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).

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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Communications,

#5451

Keith Sykes

#124209

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

Sir Malcolm Keith Sykes was an English consultant anaesthetist. Early life and education Sykes was born in Clevedon, Somerset, the only son of economist Joseph Sykes and Phyllis Mary Greenwood. He studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge, then underwent training in anaesthetics while serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and at University College Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital.

#5452

Ol' Dirty Bastard

Ol' Dirty Bastard

#37758

Overall Influence

1968 - 2004 (36 years)

Russell Tyrone Jones , better known by his stage name Ol' Dirty Bastard , was an American rapper. He was one of the founding members of the Wu-Tang Clan, a rap group primarily from Staten Island, New York City, which rose to mainstream prominence with its 1993 debut album Enter the Wu-Tang .

#5453

Ellen Kaisse

#122470

Overall Influence

Ellen M. Kaisse is an American linguist. She is professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Washington, best known for her research on the interface between phonology, syntax, and morphology.

#5454

Cub Koda

#95674

Overall Influence

1948 - 2000 (52 years)

Michael John "Cub" Koda was an American rock and roll singer, guitarist, songwriter, disc jockey, music critic, and record compiler. Rolling Stone magazine considered him best known for writing the song "Smokin' in the Boys Room", recorded by Brownsville Station, which reached number 3 on the 1974 Billboard chart. He co-wrote and edited the All Music Guide to the Blues, and Blues for Dummies, and selected a version of each of the classic blues songs on the CD accompanying the book. He also wrote liner notes for the Trashmen, Jimmy Reed, J. B. Hutto, the Kingsmen, and the Miller Sisters, among...

#5455

Beth Haller

#98222

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Beth A. Haller is a professor of mass communication and communication studies at Towson University, specializing in the handling of disability in news and new media. She serves on the advisory board of the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and traveled in Australia as a Fulbright Scholar in 2015.

#5456

Monica Macaulay

#130593

Overall Influence

Monica Macaulay is a professor of linguistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she is also affiliated with the American Indian Studies Program. Biography During her teenage years, Macaulay attended high school in Santiago, Chile. It was here that she learned Spanish. After graduating high school and traveling South America she then moved to Prescott, AZ. She relocated shortly after to northern California and pursued art school before enrolling at UC Berkeley.

#5457

Salil Chowdhury

#64368

Overall Influence

1925 - 1995 (70 years)

Salil Chowdhury was an Indian music director, songwriter, lyricist, writer and poet who predominantly composed for Bengali, Hindi and Malayalam films. He composed music for films in 13 languages. This includes over 75 Hindi films, 41 Bengali films, 27 Malayalam films, and a few Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Odia and Assamese films. His musical ability was widely recognised and acknowledged in the Indian film industry. He was an accomplished composer and arranger who was proficient in several musical instruments, including flute, the piano, and the esraj. He was also widely acclai...

#5458

Frank Foster

#93622

Overall Influence

1928 - 2011 (83 years)

Frank Benjamin Foster III was an American tenor and soprano saxophonist, flautist, arranger, and composer. Foster collaborated frequently with Count Basie and worked as a bandleader from the early 1950s. In 1998, Howard University awarded Frank Foster with the Benny Golson Jazz Master Award.

#5459

Robert Alwyn Hughes

#104364

Overall Influence

1935 - 2020 (85 years)

Robert Alwyn Hughes is a Welsh artist. Artwork and childhood Hughes's childhood memories continue to have an impact upon his artwork, with numerous references to Welsh landscape and culture, especially that of the south Wales valleys and Dowlais Top and Caeharris in particular: As a child he would regularly explore the local rugged landscape outside his back-door, just below the Brecon Beacons. His father worked at Bedlinog Colliery and had a love of Welsh literary classics. His mother was a devout Baptist and his uncles bread pigeons and ponies. The family's first language at home was Welsh until young Robert began attending the Dowlais Central School at the age of five years .

#5460

Leonardo Balada

#94931

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Leonardo Balada Ibáñez is a Catalan American classical composer, who is noted for his operas and orchestral works. Life Balada was born in Barcelona, Spain. After studying piano at the Conservatori Superior de Música del Liceu in Barcelona, Balada emigrated to the United States in 1956 to study at the New York College of Music on scholarship. He left that institution for the Juilliard School in New York, from which he graduated in 1960. He studied composition with Vincent Persichetti, Alexandre Tansman and Aaron Copland, and conducting with Igor Markevitch. In 1981, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

#5461

Jeremy Wall

#85704

Overall Influence

Jeremy Wall is a musician, and along with Jay Beckenstein, was a founding member of the jazz fusion band Spyro Gyra. He contributed to the group as a pianist, producer, and composer. He is currently an assistant professor in the Music Industry department at SUNY Oneonta.

#5462

Christoph Prégardien

#104942

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Christoph Prégardien is a German lyric tenor whose career is closely associated with the roles in Mozart operas, as well as performances of Lieder, oratorio roles, and Baroque music. He is well known for his performances and recordings of the Evangelist roles in Bach's St John Passion and St Matthew Passion.

#5463

Byron Berline

#70515

Overall Influence

1944 - 2021 (77 years)

Byron Douglas Berline was an American fiddle player who played many American music styles, including old time, ragtime, bluegrass, Cajun, country, and rock. Life and career Berline was born in Caldwell, Kansas, on July 6, 1944. He started playing the fiddle at age five and quickly developed his talent. In 1965 he recorded the album Pickin' and Fiddlin' with the Dillards. That year he met Bill Monroe at the Newport Folk Festival and was offered a job with Monroe's Bluegrass Boys, but he turned it down to finish his education. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1967 with a teaching degree in Physical Education and joined the Bluegrass Boys in March, replacing Richard Greene.

#5464

Teddy Thompson

#89501

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Teddy Thompson is an English folk and rock musician. He is the son of folk rock musicians Richard and Linda Thompson and brother of singer Kamila Thompson. He released his first album in 2000. Biography Teddy Thompson was born in 1976 in a London Sufi commune to folk rock musicians Richard and Linda Thompson, both major musical figures in the English folk rock scene from the 1960s onward. He formed a band at the age of 18. He moved to Los Angeles to pursue his music career, which included work as a singer and guitar player in his father Richard's band during the 1990s. He appears on at least ...

#5465

Joan Tower

#83803

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Joan Tower is a Grammy-winning contemporary American composer, concert pianist and conductor. Lauded by The New Yorker as "one of the most successful woman composers of all time", her bold and energetic compositions have been performed in concert halls around the world. After gaining recognition for her first orchestral composition, Sequoia , a tone poem which structurally depicts a giant tree from trunk to needles, she has gone on to compose a variety of instrumental works including Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, which is something of a response to Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, the Island Prelude, five string quartets, and an assortment of other tone poems.

#5466

Herbert Blomstedt

#81912

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (99 years)

Herbert Thorson Blomstedt is a Swedish conductor. Herbert Blomstedt was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, the son of Adolf Blomstedt and his wife Alida Armintha Thorson . Two years after his birth, his Swedish parents moved the family back to their country of origin. He studied at the Stockholm Royal College of Music and the University of Uppsala, followed by studies of contemporary music at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1949, Baroque music with Paul Sacher at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, and further conducting studies with Igor Markevitch, Jean Morel at the Juilliard School, and Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood's Berkshire Music Center.

#5467

David Stuart

#47763

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

David S. Stuart is an archaeologist and epigrapher specializing in the study of ancient Mesoamerica, the area now called Mexico and Central America. His work has studied many aspects of the ancient Maya civilization. He is widely recognized for his breakthroughs in deciphering Maya hieroglyphs and interpreting Maya art and iconography, starting at an early age. He is the youngest person ever to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, at age 18. He currently teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and his current research focuses on the understanding of Maya culture, religion and history through ...

#5468

Mohammad Dabir Moghaddam

#76805

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Mohammad Dabir Moghaddam is an Iranian linguist and professor at Allameh Tabatabaee University and a permanent member of Academy of Persian Language and Literature. He was also the recipient of Iranian Science and Culture Hall of Fame award in 2010.

#5469

Eric Martin

#88345

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Eric Lee Martin is an American rock singer and musician who was active throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, both as solo artist and as a member of various bands. He rose to prominence as the frontman for the hard rock band Mr. Big, which scored a big hit in the early 1990s with "To Be with You", a song that Martin wrote during his teen years.

#5470

Tod Machover

#71907

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Tod Machover , is a composer and an innovator in the application of technology in music. He is the son of Wilma Machover, a pianist and Carl Machover, a computer scientist. He was named Director of Musical Research at IRCAM in 1980. Joining the faculty at the new Media Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, he became Professor of Music and Media and Director of the Experimental Media Facility. Currently Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab, he is head of the Lab's Hyperinstruments/Opera of the Future group and has been co-director of the Things That Think and Toys of Tomorrow consortia since 1995.

#5471

Sandra Lee McKay

#101433

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Sandra McKay is Professor Emeritus of San Francisco State University. Her main areas of interest are sociolinguistics, English as an International Language, and second language pedagogy. For most of her career she has been involved in second language teacher education, both in the United States and abroad. She has received four Fulbright grants, as well as many academic specialists awards and distinguished lecturer invitations.

#5472

Hal Smith

#73851

Overall Influence

1916 - 1994 (78 years)

Harold John Smith was an American actor. He is credited in over 300 film and television productions, and was best known for his role as Otis Campbell, the town drunk on CBS's The Andy Griffith Show and for voicing Owl and Winnie the Pooh in the first four original Winnie the Pooh shorts and later Winnie the Pooh Discovers the Seasons, Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore and in the television series, Welcome to Pooh Corner and The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. He also did a cameo in The Apartment as a drunken Santa Claus.

#5473

Felicity Palmer

#108658

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Dame Felicity Joan Palmer, , is an English mezzo-soprano and music professor. She sang soprano roles until 1983. Palmer was born in Cheltenham and educated at Erith Grammar School, now named Erith School. She studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and under Marianne Schech's guidance at the Munich College for Music and Theatre. In April 1970, she won first prize in the Kathleen Ferrier Memorial Scholarship. She made her operatic debut in 1971 as Dido in Dido and Aeneas with the Kent Opera. In 1973, she made her US debut with the Houston Grand Opera and her Metropolitan Opera debut was in 2000 as Waltraute .

#5474

Andrei Eshpai

#99929

Overall Influence

1925 - 2015 (90 years)

Andrei Yakovlevich Eshpai was an ethnic Mari composer. He was awarded the title of People's Artist of the USSR in 1981. Biography Eshpai was born at Kozmodemyansk, Mari ASSR, Russian SFSR to a Mari father and Russian mother. A Red Army World War II veteran, he studied piano at Moscow Conservatory from 1948 to 1953 under Vladimir Sofronitsky, and composition under Nikolai Rakov, Nikolai Myaskovsky and Evgeny Golubev. He performed his postgraduate study under Aram Khachaturian from 1953 to 1956.

#5475

Rebecca Mader

#87343

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Rebecca Leigh Mader is an English actress, best known for her roles as Charlotte Lewis in the ABC series Lost, and as Zelena, the Wicked Witch of the West, on ABC's Once Upon a Time, for which she garnered critical acclaim.

#5476

Leo Abrahams

#73107

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Leo Matthew Abrahams is an English musician, composer and producer. He has collaborated with a multitude of professional musicians, including Brian Eno, Katie Melua, Imogen Heap, Jarvis Cocker, Carl Barât, Regina Spektor, Jon Hopkins and Paul Simon. After attending the Royal Academy of Music in England, he started his musical career by touring as lead guitarist with Imogen Heap. Since 2005 he has released five solo albums, largely in an ambient style involving complex arrangements and a use of guitar-generated textures. He has also co-written or arranged a variety of film soundtracks, including Peter Jackson's 2009 release The Lovely Bones and Steve McQueen's Hunger.

#5477

Buzz Feiten

#77694

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Howard "Buzz" Feiten II is an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, session musician, and luthier. He is best known as a lead and rhythm guitarist and for having patented a tuning system for guitars and similar instruments. Feiten also manufactures and markets solid-body electric guitars.

#5478

Robin Holloway

#103396

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Robin Greville Holloway is an English composer, academic and writer. Early life Holloway was born in Leamington Spa. From 1953 to 1957, he was a chorister at St Paul's Cathedral and was educated at King's College School, where his father Robert was Head of the Art Department. He attended King's College, Cambridge and studied composition with Bayan Northcott.

#5479

Gene Reynolds

#77557

Overall Influence

1923 - 2020 (97 years)

Eugene Reynolds Blumenthal was an American screenwriter, director, producer, and actor. He was one of the developers and producers of the TV series M*A*S*H. Early life Reynolds was born on April 4, 1923, to Frank Eugene Blumenthal, a businessman and entrepreneur, and Maude Evelyn Blumenthal, a model, in Cleveland, Ohio. Reynolds initially was raised in Detroit, before the family relocated to Los Angeles in 1934.

#5480

Trevor LeGassick

#89902

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Trevor LeGassick was a noted Western scholar and translator in the field of Arabic literature. He obtained a BA in Arabic from the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1958 and completed a PhD, also from SOAS, in 1960. After stints in Wisconsin and Indiana, he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in 1966, where he would teach for fifty-two years. He was promoted to full professor in 1979.

#5481

José Rodríguez Elizondo

#106724

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

José Alejandro Vladimir Rodríguez Elizondo is a Chilean lawyer and diplomat who was awarded with the National Prize of Humanities and Social Sciences in 2021. He finished his Bachelor of Arts in laws in 1960 at the University of Chile, his alma mater.

#5482

Derek Bourgeois

#109016

Overall Influence

1941 - 2017 (76 years)

Derek David Bourgeois was an English composer. Career Derek Bourgeois was born in Kingston upon Thames in 1941. After receiving his university education at Magdalene College, Cambridge , Bourgeois spent two years at the Royal College of Music, studying composition with Herbert Howells and conducting with Sir Adrian Boult.

#5483

Osamu Sato

#109684

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Osamu Sato is a Japanese digital artist, photographer, and composer. His first work was the ambient music album "Objectless", which released in 1983. His first work in the video game industry was Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou, which first released in Japan for Classic Mac OS in 1994, and in North America for Microsoft Windows the following year. In 1998, he produced and composed the music for the video game LSD: Dream Emulator on the PlayStation, which later became his most recognizable work outside of Japan.

#5484

Shaan

#63369

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Shantanu Mukherjee , better known as Shaan, is an Indian playback singer, live performer, composer, actor and television host. He has recorded numerous songs for films and albums in various Indian languages and has established himself as one of the best and highest paid playback singers of Indian Cinema.

#5485

Tamara Erofeyeva

Tamara Erofeyeva

#87669

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Tamara Ivanovna Erofeyeva is a Soviet-Russian linguist. She is a Doctor of Philology, served as Dean of the philological faculty at Perm State University , is a leader of Sociolinguistic study of urban language, head of the school of Socio- and Psycholinguistics in the Department of General and Slavonic Linguistics at Perm State National Research University, and is an Honorary Figure of Russian Higher Education.

#5486

Andy Roberts

#99478

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Andrew Jonathan Roberts is an English musician, guitarist and singer-songwriter, perhaps best known for his 37-year partnership with singer Iain Matthews in the English folk rock band, Plainsong. When he was nine years old, Roberts took up learning to play the violin and gained a violin scholarship to Felsted School in Essex. At the same time he also developed a talent for playing guitar, and became a member of various school bands. In 1965 he went to Liverpool University to study Law, and whilst there teamed up with poet Roger McGough, becoming the lone guitarist accompanying The Scaffold, and then joining The Liverpool Scene, with McGough and fellow Liverpool poet Adrian Henri.

#5487

Alanis Obomsawin

Alanis Obomsawin

#81818

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Alanis Obomsawin, is an Abenaki American-Canadian filmmaker, singer, artist, and activist primarily known for her documentary films. Born in New Hampshire, United States and raised primarily in Quebec, Canada, she has written and directed many National Film Board of Canada documentaries on First Nations issues. Obomsawin is a member of Film Fatales independent women filmmakers.

#5488

Ole Paus

#93453

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Ole Paus is a Norwegian singer, songwriter, poet and author, who is widely regarded as the foremost troubadour of the contemporary Norwegian ballad tradition . His works are marked by critical and socially conscious songwriting. His works often commented on political and societal issues, earning him the reputation of a "bourgeois anarchist" who challenged authority and societal norms from a unique position of both insider and outsider. During the 1970s Paus was known for his biting social commentary, especially in his ironic and sometimes libellous "musical newspapers" in the form of broadside ballads in a series of albums titled "The Paus Post".

#5489

Harvey Schmidt

#84731

Overall Influence

1929 - 2018 (89 years)

Harvey Lester Schmidt was an American composer for musical theatre and illustrator. He was best known for composing the music for the longest running musical in history, The Fantasticks, which ran off-Broadway for 42 years, from 1960 to 2002.

#5490

Caroline A. Macera

#131704

Overall Influence

#5491

Alexandra Stoddard

#97726

Overall Influence

Alexandra Stoddard, born Alexandra Green Johns, is an author, interior designer, and lifestyle philosopher. Stoddard has published 28 books as of April 2013. She is the mother of two daughters, Alexandra and Brooke, by her first husband Brandon Stoddard , from whom she was divorced in 1974. She subsequently married Peter Megargee Brown .

#5492

Doris Evans McGinty

#130487

Overall Influence

2000 - 2005 (5 years)

Doris Evans McGinty was a professor in the Department of Music at Howard University from 1947 until 1991. McGinty was chair of the department for eight years, and contributed to numerous publications, including the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, Black Women in American Music, and the American Dictionary of Negro Biography. She was a contributing editor to The Black Perspective in Music from 1975 until her retirement in 1991.

#5493

James Mitchell

#93425

Overall Influence

1926 - 2002 (76 years)

James William Mitchell was a British writer, principally of crime fiction and spy thrillers. He is best known for creating Callan and When the Boat Comes In . Biography The son of a shipyard worker, Mitchell also wrote under the pseudonyms James Munro and Patrick O. McGuire. He received BA and MA degrees from Oxford. After graduating he tried numerous jobs, including shipyard worker and civil servant before taking up teaching, in his own words he taught, "for some 15 years in almost every kind of institution from secondary modern school to college of art". In 1968 Mitchell moved to London to...

#5494

Hajo Alexander Reijers

#131929

Overall Influence

#5495

John Simon Gabriel Simmons

#79486

Overall Influence

1915 - 2005 (90 years)

John Simon Gabriel Simmons was a British scholar of Slavonics. Early years John Simmons was born in Birmingham, England, in 1915. He joined the library at Birmingham University as a "library boy" in 1932, and in 1934 began to study Russian under Professor Konovalov. He graduated in 1937 with a BA in Spanish and Russian, but chose to stay on at the university as an assistant librarian, beginning a DPhil on the history of Russian printing. This was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. On his first trip to Russia, he met his wife, Fanny, whom he married in 1944.

#5496

Skitch Henderson

Skitch Henderson

#83218

Overall Influence

1918 - 2005 (87 years)

Lyle Russel "Skitch" Henderson was an American pianist, conductor, and composer. His nickname "Skitch" came from his ability to "re-sketch" a song in a different key. Bing Crosby suggested that he should use the name professionally.

#5497

Andrew Hill

#92424

Overall Influence

1931 - 2007 (76 years)

Andrew Hill was an American jazz pianist and composer. Jazz critic John Fordham described Hill as a "uniquely gifted composer, pianist and educator" although "his status remained largely inside knowledge in the jazz world for most of his career."

#5498

Oleksandr Hrytsenko

#94824

Overall Influence

1957 - 2020 (63 years)

Oleksandr Andriyovych Hrytsenko was a Ukrainian poet, translator, and culturologist. He was the director of the Ukrainian Center of Cultural Research under the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine. Biography Hrytsenko was born in Vatutine, a city in Zvenyhorodka Raion, Cherkasy Oblast of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

#5499

David Gordon Green

David Gordon Green

#64465

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

David Gordon Green is an American filmmaker. Green began his career in 1997 and gained fame with the independent film George Washington . He directed two additional independent dramas, All the Real Girls and Snow Angels , as well as the thriller Undertow , all of which he wrote or co-wrote.

#5500

Larry Cohen

#51768

Overall Influence

1936 - 2019 (83 years)

Lawrence George Cohen was an American screenwriter, producer, and director of film and television, best known as an author of horror and science fiction films — often containing police procedural and satirical elements — during the 1970s and 1980s, such as It's Alive , God Told Me To , It Lives Again , The Stuff and A Return to Salem's Lot . He originally emerged as the writer of blaxploitation films such as Bone , Black Caesar, and Hell Up in Harlem . Later on he concentrated mainly on screenwriting, including Phone Booth , Cellular and Captivity .

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