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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#5001
Christopher Ryan
#82783
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Christopher Ryan is a British actor best known for his roles as Mike TheCoolPerson in the BBC comedy series The Young Ones, Dave Hedgehog in the BBC comedy series Bottom, Tony Driscoll in the BBC comedy series Only Fools and Horses, and as Edina Monsoon's ex-husband Marshall Turtle in the BBC sitcom Absolutely Fabulous. He has also appeared as the McKendrick twins in One Foot in the Grave, and played Sontaran General Staal in Doctor Who in 2008.
Go to Profile#5002
R. Murray Schafer
#40376
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Raymond Murray Schafer was a Canadian composer, writer, music educator, and environmentalist perhaps best known for his World Soundscape Project, concern for acoustic ecology, and his book The Tuning of the World . He was the first recipient of the Jules Léger Prize in 1978.
Go to Profile#5003
Chris Elliott
#50944
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Christopher Nash Elliott is an American actor, comedian, writer, director, and author. He appeared in comedic sketches on Late Night with David Letterman , created and starred in the comedy series Get a Life on Fox, and wrote and starred in the film Cabin Boy . His writing has won four consecutive Primetime Emmy Awards. His other television appearances include recurring roles on Everybody Loves Raymond and How I Met Your Mother , starring as Chris Monsanto in Adult Swim's Eagleheart and starring as Roland Schitt in Schitt's Creek . He also appeared in the film Groundhog Day , There's Somet...
Go to Profile#5004
Lester Mendez
#66801
Overall Influence
Lester Mendez is a multi-platinum, Grammy award-winning record producer, songwriter and composer. His production/writing credits include a multitude of successful hits with Shakira, Jewel, Nelly Furtado, Jessica Simpson, Enrique Iglesias, and others.
Go to Profile#5005
Mohammad Sadeqi Tehrani
#32279
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Sadeqi Tehrani was an Iranian Twelver Shi'a Marja. He has studied in seminaries of Qum, Iran under Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Muhammad Husayn Tabatabaei. He died on March 21, 2011, at the age of 85.
Go to Profile#5006
Gabriella Ambrosio
#64788
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Gabriella Ambrosio is an Italian writer, journalist, academic, and advertising creative director. Her essays Siamo Quel che Diciamo and Le Nuove Terre della Pubblicita are required advertising texts in several universities in Italy. Her first novel, Prima di Lasciarsi , related to a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, has been translated into several languages including Hebrew and Arabic.
Go to Profile#5007
Lynne Murphy
#105639
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
M. Lynne Murphy is a professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex. She runs the blog Separated by a Common Language under the username Lynneguist and has written five books. Studies Murphy has a B.A. in Linguistics and Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as well as an A.M. and PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Go to Profile#5008
John Henson
#56294
Overall Influence
1965 - 2014 (49 years)
John Paul Henson was an American puppeteer, best known for his association with the Muppets. Early years Henson was the son of puppeteer Jim Henson , best known as the creator of the Muppets, and Jane Henson , who assisted in the launch of the Muppets. He had four siblings: Lisa , Cheryl , Brian and Heather .
Go to Profile#5009
Yma Sumac
#77048
Overall Influence
1922 - 2008 (86 years)
Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo , known as Yma Sumac , was a Peruvian-born vocalist, composer, producer, actress and model. "Ima sumaq" means "how beautiful" in Quechua. She has also been called Queen of Exotica and is considered a pioneer of world music. She won a Guinness World Record for the Greatest Range of Musical Value in 1956. Her debut album, Voice of the Xtabay , peaked at number one in the Billboard 200, and its single, "Virgin of the Sun God ", reached number one on the UK Singles Chart. It sold a million copies worldwide, becoming an international success in the 1950s.
Go to Profile#5010
Mark Williams
#75416
Overall Influence
Mark Williams is an American film director, writer, and producer. Selected filmography Film Television External links
Go to Profile#5011
Bobby Thompson
#54845
Overall Influence
1937 - 2005 (68 years)
Bobby Thompson was an American banjoist and guitarist. He worked as a session musician from the 1960s through 1980s. He recorded with Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Neil Young, Perry Como, among others.
Go to Profile#5012
Guy Clark
#52132
Overall Influence
1941 - 2016 (75 years)
Guy Charles Clark was an American folk and country singer-songwriter and luthier. He released more than 20 albums, and his songs have been recorded by other artists, including Jerry Jeff Walker, Jimmy Buffett, Kathy Mattea, Lyle Lovett, Ricky Skaggs, Steve Wariner, Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Nanci Griffith and Chris Stapleton. He won the 2014 Grammy Award for Best Folk Album: My Favorite Picture of You.
Go to Profile#5013
Debbie Harry
#67202
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Deborah Ann Harry is an American singer, songwriter and actress, best known as the lead vocalist of the band Blondie. Four of her songs with the band reached on the US charts between 1979 and 1981.
Go to Profile#5014
Friedrich Cerha
#72013
Overall Influence
1926 - 2023 (97 years)
Friedrich Cerha was an Austrian composer, conductor, and academic teacher. His ensemble in Vienna was instrumental in spreading contemporary music in Austria. He composed several operas, beginning with Baal, based on Brecht's play. He is best known for completing Alban Berg's opera Lulu by orchestrating its unfinished third act, which premiered in Paris in 1979.
Go to Profile#5015
Laura Wright
#106738
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Laura Wright is a professor of English at Western Carolina University. Wright proposed vegan studies as a new academic field, and her 2015 book The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror served as the foundational text of the discipline. As of 2021 she had edited two collections of articles about vegan studies.
Go to Profile#5016
Michael Gordon
#82052
Overall Influence
1909 - 1993 (84 years)
Michael Gordon was an American stage actor and stage and film director. Life and career Gordon was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Jewish parents: Paul Luis Gordon , who was born in Lithuania, and Eva "Rachel" Kuhen , who was born in Russia. Michael was the second of three boys born to the Gordon family; first born was Bertram Ira Gordon , who was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, and the third born was Leo Allenby Gordon .
Go to Profile#5017
Sara Mills
#84457
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Sara Mills is Emeritus Professor in Linguistics at Sheffield Hallam University, England. Her linguistic interests are the comparison of linguistic forms of expression in different languages, particularly in reference to politeness. Her other major work area is feminism.
Go to Profile#5018
Marcel Mauri
#78195
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Marcel Mauri de los Rios is a journalist and historian, former vice president and spokesman of Òmnium Cultural. Biography Mauri was born in 1977 in Badalona. As a teenager, he studied in the Escola Jungfrau and in the Institut La Llauna in Badalona.
Go to Profile#5019
Hans Hotter
#80626
Overall Influence
1909 - 2003 (94 years)
Hans Hotter was a German operatic bass-baritone. He stood and his appearance was striking. His voice and diction were equally recognisable. Early life and career Born in Offenbach am Main, Hesse, Hotter studied with Matthäus Roemer in Munich. He worked as an organist and choirmaster before making his operatic debut in Opava in 1930.
Go to Profile#5020
Knut Nystedt
#95679
Overall Influence
1915 - 2014 (99 years)
Knut Nystedt was a Norwegian orchestral and choral composer. Early life Nystedt was born in Kristiania , Norway, and grew up in a Christian home where hymns and classical music were an important part of everyday life. His major compositions for choir and vocal soloists are mainly based on texts from the Bible or sacred themes. Old church music, especially Palestrina and Gregorian chants, have had a major influence on his compositions.
Go to Profile#5021
Mike Walker
#66820
Overall Influence
1946 - 2018 (72 years)
Mike Walker was an American radio personality and gossip columnist for The National Enquirer, and hosted the magazine's 1999–2001 MGM-produced newsmagazine, National Enquirer TV. He was also the author of the 2005 book, Rather Dumb: A Top Tabloid Reporter Tells CBS How to Do News.
Go to Profile#5022
Nuri Bilge Ceylan
#51299
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a Turkish director, screenwriter, photographer and actor. His film Winter Sleep won the Palme d'Or at the 67th Cannes Film Festival, while six of his films have been selected as Turkey's submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.
Go to Profile#5023
Creighton Burns
#68714
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Creighton Lee Burns, AO was an Australian journalist and academic, who was editor-in-chief of The Age newspaper in Melbourne from 1981 to 1989. Early life and naval career Born in Melbourne, Burns attended Scotch College, and at the age of 15 became a cadet journalist at The Sun News-Pictorial.
Go to Profile#5024
John Crowley
#79085
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
John Crowley is an Irish film and theatre director. He is best known for the films Brooklyn and his debut feature, Intermission , for which he won an Irish Film and Television Award for Best Director. He is a brother of the designer Bob Crowley.
Go to Profile#5025
Bernard Bate
#98548
Overall Influence
Bernard Bate was a linguistic anthropologist specializing in the Tamil language and the history of public speaking, and professor of anthropology at Yale University and at Yale-NUS College. His best known work was the book Tamil Oratory and Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India which describes the emergence of a tradition of public speaking in the Tamil language during the Indian independence movement. He received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He taught at Yale for ten years before moving to the Yale-NUS College in Singapore, where he was instrumental in the development of the college's programs.
Go to Profile#5026
Johannes M. Bauer
#55965
Overall Influence
Johannes M. Bauer is the Quello Chair for Media and Information Policy in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan. He also serves as the Director of the James H. and Mary B. Quello Center at Michigan State University.
Go to Profile#5027
Rhys Chatham
#66344
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Rhys Chatham is an American composer, guitarist, trumpet player, multi-instrumentalist , primarily active in avant-garde and minimalist music. He is best known for his "guitar orchestra" compositions. He has lived in France since 1987.
Go to Profile#5028
Paul Winter
#71085
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Paul Winter is an American saxophonist, composer, and bandleader. He is a pioneer of world music and earth music, which interweaves the voices of the wild with instrumental voices from classical, jazz and world music. The music is often improvised and recorded in nature to reflect the qualities brought into play by the environment.
Go to Profile#5029
Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig
#79640
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig is an American linguist. She is currently Provost Professor and ESL Coordinator at Indiana University . Education and research She obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree in Linguistics in 1976 and a Master of Arts degree in Linguistics in 1978 at the California State University, Northridge. She earned her PhD in linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1983, with a dissertation entitled, A Functional Approach to English Sentence Stress.
Go to Profile#5030
Philip Jackson
#86009
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Philip Jackson is an English actor known for his many television and film roles, most notably as Chief Inspector Japp in both the television series Agatha Christie's Poirot and in BBC Radio dramatisations of Poirot stories; as Melvin "Dylan" Bottomley in Porridge; and as Abbot Hugo, one of the recurring adversaries in the cult 1980s series Robin of Sherwood.
Go to Profile#5031
Farah Khan
#50860
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Farah Khan Kunder is an Indian film director, writer, film producer, actress, dancer and choreographer who works predominantly in Hindi films. Khan has choreographed more than a hundred songs in over 80 films, winning the National Film Award for Best Choreography and seven Filmfare Awards for Best Choreography.
Go to Profile#5032
Eric Fenby
#93531
Overall Influence
1906 - 1997 (91 years)
Eric William Fenby OBE was an English composer, conductor, pianist, organist and teacher who is best known for being Frederick Delius's amanuensis from 1928 to 1934. He helped Delius realise a number of works that would not otherwise have been forthcoming.
Go to Profile#5033
Donald Palma
#77861
Overall Influence
Donald Palma is a prominent classical double bassist, conductor, bass instructor, and educator of ensemble performance. He is a native of New York City, and is a graduate of the Juilliard School. Palma studied with several noted bassists including Frederick Zimmermann, Robert Brennand, Orin O'Brien, and Homer Mensch.
Go to Profile#5034
John Abercrombie
#80295
Overall Influence
1944 - 2017 (73 years)
John Laird Abercrombie was an American jazz guitarist. His work explored jazz fusion, free jazz, and avant-garde jazz. Abercrombie studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. He was known for his understated style and his work with organ trios.
Go to Profile#5035
K. S. Chithra
#56282
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Krishnan Nair Shantakumari Chithra is an Indian playback singer and Carnatic musician. In a career spanning over four decades, she has recorded over 25,000 songs in various Indian languages, as well as foreign languages such as Malay, Latin, Arabic, Sinhalese, English and French. She is also known for her extensive history of collaboration with music composers like A. R. Rahman, Ilaiyaraja, Hamsalekha, M. M. Keeravani and with the playback singers K. J. Yesudas and S. P. Balasubrahmanyam over the years. She is regarded as a cultural icon of South Indian states. She is cited as the Golden Voi...
Go to Profile#5036
Dušan Makavejev
#57315
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Dušan Makavejev was a Serbian film director and screenwriter, famous for his groundbreaking films of Yugoslav cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s—many of which belong to the Black Wave. Makavejev's most internationally successful film was the 1971 political satire W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, which he both directed and wrote.
Go to Profile#5037
Tabaimo
#84256
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Ayako Tabata , also known under her artist name Tabaimo, is a contemporary Japanese artist. She combines hand-drawn images and digital manipulation to create large scale animations which evoke traditional Japanese woodblock prints while presenting a pointed, complex view of Japanese society.
Go to Profile#5038
Glenn Albrecht
#18182
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Glenn A. Albrecht, born in 1953, was Professor of Sustainability at Murdoch University in Western Australia until his retirement in 2014. He is an honorary fellow in the School of Geosciences of the University of Sydney.
Go to Profile#5039
Eddie Rabbitt
#56468
Overall Influence
1941 - 1998 (57 years)
Edward Thomas Rabbitt was an American country music singer and songwriter. His career began as a songwriter in the late 1960s, springboarding to a recording career after composing hits such as "Kentucky Rain" for Elvis Presley in 1970 and "Pure Love" for Ronnie Milsap in 1974. Later in the 1970s, Rabbitt helped to develop the crossover-influenced sound of country music prevalent in the 1980s with such hits as "Suspicions", "I Love a Rainy Night" , and "Every Which Way but Loose" . His duets "Both to Each Other " with Juice Newton and "You and I" with Crystal Gayle later appeared on the soap o...
Go to Profile#5040
Russ Titelman
#54293
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Russ Titelman is an American record producer and songwriter. He has to date won three Grammy Awards. He earned his first producing the Steve Winwood song "Higher Love", and his second and third for Eric Clapton's Journeyman and Unplugged albums, respectively. Titelman also produced Clapton's 24 Nights live album of 1990 and the all-blues album From the Cradle, released in 1994.
Go to Profile#5041
Victor Watts
#93921
Overall Influence
1938 - 2002 (64 years)
Victor Watts, was a British toponymist, medievalist, translator, and academic, specialising in English place names. He served as Master of Grey College, Durham from 1989 until his sudden death in 2002. He had been a lecturer in English at Durham University from 1962, honorary director of the English Place-Name Survey from 1993, and editor of the Journal of the English Place-Name Society from 1996.
Go to Profile#5042
David Appleyard
#70007
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
David Appleyard is a British academic and an specialist in Ethiopian languages and linguistics. He is Professor Emeritus of the Languages of the Horn of Africa at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London, where he specialized in Amharic and other Ethiopian Semitic languages, as well as various Cushitic languages of the region. He went first to SOAS as a student in 1968, studying Amharic and Linguistics, and completed his doctorate there on the Semitic basis of the Amharic lexicon in 1975, with Edward Ullendorff as supervisor. He then joined the staff at SOAS where he remained from 1975 until his retirement in September 2006.
Go to Profile#5043
Tony Thompson
#71926
Overall Influence
1954 - 2003 (49 years)
Anthony Terrence Thompson was an American session drummer best known as the drummer of the Power Station and a member of Chic. Early life and education Thompson was raised in the middle-class community of Springfield Gardens, in Queens, New York, New York. His mother was Trinidadian and father was of Antiguan descent.
Go to Profile#5044
Gerardine DeSanctis
#44589
Overall Influence
1954 - 2005 (51 years)
Gerardine L. DeSanctis was an American organizational theorist and information systems researcher and Thomas F. Keller Professor of Business Administration at Duke University, known for her work on group decision support systems and automated decision support
Go to Profile#5045
Eduard Vääri
#124241
Overall Influence
1926 - 2005 (79 years)
Eduard Vääri was an Estonian linguist. In 1950 he graduated from Tartu University. Since 1951 he taught at Tartu University, since 1978 a professor. 1976-1978 he taught Estonian language at Helsinki University.
Go to Profile#5046
Hariprasad Chaurasia
#73600
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Hariprasad Chaurasia is an Indian music director and classical flautist, who plays the bansuri, in the Hindustani classical tradition. Early life Chaurasia was born in Allahbad in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. His mother died when he was six years old. He had to learn music without his father's knowledge, as his father wanted him to become a wrestler. Chaurasia did go to the Akhada and trained with his father for some time, although he also started learning music and practising at his friend's house.
Go to Profile#5047
Bradley S. Greenberg
#106195
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Bradley Sanders Greenberg was an American communications theorist. Greenberg studied journalism at Bowling Green State University, then earned a master's degree in the subject from the University of Wisconsin. He remained at UW to complete doctorate in mass communications, after which Greenberg became a research associate at the Institute for Communication Research of Stanford University. Greenberg joined the Michigan State University faculty in 1964. He was appointed a MSU Distinguished Professor in 1990. Greenberg, a fellow of the International Communication Association since 1983, served as its president from 1994 to 1995.
Go to Profile#5048
Maggie Black
#102426
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Margaret Black was a ballet teacher who taught in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s. She coached dancers such as Martine Van Hamel, Kevin McKenzie, Natalia Makarova and Gelsey Kirkland. She developed a ballet technique based on anatomy. She stressed moving from a neutral spinal and pelvic alignment with weight evenly distributed throughout each foot. She amassed a large following of both ballet and modern dancers. Eventually she split her class into two, one for modern dancers and one for ballet dancers. Choreographers such as William Forsythe and Ohad Naharin attended her class...
Go to Profile#5049
Jan Troell
#84458
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Jan Gustaf Troell is a Swedish writer-director and cinematographer. His realistic films, with a lyrical photography in which nature is prominent, have placed him in the first rank of modern Swedish film directors along with Ingmar Bergman and Bo Widerberg.
Go to Profile#5050
Michael Rappa
#60955
Overall Influence
Michael Rappa is an American professor and founding director of the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University. He has a PhD from the University of Minnesota and has previously worked as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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