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,

#8901

Mark Ermler

#164377

Overall Influence

1932 - 2002 (70 years)

Mark Fridrikhovich Ermler was a Russian conductor. Biography Mark Ermler was born in Leningrad in 1932. His parents were Vera Bakun, a film set designer, and Fridrikh Ermler, a film director. He began to study piano at age 5.

#8902

Roberto Sierra

#143933

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Roberto Sierra is a Puerto Rican composer of contemporary classical music. Life Sierra was born in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico. He studied composition in Europe, notably with György Ligeti in Hamburg , Germany. After his two-act opera El mensajero de plata, to a libretto by Myrna Casas, had premiered at the Interamerican Festival in San Juan on 9 October 1986, Sierra came to prominence in 1987 when his first major orchestral composition, Júbilo, was performed at Carnegie Hall by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. For more than three decades his works have been part of the repertoire of many of the leading orchestras, ensembles and festivals in the USA and Europe.

#8903

Kurt Schwertsik

#123490

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Kurt Schwertsik is an Austrian contemporary composer. He is known for creating the "Third Viennese School" and spreading contemporary classical music. Life Schwertsik was born in Vienna. A pupil of Joseph Marx and Karl Schiske at the Academy of Music, he later studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne and Darmstadt. In 1958 he founded the ensemble "die reihe" with fellow composer and conductor Friedrich Cerha and later, in 1968, the ensemble "MOB art & tone ART" with Otto Matthäus Zykan and Heinz Karl Gruber. He served as hornist of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra while teaching Composition at the Konservatorium Wien .

#8904

Jeremy Menuhin

#140718

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Jeremy Louis Eugene Menuhin is a composer and pianist and the son of violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Early life Menuhin was born in San Francisco, California, the fourth son of his father Yehudi Menuhin and the second of his mother Diana Gould Menuhin. He attended Eton College near Windsor, Berkshire. He describes his childhood as economically privileged but emotionally "grotesque", his father as "cold and detached", and his mother as "domineering and volatile".

#8905

Laureen Nussbaum

Laureen Nussbaum

#102590

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (99 years)

Laureen Nussbaum is a German-born American scholar and writer. She is best known for being a Holocaust survivor, and as a scholar and childhood friend of the famed memoirist Anne Frank. Nussbaum is frequently consulted on Anne Frank works and literature.

#8906

Paul Worley

#81701

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Paul Worley is an American record producer and session guitarist, known primarily for his work in country music. Formerly a vice president at Sony BMG, he later joined the staff of Warner Bros. Records' Nashville division as chief creative officer. Since leaving Warner in the early 2000s, Worley has worked mainly as a record producer for other acts, such as Big & Rich, as well as an occasional session guitarist. He is most widely known as the co- producer of the self-titled debut album of Lady Antebellum and as one of the producers of their second album, Need You Now . He also discovered t...

#8907

John Lowe

#159633

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

John Charles Duff Lowe is an English pianist. In the late-1950s, he played piano for the Quarrymen, the group who would evolve into the Beatles. Early career Known to his friends as "Duff", Lowe had known Paul McCartney since 1953, and was invited to play piano with the Quarrymen by McCartney in February 1958. He was in the Quarrymen for two years, and was there when the band recorded a couple of songs for a vanity disc at Percy Phillips' home studio in Liverpool. The two tracks cut that day were "That'll Be the Day" and "In Spite of All the Danger". Lowe maintained possession of the tracks and, in 1981, sold the recordings to Paul McCartney.

#8908

Andrew Wilson

#128730

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Andrew Cunningham Wilson is an American film actor and director. He is the older brother of actors Owen Wilson and Luke Wilson. Life Wilson was born in Dallas, the eldest of three sons of photographer Laura Cunningham Wilson and Robert Andrew Wilson , an advertising executive and operator of a public television station. His younger brothers Owen and Luke are also actors. Wilson is of Irish descent.

#8909

Edwin Roxburgh

#154173

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Edwin Roxburgh is an English composer, conductor and oboist. Roxburgh was born in Liverpool. After playing oboe in the National Youth Orchestra, he won a double scholarship to study composition with Herbert Howells and oboe with Terence MacDonagh at the Royal College of Music. He also studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence. Boulanger once described him as "the new Stravinsky".

#8910

Michael Moore

#168284

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Michael Moore is an American jazz bassist. Moore started on bass at age fifteen, at Withrow High School in Cincinnati, where he performed in ensembles and the Presentation Orchestra in George G. "Smittie" Smith's Withrow Minstrels. He played with his father in nightclubs in Cincinnati. He attended the Cincinnati College Conservatory, playing with Cal Collins and Woody Evans locally. He toured Africa and Europe with Woody Herman in 1966, and recorded with Dusko Goykovich while in Belgrade.

#8911

Robert van Ackeren

#168844

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Robert van Ackeren is a German movie director, actor, producer, writer and cinematographer. Filmography Blondie's Number One The Sensuous Three The Last Word Belcanto oder Darf eine Nutte schluchzen? A Woman in Flames The True Story About Men and Women

#8912

Midori Takada

#149630

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Midori Takada is a Japanese composer and percussionist. She has been described as a pioneer of ambient and minimalist music. Early career and Mkwaju Ensemble Takada graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts and began her musical career as a percussionist with the Berlin RIAS Symphonie-Orchester in the mid-1970s. She became dissatisfied with the Western classical musical tradition and returned to Japan to study African drumming and Indonesian gamelan, as well as the early minimalism of Steve Reich and Terry Riley. She channeled these influences into the group Mkwaju Ensemble which she formed with Joe Hisaishi, Yoji Sadanari, Junko Arase and Hideki Matsutake.

#8913

Kjersti Fløttum

#119165

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Kjersti Fløttum is a Norwegian linguist. After a tenure at Stavanger University College she was employed by the University of Bergen in 1995 where she is a professor of French language. She has been vice rector of international relations and from 2007 to 2011 led the Bergen Summer Research School.

#8914

John C. Pollock

#145115

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

John Crothers Pollock is a US social scientist and communication scholar specializing in health communication, public health, human rights, and community structure theory. He is currently a professor in the department of communication studies and faculty affiliate in public health at The College of New Jersey, where he has taught since 1992. He was educated at Swarthmore College, The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs , The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Stanford University.

#8915

Isamu Jordan

#177109

Overall Influence

1975 - 2013 (38 years)

Isamu Jordan was an American journalist, musician, and professor. When he was 15 years old, he joined the staff of The Spokesman-Review, where he wrote articles for Our Generation, the teen section of the newspaper. After earning a Bachelor's degree in English and Journalism, he returned to the paper, where he wrote articles about music and pop culture. He also wrote and edited articles for the weekly news magazine Spokane7, which provided coverage on local entertainment, art and culture, dining, and sporting events. As a musician, he was a member of the band The Dead Casuals and was known for establishing the hip hop orchestra, Flying Spiders, in which he was the lead vocalist.

#8916

Eric Austen

#163187

Overall Influence

1922 - 1999 (77 years)

Eric Austen was an English designer and teacher, and played a part in the creation of the well-known ND symbol, as used, among others, by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament . He grew up in the Norfolk village of Hethersett, and described his childhood in his 1996 book All that I was : a village childhood in the thirties , which has a foreword by Richard Hoggart. He attended Hethersett British School and then City of Norwich School, a grammar school to which he won a scholarship.

#8917

Ellen Bromberg

#109632

Overall Influence

Ellen R. Bromberg is an American dance scholar, currently a Distinguished Professor at University of Utah's School of Dance.

#8918

Walter Norris

#159749

Overall Influence

1931 - 2011 (80 years)

Walter Norris was an American pianist and composer. Biography Early life and career Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on December 27, 1931, Norris first studied piano at home with his mother, then with John Summers, a local church organist. His first professional performances were with the Howard Williams Band in and around Little Rock during his junior high and high school years. After graduating from high school, Norris played briefly with Mose Allison, then did a two-year tour in the US Air Force. After his time in the Air Force, Norris played with Jimmy Ford in Houston, Texas, then moved to Los Angeles where he became an integral part of the West Coast Jazz scene.

#8919

Gloria Jean

#158174

Overall Influence

1926 - 2018 (92 years)

Gloria Jean was an American actress and singer who starred or co-starred in 26 feature films from 1939 to 1959, and made numerous radio, television, stage, and nightclub appearances. She may be best remembered for her appearance with W. C. Fields in the film Never Give a Sucker an Even Break .

#8920

Stefan Müller

#173610

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Stefan Müller is a professor of linguistics at the Humboldt University of Berlin specializing in syntax, where he is the head of the German Grammar group . Education and career Stefan Müller was born in Jena in 1968, majoring in computer science, linguistics, and computational linguistics at the Humboldt University. After this he held various research and teaching positions in the public and private sectors, at the Humboldt University, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in Saarbrücken , Interprice Berlin, the Friedrich-Schiller University at Jena, the University of Potsdam,...

#8921

John Francis Daley

John Francis Daley

#92003

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (41 years)

John Francis Daley is an American filmmaker and actor. He is best known for playing high school freshman Sam Weir on the NBC comedy-drama Freaks and Geeks and FBI criminal profiler Dr. Lance Sweets on the crime drama series Bones, for which he was nominated for a 2014 PRISM Award. He plays keyboards and sings for the band Dayplayer.

#8922

Janet Jackson

#111088

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Janet Damita Jo Jackson is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and dancer. She is noted for her innovative, socially conscious and sexually provocative records, as well as elaborate stage shows. Her sound and choreography became a catalyst in the growth of MTV, enabling her to rise to prominence while breaking gender and racial barriers in the process. Lyrical content which focused on social issues and lived experiences set her reputation as a role model for youth.

#8923

Sydney Watson

#163778

Overall Influence

1903 - 1991 (88 years)

Sydney Watson was an English church musician who was the organist of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford and conductor of the Oxford Bach Choir from 1955 to 1970. Biography Watson was born in Denton, Lancashire. He attended Warwick School, before studying at the Royal College of Music and Keble College, Oxford, graduating with a BA in 1925, a B.Mus in 1926, an MA in 1928, and a D.Mus in 1932. He then took up a position at Stowe School, Buckingham, followed by appointments as music master at Radley College, Oxfordshire, organist at New College, Oxford, from 1933 to 1938, and musical director at Winchester College, from 1938 until 1945.

#8924

Brett Yasko

#175928

Overall Influence

Brett Yasko is an American graphic designer. He has designed books, gallery guides, catalogues and exhibitions for numerous artists and institutions . Yasko has taught at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design since 2005.

#8925

Annie Gosfield

#166023

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Annie Gosfield is a New-York-based composer who works on the boundaries between notated and improvised music, electronic and acoustic sounds, refined timbres and noise. She composes for others and performs with her own group, taking her music to festivals, factories, clubs, art spaces and concert halls. Much of her work combines acoustic instruments with electronic sounds, incorporating unusual sources such as satellite sounds, machine sounds, detuned or out-of-tune samples and industrial noises. Her work often contains improvisation and frequently uses extended techniques and/or altered musical instruments.

#8926

Ruthie Henshall

Ruthie Henshall

#157089

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Valentine Ruth Henshall , known professionally as Ruthie Henshall, is an English actress, singer and dancer, known for her work in musical theatre. She began her professional stage career in 1986, before making her West End debut in Cats in 1987. A five-time Olivier Award nominee, she won the 1995 Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her role as Amalia Balash in the London revival of She Loves Me .

#8927

Ann Snodgrass

#170572

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Ann Snodgrass is an American poet and translator. Life She graduated from University of Iowa, Johns Hopkins University, and from University of Utah with a Ph.D. She lived in the Netherlands, where she taught at Emerson College in Maastricht.

#8928

Kenneth Hesketh

#158694

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Kenneth Hesketh is a British composer of contemporary classical music in numerous genres including dance, orchestral, chamber, vocal and solo. He has also composed music for wind and brass bands as well as seasonal music for choir.

#8929

Peter Wiesinger

#103432

Overall Influence

1938 - 2023 (85 years)

Peter Wiesinger was an Austrian philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. Biography Peter Wiesinger was born in Vienna, Austria on 15 May 1938. He received his PhD at the University of Vienna, was subsequently a researcher on German at the University of Marburg. Wiesinger habilitated at Marburg in 1969 was appointed a professor there in 1971.

#8930

David Tod Roy

#117145

Overall Influence

1933 - 2016 (83 years)

David Tod Roy was an American sinologist and scholar of Chinese literature who was Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago from 1967 until he took early retirement in 1999. Roy is most well-known for his translation of Jin Ping Mei , published in five volumes by Princeton University Press from 1993 to 2013. It stands alongside the Four Great Novels of the Ming dynasty. Where earlier translations omitted many passages, especially the sexual ones, Roy was the first to render the whole novel into English.

#8931

John Steele Ritter

#178406

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

John Steele Ritter is an American classical keyboardist and teacher. Born and raised in Many, Louisiana, a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, he went on to graduate studies at the University of Southern California. In 1963, he became Professor of Music at Pomona College, a post which he held until 1991.

#8932

Thomas Lennon

#141280

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Thomas Furneaux Lennon is a documentary filmmaker. He was born in Washington, D.C., and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1968. Thomas F. Lennon's films, broadcast on PBS and HBO, have won an Academy Award and have been nominated for the Oscar four times. He has also received two George Foster Peabody Awards, two national Emmys and two DuPont-Columbia Journalism awards. With filmmaker Ruby Yang, he mounted a vast multi-year AIDS prevention campaign seen over a billion times on Chinese television. Together they made a trilogy of short documentary films about modern China, including The...

#8933

John Browning

#127927

Overall Influence

1933 - 2003 (70 years)

John Browning was an American pianist known for his reserved, elegant style and sophisticated interpretations of Bach and Scarlatti and for his collaboration with the American composer Samuel Barber.

#8934

Keith Alexander

#146658

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Keith Alexander is an Australian actor best known for his work in the United Kingdom. Originally from Sydney, he moved to the UK in 1965. He also spent time the United States, where he worked on The Ed Sullivan Show providing the English-language voice of the Italian puppet mouse Topo Gigio.

#8935

Nicole Awai

#116982

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Nicole Awai is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York and Austin, Texas. Her work captures both Caribbean and American landscapes and experiences and engages in cultural critique. She works in many media including painting, photography, drawing, installations, ceramics, and sculpture as well as found objects.

#8936

Paul Gray

#97878

Overall Influence

1972 - 2010 (38 years)

Paul Dedrick Gray , also known as The Pig, was an American musician who was the bassist, backing vocalist, and co-founder of the heavy metal band Slipknot, in which he was designated #2. Early life and career Paul Dedrick Gray was born in Los Angeles, California. Later his family relocated to Des Moines, Iowa. He played guitar but switched to bass after he relocated to Iowa. In his youth, Gray performed in bands such as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, Anal Blast, Vexx, Body Pit, The Have Nots and Inveigh Catharsis.

#8937

Scribe

#118956

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Malo Ioane Luafutu, also called Jeshua Ioane Luafutu , and better known by his stage name Scribe, is a New Zealand rapper of Samoan descent. He achieved two solo number ones on the singles chart from his debut album, The Crusader, which was released in 2003 in New Zealand and later certified four times platinum. He also reached number one as a featured artist on P-Money's 2004 song "Stop the Music", and in 2010 on R&B singer J.Williams' single "You Got Me".

#8938

Gerhardt Csejka

#104954

Overall Influence

1945 - 2022 (77 years)

Gerhardt Csejka is a German essayist and literary translator. He has delivered lectures at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main and the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz . He has been granted several important prizes.

#8939

Elie Siegmeister

#117558

Overall Influence

1909 - 1991 (82 years)

Elie Siegmeister was an American composer, educator and author. Early life and education Elie Siegmeister was born January 15, 1909, in New York City. Both parents were of Russian-Jewish ancestry. His father was a surgeon. The family moved to Brooklyn when Siegmeister was five, at which age he began piano lessons.

#8940

Becca Stevens

#127486

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (42 years)

Becca Stevens is an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist who draws upon elements of jazz, chamber pop, indie rock, and folk. Early life and education Stevens was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina as the youngest of three children to William Stevens, a composer known for sacred choral music, and Carolyn Dorff, a singer trained in opera and musical theater. During her childhood she performed and toured regionally with her brother, sister, and parents in her family's children's music group, the Tune Mammals. When she was ten years old, she and her mother starred in a year-long national tour of the musical The Secret Garden.

#8941

Colin Welford

#152471

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Colin Welford is an English composer for stage and screen, conductor, orchestrator and music director based in the United States. He holds a Master's degree in Music from Oxford University, England , and pursued graduate study at The Royal College of Music, London , University of Miami and at Columbia College Chicago .

#8942

David Bergman

#115093

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

David Bergman is a British investigative journalist. Bergman has worked for Bangladeshi and British newspapers. He first became known in Bangladesh for his reporting on war crimes committed during the Bangladesh Liberation War. An investigative documentary on the subject he worked as a reporter and researcher for British television in 1995 won an award. Twenty years later, he was convicted of contempt of court by Bangladesh's special war crimes tribunal in 2015 for contradicting the official death toll of the war. Bergman has also contributed to The New York Times and Foreign Policy.

#8943

Eldon Shamblin

#111160

Overall Influence

1916 - 1998 (82 years)

Eldon Shamblin was an American guitarist and arranger, particularly important to the development of Western swing music as one of the first electric guitarists in a popular dance band. He was a member of the Strangers during the 1970s and 1980s and was the last surviving member of Bob Wills' band the Texas Playboys.

#8944

Christopher Theofanidis

#120583

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Christopher Theofanidis is an American composer whose works have been performed by leading orchestras from around the world, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Moscow Soloists, the National, Atlanta, Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, and many others. He participated in the Young American Composer-in-Residence Program with Barry Jekowsky and the California Symphony from 1994 to 1996 and, more recently, served as Composer of the Year for the Pittsburgh Symphony during their 2006–2007 Season, for which he wrote a violin concerto for Sarah Chang.

#8945

Jeanne Landry

#175246

Overall Influence

1922 - 2011 (89 years)

Jeanne Landry was a Canadian composer, pianist and teacher who taught counterpoint and harmony at the Faculty of Music at Université Laval from 1951 to 1983. She began as a solo pianist in 1940 and was named the 1946 winner of the Prix d'Europe grant. Landry gave public recitals, appeared on CBC Radio and was an accompanist for various composers and instrumentalists and singers in concert, radio and television. She retired from teaching in 1983, and devoted her time to composition and writing free-form poems.

#8946

Nellie Ashford

#119056

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Nellie Ashford is a self-taught folk artist from Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Her mixed-media folk art depicts the experiences of Charlotte’s African-American community during the era of Jim Crow in the U.S. South.

#8947

Eric Boswell

#143043

Overall Influence

1921 - 2009 (88 years)

Eric Boswell was an English composer of popular songs and folk music, most famous for writing the children's Christmas song "Little Donkey". Early life Eric Boswell was born in Millfield, Sunderland, England, son of a tailor and a seamstress. He studied piano from age seven and later organ under Clifford Hartley, organist of Bishopwearmouth Church . After degrees in Electrical Engineering from Sunderland Technical College and Physics from Birkbeck College, London, Boswell joined Marconi as a scientist working with radar before becoming a Physics lecturer. Meanwhile, he spent his leisure time writing serious piano music and light songs.

#8948

Ivan Davis

#130503

Overall Influence

1932 - 2018 (86 years)

Ivan Roy Davis, Jr. was an American classical pianist and longstanding member of the faculty at the University of Miami's Frost School of Music. Early life Davis was born in Electra, Texas. He received his Bachelor of Music in 1952 from University of North Texas College of Music, and an Artist's Diploma, as a Fulbright Scholar, from the Santa Cecilia Academy in Rome. He won second prize in the 1956 and 1957 Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition and first prize in the 1958 St. Cecilia Piano Competition. In April 1960, Davis won the Franz Liszt Competition at Town Hall, New York City.

#8949

Yasunori Imamura

#177892

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

is a Japanese lutenist. Imamura has appeared on more than 150 CDs, both as a soloist and as a member of ensembles. His solo recordings include the complete lute works by Johann Sebastian Bach , three volumes of lute sonatas by Silvius Leopold Weiss , pièces pour théorbe by Robert de Visée, Spanish music for vihuela from the time of Charles V and the complete lute fantasies by Simone Molinario .

#8950

Richard Miller

#111553

Overall Influence

1926 - 2009 (83 years)

Richard Miller was a professor of singing at Oberlin College Conservatory of Music and the author of numerous books on singing technique and vocal pedagogy. He also sang recitals, oratorios, and numerous roles as a lyric tenor with major opera companies in Europe and America.

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