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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Communications,

#13001

André Jolivet

1905 - 1974 (69 years)

André Jolivet was a French composer. Known for his devotion to French culture and musical thought, Jolivet drew on his interest in acoustics and atonality, as well as both ancient and modern musical influences, particularly on instruments used in ancient times. He composed in a wide variety of forms for many different types of ensembles.

#13002

Marian Anderson

Marian Anderson

1897 - 1993 (96 years)

Marian Anderson was an American contralto. She performed a wide range of music, from opera to spirituals. Anderson performed with renowned orchestras in major concert and recital venues throughout the United States and Europe between 1925 and 1965.

#13003

Eleonora Duse

1858 - 1924 (66 years)

Eleonora Giulia Amalia Duse , often known simply as Duse, was an Italian actress, rated by many as the greatest of her time. She performed in many countries, notably in the plays of Gabriele D'Annunzio and Henrik Ibsen. Duse achieved a unique power of conviction and verity on the stage through intense absorption in the character, "eliminating the self" as she put it, and letting the qualities emerge from within, not imposed through artifice.

#13004

Johann Nepomuk Hummel

1778 - 1837 (59 years)

Johann Nepomuk Hummel was an Austrian composer and virtuoso pianist. His music reflects the transition from the Classical to the Romantic musical era. He was a pupil of Mozart, Salieri and Clementi. He also knew Beethoven and Schubert.

#13005

Enrique Granados

1867 - 1916 (49 years)

Pantaleón Enrique Joaquín Granados Campiña , commonly known as Enrique Granados in Spanish or Enric Granados in Catalan, was a Spanish composer of classical music, and concert pianist from Catalonia, Spain. His most well-known works include Goyescas, the , and María del Carmen.

#13006

Earl Hines

1903 - 1983 (80 years)

Earl Kenneth Hines, also known as Earl "Fatha" Hines , was an American jazz pianist and bandleader. He was one of the most influential figures in the development of jazz piano and, according to one source, "one of a small number of pianists whose playing shaped the history of jazz".

#13007

Stefan Mladenov

Stefan Mladenov

1880 - 1963 (83 years)

Stefan Mladenov was a Bulgarian linguist and dialectologist, a specialist in Indo-European linguistics, Slavic studies, Balkan studies, Bulgarian studies and a scientist of world renown and authority.

#13008

Adelina Patti

1843 - 1919 (76 years)

Adelina Patti was an Italian opera singer, earning huge fees at the height of her career in the music capitals of Europe and America in the 19th century. She first sang in public as a child in 1851, and gave her last performance before an audience in 1914. Along with her near contemporaries Jenny Lind and Thérèse Tietjens, Patti remains one of the most famous sopranos in history, owing to the purity and beauty of her lyrical voice and the unmatched quality of her bel canto technique.

#13009

Victor Fleming

1889 - 1949 (60 years)

Victor Lonzo Fleming was an American film director, cinematographer, and producer. His most popular films were Gone with the Wind, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Director, and The Wizard of Oz . Fleming has those same two films listed in the top 10 of the American Film Institute's 2007 AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list.

#13010

Chauncey A. Goodrich

Chauncey A. Goodrich

1790 - 1860 (70 years)

Chauncey Allen Goodrich was an American clergyman, educator and lexicographer. He was the son-in-law of Noah Webster and edited his Dictionary after his father-in-law's death. Family Goodrich was the son of Elizur and Anne Willard Goodrich. His father was a lawyer and member of the United States House of Representatives. He was also the grandson of the Reverend Elizur Goodrich. His uncle, also named Chauncey Goodrich, was also a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and a U.S. senator from Connecticut.

#13011

Carl Schachter

1900 - Present (126 years)

Carl E. Schachter is an American music theorist noted for his expertise in Schenkerian analysis. Born in Chicago, he attended Austin High School, graduating at age 16. Beginning in 1948 he began studies at the Mannes School of Music. He studied piano with Sara Levee, Isabelle Vengerova and Israel Citkowitz, and conducting with . Most significantly he studied with Felix Salzer, who was later co-author with Schachter of the influential text Counterpoint in Composition. He received a Bachelor of Science from Mannes; an MA from New York University ; and a DM from Mannes College of Music.

#13012

Eugène Ysaÿe

1858 - 1931 (73 years)

Eugène-Auguste Ysaÿe was a Belgian virtuoso violinist, composer, and conductor. He was regarded as "The King of the Violin", or, as Nathan Milstein put it, the "tsar". Legend of the Ysaÿe violin Eugène Ysaÿe came from a background of "artisans", though a large part of his family played instruments. As violinist Arnold Steinhardt recounts, a legend was passed down through the Ysaÿe family about the first violin brought to the lineage:

#13013

August Hjalmar Edgren

August Hjalmar Edgren

1840 - 1903 (63 years)

August Hjalmar Edgren was a Swedish-American linguist, professor, and author. Background August Hjalmar Edgren was born in Östanås, Älvsbacka parish in Värmland, Sweden. He was the son of Axel Edgren and Mathilda Berger . He was educated in Karlstad and Stockholm. He was a graduate of the University of Uppsala and the royal military school of Sweden. Edgren passed the officer's exam in Stockholm in 1860, and subsequently served during the American Civil War in the Union Army, where he entered the 99th New York Regiment as 2d lieutenant in January 1862. He was promoted to 1st lieutenant, and in August 1863 he was assigned to the engineer corps.

#13014

Bernard Borderie

1924 - 1978 (54 years)

Bernard Borderie was a French film director and screenwriter. His father, Raymond Borderie, was one of the producers of Les Enfants du Paradis . Selected filmography Wolves Hunt at Night La môme vert-de-gris The Women Couldn't Care Less Ces dames préfèrent le mambo The Mask of the Gorilla Sergeant X Women Are Like That The Three Musketeers Lemmy pour les dames Your Turn, Darling Hardi Pardaillan! Angélique, Marquise des Anges Marvelous Angelique Angelique and the King Brigade antigangs Sept hommes et une garce Untamable Angelique Angelique and the Sultan The Gallant Lords of Bois-Doré

#13015

Giovanni Paisiello

1740 - 1816 (76 years)

Giovanni Paisiello was an Italian composer of the Classical era, and was the most popular opera composer of the late 1700s. His operatic style influenced Mozart and Rossini. Life Paisiello was born in Taranto in the Apulia region and educated by the Jesuitss there. He became known for his beautiful singing voice and in 1754 was sent to the Conservatorio di S. Onofrio at Naples, where he studied under Francesco Durante, and eventually became assistant master. For the theatre of the Conservatorio, which he left in 1763, he wrote some intermezzi, one of which attracted so much notice that he wa...

#13016

Bert Kalmar

1884 - 1947 (63 years)

Bert Kalmar was an American songwriter, who was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970. He was also a screenwriter. Biography Kalmar, a native of New York City, left school at an early age and began working in vaudeville. He appeared on stage as a magician, comedian and dancer before switching to songwriting, after a knee injury ended his performing career. By this time, he had earned enough to start a music publishing company, Kalmar and Puck, where he collaborated with a number of songwriters, including Harry Puck and Harry Ruby. The publishing firm also operated under the nam...

#13017

César Cui

1835 - 1918 (83 years)

César Antonovich Cui was a Russian composer and music critic, member of the Belyayev circle and The Five – a group of composers combined by the idea of creating a specifically Russian type of music. As an officer of the Imperial Russian Army he rose to the rank of Engineer-General , taught fortifications in Russian military academies and wrote a number of monographs on the subject.

#13018

Alessandro Scarlatti

Alessandro Scarlatti

1660 - 1725 (65 years)

Pietro Alessandro Gaspare Scarlatti was an Italian Baroque composer, known especially for his operas and chamber cantatas. He is considered the most important representative of the Neapolitan school of opera.

#13019

Thomas Arne

1710 - 1778 (68 years)

Thomas Augustine Arne was an English composer. He is best known for his patriotic song "Rule, Britannia!" and the song "A-Hunting We Will Go", the latter composed for a 1777 production of The Beggar's Opera, which has since become popular as a folk song and a nursery rhyme. Arne was a leading British theatre composer of the 18th century, working at the West End's Drury Lane and Covent Garden. He wrote many operatic entertainments for the London theatres and pleasure gardens, as well as concertos, sinfonias, and sonatas.

#13020

Johann Adolph Hasse

Johann Adolph Hasse

1699 - 1783 (84 years)

Johann Adolph Hasse was an 18th-century German composer, singer and teacher of music. Immensely popular in his time, Hasse was best known for his prolific operatic output, though he also composed a considerable quantity of sacred music. Married to soprano Faustina Bordoni and a friend of librettist Pietro Metastasio, whose libretti he frequently set, Hasse was a pivotal figure in the development of opera seria and 18th-century music.

#13021

George Antheil

1900 - 1959 (59 years)

George Johann Carl Antheil was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author, and inventor whose modernist musical compositions explored the sounds – musical, industrial, and mechanical – of the early 20th century. Spending much of the 1920s in Europe, Antheil returned to the United States in the 1930s, and thereafter composed music for films, and eventually, television. As a result of this work, his style became more tonal. A man of diverse interests and talents, Antheil was constantly reinventing himself. He wrote magazine articles, an autobiography, a mystery novel, and newspaper and m...

#13022

Josquin des Prez

1455 - 1521 (66 years)

Josquin Lebloitte dit des Prez was a composer of High Renaissance music, who is variously described as French or Franco-Flemish. Considered one of the greatest composers of the Renaissance, he was a central figure of the Franco-Flemish School and had a profound influence on the music of 16th-century Europe. Building on the work of his predecessors Guillaume Du Fay and Johannes Ockeghem, he developed a complex style of expressive—and often imitative—movement between independent voices which informs much of his work. He further emphasized the relationship between text and music, and departed f...

#13023

Mohamed Salah Ben Mrad

1881 - 1979 (98 years)

Mohamed Salah Ben Mrad , was a Tunisian theologian, journalist and intellectual. In 1931 he published Mourning on Haddad's Woman objecting to the expanded rights for women which were advocated by Tahar Haddad in his book Our Women in the Sharia and Society published one year earlier.

#13024

George J. Adler

1821 - 1868 (47 years)

George J. Adler was a noted philologist and linguist. Early years Adler was born to John J. Adler and an unnamed mother in Germany in 1821. He arrived in the United States in 1833, with his parents, who settled in New York city, where the boy attended the public schools and entered the university of the city of New York, from which he was graduated valedictorian in 1844. Two years later he became a professor of German language at New York University, which position he filled for eight years.

#13025

Hjalmar Falk

1859 - 1928 (69 years)

Peterolsen Groth Hjalmar Seierstedt Falk was a Norwegian linguist and philologist. A professor of philology at the University in Kristiania for about thirty years, he is particularly known for his etymological dictionary of the Norwegian and Danish language in cooperation with Alf Torp.

#13026

Nino Rota

1911 - 1979 (68 years)

Giovanni Rota Rinaldi , better known as Nino Rota , was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. He also composed the music for two of Franco Zeffirelli's Shakespeare screen adaptations, and for the first two installments of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather trilogy, earning the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Godfather Part II .

#13027

Alberto Ginastera

1916 - 1983 (67 years)

Alberto Evaristo Ginastera was an Argentine composer of classical music. He is considered to be one of the most important 20th-century classical composers of the Americas. Biography Ginastera was born in Buenos Aires to a Spanish father and an Italian mother. During his later years, he preferred to use the Catalan and Italian pronunciation of his surname – , with an initial soft 'G' like that of English 'George' – rather than with a Spanish 'J' sound .

#13028

Gabriel Pierné

1863 - 1937 (74 years)

Henri Constant Gabriel Pierné was a French composer, conductor, pianist and organist. Biography Gabriel Pierné was born in Metz. His family moved to Paris, after Metz and part of Lorraine were annexed to Germany in 1871 following the Franco-Prussian War. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, gaining first prizes for solfège, piano, organ, counterpoint and fugue. He won the French Prix de Rome in 1882, with his cantata Edith. His teachers included Antoine François Marmontel, Albert Lavignac, Émile Durand, César Franck and Jules Massenet .

#13029

Jelly Roll Morton

1890 - 1941 (51 years)

Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe , known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton, was an American ragtime and jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer of Louisiana Creole descent. Morton was jazz's first arranger, proving that a genre rooted in improvisation could retain its essential characteristics when notated. His composition "Jelly Roll Blues", published in 1915, was one of the first published jazz compositions. He also claimed to have invented the genre.

#13030

Bob Wills

1905 - 1975 (70 years)

James Robert Wills was an American Western swing musician, songwriter, and bandleader. Considered by music authorities as the founder of Western swing, he was known widely as the King of Western Swing . He was also noted for punctuating his music with his trademark "ah-haa" calls.

#13031

Herbert Wilcox

1890 - 1977 (87 years)

Herbert Sydney Wilcox CBE was a British film producer and director. He was one of the most successful British filmmakers from the 1920s to the 1950s. He is best known for the films he made with his third wife Anna Neagle.

#13032

Francesco Cavalli

1602 - 1676 (74 years)

Francesco Cavalli was a Venetian composer, organist and singer of the early Baroque period. He succeeded his teacher Claudio Monteverdi as the dominant and leading opera composer of the mid 17th-century. A central figure of Venetian musical life, Cavalli wrote more than forty operas, almost all of which premiered in the city's theaters. His best known works include Ormindo , Giasone and La Calisto .

#13033

Gene Vincent

1935 - 1971 (36 years)

Vincent Eugene Craddock , known as Gene Vincent, was an American musician who pioneered the styles of rockabilly and rock and roll. His 1956 top ten hit with his backing band the Blue Caps, "Be-Bop-a-Lula", is considered a significant early example of rockabilly. His chart career was brief, especially in his home country of the US, where he notched three top 40 hits in 1956 and 1957, and never charted in the top 100 again. In the UK, he was a somewhat bigger star, racking up eight top 40 hits from 1956 to 1961.

#13034

Karol Szymanowski

1882 - 1937 (55 years)

Karol Maciej Szymanowski was a Polish composer and pianist. He was a member of the modernist Young Poland movement that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th century. Szymanowski's early works show the influence of the late Romantic German school as well as the early works of Alexander Scriabin, as exemplified by his Étude Op. 4 No. 3 and his first two symphonies. Later, he developed an impressionistic and partially atonal style, represented by such works as the Third Symphony and his Violin Concerto No. 1. His third period was influenced by the folk music of the Polish Górale people, including the ballet Harnasie, the Fourth Symphony, and his sets of Mazurkas for piano.

#13035

Manuel Moschopoulos

1265 - 1316 (51 years)

Manuel Moschopoulos , was a Byzantine commentator and grammarian, who lived during the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th century and was an important figure in the Palaiologan Renaissance. Moschopoulos means "little calf," and is probably a nickname.

#13036

Étienne Méhul

1763 - 1817 (54 years)

Étienne Nicolas Méhul was a French composer of the classical period. He was known as "the most important opera composer in France during the Revolution". He was also the first composer to be called a "Romantic". He is known particularly for his operas, written in keeping with the reforms introduced by Christoph Willibald Gluck and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

#13037

Dexter Gordon

1923 - 1990 (67 years)

Dexter Gordon was an American jazz tenor saxophonist, composer, and bandleader. He was among the most influential early bebop musicians, which included other greats such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell. Gordon's height was , so he was also known as "Long Tall Dexter" and "Sophisticated Giant". His studio and performance career spanned more than 40 years.

#13038

Ferdinand Sommer

1875 - 1962 (87 years)

Ferdinand Sommer was a German classical and Indo-European philologist. From 1893 he studied at the universities of Marburg and Freiberg, where he was a pupil of Rudolf Thurneysen. In 1899 he obtained his habilitation from the University of Leipzig with the thesis Die Komparationssuffixe im Lateinischen . In 1902 he was named professor of Indo-European linguistics, Sanskrit and classical philology at the University of Basel, and later on in his career, he held professorships in Indo-European linguistics at the universities of Rostock , Jena and Bonn . From 1926 to 1951 he was a professor of c...

#13039

Robert Dick Wilson

Robert Dick Wilson

1856 - 1930 (74 years)

Robert Dick Wilson, PhD, DD was an American linguist and Presbyterian Old Testament scholar who devoted his life to prove the reliability of the Hebrew Bible. In his quest to determine the accuracy of the original manuscripts, Wilson learned 45 languages, including Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, as well as all the languages into which the Scriptures had been translated up to 600 AD.

#13040

Agustín Lara

1897 - 1970 (73 years)

Ángel Agustín María Carlos Fausto Mariano Alfonso del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús Lara y Aguirre del Pino , known as Agustín Lara, was a Mexican composer and performer of songs and boleros. He is recognized as one of the most popular songwriters of his era. His work was widely appreciated not only in Mexico but also in Central and South America, the Caribbean and Spain. After his death, he has also been recognized in the United States, Italy and Japan.

#13041

Edmund Kean

1787 - 1833 (46 years)

Edmund Kean was a celebrated British Shakespearean stage actor born in England, who performed, among other places, in London, Belfast, New York, Quebec, and Paris. He was known for his short stature, tumultuous personal life, and controversial divorce.

#13042

Gjergj Pekmezi

1872 - 1938 (66 years)

Gjergj Pekmezi was an Albanian linguist, philosopher, folklorist and diplomat. In 1916, he became a member of the Literary Commission of Shkodër, which established the first standard form of the Albanian language.

#13043

Stoyko Stoykov

1912 - 1969 (57 years)

Stoyko Ivanov Stoykov was a Bulgarian linguist, Slavist. Biography Graduated Slavic Philology at Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", . Specialized phonetics, dialectology, and Slavic linguistics in Prague, Czech Republic . Was granted PhD by the Univerzita Karlova . Worked at the Institute for Bulgarian Language of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences as an assistant , as a head of the Section for Bulgarian Dialectology with Linguistic Atlas and as a deputy director of the same institute . Also, worked in the Sofia University as an assistant , associate professor , and professor . Was Dean of the Phylological Faculty and Deputy Rector of the same university .

#13044

François-Adrien Boieldieu

François-Adrien Boieldieu

1775 - 1834 (59 years)

François-Adrien Boieldieu was a French composer, mainly of operas, often called "the French Mozart". His date of birth was also cited as December 15 by his biographer and writer Lucien Augé de Lassus and as September 15 by some local press releases.

#13045

Robert Calvert

1945 - 1988 (43 years)

Robert Newton Calvert was a South African-British writer, poet, and musician. He is principally known for his role as lyricist, performance poet and lead vocalist of the space rock band Hawkwind. Early life Calvert was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and moved with his parents to England when he was two. He attended school in London and Margate, living in a flat in Arlington House. Having finished school he joined the Air Training Corps, in which he became a corporal and played trumpet for the 438 Squadron band. He then went on to college in Canterbury. After leaving college, and having been ...

#13046

Konstantinas Sirvydas

Konstantinas Sirvydas

1579 - 1631 (52 years)

Konstantinas Sirvydas was a Lithuanian religious preacher, lexicographer, and one of the pioneers of Lithuanian literature from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, at the time a confederal part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He was a Jesuit priest, a professor at the Academia Vilnensis, and the author of, among other works, the first grammar of the Lithuanian language and the first trilingual dictionary in Lithuanian, Latin, and Polish . Famous for his eloquence, Sirvydas spent 10 years of his life preaching sermons at St. Johns' Church in Vilnius .

#13047

Abraham Ecchellensis

1605 - 1664 (59 years)

Ibrahim al-Haqilani was a Maronite Catholic philosopher and linguist involved in the translation of the Bible into Arabic. He translated several Arabic works into Latin, the most important of which was the Chronicon orientale attributed to Ibn al-Rahib.

#13048

William Hartnell

William Hartnell

1908 - 1975 (67 years)

William Henry Hartnell was an English actor. He is best remembered for his portrayal of the first incarnation of the Doctor in Doctor Who from 1963 to 1966. In film, Hartnell notably appeared in Brighton Rock , The Mouse That Roared and This Sporting Life . He was associated with military roles, playing Company Sergeant Major Percy Bullimore in the ITV sitcom The Army Game and Sergeant Grimshaw, the title character in the first Carry On film Carry On Sergeant .

#13049

Walter Damrosch

1862 - 1950 (88 years)

Walter Johannes Damrosch was a Kingdom of Prussia-born American conductor and composer. He was the director of the New York Symphony Orchestra and conducted the world premiere performances of various works, including Aaron Copland's Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, George Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F and An American in Paris, and Jean Sibelius' Tapiola. Damrosch was also instrumental in the founding of Carnegie Hall. He also conducted the first performance of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 with the composer himself as soloist.

#13050

Munis Tekinalp

1883 - 1961 (78 years)

Moiz Cohen was a Turkish writer, philosopher, and journalist of Jewish heritage. He became an ideologue of different movements at different times: Ottomanism, Pan-Turkism, and Kemalism. Born to a Jewish family, he later changed his name to Munis Tekinalp.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions