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,
#13201
E. Adelaide Hahn
1893 - 1967 (74 years)
Emma Adelaide Hahn was an American linguist and classicist who specialized in Latin grammar and Indo-European linguistics. She served as chair of the Hunter College Classics department for twenty-seven years and was the first woman to serve as president of the Linguistic Society of America.
Go to Profile#13202
Édouard Lalo
1823 - 1892 (69 years)
Édouard-Victoire-Antoine Lalo was a French composer. His most celebrated piece is the Symphonie Espagnole, a five-movement concerto for violin and orchestra that remains a popular work in the standard repertoire.
Go to Profile#13203
Liberace
1919 - 1987 (68 years)
Władziu Valentino Liberace was an American pianist, singer, and actor. He was born in Wisconsin to parents of Italian and Polish origin and enjoyed a career spanning four decades of concerts, recordings, television, motion pictures, and endorsements. At the height of his fame from the 1950s to 1970s, he was the highest-paid entertainer in the world with established concert residencies in Las Vegas and an international touring schedule. He embraced a lifestyle of flamboyant excess both on and off stage.
Go to Profile#13204
Dorothy Day
1897 - 1980 (83 years)
Dorothy Day was an American journalist, social activist and anarchist who, after a bohemian youth, became a Catholic without abandoning her social and anarchist activism. She was perhaps the best-known political radical among American Catholics.
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Johann Christian Bach
1735 - 1782 (47 years)
Johann Christian Bach was a German composer of the Classical era, the eighteenth child of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the youngest of his eleven sons. After living in Italy for five years , Bach moved to London, where he became known as "The London Bach". He is also sometimes known as "The English Bach", and during his time spent living in the British capital, he came to be known as John Bach. He is noted for playing a role in influencing the concerto styles of Haydn and Mozart. He contributed significantly to the development of the new sonata principle.
Go to Profile#13206
Isaac Albéniz
1860 - 1909 (49 years)
Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz y Pascual was a Spanish virtuoso pianist, composer, and conductor. He is one of the foremost composers of the Post-Romantic era who also had a significant influence on his contemporaries and younger composers. He is best known for his piano works based on Spanish folk music idioms. Isaac Albéniz was close to the Generation of '98.
Go to Profile#13207
André Campra
1660 - 1744 (84 years)
André Campra was a French composer and conductor of the Baroque era. The leading French opera composer in the period between Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau, Campra wrote several tragédies en musique and opéra-ballets that were extremely well received. He also wrote three books of cantatas as well as religious music, including a requiem.
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Serge Koussevitzky
1874 - 1951 (77 years)
Serge Koussevitzky was a Russian-born conductor, composer and double-bassist, known for his long tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949. Biography Early career Koussevitzky was born into a Jewish family of professional musicians in Vyshny Volochyok, Tver Governorate , about 250 km northwest of Moscow, Russia. His parents taught him violin, cello, and piano. He also learned trumpet. At the age of fourteen he received a scholarship to the Musico-Dramatic Institute of the Moscow Philharmonic Society, where he studied double bass with Rambusek and music theory.
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Frank Borzage
1894 - 1962 (68 years)
Frank Borzage was an American film director and actor. He was the first person to win the Academy Award for Best Director for his film 7th Heaven at the 1st Academy Awards. Born to European immigrant parents in Salt Lake City, Borzage began his career as a teenager performing with traveling theater groups throughout the western United States before finding employment in Hollywood in 1912, where he began directing and acting in short films before transitioning to feature films. Borzage's other directorial feature credits include Street Angel , Bad Girl , A Farewell to Arms , Man's Castle , Hi...
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Karl Julius Schröer
1825 - 1900 (75 years)
Karl Julius Schröer was an Austrian linguist and literary critic. He was the son of the educator and writer Tobias Gottfried Schröer . Life Schröer studied literature and linguistics from 1843 to 1846 in Leipzig, Halle, and Berlin. In 1849 he became a professor of German literature and language in Pest. He returned to Pressburg in 1850 and became a schoolteacher.
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Howlin' Wolf
1910 - 1976 (66 years)
Chester Arthur Burnett , better known by his stage name Howlin' Wolf, was an American blues singer and guitarist. He was at the forefront of transforming acoustic Delta blues into electric Chicago blues, and over a four-decade career, recorded blues, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and psychedelic rock. He is regarded as one of the most influential blues musicians of all time.
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A. Bertram Chandler
1912 - 1984 (72 years)
Arthur Bertram Chandler was an Anglo-Australian merchant marine officer, sailing the world in everything from tramp steamers to troop ships, but who later turned his hand to a second career as a prolific author of pulp science fiction. He also wrote under the pseudonyms of George Whitley, Andrew Dunstan and S.H.M. Many of his short stories draw on his extensive sailing background. In 1956, he emigrated to Australia and became an Australian citizen. By 1958 he was an officer on the Sydney-Hobart route. Chandler commanded various ships in the Australian and New Zealand merchant navies, includin...
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Louis Vierne
1870 - 1938 (68 years)
Louis Victor Jules Vierne was a French organist and composer. As the organist of Notre-Dame de Paris from 1900 until his death, he focused on organ music, including six organ symphonies and a Messe solennelle for choir and two organs. He toured Europe and the United States as a concert organist. His students included Nadia Boulanger and Maurice Duruflé.
Go to Profile#13214
Vinicius de Moraes
1913 - 1980 (67 years)
Marcus Vinícius da Cruz e Mello Moraes , better known as Vinícius de Moraes and nicknamed O Poetinha , was a Brazilian poet, diplomat, lyricist, essayist, musician, singer, and playwright. With his frequent and diverse musical partners, including Antônio Carlos Jobim, his lyrics and compositions were instrumental in the birth and introduction to the world of bossa nova music. He recorded numerous albums, many in collaboration with noted artists, and also served as a successful Brazilian career diplomat.
Go to Profile#13215
Gaspare Spontini
1774 - 1851 (77 years)
Gaspare Luigi Pacifico Spontini was an Italian opera composer and conductor from the classical era. Biography Born in Maiolati, Papal State , he spent most of his career in Paris and Berlin, but returned to his place of birth at the end of his life. During the first two decades of the 19th century, Spontini was an important figure in French opera. In his more than twenty operas, Spontini strove to adapt Gluck's classical tragédie lyrique to the contemporary taste for melodrama, for grander spectacle , for enriched orchestral timbre, and for melodic invention allied to idiomatic expressiven...
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Joseph Kosma
1905 - 1969 (64 years)
Joseph Kosma was a Hungarian composer emigrated to France. Biography Kosma was born József Kozma in Budapest, where his parents taught stenography and typing. He had a brother, Ákos. A maternal relative was the photographer László Moholy-Nagy, and another was the conductor Georg Solti. He started to play the piano at age five, and later took piano lessons. At the age of 11, he wrote his first opera, Christmas in the Trenches. After completing his education at the Secondary Grammar School Franz-Josef, he attended the Academy of Music in Budapest, where he studied with Leo Weiner. He also studied with Béla Bartók at the Liszt Academy, receiving diplomas in composition and conducting.
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Stephen Foster
1826 - 1864 (38 years)
Stephen Collins Foster , known as "the father of American music", was an American composer known primarily for his parlour and minstrel music during the Romantic period. He wrote more than 200 songs, including "Oh! Susanna", "Hard Times Come Again No More", "Camptown Races", "Old Folks at Home" , "My Old Kentucky Home", "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair", "Old Black Joe", and "Beautiful Dreamer", and many of his compositions remain popular today.
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Johann Andreas Schmeller
1785 - 1852 (67 years)
Johann Andreas Schmeller was a German philologist who initially studied the Bavarian dialect. From 1828 until his death he taught in the University of Munich. He is considered the founder of modern dialect research in Germany. His lasting contribution is the four-volume , which is currently in the process of revision by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
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George M. McCune
1908 - 1948 (40 years)
George McAfee "Mac" McCune was an American scholar of Korea who developed the McCune–Reischauer romanization system of Korean with Edwin O. Reischauer. He taught Korean history and language at Occidental College and the University of California, Berkeley.
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Veikko Antero Koskenniemi
1885 - 1962 (77 years)
Veikko Antero Koskenniemi was a Finnish poet born in Oulu. From 1921 to 1948, Koskenniemi served as Professor of Literary History at the University of Turku. He was the university's rector from 1924 to 1932. In 1948 he became a member of the Finnish Academy. He died in Turku.
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Magnus Olsen
1878 - 1963 (85 years)
Magnus Bernhard Olsen was a Norwegian philologist who specialized in Old Norse studies. Born and raised in Arendal, Olsen received his degrees in philology at Royal Frederick University in Kristiania, where he became a protége of Sophus Bugge. After Bugge's death, Olsen succeeded him in 1908 as Professor of Old Norwegian and Icelandic Literature at Royal Frederick University. In this capacity, Olsen taught generations of Norwegian academics and teachers. His field of research centered on runology and Old Norse toponymy. Olsen was particularly interested in using evidence from runes and toponymy for the study of Old Norse religion.
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Pier Paolo Pasolini
1922 - 1975 (53 years)
Pier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian poet, film director, writer, screenwriter, actor and playwright. He is considered one of the defining public intellectuals in 20th-century Italian history, influential both as an artist and a political figure.
Go to Profile#13223
Yasujirō Ozu
1903 - 1963 (60 years)
was a Japanese filmmaker. He began his career during the era of silent films, and his last films were made in colour in the early 1960s. Ozu first made a number of short comedies, before turning to more serious themes in the 1930s. The most prominent themes of Ozu's work are family and marriage, and especially the relationships between generations. His most widely beloved films include Late Spring , Tokyo Story and An Autumn Afternoon .
Go to Profile#13224
Paul Monroe
1869 - 1947 (78 years)
Paul Monroe, Ph.D., LL.D. was an American educator. He specialized in the history of education, and in comparative syudies. Biography He was born at North Madison, Indiana. He graduated at Franklin College, Franklin, Indiana in 1890, studied at the University of Heidelberg and took his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1897. He became professor at Columbia in 1899, his research involving education in its historic aspect. As well as Columbia, he lectured at Yale University and the University of California. During 1912–1913, he reported on the condition of education in the Philippines.
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François-Joseph Fétis
1784 - 1871 (87 years)
François-Joseph Fétis was a Belgian musicologist, critic, teacher and composer. He was among the most influential music intellectuals in continental Europe. His enormous compilation of biographical data in the Biographie universelle des musiciens remains an important source of information today.
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Andrés Segovia
1893 - 1987 (94 years)
Andrés Segovia Torres, 1st Marquis of Salobreña was a Spanish virtuoso classical guitarist. Many professional classical guitarists were either students of Segovia or students of Segovia's students. Segovia's contribution to the modern-romantic repertoire included not only commissions but also his own transcriptions of classical or baroque works. He is remembered for his expressive performances: his wide palette of tone, and his distinctive musical personality, phrasing and style.
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Marguerite Long
1874 - 1966 (92 years)
Marguerite Marie-Charlotte Long was a French pianist, pedagogue, lecturer, and an ambassador of French music. Life Early life: 1874–1900 Marguerite Long was born to Pierre Long and Anne Marie Antoinette on November 13, 1874, in Nîmes, an old Roman town in the south of France. Long's parents were not musicians, but her mother highly emphasized the importance of music and "little Marguerite was not allowed to play wrong notes." Her sister, Claire Long, eight years older, was actually the person who influenced her in the pursuit of music. In 1883, at age seventeen, Claire was appointed Professo...
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Kenny Clarke
1914 - 1985 (71 years)
Kenneth Clarke Spearman , nicknamed Klook, was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. A major innovator of the bebop style of drumming, he pioneered the use of the ride cymbal to keep time rather than the hi-hat, along with the use of the bass drum for irregular accents .
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Nacio Herb Brown
1896 - 1964 (68 years)
Ignacio Herbert "Nacio Herb" Brown was an American writer of popular songs, movie scores and Broadway theatre music in the 1920s through the early 1950s. Amongst his most enduring work is the score for the 1952 musical film Singin' in the Rain.
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Aram Khachaturian
1903 - 1978 (75 years)
Aram Ilyich Khachaturian was a Soviet Armenian composer and conductor. He is considered one of the leading Soviet composers. Born and raised in Tbilisi, the multicultural capital of Georgia, Khachaturian moved to Moscow in 1921 following the Sovietization of the Caucasus. Without prior music training, he enrolled in the Gnessin Musical Institute, subsequently studying at the Moscow Conservatory in the class of Nikolai Myaskovsky, among others. His first major work, the Piano Concerto , popularized his name within and outside the Soviet Union. It was followed by the Violin Concerto and the Cello Concerto .
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Hugo Wolf
1860 - 1903 (43 years)
Hugo Philipp Jacob Wolf was an Austrian composer of Slovene origin, particularly noted for his art songs, or Lieder. He brought to this form a concentrated expressive intensity which was unique in late Romantic music, somewhat related to that of the Second Viennese School in concision but diverging greatly in technique.
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Dziga Vertov
1895 - 1954 (59 years)
Dziga Vertov was a Soviet pioneer documentary film and newsreel director, as well as a cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary movie-making and the Dziga Vertov Group, a radical film-making cooperative which was active from 1968 to 1972. He was a member of the Kinoks collective, with Elizaveta Svilova and Mikhail Kaufman.
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Kenji Mizoguchi
1898 - 1956 (58 years)
Kenji Mizoguchi was a Japanese filmmaker who directed roughly one hundred films during his career between 1923 and 1956. His most acclaimed works include The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums , The Life of Oharu , Ugetsu , and Sansho the Bailiff , with the latter three all being awarded at the Venice International Film Festival. A recurring theme of his films was the oppression of women in historical and contemporary Japan. Together with Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu, Mizoguchi is seen as a representative of the "golden age" of Japanese cinema.
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Coleman Hawkins
1904 - 1969 (65 years)
Coleman Randolph Hawkins , nicknamed "Hawk" and sometimes "Bean", was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. One of the first prominent jazz musicians on his instrument, as Joachim E. Berendt explained: "there were some tenor players before him, but the instrument was not an acknowledged jazz horn". Hawkins biographer John Chilton described the prevalent styles of tenor saxophone solos prior to Hawkins as "mooing" and "rubbery belches". Hawkins denied being first and noted his contemporaries Happy Caldwell, Stump Evans, and Prince Robinson, although he was the first to tailor his method of improvisation to the saxophone rather than imitate the techniques of the clarinet.
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Jean Harlow
1911 - 1937 (26 years)
Jean Harlow was an American actress. Known for her portrayal of "bad girl" characters, she was the leading sex symbol of the early 1930s and one of the defining figures of the pre-Code era of American cinema. Often nicknamed the "Blonde Bombshell" and the "Platinum Blonde", Harlow was popular for her "Laughing Vamp" screen persona. Harlow was in the film industry for only nine years, but she became one of Hollywood's biggest movie stars, whose image in the public eye has endured. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Harlow number 22 on its greatest female screen legends of classical Ho...
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Fats Waller
1904 - 1943 (39 years)
Thomas Wright "Fats" Waller was an American jazz pianist, organist, composer, and singer. His innovations in the Harlem stride style laid much of the basis for modern jazz piano. His best-known compositions, "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Honeysuckle Rose", were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1984 and 1999. Waller copyrighted over 400 songs, many of them co-written with his closest collaborator, Andy Razaf. Razaf described his partner as "the soul of melody... a man who made the piano sing... both big in body and in mind... known for his generosity... a bubbling bundle of joy". It is like...
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Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas
1632 - 1698 (66 years)
Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas y Ulloa was a Spanish cleric and bishop, notable as bishop of Michoacán and archbishop of Mexico. Life The son of Alonso Vázquez de Seixas y Lobera, regidor perpetuo of the city of Betanzos, and his wife Mariana de Ulloa, he initially studied at the Latin cathedral in Betanzos. On his father's death, he came under the protection of Fernando de Andrade, archbishop of Santiago, serving him as a page. He studied at the university of Santiago de Compostela and became its rector between 1668 and 1674. He was a magistral canon of the cathedral of Astorga. On 8 March 166...
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Raymond Bernard
1891 - 1977 (86 years)
Raymond Bernard was a French film director and screenwriter whose career spanned more than 40 years. He is best remembered for several large-scale historical productions, including the silent films Le Miracle des loups and Le Joueur d'échecs and in the 1930s Les Croix de bois and a highly regarded adaptation of Les Misérables.
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W. C. Fields
1880 - 1946 (66 years)
William Claude Dukenfield , better known as W. C. Fields, was an American actor, comedian, juggler, and writer. Fields's comic persona was a comedically crude and hard-drinking egotist who remained a sympathetic character despite his supposed contempt for children and dogs.
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John George Robertson
1867 - 1933 (66 years)
John George Robertson, FBA was a philologist and professor of German language and literature. Biography Robertson graduated with M.A. and B.Sc. from the University of Glasgow and then Ph.D. from Leipzig University. From 1896 to 1903 he was a lecturer in English at the University of Strassburg. At the University of London, he became in 1903 Professor of German Language and Literature and in 1924 Director of the Department of Scandinavian Studies. He was the founding editor-in-chief of the Modern Language Review. He wrote several books dealing with the literature of Germany and about a dozen articles for the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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Frederick Loewe
1901 - 1988 (87 years)
Frederick Loewe was an American composer. He collaborated with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner on a series of Broadway musicals, including Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady, and Camelot, all of which were made into films, as well as the original film musical Gigi , which was first transferred to the stage in 1973.
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Ezequiel Uricoechea
1834 - 1880 (46 years)
Ezequiel Uricoechea Rodríguez was a Colombian linguist and scientist. He is considered one of the first Colombian scientists and a pioneer in Spanish-language linguistics. Biography Uricoechea was born in Santa Fe de Bogotá in what was then the Republic of New Granada, his family being of Basque origin. His father was José María de Uricoechea y Zornoza, and his mother Mariana Rodríguez Moreno. He had a brother, Sabas María, and a sister; Filomena. He graduated from Yale Medical School in 1852. In 1853 he became Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Göttingen, after which he went to Brussels where he assisted Adolphe Quetelet at the Royal Observatory of Belgium.
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Niccolò Giani
1909 - 1941 (32 years)
Niccolò Giani was an Italian Fascist philosopher and journalist who was the founder of Fascist mysticism. Biography After attending the "Dante Alighieri" High School in Trieste he moved to Milan, where in 1928 he enrolled in the Faculty of Law, graduating in 1931. While at the University of Milan he also joined the Fascist University Groups . On 4 April 1930 Giani announced the imminent founding of the School of Fascist Mysticism, which he opened in Milan a few weeks later along with Arnaldo Mussolini. In 1931 Giani became director of the school, a post he left at the end of the following yea...
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Otto Stoll
1849 - 1922 (73 years)
Otto Stoll was a Swiss linguist and ethnologist. Otto Stoll was a professor of ethnology and geography at the University of Zurich who specialized in research of Mayan languages. From 1878 to 1883 he conducted scientific studies in Guatemala. He was the author of several treatises on Guatemala, including important works in the fields on ethnography and ethno-linguistics. Stoll also published on neotropical Acari with a major work being the volume in the Biologia Centrali-Americana between Dec. 1886 and Jan. 1893.
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Gottfried Sellius
1704 - 1767 (63 years)
Gottfried Sellius was a German academic and translator. He is known for his work on Teredo navalis. and to be one of the three original initiators of an encyclopedia project, which subsequently turned into the Encyclopédie.
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Gregorio Mayans
1699 - 1781 (82 years)
Gregorio Mayans y Siscar was a Spanish historian, linguist and writer of the Enlightenment in Spain. Early life Gregorio Mayans was born on 9 May 1699 in Oliva, Valencia, Spain. His father, Pasqual Maians, fought on the Austrian side in the War of the Spanish Succession and accompanied archduke Charles VI to Barcelona in 1706; this resulted in the later marginalization of Gregorio Mayans, who lived in Spain when it was dominated by the House of Bourbon. Until 1713, when he returned to Oliva, Mayans studied with the Jesuits of Cordelles, but his grandfather, a mayor named Juan Siscar, encouraged him in the study of law.
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Wolcott Gibbs
1902 - 1958 (56 years)
Wolcott Gibbs was an American editor, humorist, theatre critic, playwright and writer of short stories, who worked for The New Yorker magazine from 1927 until his death. He is notable for his 1936 parody of Time magazine, which skewered the magazine's inverted narrative structure. Gibbs wrote, "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind"; he concluded the piece, "Where it all will end, knows God!" He also wrote a comedy, Season in the Sun, which ran on Broadway for 10 months in 1950–51 and was based on a series of stories that originally appeared in The New Yorker.
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Clifford Odets
1906 - 1963 (57 years)
Clifford Odets was an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor. In the mid-1930s, he was widely seen as the potential successor to Nobel Prize–winning playwright Eugene O'Neill, as O'Neill began to withdraw from Broadway's commercial pressures and increasing critical backlash. From January 1935, Odets's socially relevant dramas were extremely influential, particularly for the remainder of the Great Depression. His works inspired the next several generations of playwrights, including Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayefsky, Neil Simon, and David Mamet. After the production of his play Clash by Nigh...
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Malcolm Sargent
1895 - 1967 (72 years)
Sir Harold Malcolm Watts Sargent was an English conductor, organist and composer widely regarded as Britain's leading conductor of choral works. The musical ensembles with which he was associated included the Ballets Russes, the Huddersfield Choral Society, the Royal Choral Society, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and the London Philharmonic, Hallé, Liverpool Philharmonic, BBC Symphony and Royal Philharmonic orchestras. Sargent was held in high esteem by choirs and instrumental soloists, but because of his high standards and a statement that he made in a 1936 interview disputing musicians' rights to tenure, his relationship with orchestral players was often uneasy.
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John Harington Gubbins
1852 - 1929 (77 years)
John Harington Gubbins was a British linguist, consular official and diplomat. He was the father of Sir Colin McVean Gubbins. Education Gubbins attended Harrow School and would have gone on to Cambridge University, had family finances allowed.
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