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).
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#12951
John Florio
1553 - 1625 (72 years)
Giovanni Florio , known as John Florio, was an English linguist, poet, writer, translator, lexicographer, and royal language tutor at the Court of James I. He is recognised as the most important Renaissance humanist in England. Florio contributed 1,149 words to the English language, placing third after Chaucer and Shakespeare , in the linguistic analysis conducted by Stanford professor John Willinsky.
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Nae Ionescu
1890 - 1940 (50 years)
Nae Ionescu was a Romanian philosopher, logician, mathematician, professor, and journalist. Near the end of his career, he became known for his antisemitism and devotion to far right politics, in the years leading up to World War II.
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Alfredo Antonini
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Alfredo Antonini was a leading Italian-American symphony conductor and composer who was active on the international concert stage as well as on the CBS radio and television networks from the 1930s through the early 1970s. In 1972 he received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Religious Programming on television for his conducting of the premiere of Ezra Laderman's opera And David Wept for CBS television during 1971. In addition, he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 1980
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Alexander Melville Bell
1819 - 1905 (86 years)
Alexander Melville Bell was a teacher and researcher of physiological phonetics and was the author of numerous works on orthoepy and elocution. Additionally he was also the creator of Visible Speech which was used to help the deaf learn to talk, and was the father of Alexander Graham Bell.
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Aleksandar Belić
1876 - 1960 (84 years)
Aleksandar Belić was a Serbian linguist and academic. Biography Belić was born in Belgrade. After studying Slavic languages in Belgrade, Odessa, and Moscow, he received his PhD at Leipzig University in 1900. He worked at the University of Belgrade and Belgrade Higher School during his academic career. He was a member and longtime president of the Serbian Academy of Sciences. His membership lasted between 1937 and 1960 with the interruption in the 1941-1944 period of the Axis occupation of Serbia when he was suspended.
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Jean Sibelius
1865 - 1957 (92 years)
Jean Sibelius was a Finnish composer of the late Romantic and early-modern periods. He is widely regarded as his country's greatest composer, and his music is often credited with having helped Finland develop a national identity during its struggle for independence from Russia.
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Gustav Meyer
1850 - 1900 (50 years)
Gustav Meyer was a German linguist and Indo-European scholar, considered to be one of the most important Albanologists of his time, most importantly by proving that the Albanian language belongs to the Indo-European family.
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Dora Carrington
1893 - 1932 (39 years)
Dora de Houghton Carrington , known generally as Carrington, was an English painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey. From her time as an art student, she was known simply by her surname as she considered Dora to be "vulgar and sentimental". She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime, as she rarely exhibited and did not sign her work. She worked for a while at the Omega Workshops, and for the Hogarth Press, designing woodcuts.
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Enrico Cecchetti
1850 - 1928 (78 years)
Enrico Cecchetti was an Italian ballet dancer, mime, and founder of the Cecchetti method. The son of two dancers from Civitanova Marche, he was born in the costuming room of the Teatro Tordinona in Rome. After an illustrious career as a dancer in Europe, he went to dance for the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he further honed his skills. Cecchetti was praised for his agility and strength in his performances, as well as his technical abilities in dance. By 1888, he was widely accepted as the greatest ballet virtuoso in the world.
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Frank Capra
1897 - 1991 (94 years)
Frank Russell Capra was an Italian-American film director, producer, and screenwriter who became the creative force behind some of the major award-winning films of the 1930s and 1940s. Born in Italy and raised in Los Angeles from the age of five, his rags-to-riches story has led film historians such as Ian Freer to consider him the "American Dream personified".
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Ivane Javakhishvili
1876 - 1940 (64 years)
Ivane Alexandres dze Javakhishvili was a Georgian historian and linguist whose voluminous works heavily influenced the modern scholarship of the history and culture of Georgia. He was one of the founding fathers of the Tbilisi State University and its rector from 1919 to 1926.
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Antonio Vivaldi
1678 - 1741 (63 years)
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was an Italian composer, virtuoso violinist and impresario of Baroque music. Along with Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, Vivaldi ranks amongst the greatest Baroque composers and his influence during his lifetime was widespread across Europe, giving origin to many imitators and admirers. He pioneered many developments in orchestration, violin technique and programmatic music. He consolidated the emerging concerto form into a widely accepted and followed idiom.
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Aaron Copland
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Aaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later a conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as the "Dean of American Composers". The open, slowly changing harmonies in much of his music are typical of what many people consider to be the sound of American music, evoking the vast American landscape and pioneer spirit. He is best known for the works he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in a deliberately accessible style often referred to as "populist" and which the composer labeled his "vernacular" style. Works in th...
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Mary Pickford
1892 - 1979 (87 years)
Gladys Marie Smith , known professionally as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian actress resident in the U.S., and also producer, screenwriter and film studio founder, who was a pioneer in the US film industry with a Hollywood career that spanned five decades.
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C. L. Moore
1911 - 1987 (76 years)
Catherine Lucille Moore was an American science fiction and fantasy writer, who first came to prominence in the 1930s writing as C. L. Moore. She was among the first women to write in the science fiction and fantasy genres . Moore's work paved the way for many other female speculative fiction writers.
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Alvin Ailey
1931 - 1989 (58 years)
Alvin Ailey Jr. was an American dancer, director, choreographer, and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater . He created AAADT and its affiliated Alvin Ailey American Dance Center as havens for nurturing Black artists and expressing the universality of the African-American experience through dance.
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Buster Keaton
1895 - 1966 (71 years)
Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton was an American actor, comedian and filmmaker. He is best known for his silent film work, in which his trademark was physical comedy accompanied by a stoic, deadpan expression that earned him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".
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Julien Duvivier
1896 - 1967 (71 years)
Julien Duvivier was a French film director and screenwriter. He was prominent in French cinema in the years 1930–1960. Amongst his most original films, chiefly notable are La Bandera, Pépé le Moko, Little World of Don Camillo, Panic , Deadlier Than the Male and Marianne de ma jeunesse.
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Charles Gavan Duffy
1816 - 1903 (87 years)
Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, KCMG, PC , was an Irish poet and journalist , Young Irelander and tenant-rights activist. After emigrating to Australia in 1856 he entered the politics of Victoria on a platform of land reform, and in 1871–1872 served as the colony's 8th Premier.
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William Robinson
1838 - 1935 (97 years)
William Robinson: was an Irish practical gardener and journalist whose ideas about wild gardening spurred the movement that led to the popularising of the English cottage garden, a parallel to the search for honest simplicity and vernacular style of the British Arts and Crafts movement, and were important in promoting the woodland garden. Robinson is credited as an early practitioner of the mixed herbaceous border of hardy perennial plants, a champion too of the "wild garden", who vanquished the high Victorian pattern garden of planted-out bedding schemes. Robinson's new approach to garden...
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Paul Elmer More
1864 - 1937 (73 years)
Paul Elmer More was an American journalist, critic, essayist and Christian apologist. Biography Paul Elmer More, the son of Enoch Anson and Katherine Hay Elmer, was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He was educated at Washington University in St. Louis and Harvard University. More taught Sanskrit at Harvard and Bryn Mawr .
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A. S. Hornby
1898 - 1978 (80 years)
Albert Sidney Hornby, usually just A. S. Hornby , was an English grammarian, lexicographer, and pioneer in the field of English language learning and teaching . Hornby was born in Chester and educated at University College London. In April 1924 he went to Japan to teach English at Oita University . He joined Harold E. Palmer in his programme of vocabulary research at the Institute for Research in English Teaching . Palmer invited him to Tokyo in April 1933 as an assistant; in 1936, Hornby became the technical adviser and editor of IRET's Bulletin.
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Alexandru Graur
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Alexandru Graur was a Romanian linguist. Born into a Jewish family in Botoșani, Graur graduated from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bucharest and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris . He obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the Sorbonne. After returning to Bucharest, he became involved in academic life and published studies in different periodicals.
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Howard Hawks
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Howard Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer, and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era. Critic Leonard Maltin called him "the greatest American director who is not a household name." Roger Ebert called Hawks "one of the greatest American directors of pure movies, and a hero of auteur critics because he found his own laconic values in so many different kinds of genre material." He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for Sergeant York and earned the Honorary Academy Award in 1974.
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Moses ibn Ezra
1060 - 1138 (78 years)
Rabbi Moses ben Jacob ibn Ezra, known as Ha-Sallaḥ was an Andalusi Jewish philosopher, linguist, and poet. He was born in Granada about 1055 – 1060, and died after 1138. Ibn Ezra is considered to have had great influence in the Arabic literary world. He is considered one of Spain's greatest poets and was thought to be ahead of his time in terms of his theories on the nature of poetry. One of the more revolutionary aspects of Ibn Ezra's poetry that has been debated is his definition of poetry as metaphor and how his poetry illuminates Aristotle's early ideas. The impact of Ibn Ezra's philosop...
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Joseph Breen
1890 - 1965 (75 years)
Joseph Ignatius Breen was an American film censor with the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America who applied the Hays Code to film production. Early life and career Breen was the youngest of three sons born to Mary and Hugh A. Breen in Philadelphia. His father had emigrated from Ireland and met his mother Mary in New Jersey. Breen was raised in a strict Roman Catholic home and attended Gesu Parish School until the eighth grade. He then attended Boys Catholic High School. He attended Saint Joseph's College but dropped out after two years, after which he worked as a newspaper reporter for fourteen years in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.
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Abel Gance
1889 - 1981 (92 years)
Abel Gance was a French film director and producer, writer and actor. A pioneer in the theory and practice of montage, he is best known for three major silent films: J'accuse , La Roue , and Napoléon .
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Kenneth Slessor
1901 - 1971 (70 years)
Kenneth Adolphe Slessor was an Australian poet, journalist and official war correspondent in World War II. He was one of Australia's leading poets, notable particularly for the absorption of modernist influences into Australian poetry. The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry is named after him.
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Django Reinhardt
1910 - 1953 (43 years)
Jean Reinhardt , known by his Romani nickname Django , was a Romani-French jazz guitarist and composer. He was one of the first major jazz talents to emerge in Europe and has been hailed as one of its most significant exponents.
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Samuel Wells Williams
1812 - 1884 (72 years)
Samuel Wells Williams was a linguist, official, missionary and Sinologist from the United States in the early 19th century. Early life Williams was born in Utica, New York, son of William Williams and the former Sophia Wells, an elder of the First Presbyterian Church. Among his siblings were brothers William Frederick Williams and Henry Dwight Williams. His father's Williams family moved from Massachusetts to Utica in 1800 where his father joined his uncle, William McLean, and assisted in publishing the Whitestown Gazette and Cato's Patrol . His became a partner in 1807, and later a master...
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William Edward Parry
1790 - 1855 (65 years)
Sir William Edward Parry was a Royal Navy officer and explorer best known for his 1819–1820 expedition through the Parry Channel, probably the most successful in the long quest for the Northwest Passage, until it was finally negotiated by Roald Amundsen in 1906. In 1827, Parry attempted one of the earliest expeditions to the North Pole. He reached 82° 45' N, setting a record for human exploration Farthest North that stood for nearly five decades before being surpassed at 83° 20' N by Albert Hastings Markham in 1875.
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Richard Dimbleby
1913 - 1965 (52 years)
Frederick Richard Dimbleby was an English journalist and broadcaster, who became the BBC's first war correspondent, and then its leading TV news commentator. As host of the long-running current affairs programme Panorama, he pioneered a popular style of interviewing that was respectful but searching. At formal public events, he could combine gravitas with creative insights based on extensive research. He was also able to maintain interest throughout the all-night election specials.
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Edwin Arnold
1832 - 1904 (72 years)
Sir Edwin Arnold KCIE CSI was an English poet and journalist, who is most known for his work The Light of Asia. Biography Arnold was born at Gravesend, Kent, the second son of a Sussex magistrate, Robert Coles Arnold. He grew up at Southchurch Wick, a farm in Southchurch, Essex, and was educated at King's School, Rochester; King's College London; and University College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate prize for poetry on the subject of "The Feast of Belshazzar" in 1852. He became a schoolmaster, at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and in 1856 went to India as Principal of the Deccan Coll...
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Frank Norris
1870 - 1902 (32 years)
Benjamin Franklin Norris Jr. was an American journalist and novelist during the Progressive Era, whose fiction was predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include McTeague: A Story of San Francisco , The Octopus: A Story of California and The Pit .
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Joost Schmidt
1893 - 1948 (55 years)
Joost Schmidt was a German typographer, a teacher and master at the Bauhaus, and later a professor at the College of Visual Arts, Berlin. He was a visionary typographer and graphic designer who is best known for designing the famous poster for the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar, Germany.
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Antonin Artaud
1896 - 1948 (52 years)
Antoine Marie Joseph Paul Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud , was a French writer, poet, dramatist, visual artist, essayist, actor and theatre director. He is widely recognized as a major figure of the European avant-garde. In particular, he had a profound influence on twentieth-century theatre through his conceptualization of the Theatre of Cruelty. Known for his raw, surreal and transgressive work, his texts explored themes from the cosmologies of ancient cultures, philosophy, the occult, mysticism and indigenous Mexican and Balinese practices.
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Vesta Tilley
1864 - 1952 (88 years)
Matilda Alice Powles, Lady de Frece was an English music hall performer. She adopted the stage name Vesta Tilley and became one of the best-known male impersonators of her era. Her career lasted from 1869 until 1920. Starting in provincial theatres with her father as manager, she performed her first season in London in 1874. She typically performed as a dandy or fop, also playing other roles. She found additional success as a principal boy in pantomime.
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Carl Darling Buck
1866 - 1955 (89 years)
Carl Darling Buck was an American philologist. Biography Buck was born on October 2, 1866, in Maine . He graduated from Yale in 1886, was a graduate student there for three years, and studied at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens from 1887 to 1889, and in Leipzig from 1889–1892.
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Rose Wilder Lane
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
Rose Wilder Lane was an American writer and daughter of American writer Laura Ingalls Wilder. Along with two other female writers, Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson, Lane is one of the most influential advocates of the American libertarian movement.
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Joseph Vendryes
1875 - 1960 (85 years)
Joseph Vendryes or Vendryès was a French Celtic linguist. After studying with Antoine Meillet, he was chairman of Celtic languages and literature at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He founded the journal Études Celtiques. He was a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and a consultant with the International Auxiliary Language Association, which standardized and presented Interlingua.
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Kyōsuke Kindaichi
1882 - 1971 (89 years)
Kyōsuke Kindaichi was a Japanese linguist, chiefly known for his dictations of yukar, or sagas of the Ainu people, as well as his study of the Matagi dialect. He is the author of the dictionary Meikai Kokugo Jiten.
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Richard Harding Davis
1864 - 1916 (52 years)
Richard Harding Davis was an American journalist and writer of fiction and drama, known foremost as the first American war correspondent to cover the Spanish–American War, the Second Boer War, and World War I. His writing greatly assisted the political career of Theodore Roosevelt. He also played a major role in the evolution of the American magazine. His influence extended to the world of fashion, and he is credited with making the clean-shaven look popular among men at the turn of the 20th century.
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Carl Maria von Weber
1786 - 1826 (40 years)
Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber was a German composer, conductor, virtuoso pianist, guitarist, and critic of the early Romantic period. Best known for his operas, he was a crucial figure in the development of German Romantische Oper .
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Daniel Auber
1782 - 1871 (89 years)
Daniel-François-Esprit Auber was a French composer and director of the Paris Conservatoire. Born into an artistic family, Auber was at first an amateur composer before he took up writing operas professionally when the family's fortunes failed in 1820. He soon established a professional partnership with the librettist Eugène Scribe that lasted for 41 years and produced 39 operas, most of them commercial and critical successes. He is mostly associated with opéra-comique and composed 35 works in that genre. With Scribe he wrote the first French grand opera, La Muette de Portici in 1828, which p...
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Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti
1774 - 1849 (75 years)
Giuseppe Gasparo Mezzofanti was an Italian cardinal and famed hyperpolyglot. Life Born to humble parents in Bologna, he showed exceptional mnemonic skills as well as a flair for music and foreign language learning from a very young age. He studied with the Piarists where he had the chance to meet several missionaries from various countries. By speaking with them he began learning several new languages including Swedish, German, Spanish and South American native languages as well as studying Latin and ancient Greek in school. He completed his theological studies before he had reached the minimum age for ordination as a priest.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas
1890 - 1998 (108 years)
Marjory Stoneman Douglas was an American journalist, author, women's suffrage advocate, and conservationist known for her staunch defense of the Everglades against efforts to drain it and reclaim land for development. Moving to Miami as a young woman to work for The Miami Herald, she became a freelance writer, producing over one hundred short stories that were published in popular magazines. Her most influential work was the book The Everglades: River of Grass , which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp. Its impact has been compared to that of Rachel Carson's influential book Silent Spring .
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Jules Feller
1859 - 1940 (81 years)
Jules Feller was a Belgian academician and Walloon militant. Biography Jules Feller created the of spelling for the Walloon language. This is also used for writing the Picard language since a consensus arose between universities in favour of the written form known as Feller-Carton .
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Charles Laughton
1899 - 1962 (63 years)
Charles Laughton was an English actor. He was trained in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and first appeared professionally on the stage in 1926. In 1927, he was cast in a play with his future wife Elsa Lanchester, with whom he lived and worked until his death.
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Claudio Monteverdi
1567 - 1643 (76 years)
Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi was an Italian composer, choirmaster and string player. A composer of both secular and sacred music, and a pioneer in the development of opera, he is considered a crucial transitional figure between the Renaissance and Baroque periods of music history.
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Maximus Planudes
1260 - 1305 (45 years)
Maximus Planudes was a Byzantine Greek monk, scholar, anthologist, translator, mathematician, grammarian and theologian at Constantinople. Through his translations from Latin into Greek and from Greek into Latin, he brought the Greek East and the Latin West into closer contact with one another. He is now best known as a compiler of the Greek Anthology.
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