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
Martha Graham
1894 - 1991 (97 years)
Martha Graham was an American modern dancer and choreographer. Her style, the Graham technique, reshaped American dance and is still taught worldwide. Graham danced and taught for over seventy years. She was the first dancer to perform at the White House, travel abroad as a cultural ambassador, and receive the highest civilian award of the US: the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction. In her lifetime she received honors ranging from the Key to the City of Paris to Japan's Imperial Order of the Precious Crown. She said, in the 1994 documentary The Dancer Revealed: "I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer.
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Edith Wharton
1862 - 1937 (75 years)
Edith Wharton was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.
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Isadora Duncan
1877 - 1927 (50 years)
Angela Isadora Duncan was an American-born dancer and choreographer, who was a pioneer of modern contemporary dance, who performed to great acclaim throughout Europe and the US. Born and raised in California, she lived and danced in Western Europe, the US and Soviet Russia from the age of 22. She died when her scarf became entangled in the wheel and axle of the car in which she was travelling in Nice, France.
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Georgette Heyer
1902 - 1974 (72 years)
Georgette Heyer was an English novelist and short-story writer, in both the Regency romance and detective fiction genres. Her writing career began in 1921, when she turned a story conceived for her ailing younger brother into the novel The Black Moth. In 1925 Heyer married George Ronald Rougier, a mining engineer. The couple spent several years living in Tanganyika Territory and Macedonia before returning to England in 1929. After her novel These Old Shades became popular despite its release during the General Strike, Heyer determined that publicity was not necessary for good sales. For the r...
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Ninette de Valois
1898 - 2001 (103 years)
Dame Ninette de Valois was an Irish-born British dancer, teacher, choreographer, and director of classical ballet. Most notably, she danced professionally with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, later establishing the Royal Ballet, one of the foremost ballet companies of the 20th century and one of the leading ballet companies in the world. She also established the Royal Ballet School and the touring company which became the Birmingham Royal Ballet. She is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of ballet and as the "godmother" of English and Irish ballet.
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Laura Ingalls Wilder
1867 - 1957 (90 years)
Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder was an American writer. The Little House on the Prairie series of children's books, published between 1932 and 1943, were based on her childhood in a settler and pioneer family.
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Katherine Anne Porter
1890 - 1980 (90 years)
Katherine Anne Porter was an American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, poet and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim.
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Dorothy Thompson
1893 - 1961 (68 years)
Dorothy Celene Thompson was an American journalist and radio broadcaster. She was the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934 and was one of the few women news commentators broadcasting on radio during the 1930s. Thompson is regarded by some as the "First Lady of American Journalism" and was recognized by Time magazine in 1939 as equal in influence to Eleanor Roosevelt. Recordings of her NBC Radio commentary and analysis of the European situation and the start of World War II were selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Regist...
Go to Profile#2859
Bronislava Nijinska
1891 - 1972 (81 years)
Bronislava Nijinska was a Russian ballet dancer of Polish origin, and an innovative choreographer. She came of age in a family of traveling, professional dancers. Her own career began in Saint Petersburg. Soon she joined Ballets Russes which ventured to success in Paris. She met war-time difficulties in Petrograd and revolutionary turbulence in Kiev. In France again, public acclaim for her works came quickly, cresting in the 1920s. She then enjoyed continuing successes in Europe and the Americas. Nijinska played a pioneering role in the broad movement that diverged from 19th-century classical ballet.
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Amy Beach
1867 - 1944 (77 years)
Amy Marcy Cheney Beach was an American composer and pianist. She was the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music. Her "Gaelic" Symphony, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1896, was the first symphony composed and published by an American woman. She was one of the first American composers to succeed without the benefit of European training, and one of the most respected and acclaimed American composers of her era. As a pianist, she was acclaimed for concerts she gave featuring her own music in the United States and in Germany.
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Fanny Kemble
1809 - 1893 (84 years)
Frances Anne "Fanny" Kemble was a British actress from a theatre family in the early and mid-19th century. She was a well-known and popular writer and abolitionist whose published works included plays, poetry, eleven volumes of memoirs, travel writing, and works about the theatre.
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Eugénie Henderson
1914 - 1989 (75 years)
Eugénie Jane Andrina Henderson was a British linguist and academic, specialising in phonetics. From 1964 to 1982, she was Professor of Phonetics at the University of London. She served as Chair of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain from 1977 to 1980, and President of the Philological Society from 1984 to 1988.
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Minnie Riperton
1947 - 1979 (32 years)
Minnie Julia Riperton Rudolph was an American soul singer best known for her 1975 single "Lovin' You", her five-octave vocal range and her use of the whistle register. Born in 1947, Riperton grew up in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side. As a child, she studied music, drama and dance at Chicago's Abraham Lincoln Center. In her teen years, she sang lead vocals for the Chicago-based girl group the Gems. Her early affiliation with the Chicago-based Chess Records afforded her the opportunity to sing backing vocals for various established artists such as Etta James, Fontella Bass, Ramsey Lewis, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters.
Go to Profile#2864
Eliza Marian Butler
1885 - 1959 (74 years)
Eliza Marian Butler , who published as E. M. Butler and Elizabeth M. Butler, was an English scholar of German, Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge from 1945. Her most influential book was The Tyranny of Greece over Germany , in which she wrote that Germany has had "too much exposure to Ancient Greek literature and art. The result was that the German mind had succumbed to 'the tyranny of an ideal'. The German worship of Ancient Greece had emboldened the Nazis to remake Europe in their image." It was controversial in Britain and its translation was banned in Germany.
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Esther Lape
1881 - 1981 (100 years)
Esther Everett Lape was a well-known American journalist, researcher, and publicist. She was associated with the Women's Trade Union League and was one of the founders of the League of Women Voters.
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Jacqueline du Pré
1945 - 1987 (42 years)
Jacqueline Mary du Pré was a British cellist. At a young age, she achieved enduring mainstream popularity. Despite her short career, she is regarded as one of the greatest cellists of all time. Her career was cut short by multiple sclerosis, which forced her to stop performing at the age of 28; she died 14 years later at the age of 42.
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Malvina Reynolds
1900 - 1978 (78 years)
Malvina Reynolds was an American folk/blues singer-songwriter and political activist, best known for her songwriting, particularly the songs "Little Boxes", "What Have They Done to the Rain" and "Morningtown Ride".
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Luisa de Medrano
1484 - 1527 (43 years)
Luisa de Medrano , was a Navarrese-Castilian poet, philosopher, scholar and professor. Luisa de Medrano was the first female Professor in Spain , at the University of Salamanca. Luisa de Medrano Bravo de Lagunas Cienfuegos belonged to the group of Renaissance women called by their contemporaries "puellae doctae" .
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Elis Regina
1945 - 1982 (37 years)
Elis Regina Carvalho Costa , known professionally as Elis Regina , was a Brazilian singer of MPB and jazz music. She is also the mother of the singers Maria Rita and Pedro Mariano. She became nationally renowned in 1965 after singing "Arrastão" in the first edition of TV Excelsior festival song contest and soon joined O Fino da Bossa, a television program on TV Record. She was noted for her vocalization as well as for her interpretation and performances in shows. Her recordings include "Como Nossos Pais" , "Upa Neguinho" , "Madalena" , "Casa no Campo" , "Águas de março" , "Atrás da Porta" , "...
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Dolores Costello
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Dolores Costello was an American film actress who achieved her greatest success during the era of silent movies. She was nicknamed "The Goddess of the Silent Screen" by her first husband, the actor John Barrymore. She was the mother of John Drew Barrymore and grandmother of actress and talk show host Drew Barrymore.
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Blanche Sweet
1896 - 1986 (90 years)
Sarah Blanche Sweet was an American silent film actress who began her career in the early days of the motion picture film industry. Early life Born Sarah Blanche Sweet in Chicago, Illinois in 1896, she was the daughter of Pearl Alexander, a dancer, and Gilbert Joel Sweet, a wine merchant. The actors Antrim and Gertrude Short were cousins of Blanche. Her mother died when Blanche was an infant, and she was raised by her maternal grandmother, Cora Blanche Alexander. Cora Alexander found her many parts as a young child. At age 4, she toured in the play The Battle of the Strong with Marie Burroug...
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Mary Lou Williams
1910 - 1981 (71 years)
Mary Lou Williams was an American jazz pianist, arranger, and composer. She wrote hundreds of compositions and arrangements and recorded more than one hundred records . Williams wrote and arranged for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and she was friend, mentor, and teacher to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie.
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Erna Berger
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Erna Berger was a German lyric coloratura soprano. She was best known for roles such as Queen of the Night and Konstanze. Career Born in Dresden, Germany, Berger spent some years as a child in India and South America. She lived there later on as well, working as a clerk and a piano teacher, before borrowing enough money for the trip back to Germany. At age 26, she secured a position as a soubrette soprano at the Semperoper in Dresden and had her first success as Hannele in Paul Graener's opera Hanneles Himmelfahrt, based on Gerhart Hauptmann's play The Assumption of Hannele. She later held leading positions at the Vienna State Opera, the Berlin State Opera, and the Deutsche Oper Berlin.
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Sarah Robertson
1891 - 1948 (57 years)
Sarah Margaret Armour Robertson was a Canadian painter of landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and murals for private homes. Early life Robertson was born in Montreal on June 16, 1891, the daughter of John Armour Robertson and Jessie Anne Christie, and the oldest of four siblings. Her parents were originally from Scotland. She was educated in Montreal. During her childhood, the family lived comfortably, but later faced financial struggles. She began art studies at the age of nineteen with a Wood Scholarship to the Art Association of Montreal under William Brymner and Maurice Cullen. World War ...
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Marjorie Lawrence
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Marjorie Florence Lawrence CBE was an Australian dramatic soprano, particularly noted as an interpreter of Richard Wagner's operas. She was the first Metropolitan Opera soprano to perform the immolation scene in Götterdämmerung by riding her horse into the flames as Wagner had intended. She was afflicted by polio from 1941. Lawrence later served on the faculty of the School of Music at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
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Juliette Alvin
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Juliette Louise Alvin was a French-British cellist, viola da gamba player, and pioneering music therapist. Biograph She was born in Limoges, France, and studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, where she was awarded the Premier Prix d'Excellence and the Mèdaille d'Or. She studied under a master class arrangement with Pablo Casals. Her debut recital took place in 1927 at London's Wigmore Hall.
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Mildred Bailey
1907 - 1951 (44 years)
Mildred Bailey was a Native American jazz singer during the 1930s, known as "The Queen of Swing", "The Rockin' Chair Lady" and "Mrs. Swing". She recorded the songs "For Sentimental Reasons", "It's So Peaceful in the Country", "Doin' The Uptown Lowdown", "Trust in Me", "Where Are You?", "I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart", "Small Fry", "Please Be Kind", "Darn That Dream", "Rockin' Chair", "Blame It on My Last Affair", and "Says My Heart". She had three records that reached number one on the popular charts.
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Alice Joyce
1890 - 1955 (65 years)
Alice Joyce Brown was an American actress who appeared in more than 200 films during the 1910s and 1920s. She is known for her roles in the 1923 film The Green Goddess and its 1930 remake of the same name.
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Wendy Barrie
1912 - 1978 (66 years)
Wendy Barrie was a British-American film and television actress. Early life Barrie was born in London to English parents. Her father, Francis Charles John Graigoe Jenkin KC, was an employee of the Great Western Railway , who then joined the Royal Fusiliers in 1902. Her mother was Ellen McDonagh. Hollywood gave her a more exotic parentage with her father being a King's Counsel. She received her education at a convent school in England and a finishing school in Switzerland.
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Marilyn Miller
1898 - 1936 (38 years)
Marilyn Miller was one of the most popular Broadway musical stars of the 1920s and early 1930s. She was an accomplished tap dancer, singer and actress, and the combination of these talents endeared her to audiences. On stage, she usually played rags-to-riches Cinderella characters who lived happily ever after. Her enormous popularity and famed image were in distinct contrast to her personal life, which was marred by disappointment, tragedy, frequent illness, and ultimately her sudden death due to complications of nasal surgery at age 37.
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Marjorie Rambeau
1889 - 1970 (81 years)
Marjorie Burnet Rambeau was an American film and stage actress. She began her stage career at age 12, and appeared in several silent films before debuting in her first sound film, Her Man . She was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her roles in Primrose Path and Torch Song , and received the 1955 National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress for her roles in A Man Called Peter and The View from Pompey's Head.
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Adele Sandrock
1863 - 1937 (74 years)
Adele Sandrock was a German-Dutch actress. After a successful theatrical career, she became one of the first German movie stars. Early life Sandrock was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands, the daughter of the German merchant Eduard Sandrock and his Dutch wife, Johanna Simonetta ten Hagen . With sister Wilhelmine and brother Christian , she grew up in Rotterdam, and, after her parents' divorce on 15 November 1869, in Berlin.
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Helene Weyl
1893 - 1948 (55 years)
Friederike Bertha Helene Weyl was a German writer and translator. She was married to the mathematician Hermann Weyl. Life Weyl was born on 30 March 1893 in Ribnitz, Germany. She was the daughter of the Jewish country doctor Bruno Joseph and his wife Bertha. Her father was born in Pomerania, and her mother came from a well-established Mecklenburg family. Weyl and her younger sister were raised atheists.
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Liza Lehmann
1862 - 1918 (56 years)
Liza Lehmann was an English soprano and composer, known for her vocal compositions. After vocal studies with Alberto Randegger and Jenny Lind, and composition studies with teachers including Hamish MacCunn, Lehmann made her singing debut in 1885 in London and pursued a concert career for nearly a decade. In 1894, she married and left the stage. She then concentrated on composing music, becoming known for her songs, including many children's songs. She also composed several pieces for the stage and wrote a textbook on singing. In 1910, she toured the United States, where she accompanied her own songs in recitals.
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Felice Rix-Ueno
1893 - 1967 (74 years)
Felice "Lizzie" Rix-Ueno was an Austrian textile, wallpaper, and craft designer. She lived in Japan, and became an influential figure in the Japanese modern art scene. Early life and education Felice Rix was born in Vienna. She studied at University of Applied Arts Vienna and Josef Hoffmann was her teacher.
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Mary Robinson
1758 - 1800 (42 years)
Mary Robinson was an English actress, poet, dramatist, novelist, and celebrity figure. She lived in England, in the cities of Bristol and London; she also lived in France and Germany for a time. She enjoyed poetry from the age of seven and started working, first as a teacher and then as actress, from the age of fourteen. She wrote many plays, poems and novels. She was a celebrity, gossiped about in newspapers, famous for her acting and writing. During her lifetime she was known as "the English Sappho". She earned her nickname "Perdita" for her role as Perdita in 1779. She was the first publi...
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Milka Ternina
1863 - 1941 (78 years)
Milka Ternina was a Croatian dramatic soprano who enjoyed a high reputation in major American and European opera houses. Praised by audiences and music critics alike for the electrifying force of her acting and the excellence of her singing in both German and Italian works, her career was curtailed at its peak in 1906 by a medical condition which paralyzed a nerve in her face.
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Maxine Sullivan
1911 - 1987 (76 years)
Maxine Sullivan , born Marietta Williams in Homestead, Pennsylvania, United States, was an American jazz vocalist and performer. As a vocalist, Sullivan was active for half a century, from the mid-1930s to just before her death in 1987. She is best known for her 1937 recording of a swing version of the Scottish folk song "Loch Lomond". Throughout her career, Sullivan also appeared as a performer on film as well as on stage. A precursor to better-known later vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, Sullivan is considered one of the best jazz vocalists of the 1930s. Singer Peggy Lee ...
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Elizabeth Hill
1900 - 1996 (96 years)
Dame Elizabeth Mary Hill DBE was a Russian-born British academic linguist. In addition to a career with the London University School of Slavonic Studies, she was course director of the Joint Services School for Linguists , a UK Government training programme to produce linguists and interpreters of Russian, for military and intelligence purposes.
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Izumo no Okuni
1572 - Present (454 years)
Izumo no Okuni was a Japanese entertainer and shrine maiden who is believed to have invented the theatrical art form of kabuki. She is thought to have begun performing her new art style of theatre in the dry riverbed of the Kamo River in Kyoto. Okuni's troupe quickly gained immense popularity, and were known for their performers, who were often lower-class women Okuni had recruited to act in her all-female theatre group.
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Charlotte Greenwood
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Frances Charlotte Greenwood was an American actress and dancer. Born in Philadelphia, Greenwood started in vaudeville, and starred on Broadway, movies and radio. Standing almost six feet tall , she was best known for her long legs and high kicks. She earned the unique praise of being, in her words, the "only woman in the world who could kick a giraffe in the eye."
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Claire Du Brey
1892 - 1993 (101 years)
Claire Du Brey was an American actress. She appeared in more than 200 films from 1916 to 1959. Her name is sometimes rendered as Claire Du Bray or as Claire Dubrey. Early years Du Brey was born in Bonner's Ferry, Idaho, to an Irish-American mother, Lilly , later Mrs. Richard Fugitt. Her parents married on November 9, 1891 in Pocatello, Bannock County, Idaho. She was raised Catholic and attended a convent school.
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Elizabeth Cotten
1893 - 1987 (94 years)
Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten was an American folk and blues musician. She was a self-taught left-handed guitarist who played a guitar strung for a right-handed player, but played it upside down. This position meant that she would play the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. Her signature alternating bass style has become known as "Cotten picking". NPR stated "her influence has reverberated through the generations, permeating every genre of music."
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Bess Flowers
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Bess Flowers was an American actress best known for her work as an extra in hundreds of films. She was known as "The Queen of the Hollywood Extras," appearing in more than 350 feature films and numerous comedy shorts in her 41-year career.
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Isa Miranda
1909 - 1982 (73 years)
Isa Miranda was an Italian actress with an international film career. Biography Miranda was born Ines Isabella Sampietro in Milan, the daughter of a street car conductor. When she was 10 years old, she began working as an errand girl for a dressmaker. She later had jobs in a box factory and a handbag factory. When she was 15, she became a model, a job that provided enough income for her to learn bookkeeping and typing in night school. She worked as a typist while attending the Accademia dei Filodrammatici in Milan and trained as a stage actress. She went on to play bit parts in Italian films in Rome.
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Eva Novak
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Eva Barbara Novak was an American film actress, who was quite popular during the silent film era. Biography On February 14, 1898, Eva Barbara Novak was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to Joseph Jerome Novak, an immigrant from Bohemia, and Barbara Medek. Her older sister, Johana, also became an actress. Joseph Novak died when Eva was still a child and Barbara was left to raise five children.
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Gracie Fields
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Dame Gracie Fields was an English actress, singer, comedian and star of cinema and music hall who was one of the top ten film stars in Britain during the 1930s and was considered the highest paid film star in the world in 1937. She was known affectionately as Our Gracie and the Lancashire Lass and for never losing her strong, native Lancashire accent. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and an Officer of the Venerable Order of St John in 1938, and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1979.
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Priaulx Rainier
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Ivy Priaulx Rainier was a South African-British composer. Although she lived most of her life in England and died in France, her compositional style was strongly influenced by the African music remembered from her childhood. She never adopted 12-tone or serial techniques, but her music shows a profound understanding of that musical language. She can be credited with the first truly athematic works composed in England. Her Cello Concerto was premiered by Jacqueline du Pré in 1964, and her Violin Concerto Due Canti e Finale was premiered by Yehudi Menuhin in 1977.
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Jocelyne Binet
1923 - 1968 (45 years)
Jocelyne Binet was a Canadian composer, pianist, and music educator. She studied in Montreal and Paris, France, and returned to compose and teach music in Canada. Biography Binet was born in East Angus, near Sherbrooke, Quebec, and obtained two music degrees in Montreal before traveling to Paris, France, for studies in piano. She studied under Claude Champagne, Jean Dansereau and Jean-Marie Beaudet at the École Supérieure de Musique d'Outremont . She continued her studies at the Paris Conservatory in 1948 and 1949 on a grant from the French government and again in 1949 and 1951 on another grant from the Quebec government, where her teachers were Tony Aubin, Noël Gallon and Olivier Messiaen.
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May McAvoy
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
May Irene McAvoy was an American actress who worked mainly during the silent-film era. Some of her major roles are Laura Pennington in The Enchanted Cottage, Esther in Ben-Hur, and Mary Dale in The Jazz Singer.
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