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,
#3251
Kemp Stillings
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Katharine Kemp Stillings was a violinist, composer, and music educator. Early life Katharine Kemp Stillings was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and began studying violin from a very early age. She went to Berlin to study with Joseph Joachim, and to Saint Petersburg for further studies with Leopold Auer.
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Ellen Ballon
1898 - 1969 (71 years)
Ellen Ballon was a Canadian pianist. The daughter of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants, she was born in Montreal, Quebec. A child prodigy, she gave her first concert at the age of five and began studying music at the McGill Conservatorium with Clara Lichtenstein at the age of six.
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Annie Patterson
1868 - 1934 (66 years)
Annie Wilson Patterson was an Irish organist, music educator, writer, composer, and arranger. Life Annie Patterson was born in Lurgan, County Armagh, Ireland, and was related through her mother's family to Lord Macaulay. She made her debut performance in Dublin at age fifteen, studied at Alexandra College and the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin , and received her doctorate in 1889, becoming the first Irish or British woman to hold a Doctorate of Music. After she completed her studies, she became an examiner for the Royal University of Ireland and worked as an organist and conductor of the Dublin Choral Union and the Hampstead Harmonic Society.
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Ella Sheppard
1851 - 1914 (63 years)
Ella Sheppard was an American soprano, pianist, composer, and arranger of spiritualss. She was the matriarch of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers of Nashville, Tennessee. She also played the organ and the guitar. Sheppard was a friend and confidante of African-American activists and orators Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass.
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Bertha Lewis
1887 - 1931 (44 years)
Bertha Amy Lewis was an English opera singer and actress primarily known for her work as principal contralto in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. Life and career
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Lulu Vere Childers
1870 - 1946 (76 years)
Lulu Vere Childers was an African-American music educator. Born in Dry Ridge, Kentucky, she graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory in 1896, and in 1905 joined the faculty of Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she is accredited with initiating the Conservatory of Music in 1913 and School of Music in 1918. Childers ran the Howard University Choral Society; over the years they performed works such as Handel's Messiah in 1919. She was musical director of the university from 1905 until 1942. She was a friend of singer Marian Anderson.
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Helen Frances Gregor
1921 - 1989 (68 years)
Helen Frances Gregor was a Czechoslovakian-Canadian artist who specialised in textile art. Career Gregor was born in Prague in Czechoslovakia, the daughter of Fred and Lily Lorenz. She was considering a career in theatrical design, but moved with her family to England in 1940 to escape the Second World War. She studied art at Newark Technical College, Birmingham College of Art, and at the Royal College of Art's School of Design in London. She exhibited at the Czechoslovak Club, and at Liberty's of London. She also studied at the American School of Craftsmen in Rochester, New York.
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Olga Steeb
1886 - 1941 (55 years)
Olga Steeb was an American pianist and music educator, based in Los Angeles, California. Early life Olga Steeb was the daughter of Carl Egon Steeb and Sophie S. Steeb, both German immigrants living in Los Angeles. Her father, a French horn player, was said to have taught his daughter to memorize hundreds of compositions as a child, and she was performing in concerts by 1904. She studied piano with Thilo Becker.
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Osceola Macarthy Adams
1890 - 1983 (93 years)
Osceola Macarthy Adams was an American actress, drama teacher, director, and clothing designer. She was one of the 22 founders of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. Born to a life insurance executive in Albany, Georgia, Macarthy was mixed with European, Native American, and African-American heritage. She attended schools in Albany, Georgia including Albany Normal School, a predecessor to Albany State University, and then attended Fisk University’s Preparatory School. Later, she attended Howard University, where she studied ancient Greek and philosophy. After graduating from Howard, Osceola marrie...
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Sara Cahier
1875 - 1951 (76 years)
Sara Charles-Cahier or Madame Charles Cahier was an American-born Swedish mezzo-soprano or contralto singer in opera and lieder, singing primarily in Europe. The American-born Cahier later acquired Swedish citizenship. She was associated with Gustav Mahler, and was one of the soloists in the posthumous premiere of his Das Lied von der Erde in 1911. She sang at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and was a teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her students included Marian Anderson.
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Emelie Hooke
1912 - 1974 (62 years)
Emelie Victoria Georgina Hooke was an Australian soprano who was notable in opera, oratorio and concert, and sang in Australia, England, Europe and South Africa. Early life Hooke was born in 1912 in Melbourne, where she was schooled. Her advanced musical training was at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. She sang frequently in opera and oratorio in Australia, and for two years was engaged by the Australian Broadcasting Commission. In 1931 and 1932 she sang in Handel's Messiah with the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic; the latter performance was with John Brownlee, the orchestra being conducted by Bernard Heinze.
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Carol Brice
1918 - 1985 (67 years)
Carol Brice was an American contralto. Born in Sedalia, North Carolina, she studied at Palmer Memorial Institute and later at Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama, where she received a Bachelor of Music in 1939. She continued her studies at the Juilliard School of Music from 1939 to 1943. She attracted considerable attention for her role in a 1939 production of The Hot Mikado at the New York World's Fair, where she worked with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. Brice made her recital debut in 1943, that year becoming the first African-American to win the Walter Naumburg Award. Her concerts often featured the piano accompaniment of her brother, Jonathan Brice.
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Beatrice Irwin
1888 - 1956 (68 years)
Beatrice Irwin was an actress, poet, designer and promoter of the Baháʼí Faith. Born Alice Beatrice Simpson, she took Beatrice Irwin as her stage name and later adopted it as her real name. After her family moved to Scotland and then to England, she attended Cheltenham Ladies' College where she graduated 1895 and took the Associate in Arts test in which she placed 5th for that year. She went on through a series of careers starting with being an actor in stage theatre which took her to Cape Colony, as it was known then, touring America, briefly in the then young country of Australia, and performed in Shanghai.
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Irma Wolpe Rademacher
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Irma Wolpe Rademacher , née Schoenberg, was a Romanian-born American pianist and teacher. Life and career She was born in 1902 in Galați, Western Moldavia, Romania, into a bourgeois Jewish family, the third of four children. In 1910 the family moved to Iași , where her father, Jacob Schoenberg , was offered the position of vice president with the newly formed Banca Moldova. Her mother, Rachel Schoenberg née Segall , conversant in many languages, was a gifted essayist and poet. Both parents were Zionists and eminently active in the Jewish community life. They were closely connected with leading...
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Polyna Savridi
Polyna Savridi was an American operatic soprano and voice teacher. As a singer she was primarily active on the international stage during the 1960s, and only performed infrequently afterwards. She taught briefly on the voice faculties of Columbia University and the Jacobs School of Music during the early 1960s before settling at the University of Calgary where she was a professor of voice from 1963 until her death from cancer seventeen years later. She is best remembered for her recordings of Greek folk songs for Concord Records and as a winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Audit...
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Liesel Schuch-Ganzel
1891 - 1990 (99 years)
Elisabeth Franziska von Schuch-Ganzel also Liesel von Schuch, Liesel Schuch-Ganzel, née von Schuch Life Born in Dresden, Schuch grew up with her parents, the conductor Ernst von Schuch and the opera singer Clementine von Schuch-Proska, in Niederlößnitz . She was a sister of the soprano Käthe von Schuch-Schmidt and the violoncellist Hans von Schuch.
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Regina Vicarino
1885 - 1957 (72 years)
Regina Vicarino was an American soprano opera singer. Early life Reine Annette Vicarino was born in New York City, the daughter of Edouard Joseph Vicarino and Leontine Camille Serre Vicarino. Her father was born in Switzerland; her mother was born in New York, to French-born parents. Reine studied voice with Delia Valeri, and with Arthur Lawrason in New York.
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Nelli Gardini
1877 - 1970 (93 years)
Grace Nelson Stensland, better known as Nellie Gardini or Madame Gardini was an American singer and educator. She was known for her opera singing and for working as the head of the voice department of the Chicago Musical College.
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Helene Wildbrunn
1882 - 1972 (90 years)
Leonore Helene Wildbrunn was an Austrian operatic soprano. She was a celebrated Wagnerian singer, possessing a wide vocal range and dramatic creativity and fine sense of style. She made her debut in 1907 at the Stadttheater Dortmund as a contralto and mezzo-soprano. She performed at the Stuttgart Court Opera from 1914 to 1918, the Berlin State Opera from 1919 to 1925, the Städtische Oper Berlin from 1925 to 1932, and the Vienna State Opera from 1919 until 1932. From 1932 to 1950, she only appeared as a concert singer, and taught at the Vienna Music Academy as a professor.
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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.
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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.
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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" .
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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...
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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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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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