Search People Result | Academic Influence

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,

#5201

David Steinberg

David Steinberg

#60772

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

David Steinberg is a Canadian comedian, actor, writer, director, and author. At the height of his popularity, during the late 1960s and mid 1970s, he was one of the best-known comics in the United States. He appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson more than 130 times and served as guest host 12 times, the youngest person ever to guest-host. Steinberg directed several films and episodes of television situation comedies, including Seinfeld, Friends, Mad About You, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Golden Girls, and Designing Women. Steinberg also hosted the interview program Inside Comed...

#5202

Constance Bumgarner Gee

#37884

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Constance Bumgarner Gee is an American scholar, memoirist, animal rights activist, and advocate of the medical use of cannabis. She was the founder and director of the Arts Policy and Administration Program at The Ohio State University, and later an assistant professor at Brown University and tenured associate professor at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Higher Education: Marijuana at the Mansion, a 2012 memoir about her life as "first lady" of several American research universities, in which she writes of the no-holds barred corporate maneuverings of university leadership and hypo...

#5203

Don Rendell

#104276

Overall Influence

1926 - 2015 (89 years)

Donald Percy Rendell was an English jazz musician and arranger. Mainly active as a tenor saxophonist, he also played soprano saxophone, flute, and clarinet. Career Rendell was born in Plymouth, England, and raised in London where he attended the City of London School, to which he gained a choral half-scholarship. The school was evacuated during the Second World War to Marlborough College, where Rendell heard Jazz for the first time. His father, Percy, was the musical director of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company; his mother Vera was also a musician. His father died when Rendell was 16.

#5204

Marge Champion

#83032

Overall Influence

1919 - 2020 (101 years)

Marjorie Celeste Champion was an American dancer and actress. At fourteen, she was hired as a dance model for Walt Disney Studios animated films. Later, she performed as an actress and dancer in film musicals, and in 1957 had a television show based on song and dance. She also did creative choreography for liturgy, and served as a dialogue and movement coach for the 1978 TV miniseries, The Awakening Land, set in the late 18th century in the Ohio Valley.

#5205

Elliott Sharp

#81200

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Elliott Sharp is an American contemporary classical composer, multi-instrumentalist, performer, author, and visual artist. A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City since the late 1970s, Sharp has released over eighty-five recordings ranging from contemporary classical, avant-garde, free improvisation, jazz, experimental, and orchestral music to noise, no wave, and electronic music. He pioneered the use of personal computers in live performance with his Virtual Stance project of the 1980s. He has used algorithms and fibonacci numbers in experimental composition since the 1970s.

#5206

Steve Khan

#83893

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Steve Khan is an American jazz guitarist. Career Steven Harris Cahn was born in Los Angeles. His father, lyricist Sammy Cahn, "loved to hear any and all versions of his songs". He took piano lessons as a child and played drums for the surf rock band the Chantays. The band's guitarist exposed him to the albums Tough Talk by The Crusaders and Movin' Wes by Wes Montgomery. In his late teens he quit the drums and started playing guitar. He was a member of the R&B band Friends of Distinction, recorded with keyboardist Phil Moore, then played on the album Bullitt by Wilton Felder . Despite his fath...

#5207

Elena Obraztsova

Elena Obraztsova

#95607

Overall Influence

1939 - 2015 (76 years)

Elena Vasilyevna Obraztsova was a Soviet and Russian mezzo-soprano. She was awarded the People's Artist of the USSR in 1976 and Hero of Socialist Labour in 1990. Life As a child, Obraztsova lived in Leningrad through the severe long siege during World War II. In 1948, at the age of nine, she began singing in the children's chorus of the Pioneers Palace in Leningrad.

#5208

Amanda D. Lotz

#70380

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Amanda D. Lotz is an American educator, television scholar, and media scholar based in Australia since 2019. She is known for her research in television studies, digital disruption, the economics of television and media companies, and also popularizing the terms network era, post-network era, and the multi-channel transition describing the television industry's transition to cable and to internet distribution.

#5209

Molissa Fenley

#61170

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Molissa Fenley is an American choreographer, performer and teacher of contemporary dance. Early life and education Molissa Fenley was born in Las Vegas, Nevada on November 15, 1954. She is the youngest of three children born to Eileen Allison Walker and John Morris Fenley. At the age of six months Fenley and her family moved to Ithaca, NY where her father was a professor of Agricultural Extension at Cornell University. At the age of six, her family moved to Ibadan, Nigeria where her father worked for the US State Department's USAID program. Fenley attended high school in Spain, and at 16 returned to the US where she received her BA in Dance from Mills College in 1975.

#5210

Karol Dejna

#85919

Overall Influence

1911 - 2004 (93 years)

Karol Dejna was a Polish linguist. In 1930 he graduated from the Juliusz Słowacki State Secondary School in Tarnopol. He studied Polish philology at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv, from which he graduated in 1935. Until 1941 he worked as a teacher in Lviv secondary schools. From 1945 associated with the University of Łódź, initially as an assistant, then assistant professor , deputy professor and professor . From 1954 he was an associate professor, and from 1962 a full professor. In 1983 he became a correspondent member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and in 1989 a full member of the Academy.

#5211

Antonella Lualdi

Antonella Lualdi

#99256

Overall Influence

1931 - 2023 (92 years)

Antonella Lualdi was an Italian actress and singer. She appeared in many Italian and French films in the 1950s and 1960s, notably in Claude Autant-Lara's film The Red and the Black in 1954. Life and career Lualdi began her career in 1949, after having won a contest for new talents of the cinema magazine Hollywood, in which she was presented as "Signorina X" , inviting the readers to choose her stage name.

#5212

Douglas Dunn

#79326

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Douglas Dunn is an American dancer and choreographer based in New York City. Choreography Dunn premiered his professional company, Douglas Dunn and Dancers, in 1976, where he served as artistic director. He was commissioned by various companies to choreograph works including the Paris Opera Ballet, Groupe de Recherche Choréographique de l'Opéra de Paris, Grande Ballet de Bordeaux, New Dance Ensemble of Minneapolis, Walker Art Center , Repertory Dance Theater , Ballet Théâtre Francais de Nancy, Institute for Contemporary Art , Perth Institute of Contemporary Art , and Portland State University ...

#5213

Craig Wolff

#102447

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Craig Wolff is an American journalist and author and a former sports, feature, and news writer for The New York Times. He was a journalism professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a former senior enterprise editor and writer at The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.

#5214

Yvonne Craig

#56446

Overall Influence

1937 - 2015 (78 years)

Yvonne Joyce Craig was an American actress who was renowned for her role as Barbara Gordon/Batgirl in the 1960s television series Batman. Other notable roles in her career include Dorothy Johnson in the 1963 movie It Happened at the World's Fair, Azalea Tatum in the 1964 movie Kissin' Cousins and as the green-skinned Orion Marta in the Star Trek episode "Whom Gods Destroy" .

#5215

Sandra Chung

#113230

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Sandra Chung is an American linguist and distinguished professor emerita at the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on Austronesian languages and syntax.

#5216

Michael Smith

#75872

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Michael Smith is an American artist known for his performance, video and installation works. He emerged in the mid-1970s at a time when performance and narrative-based art was beginning to claim space in contemporary art. Included among the Pictures Generation artists, he also appropriated pop culture, using television conventions rather than tropes from static media. Since 1979, much of Smith's work has centered on an Everyman character, "Mike," that he has portrayed in various domestic, entrepreneurial and artistic endeavors. Writers have described his videos and immersive installations as ...

#5217

Hugh Maguire

#93145

Overall Influence

1926 - 2013 (87 years)

Andrew Hugh Michael Maguire was an Irish violinist, leader, concertmaster and principal player of the London Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra , leader of the Melos Ensemble and the Allegri Quartet, a professor at the Royal Academy of Music, and violin tutor to the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain.

#5218

Muhammad Farooq

Muhammad Farooq

#31869

Overall Influence

Muhammad Farooq is a journalist, Qari, Naat Khawan and newscaster from Pakistan. He also worked as Joint Executive Editor Daily Mashriq Quetta. Nowadays, he is working in Daily Pakistan Lahore as a News Editor. He also had worked for Pakistan Television Corporation and Radio Pakistan.

#5219

Davis McCaughey

#37002

Overall Influence

1914 - 2005 (91 years)

John Davis McCaughey was an Irish-born Australian academic theologian, Christian minister, university administrator and the 23rd Governor of Victoria from 1986 to 1992. Early life and academic career McCaughey was born in Belfast, Ireland, on 12 July 1914. He was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1941 and during the next decade he also worked for the British Council of Churches.

#5220

Walter Murphy

#61594

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Walter Anthony Murphy Jr. is an American composer, keyboardist, songwriter, and record producer. He is best known for the instrumental "A Fifth of Beethoven", a disco adaptation of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony which topped the charts in 1976 and was featured on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in 1977. Further classical–disco fusions followed, such as "Flight '76", "Toccata and Funk in 'D' Minor" "Bolero", and "Mostly Mozart", but were not as successful.

#5221

Kay Walsh

#89101

Overall Influence

1911 - 2005 (94 years)

Kathleen "Kay" Walsh was an English actress, dancer, and screenwriter. Her film career prospered after she met her future husband film director David Lean, with whom she worked on prestige productions such as In Which We Serve and Oliver Twist.

#5222

Hubert Sumlin

#61614

Overall Influence

1931 - 2011 (80 years)

Hubert Charles Sumlin was a Chicago blues guitarist and singer, best known for his "wrenched, shattering bursts of notes, sudden cliff-hanger silences and daring rhythmic suspensions" as a member of Howlin' Wolf's band. He was ranked number 43 in Rolling Stones "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".

#5223

Ferzan Özpetek

#73873

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Ferzan Özpetek is a Turkish-Italian film director and screenwriter, residing in Italy. Biography Ferzan Özpetek was born in Istanbul in 1959. In 1976, he decided to move to Italy to study Cinema History at Sapienza University of Rome. He completed his education attending art history and costume design classes at the Navona Academy. He also attended director classes at the Silvio D'Amico National Academy of Dramatic Art.

#5224

Srihadi Soedarsono

#48855

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Kanjeng Raden Haryo Tumenggung H. Srihadi Soedarsono Adhikoesoemo was an Indonesian painter and tenured lecturer. He married Farida Srihadi, who is also an accomplished painter that studied at the Bandung Institute of Technology , as well as abroad in the Netherlands and England.

#5225

Suman Ghosh

#68900

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Suman Ghosh is a film director, and a professor of economics at Florida Atlantic University. Education Suman Ghosh gained his B.Sc. in economics from Presidency College, Calcutta and his M.A. in economics from the Delhi School of Economics. He completed his Ph.D. in economics at Cornell University in 2002. His research interests are public economics, personnel economics, and development economics.

#5226

Rag'n'Bone Man

#70922

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (41 years)

Rory Charles Graham , known professionally as Rag'n'Bone Man, is an English singer. He is known for his deep baritone voice. His first hit single, "Human", was released in 2016, and his debut album of the same name was released in 2017. The album became the fastest selling debut album by a male for the decade and has since achieved 4× Platinum certification. At the 2017 Brit Awards, he was named British Breakthrough Act and received the Critics' Choice Award and went on to receive a further Brit Award for Best British Single, with the title track in 2018.

#5227

Jimmie Vaughan

#56879

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Jimmie Lawrence Vaughan Jr. is an American blues rock guitarist and singer based in Austin, Texas. He is the older brother of the late Texas blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan. Several notable blues guitarists have had a significant influence on Vaughan's playing style, including the "Three Kings" and Johnny "Guitar" Watson.

#5228

Hugh Martin

#73574

Overall Influence

1914 - 2011 (97 years)

Hugh Martin was an American musical theater and film composer, arranger, vocal coach, and playwright. He was best known for his score for the 1944 MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis, in which Judy Garland sang three Martin songs, "The Boy Next Door", "The Trolley Song", and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". The last of these has become a Christmas season standard in the United States and around the English-speaking world. Martin became a close friend of Garland and was her accompanist at many of her concert performances in the 1950s, including her appearances at the Palace Theater.

#5229

Ellen Wartella

#77838

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Ellen A. Wartella is a leading scholar of the role of media in children's development. She is the chair and professor of communication, director of Northwestern University's Center on Media and Human Development, and an adviser for the review at Northwestern University. She studies social policy, media studies, psychology, and child development at the University. She believes that smartphones are disruptive in a way that's different from earlier technology.

#5230

Peter Chelsom

#87120

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Peter Chelsom is a British film director, writer, and actor. He has directed such films as Hector and the Search for Happiness, Serendipity, and Shall We Dance? Peter Chelsom is a member of the British Academy, the American Academy, The Directors Guild of America, and The Writers Guild of America.

#5231

Stephen G. Bloom

#85776

Overall Influence

Stephen G. Bloom is an American journalist and professor of journalism at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City. Background Born in New Jersey, Bloom attended the University of California, Berkeley, and received a B.A. in 1973.

#5232

Lyle Ritz

#75944

Overall Influence

1930 - 2017 (87 years)

Lyle Joseph Ritz was an American musician, known for his work on ukulele and bass . His early career in jazz as a ukulele player made him a key part of the Hawaii music scene in the 1950s. By the 1960s, he had begun working as a session musician, more often on double bass or electric bass guitar. His prominence in the Los Angeles session scene made him a part of the Wrecking Crew, an informal group of well-used Los Angeles-based musicians. Ritz contributed to many American pop hits from the mid 1960s to the early 1980s. Starting in the mid-1980s, a rediscovery of his earlier ukulele wor...

#5233

Fyodor Khitruk

#81550

Overall Influence

1917 - 2012 (95 years)

Fyodor Savelyevich Khitruk was a Soviet and Russian animator and animation director. Biography Khitruk was born in Tver , into a Jewish family. He came to Moscow to study graphic design at the OGIS College for Applied Arts. He graduated in 1936 and started to work with Soyuzmultfilm in 1938 as an animator. From 1962 onwards, he worked as a director. His first film The Story of a Crime was an immense success. Today, this film is seen as the beginning of a renaissance of Soviet animation after a two-decade-long life in the shadows of Socialist realism.

#5234

Dick Dale

#98531

Overall Influence

1926 - 2014 (88 years)

Richard L. Dale was an American singer and musician, best known as a featured singer and saxophone player on the television variety show The Lawrence Welk Show. A native of Algona, Iowa, he served in the United States Navy during World War II after graduation from Algona High School. His entertainment career began when he worked for several bands such as Harold Loeffelmacher and his Six Fat Dutchmen polka band. He was discovered by Lawrence Welk in 1951.

#5235

Junior Walker

#69696

Overall Influence

1931 - 1995 (64 years)

Autry DeWalt Mixon Jr. , known professionally as Junior Walker, was an American multi-instrumentalist and vocalist who recorded for Motown during the 1960s. He also performed as a session and live-performing saxophonist with the band Foreigner during the 1980s.

#5236

Anita Kerr

#79325

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

Anita Jean Kerr was an American singer, arranger, composer, conductor, pianist, and music producer. She recorded and performed with her vocal harmony groups in Nashville, Los Angeles, and Europe. Career

#5237

Mayo Thompson

#64069

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Mayo Thompson is an American musician and visual artist best known as the leader of the experimental rock band Red Krayola. Background His formal education includes Garden of Arts Kindergarten until Holy Rosary Elementary School through fifth grade, then Moye Military School until high school at Cascia Hall College Preparatory School, from which he received a diploma in 1962. He went on to study at St. Thomas University, trying variously, off and on, in some cases simultaneously, pre-Law, Creative Writing, English and American Literature, Philosophy, and Art History, before dropping out and s...

#5238

Gideon Lester

#54550

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Gideon Lester is a Tony Award-winning artistic director, dramaturg, curator, and creative producer. He is currently Artistic Director of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, Senior Curator of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts, and a professor at Bard. He has collaborated with a broad range of American and international artists including Romeo Castellucci, Justin Vivian Bond, Krystian Lupa, Peter Sellars, Tania El Khoury, Anna Deavere Smith, and Neil Gaiman. In 2015 he produced Daniel Fish's production of Oklahoma! at the Fisher Center; it subsequently transferred to St.

#5239

Emma Sulkowicz

#42316

Overall Influence

1992 - Present (34 years)

Emma Sulkowicz is best known as a political activist and performance artist. While still a college student, Sulkowicz developed a national reputation with the performance artwork Mattress Performance . In 2019, she said she had stopped making art and began a master's program in traditional Chinese medicine.

#5240

Natalie Cassidy

Natalie Cassidy

#96841

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Natalie Ann Cassidy is an English actress. She has played Sonia Fowler in EastEnders since 1993, appeared in the BBC Two sitcom-horror Psychoville and was a contestant on the seventh series of Strictly Come Dancing and the ninth series of Celebrity Big Brother.

#5241

Wiktor Jassem

#51191

Overall Influence

1922 - 2016 (94 years)

Wiktor Jassem was a Polish phonetician, philologist, linguist, technical sciences professor, and honourable member of Polish Phonetic Association. He specialized in acoustic phonetics and conducted research on the production of sounds and the processes of understanding of the speech.

#5242

Vladimir de Semir

#101162

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Vladimir de Semir is Spanish journalist. He started his career in 1975 and has specialized in science journalism and science popularization since 1982. In 1994 he began teaching and training new journalists and popular science writers at Pompeu Fabra University where he directs the Science Communication Observatory. In 1994, the Spanish Scientific Research Council awarded de Semir with the Prize for Scientific Journalism "for the extraordinary work carried out by him in 1993 and previous years in the Science and Technology and Medicine and Quality of Life supplements of the La Vanguardia new...

#5243

Daniel Lewis

#111905

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Daniel Lewis is a U.S. choreographer and dance teacher, currently the Dean of Dance at the New World School of the Arts. Career Lewis was born in Brooklyn, New York and graduated from the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. Beginning in 1962, Lewis danced with the José Limón Dance Company for 12 years, originating many roles. As Limón's assistant, Lewis completed the choreography of the Waldstein Sonata. In addition, Lewis danced with the companies of Ruth Currier, Felix Fibich, Stuart Hodes, Sofie Maslow, David Wood, Norman Walker, Matthew Diamond, Charles W...

#5244

John Tropea

#83954

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

John Tropea is an American jazz guitarist and composer. Career Tropea began guitar studies at the age of 12. His musical education continued at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he studied jazz guitar, harmony, musical composition, and big band arranging. After arriving in Boston, Tropea began playing jazz and R&B with local bands, including The Three Degrees. He was influenced by Wes Montgomery, Johnny Smith, Luiz Bonfá, Pat Martino, and George Benson. Among his mentors were Hammond B3 organ players Jack McDuff and Jimmy Smith.

#5245

Charles Groves

#105174

Overall Influence

1915 - 1992 (77 years)

Sir Charles Barnard Groves CBE was an English conductor. He was known for the breadth of his repertoire and for encouraging contemporary composers and young conductors. After accompanying positions and conducting various orchestras and studio work for the BBC, Groves spent a decade as conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. His best-known musical directorship was of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, beginning in 1963, with which he made most of his recordings. From 1967 until his death, Groves was associate conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and in the 1970s he was one of the regular conductors of the Last Night of the Proms.

#5246

Der Scutt

#20244

Overall Influence

1934 - 2010 (76 years)

Der Scutt was an American architect and designer of a number of major and notable buildings throughout New York City and the United States. Scutt worked on Trump Tower next to the Tiffany & Co. flagship store on Fifth Avenue, New York City, developed by Donald Trump. His other major buildings include One Astor Plaza, 520 Madison Avenue, the Continental Insurance Corporation headquarters in New York City, and the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company Headquarters in Milwaukee. He was the design consultant for the Grand Hyatt New York.

#5247

Bernard G. Weiss

#43105

Overall Influence

1933 - 2018 (85 years)

Bernard G. Weiss was a professor of languages and literature at the University of Utah. He has an extensive publication record and is recognized as one of the foremost scholars in Islamic law, Islamic theology, Islamic philosophy, Islamic political thought, Arab history and Muslim discussions of linguistics and the origin of language.

#5248

Lorenzo Ghielmi

#97630

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Lorenzo Ghielmi is an Italian organist and harpsichordist. He teaches old music at the Accademia Internazionale della Musica in Milan and at the "Schola Cantorum Basiliensis" in Basel. He was professor in Trossingen and at the Hochschule für Musik in Lübeck too. Ghielmi also played with Ensemble Il Giardino Armonico . Ghielmi combines his concert activities with a Musicology. He has published works by Girolamo Frescobaldi.

#5249

Joanne Dru

#81130

Overall Influence

1922 - 1996 (74 years)

Joanne Dru was an American film and television actress, known for such films as Red River, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, All the King's Men, and Wagon Master. Career Born in Logan, West Virginia, Dru moved to New York City in 1940 at the age of eighteen. After finding employment as a model, she was chosen by Al Jolson to appear in the cast of his Broadway show Hold On to Your Hats. When she moved to Hollywood, she found work in the theater. Dru was spotted by a talent scout and made her first film appearance in Abie's Irish Rose . Over the next decade, Dru appeared frequently in films and on television.

#5250

Barry Posner

#125322

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Barry Zane Posner is the Accolti Professor of Leadership at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. Early life and education Posner received a B.A. degree in political science from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1970, a M.A. from The Ohio State University in Public Administration in 1972, and a Ph.D in Organizational Behavior and Administrative Theory from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1976;. His doctoral thesis was "Characteristics of individuals' control in organizations"

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