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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List of the most influential people in Communications,

#7351

William Duckworth

#137220

Overall Influence

1943 - 2012 (69 years)

William Duckworth was an American composer, author, educator, and Internet pioneer. He wrote more than 200 pieces of music and is credited with the composition of the first postminimal piece of music, The Time Curve Preludes , for piano. Duckworth was a Professor of Music at Bucknell University. Together with Nora Farrell, his wife, he ran Monroe Street Music, the publisher of many Duckworth's pieces.

#7352

David White

#127131

Overall Influence

1939 - 2019 (80 years)

David Ernest White , also known as David White Tricker, was an American singer and songwriter. He formed the doo-wop quartet Danny & the Juniors, as well as being a founding member of the pop trio The Spokesmen. He wrote "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay" and co-wrote a number of other hit songs, including "At the Hop", "You Don't Own Me", and "1-2-3".

#7353

Boris Klyuyev

#140791

Overall Influence

1944 - 2020 (76 years)

Boris Vladimirovich Klyuyev was a Soviet and Russian actor and theatre teacher. He served as one of the lead actors of the Maly Theatre from 1969 to 2020 and taught acting technique in Shchepkin Higher Theatre School. He was named a People's Artist of Russia in 2002. He died on 1 September 2020 at the age of 76 from lung cancer.

#7354

Auli Hakulinen

#138435

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Auli Talvikki Hakulinen is a Finnish researcher and professor emerita. She worked as professor of Finnish at the University of Helsinki from 1991 to 2006. From 2001 to 2004, she was an academy professor.

#7355

Alois Kottmann

#75805

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Alois Kottmann was a German violinist, music pedagogue, university professor and patron. He was based in Frankfurt, where he founded several ensembles, and taught at both the Hoch Conservatory and the Musikhochschule Frankfurt. He founded concert series in the area, and a prize for young violinists.

#7356

Harry Dean Stanton

Harry Dean Stanton

#114137

Overall Influence

1926 - 2017 (91 years)

Harry Dean Stanton was an American actor, musician, and singer. In a career that spanned more than six decades, Stanton played supporting roles in films including Cool Hand Luke , Kelly's Heroes , Dillinger , The Godfather Part II , Alien , Escape from New York , Christine , Repo Man , One Magic Christmas , Pretty in Pink , The Last Temptation of Christ , Wild at Heart , The Straight Story , The Green Mile , The Man Who Cried , Alpha Dog , and Inland Empire . He had rare lead roles in Paris, Texas and in Lucky .

#7357

Stephen Oliver

#121495

Overall Influence

1950 - 1992 (42 years)

Stephen Michael Harding Oliver was an English composer, best known for his operas. Early life and education Oliver was born on 10 March 1950 in Chester, the son of , a religious education adviser, and Osborne George Oliver , an electricity board official. His maternal great-grandfather was William Boyd Carpenter, a Bishop of Ripon and a court chaplain to Queen Victoria.

#7358

Jesse L. Martin

Jesse L. Martin

#55737

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Jesse Lamont Martin is an American actor and singer. He is best known for his role of Tom Collins on Broadway in the musical Rent and performed on television as NYPD Detective Ed Green on Law & Order, Captain Joe West on The Flash, and professor Alec Mercer on The Irrational.

#7359

Matthew Wright

#118563

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Alexander Matthew Wright is an English television presenter and former tabloid journalist. He worked as a journalist for The Sun and was a showbusiness gossip columnist for The Daily Mirror before launching a television career. He hosted the Channel 5 topical debate show The Wright Stuff from 2000 to 2018. Wright occasionally appears on This Morning discussing what is in the news.

#7360

Gayle Wald

#92199

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Gayle Wald is a professor of English and American Studies at George Washington University and a Guggenheim Fellow. From 1994-95 she was Visiting Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

#7361

Tyler Bates

#58866

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Tyler Bates is an American musician, producer, and composer for film, television, and video game scores. Much of his work is in the action and horror film genres, with films like Dawn of the Dead, 300, Sucker Punch, Halloween I and II, and the John Wick franchise. He has collaborated with directors like Zack Snyder, Rob Zombie, Neil Marshall, William Friedkin, Scott Derrickson, James Gunn, Chad Stahelski and David Leitch. In addition, he is also the former lead guitarist of the American rock band Marilyn Manson, and produced its albums The Pale Emperor and Heaven Upside Down. He's currently J...

#7362

Ernie Wilkins

#107664

Overall Influence

1919 - 1999 (80 years)

Ernest Brooks Wilkins Jr. was an American jazz saxophonist, conductor and arranger who spent several years with Count Basie. He also wrote for Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, and Dizzy Gillespie. He was musical director for albums by Cannonball Adderley, Dinah Washington, Oscar Peterson, and Buddy Rich.

#7363

Brian Tyler

#79789

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Brian Theodore Tyler is an American composer, conductor, musician, arranger, and record producer, best known for his film, television, and video game scores. In his 24-year career, Tyler has scored seven installments of the Fast & Furious franchise, Rambo, Eagle Eye, The Expendables trilogy, Iron Man 3, Now You See Me, Avengers: Age of Ultron with Danny Elfman, Crazy Rich Asians and The Super Mario Bros. Movie among others. He also composed and re-arranged the current fanfare of the Universal Pictures logo, originally composed by Jerry Goldsmith, for Universal Pictures' 100th anniversary, w...

#7364

Mort Garson

#99318

Overall Influence

1924 - 2008 (84 years)

Morton Sanford Garson was a Canadian composer, arranger, songwriter, and pioneer of electronic music. He is best known for his albums in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Mother Earth's Plantasia . He also co-wrote several hit songs, including "Our Day Will Come", a hit for Ruby & the Romantics. According to Allmusic, "Mort Garson boasts one of the most unique and outright bizarre resumés in popular music, spanning from easy listening to occult-influenced space-age electronic pop."

#7365

Stonewall Jackson

Stonewall Jackson

#104892

Overall Influence

1932 - 2021 (89 years)

Stonewall Jackson was an American country music singer and musician who achieved his greatest fame during country's "golden" honky tonk era in the 1950s and early 1960s. Biography Early years Born in Tabor City, North Carolina on November 6, 1932, Jackson was the youngest of three children. Stonewall is not a nickname; he was named after Confederate General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.

#7366

Eric Owens

#125420

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Eric Owens is an American operatic bass-baritone. He has performed both in new works and reinterpreted classic repertoire. In 1996 he won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. Life and career Born in Philadelphia, Owens began studying the piano at the age of 6 at the Settlement Music School. In junior high school his interest shifted to the oboe and he began studying the oboe at the Settlement Music School with English-horn player Louis Rosenblatt of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He later continued his oboe studies with Laura Ahlbeck, a second oboe in the Metropolitan Opera orchestra, while attending Central High School in Philadelphia.

#7367

Lynn Harrell

#102510

Overall Influence

1944 - 2020 (76 years)

Lynn Harrell was an American classical cellist. Known for the "penetrating richness" of his sound, Harrell performed internationally as a recitalist, chamber musician, and soloist with major orchestras over a career spanning nearly six decades.

#7368

Anthony Shay

#93068

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Anthony Shay is a dancer and choreographer specializing in dances from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. In 50 years of work he has created over 200 choreographies. Shay created and directed several dance groups: Village Dancers, AMAN Folk Ensemble , and AVAZ International Dance Theatre .

#7369

Wade Robson

#64031

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Wade Jeremy William Robson is an Australian dancer and choreographer. He began performing as a dancer at age five, and has directed music videos and world tours for pop acts such as NSYNC and Britney Spears. Robson was the host and executive producer of The Wade Robson Project, which aired on MTV in 2003. In 2007, he joined the Fox television dance series So You Think You Can Dance as a guest judge and choreographer. He won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Choreography for the dance number "Ramalama " of So You Think You Can Dance.

#7370

Martha Young-Scholten

#119341

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Martha Young-Scholten is a linguist specialising in the phonology and syntax of second language acquisition . Education and career Young-Scholten obtained a master's degree in linguistics at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her PhD at the same institution, which was awarded in 1991, concerned the structure of phonology in German as a second language. She has been a Prof of SLA at the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University in the United Kingdom since September 2006.

#7371

John F. White

#71311

Overall Influence

1917 - 2005 (88 years)

John F. White was an academic administrator, president of National Educational Television, and president of the Cooper Union. Early life and career White was born on October 11, 1917, in Waukegan, Illinois, to the Reverend Edward Sydney and Lilah McCormick White. He was educated at the Harvard School for Boys and Hyde Park High School and went on to receive his B.A. from Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin in 1941. He married Joan Glasow in May 1943 with whom he had three children: Susan, Michael, and Christopher. In 1944, he received his master's degree at the University of Chicago.

#7372

Kaki King

#99058

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Kaki King is an American guitarist and composer. King is known for her percussive and jazz-tinged melodies, energetic live shows, use of multiple tunings on acoustic and lap steel guitar, and her diverse range in different genres.

#7373

Remko Scha

#107061

Overall Influence

1945 - 2015 (70 years)

Remko Jan Hendrik Scha was a professor of computational linguistics at the faculty of humanities and Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. He made important contributions to semantics, in particular the treatment of plurals, and to discourse analysis, and laid the foundations for what became an important research paradigm in computational linguistics, Data Oriented Parsing.

#7374

Lynne Bowker

#145168

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Lynne Bowker is a Canadian linguist. She is a Professor of Translation and Information Studies at the University of Ottawa and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Early life and education Bowker was born in 1969. She earned her Bachelor of Arts and Master's degree from the University of Ottawa before travelling to Europe to attend the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and Dublin City University.

#7375

John L. Crain

#54962

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

John Luther Crain is an American accountant and academic administrator and formerly served as president of Southeastern Louisiana University, having been appointed to the position on February 17, 2009, by the Board of Supervisors of the University of Louisiana System. He succeeded Randy Moffett. Crain so far has served the longest presidency at Southeastern Louisiana University and in the UL system.

#7376

Judith Colell

#115480

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Judith Colell i Pallarès is a Catalan film director, screenwriter and producer. Since July 2021 she has been president of the Catalan Film Academy. Biography Colell was awarded a degree in art history at the University of Barcelona. Afterwards she got a certificate in film from the New York University. Since then, she has directed a number of films, including Dones, winner of the 2001 Butaca Prize for best Catalan film, and Elisa K, which was co-directed by Jordi Cadena and has been shown at film festivals across the world. This film won the Jury's Special Award at 2010s edition of the San Se...

#7377

Joe Chambers

#90647

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Joe Chambers is an American jazz drummer, pianist, vibraphonist and composer. He attended the Philadelphia Conservatory for one year. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chambers gigged with many high-profile artists such as Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Wayne Shorter, and Chick Corea. During this period, his compositions were featured on some of the albums on which he appeared, such as those with Freddie Hubbard and Bobby Hutcherson. He has released fifteen albums as a bandleader and been a member of several incarnations of Max Roach's M'Boom percussion ensemble.

#7378

John Carney

#94232

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

John Carney is an Irish film director, producer, screenwriter and lyricist who specialises in musical drama films. He is best known as the showrunner and executive producer of Modern Love on Amazon Prime Video, for his films Once, Begin Again, and Sing Street. He is also a co-creator of the Irish TV drama series Bachelors Walk.

#7379

Shigeaki Saegusa

Shigeaki Saegusa

#124360

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Shigeaki Saegusa is a Japanese composer. Career Saegusa is best known for his opera version Chushingura of the well-known kabuki epic of the Forty-seven Ronin/Chūshingura with a libretto by the novelist Shimada Masahiko. Written over a period of 10 years, the opera was most recently performed at the New National Theatre, Tokyo in 2002. His newest opera, Jr. Butterfly is a sequel to Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly.

#7380

Tracii Guns

#57254

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Tracy Irving Richard Ulrich , known professionally as Tracii Guns, is an American guitarist best known as the co-founder of glam metal group L.A. Guns, as well as the supergroups named Brides of Destruction and Contraband. He was also a founding member of Guns N' Roses, but left shortly afterwards and was replaced by guitarist Slash.

#7381

Ian Brown

#89579

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Ian Brown is a Canadian journalist and author, winner of several national magazine and newspaper awards. Brown is currently the host of Human Edge and The View from Here on TVOntario, and has hosted programming for CBC Radio One, including Later the Same Day, Talking Books, and Sunday Morning. He has also worked as a business writer at Maclean's and the Financial Post, a feature reporter for The Globe and Mail, and a freelance journalist for other magazines including Saturday Night. He is an occasional contributor to the American public radio program This American Life.

#7382

André Prévost

#138595

Overall Influence

1934 - 2001 (67 years)

André Prévost, was a Canadian composer and music educator. He was awarded the Canadian Music Council Medal in 1977 and in 1985 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He also received the "Trophy for Concert Music" from the Performing Rights Organization of Canada.

#7383

Cyrus Forough

#100291

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Cyrus Forough Forough was born in Tehran and began violin studies at age five with his mother, a graduate of the Brussels Royal Conservatory of Music. At nine, Forough was the youngest ever to be admitted to the Royal Conservatory of Music, Brussels as a pupil of Arthur Grumiaux. Later studies were with David Oistrakh at the Moscow Conservatory. Following Oistrakh's death, Forough came to the United States to study with Josef Gingold at Indiana University and served as Gingold's assistant.

#7384

William Patrick

William Patrick

#102539

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

William Patrick is an editor, book doctor, and ghost-writer, and the co-author of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. He has also written two well-regarded suspense novels. He began his career at Little, Brown, then moved to Harvard University Press, where he acquired and edited works by the likes of Edward O. Wilson and Jane Goodall. While working at Harvard he wrote Spirals , a novel set in Cambridge during the early days of cloning and recombinant DNA research. His next work of fiction was Blood Winter , a thriller about germ warfare which the Wall Street Journal ...

#7385

Bené Arnold

#168682

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Bené Arnold is an American ballet dancer, she is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Utah.

#7386

Lotfi Mansouri

#117101

Overall Influence

1929 - 2013 (84 years)

Lotfollah "Lotfi" Mansouri was an Iranian-born opera director and manager. He was an opera director from about 1960 onwards, and is best known for being the General Director of the Canadian Opera Company and of the San Francisco Opera from 1988 through 2001. In 1992 he became a Chevalier of France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and the subject of a 1998 biography.

#7387

Gennadi Poloka

#105885

Overall Influence

1930 - 2014 (84 years)

Gennadi Ivanovich Poloka was a Soviet and Russian film director, screenwriter, producer and actor. People's Artist of Russia . IV Class Order "For Merit to the Fatherland" . Early years Gennadi Poloka was born in Kuybyshev . His family name comes from his Slovak great-grandfather who left Austria-Hungary for the Russian Empire just before the start of the World War I, saving from ethnic cleansing of Slavs. Poloka commented on his ethnicity: I come from a multinational family: there were Poles, Germans, Ukrainians... I have a strange surname. Every time I arrive in some country, there's always a question at the press-conference about my ethnicity.

#7388

John Clapp

#123542

Overall Influence

John Clapp is a visual artist from the San Francisco Bay Area. He was educated at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and is a professor in the School of Art & Design at San Jose State University in San Jose, California.

#7389

Oyeronke Oyewumi

#40779

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí is a Nigerian gender scholar and full professor of sociology at Stony Brook University. She acquired her bachelor's degree in political science at the University of Ibadan in Ibadan, Nigeria and went on to pursue her graduate degree in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Oyěwùmí is the winner of the African Studies Association's 2021 Distinguished Africanist Award, which recognizes and honours individuals who have contributed a lifetime of outstanding scholarship in African studies combined with service to the Africanist community.

#7390

Ed King

#67073

Overall Influence

1949 - 2018 (69 years)

Edward Calhoun King was an American musician. He was a guitarist for the psychedelic rock band Strawberry Alarm Clock and guitarist and bassist for the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd from 1972 to 1975 and again from 1987 to 1996.

#7391

Stanley A. Deetz

#35656

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Stanley A. Deetz is President of Interaction Design for Innovation and Professor Emeritus and a President's Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He was the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Conflict, Collaboration and Creative Governance and long term Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program when he taught at the University of Colorado.

#7392

Rufus Reid

#113770

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Rufus Reid is an American jazz bassist, educator, and composer. Biography Reid was raised in Sacramento, California, where he played the trumpet through junior high and high school. Upon graduation from Sacramento High School, he entered the United States Air Force as a trumpet player. During that period he began to be seriously interested in the bass.

#7393

Sadao Watanabe

#89708

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Sadao Watanabe is a Japanese jazz musician who plays alto saxophone and sopranino saxophone. He is known for his bossa nova recordings, although his work encompasses many styles, with collaborations from musicians all over the world.

#7394

Mark Turner

#108608

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Mark Turner is an American jazz saxophonist. Biography Born in Fairborn, Ohio, and raised in the small Southern California town of Palos Verdes Estates, Turner originally intended to become a commercial artist. In elementary school he played the clarinet, followed by the alto and tenor saxophones in high school. He attended California State University, Long Beach in the 1980s and then transferred to and graduated from Berklee College of Music in 1990 before moving to New York. Turner worked at Tower Records in New York City for an extended period before working full-time as a jazz musician.

#7395

Arthur Butterworth

#132743

Overall Influence

1923 - 2014 (91 years)

Arthur Eckersley Butterworth, was an English composer, conductor, trumpeter and teacher. Biography Early life and education Butterworth was born in New Moston, near Manchester. His father was secretary of the local church choir. His mother played the piano and Butterworth himself sang in the choir. For the entrance fee of sixpence, young Butterworth attended Hallé concerts and volunteered for the village brass band who allocated him the trombone. While still a teenager he played with the noted band at Besses o' th' Barn and started taking conducting lessons. While playing with the band, he ...

#7396

Paul Riser

#68850

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Paul Riser is an American trombonist and Motown musical arranger who was responsible for co-writing and arranging dozens of top ten hit records. His legacy as one of the "Funk Brothers" is similar to that of most of the other "Brothers", as his career has been overlooked and overshadowed by the stars of Motown that became household names. Some of the Funk Brothers he worked with include: Earl Van Dyke, Johnny Griffith, Robert White, Eddie Willis, Joe Messina, Dennis Coffey, Wah Wah Watson, James Jamerson, Bob Babbitt, Eddie Watkins, Richard "Pistol" Allen, Uriel Jones, Andrew Smith, Jack Ashf...

#7397

Roy Gordon Grainger

#133843

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Roy Gordon Grainger is a New Zealand physicist. He is head of the Earth Observation Data Group in the Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Sub-Department at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow in Physics at St Hugh's College, Oxford.

#7398

Bill Callahan

#91224

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Bill Callahan is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist who has also recorded and performed under the band name Smog. Callahan began working in the lo-fi genre, with home-made tape-albums recorded on four-track tape recorders. Later he began releasing albums with the label Drag City, to which he remains signed today. His work, in addition to lo-fi music, has encompassed apocalyptic folk and gothic country.

#7399

A. Monem Mahjoub

A. Monem Mahjoub

#118302

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

A. Monem Mahjoub is a Libyan linguist, philosopher, poet, historian, and political critic. Sometimes described as "the last Sumerian", his major works are in the fields of linguistics, philology, historiography, religion and humanistic thought, civilization development and politics. As a prolific author he has written more than twenty-five books.

#7400

Paavo Heininen

#119404

Overall Influence

1938 - 2022 (84 years)

Paavo Johannes Heininen was a Finnish composer and pianist. Biography He was born in Helsinki, where he studied at the Sibelius Academy and was taught composition by Aarre Merikanto, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Einar Englund, and Joonas Kokkonen. He continued his studies in Cologne with Bernd Alois Zimmermann; at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City with Vincent Persichetti and Eduard Steuermann; and privately in Poland with Witold Lutosławski. He also studied musicology at the University of Helsinki.

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