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.

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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,

#13051

Leonard Bernstein

1918 - 1990 (72 years)

Leonard Bernstein was an American conductor, composer, pianist, music educator, author, and humanitarian. Considered to be one of the most important conductors of his time, he was the first American conductor to receive international acclaim. Bernstein was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history" according to music critic Donal Henahan. Bernstein received numerous honors and accolades including seven Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, and 16 Grammy Awards as well as an Academy Award nomination. He received the Kennedy Center Honor in 1981.

#13052

Milman Parry

1902 - 1935 (33 years)

Milman Parry was an American Classicist whose theories on the origin of Homer's works have revolutionized Homeric studies to such a fundamental degree that he has been described as the "Darwin of Homeric studies". In addition, he was a pioneer in the discipline of oral tradition.

#13053

William Allen White

1868 - 1944 (76 years)

William Allen White was an American newspaper editor, politician, author, and leader of the Progressive movement. Between 1896 and his death, White became a spokesman for middle America. At a 1937 banquet held in his honor by the Kansas Editorial Association, he was called "the most loved and most distinguished member" of the Kansas press.

#13054

Izaak Walton

1593 - 1683 (90 years)

Izaak Walton was an English writer. Best known as the author of The Compleat Angler, he also wrote a number of short biographies including one of his friend John Donne. They have been collected under the title of Walton's Lives.

#13055

Berthold Delbrück

1842 - 1922 (80 years)

Berthold Gustav Gottlieb Delbrück was a German linguist who devoted himself to the study of the comparative syntax of the Indo-European languages. Early life Delbrück was born in Putbus. He studied at the universities of Halle and Berlin, receiving his doctorate at Halle in 1863. In 1870 he succeeded August Leskien as an associate professor at the University of Jena, where in 1873 he was named a full professor of Sanskrit and comparative linguistics.

#13056

Frank Brangwyn

1867 - 1956 (89 years)

Sir Frank William Brangwyn was a Welsh artist, painter, watercolourist, printmaker, illustrator, and designer. Brangwyn worked in a wide range of artistic fields. As well as paintings and drawings, he produced designs for stained glass, furniture, ceramics, glass tableware, mosaics, buildings and interiors, was a lithographer and woodcutter and was a book illustrator. It has been estimated that during his lifetime Brangwyn produced over 12,000 works. His mural commissions would cover over of canvas, he painted over 1,000 oils, over 660 mixed media works , over 500 etchings, about 400 wood-e...

#13057

Carl von Ossietzky

Carl von Ossietzky

1889 - 1938 (49 years)

Carl von Ossietzky was a German journalist and pacifist. He was the recipient of the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in exposing the clandestine German rearmament. As editor-in-chief of the magazine Die Weltbühne, Ossietzky published a series of exposés in the late 1920s, detailing Germany's violation of the Treaty of Versailles by rebuilding an air force and training pilots in the Soviet Union. He was convicted of treason and espionage in 1931 and sentenced to eighteen months in prison but was granted amnesty in December 1932.

#13058

Johannes Itten

1888 - 1967 (79 years)

Johannes Itten was a Swiss expressionist painter, designer, teacher, writer and theorist associated with the Bauhaus school. Together with German-American painter Lyonel Feininger and German sculptor Gerhard Marcks, under the direction of German architect Walter Gropius, Itten was part of the core of the Weimar Bauhaus.

#13059

Adele Astaire

1896 - 1981 (85 years)

Adele Astaire Douglass , was an American dancer, stage actress, and singer. After beginning work as a dancer and vaudeville performer at the age of nine, Astaire built a successful performance career with her younger brother, Fred Astaire.

#13060

Jacques Delille

Jacques Delille

1738 - 1813 (75 years)

Jacques Delille was a French poet who came to national prominence with his translation of Virgil’s Georgics and made an international reputation with his didactic poem on gardening. He barely survived the slaughter of the French Revolution and lived for some years outside France, including three years in England. The poems on abstract themes that he published after his return were less well received.

#13061

Hilda of Whitby

Hilda of Whitby

614 - 680 (66 years)

Hilda of Whitby was a saint of the early Church in Britain. She was the founder and first abbess of the monastery at Whitby which was chosen as the venue for the Synod of Whitby in 664. An important figure in the Christianisation of Anglo-Saxon England, she was abbess in several convents and recognised for the wisdom that drew kings to her for advice.

#13062

Grant Wood

1891 - 1942 (51 years)

Grant DeVolson Wood was an American painter and representative of Regionalism, best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest. He is particularly well known for American Gothic , which has become an iconic example of early 20th-century American art.

#13063

Duke Ellington

1899 - 1974 (75 years)

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was an American jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra from 1923 through the rest of his life. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Ellington was based in New York City from the mid-1920s and gained a national profile through his orchestra's appearances at the Cotton Club in Harlem. A master at writing miniatures for the three-minute 78 rpm recording format, Ellington wrote or collaborated on more than one thousand compositions; his extensive body of work is the largest recorded personal jazz legacy, and many of his pieces have become standards.

#13064

Richard Norman Shaw

Richard Norman Shaw

1831 - 1912 (81 years)

Richard Norman Shaw RA , also known as Norman Shaw, was a British architect who worked from the 1870s to the 1900s, known for his country houses and for commercial buildings. He is considered to be among the greatest of British architects; his influence on architectural style was strongest in the 1880s and 1890s.

#13065

Edith Skinner

1902 - 1981 (79 years)

Edith Skinner was a vocal coach and a consultant to actors. Her book, Speak With Distinction, has been reprinted several times, promoting actors' use of what she called "Good American Speech". Life Skinner was born in Moncton, New Brunswick, in eastern Canada, on 22 September 1902, to Herbert Havelock Warman and his wife Agnes Lynn, née Orr. She attended the Leland Powers School for the Spoken Word in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States, and graduated in 1923. There she met Margaret Prendergast McLean, and through her, William Tilly, whose assistant she became in 1926. She studied at ...

#13066

Aeschines

389 BC - 314 BC (75 years)

Aeschines was a Greek statesman and one of the ten Attic orators. Biography Although it is known he was born in Athens, the records regarding his parentage and early life are conflicting; but it seems probable that his parents, though poor, were respectable. Aeschines' father was Atrometus, an elementary school teacher of letters. His mother Glaukothea assisted in the religious rites of initiation for the poor. After assisting his father in his school, he tried his hand at acting with indifferent success, served with distinction in the army, and held several clerkships, amongst them the office of clerk to the Boule.

#13067

Henry Purcell

1659 - 1695 (36 years)

Henry Purcell was an English composer of Baroque music. Purcell's musical style was uniquely English, although it incorporated Italian and French elements. Generally considered among the greatest English opera composers, Purcell is often linked with John Dunstaple and William Byrd as England's most important early music composers. No later native-born English composer approached his fame until Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, William Walton and Benjamin Britten in the 20th century.

#13068

Edward Elgar

1857 - 1934 (77 years)

Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies. He also composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924.

#13069

Gaetano Donizetti

1797 - 1848 (51 years)

Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti was an Italian composer, best known for his almost 70 operas. Along with Gioachino Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini, he was a leading composer of the bel canto opera style during the first half of the nineteenth century and a probable influence on other composers such as Giuseppe Verdi. Donizetti was born in Bergamo in Lombardy. At an early age he was taken up by Simon Mayr who enrolled him with a full scholarship in a school which he had set up. There he received detailed musical training. Mayr was instrumental in obtaining a place for Donizetti at the Bologna Ac...

#13070

Rudolf Thurneysen

1857 - 1940 (83 years)

Eduard Rudolf Thurneysen was a Swiss linguist and Celticist. Biography Born in Basel, Thurneysen studied classical philology in Basel, Leipzig, Berlin and Paris. His teachers included Ernst Windisch and Heinrich Zimmer. He received his promotion in 1879 and his habilitation, in Latin and the Celtic languages, followed at the University of Jena in 1882.

#13071

Thomas Francis Wade

Thomas Francis Wade

1818 - 1895 (77 years)

Sir Thomas Francis Wade, was a British diplomat and sinologist who produced an early Chinese textbook in English, in 1867, that was later amended, extended and converted into the Wade-Giles romanization system for Mandarin Chinese by Herbert Giles in 1892. He was the first professor of Chinese at Cambridge University.

#13072

Ruth St. Denis

1879 - 1968 (89 years)

Ruth St. Denis was an American pioneer of modern dance, introducing eastern ideas into the art and paving the way for other women in dance. She was inspired by the Delsarte advocate Genevieve Stebbins. St. Denis was the co-founder in 1915 of the American Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts. She taught notable performers including Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey. In 1938, she founded the pioneering dance program at Adelphi University. She published several articles on spiritual dance and the mysticism of the body.

#13073

Hermann Grassmann

Hermann Grassmann

1809 - 1877 (68 years)

Hermann Günther Grassmann was a German polymath known in his day as a linguist and now also as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, general scholar, and publisher. His mathematical work was little noted until he was in his sixties. His work preceded and exceeded the concept which is now known as a vector space. He introduced the Grassmannian, the space which parameterizes all k-dimensional linear subspaces of an n-dimensional vector space V.

#13074

Alfred Döblin

1878 - 1957 (79 years)

Bruno Alfred Döblin was a German novelist, essayist, and doctor, best known for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz . A prolific writer whose œuvre spans more than half a century and a wide variety of literary movements and styles, Döblin is one of the most important figures of German literary modernism. His complete works comprise over a dozen novels ranging in genre from historical novels to science fiction to novels about the modern metropolis; several dramas, radio plays, and screenplays; a true crime story; a travel account; two book-length philosophical treatises; scores of essays on politi...

#13075

Giacomo Puccini

Giacomo Puccini

1858 - 1924 (66 years)

Giacomo Puccini was an Italian composer known primarily for his operas. Regarded as the greatest and most successful proponent of Italian opera after Verdi, he was descended from a long line of composers, stemming from the late-Baroque era. Though his early work was firmly rooted in traditional late-19th-century Romantic Italian opera, he later developed his work in the realistic verismo style, of which he became one of the leading exponents.

#13076

Christoph Willibald Gluck

1714 - 1787 (73 years)

Christoph Willibald Gluck was a composer of Italian and French opera in the early classical period. Born in the Upper Palatinate and raised in Bohemia, both part of the Holy Roman Empire, he gained prominence at the Habsburg court at Vienna. There he brought about the practical reform of opera's dramaturgical practices for which many intellectuals had been campaigning. With a series of radical new works in the 1760s, among them Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste, he broke the stranglehold that Metastasian opera seria had enjoyed for much of the century. Gluck introduced more drama by using orchestral recitative and cutting the usually long da capo aria.

#13077

Kumārajīva

344 - 413 (69 years)

Kumārajīva was a Buddhist monk, scholar, missionary and translator from Kucha . Kumārajīva is seen as one of the greatest translators of Chinese Buddhism. According to Lu Cheng, Kumarajiva's translations are "unparalleled either in terms of translation technique or degree of fidelity".

#13078

Giorgio Morandi

Giorgio Morandi

1890 - 1964 (74 years)

Giorgio Morandi was an Italian painter and printmaker who specialized in still lifes. His paintings are noted for their tonal subtlety in depicting simple subjects, mainly vases, bottles, bowls, flowers, and landscapes.

#13079

Nikolai Marr

1864 - 1934 (70 years)

Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr was a Georgian-born historian and linguist who gained a reputation as a scholar of the Caucasus during the 1910s before embarking on his "Japhetic theory" on the origin of language , now considered as pseudo-scientific, and related speculative linguistic hypotheses.

#13080

Ben Jonson

1572 - 1637 (65 years)

Benjamin Jonson was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour , Volpone, or The Fox , The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry. "He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I."

#13081

Arthur Capell

1902 - 1986 (84 years)

Arthur Capell was an Australian linguist, who made major contributions to the study of Australian languages, Austronesian languages and Papuan languages. Early life Capell was born in Newtown, New South Wales in 1902, the only child of Sarah Ann and her husband, Henry Capell. He attended North Sydney Boys' High School.

#13082

Edward Thomas

1878 - 1917 (39 years)

Philip Edward Thomas was a British writer of poetry and prose. He is sometimes considered a war poet, although few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences. He only started writing poetry at the age of 36, but by that time he had already been a prolific critic, biographer, nature writer and travel writer for two decades. In 1915, he enlisted in the British Army to fight in the First World War and was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in 1917, soon after he arrived in France.

#13083

Jacob Wackernagel

Jacob Wackernagel

1853 - 1938 (85 years)

Jacob Wackernagel was a Swiss linguist, Indo-Europeanist and scholar of Sanskrit. He was born in Basel, son of the philologist Wilhelm Wackernagel . Biography Jacob Wackernagel was born on 11 December 1853 in Basel to Wilhelm Wackernagel, a Professor of German Language and Literature in Basel, and his second wife, Maria Salome . He was named after his godfather, Jacob Grimm of the Brothers Grimm. Jacob's father died when he was sixteen.

#13084

Louis Armstrong

1901 - 1971 (70 years)

Louis Daniel Armstrong , nicknamed "Satchmo", "Satch", and "Pops", was an American trumpeter and vocalist. He was among the most influential figures in jazz. His career spanned five decades and several eras in the history of jazz. He received numerous accolades including the Grammy Award for Best Male Vocal Performance for Hello, Dolly! in 1965, as well as a posthumous win for the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1972, and induction into the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame in 2017.

#13085

Arturo Toscanini

1867 - 1957 (90 years)

Arturo Toscanini was an Italian conductor. He was one of the most acclaimed and influential musicians of the late 19th and early 20th century, renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his eidetic memory. He was at various times the music director of La Scala in Milan and the New York Philharmonic. Later in his career, he was appointed the first music director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra , and this led to his becoming a household name, especially in the United States, through his radio and television broadcasts and many recordings of the ...

#13086

Robert Emmet

1780 - 1803 (23 years)

Robert Emmet was an Irish Republican, orator and rebel leader. Following the suppression of the United Irish uprising in 1798, he sought to organise a renewed attempt to overthrow the British Crown and Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, and to establish a nationally representative government. Emmet entertained, but ultimately abandoned, hopes of immediate French assistance and of coordination with radical militants in Great Britain. In Ireland, many of the surviving veterans of '98 hesitated to lend their support, and his rising in Dublin in 1803 proved abortive.

#13087

Gerhard Rohlfs

1892 - 1986 (94 years)

Gerhard Rohlfs was a German linguist. He taught Romance languages and literature at the universities in Tübingen and Munich. He was described as an "archeologist of words". Biography Rohlfs was born in Berlin-Lichterfelde. His main interest was the languages and dialects spoken in Southern Italy and he travelled extensively in this region. He studied Italiot Greek and found several indications suggesting that Italiot-Greek is a direct descendant of the language originally spoken by the Greek colonists of Magna Grecia. He first advanced this theory in his book Griechen und Romanen in Unteritalien .

#13088

Marcel Cohen

1884 - 1974 (90 years)

Marcel Samuel Raphaël Cohen was a French linguist. He was an important scholar of Semitic languages and especially of Ethiopian languages. He studied the French language and contributed much to general linguistics.

#13089

Priscus

410 - 471 (61 years)

Priscus of Panium was a 5th-century Eastern Roman diplomat and Greek historian and rhetorician . Biography Priscus was born in Panion between 410 and 420 AD. In 448/449 AD, he accompanied Maximinus, the head of the Byzantine embassy representing Emperor Theodosius II , on a diplomatic mission to the court of Attila the Hun. While there, he met and conversed with a Greek merchant, dressed in "Scythian" fashion, who was captured eight years earlier when the city of Viminacium was sacked by the Huns. The trader explained to Priscus that after the sack of Viminacium, he was a slave of Onegesius, a Hunnic nobleman, but obtained his freedom and chose to settle among the Huns.

#13090

Francis Poulenc

1899 - 1963 (64 years)

Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc was a French composer and pianist. His compositions include songs, solo piano works, chamber music, choral pieces, operas, ballets, and orchestral concert music. Among the best-known are the piano suite Trois mouvements perpétuels , the ballet Les biches , the Concert champêtre for harpsichord and orchestra, the Organ Concerto , the opera Dialogues des Carmélites , and the Gloria for soprano, choir, and orchestra.

#13091

Václav Hanka

1791 - 1861 (70 years)

Václav Hanka was a Czech philologist. Biography Hanka was born at Hořiněves near Hradec Králové. He was sent in 1807 to school at Hradec Králové, to escape the conscription, then to the University of Prague, where he founded a society for the cultivation of the Czech language. At Vienna, where he afterwards studied law, he established a Czech periodical; and in 1813 he made the acquaintance of Josef Dobrovský, an eminent philologist.

#13092

Jerzy Kuryłowicz

1895 - 1978 (83 years)

Jerzy Kuryłowicz was a Polish linguist who studied Indo-European languages. Life Born in Stanisławów, Galicia, Austria-Hungary , Kuryłowicz was a Polish historical linguist, structuralist and language theoretician, deeply interested in the studies of Indo-European languages. He studied at the Vienna University of Economics and Business , and then, after World War I, continued his studies at Lwów University, where his unusual language skills drew the attention of some prominent linguists. As a result, he was granted a scholarship in Paris. This gave him an opportunity to qualify as a university professor of Indo-European linguistics soon after his return to Poland.

#13093

John Bowring

1792 - 1872 (80 years)

Sir John Bowring , or Phraya Siamanukulkij Siammitrmahayot was a British political economist, traveller, writer, literary translator, polyglot and the fourth Governor of Hong Kong. He was appointed by Queen Victoria as emissary to Siam, later he was appointed by King Mongkut of Siam as ambassador to London, also making a treaty of amity with Siam on April 18, 1855, now referred to as the "Bowring Treaty". His namesake treaty was fully effective for 70 years, until the reign of Vajiravudh. This treaty was gradually edited and became completely ineffective in 1938 under the government of Plaek Phibunsongkhram.

#13094

Heinrich Zimmer

Heinrich Zimmer

1890 - 1943 (53 years)

Heinrich Robert Zimmer was a German Indologist and linguist, as well as a historian of South Asian art, most known for his works, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization and Philosophies of India. He was the most important German scholar in Indian Philology after Max Müller .

#13095

Bernard Bloch

1907 - 1965 (58 years)

Bernard Bloch was an American linguist. He taught at Brown University and was Professor of Linguistics at Yale University. His father, Albert Bloch, was the only American member of Der Blaue Reiter , a group of early 20th-century European modernist painters. His brother was the film writer Walter Bloch, who also wrote under the name, Walter Black.

#13096

Antonín Dvořák

1841 - 1904 (63 years)

Antonín Leopold Dvořák was a Czech composer. Dvořák frequently employed rhythms and other aspects of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia, following the Romantic-era nationalist example of his predecessor Bedřich Smetana. Dvořák's style has been described as "the fullest recreation of a national idiom with that of the symphonic tradition, absorbing folk influences and finding effective ways of using them."

#13097

Constantine P. Cavafy

Constantine P. Cavafy

1863 - 1933 (70 years)

Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis , known, especially in English, as Constantine P. Cavafy and often published as C. P. Cavafy , was a Greek poet, journalist, and civil servant from Alexandria. His work, as one translator put it, "holds the historical and the erotic in a single embrace."

#13098

Jean-Baptiste Lully

1632 - 1687 (55 years)

Jean-Baptiste Lully was an Italian naturalized French composer, guitarist, violinist, and dancer who is considered a master of the French Baroque music style. Best known for his operas, he spent most of his life working in the court of Louis XIV of France and became a French subject in 1661. He was a close friend of the playwright Molière, with whom he collaborated on numerous comédie-ballets, including L'Amour médecin, George Dandin ou le Mari confondu, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Psyché and his best known work, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme.

#13099

Mouloud Mammeri

Mouloud Mammeri

1917 - 1989 (72 years)

Mouloud Mammeri was an Algerian writer, anthropologist and linguist. Biography He was born on December 28, 1917, in Ait Yenni, in Tizi Ouzou Province, French Algeria. He attended a primary school in his native village, then emigrated to Morocco to live in his uncle's house in Rabat. Four years later he returned to Algiers and pursued his studies at Bugeaud College, before continuing his education at Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, intending to join the École Normale Supérieure. Conscripted in 1939 and discharged in October 1940, Mammeri registered at the Faculté des Lettres d’Alger. Re-conscri...

#13100

John Ford

1894 - 1973 (79 years)

John Martin Feeney , known professionally as John Ford, was an American film director. He was one of the most important and influential filmmakers of his generation. Ford made frequent use of location shooting and wide shots, in which his characters were framed against a vast, harsh, and rugged natural terrain.

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