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,
#3201
Trixie Smith
1895 - 1943 (48 years)
Trixie Smith was an American blues singer. She made four dozen recordings. Biography Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Smith came from a middle-class background. Various years are given for her birth including 1885, 1888, and 1895. She attended Selma University, in Alabama, before moving to New York City at the age of twenty around 1915. Soon after, she began working in a number of different cafés and theaters in Harlem and Philadelphia.
Go to Profile#3202
Cecilia Clare Bocard
1899 - 1994 (95 years)
Sister Cecilia Clare Bocard, S.P., was an American musician and composer of works for organ, piano, and chorus. Born Frances Ada Bocard in New Albany, Indiana, she began studying piano in first grade and organ in third grade. Bocard began as her parish's organist at the early age of nine. She entered the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods in 1916 at the age of 17, taking the religious name Sister Cecilia Clare. In addition to her composing work, Bocard taught piano, organ, composition and theory at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College Conservatory of Music for 47 years. Beginning in 1970, she served as organist at the Church of the Immaculate Conception until her death in 1994.
Go to Profile#3203
Tina Lerner
1889 - 2000 (111 years)
Tina Lerner was a Russian-American concert pianist born in Odessa. Early life Valentina Osipovna Lerner was the daughter of Yiddish writers Osip Mikhailovich Lerner and Mariam Rabinovitch. She showed musical promise from an early age, in her birthplace, Odessa. She studied at Moscow Conservatory and with Leopold Godowsky, and began performing while still a teenager.
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Henrietta Myers
1878 - 1968 (90 years)
Henrietta Crawley Myers, a.k.a. "Mrs. James A. Myers" was a singer and choral director, primarily known for her work as director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Nashville, Tennessee. Early life Henrietta Crawley was born November 10, 1878, in Nashville, Tennessee, the oldest of 10 children born to Thomas Edward and Mary Jane Crawley. She was educated in the public schools of Nashville, and later at Fisk University. She began her career as a Fisk Jubilee Singer under the direction of John W. Work II.
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Eliza Mazzucato Young
1846 - 1937 (91 years)
Eliza Mazzucato Young was an Italian-born American composer, musician, and educator. She wrote Mr. Sampson of Omaha , one of the first operas by a woman to be produced in the United States. Early life Elisa Mazzucato was born in Milan, the daughter of opera composer Alberto Mazzucato and Teresa Bolza, a daughter of Count , Austrian police commissioner in Milan.
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Katarina Jovanović
1869 - 1954 (85 years)
Katarina A. Jovanović was a Serbian translator, literary historian, publicist, philosopher, journalist and humanitarian. She translated into German Petar II Petrović Njegoš's masterpiece "Mountain Wreath" .
Go to Profile#3207
Elisabeth Kuyper
1877 - 1953 (76 years)
Elisabeth Johanna Lamina Kuyper was a Dutch Romantic composer and conductor. Life Elisabeth Kuyper was born in Amsterdam, the eldest of three children. At the age of twelve, she began the formal study of music at the Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst with Antoon Averkamp, Louis Coenen, and Daniel de Lange. She began composing at an early age, including a piano sonata and a prelude and fugue, which she performed for her diploma examination in 1895, and a one-act opera that was performed in Amsterdam in 1895. She moved to Berlin in 1896 to continue her composition studies with Heinrich...
Go to Profile#3208
Han Young-suk
1920 - 1990 (70 years)
Han Young-suk , was an Ingan-munhwage for the Seungmu and Hakmu, which is an Important Intangible Cultural Properties of Korea. She was designated on July 4, 1969. She was a master of Korean dance especially Seungmu, Hakmu, Taepyeongmu and Salpuri. She used Byeoksa as a pseudonym.
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Auguste Götze
1840 - 1908 (68 years)
Auguste Götze was a German classical singer, actress, playwright, and a distinguished voice teacher. Götze was born in Weimar where she initially trained in music with her father, the tenor Franz Götze. In her later years, she had her own singing school in Leipzig as well as teaching in the conservatory there. She died in Leipzig at the age of 68 after several years of increasingly poor health.
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Anna Granville Hatcher
1905 - 1978 (73 years)
Anna Granville Hatcher was an American linguist. She started her career as a Romance linguist, and later conducted research in medieval literature as well as branching out from Late Latin and Old French to studies on Provençal, Spanish, Italian, English, and German. She was the first woman to hold the position of full professor at Johns Hopkins University.
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Nora Bayes
1880 - 1928 (48 years)
Nora Bayes was an American singer and vaudeville performer who was popular internationally between the 1900s and 1920s. She is credited with co-writing the song "Shine On, Harvest Moon" and performed many successful songs during the First World War, including "Over There." She was also noted for her independent views and unconventional private life, becoming an early media celebrity. She made over 160 recordings.
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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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Diana Archangeli
1900 - Present (126 years)
Diana B. Archangeli is an American linguist and Professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. She earned her M.A. at the University of Texas-Austin in 1981, and her PhD from MIT in 1984, with a dissertation entitled, "Underspecification in Yawelmani Phonology and Morphology." Her dissertation was selected for publication in Garland's Outstanding Dissertation series .
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Ruth Murray
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Ruth Lovell Murray was a pioneer in the field of dance education. Early life and education Ruth L. Murray was born on October 20, 1900, in Detroit, Michigan. She attended Teachers College, Columbia University and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1925. She earned her master's degree from that university in 1933.
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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...
Go to Profile#3222
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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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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Hanya Holm
1893 - 1992 (99 years)
Hanya Holm is known as one of the "Big Four" founders of American modern dance. She was a dancer, choreographer, and above all, a dance educator. Early life, connection with Mary Wigman Born as Johanna Eckert on 3 March 1893 in Worms, Rhineland-Palatinate, German Empire. Holm was drawn to music and drama at an early age, she attended the Dalcroze Institute of Applied Rhythm in Frankfurt, studying under Emile Jaques-Dalcroze throughout her childhood and young adult life.
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Madeleine Carroll
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Edith Madeleine Carroll was an English actress, popular both in Britain and America in the 1930s and 1940s. At the peak of her success in 1938, she was the world's highest-paid actress. Carroll is remembered for starring in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps where she originated the "ice cold blonde" role in Hitchcock films. The director stated, "how very well Madeleine fitted into the part. I had heard a lot about her as a tall, cold, blonde beauty. After meeting her, I made up my mind to present her to the public as her natural self". She is also noted for largely abandoning her acting career...
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Marion Davies
1897 - 1961 (64 years)
Marion Davies was an American actress, producer, screenwriter, and philanthropist. Educated in a religious convent, Davies fled the school to pursue a career as a chorus girl. As a teenager, she appeared in several Broadway musicals and one film, Runaway Romany . She soon became a featured performer in the Ziegfeld Follies.
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Ellen Terry
1847 - 1928 (81 years)
Dame Alice Ellen Terry was a leading English actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born into a family of actors, Terry began performing as a child, acting in Shakespeare plays in London, and toured throughout the British provinces in her teens. At 16, she married the 46-year-old artist George Frederic Watts, but they separated within a year. She soon returned to the stage but began a relationship with the architect Edward William Godwin and retired from the stage for six years. She resumed acting in 1874 and was immediately acclaimed for her portrayal of roles in Shakespeare and...
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Carolyn Leigh
1926 - 1983 (57 years)
Carolyn Leigh was an American lyricist for Broadway, film, and popular songs. She is best known as the writer with partner Cy Coleman of the pop standards "Witchcraft" and "The Best Is Yet to Come". With Johnny Richards, she wrote the million-seller "Young at Heart" for the film of the same name, starring Frank Sinatra.
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Sarah Vaughan
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
Sarah Lois Vaughan was an American jazz singer and pianist. Nicknamed "Sassy" and "The Divine One", she won two Grammy Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, and was nominated for a total of nine Grammy Awards. She was given an NEA Jazz Masters Award in 1989. Critic Scott Yanow wrote that she had "one of the most wondrous voices of the 20th century".
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Clara Schumann
1819 - 1896 (77 years)
Clara Josephine Schumann was a German pianist, composer, and piano teacher. Regarded as one of the most distinguished pianists of the Romantic era, she exerted her influence over the course of a 61-year concert career, changing the format and repertoire of the piano recital by lessening the importance of purely virtuosic works. She also composed solo piano pieces, a piano concerto , chamber music, choral pieces, and songs.
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Wanda Landowska
1879 - 1959 (80 years)
Wanda Aleksandra Landowska was a Polish harpsichordist and pianist whose performances, teaching, writings and especially her many recordings played a large role in reviving the popularity of the harpsichord in the early 20th century. She was the first person to record Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations on the harpsichord in 1933. She became a naturalized French citizen in 1938.
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E. Adelaide Hahn
1893 - 1967 (74 years)
Emma Adelaide Hahn was an American linguist and classicist who specialized in Latin grammar and Indo-European linguistics. She served as chair of the Hunter College Classics department for twenty-seven years and was the first woman to serve as president of the Linguistic Society of America.
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Dorothy Day
1897 - 1980 (83 years)
Dorothy Day was an American journalist, social activist and anarchist who, after a bohemian youth, became a Catholic without abandoning her social and anarchist activism. She was perhaps the best-known political radical among American Catholics.
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Marguerite Long
1874 - 1966 (92 years)
Marguerite Marie-Charlotte Long was a French pianist, pedagogue, lecturer, and an ambassador of French music. Life Early life: 1874–1900 Marguerite Long was born to Pierre Long and Anne Marie Antoinette on November 13, 1874, in Nîmes, an old Roman town in the south of France. Long's parents were not musicians, but her mother highly emphasized the importance of music and "little Marguerite was not allowed to play wrong notes." Her sister, Claire Long, eight years older, was actually the person who influenced her in the pursuit of music. In 1883, at age seventeen, Claire was appointed Professo...
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Jean Harlow
1911 - 1937 (26 years)
Jean Harlow was an American actress. Known for her portrayal of "bad girl" characters, she was the leading sex symbol of the early 1930s and one of the defining figures of the pre-Code era of American cinema. Often nicknamed the "Blonde Bombshell" and the "Platinum Blonde", Harlow was popular for her "Laughing Vamp" screen persona. Harlow was in the film industry for only nine years, but she became one of Hollywood's biggest movie stars, whose image in the public eye has endured. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Harlow number 22 on its greatest female screen legends of classical Ho...
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Marian Anderson
1897 - 1993 (96 years)
Marian Anderson was an American contralto. She performed a wide range of music, from opera to spirituals. Anderson performed with renowned orchestras in major concert and recital venues throughout the United States and Europe between 1925 and 1965.
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Eleonora Duse
1858 - 1924 (66 years)
Eleonora Giulia Amalia Duse , often known simply as Duse, was an Italian actress, rated by many as the greatest of her time. She performed in many countries, notably in the plays of Gabriele D'Annunzio and Henrik Ibsen. Duse achieved a unique power of conviction and verity on the stage through intense absorption in the character, "eliminating the self" as she put it, and letting the qualities emerge from within, not imposed through artifice.
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Adelina Patti
1843 - 1919 (76 years)
Adelina Patti was an Italian opera singer, earning huge fees at the height of her career in the music capitals of Europe and America in the 19th century. She first sang in public as a child in 1851, and gave her last performance before an audience in 1914. Along with her near contemporaries Jenny Lind and Thérèse Tietjens, Patti remains one of the most famous sopranos in history, owing to the purity and beauty of her lyrical voice and the unmatched quality of her bel canto technique.
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Celia Johnson
1908 - 1982 (74 years)
Dame Celia Elizabeth Johnson, was an English actress, whose career included stage, television and film. She is especially known for her roles in the films In Which We Serve , This Happy Breed , Brief Encounter and The Captain's Paradise . For Brief Encounter, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. A six-time BAFTA Award nominee, she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie .
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Françoise Rosay
1891 - 1974 (83 years)
Françoise Rosay was a French opera singer, diseuse, and actress who enjoyed a film career of over sixty years and who became a legendary figure in French cinema. She went on to appear in over 100 movies in her career.
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Lupe Vélez
1908 - 1944 (36 years)
María Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez , known professionally as Lupe Vélez, was a Mexican actress, singer, and dancer during the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. Vélez began her career as a performer in Mexican vaudeville in the early 1920s. After moving to the United States, she made her first film appearance in a short in 1927. By the end of the decade, she was acting in full-length silent films and had progressed to leading roles in The Gaucho , Lady of the Pavements and Wolf Song , among others. Vélez made the transition to sound films without difficulty. She was one of the first successful Mexican actresses in Hollywood.
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Jane Ingham
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Rose Marie "Jane" Ingham was an English botanist and scientific translator. She was appointed research assistant to Joseph Hubert Priestley in the Botany Department at the University of Leeds, and together, they were the first to separate cell walls from the root tip of broad beans. They analysed these cell walls and concluded that they contained protein. She carried out experiments on the cork layer of trees to study how cells function under a change of orientation and found profound differences in cell division and elongation in the epidermal layer of plants.
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Alice Guy-Blaché
1873 - 1968 (95 years)
Alice Ida Antoinette Guy-Blaché was a French pioneer filmmaker. She was one of the first filmmakers to make a narrative fiction film, as well as the first woman to direct a film. From 1896 to 1906, she was probably the only female filmmaker in the world. She experimented with Gaumont's Chronophone sync-sound system, and with color-tinting, interracial casting, and special effects.
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