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.
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List of the most influential female people in Communications,
#3151
Lula Mysz-Gmeiner
1876 - 1948 (72 years)
Lula Mysz-Gmeiner was a German concert contralto and mezzo-soprano born in Transylvania, who performed lieder recitals in Europe and the United States. She was an academic voice teacher in Berlin and taught both Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Peter Anders.
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Valeria Barsova
1892 - 1967 (75 years)
Valeria Vladimirovna Barsova , PAU, was a Russian operatic soprano, one of the leading lyric-coloratura sopranos of the first half of the 20th century in Russia. Life and career Valeria Barsova first studied the piano with Estonian composer Artur Kapp. She then studied singing at the Moscow Conservatory with Mazetti. In 1915, she was singing in a Moscow cabaret when she was noticed by Sergei Zimin, director of the Zimin Opera, where she made her operatic debut in 1917, as Gilda in Rigoletto. Other roles at this theatre included; Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro, Constance in Die Entführung aus de...
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Millicent Silver
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Millicent Irene Silver was an English harpsichordist, who began her career as a pianist and violinist. Early life Born in South London, her father, James Brand Silver, was a violinist and oboist, and had been a boy chorister at St. George's Chapel, Windsor where his singing attracted the attention of Queen Victoria. Her mother Amelia Argyle Silver was a piano teacher. Millicent was the second of four children. Her musical talent was discovered at the age of three, when she imitated her elder brother's practising.
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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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Branka Musulin
1917 - 1975 (58 years)
Branka Musulin was a German-Croatian classical pianist and teacher. Life Musulin was born in Croatia in Zagreb. As from the age of eight, she studied with celebrated Croatian pianist Svetislav Stančić in Zagreb and played in public at that time. After her concert diploma, she travelled to Paris in 1936 to study with Alfred Cortot and Yvonne Lefébure. As from 1938, she studied with Alfredo Casella in Siena and after 1941 with Max von Pauer in South Germany .
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Mirta Aguirre
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
Mirta Aguirre Carreras was a Cuban poet, novelist, journalist and political activist from the LGBTQI movement. She has been called "the most important female academic and woman of letters in post-revolutionary Cuba".
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Carrie Tubb
1876 - 1976 (100 years)
Caroline Elizabeth Tubb was an English soprano of the early 20th century, and later a teacher of singing at the Guildhall School of Music. She made her debut at London's Royal Opera House in 1910, where she appeared in such works as Elektra and Hänsel und Gretel. With Thomas Beecham's opera company at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, she sang in Die Fledermaus, The Marriage of Figaro and The Tales of Hoffmann. Later, she mostly appeared on the concert platform, including at 54 Prom concerts and at the major British music festivals. She also made some early recordings. Around 1930 she retired from singing and began teaching.
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Gene Gauntier
1885 - 1966 (81 years)
Gene Gauntier was an American screenwriter and actress who was one of the pioneers of the motion picture industry. A writer, director, and actress in films from mid 1906 to 1920, she wrote screenplays for 42 films. She performed in 87 films and is credited as the director of The Grandmother .
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Ilona Štěpánová-Kurzová
1899 - 1975 (76 years)
Ilona Štěpánová-Kurzová was a Czechoslovak concert pianist and piano teacher, a professor at the Prague Academy of Arts. Her students included Ivan Moravec. Ilona Štěpánová-Kurzová was the mother of pianist Pavel Štěpán.
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Frances James
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Frances James was a Canadian soprano who specialized in concert repertoire. She worked prolifically as a performer on CBC Radio and as a recitalist from the late 1920s through the 1950s; premiering works by numerous Canadian composers of note and championing works by contemporary international composers. Her performances were noted for their musical intelligence and sophistication. Her singing was admired by several important composers, including Benjamin Britten, Paul Hindemith, and Darius Milhaud. While her performances, both live and on radio/disc, were mainly from the concert repertoire, ...
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Mary Elizabeth Turner Salter
1856 - 1938 (82 years)
Mary Elizabeth Turner Salter was an American soprano and composer. She was born in Peoria, Illinois, the daughter of Jonathan and Mary E. Hinds Turner. Turner graduated from Burlington High School in Burlington, Iowa, and the Boston College of Music, and then worked as a voice teacher at Wellesley College and performed in churches. In 1881 she married Sumner Salter. She died in Orangeburg, New York. She was one of the founding members of the American Society of Women Composers.
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Charlotte Burton
1881 - 1942 (61 years)
Charlotte E. Burton was an American silent film actress. Biography Early life and education Charlotte E. Burton was born on May 30, 1881, in San Francisco, California. However there is some debate on her date of birth; some sources state she was born ten years later, on May 30, 1891; and other sources state she died at age 48 .
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Mildred Lund Tyson
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Mildred Lund Tyson was an American choral director, composer, organist, and soprano. Biography Tyson was born in Moline, Illinois, to Mary Helena Anderson and Oscar Fredrick Lund. She married Harold Canfield Tyson in 1927 and they had a daughter, Barbara, in 1930.
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Helen Hopekirk
1856 - 1945 (89 years)
Helen Hopekirk was a Scottish pianist and composer who lived and worked in Boston. Life and career Helen Hopekirk was born in Portobello, Edinburgh in Scotland, a daughter of music shop owners Adam and Helen Hopekirk. She studied music with George Lichtenstein and Scottish composer Alexander Mackenzie, and made her debut as a soloist in 1874 with the Edinburgh Amateur Orchestral Society. After other successful performances and the death of her father, she relocated to study composition with Carl Reinecke in Leipzig. After successful debuts in Leipzig and London, she began regular concert to...
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Lola Gjoka
1910 - 1985 (75 years)
Lola Gjoka Aleksi was an Albanian pianist during the period of the Communist regime. Life Gjoka was born in Sevastopol in 1910, into an Albanian family. She began learning the piano at the age of six, and her success was such that her father arranged for her to have lessons from the pianist Karalovy. In 1932 her family moved to Korçë, where Gjoka worked as an accompanist for singers including the soprano Tefta Tashko-Koço, the Albanian folk singer Marie Kraja, and Mihal Ciko.
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Luella Gear
1897 - 1980 (83 years)
Luella Gear was an American actress. She appeared in numerous films, TV series and theatrical productions throughout the 1910s to the 1960s Early life Gear was born in New York in 1897. She attended the Spence School and was educated in Brussels, Belgium.
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Fanny Arthur Robinson
1831 - 1879 (48 years)
Fanny Arthur Robinson was an English pianist, music educator and composer who spent most of her career in Dublin, Ireland. Biography Fanny Robinson was born in Southampton and studied the piano in London with William Sterndale Bennett and Sigismund Thalberg. She performed in Dublin in February 1849 where she met her future husband Joseph Robinson, conductor, composer and chorister at St. Patrick's Cathedral. They married on 17 July 1849. She appeared as a pianist in London and Paris, and in 1856 made her performing debut in Ireland. She took a teaching position at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in the same year.
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Judith Raskin
1928 - 1984 (56 years)
Judith Raskin was an American lyric soprano, renowned for her fine voice as well as her acting. Life and work Raskin was born in New York to Harry A. Raskin, a high school music teacher, and Lillian Raskin, a grade school teacher. Her father aroused her childhood interest in music, leading her to study violin and piano, before she turned her focus to singing. In 1945, she graduated from Roosevelt High School, Yonkers and attended Smith College, where she majored in music. It was during her college years that she began taking singing lessons, which she continued after graduation in order to...
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Julia Perry
1924 - 1979 (55 years)
Julia Amanda Perry was an American classical composer and teacher who combined European classical and neo-classical training with her African-American heritage. Life and education Born in Lexington, Kentucky, as a child Perry moved with her family to Akron, Ohio. She went on to study voice, piano, and composition at the Westminster Choir College 1943–48. It was there that she received her B.M. and M.M. She continued on to her graduate studies at Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, where she was a student of Luigi Dallapiccola, and then later studied at the Juilliard School of Music. Around...
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Clara Kathleen Rogers
1844 - 1931 (87 years)
Clara Kathleen Barnett Rogers , was an English-born American composer, singer, writer and music educator. Early life and education Rogers was born in Cheltenham, England, into a musical family. Her grandfather, Robert Lindley, was a cellist; her father, John Barnett, was an opera composer and was the first music teacher his children had; her mother, Eliza, was a singer. At the age of twelve, her family moved to Germany to further the musical education of the children. Clara was denied acceptance to the Leipzig Conservatory, but that decision was changed in 1857 in view of her talent, making her the youngest student ever admitted.
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Alicia Urreta
1930 - 1986 (56 years)
Alicia Urreta was a Mexican pianist, music educator and composer. Biography Alicia Urreta was born in Veracruz, Veracruz. In 1952 she entered the Conservatorio Nacional de Música in Mexico City, studying harmony with Rodolfo Halffter, and other topics under Hernández Moncada, León Mariscal, and Sandor Roth. In 1969, she studied with Jean-Etienne Marie at Schola Cantorum of Paris, France. She also studied piano instruction from Alfred Brendel and Alicia de Larrocha. She later worked as a concert pianist for the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional. She also taught at the University of Mexico and was an...
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Albertine Morin-Labrecque
1886 - 1957 (71 years)
Albertine Morin-Labrecque was a Canadian pianist, soprano, composer, and music educator. Her compositional output includes 4 ballets, 2 comic operas, the Chinese opera Pas-chu, 2 concertos for two pianos, the symphonic poem Le Matin, numerous symphonic works, and compositions for band. Her works have been published by a variety of companies. A square and a street in Montreal were named after her in 1984.
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Emma Lomax
1873 - 1963 (90 years)
Louise Emily Lomax was an English composer and pianist. She was born in Brighton, daughter of the curator of Brighton Free Library and Museum. She studied at the Brighton School of Music and then at the Royal Academy of Music in London, studying composition with Frederick Corder and the clarinet. She was a Goring Thomas Scholar from 1907 to 1910 and won the Charles Lucas Medal in 1910, awarded for her Theme and Variations for orchestra.
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Helen Morgan
1900 - 1941 (41 years)
Helen Morgan was an American singer and actress who worked in films and on the stage. A quintessential torch singer, she made a big splash in the Chicago club scene in the 1920s. She starred as Julie LaVerne in the original Broadway production of Hammerstein and Kern's musical Show Boat in 1927, as well as in the 1932 Broadway revival of the musical, and appeared in two film adaptations, a part-talkie made in 1929 and a full-sound version made in 1936, becoming firmly associated with the role. She suffered from bouts of alcoholism, and despite her notable success in the title role of another Hammerstein and Kern's Broadway musical, Sweet Adeline , her stage career was relatively short.
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Sylvia Lark
1947 - 1990 (43 years)
Sylvia Lark was a Native American/Seneca artist, curator, and educator. She best known as an Abstract expressionist painter and printmaker. Lark lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years. Early life and education Lark was born in 1947 in Buffalo, New York. She went to high school at Nardin Academy in Buffalo. Lark attended school at the University of Siena; University at Buffalo where she received her B.A. degree in 1969; Mills College; and the University of Wisconsin–Madison where she received her M.A. degree in 1970 and M.F.A. degree in 1972.
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Mamie Smith
1883 - 1946 (63 years)
Mamie Smith was an American singer. As a vaudeville singer, she performed in multiple styles, including jazz and blues. In 1920, she entered blues history as the first African-American artist to make vocal blues recordings. Willie "The Lion" Smith described the background of these recordings in his autobiography Music on My Mind .
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Margarete Kupfer
1881 - 1953 (72 years)
Margarete Kupfer was a German actress. Partial filmography The Canned Bride Frau Eva The Queen's Secretary When Four Do the Same The Ballet Girl I Don't Want to Be a Man The Foreign Prince The Rosentopf Case The Seeds of Life Carmen Prince Cuckoo The Loves of Käthe Keller The Dancer Sumurun Wibbel the Tailor The Head of Janus Countess Walewska Judith Trachtenberg Waves of Life and Love A Woman's Revenge The Devil and Circe The Hunt for the Truth The Story of a Maid Children of Darkness The Devil's Chains Nathan the Wise Bigamy Only One Night Gold and Luck Nanon Girls You Don't Marry Debit and...
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Edith Farnadi
1911 - 1973 (62 years)
Edith Farnadi was a Hungarian pianist. She was born in Budapest and began her studies at the age of 7 at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music. She studied with Professor Arnold Székely . At the age of 9, she made her musical debut as a child prodigy. At the age of 12, she played Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1, directing the orchestra from the piano. She received her diploma from the Musical Academy in Budapest when she was 17 years old. During her studies at the Music Academy she won the Franz Liszt Prize twice. She became a professor at the Budapest Franz Liszt Academy where she remained until 1942.
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Philippine Schick
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Ida Philippine Eleanor Rosa Schick, married name Philippine von Waltershausen, was a German composer, pianist, conductor and university lecturer. She was one of the few female composers whose works were performed in Nazi Germany.
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Marinka Gurewich
1902 - 1990 (88 years)
Marinka Gurewich was an American voice teacher and mezzo-soprano of Jewish Czech descent. She is best remembered for teaching several successful opera singers, including Martina Arroyo, Marcia Baldwin, Grace Bumbry, Joy Clements, Ruth Falcon, Melvyn Poll, Florence Quivar, Diana Soviero, Sharon Sweet, Carol Toscano, Beverly Vaughn, and Mel Weingart among others.
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Maria Luisa Zubizarreta
1900 - Present (126 years)
Maria Luisa Zubizarreta is professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Southern California. Education and personal life Zubizarreta was born and raised in Asunción, Paraguay. She obtained her Maîtrise in General Linguistics from Paris 8 University in 1978 and her PhD in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982, with a dissertation entitled On the Relationship of the Lexicon to Syntax. She held various academic positions before arriving at the University of Southern California , where she held a position from 1988 until her retirement.
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Else Schmitz-Gohr
1901 - 1987 (86 years)
Else Schmitz-Gohr was a German composer, pianist, and teacher who is best remembered for her Elegy for the Left Hand for piano, her successful students, and her recordings of Max Reger’s works for piano.
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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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Katharine Lloyd-Williams
1896 - 1973 (77 years)
Katharine Georgina Lloyd-Williams CBE was a British anaesthetist, general practitioner and medical educator. She was a consultant anaesthetist at the Royal Free Hospital from 1934 and dean of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine from 1945, retiring from both posts in 1962.
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Gladys Pitcher
1890 - 1996 (106 years)
Gladys Pitcher was an American music editor, teacher, and composer. Biography Pitcher was born in Belfast, Maine in 1890. She attended high school in Belfast and was considered for the Boston Globe scholarship contest in 1906 and received many votes towards it, including from people who were not from Belfast. She graduated from the New England Conservatory and completed postgraduate work in theory, composition, and cello. Pitcher taught at Beloit College and directed music at schools in Bennington, Vermont and Manchester, New Hampshire. She was the music editor for C.C. Birchard Company in Boston before moving back to Belfast, Maine.
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Doris Humphrey
1895 - 1958 (63 years)
Doris Batcheller Humphrey was an American dancer and choreographer of the early twentieth century. Along with her contemporaries Martha Graham and Katherine Dunham, Humphrey was one of the second generation modern dance pioneers who followed their forerunners – including Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn – in exploring the use of breath and developing techniques still taught today. As many of her works were annotated, Humphrey continues to be taught, studied and performed.
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Louise Kaiser
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Louise Kaiser was a Dutch phonetician and linguist and the first female lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and became known for her research into the phonetic and physical-anthropological measurements on the people of Urk in the Netherlands.
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Camille Nickerson
1888 - 1982 (94 years)
Camille Lucie Nickerson was an American pianist, composer, arranger, collector, and Howard University professor from 1926 to 1962. She was influenced by Creole folksongs of Louisiana, which she arranged and sang.
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Hazel Harrison
1883 - 1969 (86 years)
Hazel Harrison was an American concert pianist. She was the first fully American-trained musician to appear with a European orchestra. Harrison was born in La Porte, Indiana, and spent most of her childhood home schooled; but she attended La Porte High School, and graduated. She began private piano training as a child of four or five years old with Richard Warren Pellow, an English organist at the First Presbyterian Church who taught music in the local public schools. In high school she began studies under German musician Victor Heinze, eventually commuting between La Porte and Chicago to continue lessons with him.
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Marion Bauer
1882 - 1955 (73 years)
Marion Eugénie Bauer was an American composer, teacher, writer, and music critic. She played an active role in shaping American musical identity in the early half of the twentieth century. As a composer, Bauer wrote for piano, chamber ensembles, symphonic orchestra, solo voice, and vocal ensembles. She gained prominence as a teacher, serving on the faculty of Washington Square College of New York University, where she taught music history and composition from 1926 to 1951. In addition to her position at NYU, Bauer was affiliated with Juilliard as a guest lecturer from 1940 until her death in 1955.
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Isobel Baillie
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Dame Isobel Baillie, , née Isabella Douglas Baillie, was a Scottish soprano. She made a local success in Manchester, where she was brought up, and in 1923 made a successful London debut. Her career, encouraged by the conductor Sir Hamilton Harty, quickly developed, with breaks in the first years for vocal study in Milan. Baillie's career was almost wholly as a concert singer: she only once acted in an opera production on stage. She was associated above all with oratorio, becoming well known for her many performances in Handel's Messiah, Haydn's The Creation, Mendelssohn's Elijah and the chor...
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Angna Enters
1897 - 1989 (92 years)
Anita "Angna" Enters was an American dancer, mime, painter, writer, novelist and playwright. She studied at the Art Students League of New York and was a 1934 Guggenheim fellow. She wrote a novel and three autobiographies as well as the films Lost Angel and Tenth Avenue Angel .
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Emily Daymond
1866 - 1949 (83 years)
Emily Rosa Daymond was an English musician. Daymond was born in Framlingham, Suffolk, the daughter of the Reverend Albert Cooke Daymond, headmaster of a boys’ school – Timsbury. She entered the Royal College of Music as a Foundation Scholar on 7 May 1883, when the College first opened, studying with Ernst Pauer , Richard Gompertz , Dr. Frederick Bridge and Dr. Hubert Parry, eventually becoming devoted disciple of Parry.
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Annie Besant
1847 - 1933 (86 years)
Annie Besant was a British socialist, theosophist, freemason, women's rights and Home Rule activist, educationist, and campaigner for Indian nationalism. She was an ardent supporter of both Irish and Indian self-rule. She became the first female president of the Indian National Congress in 1917.
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Virginia Woolf
1882 - 1941 (59 years)
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf was born into a very affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen in a blended family of eight that included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. She was home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature from a young age. From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied cla...
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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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