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,
#3251
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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Margaret Farrand Thorp
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Margaret Farrand Thorp was a writer, English professor, and journalist. Thorp published six books, including five biographies. She is most noted for her 1939 work America at the Movies and her 1949 work Female Persuasion: Six Strong-Minded Women.
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Florence Price
1887 - 1953 (66 years)
Florence Beatrice Price was an American classical composer, pianist, organist and music teacher. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price was educated at the New England Conservatory of Music, and was active in Chicago from 1927 until her death in 1953. Price is noted as the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, and the first to have a composition played by a major orchestra. Price composed over 300 works: four symphonies, four concertos, as well as choral works, art songs, chamber music and music for solo instruments. In 2009, a substantial collection of her work...
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Toni Stolper
1890 - 1988 (98 years)
Antonie "Toni" Stolper was an Austrian-German economist and journalist. She fled Europe and immigrated to the United States in 1933 and moved to Canada in 1977. Biography Stolper was born Antonie Kassowitz, daughter of and , in Vienna, Austria in 1890. She studied law in Vienna and economics in Berlin, Germany, earning her doctorate under Heinrich Herkner in 1917. In 1921, she married Gustav Stolper, the editor of a journal called Der Österreichische Volkswirt . In 1925, the couple moved to Berlin, where Gustav Stolper established a new paper, Der Deutsche Volkswirt . Toni Stolper wrote regu...
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Elisabeth Schumann
1888 - 1952 (64 years)
Elisabeth Schumann was a German lyric soprano who sang in opera, operetta, oratorio, and lieder. She left a substantial legacy of recordings. Career Born in Merseburg, Schumann trained for a singing career in Berlin and Dresden. She made her stage debut in Hamburg in 1909. Her initial career started in the lighter soubrette roles that expanded into mostly lyrical roles, some coloratura roles, and even a few dramatic roles. She remained at the Hamburg State Opera until 1919, also singing during the 1914/1915 season at the Metropolitan Opera, New York.
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Stefi Geyer
1888 - 1956 (68 years)
Stefi Geyer was a Hungarian violinist who was considered one of the leading violinists of her generation. Biography Born in 1888 in Budapest, she was the daughter of Josef Geyer, a police doctor who played the violin himself. When she was 5 years old she started playing the violin, with remarkable results for someone who had not practiced at all. She subsequently studied under Jenő Hubay.
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Etta Lemon
1860 - 1953 (93 years)
Margaretta "Etta" Louisa Lemon was an English bird conservationist and a founding member of what is now the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds . She was born into an evangelical Christian family in Kent, and after her father's death she increasingly campaigned against the use of plumage in hatmaking which had led to billions of birds being killed for their feathers. She founded the Fur, Fin and Feather Folk with Eliza Phillips in Croydon in 1889, which two years later merged with Emily Williamson's Manchester-based Society for the Protection of Birds , also founded in 1889. The new or...
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Cass Elliot
1941 - 1974 (33 years)
Ellen Naomi Cohen , known professionally as Cass Elliot, was an American singer and voice actress. She was also known as "Mama Cass", but she reportedly hated the name. She was a member of the singing group the Mamas & the Papas. After the group broke up, Elliot released five solo albums. She received the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Performance for "Monday, Monday" . In 1998, she was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for her work with the Mamas & the Papas.
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Helene Chadwick
1897 - 1940 (43 years)
Helene Chadwick was an American actress in silent and in early sound films. Early life and career Chadwick was born in the small town of Chadwicks, New York, which was named for her great-grandfather. Her parents were George W. Chadwick Jr. and Marie Louise Norton Chadwick. Her mother was a singer who performed on the stage and her father was a business man.
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Marilyn Monroe
1926 - 1962 (36 years)
Marilyn Monroe was an American actress and model. Known for playing comic "blonde bombshell" characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as an emblem of the era's sexual revolution. She was a top-billed actress for a decade, and her films grossed $200 million by the time of her death in 1962. Long after her death, Monroe remains a pop culture icon. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her as the sixth-greatest female screen legend from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
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Ethel Clayton
1882 - 1966 (84 years)
Ethel Clayton was an American actress of the silent film era. Early years Born in Champaign, Illinois, Clayton attended St. Elizabeth's school in Chicago. Career Clayton debuted on stage as a professional as a member of the chorus in a production at the Chicago Opera House. After that, she worked with stock theater companies in Milwaukee and Minneapolis.
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Nadia Reisenberg
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
Nadia Reisenberg Sherman was an American pianist of Lithuanian birth. Biography Nadia Reisenberg was born in Vilnius to a Jewish family. Her parents were Aaron and Rachel Reisenberg. Her sister Anna was born two years later, and Clara in 1911 who later took the married name of Clara Rockmore and became renowned for her virtuosity on the theremin. The three sisters remained extremely close. When Nadia was six, her uncle Paul sent the family a piano, and Nadia immediately knew she would be at the keyboard for the rest of her life. Her talent demanded that the family move to St. Petersburg for ...
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Alice Blinn
1889 - 1982 (93 years)
Alice Blinn was an American educator, home efficiency expert, and magazine editor. Born in Candor, New York, she attended the New York State normal school and became a teacher. After teaching briefly, in 1913, she entered Cornell University and earned a degree in Domestic Science. While in school, she founded and managed the Cornell Women's Review. After graduation in 1917, she became a food conservation demonstrator for the New York Extension Service and then returned after a year to teach and manage the publications office for the Extension Service at Cornell.
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Mabel Normand
1892 - 1930 (38 years)
Amabel Ethelreid Normand , better known as Mabel Normand, was an American silent film actress, director and screenwriter. She was a popular star and collaborator of Mack Sennett in their Keystone Studios films, and at the height of her career in the late 1910s and early 1920s had her own film studio and production company, the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company. On screen, she appeared in twelve successful films with Charlie Chaplin and seventeen with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, sometimes writing and directing films featuring Chaplin as her leading man. In the 1920s Normand's name was linked wit...
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Chung Chil-sung
1897 - 1958 (61 years)
Chung Chil-sung , also known by her pen name Geumjuk , was a Korean dancer, feminist, and independence activist. Biography She was born in Daegu province, one of twenty three provinces of the Joseon kingdom. It was said that she came from a poor family. Her exact birth year is questioned often as others say she was born in 1902, 1905, and 1908, but others say that 1897 seems to be more appropriate. There are no details about her childhood or her family clan.
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Marie Tempest
1864 - 1942 (78 years)
Dame Mary Susan Etherington, , known professionally as Marie Tempest, was an English singer and actress. Tempest became a famous soprano in late Victorian light opera and Edwardian musical comedies. Later, she became a leading comic actress and toured widely in North America and elsewhere. She was, at times, her own theatre manager during a career spanning 55 years. She was also instrumental in the founding of the actors' union Equity in Britain.
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Liane Haid
1895 - 2000 (105 years)
Juliane "Liane" Haid was an Austrian actress and singer. She has often been referred to as Austria's first movie star. Biography Juliane Haid was born in Vienna on 16 August 1895, the first child to Georg Haid and Juliane Haid . She had two younger sisters, Grit, who also became an actress, and Johanna .
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Winifred Copperwheat
1905 - 1976 (71 years)
Winifred May Copperwheat was an English classical viola player and teacher. She studied under English violist Lionel Tertis at the Royal Academy of Music. Tertis later said after one of her recitals, that she had "played like an angel".
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Tosca Kramer
1903 - 1976 (73 years)
Tosca Berger Kramer was a New Zealand-born American violinist and violist. Kramer, along with her parents, was instrumental in bringing classical music performance and instruction to the state of Oklahoma.
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Annelies Kupper
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Annelies Kupper , was a German operatic soprano, particularly associated with Mozart and the German repertory. Kupper was born at Glatz in Lower Silesia. She studied in Breslau and was a music teacher there before making her operatic debut in 1935. She then appeared in Schwerin , Weimar , Hamburg , Munich . She sang Eva in Die Meistersinger at the Bayreuth festival, in 1944, and returned as Elsa in Lohengrin in 1960. She created Danae in Richard Strauss's Die Liebe der Danae at the Salzburg festival, in 1952.
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Myrna Sharlow
1893 - 1952 (59 years)
Myrna Docia Sharlow was an American soprano who had an active performance career in operas and concerts during the 1910s through the 1930s. She began her career in 1912 with the Boston Opera Company and became one of Chicago's more active sopranos from 1915–1920, and again in 1923–1924 and 1926–1927. She sang with several other important American opera companies during her career, including one season at the Metropolitan Opera. She made only a handful of opera appearances in Europe during her career, most notably singing in the English premiere of Riccardo Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini at Covent Garden in 1914.
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Ania Dorfmann
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
Ania Dorfmann was a Russian-American pianist and teacher, who taught at the Juilliard School in New York for many years and was the first of only a very few women pianists to play or record under Arturo Toscanini.
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Rosina Buckman
1881 - 1948 (67 years)
Rosina Buckman was a New Zealand soprano who became a prima donna during World War I and later a professor of singing at the Royal Academy of Music. She was born in Blenheim, grew up mostly in the North Island and went to England when still a teenager to get a formal singing education from Charles Swinnerton Heap. After Heap's death, she moved to the Birmingham School of Music. Graduating in 1903, she could immediately sustain herself from singing engagements but fell ill and returned to New Zealand the following year. She advanced her career in the country of her birth and had her operatic debut in 1905.
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Miriam Bernstein-Cohen
1895 - 1991 (96 years)
Miriam Bernstein-Cohen , 1895–1991, was an Israeli actress, director, poet and translator. Miriam Bernstein-Cohen was born in Kishinev, Russian Empire. Her father was the doctor and community activist Jacob Bernstein-Kogan. She grew up in Kharkov. After training as a medical doctor she enrolled in drama school. She studied with Konstantin Stanislavski in Moscow in 1918 before returning to Moldova as an actress, where she worked under the name Maria Alexandrova.
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Judy Canova
1913 - 1983 (70 years)
Judy Canova , born Juliette Canova , was an American comedienne, actress, singer, and radio personality. She appeared on Broadway and in films. She hosted her own self-titled network radio program, a popular series broadcast from 1943 to 1955.
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Mary Jarred
1899 - 1993 (94 years)
Mary Jarred was an English opera singer of the mid-twentieth century. She is sometimes classed as a mezzo-soprano and sometimes as a contralto. Biography Jarred was born in Brotton, Yorkshire, , and studied at the Royal College of Music.
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Lucille Bogan
1897 - 1948 (51 years)
Lucille Bogan was an American classic female blues singer and songwriter, among the first to be recorded. She also recorded under the pseudonym Bessie Jackson. Music critic Ernest Borneman noted that Bogan was one of "the big three of the blues", along with Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Many of Bogan's songs have been recorded by later blues and jazz musicians.
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Hibari Misora
1937 - 1989 (52 years)
Hibari Misora was a Japanese singer, actress and cultural icon. She received a Medal of Honor for her contributions to music and for improving the welfare of the public, and was the first woman to receive the People's Honour Award, which was conferred posthumously for giving the public hope and encouragement after World War II.
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Eleanor Sophia Smith
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Eleanor Sophia Smith was an American composer and music educator. She was one of the founders of Chicago's Hull House Music School, and headed its music department from 1893 to 1936. Born into a musical family, Smith taught herself to play the piano and later became a classically trained musician. Earning a teaching degree, she began publishing music compositions for children using the philosophy of Friedrich Fröbel, advocating for less memorization and drilling and more attention to intuitive appreciation of music. Studying composition and voice in Germany, she also toured the country observ...
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