The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#7151
Robert Jason Phillipson
#165246
Overall Influence
#7152
Quiara Alegría Hudes
#64120
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Quiara Alegría Hudes is an American playwright, producer, lyricist and essayist. She is best known for writing the book for the musical In the Heights , and screenplay for its film adaptation. Hudes' first play in her Elliot Trilogy, Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. She received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Water by the Spoonful, her second play in that trilogy.
Go to Profile#7153
Laurence Cummings
#144411
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Laurence Cummings is a British harpsichordist, organist, and conductor. He is currently music director of the Academy of Ancient Music. Biography Cummings was born in Birmingham and educated at Solihull School, Christ Church, Oxford and the Royal College of Music. His teachers have included Jill Severs. Cummings has played harpsichord and organ continuo with many leading period instrument groups, including Les Arts Florissants, The Sixteen Choir, the Gabrieli Consort and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
Go to Profile#7154
Kenneth Paul Vogel
#165309
Overall Influence
#7155
Raymond J. Barry
#86176
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Raymond John Barry is an American film, television, and stage actor. He was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male for his performance in the film Steel City. Personal life Raymond John Barry was born in Hempstead, New York. He is married to writer Robyn Mundell. Together they have four children, Oona, Raymond, Liam and Manon.
Go to Profile#7156
Victor Wooten
#70641
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Victor Lemonte Wooten is an American bassist, songwriter, and record producer. He has been the bassist for Béla Fleck and the Flecktones since the group's formation in 1988 and a member of the band SMV with two other bassists, Stanley Clarke and Marcus Miller. From 2017 to 2019 he recorded as the bassist for the metal band Nitro.
Go to Profile#7157
Chris Thile
#80242
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Christopher Scott Thile is an American mandolinist, singer, songwriter, composer, and radio personality, best known for his work in the progressive acoustic trio Nickel Creek and the acoustic folk and progressive bluegrass quintet Punch Brothers. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. From 2016 to its cancellation in 2020, he hosted the radio variety show Live from Here.
Go to Profile#7158
Bill Vanpatten
#165357
Overall Influence
#7159
Anne Boyd
#117888
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Anne Elizabeth Boyd AM is an Australian composer and emeritus professor of music at the University of Sydney. Early life Boyd was born in Sydney to James Boyd and Annie Freda Deason Boyd . Her father died when she was age 3, and her mother sent her to live with relatives on a sheep station near Longreach, in central Queensland. This intimate experience with the Australian landscape – its expansiveness, its dramatic changes, and its "indescribable energy" – had a profound influence on her future as a composer. She began composing while still at Maneroo, at the age of eight, for the resources she had available: recorder and voice.
Go to Profile#7160
Frank Ticheli
#79437
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Frank Ticheli is an American composer of orchestral, choral, chamber, and concert band works. He lives in Los Angeles, California, where he is a Professor Emeritus of Composition at the University of Southern California. He was the Pacific Symphony's composer-in-residence from 1991 to 1998, composing numerous works for that orchestra. A number of his works have become standards in concert band repertoire.
Go to Profile#7161
Shoaib Mansoor
#42910
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Shoaib Mansoor , is a Pakistani television and film director, writer, producer, lyricist and musician of Muhajir origin. Active in the television industry since 1976, when he produced one of PTV's first programmes to be aired in colours, the music show Jharnay, he first found success for composing and writing the song Dil Dil Pakistan in 1987, thereby introducing Vital Signs musical band in mainstream Pakistani television. He was also well-recognised for directing many critically acclaimed hit drama series on Pakistani television.
Go to Profile#7162
Sergio Asti
#26167
Overall Influence
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
Sergio Asti was an Italian designer and architect, primarily known for his industrial designs for firms such as Artemide, Brionvega, , Gabbianelli, Heller, Knoll, Salviati, and Zanotta. Life and career Asti was born in Milan. After receiving his degree in architecture at the Polytechnic University of Milan, he opened his own design studio in 1956. That same year he became one of the founders of the Associazione per il Disegno Industriale.
Go to Profile#7163
Billy Mann
#61646
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
William H. Mann is a Grammy-nominated American songwriter, record producer and founder of independent music publishing company Green & Bloom/Topline, as well as chairman of management firm Manncom. In 2021, alongside partner Benton James, he launched Proof Of Concept, a talent development and creative media services firm. Later that same year, in partnership with Warner Music Group’s ADA Worldwide, Mann and James announced the launch of joint venture label, icons+giants.
Go to Profile#7164
Robin Eubanks
#102817
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Robin Eubanks is an American jazz and jazz fusion slide trombonist, the brother of guitarist Kevin Eubanks and trumpeter Duane Eubanks. His uncles are jazz pianist Ray Bryant and bassist Tommy Bryant. His mother, Vera Eubanks, was famed pianist Kenny Barron's first piano teacher.
Go to Profile#7165
Jimmy Martin
#105615
Overall Influence
1927 - 2005 (78 years)
James Henry Martin was an American bluegrass singer and musician, known as the "King of Bluegrass". Early years Martin was born in Sneedville, Tennessee, United States, and was raised in the hard farming life of rural East Tennessee. He grew up near Sneedville, singing in church and with friends from surrounding farms. His mother and stepfather who used to sing gospel were his first influences. When he was in his teens he played guitar in a local string band and later appeared on radio with Tex Climer and the Blue Band Coffee Boys.
Go to Profile#7166
Jorma Taccone
#74055
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Jorma Christopher Taccone is an American actor, comedian, writer, director, producer, and musician. He is one-third of the sketch comedy troupe The Lonely Island, with childhood friends Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer. In 2010, Taccone co-wrote and directed the SNL spinoff film MacGruber, which was his directorial debut. He directed his second feature alongside Schaffer, the musical comedy Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, which he also co-wrote and co-starred in with Schaffer and Samberg.
Go to Profile#7167
Jeet Gannguli
#99395
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Jeet Gannguli , is an Indian score composer of Bengali and Hindi movies and Playback Singer of Bengali Movies. Early life and education Born in a Kulin Bengali Brahmin family, Gannguli was initiated into the world of music at the age of three. He was a student of Baranagore Ramakrishna Mission Ashrama High School from where he completed his schooling. Later he graduated from the University of Calcutta. He is trained in Indian classical music under the guidance of his father Kali Ganguly and his pisima Shibani Roychowdhury. He studied western classical music, jazz and rock with jazz guitarist...
Go to Profile#7168
Rajiv Sabherwal
#165630
Overall Influence
#7169
Scott Schwenter
#151697
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Scott A. Schwenter is Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, where he has taught since 1999. He is a variationist morphosyntactician and pragmaticist, whose research addresses grammatical issues in both Spanish and Portuguese. His work has included both experimental and corpus-based approaches, making use of multivariate statistical analysis to examine broad-scale patterns across different varieties of Spanish and Portuguese.
Go to Profile#7170
David Baker
#87245
Overall Influence
1931 - 2016 (85 years)
David Nathaniel Baker Jr. was an American jazz composer, conductor, and musician from Indianapolis, as well as a professor of jazz studies at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Baker is best known as an educator and founder of the jazz studies program. From 1991 to 2012, he was conductor and musical and artistic director for the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra. He has more than 65 recordings, 70 books, and 400 articles to his credit.
Go to Profile#7171
Ranjith
#72177
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Ranjith Balakrishnan is an Indian film director, screenwriter, lyricist, producer, and actor who works in Malayalam cinema. Ranjith made his directorial debut in 2001 with Ravanaprabhu, the sequel to Devaasuram. His films Thirakkatha and Indian Rupee won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Malayalam in 2008 and 2011 respectively. He is also the current chairman of Kerala State Chalachitra Academy.
Go to Profile#7172
John Mandel
#153935
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
John Mandel is an American visual artist and one of the first photorealists to emerge in New York. His figurative oil and acrylic paintings, often monochromatic, were a departure from ordinary subject depiction. His works involved movement in compressed space. Mandel's work was exhibited at Max Hutchinson Gallery in SoHo and in the first biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum; his work has also been shown in the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Santa Monica Museum of Art, and in the Max Hutchinson, Sidney Janis, Modernism, Thomas/Llewellen, and Krygier/Landau Contemporary Art.
Go to Profile#7173
Ethan Iverson
#98403
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Ethan Iverson is a pianist, composer, and critic best known for his work in the avant-garde jazz trio The Bad Plus with bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King. Biography Iverson was born in Menomonie, Wisconsin. Before forming The Bad Plus, he was musical director of the Mark Morris Dance Group and a student of Fred Hersch and Sophia Rosoff. He has worked with artists such as Billy Hart, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Tim Berne, Mark Turner, Ben Street, Lee Konitz, Albert "Tootie" Heath, Paul Motian, Larry Grenadier, Charlie Haden and Ron Carter. He currently studies with John Bloomfield and is on th...
Go to Profile#7174
Tony Scott
#93114
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Tony Scott was an American jazz clarinetist and arranger with an interest in folk music around the world. For most of his career he was held in high esteem in new-age music circles because of his involvement in music linked to Asian cultures and to meditation.
Go to Profile#7175
Richard Teitelbaum
#76527
Overall Influence
1939 - 2020 (81 years)
Richard Lowe Teitelbaum was an American composer, keyboardist, and improvisor. A student of Allen Forte, Mel Powell, and Luigi Nono, he was known for his live electronic music and synthesizer performances. He was a pioneer of brain-wave music. He was also involved with world music and used Japanese, Indian, and western classical instruments and notation in both composition and improvisational settings.
Go to Profile#7176
Corey Hébert
#24508
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Corey Hébert is an American physician, journalist, and educator practicing in New Orleans, Louisiana, and is the Chief Medical Correspondent for WWL-TV, the CBS Affiliate for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He is an assistant professor in private practice at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center and Tulane University. Hébert is also the Chief Medical Officer of CareRx Inform, a prescription service.
Go to Profile#7177
David Rogers
#77792
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
David Peter Rogers was Chief Executive of the Met Office from June 2004 to July 2005. Since 2007, he has been President and Chairman of the Health and Climate Foundation, a charity with headquarters in Washington, DC.
Go to Profile#7178
Arthur Braverman
#151846
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Arthur Braverman is an American author and translator, primarily translating from Japanese to English. A Zen Buddhist practitioner, Braverman lived in Japan for seven years and studied at Antai-ji temple in 1969 training under Kosho Uchiyama. In 1978 he returned to the United States and studied classical Japanese at Columbia University. He lives in Ojai, CA with his wife.
Go to Profile#7179
Chris Goss
#66732
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Christopher Allen Goss is an American record producer and musician. Best known for producing records for Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age, he is regarded as an important figure in the development of stoner rock and desert rock genres. Goss is also the lead singer and guitarist of the hard rock band Masters of Reality.
Go to Profile#7180
Paul McGrath
#125849
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Paul McGrath is a British conductor and television personality best known for his involvement with prominent contemporary composers such as Jonathan Dove, Julian Grant, Michael Nyman and Judith Weir and for his role as a mentor in the BBC series A Maestro at the Opera. He is the Director of Music at the University of Warwick.
Go to Profile#7181
Bruno Bartoletti
#128028
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Bruno Bartoletti was an Italian operatic conductor. His active international career lasted from 1953 to 2007, and he specialized in the Italian repertory and contemporary works. He was particularly noted for his 51-year association with Lyric Opera of Chicago, as co-artistic director, artistic director, principal conductor, and artistic director emeritus. He also served as Artistic Director of both the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino , and as principal conductor of the Danish Royal Opera , in addition to frequent work as a guest conductor at various major opera...
Go to Profile#7182
Marc Gopin
#45961
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Marc Gopin is the director of the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution , and James H. Laue Professor at the School of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University.
Go to Profile#7183
Helen Loveday
#138710
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Helen Loveday is a lecturer in Chinese and Japanese art at the University of Geneva and curator of the Baur Foundation, Museum of Far Eastern Art, Geneva. She has written extensively on Asian art and translated a number of books.
Go to Profile#7184
Adrian Young
#69461
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Adrian Samuel Young is an American drummer and member of the rock bands No Doubt and Dreamcar. He also serves as a producer in his free time. Biography When not performing, in the studio or touring, Young likes to spend his time out on the golf course, as he is an avid golf player. He is a scratch golfer who is a much desired participant in celebrity golf tournaments such as the Michael Jordan Invitational, Alice Cooper Foundation Tournament and others. Young has participated in VH1's Fairway to Heaven numerous times.
Go to Profile#7185
Lisa Coleman
#76788
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Lisa Kanclerz Coleman is an American musician, primarily on keyboards and piano. Coleman is known for her tenure as a member of Prince's backing band The Revolution from 1979 to 1986, as well as Wendy & Lisa, her musical partnership with fellow Revolution alum Wendy Melvoin.
Go to Profile#7186
Olga Stolbova
#132710
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Olga Valerevna Stolbova is a Russian and Soviet linguist, known for her work on the Chadic languages. She received her Doctor of Sciences in 1998. Stolbova is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a representative of the Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics.
Go to Profile#7187
Mary Laughren
#135785
Overall Influence
Mary Laughren is an Australian linguist. She received her PhD from Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis in 1973. Her research interests include Australian Aboriginal languages, language in education, lexicography and the semantic-syntactic interface. Laughren has played a key role in the documentation of the Warlpiri Language, with notable contributions to the understanding of song register and baby talk register. She was also the editor of the Warlpiri-English encyclopedic dictionary.
Go to Profile#7188
Buddy Tate
#126626
Overall Influence
1913 - 2001 (88 years)
George Holmes "Buddy" Tate was an American jazz saxophonist and clarinetist. Biography Tate was born in Sherman, Texas, United States, and first played the alto saxophone. According to the website All About Jazz, "Tate was performing in public as early as 1925 in a band called McCloud's Night Owls." Tate's 2001 New York Times obituary stated that "he began his career in the late 1920s, playing around the Southwest with bands led by Terrence Holder, Andy Kirk and Nat Towles."
Go to Profile#7189
Udo Hahn
#166143
Overall Influence
#7190
Alla Rakha
#84918
Overall Influence
1919 - 2000 (81 years)
Ustad Alla Rakha Qureshi , mononymously known as Alla Rakha, was an Indian tabla player who specialised in Hindustani classical music. He was a frequent accompanist of sitar player Pandit Ravi Shankar and was largely responsible for introducing Tabla to the western audience.
Go to Profile#7191
Marc Alexander
#117306
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Marc Alexander is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Glasgow, and Director of the Historical Thesaurus of English. His research is on the semantic development of English, particularly focusing on the relationships between language, culture, and history. As the Chief Editor of the Thesaurus, he was a recipient—as part of the University of Glasgow—of the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher Education in 2017. He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize of £100,000 for his linguistic research in 2019.
Go to Profile#7192
Marco Mellia
#166178
Overall Influence
#7193
Jean-Claude Coquet
#149009
Overall Influence
1928 - 2023 (95 years)
Jean-Claude Coquet was a French linguist and semiotician. Publications Sémiotique littéraire. Contribution à l'analyse sémantique du discours Le discours et son sujet I. Essai de grammaire modale Le discours et son sujet II. Pratique de la grammaire modale La Quête du sens. Le Langage en question Phusis et Logos. Une Phénoménologie du langage Phénoménologie du langage
Go to Profile#7194
Shantanu Moitra
#73415
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Shantanu Moitra is an Indian score composer, musician and pianist who has composed songs for the Hindi film industry, and is most known for his scores in the films Parineeta , Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi , Lage Raho Munnabhai and 3 Idiots , and private albums, Mann ke Manjeere and Ab ke Saawan sung by Shubha Mudgal. In 2014, he received the National Film Award for Best Music Direction for Na Bangaaru Talli.
Go to Profile#7195
Brett Simon
#95799
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Brett Simon is an American commercial, music video and film director. Career Simon graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1997 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing, and later graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002 with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Art Practice. He is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at UC Berkeley. In 2001, he wrote, directed, edited and produced the short film Counterfeit Film, which showed at the Telluride Film Festival, South by Southwest and RESFest and has been archived at the Pacific Film Archive at UC Berkeley, as well as winning numerous awards.
Go to Profile#7196
Lü Shuxiang
#106892
Overall Influence
1904 - 1998 (94 years)
Lü Shuxiang was a Chinese linguist, lexicographer and educator, and founder of Modern Chinese linguistic studies. Overview Lü Shuxiang was born in Danyang, Jiangsu Province. He studied Foreign Languages and Literature in the National Central University and graduated in 1926. He then taught in Danyang Middle School and Suzhou High School. In 1936, he went to England for postgraduate studies in the Anthropology Department of Oxford University and then in the Library Science Department of the University of London. He returned to China in 1938 during the war, and held various professorships in Yu...
Go to Profile#7197
John Casken
#120930
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
John Arthur Casken is an English composer. Casken was born in Barnsley, West Riding of Yorkshire, England. While at Barnsley Grammar School in the 1960s his music teacher played a recording of Berg's Violin Concerto, which had a lasting influence. He studied composition at the University of Birmingham with John Joubert and Peter Dickinson. He attended the Warsaw Academy of Music between 1971 and 1972, where he studied with Andrzej Dobrowolski but also met and became friends with Witold Lutosławski. He has lectured at the universities of Birmingham and Durham , and between 1992 and 2008 he was Professor of Music at the University of Manchester.
Go to Profile#7198
Gary Green
#120478
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Gary William Green is an English musician. During the 1970s, he was the guitarist for the progressive rock band Gentle Giant. Green was with the band from the debut album Gentle Giant all the way to the last album Civilian. Green's style was different from most of his peers, being a more blues-based guitarist. Like his fellow band members, Green was also adept at other instruments, including mandolin and recorder. According to a 2008 interview, founding member Phil Shulman said that, despite Green's blues influences, he fit in well with the band's progressive style since Green was "quick on t...
Go to Profile#7199
Josh Paul
#60701
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Josh Paul is an American bass guitarist best known as an original member of the band Daughtry, playing on all six of their studio albums. In January 2022, Paul left Daughtry. Prior to that, at the age of 18, he joined thrash/punk band Suicidal Tendencies. Other notable work includes his soul/rock side project Bobby Church, and contributions to a diverse range of bands and artists such as Infectious Grooves, Everlast, Kelly Osbourne, The Veronicas, and Ashley Parker Angel.
Go to Profile#7200
Alvin Curran
#109930
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Alvin Curran is an American composer, performer, improviser, sound artist, and writer. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and lives and works in Rome, Italy. He is the co-founder, with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, of Musica Elettronica Viva, and a former student of Elliott Carter. Curran's music often makes use of electronics and environmental found sounds. He was a professor of music at Mills College in California until 2006 and now teaches privately in Rome and sporadically at various institutions.
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