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).
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.
List of the most influential people in Communications,
#13001
Edward FitzGerald
1809 - 1883 (74 years)
Edward FitzGerald or Fitzgerald was an English poet and writer. His most famous poem is the first and best-known English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which has kept its reputation and popularity since the 1860s.
Go to Profile#13002
Mahmud al-Kashgari
1029 - 1101 (72 years)
Mahmud ibn Husayn ibn Muhammad al-Kashgari was an 11th-century Kara-Khanid scholar and lexicographer of the Turkic languages from Kashgar. His father, Husayn, was the mayor of Barsgan, a town in the southeastern part of the lake of Issyk-Kul and related to the ruling dynasty of Kara-Khanid Khanate. Around 1057 C.E. Mahmud al-Kashgari became a political refugee, before settling down in Baghdad.
Go to Profile#13003
Philippe Quinault
1635 - 1688 (53 years)
Philippe Quinault , French dramatist and librettist, was born in Paris. Biography Quinault was educated by the liberality of François Tristan l'Hermite, the author of Marianne. Quinault's first play was produced at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1653, when he was only eighteen. The piece succeeded, and Quinault followed it up, but he also read for the bar; and in 1660, when he married a widow with money, he bought himself a place in the Cour des Comptes. Then he tried tragedies with more success.
Go to Profile#13004
Charles Gounod
1818 - 1893 (75 years)
Charles-François Gounod , usually known as Charles Gounod, was a French composer. He wrote twelve operas, of which the most popular has always been Faust ; his Roméo et Juliette also remains in the international repertory. He composed a large amount of church music, many songs, and popular short pieces including his Ave Maria and "Funeral March of a Marionette".
Go to Profile#13005
William George Aston
1841 - 1911 (70 years)
William George Aston was an Anglo-Irish diplomat, author and scholar-expert in the language and history of Japan and Korea. Early life Aston was born near Derry, Ireland. He distinguished himself at Queen's College, Belfast , which he attended 1859–1863. There he received a very thorough philological training in Latin, Greek, French, German and modern history. One of his professors was James McCosh.
Go to Profile#13006
Fernand Cormon
1845 - 1924 (79 years)
Fernand Cormon was a French painter born in Paris. He became a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel, Eugène Fromentin, and Jean-François Portaels, and one of the leading historical painters of modern France.
Go to Profile#13007
A. Y. Jackson
1882 - 1974 (92 years)
Alexander Young Jackson LL. D. was a Canadian painter and a founding member of the Group of Seven. Jackson made a significant contribution to the development of art in Canada, and was instrumental in bringing together the artists of Montreal and Toronto. In addition to his work with the Group of Seven, his long career included serving as a war artist during World War I and teaching at the Banff School of Fine Arts, from 1943 to 1949. In his later years he was artist-in-residence at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario.
Go to Profile#13008
Carlo Gesualdo
1566 - 1613 (47 years)
Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa was Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza. As a composer he is known for writing madrigals and pieces of sacred music that use a chromatic language not heard again until the late 19th century. He is also known for killing his first wife and her aristocratic lover upon finding them in flagrante delicto.
Go to Profile#13009
Georg Curtius
1820 - 1885 (65 years)
Georg Curtius was a German philologist and distinguished comparativist. Biography Curtius was born in Lübeck, and was the brother of the historian and archeologist Ernst Curtius. After an education at Bonn and Berlin, he was for three years a schoolmaster in Dresden, until he returned to Berlin University as privatdocent. In 1849 he was placed in charge of the Philological Seminary at Prague, and two years later was appointed professor of classical philology in Prague University. In 1854, he moved from Prague to a similar appointment at Kiel, and again in 1862 from Kiel to Leipzig. He was teaching lndo-European and the historical grammar of the classical languages at Leipzig.
Go to Profile#13010
Théo van Rysselberghe
1862 - 1926 (64 years)
Théophile "Théo" van Rysselberghe was a Belgian neo-impressionist painter, who played a pivotal role in the European art scene at the turn of the twentieth century. Biography Early years Born in Ghent to a French-speaking bourgeois family, he studied first at the Academy of Ghent under Theo Canneel and from 1879 at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels under the directorship of Jean-François Portaels. The North African paintings of Portaels had started an orientalist fashion in Belgium. Their impact would strongly influence the young Théo van Rysselberghe. Between 1882 and 1888, he...
Go to Profile#13011
Margaret Mitchell
1900 - 1949 (49 years)
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American novelist and journalist. Mitchell wrote only one novel, published during her lifetime, the American Civil War-era novel Gone with the Wind, for which she won the National Book Award for Fiction for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. Long after her death, a collection of Mitchell's girlhood writings and a novella she wrote as a teenager, titled Lost Laysen, were published. A collection of newspaper articles written by Mitchell for The Atlanta Journal was republished in book form.
Go to Profile#13012
John Reed
1887 - 1920 (33 years)
John "Jack" Silas Reed was an American journalist, poet, and communist activist. Reed first gained prominence as a war correspondent during the Mexican Revolution for Metropolitan and World War I for The Masses. He is best known for his coverage of the October Revolution in Petrograd, Russia, which he wrote about in his 1919 book Ten Days That Shook the World.
Go to Profile#13013
Jules Massenet
1842 - 1912 (70 years)
Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet was a French composer of the Romantic era best known for his operas, of which he wrote more than thirty. The two most frequently staged are Manon and Werther . He also composed oratorios, ballets, orchestral works, incidental music, piano pieces, songs and other music.
Go to Profile#13014
Camille Saint-Saëns
1835 - 1921 (86 years)
Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era. His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso , the Second Piano Concerto , the First Cello Concerto , Danse macabre , the opera Samson and Delilah , the Third Violin Concerto , the Third Symphony and The Carnival of the Animals .
Go to Profile#13015
Jimi Hendrix
1942 - 1970 (28 years)
James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix was an American guitarist, songwriter, and singer. Although his mainstream career spanned only four years, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential electric guitarists in the history of popular music, and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as "arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music."
Go to Profile#13016
George Grove
1820 - 1900 (80 years)
Sir George Grove was an English engineer and writer on music, known as the founding editor of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Grove was trained as a civil engineer, and successful in that profession, but his love of music drew him into musical administration. When responsible for the regular orchestral concerts at the Crystal Palace, he wrote a series of programme notes from which eventually grew his musical dictionary. His interest in the music of Franz Schubert, which was neglected in England at that point in the nineteenth century, led him and his friend Arthur Sullivan to go to Vienna in search of undiscovered Schubert manuscripts.
Go to Profile#13017
Jean-Philippe Rameau
1683 - 1764 (81 years)
Jean-Philippe Rameau was a French composer and music theorist. Regarded as one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the 18th century, he replaced Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant composer of French opera and is also considered the leading French composer of his time for the harpsichord, alongside François Couperin.
Go to Profile#13018
Karl Verner
1846 - 1896 (50 years)
Karl Adolph Verner was a Danish linguist. He is remembered today for Verner's law, which he published in 1876. Biography Verner's interest in languages was stimulated by reading about the work of Rasmus Christian Rask. He began his university studies in 1864 in Oriental, Germanic, and Slavic languages, and then he served in the army before resuming his studies. He traveled to Russia in December 1871, spending nearly a year learning the language. His first scientific paper was Nogle Raskiana . He began to study the accent of Danish and Slavic languages, and he was puzzled by the fact that the Gothic words fadar and broþar have different consonants after the root vowel.
Go to Profile#13019
Fatima Jinnah
1893 - 1967 (74 years)
Fatima Jinnah was a Pakistani politician and stateswoman. She was the younger sister of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder and the first governor-general of Pakistan. She was the Leader of the Opposition of Pakistan from 1960 until her death in 1967.
Go to Profile#13020
Rita Hayworth
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Rita Hayworth was an American actress. She achieved fame during the 1940s as one of the era's top stars, appearing in 61 films over 37 years. The press coined the term "The Love Goddess" to describe Hayworth after she had become the most glamorous screen idol of the 1940s. She was the top pin-up girl for GIs during World War II.
Go to Profile#13021
Antonio de Nebrija
1444 - 1522 (78 years)
Antonio de Nebrija was the most influential Spanish humanist of his era. He wrote poetry, commented on literary works, and encouraged the study of classical languages and literature, but his most important contributions were in the fields of grammar and lexicography. Nebrija was the author of the Spanish Grammar and the first dictionary of the Spanish language . His grammar is the first published grammar study of any modern European language. His chief works were published and republished many times during and after his life and his scholarship had a great influence for more than a century, ...
Go to Profile#13022
Arthur Sullivan
1842 - 1900 (58 years)
Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan was an English composer. He is best known for 14 operatic collaborations with the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, including H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado. His works include 24 operas, 11 major orchestral works, ten choral works and oratorios, two ballets, incidental music to several plays, and numerous church pieces, songs, and piano and chamber pieces. His hymns and songs include "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and "The Lost Chord".
Go to Profile#13023
Willy Ley
1906 - 1969 (63 years)
Willy Otto Oskar Ley was a German and American science writer and proponent of cryptozoology. The crater Ley on the far side of the Moon is named in his honor. Early life and Berlin years Willy Otto Oskar Ley was the son of Julius Otto Ley, a traveling merchant, and Frida May, the daughter of a Lutheran sexton. Ley grew up in his native Berlin during the First World War under the supervision of two aunts. When war erupted his father was in Great Britain. Consequently, he spent the remainder of the war at a detention camp on the Isle of Man. Meanwhile, his mother worked as milliner in a di...
Go to Profile#13024
David Smith
1906 - 1965 (59 years)
Roland David Smith was an influential and innovative American abstract expressionist sculptor and painter, best known for creating large steel abstract geometric sculptures. Born in Decatur, Indiana, Smith initially pursued painting, receiving training at the Art Students League in New York from 1926 to 1930. However, his artistic journey took a transformative turn in the early 1930s when he shifted his focus to sculpture.
Go to Profile#13025
Vasili Eroshenko
1890 - 1952 (62 years)
Vasili Yakovlevich Eroshenko was a blind writer, translator, esperantist, linguist, traveler, poet and teacher. He wrote in Esperanto and Japanese. Early life At the age of four, he contracted measles and as a result, became blind.
Go to Profile#13026
Alfredo Trombetti
1866 - 1929 (63 years)
Alfredo Trombetti , was an Italian linguist active in the early 20th century. Career overview Trombetti was a professor at the University of Bologna. He was a member of the Italian Academy. He is best known as an advocate of the doctrine of monogenesis, according to which all of the world's languages go back to a single common ancestral language. His arguments for monogenesis were first presented in his book L'unità d'origine del linguaggio, published in 1905. This doctrine is still extremely controversial.
Go to Profile#13027
Johann Strauss II
1825 - 1899 (74 years)
Johann Baptist Strauss II , also known as Johann Strauss Jr., the Younger or the Son , was an Austrian composer of light music, particularly dance music and operettas as well as a violinist. He composed over 500 waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, and other types of dance music, as well as several operettas and a ballet. In his lifetime, he was known as "The Waltz King", and was largely responsible for the popularity of the waltz in Vienna during the 19th century. Some of Johann Strauss's most famous works include "The Blue Danube", "Kaiser-Walzer" , "Tales from the Vienna Woods", "Frühlingsstimmen", and the "Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka".
Go to Profile#13028
Giorgi Akhvlediani
1887 - 1973 (86 years)
Giorgi Akhvlediani was a Georgian linguist whow was member of the Georgian Academy of Sciences and a corresponding member of Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union from 1939. He was one of the founders of the Tbilisi State University . Honored Scientist of the Georgian SSR . A member of the International Society of Experimental Phonetics and Linguistic Society of America . A member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1942.
Go to Profile#13029
George Cukor
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
George Dewey Cukor was an American film director and producer. He mainly concentrated on comedies and literary adaptations. His career flourished at RKO when David O. Selznick, the studio's Head of Production, assigned Cukor to direct several of RKO's major films, including What Price Hollywood? , A Bill of Divorcement , Our Betters , and Little Women . When Selznick moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1933, Cukor followed and directed Dinner at Eight and David Copperfield for Selznick, and Romeo and Juliet and Camille for Irving Thalberg.
Go to Profile#13030
Renato Guttuso
1911 - 1987 (76 years)
Renato Guttuso was an Italian painter and politician. His best-known works include Flight from Etna , Crucifixion and La Vucciria . Guttuso also designed for the theatre and did illustrations for books. Those for Elizabeth David’s Italian Food , introduced him to many in the English-speaking world. A fierce anti-Fascist, "he developed out of Expressionism and the harsh light of his native land to paint landscapes and social commentary".
Go to Profile#13031
Nadia Boulanger
1887 - 1979 (92 years)
Juliette Nadia Boulanger was a French music teacher and conductor. She taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century, and also performed occasionally as a pianist and organist.
Go to Profile#13032
Eugen Dieth
1893 - 1956 (63 years)
Eugen Dieth was a Swiss linguist, phonetician and dialectologist. He is well known for his work in English and German phonetics, and for co-initiating the Survey of English Dialects. Biography Eugen Dieth studied General Linguistics, English and German at the University of Zurich and the University of Geneva. He earned his PhD in 1919 with a dissertation on Middle English syntax. Between 1922 and 1927 he was lecturer in German in Aberdeen. In 1927 he became Professor extraordinarius and in 1947 Professor ordinarius for English, Old Norse and General Phonetics at the University of Zurich. He founded the Phonetics Laboratory of the University of Zurich in 1935.
Go to Profile#13033
Richard Rodgers
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Richard Charles Rodgers was an American composerr who worked primarily in musical theater. With 43 Broadway musicals and over 900 songs to his credit, Rodgers was one of the most well-known American composers of the 20th century, and his compositions had a significant influence on popular music.
Go to Profile#13034
François Couperin
1668 - 1733 (65 years)
François Couperin was a French Baroque composer, organist and harpsichordist. He was known as Couperin le Grand to distinguish him from other members of the musically talented Couperin family. Life Couperin was born in Paris, into a prominent musical family. His father Charles was organist at the Church of Saint-Gervais in the city, a position previously held by Charles's brother Louis Couperin, the esteemed keyboard virtuoso and composer whose career was cut short by an early death. As a boy François must have received his first music lessons from his father, but Charles died in 1679 leavi...
Go to Profile#13035
Gabriel Ferrater
1922 - 1972 (50 years)
Gabriel Ferrater i Soler was an author, translator and scholar of linguistics of the sixties who wrote in Catalan language. His poetical work is one of the most important among the authors of post-war Catalonia and he continues to exert a great deal of influence over authors nowadays. He published three collections of poems: Da nuces pueris , Menja't una cama and Teoria dels cossos , consequently compiled into a single volume called Les dones i els dies , which was a milestone in Catalan literature.
Go to Profile#13036
Ľudovít Štúr
1815 - 1856 (41 years)
Ludevít Štúr , also known as Ľudovít Velislav Štúr, was a Slovak revolutionary, politician, and writer. As a leader of the Slovak national revival in the 19th century, and the author of the Slovak language standard, he is lauded as one of the most important figures in Slovak history.
Go to Profile#13037
Barbara Stanwyck
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Barbara Stanwyck was an American actress, model and dancer. A stage, film, and television star, during her 60-year professional career she was known for her strong, realistic screen presence and versatility. She was a favorite of directors, including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang, and Frank Capra, and made 85 films in 38 years before turning to television.
Go to Profile#13038
Gotthelf Bergsträsser
1886 - 1933 (47 years)
Gotthelf Bergsträsser was a German linguist specializing in Semitic studies, generally considered to be one of the greatest of the twentieth century. Bergsträsser was initially a teacher of classical languages before deciding to approach Semitic.
Go to Profile#13039
Jan de Vries
1890 - 1964 (74 years)
Jan Pieter Marie Laurens de Vries was a Dutch philologist, linguist, religious studies scholar, folklorist, educator, writer, editor and public official who specialized in Germanic studies. A polyglot, de Vries studied Dutch, German, Sanskrit and Pali at the University of Amsterdam from 1907 to 1913, and gained a PhD in Nordic languages from the University of Leiden in 1915 with great distinction. Subsequently, authoring a number of important works on a variety of subjects, de Vries was in 1926 appointed Chair of Ancient Germanic Linguistics and Philology at the University of Leiden. In subse...
Go to Profile#13040
Paul Hindemith
1895 - 1963 (68 years)
Paul Hindemith was a German and American composer, music theorist, teacher, violist and conductor. He founded the Amar Quartet in 1921, touring extensively in Europe. As a composer, he became a major advocate of the Neue Sachlichkeit style of music in the 1920s, with compositions such as Kammermusik, including works with viola and viola d'amore as solo instruments in a neo-Bachian spirit. Other notable compositions include his song cycle Das Marienleben , Der Schwanendreher for viola and orchestra , the opera Mathis der Maler , the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber , and the oratorio When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd , a requiem based on Walt Whitman's poem.
Go to Profile#13041
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
1844 - 1908 (64 years)
Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was a Russian composer, a member of the group of composers known as The Five. He was a master of orchestration. His best-known orchestral compositions—Capriccio Espagnol, the Russian Easter Festival Overture, and the symphonic suite Scheherazade—are staples of the classical music repertoire, along with suites and excerpts from some of his 15 operas. Scheherazade is an example of his frequent use of fairy-tale and folk subjects.
Go to Profile#13042
Edward Heyman
1907 - 1981 (74 years)
Edward Heyman was an American lyricist and producer, best known for his lyrics to "Body and Soul," "When I Fall in Love," and "For Sentimental Reasons." He also contributed to a number of songs for films.
Go to Profile#13043
Alexander Korda
1893 - 1956 (63 years)
Sir Alexander Korda was a Hungarian–born British film director, producer and screenwriter, who founded his own film production studios and film distribution company. Born in Hungary, where he began his career, he worked briefly in the Austrian and German film industries during the era of silent films, before being based in Hollywood from 1926 to 1930 for the first of his two brief periods there . The change led to a divorce from his first wife, the Hungarian film actress María Corda, who was unable to make the transition from silent films to "talkies" because of her Hungarian accent.
Go to Profile#13044
D. W. Griffith
1875 - 1948 (73 years)
David Wark Griffith was an American film director. Considered one of the most influential figures in the history of the motion picture, he pioneered many aspects of film editing and expanded the art of the narrative film.
Go to Profile#13045
Maurice Tourneur
1876 - 1961 (85 years)
Maurice Félix Thomas , known as Maurice Tourneur , was a French film director and screenwriter. Life Born Maurice Félix Thomas in the Épinettes district , his father was a wholesaler. As a young man, Maurice Thomas first trained as a graphic designer and a magazine illustrator but was soon drawn to the theater. In 1904, he married the actress Fernande Petit. They had a son, Jacques , who would follow his father into the film industry, establishing his own reputation as a director of American films in the 1940s and 1950s.
Go to Profile#13046
Edvard Grieg
1843 - 1907 (64 years)
Edvard Hagerup Grieg was a Norwegian composer and pianist. He is widely considered one of the leading Romantic era composers, and his music is part of the standard classical repertoire worldwide. His use of Norwegian folk music in his own compositions brought the music of Norway to fame, as well as helping to develop a national identity, much as Jean Sibelius did in Finland and Bedřich Smetana in Bohemia.
Go to Profile#13047
Eduard Seler
1849 - 1922 (73 years)
Eduard Georg Seler was a prominent German anthropologist, ethnohistorian, linguist, epigrapher, academic and Americanist scholar, who made extensive contributions in these fields towards the study of pre-Columbian era cultures in the Americas.
Go to Profile#13048
Gichin Funakoshi
1868 - 1957 (89 years)
was the founder of Shotokan karate-do, perhaps the most widely known style of karate, and is known as a "father of modern karate". Following the teachings of Anko Itosu and Anko Asato, he was one of the Okinawan karate masters who introduced karate to the Japanese mainland in 1922, following its earlier introduction by his teacher Itosu. He taught karate at various Japanese universities and became honorary head of the Japan Karate Association upon its establishment in 1949.
Go to Profile#13049
J. Francis McComas
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Jesse Francis McComas was an American science fiction editor. McComas wrote several stories on his own in the 1950s using both his own name and the pseudonym Webb Marlowe. He entered publishing in 1941 as a salesman and editorial representative, spending two years in New York with Random House. He returned to California in 1944, working as the Pacific Coast editorial representative for Henry Holt and Company. For Simon & Schuster he became their Northern California sales manager and general editorial representative.
Go to Profile#13050
Vittorio De Sica
1901 - 1974 (73 years)
Vittorio De Sica was an Italian film director and actor, a leading figure in the neorealist movement. Four of the films he directed won Academy Awards: Sciuscià and Bicycle Thieves , while Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and Il giardino dei Finzi Contini won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Indeed, the great critical success of Sciuscià and Bicycle Thieves helped establish the permanent Best Foreign Film Award. These two films are considered part of the canon of classic cinema. Bicycle Thieves was deemed the greatest film of all time by Sight & Sound magazine's poll of filmmak...
Go to Profile