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,
#13351
John Scofield
1951 - Present (75 years)
John Scofield is an American guitarist and composer whose music over a long career has blended jazz, jazz fusion, funk, blues, soul and rock. He first came to mainstream attention in the band of Miles Davis, and has toured and recorded with many prominent jazz artists, including saxophonists Eddie Harris, Dave Liebman, Joe Henderson and Joe Lovano; keyboardists George Duke, Joey DeFrancesco, Herbie Hancock, Larry Goldings and Robert Glasper; fellow guitarists Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie, Pat Martino and Bill Frisell; bassists Marc Johnson and Jaco Pastorius; and drummers Billy Cobham and Dennis Chambers.
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Gordon Jenkins
1910 - 1984 (74 years)
Gordon Hill Jenkins was an American arranger, composer, and pianist who was influential in popular music in the 1940s and 1950s. Jenkins worked with The Andrews Sisters, Johnny Cash, The Weavers, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Harry Nilsson, Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald.
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Walter Gieseking
1895 - 1956 (61 years)
Walter Wilhelm Gieseking was a French-born German pianist and composer. Gieseking was renowned for his subtle touch, pedaling, and dynamic control—particularly in the music of Debussy and Ravel; he made integral recordings of all their published works which were extant during his life. He also recorded most of Mozart's solo piano works.
Go to Profile#13354
Lawrence Tibbett
1896 - 1960 (64 years)
Lawrence Mervil Tibbett was an American opera singer and recording artist who also performed as a film actor and radio personality. A baritone, he sang leading roles with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City more than 600 times from 1923 to 1950. He performed diverse musical theatre roles, including Captain Hook in Peter Pan in a touring show.
Go to Profile#13355
Leslie Cole
1910 - 1976 (66 years)
Leslie James Cole was a British artist and teacher. He served as a war artist from 1942 to 1946 during which time he recorded events in several theatres of war and also the aftermath of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
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Stuart Sutcliffe
1940 - 1962 (22 years)
Stuart Fergusson Victor Sutcliffe was a British painter and musician best known as the original bass guitarist of the Beatles. Sutcliffe left the band to pursue his career as a painter, having previously attended the Liverpool College of Art. Sutcliffe and John Lennon are credited with inventing the name "Beetles" , as they both liked Buddy Holly's band, the Crickets. They also had a fascination of group names with double meanings , so Lennon then came up with "The Beatles", from the word beat . As a member of the group when it was a five-piece band, Sutcliffe is one of several people sometim...
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Helena Modjeska
1840 - 1909 (69 years)
Helena Modrzejewska , known professionally as Helena Modjeska, was a Polish actress who specialized in Shakespearean and tragic roles. She was successful first on the Polish stage. After emigrating to the United States , she also succeeded on stage in America and London. She is regarded as the greatest actress in the history of theatre in Poland.
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Sidney Lanier
1842 - 1881 (39 years)
Sidney Clopton Lanier was an American musician, poet and author. He served in the Confederate States Army as a private, worked on a blockade-running ship for which he was imprisoned , taught, worked at a hotel where he gave musical performances, was a church organist, and worked as a lawyer. As a poet he sometimes used dialects. Many of his poems are written in heightened, but often archaic, American English. He became a flautist and sold poems to publications. He eventually became a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and is known for his adaptation of musical meter to poetry.
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Dimitri Mitropoulos
1896 - 1960 (64 years)
Dimitri Mitropoulos was a Greek and American conductor, pianist, and composer. Life and career Mitropoulos was born in Athens, the son of Yannis and Angelikē Mitropoulos. His father owned a leather goods shop in downtown Athens. He was musically precocious, demonstrating his abilities at an early age. From the ages of eleven to fourteen, when Mitropoulos was in secondary school, he would host and preside over informal musical gatherings at his house every Saturday afternoon. His earliest acknowledged composition – a sonata for violin and piano, now lost – dates from this period. His opera S...
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William Grant Still
1895 - 1978 (83 years)
William Grant Still Jr. was an American composer of nearly two hundred works, including five symphonies, four ballets, nine operas, over thirty choral works, art songs, chamber music, and solo works. Born in Mississippi and growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, Still attended Wilberforce University and Oberlin Conservatory of Music as a student of George Whitefield Chadwick and then Edgard Varèse. Because of his close association and collaboration with prominent African-American literary and cultural figures, Still is considered to be part of the Harlem Renaissance.
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Albert Bachmann
1863 - 1934 (71 years)
Johann Albert Bachmann was a Swiss lexicographer and dialectologist, professor for Germanic philology at Zürich University from 1896. From 1892 he was an editor of the Schweizerisches Idiotikon dictionary, acting as editor-in-chief from 1896 until his death. Bachmann specialized on Swiss German dialects. He edited the series Beiträge zur Schweizerdeutschen Grammatik and founded, together with Louis Gauchat, the Phonographic Archive of Zurich University in 1913.
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Paul Chambers
1935 - 1969 (34 years)
Paul Laurence Dunbar Chambers Jr. was an American jazz double bassist. A fixture of rhythm sections during the 1950s and 1960s, he has become one of the most widely-known jazz bassists of the hard bop era. He was also known for his bowed solos. Chambers recorded about a dozen albums as a leader or co-leader, and over 100 more as a sideman, especially as the anchor of trumpeter Miles Davis's "first great quintet" and with pianist Wynton Kelly .
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Mark Noble
1754 - 1827 (73 years)
Mark Noble was an English clergyman, biographer and antiquary. Life He was born in Digbeth, Birmingham, the third surviving son of William Heatley Noble, a merchant there. His father sold, among many other commodities, beads, knives, toys, and other trifles which he distributed wholesale among slave traders, and he had also a large mill for rolling silver and for plating purposes. Mark was educated at schools at Yardley, Worcestershire, and Ashbourne, Derbyshire. On the death of his father he inherited a modest fortune, and was articled to Mr. Barber, a solicitor of Birmingham. On the expira...
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Robert Stolz
1880 - 1975 (95 years)
Robert Elisabeth Stolz was an Austrian songwriter and conductor as well as a composer of operettas and film music. Biography Stolz was born of musical parents in Graz. His father was conductor and composer Jakob Stolz, his mother was concert pianist Ida Bondy, and he was the great-nephew of the soprano Teresa Stolz. At the age of seven, he toured Europe as a pianist, playing Mozart. He studied at the Vienna Conservatory with Robert Fuchs and Engelbert Humperdinck. From 1899 he held successive conducting posts at Maribor , Salzburg and Brno before succeeding Artur Bodanzky at the Theater an der Wien in 1907.
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Ferdinand Hérold
1791 - 1833 (42 years)
Louis Joseph Ferdinand Herold , better known as Ferdinand Hérold , was a French composer. He was celebrated in his lifetime for his operas, of which he composed more than twenty, but he also wrote ballet music, works for piano and choral pieces. He is best known today for the ballet La Fille mal gardée and the overture to the opera Zampa.
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Charles Coburn
1877 - 1961 (84 years)
Charles Douville Coburn was an American actor and theatrical producer. He was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award three times – in The Devil and Miss Jones , The More the Merrier , and The Green Years – winning for his performance in The More the Merrier. He was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 for his contribution to the film industry.
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Amy Beach
1867 - 1944 (77 years)
Amy Marcy Cheney Beach was an American composer and pianist. She was the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music. Her "Gaelic" Symphony, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1896, was the first symphony composed and published by an American woman. She was one of the first American composers to succeed without the benefit of European training, and one of the most respected and acclaimed American composers of her era. As a pianist, she was acclaimed for concerts she gave featuring her own music in the United States and in Germany.
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Fanny Kemble
1809 - 1893 (84 years)
Frances Anne "Fanny" Kemble was a British actress from a theatre family in the early and mid-19th century. She was a well-known and popular writer and abolitionist whose published works included plays, poetry, eleven volumes of memoirs, travel writing, and works about the theatre.
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Wang Wei
699 - 759 (60 years)
Wang Wei was a Chinese musician, painter, poet, and politician of the middle Tang dynasty. He is regarded as one of the most famous men of arts and letters of his era. Many of his poems survive and 29 of them are included in the 18th-century anthology Three Hundred Tang Poems. Many of his best poems were inspired by the local landscape.
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Ignaz Pleyel
1757 - 1831 (74 years)
Ignace Joseph Pleyel was an Austrian composer, music publisher and piano builder of the Classical period. Life Early years He was born in in Lower Austria, the son of a schoolmaster named Martin Pleyl. Despite the fact that some sources claim that he had 37 siblings, he was the eighth and last child of his father's first marriage to Anna Theresia née Forster and he had eight more half siblings from his father's second marriage to Maria Anna née Placho. While still young, he probably studied with Johann Baptist Wanhal, and from 1772 he became the pupil of Joseph Haydn in Eisenstadt. As with...
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Giovanni Martinelli
1885 - 1969 (84 years)
Giovanni Martinelli was an Italian operatic spinto tenor. He was associated with the Italian lyric-dramatic repertory, although he performed French operatic roles to great acclaim as well. Martinelli was one of the most famous tenors of the 20th century, enjoying a long career at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City and appearing at other major international theatres.
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Jean Gabin
1904 - 1976 (72 years)
Jean Gabin was a French actor and singer. Considered a key figure in French cinema, he starred in several classic films including Pépé le Moko , La grande illusion , Le Quai des brumes , La bête humaine , Le jour se lève , and Le plaisir . During his career he twice won both the Silver Bear for Best Actor from the Berlin International Film Festival and the Volpi Cup for Best Actor from the Venice Film Festival respectively. Gabin was made a member of the Légion d'honneur in recognition of the important role he played in French cinema.
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Werner Krauss
1884 - 1959 (75 years)
Werner Johannes Krauss was a German stage and film actor. Krauss dominated the German stage of the early 20th century. However, his participation in the antisemitic propaganda film Jud Süß and his collaboration with the Nazis made him a controversial figure.
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Lucjan Malinowski
1839 - 1898 (59 years)
Lucjan Feliks Malinowski was a Polish linguist, a researcher of regional dialects of Silesia, a traveller, a professor of Jagiellonian University, from the 1887 principal Seminar Slavic languages. Malinowski studied the history of the Polish language and etymology. He was the father of anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski.
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Clarence Williams
1893 - 1965 (72 years)
Clarence Williams was an American jazz pianist, composer, promoter, vocalist, theatrical producer, and publisher. Biography Williams was born in Plaquemine, Louisiana, to Dennis, a bassist, and Sally Williams, and ran away from home at age 12 to join Billy Kersands' Traveling Minstrel Show, then moved to New Orleans. At first, Williams worked shining shoes and doing odd jobs, but soon became known as a singer and master of ceremonies. By the early 1910s, he was a well-regarded local entertainer also playing piano, and was composing new tunes by 1913. Williams was a good businessman and worked...
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Carl Friedrich Zelter
1758 - 1832 (74 years)
Carl Friedrich Zelter was a German composer, conductor and teacher of music. Working in his father's bricklaying business, Zelter attained mastership in that profession, and was a musical autodidact.
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Ernest Tubb
1914 - 1984 (70 years)
Ernest Dale Tubb , nicknamed the Texas Troubadour, was an American singer and songwriter and one of the pioneers of country music. His biggest career hit song, "Walking the Floor Over You" , marked the rise of the honky tonk style of music.
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Gregor Piatigorsky
1903 - 1976 (73 years)
Gregor Piatigorsky was a Russian Empire-born American cellist. Biography Early life Gregor Piatigorsky was born in Ekaterinoslav into a Jewish family. As a child, he was taught violin and piano by his father. After seeing and hearing the cello, he was determined to become a cellist and was given his first cello when he was seven.
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Miles Malleson
1888 - 1969 (81 years)
William Miles Malleson was an English actor and dramatist, particularly remembered for his appearances in British comedy films of the 1930s to 1960s. Towards the end of his career he also appeared in cameo roles in several Hammer horror films, with a fairly large role in The Brides of Dracula as the hypochondriac and fee-hungry local doctor. Malleson was also a writer on many films, including some of those in which he had small parts, such as Nell Gwyn and The Thief of Bagdad . He also translated and adapted several of Molière's plays .
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Leo Robin
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Leo Robin was an American composer, lyricist and songwriter. He is probably best known for collaborating with Ralph Rainger on the 1938 Oscar-winning song "Thanks for the Memory," sung by Bob Hope and Shirley Ross in the film The Big Broadcast of 1938, and with Jule Styne on "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," a song whose witty, Cole Porter style of lyric came to be identified with its famous interpreter Marilyn Monroe.
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Ernst Buschor
1886 - 1961 (75 years)
Ernst Buschor was a German archaeologist and translator. Biography From 1905 he studied at the University of Munich as a pupil of classical archaeologist Adolf Furtwängler, earning his doctorate in 1912. After serving as a soldier in the Balkans during World War I, he became an associate professor of classical archaeology at the University of Erlangen. In 1920 he became a full professor at the University of Freiburg. From 1921 to 1929, he was director of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens. From 1929 to 1959, he served as a professor of classical archaeology at Munich.
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Claude Dauphin
1903 - 1978 (75 years)
Claude Dauphin was a French actor. He appeared in more than 130 films between 1930 and 1978, including Barbarella, The Quiet American, and a voice role in The Tale of the Fox, considered to be one of the earliest stop-motion animated films.
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Lauritz Melchior
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
Lauritz Melchior was a Danish-American opera singer. He was the preeminent Wagnerian heldentenor of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s and has come to be considered the quintessence of his voice type. Late in his career, Melchior appeared in movie musicals and on radio and television. He also made numerous recordings.
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Maurice Evans
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Maurice Herbert Evans was an English actor, noted for his interpretations of Shakespearean characters. His best-known screen roles include Dr. Zaius in the 1968 film Planet of the Apes and Samantha Stephens's father, Maurice, on Bewitched.
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Epiphanius Slavinetsky
1700 - 1675 (-25 years)
Epifany Slavinetsky was an ecclesiastical expert of the Russian Orthodox Church who helped Patriarch Nikon to revise ancient service-books. His actions precipitated the raskol, the great schism of the national church.
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Eduardo De Filippo
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Eduardo De Filippo , also known simply as Eduardo, was an Italian actor, director, screenwriter and playwright, best known for his Neapolitan works Filumena Marturano and Napoli Milionaria. Considered one of the most important Italian artists of the 20th century, De Filippo was the author of many theatrical dramas staged and directed by himself first and later awarded and played outside Italy. For his artistic merits and contributions to Italian culture, he was named senatore a vita by the President of the Italian Republic Sandro Pertini.
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Eugénie Henderson
1914 - 1989 (75 years)
Eugénie Jane Andrina Henderson was a British linguist and academic, specialising in phonetics. From 1964 to 1982, she was Professor of Phonetics at the University of London. She served as Chair of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain from 1977 to 1980, and President of the Philological Society from 1984 to 1988.
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Harry B. Smith
1860 - 1936 (76 years)
Harry Bache Smith was a writer, lyricist and composer. The most prolific of all American stage writers, he is said to have written over 300 librettos and more than 6000 lyrics. Some of his best-known works were librettos for the composers Victor Herbert and Reginald De Koven. He also wrote the book or lyrics for several versions of the Ziegfeld Follies.
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Claude Thornhill
1909 - 1965 (56 years)
Claude Thornhill was an American pianist, arranger, composer, and bandleader. He composed the jazz and pop standards "Snowfall" and "I Wish I Had You". Early years Thornhill was the son of J. Chester Thornhill and his wife, Maude. When he was 11 years old, he played piano professionally. While still a youth, he played with two local combos. As a student at Garfield High School in Terre Haute, he played with several theater bands. Thornhill studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
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Arthur John Butler
1844 - 1910 (66 years)
Arthur John Butler , was an English scholar, editor, and mountaineer, professor of Italian language and literature at University College London. Apart from his work on Dante and other Italian poets, Butler translated books from German and French, including the memoirs of Bismarck, Thiébault, and Marbot, and work by Sainte-Beuve. He also contributed to the Cambridge Modern History and the Dictionary of National Biography and in the 1890s was editor of the Alpine Journal.
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Charles Julius Hempel
1811 - 1879 (68 years)
Charles Julius Hempel was a German-born translator and homeopathic physician who worked in the United States. Biography After completing his collegiate course at Solingen, he attended lectures at the Université de France and Collège de France, in Paris, and financed his schooling by translating. At the Université de France, he assisted Jules Michelet, who succeeded François Guizot as professor of history, in the publication of his Histoire de la France .
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Art Tatum
1909 - 1956 (47 years)
Arthur Tatum Jr. was an American jazz pianist who is widely regarded as one of the greatest ever. From early in his career, fellow musicians acclaimed Tatum's technical ability as extraordinary. Tatum also extended jazz piano's vocabulary and boundaries far beyond his initial stride influences, and established new ground through innovative use of reharmonization, voicing, and bitonality.
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Gian Francesco Malipiero
1882 - 1973 (91 years)
Gian Francesco Malipiero was an Italian composer, musicologist, music teacher and editor. Life Early years Born in Venice into an aristocratic family, the grandson of the opera composer Francesco Malipiero, Gian Francesco Malipiero was prevented by family troubles from pursuing his musical education in a consistent manner. His father separated from his mother in 1893 and took Gian Francesco to Trieste, Berlin and eventually to Vienna. The young Malipiero and his father broke up their relationship bitterly, and in 1899 Malipiero returned to his mother's home in Venice, where he entered the Ve...
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George Schick
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
George Schick was a Czechoslovakian conductor, vocal coach, accompanist, and music educator. He served as accompanist for Richard Tauber on his 1946/7 tour of North, Central and South America, also for Elizabeth Schumann, including what proved to be some of her last recordings in New York in 1950. He is particularly remembered for his work as an opera conductor, notably serving on the conducting staffs of the Metropolitan Opera and the Prague State Opera. He spent the latter years of his career serving as the President of the Manhattan School of Music from 1969-1976.
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Jan Peerce
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Jan Peerce was an American operatic tenor. Peerce was an accomplished performer on the operatic and Broadway concert stages, in solo recitals, and as a recording artist. He is the father of film director Larry Peerce.
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Deems Taylor
1885 - 1966 (81 years)
Joseph Deems Taylor was an American music critic, composer, and promoter of classical music. Nat Benchley, co-editor of The Lost Algonquin Roundtable, referred to him as "the dean of American music." He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1934.
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Arthur Talmage Abernethy
1872 - 1956 (84 years)
Arthur Talmage Abernethy was a writer, theologian, and poet. He pastored several churches, contributed articles and poems to newspapers around the United States, and was named by Governor R. Gregg Cherry as the first North Carolina Poet Laureate in 1948.
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Hal Ashby
1929 - 1988 (59 years)
William Hal Ashby was an American film director and editor. His work exemplified the countercultural attitude of the era. He directed wide ranging films featuring iconic performances. He is associated with the New Hollywood wave of filmmaking with filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Mike Nichols, and Sidney Lumet.
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Anton Reicha
1770 - 1836 (66 years)
Anton Joseph Reicha was a Czech-born, Bavarian-educated, later naturalized French composer and music theorist. A contemporary and lifelong friend of Beethoven, he is now best remembered for his substantial early contributions to the wind quintet literature and his role as teacher of pupils including Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz and César Franck. He was also an accomplished theorist, and wrote several treatises on various aspects of composition. Some of his theoretical work dealt with experimental methods of composition, which he applied in a variety of works such as fugues and études for pia...
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Minnie Riperton
1947 - 1979 (32 years)
Minnie Julia Riperton Rudolph was an American soul singer best known for her 1975 single "Lovin' You", her five-octave vocal range and her use of the whistle register. Born in 1947, Riperton grew up in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side. As a child, she studied music, drama and dance at Chicago's Abraham Lincoln Center. In her teen years, she sang lead vocals for the Chicago-based girl group the Gems. Her early affiliation with the Chicago-based Chess Records afforded her the opportunity to sing backing vocals for various established artists such as Etta James, Fontella Bass, Ramsey Lewis, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters.
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