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,
#8651
Gary Burr
#87152
Overall Influence
Gary Burr is an American musician, songwriter, and record producer, primarily in the country music genre. Many of the songs he has written have become Top-10 hits, the first of which was "Love's Been A Little Bit Hard On Me" released by Juice Newton in 1982. He became a member of the group Pure Prairie League , taking over after Vince Gill departed the group. Burr later moved to Nashville to focus on his songwriting career, though he has continued performing and is currently a member of the Blue Sky Riders. He has written and co-written songs for many country artists , and a few songs for Po...
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Pieter Ballon
#175540
Overall Influence
Pieter Ballon is a Belgian historian and communications scholar specializing in smart cities. He is a Professor in Communication Sciences at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and holder of the university's academic Chair on Smart Cities.
Go to Profile#8653
Ján Horecký
#116548
Overall Influence
1920 - 2006 (86 years)
Ján Horecký was a Slovak linguist. In 1944 he graduated in Slovak and Latin language at the Slovak University in Bratislava . After graduation, Horecký became a researcher at the Slovak Academy of Sciences.
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Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin
#130542
Overall Influence
1950 - 2018 (68 years)
Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin was an Irish musician, composer, academic and educationalist. Biography Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin was a pianist, composer, recording artist and academic; he held the Professorship of Music at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance which he founded at the University of Limerick in 1994. I
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Francine Simonin
#126276
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Francine Simonin was a Swiss-Canadian painter, engraver, and designer. She was considered to be an expressionist. Biography Simonin received much exposure to painting, literature, and music during her childhood, where she often moved between Lausanne and Champex. She entered the École cantonale d'art de Lausanne in 1953. She attended the studio of Casimir Reymond from 1958 to 1960. During her artistic career, she regularly travelled across Europe and built a friendship with Marguerite Duras, and the two women were very close until the 1980s. She was also good friends with Janette Laverrière.
Go to Profile#8656
Mauro Maur
#151161
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Mauro Maur, OMRI is an Italian trumpeter and composer. He has collaborated alongside musicians such as Ennio Morricone, Placido Domingo, Uto Ughi, Riccardo Muti, Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, and Pierre Boulez.
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Frank Kaderabek
#137851
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Frank John Kaderabek is the former principal trumpet of the Philadelphia Orchestra and former trumpet instructor of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Career Born in Chicago, he studied with Edward Masacek and Adolph Herseth and moved to New York to study with Harry Glantz and Nathan Prager. He was principal trumpet of the Dallas Symphony , assistant/third trumpet with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and principal with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra before joining the Philadelphia Orchestra under chief conductor Eugene Ormandy. Many of his private students and students from Curtis now play in major orchestras.
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Teresa Cheng
#108083
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Teresa Cheng is an animation producer specifically skilled in computer graphics and most famously known for her work on Shrek Forever After, Madagascar, Batman & Robin, and True Lies. She has worked with major agencies such as Warner Brothers Studios, DreamWorks, assumed the role of general manager for Lucasfilm Animation, and most recently has become chair of the John C. Hench Division of Animation and Digital Arts at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
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Kim Soo-yong
#140668
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Kim Soo-yong is a South Korean film director. Kim made his debut in 1958 with A Henpecked Husband and directed more than 100 movies through 1999 with Scent of Love . He made many popular commercial films of the past decades, such as Sad Story of Self Supporting Child as well as some 50 literary movies based on popular Korean novels such as The Sea Village and Mist .
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Fred Anderson
#142400
Overall Influence
1929 - 2010 (81 years)
Fred Anderson was an American jazz tenor saxophonist who was based in Chicago, Illinois. Anderson's playing was rooted in the swing music and hard bop idioms, but he also incorporated innovations from free jazz. Anderson was also noted for having mentored numerous young musicians. Critic Ben Ratliff called him "a father figure of experimental jazz in Chicago". Writer John Corbett referred to him as "scene caretaker, underground booster, indefatigable cultural worker, quiet force for good." In 2001, author John Litweiler called Anderson "the finest tenor saxophonist in free jazz/underground ja...
Go to Profile#8661
Susan M. Dray
#87591
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Susan M. Dray is an American human-computer interaction and user experience professional who is a member of the CHI academy and the User Experience Professionals Association . Dray is known for her work in the field of UX design and is also a founding member of SIGCHI, the Association for Computing Machinery's special interest group for human-computer interaction.
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Rae Woodland
#168079
Overall Influence
1922 - 2013 (91 years)
Rae Woodland was a British soprano who studied with Roy Henderson. Her debut was as Queen of the Night at Sadlers Wells. She sang in many European festivals, and debuted at Covent Garden in La sonnambula with Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti. She was first asked to sing for Benjamin Britten on the English Opera Group's tour of Russia, and played many roles for him subsequently. She also created roles for Gottfried von Einem, Nicholas Maw and Sir Arthur Bliss, and made many live broadcasts for the BBC, from the RAH Proms to Friday Night is Music Night. She retired from the opera stage in 1984.
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Takeshi Kitano
#128626
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
, also known as in Japan, is a Japanese comedian, actor, and filmmaker. While he is known primarily as a comedian and TV host in his native Japan, he is better known abroad for his work as a filmmaker and actor as well as TV host.
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Daniel Pearl
#116650
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Daniel Pearl, A.S.C. is an American cinematographer who has worked on many feature films, over 400 music videos and more than 250 commercials. He is known for his cinematography work on various horror films, including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and its 2003 remake, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem , Friday the 13th , The Boy and Mom and Dad .
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Eric Shilling
#155373
Overall Influence
1920 - 2006 (86 years)
Eric Shilling was an English opera singer and producer, long associated with English National Opera. He was married to the soprano Erica Johns, and they have two sons the oldest is George Shilling. He was born and died in London.
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Peter Cornelius
#117593
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
#8667
Rudolf Sremec
#158949
Overall Influence
1909 - 1999 (90 years)
Rudolf Sremec was a Yugoslav and Croatian film director. He is regarded as one of the most important Croatian authors of short documentary films. In a career spanning four decades, Sremec directed and wrote some 90 documentary shorts, mainly dealing with various cultural and anthropological topics.
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Don Fleming
#94852
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Donald Gene Fleming is an American musician and producer. Besides fronting a number of his own bands, Fleming has produced Sonic Youth, Screaming Trees, Teenage Fanclub and Hole. Career Bands The Stroke Band Fleming started his musical career with the art/garage/punk group The Stroke Band of Adel, Georgia in the late 1970s. They released one album, Green and Yellow, in 1978 on Abacus Records.
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Gerardo Gandini
#126407
Overall Influence
1936 - 2013 (77 years)
Gerardo Gandini was a pianist, composer, and music director, who became one of the most relevant figures of contemporary Argentine music of the second half of the 20th century. He studied composition with Goffredo Petrassi and Alberto Ginastera, and piano with Roberto Caamaño, Pía Sebastiani, and Ivonne Loriod. He was Astor Piazzolla's pianist in the Sexteto Nuevo Tango formed in 1989.
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John Mills
#164621
Overall Influence
John Mills was a British stage actor. A long-standing part of the Drury Lane company from 1695 until his death, he appeared in both comedies and tragedies. His wife Margaret Mills was an actress, and his son William Mills also became an actor at Drury Lane.
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Diane-Monique Daviau
#130987
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Diane-Monique Daviau is a Quebec educator, writer, translator and journalist. Biography She was born in Montreal. Daviau wrote literary columns for Le Devoir, Lettres québécoises and Liberté, also contributing to the radio programs En toutes lettres, Littératures actuelles and Paysages littéraires on Radio Canada FM. She has taught literature, German and translation at McGill University, at the Université de Montréal and at the Goethe-Institut. Daviau was an editor for several publishing houses and also worked as a translator from German to French and from French to German. She served on the editorial committees for Lettres québécoises and for XYZ, la revue de la nouvelle.
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Tony Williams
#134768
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Anthony Williams is an English musician who played bass guitar in the folk rock/rock band Stealers Wheel and who also played with Jethro Tull. Career Born in Durham City, he later moved to Blackpool, Lancashire where other future band members of Jethro Tull also lived including, Ian Anderson, Barriemore Barlow, John Evan and Jeffrey Hammond.
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Tim Ries
#135716
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Timothy M. Ries is an American saxophonist, composer, arranger, band leader, and music educator at the collegiate/conservatory level. Ries is in his year as a professor of jazz studies at the University of Toronto. His universe of work as composer, arranger, and instrumentalist ranges from rock to jazz to classical to experimental to ethno to fusions of respective genres thereof. His notable works with wide popularity include The Rolling Stones Project, a culmination of jazz arrangements of music by the Stones produced on two albums, the first in 2005 and the second in 2008.
Go to Profile#8674
Ida Bieler
#73709
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Ida Bieler is an American violinist and professor of Violin. Biography Bieler studied under Ruggiero Ricci at the North Carolina School of the Arts, Oscar Shumsky at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, Max Rostal in Cologne and Nathan Milstein in London. From 1982 to 1988 she was concertmaster of the Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne.
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Denny Zeitlin
#127463
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Denny Zeitlin is an American jazz pianist, composer, and clinical professor of psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco. Since 1963, he has recorded more than 100 compositions and was a first-place winner in the DownBeat International Jazz Critics' Poll in 1965 and 1974. He composed the soundtrack for the 1978 science-fiction horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
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Alexey Rybnikov
#128246
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Alexey Lvovich Rybnikov is a modern Russian composer. He is the author of music for Soviet and Russian musicals The Star and Death of Joaquin Murieta and Juno and Avos , for numerous plays and operas, for more than 80 Russian movies. More than 10 million discs with his music have been sold to 1989.
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Tomokazu Seki
#137900
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
is a Japanese voice actor and singer. He has previously worked with Haikyō. He is honorary president of and affiliated with Atomic Monkey and the chairman of theater company HeroHero Q. He is a special lecturer at Japan Newart College.
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Victor Lewis
#149727
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Victor Lewis is an American jazz drummer, composer, and educator. Early life Victor Lewis was born on May 20, 1950, in Omaha, Nebraska. His father, Richard Lewis, who played saxophone and mother, Camille, a pianist-vocalist were both classically trained musicians who performed with many of the "territory bands" that toured the midwest in the forties. Consequently, Victor grew up with jazz as well as popular and European classical music at home. He would also go with his father to hear touring big bands as they passed through Omaha, such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Woody Herman.
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Dave Roberts
#134288
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Dave Roberts is a British musician, known for being the original bassist of the UK gothic rock band Sex Gang Children during the Batcave era of the early 1980s, recording under the name "Dave Sex Gang". He left the band in 1983 following the release of their first studio album, Song and Legend, and formed the group Carcrash International, releasing several singles in the 1983–1985 period.
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Iason Athanasiadis
#167990
Overall Influence
Iason Athanasiadis is a writer, photographer, political analyst, and television producer who has contributed to a range of media, including the BBC, Al Jazeera English, and Channel 4. He specializes in the Middle East.
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Majid Kiani
#132862
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Majid Kiani is a Master of the Persian Santur. He was the best student of Manoochehr Sadeghi, among others. He teaches traditional Iranian music and his masterpiece is the book named: "Seven Dastgah of Iranian Music". He is a leading figure in the Iranian musical establishment, and known for his controlled expositions.
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Lance Dossor
#173035
Overall Influence
1916 - 2005 (89 years)
Harry Lancelot Dossor was a British-born classical music concert pianist and teacher who emigrated to Australia in May 1953. Biography Harry Lancelot Dossor was born on 14 May 1916 in Weston-super-Mare, United Kingdom, the third child of a jeweller who was also a distinguished amateur tenor. Dossor was educated at Seaford College and matriculated at the University of London. In 1932 he obtained an open scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where he studied piano with Herbert Fryer and composition with Herbert Howells.
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Simone Rapisarda Casanova
#114376
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Simone Rapisarda Casanova is an Italian experimental filmmaker currently living in Canada. In 2014 he won the Leopard for Best Emerging Director at the Locarno International Film Festival. Life Rapisarda Casanova was born in Catania, Italy. He developed an interest in photography and cinema while studying Computer Science at the University of Pisa. Soon after moving to Canada in 2000, he abandoned his career in the software industry to devote himself to studying film, first in Montreal and later in Toronto.
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Herb Pomeroy
#107480
Overall Influence
1930 - 2007 (77 years)
Irving Herbert Pomeroy III was an American jazz trumpeter, teacher, and the founder of the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble. Early life Pomeroy was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, United States. He began playing trumpet at an early age. In his early teens he started performing in Boston, claiming inspiration from the music of Louis Armstrong. In 1946, at the age of 16, he became a member of the Musicians Union in Gloucester after the union did not have enough members to conduct a meeting. He studied dentistry at Harvard University for a year but dropped out to pursue his jazz career.
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Peter Harvey
#170922
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Peter Harvey is an English baritone. Harvey specialises in Baroque music. However, he also sings works by later composers, including contemporary ones. Harvey was a choral scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied languages before switching to music. He then went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.
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Mans Hulden
#130409
Overall Influence
Mans Hulden is a researcher in computational linguistics currently holding the title of Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Colorado Boulder. He teaches courses in computational linguistics, phonology, and phonetics, and is the creator and maintainer of the free and open source finite-state toolkit Foma.
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Beveridge Webster
#157632
Overall Influence
1908 - 1999 (91 years)
Beveridge Webster was an American pianist and educator. Biography Beveridge Webster initially studied with his father, who was director of the Pittsburgh Conservatory of Music. In 1921, at the age of fourteen, he began five years of study in Europe, first at the American Academy at Fontainebleau, then at the Paris Conservatory with Isidor Philipp and Nadia Boulanger. He also studied in Berlin with Artur Schnabel.
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Paul Harvey
#131105
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Paul Arthur Harvey is a British musician and Stuckist artist, whose work was used to promote the Stuckists' 2004 show at the Liverpool Biennial. His paintings draw on pop art and the work of Alphonse Mucha, and often depict celebrities, including Madonna.
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Karl Korte
#157889
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Karl Richard Korte was an American composer of contemporary classical music. He was born in Ossining, New York, and grew up in Englewood, New Jersey. He attended the Juilliard School, where he studied with Peter Mennin, William Bergsma, and Vincent Persichetti. He later studied composition with Otto Luening, Goffredo Petrassi, and Aaron Copland.
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Rusty Morrison
#128075
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Rusty Morrison is an American poet and publisher. She received a BA in English from Mills College in Oakland, California, an MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary's College of California in Moraga, California, and an MA in Education from California State University, San Francisco. She has taught in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco and was Poet in Residence at Saint Mary’s College in 2009. She has also served as a visiting poet at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Redlands, the University of Arizona, Boise State University, Marylhurst University, and Millikin University.
Go to Profile#8691
Joseph Lin
#82456
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Joseph Lin is a Taiwanese-American violinist. From 2011 to 2018, he was the first violinist of the Juilliard String Quartet. Currently, he is on the violin and chamber music faculty of the Juilliard School in New York City.
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David Miner
#126587
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
David Miner , sometimes credited as David Minor, is an American singer, guitarist and songwriter, perhaps best known as a member of The Great Society in the 1960s. He co-founded The Great Society along with Jerry, Darby, and Grace Slick as well as Bard Du Pont, in the sense that he was there from the start. Miner sang most of the lead vocals in the early days of the band and wrote a number of songs, including "That's How It Is", "You Can't Cry", and "Daydream Nightmare Love".
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Silvia Malagrino
#130968
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Silvia A. Malagrino is an American multimedia artist, independent filmmaker and educator based in Chicago, Illinois. She is known for interdisciplinary work that explores historical and cultural representation, and the intersections of fact, fiction, memory and subjectivity. Her experimental documentary, Burnt Oranges , interwove personal narrative, witness testimony, interviews, and both documentary and re-created footage to examine the long-term effects of Argentina's Dirty War. Malagrino's art has been featured at The Art Institute of Chicago, Palais de Glace and Centro Cultural Recoleta ,...
Go to Profile#8694
Gary Graffman
#103006
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Gary Graffman is an American classical pianist, teacher and administrator. Early life Graffman was born in New York City to Russian-Jewish parents. Having started piano at age 3, Graffman entered the Curtis Institute of Music at age 7 in 1936 as a piano student of Isabelle Vengerova. After graduating from Curtis in 1946, he made his professional solo debut with conductor Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. From 1946 to 1948, he studied at Columbia University. In 1949, Graffman won the Leventritt Competition. He then furthered his piano studies with Rudolf Serkin at the Marlboro Music Festival and informally with Vladimir Horowitz.
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James Fankhauser
#84597
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
James Lee Fankhauser is an American conductor, tenor, and educator who is primarily known for his work within the field of choral music in Canada. Fankhauser began his professional studies at Purdue in 1957 where he studied engineering. He entered the music program at Southwestern College in his native Kansas in the Fall of 1958 and transferred after two years to the Oberlin Conservatory of Music where he obtained a Bachelor of Music in 1962. He was awarded a Fulbright Grant which enabled him to pursue graduate studies in vocal performance in London at the Royal Academy of Music and choral co...
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Hagit Borer
#177572
Overall Influence
#8697
Andrea Martin
#101810
Overall Influence
1972 - 2021 (49 years)
Andrea Monica Martin was an American R&B singer-songwriter and record producer. Career She was primarily known for writing hit songs for artists like Toni Braxton , Monica , Angie Stone , En Vogue , SWV , and British singer Leona Lewis . She has written a number of hits in both the UK and the US, as well as non-charting singles for the likes of Paloma Faith , Nelly , RBD and Jennifer Hudson .
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John Wesley
#119957
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
John Wesley Dearth III is an American guitarist and singer, best known as touring guitarist for Porcupine Tree between 2002 and 2010, and also for performing with Mike Tramp, Fish, Sound of Contact, Edison's Children and Vertical Horizon, as well as for his solo work.
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Lewis Porter
#111156
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Lewis Robert Porter is an American jazz pianist, composer, author, and educator. Education and career Porter was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, but raised primarily in the Bronx in New York City. Porter decided at age 10 that he wanted to be a musician, and took violin lessons from about age 10 to 12, then taught himself at the family's upright piano, eventually taking some lessons in college and afterward. Porter earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Rochester in 1972, and, while there, studied music at Eastman. He went on to earn a Master of Education in Counseling...
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Richard Gordon
#171627
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Richard Gordon was a British-born producer and financier of horror films. Career As a youth, Gordon displayed a love of films from an early age. While he was in school, he wrote articles on the subject, edited fan club magazines, and organized a film society. His entry into the industry was delayed by a period of service in the British Royal Navy, from 1944 through 1946.
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