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.
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#13351
Theodor Capidan
1879 - 1953 (74 years)
Theodor Capidan was an Ottoman-born Romanian linguist. An ethnic Aromanian from the Macedonia region, he studied at Leipzig before teaching school at Thessaloniki. Following the creation of Greater Romania at the end of World War I, Capidan followed his friend Sextil Pușcariu to the Transylvanian capital Cluj, where he spent nearly two decades, the most productive part of his career. He then taught in Bucharest for a further ten years and was marginalized late in life under the nascent communist regime. Capidan's major contributions involve studies of the Aromanians and the Megleno-Romanians, as well as their respective languages.
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Maria Malibran
1808 - 1836 (28 years)
Maria Felicia Malibran was a Spanish singer who commonly sang both contralto and soprano parts, and was one of the best-known opera singers of the 19th century. Malibran was known for her stormy personality and dramatic intensity, becoming a legendary figure after her death in Manchester, England, at age 28. Contemporary accounts of her voice describe its range, power and flexibility as extraordinary.
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Johannes Friedrich
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Johannes Friedrich was a German hittitologist who published the Hethitisches Elementarbuch , and the Kurzgefasstes Hethitisches Wörterbuch . A translation of his book "Entzifferung Verschollener Schriften und Sprachen" was published by Philosophical Library New York 1957: a study of Ancient Orient languages, including Egyptian hieroglyphics, cuneiform writing, Hittite hieroglyphics and other scripts and languages of the Old world.
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Max Margolis
1866 - 1932 (66 years)
Max Leopold Margolis was a Lithuanian Jewish and American philologist. Son of Isaac Margolis; educated at the elementary school of his native town, the Leibniz gymnasium, Berlin, and Columbia University, New York City . In 1891 he was appointed to a fellowship in Semitic languages at Columbia University, and from 1892 to 1897 he was instructor, and later assistant professor, of Hebrew language and Biblical exegesis at the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati. In 1897 he became assistant professor of Semitic languages in the University of California; in 1898, associate professor; and from 1902 the head of the Semitic department.
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Clarence Brown
1890 - 1987 (97 years)
Clarence Leon Brown was an American film director. Early life Born in Clinton, Massachusetts, to Larkin Harry Brown, a cotton manufacturer, and Katherine Ann Brown , Brown moved to Tennessee when he was 11 years old. He attended Knoxville High School and the University of Tennessee, both in Knoxville, Tennessee, graduating from the university at the age of 19 with two degrees in engineering. An early fascination in automobiles led Brown to a job with the Stevens-Duryea Company, then to his own Brown Motor Car Company in Alabama. He later abandoned the car dealership after developing an interest in motion pictures around 1913.
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Franz Brendel
1811 - 1868 (57 years)
Karl Franz Brendel was a German music critic, journalist and musicologist born in Stolberg, the son of a successful mining engineer named Christian Friedrich Brendel. Biography He was a student at the University of Leipzig, University of Berlin, and University of Freiburg up until the year 1840. In 1846 he began teaching music history at the Leipzig Conservatory, and in 1852 he published a well-regarded general history of European music. Brendel also published a book on Franz Liszt.
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Sergio Corbucci
1927 - 1990 (63 years)
Sergio Corbucci was an Italian film director, screenwriter and producer. He directed both very violent Spaghetti Westerns and bloodless Bud Spencer and Terence Hill action comedies. He is the older brother of screenwriter and film director Bruno Corbucci.
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Mikołaj Rudnicki
1881 - 1978 (97 years)
Mikołaj Rudnicki - was a Polish linguist. He finished his studies in Kraków. In 1911 he became a docent in Indoeuropean linguistics. In 1919 he became a professor at Uniwersytet Poznański. From 1945 he was a member of the Polish Academy of Learning.
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A. L. Lloyd
1908 - 1982 (74 years)
Albert Lancaster Lloyd , usually known as A. L. Lloyd or Bert Lloyd, was an English folk singer and collector of folk songs, and as such was a key figure in the British folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. While Lloyd is most widely known for his work with British folk music, he had a keen interest in the music of Spain, Latin America, Southeastern Europe and Australia. He recorded at least six discs of Australian Bush ballads and folk music.
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John Gilbert
1897 - 1936 (39 years)
John Gilbert was an American actor, screenwriter and director. He rose to fame during the silent era and became a popular leading man known as "The Great Lover". His breakthrough came in 1925 with his starring roles in The Merry Widow and The Big Parade. At the height of his career, Gilbert rivaled Rudolph Valentino as a box office draw.
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Domenico Cimarosa
1749 - 1801 (52 years)
Domenico Cimarosa was an Italian composer of the Neapolitan School and of the Classical period. He wrote more than eighty operas, the best known of which is Il matrimonio segreto ; most of his operas are comedies. He also wrote instrumental works and church music.
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Antonio Caldara
1671 - 1736 (65 years)
Antonio Caldara was an Italian Baroque composer. Life Caldara was born in Venice , the son of a violinist. He became a chorister at St Mark's in Venice, where he learned several instruments, probably under the instruction of Giovanni Legrenzi. In 1699 he relocated to Mantua, where he became maestro di cappella to the inept Charles IV, Duke of Mantua, a pensionary of France with a French wife, who took the French side in the War of the Spanish Succession. Caldara removed from Mantua in 1707, after the French were expelled from Italy, then moved on to Barcelona as chamber composer to Charles III, the pretender to the Spanish throne and who kept a royal court at Barcelona.
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Abu Sulayman Sijistani
932 - 1000 (68 years)
Abu Sulayman Muhammad Sijistani, also called al-Mantiqi , named for his origins in Sijistan or Sistan province in present-day Eastern Iran and Southern Afghanistan, became the leading Persian Islamic humanist philosopher in Baghdad.
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Vincent Starrett
1886 - 1974 (88 years)
Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett , known as Vincent Starrett, was a Canadian-born American writer, newspaperman, and bibliophile. Biography Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett was born above his grandfather's bookshop in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His father moved the family to Chicago in 1889 where Starrett attended John Marshall High School.
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Samuel Clarke
1599 - 1683 (84 years)
Samuel Clarke was an English clergyman and significant Puritan biographer. Life He was born 10 October 1599 at Wolston, Warwickshire, the son of Hugh Clarke , who was vicar of Wolston for forty years. Clarke was educated by his father till he was thirteen; then at the free school in Coventry; and when seventeen was entered at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was ordained about 1622, and held charges at Knowle in Warwickshire, Thornton-le-Moors in Cheshire, and Shotwick on the estuary of the Dee. Here, 2 February 1626, he married Katherine, daughter of Valentine Overton, rector of Bedworth, Wa...
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Benjamin Godard
1849 - 1895 (46 years)
Benjamin Louis Paul Godard was a French violinist and Romantic-era composer of Jewish extraction, best known for his opera Jocelyn. Godard composed eight operas, five symphonies, two piano and two violin concertos, string quartets, sonatas for violin and piano, piano pieces and etudes, and more than a hundred songs. He died at the age of 45 in Cannes of tuberculosis and was buried in the family tomb in Taverny in the French department of Val-d'Oise.
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Engelbert Humperdinck
1854 - 1921 (67 years)
Engelbert Humperdinck was a German composer. He is known widely for his opera Hansel and Gretel . Biography Humperdinck was born at Siegburg in the Rhine Province in 1854. After receiving piano lessons, he produced his first composition at the age of seven. His first attempts at works for the stage were two singspiele written when he was 13. His parents disapproved of his plans for a career in music and encouraged him to study architecture.
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Thomas Morley
1559 - 1602 (43 years)
Thomas Morley was an English composer, theorist, singer and organist of the Renaissance. He was one of the foremost members of the English Madrigal School. Referring to the strong Italian influence on the English madrigal, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians states that Morley was "chiefly responsible for grafting the Italian shoot on to the native stock and initiating the curiously brief but brilliant flowering of the madrigal that constitutes one of the most colourful episodes in the history of English music."
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Thea von Harbou
1888 - 1954 (66 years)
Thea Gabriele von Harbou was a German screenwriter, novelist, film director, and actress. She is remembered as the screenwriter of the science fiction film classic Metropolis and for the 1925 novel on which it was based. von Harbou collaborated as a screenwriter with film director Fritz Lang, her husband, during the period of transition from silent to sound films.
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Yakov Protazanov
1881 - 1945 (64 years)
Yakov Alexandrovich Protazanov was a Russian and Soviet film director and screenwriter, and one of the founding fathers of cinema of Russia. He was an Honored Artist of the Russian SFSR and Uzbek SSR .
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Victor Saville
1895 - 1979 (84 years)
Victor Saville was an English film director, producer, and screenwriter. He directed 39 films between 1927 and 1954. He also produced 36 films between 1923 and 1962. Biography Saville produced his first film, Woman to Woman, with Michael Balcon in 1923, and on the back of its success produced pictures for the veteran director Maurice Elvey, including the classic British silent Hindle Wakes . His first picture as director was The Arcadians . In 1929 he and Balcon worked together again on a talkie remake of Woman to Woman for Balcon's company, Gainsborough Pictures. This time Saville directed i...
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Emmerich Kálmán
1882 - 1953 (71 years)
Emmerich Kálmán was a Hungarian composer of operettas and a prominent figure in the development of Viennese operetta in the 20th century. Among his most popular works are Die Csárdásfürstin and Gräfin Mariza . Influences on his compositional style include Hungarian folk music , the Viennese style of precursors such as Johann Strauss II and Franz Lehár, and, in his later works, American jazz. As a result of the Anschluss, Kálmán and his family fled to Paris and then to the United States. He eventually returned to Europe in 1949 and died in Paris in 1953.
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Michel Richard Delalande
1657 - 1726 (69 years)
Michel Richard Delalande [de Lalande] was a French Baroque composer and organist who was in the service of King Louis XIV. He was one of the most important composers of grands motets. He also wrote orchestral suites known as Simphonies pour les Soupers du Roy and ballets.
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Mitchell Leisen
1898 - 1972 (74 years)
James Mitchell Leisen was an American director, art director, and costume designer. Film career He entered the film industry in the 1920s, beginning in the art and costume departments. He directed his first film in 1933 with Cradle Song and became known for his keen sense of aesthetics in the glossy Hollywood melodramas and screwball comedies he turned out.
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Kenneth Adam
1908 - 1978 (70 years)
Kenneth Adam was an English journalist and broadcasting executive, who from 1957 until 1961 served as the Controller of the BBC Television Service. Early life and education He was born in Nottingham. After attending Nottingham High School, Adam read history at St John's College, Cambridge, and graduated with a first-class degree. While at St John's he was both President of the Union and President of the University Liberal Club. After graduating, he joined the staff of the Manchester Guardian newspaper as a journalist at the age of just twenty-two. While working for the Guardian he also began...
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Maude Adams
1872 - 1953 (81 years)
Maude Ewing Adams Kiskadden , known professionally as Maude Adams, was an American actress and stage designer who achieved her greatest success as the character Peter Pan, first playing the role in the 1905 Broadway production of Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. Adams' personality appealed to a large audience and helped her become the most successful and highest-paid performer of her day, with a yearly income of more than $1 million during her peak.
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Géza von Bolváry
1897 - 1961 (64 years)
Géza von Bolváry was a Hungarian actor, screenwriter, and film director, who worked principally in Germany and Austria. Biography Géza von Bolváry was born in Budapest. He attended the Imperial Military Academy in Budapest and subsequently served in the Hungarian army . After World War I he left military service with the rank of Royal Hungarian Rittmeister. He then earned his living in the new Hungarian film industry. He began his career in about 1920 as an actor in various silent films, but soon changed to the Star-Film company, where he was first active as a director and made his debut as d...
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Clara Butt
1872 - 1936 (64 years)
Dame Clara Ellen Butt was an English dramatic contralto and one of the most popular singers from the 1890s through to the 1920s. She had an exceptionally fine contralto voice and an agile singing technique, and impressed contemporary composers such as Saint-Saëns and Elgar; the latter composed his Sea Pictures, Op. 37 with her voice in mind.
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Simon Mayr
1763 - 1845 (82 years)
Johann Simon Mayr , also known in Italian as Giovanni Simone Mayr or Simone Mayr , was a German composer. His music reflects the transition from the Classical to the Romantic musical era. In 1805 he founded the Bergamo Conservatory. He was an early inspiration to Rossini and taught and advocated for Donizetti.
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Michael William Balfe
1808 - 1870 (62 years)
Michael William Balfe was an Irish composer, best remembered for his operas, especially The Bohemian Girl. After a short career as a violinist, Balfe pursued an operatic singing career, while he began to compose. In a career spanning more than 40 years, he composed at least 29 operas, almost 250 songs, several cantatas and other works. He was also a noted conductor, directing Italian Opera at Her Majesty's Theatre for seven years, among other conducting posts.
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Josiah Willard Gibbs Sr.
1790 - 1861 (71 years)
Josiah Willard Gibbs Sr. was an American linguist and theologian, who served as professor of sacred literature at Yale University. He is chiefly remembered today for his involvement in the Amistad case and as the father of theoretical physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs.
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Rudolf Friml
1879 - 1972 (93 years)
Charles Rudolf Friml was a Czech-born composer of operettas, musicals, songs and piano pieces, as well as a pianist. After musical training and a brief performing career in his native Prague, Friml moved to the United States, where he became a composer. His best-known works are Rose-Marie and The Vagabond King, each of which enjoyed success on Broadway and in London and were adapted for film.
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Leroy Anderson
1908 - 1975 (67 years)
Leroy Anderson was an American composer of short, light concert pieces, many of which were introduced by the Boston Pops Orchestra under the direction of Arthur Fiedler. John Williams described him as "one of the great American masters of light orchestral music."
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Oscar Straus
1870 - 1954 (84 years)
Oscar Nathan Straus was a Viennese composer of operettas, film scores, and songs. He also wrote about 500 cabaret songs, chamber music, and orchestral and choral works. His original name was actually Strauss, but for professional purposes he deliberately omitted the final 's'. He wished not to be associated with the musical Strauss family of Vienna. However, he did follow the advice of Johann Strauss II in 1898 about abandoning the prospective lure of writing waltzes for the more lucrative business of writing for the theatre.
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Adolphe Cohn
1851 - 1930 (79 years)
Adolphe Cohn was a Franco-American educator, born in Paris. He was graduated "bachelier ès lettres" from the University of Paris in 1868, and studied law, historical criticism, and philology at various institutions of higher learning in Paris, receiving the degrees of LL.B. in 1873. A pupil of the École des Chartes, his thesis was called Vues sur l’histoire de l’organisation judiciaire en France du IXe au XIIIe siècle considérée au point de vue des juridictions extraordinaires and he got the diploma of "archiviste paléographe" in 1874. At the commencement of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, h...
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Mikio Naruse
1905 - 1969 (64 years)
Mikio Naruse was a Japanese filmmaker who directed 89 films spanning the period 1930 to 1967. Naruse is known for imbuing his films with a bleak and pessimistic outlook. He made primarily shōshimin-eiga films with female protagonists, portrayed by actresses such as Hideko Takamine, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Setsuko Hara. Because of his focus on family drama and the intersection of traditional and modern Japanese culture, his films have been compared with the works of Yasujirō Ozu. Many of his films in his later career were adaptations of the works of acknowledged Japanese writers. Titled a "major fi...
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Kid Ory
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
Edward "Kid" Ory was an American jazz composer, trombonist and bandleader. One of the early users of the glissando technique, he helped establish it as a central element of New Orleans jazz. He was born near LaPlace, Louisiana and moved to New Orleans on his 21st birthday, to Los Angeles in 1910 and to Chicago in 1925. The Ory band later was an important force in reviving interest in New Orleans jazz, making radio broadcasts on The Orson Welles Almanac program in 1944, among other shows. In 1944–45, the group made a series of recordings for the Crescent label, which was founded by Nesuhi Erte...
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Pat O'Brien
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
William Joseph Patrick O'Brien was an American film actor with more than 100 screen credits. Of Irish descent, he often played Irish and Irish-American characters and was referred to as "Hollywood's Irishman in Residence" in the press. One of the best-known screen actors of the 1930s and 1940s, he played priests, cops, military figures, pilots, and reporters. He is especially well-remembered for his roles in Knute Rockne, All American , Angels with Dirty Faces , and Some Like It Hot . He was frequently paired onscreen with Hollywood star James Cagney. O'Brien also appeared on stage and televi...
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Nicola Porpora
1686 - 1768 (82 years)
Nicola Antonio Giacinto Porpora was an Italian composer and teacher of singing of the Baroque era, whose most famous singing students were the castrati Farinelli and Caffarelli. Other students included composers Johann Adolph Hasse, Matteo Capranica and Joseph Haydn.
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Robert Wiene
1873 - 1938 (65 years)
Robert Wiene was a German film director, screenwriter and producer, active during the silent era. He is widely-known for directing the landmark 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and a succession of other expressionist films. Wiene also directed a variety of other films of varying styles and genres. Following the Nazi rise to power in Germany, Wiene, who was of Jewish descent, fled into exile.
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Joseph Fuchs
1899 - 1997 (98 years)
Joseph Philip Fuchs was one of the most important American violinists and teachers of the 20th century, and the brother of Lillian Fuchs. Born in New York, he graduated in 1918 from the Institute of Musical Art in New York where he studied with Franz Kneisel. In 1926 he was appointed concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra, but resigned in 1940 to pursue a solo career. After a successful New York début in 1943, he became co-founder of the Musicians’ Guild, a chamber music organization which he directed there until 1956.
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Basil Dearden
1911 - 1971 (60 years)
Basil Dearden was an English film director. Early life and career Dearden was born at 5, Woodfield Road, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex to Charles James Dear, a steel manufacturer, and his wife, Florence Tripp.
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Fletcher Henderson
1897 - 1952 (55 years)
James Fletcher Hamilton Henderson was an American pianist, bandleader, arranger and composer, important in the development of big band jazz and swing music. He was one of the most prolific black musical arrangers and, along with Duke Ellington, is considered one of the most influential arrangers and bandleaders in jazz history. Henderson's influence was vast. He helped bridge the gap between the Dixieland and the swing eras. He was often known as "Smack" Henderson .
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Dinah Washington
1924 - 1963 (39 years)
Dinah Washington was an American singer and pianist, one of the most popular black female recording artists of the 1950s. Primarily a jazz vocalist, she performed and recorded in a wide variety of styles including blues, R&B, and traditional pop music, and gave herself the title of "Queen of the Blues". She was a 1986 inductee of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.
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Karl Sapper
1866 - 1945 (79 years)
Karl Theodor Sapper was a German traveler, explorer, and antiquarian who is known for his research into the natural history, and cultures of Central America. Education Sapper studied geology in Munich and showed a vivid interest in geography.
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John Randall
1715 - 1799 (84 years)
John Randall was an English organist and academic. Life John Randall was a chorister of the Chapel Royal under Bernard Gates. On 23 February 1732 at Gates's house, Randall acted and sang the part of Esther in a dramatic representation of Handel's oratorio Esther. In 1744 he graduated Mus. Bac. at Cambridge. In the following year he was appointed organist to King's College Chapel.
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Norma Talmadge
1894 - 1957 (63 years)
Norma Marie Talmadge was an American actress and film producer of the silent era. A major box-office draw for more than a decade, her career reached a peak in the early 1920s, when she ranked among the most popular idols of the American screen.
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Alf Torp
1853 - 1916 (63 years)
Alf Torp was a Norwegian philologist and author. He is most known for his work with Indo-European and Nordic language history and meaning of ancient languages. Biography Alf Torp was born in Stryn, Sogn og Fjordane, Norway. He became cand. philol. in 1877 at the Bergen Cathedral School. He was a student of Sophus Bugge, and during a stay in Leipzig in 1878-80 a student of Georg Curtius and Ernst Windisch. In 1881 he got his doctorate at the University of Leipzig with the dissertation Die Flexion des Pali in ihrem Verhältnis zum Sanskrit.
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Harry Partch
1901 - 1974 (73 years)
Harry Partch was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of unique musical instruments. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century composers in the West to work systematically with microtonal scales, alongside Lou Harrison. He built his own instruments in these tunings on which to play his compositions, and described the method behind his theory and practice in his book Genesis of a Music .
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Cannonball Adderley
1928 - 1975 (47 years)
Julian Edwin "Cannonball" Adderley was an American jazz alto saxophonist of the hard bop era of the 1950s and 1960s. Adderley is perhaps best remembered for the 1966 soul jazz single "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy", which was written for him by his keyboardist Joe Zawinul and became a major crossover hit on the pop and R&B charts. A cover version by the Buckinghams, who added lyrics, also reached No. 5 on the charts. Adderley worked with Miles Davis, first as a member of the Davis sextet, appearing on the seminal records Milestones and Kind of Blue , and then on his own 1958 album Somethin' Else. He w...
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