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,
#13101
Brion Gysin
1916 - 1986 (70 years)
Brion Gysin was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices. He is best known for his use of the cut-up technique, alongside his close friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs. With the engineer Ian Sommerville he also invented the Dreamachine, a flicker device designed as an art object to be viewed with the eyes closed. It was in painting and drawing, however, that Gysin devoted his greatest efforts, creating calligraphic works inspired by cursive Japanese "grass" script and Arabic script. Burroughs later stated that "Brion Gysin ...
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Ralph Vaughan Williams
1872 - 1958 (86 years)
Ralph Vaughan Williams was an English composer. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.
Go to Profile#13103
Johannes Schmidt
1843 - 1901 (58 years)
Johannes Friedrich Heinrich Schmidt was a German linguist. He developed the Wellentheorie of language development. Biography Schmidt was born in Prenzlau, Province of Brandenburg. He was educated at Bonn and at Jena where he studied philology with August Schleicher and specialized in Indo-European, especially Slavic, languages. He earned a doctorate in 1865 and worked from 1866 as a teacher at a gymnasium in Berlin.
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Akseli Gallen-Kallela
1865 - 1931 (66 years)
Akseli Gallen-Kallela was a Finnish painter who is best known for his illustrations of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. His work is considered a very important aspect of the Finnish national identity. He changed his name from Gallén to Gallen-Kallela in 1907.
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Julius Pokorny
1887 - 1970 (83 years)
Julius Pokorny was an Austrian-Czech linguist and scholar of the Celtic languages, particularly Irish, and a supporter of Irish nationalism. He held academic posts in Austrian and German universities.
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Vladimir Stasov
1824 - 1906 (82 years)
Vladimir Vasilievich Stasov , was a Russian critic of music and art. Born into a wealthy, noble family, Stasov became a prominent figure in mid-19th-century Russian culture. He discovered a large number of its greatest talents, inspired many of their works and fought their battles in numerous articles and letters to the press. As such, he carried on a lifelong debate with Russian novelist and playwright Ivan Turgenev, who considered Stasov "our great all-Russian critic." He wanted Russian art to liberate itself from what he saw as Europe's hold. By copying the west, he felt, Russian artists could be, at best, second-rate.
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Paul Delvaux
1897 - 1994 (97 years)
Paul Delvaux was a Belgian painter noted for his dream-like scenes of women, classical architecture, trains and train stations, and skeletons, often in combination. He is often considered a surrealist, although he only briefly identified with the Surrealist movement. He was influenced by the works of Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte, but developed his own fantastical subjects and hyper-realistic styling, combining the detailed classical beauty of academic painting with the bizarre juxtapositions of surrealism.
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Malcolm Guthrie
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Malcolm Guthrie was an English linguist who specialized in Bantu languages. Guthrie was a foremost professor of Bantu languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He is known primarily for his classification of Bantu languages, Guthrie 1971. The classification, though based more on geography than linguistic relatedness, is nonetheless the most widely used. Together with the Belgian linguist Achille Émile Meeussen , he is regarded as one of the two leading Bantu specialists of the second half of the 20th century.
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Robert Burns
1759 - 1796 (37 years)
Robert Burns , also known familiarly as Rabbie Burns, was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is in a "light Scots dialect" of English, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these writings his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest.
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Diogenes Laertius
180 - 240 (60 years)
Diogenes Laërtius was a biographer of the Greek philosophers. Nothing is definitively known about his life, but his surviving Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is a principal source for the history of ancient Greek philosophy. His reputation is controversial among scholars because he often repeats information from his sources without critically evaluating it. He also frequently focuses on trivial or insignificant details of his subjects' lives while ignoring important details of their philosophical teachings and he sometimes fails to distinguish between earlier and later teachings of specific philosophical schools.
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Cornelius Ryan
1920 - 1974 (54 years)
Cornelius Ryan was an Irish journalist and author known mainly for writing popular military history. He was especially known for his histories of World War II events: The Longest Day: 6 June 1944 D-Day , The Last Battle , and A Bridge Too Far .
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Sidney Lee
1859 - 1926 (67 years)
Sir Sidney Lee was an English biographer, writer, and critic. Biography Lee was born Solomon Lazarus Lee in 1859 at 12 Keppel Street, Bloomsbury, London. He was educated at the City of London School and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in Modern History in 1882. In 1883, Lee became assistant-editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. In 1890 he became joint editor and, on the retirement of Sir Leslie Stephen in 1891, succeeded him as editor.
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Felix Mendelssohn
1809 - 1847 (38 years)
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy , widely known as Felix Mendelssohn, was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period. Mendelssohn's compositions include symphonies, concertos, piano music, organ music and chamber music. His best-known works include the overture and incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream , the Italian Symphony, the Scottish Symphony, the oratorio St. Paul, the oratorio Elijah, the overture The Hebrides, the mature Violin Concerto and the String Octet. The melody for the Christmas carol "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" is also his.
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Winsor McCay
1867 - 1934 (67 years)
Zenas Winsor McCay was an American cartoonist and animator. He is best known for the comic strip Little Nemo and the animated film Gertie the Dinosaur . For contractual reasons, he worked under the pen name Silas on the comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend.
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Joseph Wright
1855 - 1930 (75 years)
Joseph Wright FBA was an English Germanic philologist who rose from humble origins to become Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford. Early life Wright was born in Idle, near Bradford in the former West Riding of Yorkshire, the second son of Dufton Wright, a woollen cloth weaver and quarryman, and his wife Sarah Ann . He started work as a "donkey-boy" in a quarry around 1862, at the age of six, leading a donkey-drawn cart full of tools to the smithy to be sharpened. He later became a bobbin doffer – responsible for removing and replacing full bobbins – in a mill in Sir Titus Salt's model village of Saltaire in Yorkshire.
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Jacob Jordaens
1593 - 1678 (85 years)
Jacob Jordaens was a Flemish painter, draughtsman and a designer of tapestries and prints. He was a prolific artist who created biblical, mythological, and allegorical compositions, genre scenes, landscapes, illustrations of Flemish sayings and portraits. After the death of Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, he became the leading Flemish Baroque painter of his time. Unlike those illustrious contemporaries he never travelled abroad to study the Antique and Italian painting and, except for a few short trips to locations elsewhere in the Low Countries, he resided in Antwerp his entire life. He also remained largely indifferent to Rubens and van Dyck's intellectual and courtly aspirations.
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Stobaeus
430 - 470 (40 years)
Joannes Stobaeus , from Stobi in Macedonia, was the compiler of a valuable series of extracts from Greek authors. The work was originally divided into two volumes containing two books each. The two volumes became separated in the manuscript tradition, and the first volume became known as the Extracts and the second volume became known as the Anthology . Modern editions now refer to both volumes as the Anthology. The Anthology contains extracts from hundreds of writers, especially poets, historians, orators, philosophers and physicians. The subjects range from natural philosophy, dialectics, and ethics, to politics, economics, and maxims of practical wisdom.
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Pierre Larousse
1817 - 1875 (58 years)
Pierre Athanase Larousse was a French grammarian, lexicographer and encyclopaedist. He published many of the outstanding educational and reference works of 19th-century France, including the 15-volume .
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Milton Caniff
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
Milton Arthur Paul Caniff was an American cartoonist famous for the Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon comic strips. Biography Caniff was born in Hillsboro, Ohio. He was an Eagle Scout and a recipient of the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award from the Boy Scouts of America. Caniff did cartoons for local newspapers while studying at Stivers High School in Dayton Ohio. At Ohio State University, Caniff joined the Sigma Chi fraternity and later illustrated for The Magazine of Sigma Chi and The Norman Shield . Graduating in 1930, Caniff began at the Columbus Dispatch where he worked with the not...
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Jonas Jablonskis
1860 - 1930 (70 years)
Jonas Jablonskis was a distinguished Lithuanian linguist and one of the founders of the standard Lithuanian language. He used the pseudonym Rygiškių Jonas, taken from the small town named Rygiškiai where he spent his childhood.
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Bedřich Hrozný
1879 - 1952 (73 years)
Bedřich Hrozný , also known as , was a Czech orientalist and linguist. He contributed to the decipherment of the ancient Hittite language, identified it as an Indo-European language, and laid the groundwork for the development of Hittitology.
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Howard Dietz
1896 - 1983 (87 years)
Howard Dietz was an American publicist, lyricist, and librettist, best remembered for his songwriting collaboration with Arthur Schwartz. Biography Dietz was born in New York City. He attended Columbia College and then studied journalism at Columbia University. He also served as publicist/director of advertising for Goldwyn Pictures and later MGM and is often credited with creating Leo the Lion, its lion mascot, and choosing their slogan Ars Gratia Artis. In 1942, he was made MGM's Vice President in Charge of Publicity. He held that position until his retirement in 1957.
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Lawren Harris
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
Lawren Stewart Harris LL. D. was a Canadian painter, best known as a leading member of the Group of Seven. He played a key role as a catalyst in Canadian art and as a visionary in Canadian landscape art.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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".
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 .
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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, ...
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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".
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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".
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