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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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Communications,

#6801

Andreas Musolff

#156903

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

#6802

Phil Perry

#73643

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Philip Eugene Perry is an American R&B singer, songwriter, musician and a former member of the soul group, The Montclairs, from 1971 to 1975. He was also known for performing the opening song to Disney’s sitcom, Goof Troop.

#6803

Bernard Rands

#103706

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Bernard Rands is a British-American contemporary classical composer. He studied music and English literature at the University of Wales, Bangor, and composition with Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna in Darmstadt, Germany, and with Luigi Dallapiccola and Luciano Berio in Milan, Italy. He held residencies at Princeton University, the University of Illinois, and the University of York before emigrating to the United States in 1975; he became a U.S. citizen in 1983. In 1984, Rands's Canti del Sole, premiered by Paul Sperry, Zubin Mehta, and the New York Philharmonic, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

#6804

Li Jinfang

#130875

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Li Jinfang is a Chinese linguist at Minzu University in Beijing, China. Li, an ethnic Zhuang, is a leading specialist in the Kra-Dai languages of southern China, especially the Kra branch. Li's doctoral dissertation focused on the Buyang language, and was published as Studies on the Buyang Language in 1999.

#6805

Patrick W. Hanks

#156938

Overall Influence

#6806

Joan Miller

#87213

Overall Influence

1936 - 2014 (78 years)

Joan Miller was an American dancer, choreographer, and educator. She was the artistic director of The Joan Miller Chamber Arts/Dance Players, a mixed-media dance company that used satire to make social commentary and provoke social change, from 1970 to 2007. Miller was also the founder and director of the dance program at Lehman College from 1970 to 2000.

#6807

Emmanuel Halperin

Emmanuel Halperin

#111893

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Emmanuel Halperin is an Israeli journalist, television presenter, and editor. Likewise, a Lecturer, and a Theatre and Television Actor. Halperin is best known in Israel for his role as one of the main presenters of the nightly News program MeHayom LeMahar.

#6808

Geri Allen

#87862

Overall Influence

1957 - 2017 (60 years)

Geri Antoinette Allen was an American jazz pianist, composer, and educator. She taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Pittsburgh. Early life and education Allen was born in Pontiac, Michigan, on June 12, 1957, and grew up in Detroit. "Her father, Mount Allen Jr, was a school principal, her mother, Barbara, a government administrator in the defence industry." Allen was educated in Detroit Public Schools. She started playing the piano at the age of seven, and settled on becoming a jazz pianist in her early teens.

#6809

Juana Muñoz-Liceras

#156994

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Juana Muñoz-Liceras is Professor of Hispanic and General Linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada. Her main research focus on the acquisition of Spanish as a Second Language as well theoretical linguistics and language contact. She was recognized as one of the 10 most influential Hispanics of 2013 in Canada.

#6810

Goggo Addi

#122096

Overall Influence

1911 - 1999 (88 years)

Goggo Addi was a Cameroonian storyteller who performed in the Fula language. She hosted storytelling events in the country for several decades, and from 1985 to 1989 she consented to have her stories recorded and transcribed by the researcher Ursula Baumgardt, contributing significantly to perpetuating this West African oral tradition.

#6811

Bill Perkins

#114182

Overall Influence

1924 - 2003 (79 years)

William Reese Perkins was an American cool jazz saxophonist and flutist, popular on the West Coast jazz scene, known primarily as a tenor saxophonist. Born in San Francisco, California, United States, Perkins started performing in the big bands of Woody Herman and Jerry Wald. He worked for the Stan Kenton orchestra, which led to his entry into the cool jazz idiom. He began performing with Art Pepper and Bud Shank. He was also a member of The Tonight Show Band from 1970 to 1992 and The Lighthouse All-Stars. In the 1960s, Perkins had a second career as a recording engineer.

#6812

Bill Williams

#79636

Overall Influence

1960 - 1998 (38 years)

Bill Williams was an American video game designer, programmer, composer, and author born with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder. According to a medical encyclopedia Williams consulted when he was 12, people with cystic fibrosis weren't expected to live past the age of 13.

#6813

Al Perkins

#79056

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Al Perkins is an American guitarist known primarily for his steel guitar work. The Gibson guitar company called Perkins "the world's most influential Dobro player" and began producing an "Al Perkins Signature" Dobro in 2001—designed and autographed by Perkins.

#6814

W. Nelson Francis

#157087

Overall Influence

#6815

Maryn McKenna

#97614

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Maryn McKenna is an American author and journalist. She has written for Nature, National Geographic, and Scientific American, and spoke on antibiotics at TED 2015. Fellowships In 2009, McKenna received a Dart Center Ochberg Fellowship from The Journalism School at Columbia University. In 2012, she was awarded an Ethics & Justice Investigative Journalism Fellowship at The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. In 2013, she joined the Knight Science Journalism program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work on a Fellowship.

#6816

Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz

#75273

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz is a German Catholic philosopher and author. She studies Catholic religious philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries. Biography Education Gerl-Falkovitz studied philosophy, German Studies, and political science at the universities of Munich and Heidelberg from 1965 to 1971; she earned her doctorate from the University of Munich in 1971. In an interview in 2021, she said of this formative period in her life, "The theology of the 1960s, when I was studying in Munich, was not attractive for me: too much historical criticism, also in methodology, too much existentia...

#6817

Isaac Hayes

#79157

Overall Influence

1942 - 2008 (66 years)

Isaac Lee Hayes Jr. was an American singer, songwriter, actor, and composer. He was one of the creative forces behind the Southern soul music label Stax Records, serving as both an in-house songwriter and as a session musician and record producer, teaming with his partner David Porter during the mid-1960s. Hayes and Porter were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005 in recognition of writing scores of songs for themselves, the duo Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas, and others. In 2002, Hayes was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

#6818

Adriano Duarte Rodrigues

Adriano Duarte Rodrigues

#117850

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Adriano Duarte Rodrigues is a Portuguese communication theorist. As an assistant professor of the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, he created Portugal's first communications department and undergraduate degree.

#6819

Heinrich Schiff

#110661

Overall Influence

1951 - 2016 (65 years)

Heinrich Schiff was an Austrian cellist and conductor. Early life Heinrich Schiff was born on 18 November 1951 in Gmunden, Austria. His parents, Helga and Helmut Schiff, were composers. He studied cello with Tobias Kühne and André Navarra and made his solo debut in Vienna and London in 1971. He studied conducting with Hans Swarowsky.

#6820

Stig Egil Bojesen

#157160

Overall Influence

#6821

Bill Whelan

#87737

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

William Michael Joseph Whelan is an Irish composer and musician. He is best known for composing a piece for the interval of the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest. The result, "Riverdance", was a seven-minute piece of original music accompanying a new take on traditional Irish dancing that became a full-length stage production and spawned a worldwide craze for Irish music and dance. The corresponding soundtrack album earned him a Grammy. "Riverdance" was released as a single in 1994, credited to "Bill Whelan and Anúna featuring the RTÉ Concert Orchestra". It reached number one in Ireland for 18 weeks and number nine in the UK.

#6822

Etta Jones

#107588

Overall Influence

1928 - 2001 (73 years)

Etta Jones was an American jazz singer. Her best-known recordings are "Don't Go to Strangers" and "Save Your Love for Me". She worked with Buddy Johnson, Oliver Nelson, Earl Hines, Barney Bigard, Gene Ammons, Kenny Burrell, Milt Jackson, Cedar Walton, and Houston Person.

#6823

Ollie E. Brown

#66101

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Ollie E. Brown is an American drummer, percussionist, record producer, and high-school basketball coach. A prolific session musician, Brown has performed on over a hundred albums in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Brown was also half of the American dance-pop duo Ollie & Jerry, which had a Top 10 hit with "Breakin'... There's No Stopping Us" in 1984.

#6824

Chris Bailey

#112188

Overall Influence

1957 - 2022 (65 years)

Christopher James Mannix Bailey was an Australian singer, songwriter, musician and producer. He was the co-founder and singer of rock band the Saints. Early life Bailey was born in Nanyuki, Colony of Kenya to Irish parents. He grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, until the age of seven, when his family migrated to Australia. His family settled in Inala in Brisbane, Queensland. He and his sister Margaret attended Inala State High School, Oxley State High School and Corinda State High School, where Ed Kuepper and Ivor Hay were also students.

#6825

Jan Ivarsson

#100603

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Jan Ivarsson is a Swedish translation scholar specialised in the field of audiovisual translation. Life Ivarsson studied mathematics, physics, literature, Scandinavian languages and English at Uppsala University. He was very involved in student theatre and later worked at the municipal theatre. From 1960 to 1963 he taught at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel and from 1963 to 1970 he taught Swedish language and literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. He later taught from 1965 until 1970 at the École Supérieure d'Interprètes et de Traducteurs in Paris and worked in a number of Paris theatres.

#6826

Mark O'Connor

#71595

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Mark O'Connor is an American fiddle player and composer whose music combines bluegrass, country, jazz and classical. A three-time Grammy Award winner, he has won six Country Music Association Musician Of The Year awards and, was a member of three influential musical ensembles; the David Grisman Quintet, The Dregs, and Strength in Numbers.

#6827

Giselher Klebe

#100033

Overall Influence

1925 - 2009 (84 years)

Giselher Wolfgang Klebe was a German composer, and an academic teacher. He composed more than 140 works, among them 14 operas, all based on literary works, eight symphonies, 15 solo concerts, chamber music, piano works, and sacred music.

#6828

R. David Zorc

#110528

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

R. David Zorc is an American linguist primarily known for his work on Austronesian languages and linguistics, particularly the Philippine languages. Education Zorc graduated cum laude with an A.B. in Philosophy from Georgetown University in 1965. From 1965 to 1969, he was a Peace Corps member in the Philippines. In 1971, he obtained an M.A. in Linguistics & Anthropology from Cornell University, and graduated with a Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1975. His doctoral dissertation was a comprehensive survey of the Bisayan languages.

#6829

Harold Land

#101666

Overall Influence

1928 - 2001 (73 years)

Harold de Vance Land was an American hard bop and post-bop tenor saxophonist. Land developed his hard bop playing with the Max Roach/Clifford Brown band into a personal, modern style, often rivalling Clifford Brown's instrumental ability with his own inventive and whimsical solos. His tone was strong and emotional, yet hinted at a certain introspective fragility.

#6830

Robert Maxwell

#125713

Overall Influence

1921 - 2012 (91 years)

Robert Maxwell was an American harpist, songwriter, and teacher who wrote the music for two well-known songs: "Ebb Tide" and "Shangri-La" . He also wrote "Solfeggio", used in a repeated skit by entertainment television innovator Ernie Kovacs.

#6831

Dominic Muldowney

#114872

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Dominic Muldowney is a British composer. Biography Dominic Muldowney studied at the University of Southampton with Jonathan Harvey, at the University of York , and privately with Harrison Birtwistle. From 1974 to 1976 he was composer-in-residence to the Southern Arts Association. In 1976 he was invited by Birtwistle to become Assistant Music Director of the Royal National Theatre in London. He succeeded Birtwistle as Music Director in 1981, remaining in that post until 1997.

#6832

Gerald Ray Miller

#157416

Overall Influence

#6833

William E. Simkin

#95784

Overall Influence

1907 - 1992 (85 years)

William Edward Simkin was an American labor mediator and private arbitrator who worked on resolving strikes in major nationwide industries as the longest-serving head of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the nation's top labor mediator.

#6834

Ed Nimmervoll

#79313

Overall Influence

1947 - 2014 (67 years)

Edward Charles Nimmervoll was an Australian music journalist, author and historian. He worked on rock and pop magazines Go-Set and Juke Magazine both as a journalist and as an editor. From 2000, Nimmervoll was editor of HowlSpace, a website detailing Australian rock/pop music history, providing artist profiles, news and video interviews. He was an author of books on the same subject and co-authored books with musicians including Brian Cadd and Renée Geyer .

#6835

Mercer Ellington

Mercer Ellington

#88183

Overall Influence

1919 - 1996 (77 years)

Mercer Kennedy Ellington was an American musician, composer, and arranger. His father was Duke Ellington, whose band Mercer led for 20 years after his father's death. Biography Early life and education Ellington was born in Washington, D.C., United States. He was the only child of the composer, pianist, and bandleader Duke Ellington and his high school sweetheart Edna Thompson , whom Duke married in 1918 and never divorced. Ellington grew up primarily in Harlem from the age of eight. By the age of eighteen, Ellington had written his first piece to be recorded by his father . Ellington atten...

#6836

Earl Thomas Conley

#85321

Overall Influence

1941 - 2019 (78 years)

Earl Thomas Conley was an American country music singer-songwriter. Between 1980 and 2003, he recorded ten studio albums, including seven for RCA Records. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, Conley also charted more than 30 singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, of which 18 reached Number One. His 18 Billboard Number One country singles during the 1980s were the third most by any artist in any genre during that decade, after Alabama and Ronnie Milsap.

#6837

Noël Lee

#134116

Overall Influence

1924 - 2013 (89 years)

Noël Lee was an American classical pianist and composer. Born in 1924 in Nanjing, China, Lee studied music in Lafayette, Indiana, then attended Harvard University, studying with Walter Piston, Irving Fine, and Tillman Merritt and was also a student at the Longy School of Music in the early 1940s. Following World War II, he traveled to Paris where he studied music with Nadia Boulanger and was a friend of Douglas Allanbrook. He composed orchestral, chamber, piano, vocal, and film music. In addition, he completed several unfinished piano works by Franz Schubert, and composed cadenzas for piano concertos by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven.

#6838

Lee S. Sproull

#157540

Overall Influence

#6839

Hans Drewanz

#109771

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Hans Drewanz was a German conductor and academic teacher. He was the Generalmusikdirektor of Darmstadt for more than three decades, shaping musical life in the town especially at the Staatstheater Darmstadt.

#6840

Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh

Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh

#110521

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh is an Irish fiddler and the lead vocalist for the Irish folk music band Altan, which she co-founded with her husband Frankie Kennedy in 1987. Ní Mhaonaigh is recognised as a leading exponent in the Donegal fiddle tradition, and she is often considered one of the foremost singers in the Irish language, her native tongue. She was part of the Irish supergroup T with the Maggies who performed in January 2009 at Temple Bar TradFest in Dublin their first ever two concerts under that name and who released in October 2010 their debut album. After nearly 22 years with Altan, on 2...

#6841

Eugen Doga

#74005

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Eugen Doga is a Soviet composer of Moldovan descent. A creator of three ballets "Luceafărul", "Venancia", "Queen Margot", the opera "Dialogues of Love", more than 100 instrumental and choral works – symphonies, 6 quartets, "Requiem", church music, and other, plus music for 13 plays, radio shows, more than 200 movies, more than 260 songs and romances, more than 70 waltzes; he is also the author of works for children, the music for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic Games in 1980 in Moscow.

#6842

Wild Bill Davis

Wild Bill Davis

#112618

Overall Influence

1918 - 1995 (77 years)

Wild Bill Davis was the stage name of American jazz pianist, organist, and arranger William Strethen Davis. He is best known for his pioneering jazz electric organ recordings and for his tenure with the Tympany Five, the backing group for Louis Jordan. Prior to the emergence of Jimmy Smith in 1956, Davis was the pacesetter among organists.

#6843

Christopher Parkening

#97970

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Christopher William Parkening is an American classical guitarist. He holds the Chair of Classical Guitar at Pepperdine University under the title Distinguished Professor of Music. Biography Parkening was born in Los Angeles, California. His cousin Jack Marshall, a studio musician active in the 1960s, introduced Parkening to the recordings of Andrés Segovia when he was 11 and encouraged his classical guitar studies. By the age of 19 he had embarked on a professional career of regular touring and recording.

#6844

David "Fathead" Newman

David "Fathead" Newman

#88109

Overall Influence

1933 - 2009 (76 years)

David "Fathead" Newman was an American jazz and rhythm-and-blues saxophonist, who made numerous recordings as a session musician and leader, but is best known for his work as a sideman on seminal 1950s and early 1960s recordings by Ray Charles.

#6845

Doris Jean Austin

#122240

Overall Influence

1949 - 1994 (45 years)

Doris Jean Austin was an American author and journalist. Early life and education Doris Jean Austin was born in 1949 in Mobile, Alabama, in the United States. She was raised by her mother and grandmother. When she was six years old, Austin moved with her family to Jersey City, New Jersey, where she attended Lincoln High School. She was influenced to become a writer by her high school English teacher Reverend Ercell F. Webb. She was raised in a strict Baptist household, which would also serve as an inspiration for her work. She died in 1994 of liver cancer.

#6846

George E. Lewis

#88205

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

George Emanuel Lewis is an American composer, performer, and scholar of experimental music. He has been a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians since 1971, when he joined the organization at the age of 19. He is renowned for his work as an improvising trombonist and considered a pioneer of computer music, which he began pursuing in the late 1970s; in the 1980s he created Voyager, an improvising software he has used in interactive performances. Lewis's many honors include a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music received the American Book Award.

#6847

Peter Erős

#97570

Overall Influence

1932 - 2014 (82 years)

Peter Sandor Erős was a Hungarian-American conductor. Erős attended the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, where he studied composition with Zoltán Kodály, chamber music with Leó Weiner, and conducting with László Somogyi.

#6848

Claudio Gora

#118075

Overall Influence

1913 - 1998 (85 years)

Claudio Gora, Emilio Giordana was an Italian actor and film director. He was particularly prolific, making some 155 appearances in film and television over nearly 60 years . In the 1950s he did dabble with directing and screenwriting and directed the film Three Strangers in Rome in 1958 which was incidentally the first leading role by Claudia Cardinale. Some of his notable roles includes Adua e le compagne, directed by Antonio Pietrangeli, Tutti a casa by Luigi Comencini, and Dino Risi's A Difficult Life and Il Sorpasso.

#6849

Alon Lavie

#157870

Overall Influence

#6850

AJ Tracey

#81412

Overall Influence

1994 - Present (32 years)

Ché Wolton Grant , known professionally as AJ Tracey, is an independent British rapper, singer, songwriter, and record producer. He is from Ladbroke Grove, West London. Tracey rose to popularity in 2016 and was listed by The Guardian in a list of "best new acts to catch at festivals in 2016".

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