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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Communications,

#101

Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson

#367

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Neal Town Stephenson is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction. His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, and baroque.

#102

Anthea Bell

#4513

Overall Influence

1936 - 2018 (82 years)

Anthea Bell was an English translator of literary works, including children's literature, from French, German and Danish. These include The Castle by Franz Kafka, Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, the Inkworld trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the French Asterix comics with co-translator Derek Hockridge.

#103

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein

#711

Overall Influence

1923 - 1997 (74 years)

Roy Fox Lichtenstein was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the premise of pop art through parody. Inspired by the comic strip, Lichtenstein produced precise compositions that documented while they parodied, often in a tongue-in-cheek manner. His work was influenced by popular advertising and the comic book style. His artwork was considered to be "disruptive". He described pop art as "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting". His paintings we...

#104

Arthur Penn

#1454

Overall Influence

1922 - 2010 (88 years)

Arthur Hiller Penn was an American director and producer of film, television and theater. Closely associated with the American New Wave, Penn directed critically acclaimed films throughout the 1960s such as the drama The Chase , the biographical crime film Bonnie and Clyde and the comedy Alice's Restaurant . He also received attention for his acclaimed revisionist Western Little Big Man . Night Moves and The Missouri Breaks which were commercial flops, though they first generated positive reviews.

#105

Yves Robert

#5246

Overall Influence

1920 - 2002 (82 years)

Yves Robert was a French actor, screenwriter, director, and producer. Life and career Robert was born in Saumur, Maine-et-Loire, France. In his teens, he went to Paris to pursue a career in acting, starting with unpaid parts on stage in the city's various theatre workshops. From ages 12–20 he set type as a typographer, then studied mime in his early 20s. In 1948 he made his motion picture debut with one of the secondary roles in the film, Les Dieux du dimanche. Within a few years, Robert was writing scripts, directing, and producing.

#106

Terry Gross

#1302

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Terry Gross is an American journalist who is the host and co-executive producer of Fresh Air, an interview-based radio show produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and distributed nationally by NPR. Since joining NPR in 1975, Gross has interviewed thousands of guests.

#107

Ronald Langacker

#4694

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Ronald Wayne Langacker is an American linguist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is best known as one of the founders of the cognitive linguistics movement and the creator of cognitive grammar. He has also made significant contributions to the comparative study of Uto-Aztecan languages, publishing several articles on historical Uto-Aztecan linguistics, as well as editing collections of grammar sketches of under-described Uto-Aztecan languages.

#108

George Monbiot

#478

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

George Joshua Richard Monbiot is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism. He writes a regular column for The Guardian and is the author of a number of books. Monbiot grew up in Oxfordshire and studied zoology at the University of Oxford. He then began a career in investigative journalism, publishing his first book Poisoned Arrows in 1989 about human rights issues in West Papua. In later years, he has been involved in activism and advocacy related to various issues, such as climate change, British politics and loneliness. In Feral , he discussed and endorsed expansion of rewilding.

#109

Milton Glaser

#2653

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

Milton Glaser was an American graphic designer. His designs include the I Love New York logo, a 1966 poster for Bob Dylan, and the logos for DC Comics, Stony Brook University, and Brooklyn Brewery. In 1954, he also co-founded Push Pin Studios, co-founded New York magazine with Clay Felker, and established Milton Glaser, Inc. In 1969, he produced and designed "Short Subject", commonly known as "Mickey Mouse in Vietnam", a short 16mm anti-war film directed by Whitney Lee Savage . His artwork has been featured in exhibits, and placed in permanent collections in many museums worldwide. Throughout his long career, he designed many posters, publications and architectural designs.

#110

Makoto Shinkai

#2803

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Makoto Niitsu, known as Makoto Shinkai, is a Japanese animator, filmmaker, author, and manga artist. Shinkai began his career as a video game animator with Nihon Falcom in 1996, and gained recognition as a filmmaker with the release of the original video animation She and Her Cat . Beginning his longstanding association with CoMix Wave Films, Shinkai then released the science-fiction OVA Voices of a Distant Star in 2002, and followed this with his debut feature film The Place Promised in Our Early Days .

#111

Michael I of Romania

#893

Overall Influence

1921 - 2017 (96 years)

Michael I was the last king of Romania, reigning from 20 July 1927 to 8 June 1930 and again from 6 September 1940 until his forced abdication on 30 December 1947. Shortly after Michael's birth, his father, Crown Prince Carol, had become involved in a controversial relationship with Magda Lupescu. In 1925, Carol was pressured to renounce his rights to the throne and moved to Paris in exile with Lupescu. In 1927, following the death of his grandfather Ferdinand I, Michael ascended the throne at age five, the youngest crowned head in Europe. As Michael was still a minor, a regency council was in...

#112

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke

#505

Overall Influence

1917 - 2008 (91 years)

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke was an English science fiction writer, science writer, futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host. He co-wrote the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, widely regarded as one of the most influential films of all time. Clarke was a science fiction writer, an avid populariser of space travel, and a futurist of a distinguished ability. He wrote many books and many essays for popular magazines. In 1961, he received the Kalinga Prize, a UNESCO award for popularising science. Clarke's science and science fiction writings earned him the moniker "Prophet of the Space Age".

#113

Brian Aldiss

#642

Overall Influence

1925 - 2017 (92 years)

Brian Wilson Aldiss was an English writer, artist and anthology editor, best known for science fiction novels and short stories. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss, except for occasional pseudonyms during the mid-1960s.

#114

Jerome Robbins

#1437

Overall Influence

1918 - 1998 (80 years)

Jerome Robbins was an American dancer, choreographer, film director, theatre director and producer who worked in classical ballet, on stage, film, and television. Among his numerous stage productions were On the Town, Peter Pan, High Button Shoes, The King and I, The Pajama Game, Bells Are Ringing, West Side Story, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof. Robbins was a five-time Tony Award-winner and a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors. He received two Academy Awards, including the 1961 Academy Award for Best Director with Robert Wise for West Side Story and a special Academy Honorary Award for ...

#115

Alexis Petridis

#446

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Alexis Petridis is a British journalist. He is the head rock and pop music critic for The Guardian, and a regular contributor for GQ. In addition to his music journalism for the paper, he has written a weekly column in the fashion section of The Guardian Weekend section, as well as contributing to its Lost in Showbiz column.

#116

Jeff Koons

#651

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Jeffrey Lynn Koons is an American artist recognized for his work dealing with popular culture and his sculptures depicting everyday objects, including balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces. He lives and works in both New York City and his hometown of York, Pennsylvania. His works have sold for substantial sums, including at least two record auction prices for a work by a living artist: US$58.4 million for Balloon Dog in 2013 and US$91.1 million for Rabbit in 2019.

#117

Amy Goodman

#1392

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Amy Goodman is an American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter, and author. Her investigative journalism career includes coverage of the East Timor independence movement, Morocco's occupation of Western Sahara, and Chevron Corporation's role in Nigeria.

#118

Michael E. Krauss

Michael E. Krauss

#5168

Overall Influence

1934 - 2019 (85 years)

Michael E. Krauss was an American linguist, professor emeritus, founder and long-time head of the Alaska Native Language Center. He died on August 11, 2019, four days before his 85th birthday. The Alaska Native Language Archive is named after him.

#119

Geoffrey Sampson

#2288

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Geoffrey Sampson is Professor of Natural Language Computing in the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex. He produces annotation standards for compiling corpora of ordinary usage of the English language. His work has been applied in automatic language-understanding software, and in writing-skills training. He has also analysed Ronald Coase's "theory of the firm" and the economic and political implications of e-business.

#120

Leos Carax

#6317

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Alex Christophe Dupont , best known as Leos Carax , is a French film director, critic and writer. Carax is noted for his poetic style and his tortured depictions of love. His first major work was Boy Meets Girl , and his notable works include Les Amants du Pont-Neuf , Holy Motors and Annette . For the last, he won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. His professional name is an anagram of his real name, 'Alex', and 'Oscar'.

#121

Paul Frommer

#5963

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Paul R. Frommer is an American communications professor at the University of Southern California and a linguistics consultant. He is the former Vice President, Special Projects Coordinator, Strategic Planner, and Writer-Researcher at Bentley Industries in Los Angeles, California. From 2005 to 2008, he served as Director of the Center for Management Communication at the USC Marshall School of Business.

#122

Gene Wolfe

#1506

Overall Influence

1931 - 2019 (88 years)

Gene Rodman Wolfe was an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He was noted for his dense, allusive prose as well as the strong influence of his Catholic faith. He was a prolific short story writer and novelist, and won many literary awards. Wolfe has been called "the Melville of science fiction", and was honored as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

#123

Jack Vance

#1581

Overall Influence

1916 - 2013 (97 years)

John Holbrook Vance was an American mystery, fantasy, and science fiction writer. Though most of his work has been published under the name Jack Vance, he also wrote several mystery novels under pen names, including Ellery Queen.

#124

Julie Taymor

#2096

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Julie Taymor is an American director and writer of theater, opera, and film. Her stage adaptation of The Lion King debuted in 1997 and received eleven Tony Award nominations, with Taymor receiving Tony Awards for her direction and costume design. Her film Frida, about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, was nominated for five Academy Awards, including a Best Original Song nomination for Taymor's composition "Burn It Blue". She also directed the 2007 jukebox musical film Across the Universe, based on the music of the Beatles.

#125

Michael Schudson

Michael Schudson

#2685

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Michael S. Schudson is professor of journalism in the graduate school of journalism of Columbia University and adjunct professor in the department of sociology. He is professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is an expert in the fields such as journalism history, media sociology, political communication, and public culture.

#126

Eric Clapton

#1177

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Eric Patrick Clapton is an English rock and blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He is regarded as one of the most successful and influential guitarists in rock music. He ranked second in Rolling Stones list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and fourth in Gibsons "Top 50 Guitarists of All Time". In 2023, Clapton was named the 35th best guitarist of all time. He was also named number five in Time magazine's list of "The 10 Best Electric Guitar Players" in 2009.

#127

Frank Rich

#1192

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Frank Hart Rich Jr. is an American essayist and liberal op-ed columnist, who held various positions within The New York Times from 1980 to 2011. He has also produced television series and documentaries for HBO.

#128

Alexander Vovin

Alexander Vovin

#4037

Overall Influence

1961 - 2022 (61 years)

Alexander Vladimirovich Vovin was a Soviet-born Russian-American linguist and philologist, and director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, France. He was a world-renowned linguist, well known for his research on East Asian languages.

#129

Stanley Karnow

#1737

Overall Influence

1925 - 2013 (88 years)

Stanley Abram Karnow was an American journalist and historian. He is best known for his writings on East Asia and the Vietnam War. Education and career Karnow was born in Brooklyn in 1925, and had a middle-class, secular Jewish upbringing. His father was a machinery salesman; his mother, an immigrant from Hungary, a homemaker. Interested in writing from a young age, at James Madison High School in Brooklyn he wrote radio plays and was a sports writer and an editor of the school paper.

#130

Julien Temple

#2209

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Julien Temple is a British film, documentary and music video director. He began his career with short films featuring the Sex Pistols, and has continued with various off-beat projects, including The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, Absolute Beginners and a documentary film about Glastonbury.

#131

Chris Thomas

#1904

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Christopher P. Thomas is an English record producer who has worked extensively with the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Procol Harum, Roxy Music, Badfinger, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Pete Townshend, Pulp and the Pretenders. He has also produced breakthrough albums for the Sex Pistols, the Climax Blues Band and INXS.

#132

Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan

#703

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Andrew Michael Sullivan is a British-American author, editor, and blogger. Sullivan is a political commentator, a former editor of The New Republic, and the author or editor of six books. He started a political blog, The Daily Dish, in 2000, and eventually moved his blog to platforms, including Time, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and finally an independent subscription-based format. He announced his retirement from blogging in 2015. From 2016 to 2020, Sullivan was a writer-at-large at New York. His newsletter The Weekly Dish was launched in July 2020.

#133

Harold Evans

#1991

Overall Influence

1928 - 2020 (92 years)

Sir Harold Matthew Evans was a British-American journalist and writer. In his career in his native Britain, he was editor of The Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981, and its sister title The Times for a year from 1981, before being forced out of the latter post by Rupert Murdoch. While at The Sunday Times, he led the newspaper's campaign to seek compensation for mothers who had taken the morning sickness drug thalidomide, which led to their children having severely deformed limbs.

#134

Gulzar

#1106

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Gulzar is an Indian Urdu poet, lyricist, author, screenwriter, and film director known for his works in Hindi cinema. He is regarded as one of greatest Urdu poets of this era. He started his career with music director S.D. Burman as a lyricist in the 1963 film Bandini and worked with many music directors including R. D. Burman, Salil Chowdhury, Vishal Bhardwaj and A. R. Rahman. Gulzar also writes poetry, dialogues and scripts. He directed films such as Aandhi and Mausam during the 1970s and the TV series Mirza Ghalib in the 1980s. He also directed Kirdaar in 1993.

#135

Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card

#423

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Orson Scott Card is an American writer known best for his science fiction works. He is the first and only person to win a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award in consecutive years, winning both awards for his novel Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead . A feature film adaptation of Ender's Game, which Card co-produced, was released in 2013. Card also wrote the Locus Fantasy Award-winning series The Tales of Alvin Maker .

#136

Ryszard Kapuściński

Ryszard Kapuściński

#2801

Overall Influence

1932 - 2007 (75 years)

Ryszard Kapuściński was a Polish journalist, photographer, poet and author. He received many awards and was considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kapuściński's personal journals in book form attracted both controversy and admiration for blurring the conventions of reportage with the allegory and magical realism of literature. He was the Communist-era Polish Press Agency's only correspondent in Africa during decolonization, and also worked in South America and Asia. Between 1956 and 1981 he reported on 27 revolutions and coups, until he was fired because of his support for the pro-democracy Solidarity movement in his native country.

#137

Andrew Marr

#1195

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Andrew William Stevenson Marr is a Scottish journalist and broadcaster. Beginning his career as a political commentator, he subsequently edited The Independent newspaper from 1996 to 1998 and was political editor of BBC News from 2000 to 2005.

#138

Johanna Nichols

#3744

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Johanna Nichols is an American linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Career She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973 with a dissertation titled, "The Balto-Slavic predicate instrumental: a problem in diachronic syntax."

#139

Mike Newell

#2192

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Michael Cormac Newell is an English film and television director and producer. He won the BAFTA for Best Direction for Four Weddings and a Funeral , which also won the BAFTA Award for Best Film, and directed the films Donnie Brasco and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire .

#140

Michael Cacoyannis

Michael Cacoyannis

#2150

Overall Influence

1921 - 2011 (90 years)

Michael Cacoyannis , sometimes credited as Michael Yannis, was a Greek Cypriot theatre and film director, writer, producer, and actor. Much of his work was rooted in classical texts, especially those of the Greek tragedian Euripides. His most acclaimed work is the 1964 film Zorba the Greek, an adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel of the same name. He also directed the 1983 Broadway revival of the musical based on the film. In addition to directing, he also wrote, produced, translated, and designed dozens of stage play and opera productions.

#141

Jeremy Paxman

#1491

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jeremy Dickson Paxman is an English retired broadcaster, journalist, author, and television presenter. Born in Leeds, Paxman was educated at Malvern College and St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he edited the undergraduate newspaper Varsity. At Cambridge, he was a member of a Labour Party club and described himself as a socialist, in later life describing himself as a one-nation conservative. He joined the BBC in 1972, initially at BBC Radio Brighton, relocating to London in 1977. In following years, he worked on Tonight and Panorama, becoming a newsreader for the BBC Six O'Clock News ...

#142

Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman

#670

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Thomas Loren Friedman is an American political commentator and author. He is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner who is a weekly columnist for The New York Times. He has written extensively on foreign affairs, global trade, the Middle East, globalization, and environmental issues.

#143

Salikoko Mufwene

#7029

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Salikoko Mufwene is a linguist born in Mbaya-Lareme in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago. Mufwene was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.

#144

Richard Vatz

#4287

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Richard Eugene Vatz is an American academic, lecturer and writer who is a professor of Rhetoric and Communication at Towson University. Vatz is a Faculty Fellow at the Eastern Communication Association and has been honored by the National Communication Association .

#145

Margaret Busby

#1052

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Margaret Yvonne Busby, , Hon. FRSL , also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisher when she and Clive Allison co-founded the London-based publishing house Allison and Busby in the 1960s. She edited the anthology Daughters of Africa , and its 2019 follow-up New Daughters of Africa. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. In 2020 she was voted one of the "100 Great Black Britons". In 2021, she was honoured with the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award.

#146

Pete Hamill

#2788

Overall Influence

1935 - 2020 (85 years)

Pete Hamill was an American journalist, novelist, essayist and editor. During his career as a New York City journalist, he was described as "the author of columns that sought to capture the particular flavors of New York City's politics and sports and the particular pathos of its crime." Hamill was a columnist and editor for the New York Post and the New York Daily News.

#147

John Hersey

#2032

Overall Influence

1914 - 1993 (79 years)

John Richard Hersey was an American writer and journalist. He is considered one of the earliest practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, in which storytelling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reportage. In 1999, Hiroshima, Hersey's account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, was adjudged the finest work of American journalism of the 20th century by a 36-member panel associated with New York University's journalism department.

#148

Connie Chung

#2228

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Constance Yu-Hwa Chung is an American journalist who has been a news anchor and reporter for the U.S. television news networks ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC. Some of her more famous interview subjects include Claus von Bülow and U.S. representative Gary Condit, whom Chung interviewed first after the Chandra Levy disappearance, and basketball legend Magic Johnson after he went public about being HIV-positive. In 1993, she became the second woman to co-anchor a network newscast as part of CBS Evening News.

#149

James L. Brooks

James L. Brooks

#770

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

James Lawrence Brooks is an American director, producer, screenwriter and co-founder of Gracie Films. His television and film work includes The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, The Simpsons, Broadcast News, As Good as It Gets, and Terms of Endearment.

#150

Neil Postman

#1223

Overall Influence

1931 - 2003 (72 years)

Neil Postman was an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic, who eschewed digital technology, including personal computers, mobile devices, and cruise control in cars, and was critical of uses of technology, such as personal computers in school. He is best known for twenty books regarding technology and education, including Amusing Ourselves to Death , Conscientious Objections , Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology , The Disappearance of Childhood and The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School .

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