for GIs during World War II.
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Nadia Boulanger
1887 - 1979 (92 years)
Juliette Nadia Boulanger was a French music teacher and conductor. She taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century, and also performed occasionally as a pianist and organist.
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Barbara Stanwyck
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Barbara Stanwyck was an American actress, model and dancer. A stage, film, and television star, during her 60-year professional career she was known for her strong, realistic screen presence and versatility. She was a favorite of directors, including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang, and Frank Capra, and made 85 films in 38 years before turning to television.
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Clotilde Tambroni
1758 - 1817 (59 years)
Clotilde Tambroni , was an Italian philologist, linguist and poet. She was a professor in the Greek language at the University of Bologna in 1793–1798, and a professor in Greek and literature in 1800–1808. She succeeded in achieving institutional recognition by a university long before women in many parts of the world could even attend university. As well as her native Italian, she was also fluent in French, English and Spanish.
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Catherine Winkworth
1827 - 1878 (51 years)
Catherine Winkworth was an English hymnwriter and educator. She translated the German chorale tradition of church hymns for English speakers, for which she is recognized in the calendar of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She also worked for wider educational opportunities for girls, and translated biographies of two founders of religious sisterhoods. When 16, Winkworth appears to have coined a once well-known political pun, peccavi, "I have Sindh", relating to the British occupation of Sindh in colonial India.
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Cedar Paul
1880 - 1972 (92 years)
Cedar Paul, née Gertrude Mary Davenport was a singer, author, translator and journalist. Biography Gertrude Davenport came from a musical family: she was the granddaughter of the composer George Alexander Macfarren and the daughter of the composer Francis William Davenport . She was educated at convent schools in Belgium, France, Italy and England, and studied music in Germany.
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Natalie Duddington
1886 - 1972 (86 years)
Natalie Duddington was a philosopher and a translator of Russian literature into English. Her first name sometimes appears as Nathalie . Biography Nataliya Aleksandrovna Ertel was born in Voronezh on 14 November 1886, to the author Alexander Ertel. She was Ertel's oldest daughter and considered intelligent as a child. When the English translator Constance Garnett visited Ertel in the summer of 1904, she was much impressed by Natalie, who began studying at Saint Petersburg University the following year. When the university was temporarily closed due to student unrest in the 1905 revolution, Garnett encouraged Natalie to come to England.
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Billie Holiday
1915 - 1959 (44 years)
Billie Holiday was an American jazz and swing music singer. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner, Lester Young, Holiday made a significant contribution to jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly influenced by jazz instrumentalists, inspired a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills.
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