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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School

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Ranking

List of the most influential people in Communications,

#9451

Tossy Spivakovsky

Tossy Spivakovsky

#176470

Overall Influence

1906 - 1998 (92 years)

Nathan "Tossy" Spivakovsky , a Jewish, Russian Empire-born, German-trained violin virtuoso, was considered one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century. Biography Tossy Spivakovsky was born in Odessa, which in 1906 was still part of the Russian Empire. Under the increasing threat of pogroms his family moved to Berlin, where he studied with Arrigo Serato privately and later with Willy Hess at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik. A violin prodigy, he gave his first recital at age 10. Together with his elder brother Jacob "Jascha" , a renowned concert pianist, Tossy made his first European co...

#9452

David Borden

#111370

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

David Russell Borden is an American composer and keyboard player of minimalist music. In 1969, with the support of Robert Moog, he founded the synthesizer ensemble Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company in Ithaca New York. Mother Mallard performed pieces by Robert Ashley, John Cage, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich. In addition to his work with electronics and the Mother Mallard ensemble, Borden has written music for various chamber and vocal ensembles. He is also an accomplished jazz pianist.

#9453

Stephen Scott

#173135

Overall Influence

1944 - 2021 (77 years)

Stephen Scott was an American composer best known for his development of the bowed piano. This is a form of extended technique which involves a grand piano being played by an ensemble of ten musicians who utilize lengths of rosined horsehair, nylon filament, and other utensils to bow the strings of the piano, creating an orchestra-like sound. Scott borrowed the technique from C. Curtis-Smith, who invented it in 1972. Scott founded the Bowed Piano Ensemble in 1977, for which he composed. His work is associated with the minimalist style of composition.

#9454

James Hill

#168115

Overall Influence

1916 - 2001 (85 years)

James Hill was an American film producer and screenwriter active from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. He was born in Indianapolis, Indiana and came to Hollywood as a writer, working on films and televisions shows for Warner Brothers Pictures and Columbia Broadcasting System. He was eventually teamed with film producer Harold Hecht and actor Burt Lancaster when the pair produced His Majesty O'Keefe for their own film production company, Norma Productions. The movie was filmed in 1952 in the Fiji Islands, but only released in 1954.

#9455

Johannes Birringer

#114990

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Johannes Birringer is an independent media choreographer and artistic director of AlienNation Co., a multimedia ensemble that has collaborated on various site-specific and cross-cultural performance and installation projects since 1993. He lives and works in Houston and London.

#9456

Lev Naumov

#164770

Overall Influence

1925 - 2005 (80 years)

Lev Nikolayevich Naumov was a Russian classical pianist, composer and educator. Received a title of People's Artist of Russia and was nicknamed the "Godfather of the Russian piano school". Professor Naumov studied with the legendary Heinrich Neuhaus, becoming his assistant and eventually his successor. Naumov was a professor of piano at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory and a jury member in many international competitions. Professor Naumov's studio produced some of the better-known pianists to emerge from Russia in the past 40 years. Among his students at different times were such pianists ...

#9457

Anton Steck

#180932

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Anton Steck is a German violinist and conductor. Life Steck began studying the modern violin with Jörg-Wolfgang Jahn in Karlsruhe and the baroque violin with Reinhard Goebel in Cologne. After his studies he served as concertmaster for Musica Antiqua Köln and the French ensemble Les Musicians du Louvre under Marc Minkowski. With these ensembles he gave concerts worldwide and has participated in more than thirty CD recordings. In 1996 he co-founded the Schuppanzigh Quartet, where he is first violin. From 2005 to 2008 he was concertmaster of Concerto Köln. In 1997 he made his conducting début wi...

#9458

Liz Collins

#121749

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Liz Collins is an American contemporary artist and designer. Collins is recognized for her artwork involving fabric, knitwear, and textiles as well as the fashion label she developed. She has expertise in textile media including the transition of fabric into multi-dimensional forms as a method to vary the scale of her pieces to make them architectural and inviting rather than object-based. Collins is based in Brooklyn, New York.

#9459

Gerd Kühr

#149832

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Gerd Kühr, also Gerd Kuhr , is an Austrian conductor, composer of classical music and academic teacher. He is known for operas, such as Stallerhof on a libretto by the author of the play, Franz Xaver Kroetz, and film music including Schlöndorff's Eine Liebe von Swann.

#9460

Steffani Jemison

Steffani Jemison

#123086

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Steffani Jemison is an American artist, writer, and educator. Her videos and multimedia projects explore the relationship between Black embodiment, sound cultures, and vernacular practices to modernism and conceptual art. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and other U.S. and international venues. She is based in Brooklyn, New York and is represented by Greene Naftali, New York and Annet Gelink, Amsterdam.

#9461

Walther von Hahn

#129908

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Walther von Hahn is a German linguist and computer scientist. From 1977 to 2007, von Hahn taught Computer Science and Linguistics at Universität Hamburg. Education and career Von Hahn studied German linguistics and literature, philosophy, and Latin and Protestant theology in Marburg/Lahn from 1962 to 1969. He received his PhD at the same university, with Prof. Dr. Ludwig Erich Schmitt. He moved to Hamburg University where he gave seminars in German linguistics, becoming a faculty professor in 1977. At that time, research and teaching shifted to more formal fields in the German seminar thereat.

#9462

John Cullum

#144211

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

John Cullum is an American actor and singer. He has appeared in many stage musicals and dramas, including Shenandoah and On the Twentieth Century , winning the Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical for each. In 1966 he gained his first Tony nomination as the lead in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, in which he introduced the title song, and more recently received Tony nominations for Urinetown The Musical and as Best Featured Actor in the revival of 110 in the Shade .

#9463

Al Lerner

#134230

Overall Influence

1919 - 2014 (95 years)

Al Lerner was an American pianist, composer, arranger, and conductor from the big band era. He was a member of the Harry James band for many years, playing piano. He wrote music for several artists, including Allan Sherman and Liza Minnelli. He also wrote the music for "So Until I See You", the closing theme for The Tonight Show with Jack Paar in the early 1960s, and was the pianist for A Tribute to Eddie Duchin, which was a soundtrack for the 1956 biographical film pic The Eddy Duchin Story.

#9464

John Hancock

#169052

Overall Influence

1941 - 1992 (51 years)

John Hancock was an American actor. Born in Hazen, Arkansas, Hancock moved to Detroit, Michigan with his parents. Hancock went to Wayne State University in Detroit. He was employed at Mid-Town Market to pay his way through college. Hancock is possibly best remembered for his role as "Scotty" in the ABC miniseries Roots: The Next Generations. His large size and distinctive bass voice allowed him to establish a niche playing authority figures, and he was often cast as a minister, judge or high-ranking military officer.

#9465

Karl Suske

#90759

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Karl Johann Suske is a German violinist. In the course of his more than forty-year career as a musician, Suske has been first concertmaster of the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra as well as the Bayreuth Festival orchestra. He was also a member of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Quartet and founder of a quartet named after him in Berlin. Until 1990 Suske held professorships at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar and the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig.

#9466

Ingrid Haebler

#173950

Overall Influence

1929 - 2023 (94 years)

Ingrid Haebler was an Austrian classical pianist. Early life Haebler was born in Vienna. Her birth year has been variously given as 1926 or 1929; The New York Times has suggested the former date was "probably" the accurate one. Her parents moved to Poland shortly after her birth, where she remained for her early childhood. Many celebrated musicians were regular visitors to the Haebler home, including Claudio Arrau, Robert Casadesus and Bronislaw Huberman. It was Casadesus who recognised the child's talent as a pianist and predicted a great future for her.

#9467

Robert Moevs

#167989

Overall Influence

1920 - 2007 (87 years)

Robert Walter Moevs was an American composer of contemporary classical music. He was known for his highly chromatic music. Career Moevs was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and served in the United States Army Air Forces as a pilot during World War II. He then received his degree from Harvard University. Moevs was a student of Walter Piston and Nadia Boulanger. He taught at Harvard University and Rutgers University. He received the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship . In 1978 his Concerto Grosso was awarded the Stockhausen International Prize in Composition.

#9468

Masaru Tomita

#181607

Overall Influence

#9469

Judy Ledgerwood

#116023

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Judy Ledgerwood is an American abstract painter and educator, who has been based in Chicago. Her work confronts fundamental, historical and contemporary issues in abstract painting within a largely high-modernist vocabulary that she often complicates and subverts. Ledgerwood stages traditionally feminine-coded elements—cosmetic and décor-related colors, references to ornamental and craft traditions—on a scale associated with so-called "heroic" abstraction; critics suggest her work enacts an upending or "domestication" of modernist male authority that opens the tradition to allusions to female sexuality, design, glamour and pop culture.

#9470

Wolfgang Schneiderhan

#163828

Overall Influence

1915 - 2002 (87 years)

Wolfgang Eduard Schneiderhan was an Austrian classical violinist. Career Schneiderhan was born in Vienna. From the age of five, he was recognised as a child prodigy. After briefly studying with Otakar Ševčík in Písek, he studied with Julius Winkler in Vienna. At age 10 he publicly performed Bach's Chaconne in D minor. The next year he made his debut in Copenhagen playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. He lived in England for some time from 1929, where he appeared in concerts with artists such as Maria Jeritza, Feodor Chaliapin, Jan Kiepura and Paul Robeson.

#9471

Brian Smith

#175222

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Brian Smith is a New Zealand jazz saxophonist and flautist. Life and career Smith studied piano in his youth but was primarily an autodidact on reeds. He played locally in pop and jazz groups before moving to England in 1964, where he played with Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated. Following this he played at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in 1966-67 and in the big bands of Tubby Hayes and Maynard Ferguson . He worked with the group Nucleus from 1969 to 1982, and also with Mike Westbrook , Neil Ardley , Mike Gibbs , the Spontaneous Music Ensemble , and Keith Tippett . He also worked with Pacific E...

#9472

Yang Jing

#76979

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Yang Jing is a Chinese violist, violinist, and five-string violinist. Along with the pianists Yin Chengzong and Xu Feiping, Yang is considered one of the three most famous classical musicians from Kulangsu, China’s "Music Island". She played at the 41st Session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee to celebrate the inscription of Kulangsu as World Cultural Heritage site.

#9473

Michael Wolff

#130392

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Michael Wolff is an American journalist, as well as a columnist and contributor to USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter, and the UK edition of GQ. He has received two National Magazine Awards, a Mirror Award, and has authored seven books, including Burn Rate about his own dot-com company, and The Man Who Owns the News , a biography of Rupert Murdoch. He co-founded the news aggregation website Newser and is a former editor of Adweek.

#9474

Paul Schoenfield

#150213

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Paul Schoenfield, also spelled Paul Schoenfeld or Pinchas Schoenfeld, is a classical composer. He is known for combining popular, folk, and classical music forms. He began to take piano lessons at the age of six, and wrote his first composition a year later. Among his teachers were Julius Chajes, Ozan Marsh and Rudolf Serkin. He holds a B.A. degree from Carnegie-Mellon University and a Doctor of Music Arts degree from the University of Arizona.

#9475

Yip Wing-sie

#108640

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Yip Wing-sie is a Hong Kong musician. A highly respected and influential figure in Asia's orchestral music scene, Yip Wing-sie has been the Music Director of Hong Kong Sinfonietta since 2002. Positions she has previously held Principal Conductor and later Music Director of Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra and Resident Conductor of Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra.

#9476

Blaze Ya Dead Homie

Blaze Ya Dead Homie

#89405

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Christopher C. Rouleau , known professionally by his pseudonym Blaze Ya Dead Homie or simply Blaze, is an American rapper from Mount Clemens, Michigan. A representative of the hip hop music subgenres gangsta rap and horrorcore, his stage persona is a resurrected gang member who had been killed in the late 1980s.

#9477

Valerie Tryon

#178972

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Valerie Tryon, is an English classical pianist. Since 1971 she has resided in Canada, but continues to pursue an international performing and recording career, and spends a part of each year in her native Britain. Among her specialisms is the music of Franz Liszt, of which she has made a number of celebrated recordings. Currently 'Artist-in-Residence' at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Tryon is active as a concerto soloist, recitalist, chamber musician, accompanist and adjudicator.

#9478

Elżbieta Magdalena Wąsik

Elżbieta Magdalena Wąsik

#176310

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Elżbieta Magdalena Wąsik is a Polish linguist specializing in general linguistics and semiotics of communication, employed as professor extraordinarius at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland.

#9479

Anthony Powers

#170518

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Anthony Powers is a British composer of classical music. He has received a number of commissions, including the BBC and the Three Choirs Festival Society and a number of individuals, while his works have been performed both in Great Britain and abroad. He was shortlisted for a British Composer Award in 2003.

#9480

Tappi Iwase

#157369

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Tappi Iwase, sometimes credited professionally as TAPPY, is a Japanese musical composer. He is best known for his contributions to the Metal Gear and Suikoden franchises. Iwase studied music with Dick Grove at the Grove School of Music prior to its closure in 1991.

#9481

Gwen Pearson

#85227

Overall Influence

Gwen Pearson is a science writer and education coordinator in the Department of Entomology at Purdue University. Education Pearson completed a Bachelors in Zoology at Ohio State University in 1984. In 1991, Pearson testified before a Congressional Hearing to request that the tax-exempt status of graduate student stipends should be maintained. She completed her graduate studies at North Carolina State University in 1992, where she worked on sesiid pheromone biology.

#9482

Paul Wertico

#114637

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Paul Wertico is an American drummer. He gained recognition as a member of the Pat Metheny Group from 1983 until 2001, leaving the group to spend more time with his family and to pursue other musical interests.

#9483

James William Hipp

#70087

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

J. William “Bill” Hipp is an American music educator and administrator. He served as the fourth dean of the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami from 1983 to 2007. He served as the president of the National Association of Schools of Music from 1998 to 2000 and was inducted into the Florida Music Education Association Hall of Fame in 2002.

#9484

Jenny McLeod

#161614

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Jennifer Helen McLeod was a New Zealand composer and professor of music at Victoria University of Wellington. She composed several major works for big groups including Under the Sun for four orchestras and 450 children, and the opera Hōhepa.

#9485

Katsumi Nishikawa

#108639

Overall Influence

1918 - 2010 (92 years)

Katsumi Nishikawa was a Japanese film director most famous for his youth films . Graduating from Nihon University, he started out at the Shochiku studio in 1939 and directed his first film in 1952. He moved to Nikkatsu in 1954 and, while working in a variety of genres, became most famous for his youth films starring Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yujiro Ishihara, and Hideki Takahashi. In the 1970s, he remade some of these films with the idol singer Momoe Yamaguchi and her future husband Tomokazu Miura. The Katsumi Nishikawa Memorial Film Museum was opened in his hometown of Chizu, Tottori, in 2001. Nishik...

#9486

Randall Hodgkinson

#169275

Overall Influence

Randall Hodgkinson is an American classical pianist. Education Hodgkinson obtained his Bachelor of Music degree with honors, Master of Music degree with distinction and artist diploma from the New England Conservatory of Music. He studied with Veronica Jochum and Russell Sherman.

#9487

Peter Frankl

#160299

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Peter Frankl is a Hungarian-born British pianist. He mainly performs music from the Classical period , the Romantic period and the early Modern period. His recordings include the complete solo piano music of both Debussy and Schumann.

#9488

David Briggs

#177068

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

David John Briggs is an English organist and composer. He started his career as a cathedral organist as Assistant Organist at Hereford Cathedral before becoming the organist of Truro and Gloucester Cathedrals. Heavily influenced by Jean Langlais and Pierre Cochereau, Briggs is regarded as one of the world's finest improvisors, and now works as a concert organist. He is also a composer of choral and organ music and has transcribed many orchestral works for solo organ, as well as many of Cochereau's recorded improvisations. His daughter is the composer Kerensa Briggs.

#9489

Frank Mantooth

#171692

Overall Influence

1947 - 2004 (57 years)

Frank Mantooth was an American jazz pianist and arranger. Mantooth attended University of North Texas College of Music, graduating in 1969, then played in and arranged for the Air Force Academy Falconaires from 1969 to 1973. He spent the rest of the 1970s living in Austria, where he published arrangements for big bands and small ensembles.

#9490

Willi Gundlach

#111567

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

Willi Gundlach is a German choral conductor and academic. He taught at the music department of the Technical University of Dortmund. He researched and edited works by Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn. He founded and conducted a chamber choir at the university and recorded with them, including operas for the Kurt Weill Foundation. After his retirement from teaching, he cofounded and organised a concert series at St. Peter, Syburg, including organ concerts and vocal concerts with notable performers.

#9491

Ralph Bowen

#159360

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Ralph Bowen is a Canadian jazz saxophonist. Biography Bowen started piano lessons at an early age, with clarinet and saxophone lessons following soon after. At thirteen he led a quartet and performed in big bands in Toronto. As a teenager, he was awarded a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to study music with Pat LaBarbera and Phil Nimmons at the Banff School of Fine Arts. While in Toronto, he studied with LaBarbera for eight years and developed a long-time association with drummer Keith Blackley and his father, drummer Jim Blackley. He performed and recorded with Canadian fusion gro...

#9492

Sidney Harth

#103485

Overall Influence

1925 - 2011 (86 years)

Sidney Harth was an American violinist and conductor. Education Harth was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Music and studied with Joseph Fuchs, Joseph Knitzer, Mishel Boris Piastro and George Enescu. Subsequently, he held faculty positions at University of Louisville, the University of Houston, the University of Texas, Yale University, and the Mannes College of Music.

#9493

Zhou Long

#121989

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Zhou Long is a Chinese American composer. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Biography Zhou Long was born in Beijing, China. Born into an artistic family, he began studying piano from an early age. Due to the artistic restrictions implemented during the Cultural Revolution, he was forced to delay his piano studies and live on a state-run farm where he operated a tractor. The deserted landscape with fierce winds and fires he experienced during the Cultural Revolution made a deep impression and influence his compositions even today.

#9494

Giacomo Gates

#174033

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Giacomo Gates is an American jazz vocalist. Career Gates was born and raised in Connecticut. His father was a classical violinist. He made his public debut as a vocalist at the age of six. Soon after, he picked up guitar. In his youth he listened to jazz stations broadcasting from New York City, learned about jazz from disc jockeys, and played along on guitar. When he was ten, he bought his first jazz album, Time Out by Dave Brubeck. Between radio and his record collection, he listened to many of the biggest names in jazz. He took a particular interest in vocalists, such as Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra.

#9495

Sut Jhally

#181723

Overall Influence

#9496

Donald Weilerstein

#136738

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Donald Weilerstein is an American violinist and pedagogue. Early life and education Weilerstein was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Berkeley, California. He began playing the violin at the age of four and earned a Bachelor of Music and Master of Music from the Juilliard School.

#9497

Mitchell Rose

#148221

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Mitchell Rose is an American director of short films known for comedic work and dance film. He began his career as a choreographer and performance artist and became known at "the dance world's Woody Allen" after being so dubbed by The New York Times. He then migrated to film and his works have won numerous awards, notably Elevator World, Modern Daydreams, and Learn to Speak Body. He tours a program called The Mitch Show which features his films and audience participation pieces.

#9498

Rob Chiarelli

#98277

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Rob Chiarelli is an American record producer, mix engineer, musician, published author and multiple Grammy Award winner. Widely recognized as a music producer for Will Smith and Men in Black II , Chiarelli's work appears on numerous gold and platinum albums and motion picture soundtracks, including fourteen Grammy winners.

#9499

Duncan Druce

#170419

Overall Influence

1939 - 2015 (76 years)

Robert Duncan Druce was an English composer, string player and musicologist, noted for his breadth of musical interests ranging from contemporary music to baroque and early music, as well as music of India.

#9500

Barbara Walsh

#145274

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Barbara Ann Walsh is an American journalist and writer of children's books. She has worked for The Eagle-Tribune , Portland Press Herald, and South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and has taught journalism at Florida International University, University of Southern Maine, and University of Maine at Augusta. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for a series she wrote for the Eagle-Tribune about the Massachusetts prison system. Barbara has also worked as an international speaker for the U.S. Department of State.

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