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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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Communications,

#5901

Grover Washington Jr.

#74279

Overall Influence

1943 - 1999 (56 years)

Grover Washington Jr. was an American jazz-funk and soul-jazz saxophonist and Grammy Award winner. Along with Wes Montgomery and George Benson, he is considered by many to be one of the founders of the smooth jazz genre. He wrote some of his material and later became an arranger and producer.

#5902

Bapu

#70356

Overall Influence

1933 - 2014 (81 years)

Sattiraju Lakshminarayana , known professionally as Bapu, was an Indian film director, painter, illustrator, cartoonist, screenwriter, music artist, and designer known for his works in Telugu cinema, and Hindi cinema. In 2013, he was awarded the Padma Shri, for his contribution to Indian art and cinema. He has garnered two National Honors, two National Film Awards, seven state Nandi Awards, two Filmfare Awards South, a Raghupathi Venkaiah Award, and a Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award – South.

#5903

Les McCann

#73677

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Leslie Coleman McCann is an American jazz pianist and vocalist. Early life Les McCann was born in Lexington, Kentucky. He grew up in a musical family of four, a brother and three sisters with most of McCann's family singing in church choirs. His father was a fan of jazz music and his mother was known to hum opera tunes around the house. As a youth, McCann played the tuba and drums and performed in his school's marching band. As a pianist, he was largely self-taught. He explained that he only received piano lessons for a few weeks as a six-year-old before his teacher died.

#5904

Wendell Rawls Jr.

#46908

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Wendell Lee Rawls Jr. is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and editor. His career spans 40 years in journalism and media, beginning in 1967 at The Tennessean. Life Raised in the Nashville, Tennessee, area and in Red Bank, Tennessee, Rawls is a graduate of Baylor School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Vanderbilt University. He is often known by the nickname "Sonny."

#5905

Laszlo Halasz

#92548

Overall Influence

1905 - 2001 (96 years)

Laszlo Halasz was an American opera director, conductor, and pianist of Hungarian birth. In 1943 he was appointed the first director of the New York City Opera, a position he held through 1951. He later served on music faculties of the Peabody Conservatory of Music and the Eastman School of Music as part of their conducting and opera departments. He was married to the cellist Suzette Forgues Halasz for more than 50 years.

#5906

Aldo Parisot

#109712

Overall Influence

1918 - 2018 (100 years)

Aldo Simoes Parisot was a Brazilian-born American cellist and cello teacher. He was first a member of the Juilliard School faculty, and then went on to serve as a music professor at the Yale School of Music for sixty years , the longest-serving member of that school's faculty ever.

#5907

Joyce Friedman

#67825

Overall Influence

1928 - 2018 (90 years)

Joyce Barbara Friedman was an American mathematician, operations researcher, computer scientist, and computational linguist who worked as a professor at the University of Michigan and Boston University and served as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

#5908

Nadine George-Graves

#127137

Overall Influence

Nadine George-Graves is an academic who works at the intersection of African American studies, gender studies, and dance and theater history. She holds the Naomi Willie Pollard Endowed Chair at Northwestern University with appointments in the Department of Performance Studies and Deaprtment of Theatre . She is also the executive co-editor of Dance Research Journal. She has a PhD in Theater and Drama from Northwestern University, and a BA in Philosophy and Theater Studies from Yale University.

#5909

Wolfgang Binding

#89028

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Wolfgang Binding is a German sculptor and graphic artist. Biography Binding was born in Munich but grew up in Cologne. After graduating from high school in 1957, he completed an apprenticeship as a sculptor and stonemason at Cologne's Dombauhütte, and then studied sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Between 1959 and 1963, he was a master student of Zoltan Székessy. In 1963, a scholarship enabled him to spend two years abroad in Alexandria and Cairo. He was assistant to Elmar Hillebrand between 1965 and 1975. After habilitating in sculpture in 1973, he became a visiting professor at Northern Michigan University, and then a full professor of sculpture at RWTH Aachen University.

#5910

Axel Bertram

#110035

Overall Influence

1936 - 2019 (83 years)

Axel Bertram was a German commercial artist, type designer, illustrator, magazine designer and medalist. During his later decades he became, in addition, a knowledgeable and dedicated expert on calligraphy. Confident in his judgements, he also contributed articles to newspapers and magazines, though this was motivated more by a personal drive to share his enthusiasm for his ideas on design than because he aspired to any sort of career as a journalist or commentator.

#5911

Artie Butler

#95948

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Arthur Butler is an American composer, arranger, songwriter, and session musician. In a long career, he has been involved in numerous hit records and other recordings, and has been awarded over 60 gold and platinum albums.

#5912

Simon Jones

#98721

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Simon Robin David Jones is an English bass guitarist. He played bass and provided occasional backing vocals for the rock band The Verve. The Verve Away from the musical side of The Verve, Jones is the only other band member other than the band's main mouthpiece, lead singer Richard Ashcroft, who tends to speak publicly and in interviews. Most notably, he, along with Ashcroft, made a speech at the 2007 Q Awards as they won a classic album award for their 1997 album Urban Hymns. He thanked the band member's wives and children and also thanked former Verve guitarist Simon Tong, who was not included in the newly reformed Verve line up.

#5913

Pamela Cytrynbaum

#104128

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Pamela Cytrynbaum is an American journalist who teaches and specializes in investigative reporting and restorative justice. She is the executive director of the Chicago Innocence Center and a restorative justice practitioner.

#5914

Kurt Elling

#76598

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Kurt Elling is an American jazz singer and songwriter. Born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in Rockford, Elling became interested in music through his father, who was Kapellmeister at a Lutheran church. He sang in choirs and played musical instruments. He encountered jazz while a student at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota. After college, he enrolled in the University of Chicago Divinity School, but he left one credit short of a degree to pursue a career as a jazz vocalist.

#5915

Christopher Rouse

#86426

Overall Influence

1949 - 2019 (70 years)

Christopher Chapman Rouse III was an American composer. Though he wrote for various ensembles, Rouse is primarily known for his orchestral compositions, including a Requiem, a dozen concertos, and six symphonies. His work received numerous accolades, including the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award, the Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition, and the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He also served as the composer-in-residence for the New York Philharmonic from 2012 to 2015.

#5916

France Martineau

France Martineau

#138665

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

France Martineau is a professor and a Canadian linguist. Martineau is an expert in Canadian French linguistics and considered a leader in historical sociolinguistics as well as a pioneer in the digital humanities. Martineau presently holds the University of Ottawa Research Chair Le français en mouvement: Frontières, réseaux et contacts en Amérique française.

#5917

Zbigniew Rybczyński

Zbigniew Rybczyński

#75567

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Zbigniew Rybczyński is a Polish filmmaker, director, cinematographer, screenwriter, creator of experimental animated films, and multimedia artist who has won numerous prestigious industry awards both in the United States and internationally including the 1982 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for Tango.

#5918

Davide Rossi

#67906

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Davide Rossi is an Italian violinist, string arranger, orchestrator, songwriter, composer and conductor, perhaps best known for having been the electric violinist and multi-instrumentalist for the British electronic music duo Goldfrapp from 2000 until 2013, and for his large contribution of electric violin parts and for most of the string arrangements on all Coldplay's albums since Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends,.

#5919

Theo Adam

#100030

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

Theo Adam was a German operatic bass-baritone and bass singer who had an international career in opera, concert and recital from 1949. He was a member of the Staatsoper Dresden for his entire career, and sang at the Bayreuth Festival from 1952 to 1980. He particularly excelled in portraying roles by Richard Wagner, especially Wotan in Der Ring des Nibelungen, which he also performed at the Metropolitan Opera, among others. In concert, he was a much admired Bach singer and also drew acclaim for his interpretation of the title character of Mendelssohn's Elijah. He was a voice teacher at the Mus...

#5920

Tom Noonan

#84074

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Tom Noonan is an American actor, director, and screenwriter, best known for his roles as Francis Dolarhyde in Manhunter , Frankenstein's Monster in The Monster Squad , Cain in RoboCop 2 , The Ripper in Last Action Hero , Sammy Barnathan in Synecdoche, New York , Reverend Nathaniel in Hell on Wheels , the Pallid Man in 12 Monkeys and as the voice of everyone but the two main characters in Anomalisa .

#5921

Jerome C. Glenn

#44586

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Jerome C. Glenn is a futurist who serves as the executive director of the Millennium Project. He has been the executive director of the American Council for the United Nations University and the deputy director of Partnership for Productivity International.

#5922

Terrence G. Wiley

#108833

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Terrence G. Wiley has served as chief executive officer of the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C. , professor emeritus of educational policy studies and applied linguistics at Arizona State University, and member of the college of education, graduate faculty at the University of Maryland.

#5923

Marta Casals Istomin

Marta Casals Istomin

#91570

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Marta Casals Istomin , who uses the surnames of her first husband, Pablo Casals, and her second husband, Eugene Istomin, is a musician from Puerto Rico, and the former president of the Manhattan School of Music. She served as artistic director of the Kennedy Center from 1980 to 1990.

#5924

Flip Wilson

#64592

Overall Influence

1933 - 1998 (65 years)

Clerow "Flip" Wilson Jr. was an American comedian and actor best known for his television appearances during the late 1960s and 1970s. From 1970 to 1974, Wilson hosted his own weekly variety series The Flip Wilson Show, and introduced viewers to his recurring character Geraldine. The series earned Wilson a Golden Globe and two Emmy Awards, and it was the second highest-rated show on network television for a time.

#5925

Joseph Straus

#35441

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Joseph Straus is professor of intellectual property law, former director of the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law, Munich, Germany, and Chairman of the Managing Board of the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center . According to the Intellectual Asset Management magazine, he is "one of the world's most influential patent scholars." He is member and dean of the Class "Social Sciences, Law and Economics" of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

#5926

Max Richter

#72561

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Max Richter is a German-born British composer and pianist. He works within postminimalist and contemporary classical styles. Richter is classically trained, having graduated in composition from the University of Edinburgh, the Royal Academy of Music in London, and studied with Luciano Berio in Italy.

#5927

Henry Tosi

#138850

Overall Influence

#5928

Ray Ring

#105472

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Ray Ring is an American novelist and journalist. Ring has been based in the American West since the 1970s, with stints in Arizona, Colorado and Montana. Novels Montana Blues is an unusual mystery/thriller about a determined Black man and a spirited White woman who face racial violence on a spectacular landscape. A sample review in The Arizona Daily Star said it's a “compulsively readable new thriller … Ring’s flair for fully-realized characters and smart dialog is on display here; combined with fast-paced action, this is propulsive storytelling that will keep you on the edge of your seat.”Ari...

#5929

Inez De Florio-Hansen

Inez De Florio-Hansen

#113012

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Inez De Florio is a German applied linguist and educational psychologist whose work focuses on science-oriented teaching and learning with particular reference to multilingualism and intercultural competence. She is a proponent of empirical research. Above all, her critical view of evidence-based education leads her to a particular focus on individual aspects of teachers, learners and their learning contexts.

#5930

Julius Lester

#76591

Overall Influence

1939 - 2018 (79 years)

Julius Bernard Lester was an American writer of books for children and adults and an academic who taught for 32 years at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Lester was also a civil rights activist, a photographer, and a musician who recorded two albums of folk music and original songs.

#5931

Michael J. Mikos

#107831

Overall Influence

Michael J. Mikos is a professor of foreign languages and literature at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He specializes in Polish language, literature, and culture. He is also a translator and has rendered many works of Polish literature into English.

#5932

Terence Wade

#83752

Overall Influence

1930 - 2005 (75 years)

Terence Leslie Brian Wade was an English linguist who was Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Strathclyde from 1987 to 1995. After reading German and French at Durham University, he was both a student and instructor in the Joint Services School for Linguists, during which time he studied Russian at Cambridge. He arrived in Glasgow in 1963, and taught and developed courses at Strathclyde, where he received a PhD in 1977. He had a successful stint as chairman of the university's Department of Modern Languages from 1985 to 1993.

#5933

Daniel Nagrin

#65990

Overall Influence

1917 - 2008 (91 years)

Daniel Nagrin was an American modern dancer, choreographer, teacher, and author. He was born in New York City. Nagrin studied with Martha Graham, Anna Sokolow, Hanya Holm, Bill Matons and Helen Tamiris whom he later married. In addition to working as a modern dancer, Nagrin also performed on Broadway in Plain and Fancy, Up in Central Park, and Annie Get Your Gun, among other musicals. His 1950 dance Dance in the Sun was adapted by filmmaker Shirley Clarke for her 1953 film of the same name.

#5934

Fabio Luisi

#90408

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Fabio Luisi is an Italian conductor. He is currently principal conductor of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and chief conductor of the NHK Symphony Orchestra.

#5935

Jam Master Jay

#72699

Overall Influence

1965 - 2002 (37 years)

Jason William Mizell , better known by his stage name Jam Master Jay, was an American musician and DJ. He was the DJ of the influential hip hop group Run-DMC. During the 1980s, Run-DMC became one of the biggest hip hop groups and are credited with breaking hip hop into mainstream music.

#5936

Dominik Graf

#110795

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Dominik Graf is a German film director. He studied film direction at University of Television and Film Munich, from where he graduated in 1975. While he has directed several theatrically released feature films since the 1980s, he more often finds work in television, focussing primarily on the genres police drama, thriller and crime mystery, although he has also made comedies, melodramas, documentaries and essay films. He is an active participant in public discourse about the values of genre film in Germany, through numerous articles, and interviews, some of which have been collected into a bo...

#5937

Evangelia Adamou

#112620

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Evangelia Adamou is a senior researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, specializing in language contact and endangered languages. Biography Adamou studied at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Paris Descartes University . After working as a teaching assistant and then lecturer at Paris Descartes University, she became a junior researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in 2005, and was promoted to senior researcher in 2015.

#5938

Donald Forst

#93011

Overall Influence

1932 - 2014 (82 years)

Donald H. Forst was an American newspaper editor who worked for a variety of newspapers, mostly in New York, and headed New York Newsday, The Village Voice, and The Boston Herald. Early life and education Forst was born in Crown Heights and raised in Brooklyn, where his father was a lawyer. He was educated at the University of Vermont, where he started in journalism working on the college newspaper—he said in an interview because there was an attractive girl at the sign-up table. He earned a Master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. According to Wayne Barrett of The Village Voic...

#5939

Passenger

#87835

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (42 years)

Michael David Rosenberg , better known by his stage name Passenger, is an English indie folk singer-songwriter. From 2003 to 2009, Rosenberg fronted a band by the same name; he opted to keep the Passenger moniker for his solo work after the band dissolved. Rosenberg is best known for the 2012 song "Let Her Go", which topped the charts in 16 countries and accumulated more than 3.5 billion views on YouTube. Because Rosenberg was based in Australia at the time of release , it is the most-viewed Australian YouTube video of all time. In 2014, the song was nominated for the Brit Award for British Si...

#5940

Michael Almereyda

#79034

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Michael Almereyda is an American film director, screenwriter, and film producer. Early work Almereyda studied art history at Harvard but dropped out after three years to pursue filmmaking. He acquired a Hollywood agent on the strength of a spec script about Nikola Tesla. His first film as writer/director was a self-financed, black-and-white short featuring Dennis Hopper, A Hero of Our Time, based on Mikhail Lermontov's novel of the same title. Shot in 1985, it was finished in 1987 and screened in the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.

#5941

Amalia Arvaniti

#135449

Overall Influence

Amalia Arvaniti is a Greek linguist and Professor and Chair of English Language and Linguistics at Radboud University. She is known for her works on phonetics, phonology, and prosody, particularly intonation and speech rhythm.

#5942

Jerry Dodgion

#115619

Overall Influence

1932 - 2023 (91 years)

Jerry Dodgion was an American jazz saxophonist and flautist. Dodgion was born in Richmond, California. He played alto sax in middle school and began working locally in the San Francisco area in the 1950s. He played in bands with Rudy Salvini, John Coppola/Chuck Travis and Gerald Wilson and worked with the Vernon Alley Quartet, who accompanied Billie Holiday in 1955. He played with Gerald Wilson from 1953 to 1955, Benny Carter in the 1950s, Red Norvo from 1958 to 1961, Benny Goodman , Oliver Nelson, Thad Jones and Mel Lewis , Herbie Hancock, Duke Pearson, Blue Mitchell, Count Basie, and Marian McPartland.

#5943

Mark Adamo

#104268

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Mark Adamo is an American composer, librettist, and professor of music composition at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He was born in Philadelphia.

#5944

Shinji Aoyama

#97835

Overall Influence

1964 - 2022 (58 years)

Shinji Aoyama was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, composer, film critic, and novelist. He graduated from Rikkyo University. He won two awards at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival for his film Eureka.

#5945

Stephen M. Jones

#136878

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Stephen M. Jones is an American professor of music composition at Brigham Young University and former Dean of the BYU College of Fine Arts and Communications. Among his works is the music for the hymn "When Faith Endures", which is included in the current English-language edition of the LDS hymnal. His chamber, choral and orchestral music has been commissioned and performed by the Chicago Symphony, the Utah Symphony, the Utah Arts Festival, the Beijing Modern Music Festival, The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, and many others.

#5946

Tony Macaulay

#84448

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Tony Macaulay is an English author, composer for musical theatre, and songwriter. He has won the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors Award twice as 'Songwriter of the Year' . He is a nine time Ivor Novello Awards winning songwriter. In 2007, he became the only British person to win the Edwin Forrest Award for outstanding contribution to the American theatre. Macaulay's best-known songs include "Baby Now That I've Found You" and "Build Me Up Buttercup" with The Foundations, " I Didn't Get to Sleep at All," as well as "Love Grows " and "Don't Give Up on Us".

#5947

Waldemar Kmentt

#121341

Overall Influence

1929 - 2015 (86 years)

Waldemar Kmentt was an Austrian operatic tenor, who was particularly associated with the German repertory, both opera and operetta. Born in Vienna, Kmentt studied at the Vienna Music Academy, first the piano, and later voice with Adolf Vogel, Elisabeth Radó and Hans Duhan. In 1950, he sang the tenor-solo part in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony under Karl Böhm. His professional opera debut was in 1951 at the Vienna State Opera, as the Prince in The Love for Three Oranges. He appeared regularly at the Staatsoper for the next 35 years, in a total of 1,480 performances, and the company awarded him honorary membership in 1982.

#5948

Elizabeth A. Mannix

#79848

Overall Influence

Elizabeth A. Mannix is the professor of Management and Organizations at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management, and the Director of the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University. She obtained her PhD from the University of Chicago.

#5949

Rob Warden

#63888

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Rob Warden is a Chicago legal affairs journalist and co-founder of three organizations dedicated to exonerating the innocent and reforming criminal justice: the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, the National Registry of Exonerations at the University of California-Irvine, and Injustice Watch, a non-partisan, not-for-profit, journalism organization that conducts in-depth research exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality. As an investigative journalist in the 1970s, he began focusing on death penalty cases, which led to a career exposing and publicizing the injustices and misconduct in the legal system.

#5950

Jon Delano

#32146

Overall Influence

Jon Delano is the Money & Politics Editor for KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a position he began on a full-time basis in 2001 after joining the station in 1994 as its political analyst. Career A graduate of Haverford College and University of Pennsylvania Law School, Delano spent 14 years working as chief of staff for Congressman Doug Walgren.

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