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
Victor Hely-Hutchinson
1901 - 1947 (46 years)
Christian Victor Noel Hope Hely-Hutchinson was a British composer, conductor, pianist and music administrator. He is best known for the Carol Symphony and for humorous song-settings. Early life Hely-Hutchinson was born in Cape Town, Cape Colony . His parents were Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson, Governor of Cape Colony from 1901 to 1910 during and after the Boer War, and May Hely-Hutchinson. He initially lived in Kent, then moved back to South Africa in 1907. He was taught the piano by Dr Thomas Barrow Dowling , the organist of Cape Town cathedral. Victor was a child prodigy, composing many pieces...
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Emanuel Feuermann
1902 - 1942 (40 years)
Emanuel Feuermann was an internationally celebrated cellist in the first half of the 20th century. Life Feuermann was born in 1902 in Kolomyja, Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire to Jewish parents. Both of his parents were amateur musicians. His father, who played the violin and cello, was his first teacher. His older brother Sigmund was also musically talented, and their little sister, Sophie was the piano prodigy in the family. Their father decided to move the family to Vienna in 1907 for Sigmund to start his professional career there. At the age of nine, Emanuel received lessons from Frie...
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Gerardus Johannes Geers
1891 - 1965 (74 years)
Gerardus Johannes Geers, , was a Dutch linguist and Hispanist. He wrote his thesis on the language of the Blackfoot Indians in North America but spent his career studying the Spanish language and Spanish culture.
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Johannes Voldemar Veski
1873 - 1968 (95 years)
Johannes Voldemar Veski was an Estonian linguist. From 1896 until 1899, he studied at the University of Tartu; at the beginning he studied religion and thereafter nature sciences. From 1920 until 1938, he taught at the University of Tartu.
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Tibor Ney
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
Tibor Ney was a Hungarian violinist and music teacher. Tibor Ney was the professor of violin at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, the concertmaster of the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and a founding member of the Hungarian String Trio.
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Camille Nickerson
1888 - 1982 (94 years)
Camille Lucie Nickerson was an American pianist, composer, arranger, collector, and Howard University professor from 1926 to 1962. She was influenced by Creole folksongs of Louisiana, which she arranged and sang.
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Ernst-Lothar von Knorr
1896 - 1973 (77 years)
Ernst-Lothar von Knorr was a German composer, music educator and civil servant. The years until 1933 Born in Eitorf, Knorr grew up in Bonn. His parents were the pharmacist Dr. chem. Karl Ferdinand von Knorr and Eugenie Sophie Merten. From 1902 he had his first violin lessons. In 1907 he was admitted to the Cologne Conservatory. After graduating from high school, conservatory examination and military service, he became a violin teacher at the Heidelberg Music Academy in 1919, and in 1920 he founded the Heidelberg Chamber Orchestra Association with P. Gies. On 6 October 1923 he married in Gummersbach Elise Siebel, a granddaughter of , the co-founder of the paper mill .
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Orlando Morgan
1865 - 1956 (91 years)
Robert Orlando Morgan was an English music teacher, composer and musicologist. He is best remembered as an influential teacher at the Guildhall School of Music in London, where he taught for 64 years, from 1887 to 1951, as Professor of Pianoforte and Composition. His pupils included the composer Benjamin Frankel and the pianist Dame Myra Hess.
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Hans Ehelolf
1881 - 1939 (58 years)
Hans Wilhelm Heinrich Ehelolf was a German Hittitologist. He was born in Hanover, Lower Saxony. He began his oriental studies in Marburg, focusing on Assyriology, Semitic linguistics, Indology, and Biblical exegesis. He wrote a PhD thesis entitled Ein Wortfolgeprinzip im Assyrisch-Babylonischen and received his degree on July 29, 1914. Ehelolf served in World War I and was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class and the Turkish Iron Crescent.
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Jean Haust
1868 - 1946 (78 years)
Jean Haust was a Belgian academic, linguist and philologist. He was a professor at the University of Liège en became known for his publication of several dictionaries containing the Walloon dialect of Liège.
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Albert Sechehaye
1870 - 1946 (76 years)
Albert Sechehaye was a Swiss linguist. He is known for editing Ferdinand de Saussure's lectures, Course in General Linguistics. Biography Sechehaye studied at the University of Geneva under Ferdinand de Saussure. From 1893 to 1902 he trained at Göttingen, where he wrote a thesis in German about the French imperfect subjunctive. After that, he taught in Geneva until his death, though not becoming a professor until 1939, when he succeeded his colleague Charles Bally. His wife Marguerite Sechehaye was a psychotherapist and a pioneer in the psychoanalytic treatment of schizophrenics.
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August Leskien
1840 - 1916 (76 years)
August Leskien was a German linguist active in the field of comparative linguistics, particularly relating to the Baltic and Slavic languages. Biography Leskien was born in Kiel. He studied philology at the universities of Kiel and Leipzig, receiving his doctorate from the latter in 1864. He taught Latin and Ancient Greek at the from 1864 to 1866. In 1866, he began studying comparative linguistics under August Schleicher at the University of Jena. He completed his habilitation in 1867 and went on to lecture at the University of Göttingen.
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Harrison Russell
1881 - 1968 (87 years)
Henry Harrison Russell was an American football, basketball and baseball coach. He was the eighth head football coach at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, serving from 1912 to 1922 and compiling a record of 15–43–10.
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Arthur Fickenscher
1871 - 1954 (83 years)
Arthur Fickenscher was an American composer and academic. The first head of the music department of the University of Virginia, he is credited with being an early 20th-century pioneer of microtonal music.
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Mikhail Raukhverger
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Mikhail Rafailovich Raukhverger was a Jewish–Soviet pianist and composer. Career Mikhail Raukhverger was born in Odessa. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory under Felix Blumenfeld in 1927 and in 1929–1941 taught there.
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Torsten Evert Karsten
1870 - 1942 (72 years)
Torsten Evert Karsten was a Finnish philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. Biography Torsten Evert Karsten was born in Orivesi, Grand Duchy of Finland, the son of Pastor Klas Edvin Karsten and Maria Augusta Emilia Cajanus. His family were Finland Swedes. He was the brother of philosopher Rafael Karsten.
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Hazel Harrison
1883 - 1969 (86 years)
Hazel Harrison was an American concert pianist. She was the first fully American-trained musician to appear with a European orchestra. Harrison was born in La Porte, Indiana, and spent most of her childhood home schooled; but she attended La Porte High School, and graduated. She began private piano training as a child of four or five years old with Richard Warren Pellow, an English organist at the First Presbyterian Church who taught music in the local public schools. In high school she began studies under German musician Victor Heinze, eventually commuting between La Porte and Chicago to continue lessons with him.
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Gordon Jacob
1895 - 1984 (89 years)
Gordon Percival Septimus Jacob CBE was an English composer and teacher. He was a professor at the Royal College of Music in London from 1924 until his retirement in 1966, and published four books and many articles about music. As a composer he was prolific: the list of his works totals more than 700, mostly compositions of his own, but a substantial minority of orchestrations and arrangements of other composers' works. Those whose music he orchestrated range from William Byrd to Edward Elgar to Noël Coward.
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Jac. van Ginneken
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Jacobus Joannes Antonius van Ginneken S.J. was a Dutch linguist, priest and Jesuit, professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen since its start in 1923. He taught Dutch Language and Dutch Literature, comparative linguistics of the Indo-european languages, and Sanskrit.
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Joseph Suder
1892 - 1980 (88 years)
Joseph Suder was a German composer. His opera Kleider machen Leute was composed 1926–34 but not performed until 1964. In 1952, Suder created the , which was passed down to his son, Alexander L. Suder.
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Marion Bauer
1882 - 1955 (73 years)
Marion Eugénie Bauer was an American composer, teacher, writer, and music critic. She played an active role in shaping American musical identity in the early half of the twentieth century. As a composer, Bauer wrote for piano, chamber ensembles, symphonic orchestra, solo voice, and vocal ensembles. She gained prominence as a teacher, serving on the faculty of Washington Square College of New York University, where she taught music history and composition from 1926 to 1951. In addition to her position at NYU, Bauer was affiliated with Juilliard as a guest lecturer from 1940 until her death in 1955.
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Isobel Baillie
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Dame Isobel Baillie, , née Isabella Douglas Baillie, was a Scottish soprano. She made a local success in Manchester, where she was brought up, and in 1923 made a successful London debut. Her career, encouraged by the conductor Sir Hamilton Harty, quickly developed, with breaks in the first years for vocal study in Milan. Baillie's career was almost wholly as a concert singer: she only once acted in an opera production on stage. She was associated above all with oratorio, becoming well known for her many performances in Handel's Messiah, Haydn's The Creation, Mendelssohn's Elijah and the chor...
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Heinz Tiessen
1887 - 1971 (84 years)
Richard Gustav Heinz Tiessen was a German composer. Biography Tiessen was born at Königsberg, where he studied with composer Erwin Kroll before moving to Berlin. There, he enrolled at Humboldt University and at the Stern'sches Konservatorium, where he studied composition and music theory. He worked as a music critic for Allgemeine Musikzeitung from 1911 to 1917 before becoming a theater Kapellmeister and composer for Volksbühne in 1918. From 1920 to 1922, he conducted the Akademische Orchester and between 1925 and 1945, he taught music theory and composition at the Berliner Musikhochschule. ...
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Angna Enters
1897 - 1989 (92 years)
Anita "Angna" Enters was an American dancer, mime, painter, writer, novelist and playwright. She studied at the Art Students League of New York and was a 1934 Guggenheim fellow. She wrote a novel and three autobiographies as well as the films Lost Angel and Tenth Avenue Angel .
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M. K. Joseph
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Michael Kennedy Joseph was a British-born New Zealand poet and novelist in several genres. He studied at Sacred Heart College, Auckland, and at Merton College, Oxford, from 1936 to 1939. During the Second World War he served with the Royal Artillery. His works range from I'll Soldier No More, A Pound of Saffron and A Soldier's Tale to the science fiction works The Hole in the Zero and The Time of Achamoth to a historical novel, Kaspar's Journey, based on the medieval Children's Crusade. The Hole in the Zero includes the first known use of the word "hoverboard".
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Saint Cecilia
180 - 230 (50 years)
Saint Cecilia , also spelled Cecelia, was a Roman virgin martyr and is venerated in Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and some Lutheran churches, such as the Church of Sweden. She became the patroness of music and musicians, it being written that, as the musicians played at her wedding, Cecilia "sang in her heart to the Lord". Musical compositions are dedicated to her, and her feast, on 22 November, is the occasion of concerts and musical festivals. She is also known as Cecilia of Rome.
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François Truffaut
1932 - 1984 (52 years)
François Roland Truffaut was a French filmmaker, actor, and critic. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. With a career of more than 25 years, he is an icon of the French film industry.
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Joseph Haydn
1732 - 1809 (77 years)
Franz Joseph Haydn was an Austrian composer of the Classical period. He was instrumental in the development of chamber music such as the string quartet and piano trio. His contributions to musical form have led him to be called "Father of the Symphony" and "Father of the String Quartet".
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Bernhard Karlgren
1889 - 1978 (89 years)
Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren was a Swedish sinologist and linguist who pioneered the study of Chinese historical phonology using modern comparative methods. In the early 20th century, Karlgren conducted large surveys of the varieties of Chinese and studied historical information on rhyming in ancient Chinese poetry, then used them to create the first ever complete reconstructionss of what are now called Middle Chinese and Old Chinese.
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William Cullen Bryant
1794 - 1878 (84 years)
William Cullen Bryant was an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post. Born in Massachusetts, he started his career as a lawyer but showed an interest in poetry early in his life. He soon relocated to New York and took up work as an editor at various newspapers. He became one of the most significant poets in early literary America and has been grouped among the fireside poets for his accessible, popular poetry.
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Eric Partridge
1894 - 1979 (85 years)
Eric Honeywood Partridge was a New Zealand–British lexicographer of the English language, particularly of its slang. His writing career was interrupted only by his service in the Army Education Corps and the RAF correspondence department during World War II.
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Aldus Manutius
1449 - 1515 (66 years)
Aldus Pius Manutius was an Italian printer and humanist who founded the Aldine Press. Manutius devoted the later part of his life to publishing and disseminating rare texts. His interest in and preservation of Greek manuscripts mark him as an innovative publisher of his age dedicated to the editions he produced. Aldus Manutius introduced the small portable book format with his enchiridia, which revolutionized personal reading and are the predecessor of the modern paperback book. He also helped to standardize use of punctuation including the comma and the semicolon.
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Alejo Carpentier
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Alejo Carpentier y Valmont was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, of French and Russian parentage, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba, and despite his European birthplace, he strongly identified as Cuban throughout his life. He traveled extensively, particularly in France, and to South America and Mexico, where he met prominent members of the Latin American cultural and artistic community. Carpentier took a keen interest in Latin American politics and often aligned himse...
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Priscian
500 - 600 (100 years)
Priscianus Caesariensis , commonly known as Priscian , was a Latin grammarian and the author of the Institutes of Grammar, which was the standard textbook for the study of Latin during the Middle Ages. It also provided the raw material for the field of speculative grammar.
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Georg Forster
1754 - 1794 (40 years)
Johann George Adam Forster, also known as Georg Forster , was a German geographer, naturalist, ethnologist, travel writer, journalist and revolutionary. At an early age, he accompanied his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, on several scientific expeditions, including James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific. His report of that journey, A Voyage Round the World, contributed significantly to the ethnology of the people of Polynesia and remains a respected work. As a result of the report, Forster, who was admitted to the Royal Society at the early age of twenty-two, came to be considered one of t...
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Ulrike Meinhof
1934 - 1976 (42 years)
Ulrike Marie Meinhof was a German left-wing journalist and founding member of the Red Army Faction in West Germany, commonly referred to in the press as the "Baader-Meinhof gang". She is the reputed author of The Urban Guerilla Concept . The manifesto acknowledges the RAF's "roots in the history of the student movement"; condemns "reformism" as "a brake on the anti-capitalist struggle"; and invokes Mao Zedong to define "armed struggle" as "the highest form of Marxism-Leninism".
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Jean-Paul Laurens
1838 - 1921 (83 years)
Jean-Paul Laurens was a French painter and sculptor, and one of the last major exponents of the French Academic style. Biography Laurens was born in Fourquevaux and was a pupil of Léon Cogniet and Alexandre Bida. Strongly anti-clerical and republican, his work was often on historical and religious themes, through which he sought to convey a message of opposition to monarchical and clerical oppression. His erudition and technical mastery were much admired in his time, but in later years his highly realistic technique, coupled to a theatrical mise-en-scène, came to be regarded by some art-historians as overly didactic.
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Isaac Babel
1894 - 1940 (46 years)
Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel was a Russian writer, journalist, playwright, and literary translator. He is best known as the author of Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, and has been acclaimed as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry." Babel was arrested by the NKVD on 15 May 1939 on fabricated charges of terrorism and espionage, and executed on 27 January 1940.
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Ilya Ehrenburg
1891 - 1967 (76 years)
Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg was a Soviet writer, revolutionary, journalist and historian. Ehrenburg was among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist – in particular, as a reporter in three wars . His incendiary articles calling for violence against Germans during the Great Patriotic War won him a huge following among front-line Soviet soldiers, but also caused much controversy due to their perceived anti-German sentiment. Ehrenburg later clarified that his writings wer...
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Jacques Doriot
1898 - 1945 (47 years)
Jacques Doriot was a French politician, initially communist, later fascist, before and during World War II. In 1936, after his exclusion from the Communist Party, he founded the French Popular Party and took over the newspaper La Liberté, which took a stand against the Popular Front.
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Franz Schubert
1797 - 1828 (31 years)
Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short life, Schubert left behind a vast oeuvre, including more than 600 secular vocal works , seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music, and a large body of piano and chamber music. His major works include the art songs Erlkönig, Gretchen am Spinnrade, Ave Maria; the Trout Quintet, the unfinished Symphony No. 8 in B minor, the "Great" Symphony No. 9 in C major, the String Quartet No. 14 "Death and the Maiden", a String Quintet, the two sets of Impromptus for solo ...
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Marina Abramović
1946 - Present (80 years)
Marina Abramović is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist. Her work explores body art, endurance art, the relationship between the performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Being active for over four decades, Abramović refers to herself as the "grandmother of performance art". She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body". In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute , a non-profit foundation for performance art.
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Sarah Bernhardt
1844 - 1923 (79 years)
Sarah Bernhardt was a French stage actress who starred in some of the more popular French plays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including by Alexandre Dumas fils, Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo, Fédora and La Tosca by Victorien Sardou, and L'Aiglon by Edmond Rostand. She also played male roles, including Shakespeare's Hamlet. Rostand called her "the queen of the pose and the princess of the gesture", and Hugo praised her "golden voice". She made several theatrical tours around the world, and she was one of the early prominent actresses to make sound recordings and to act in motion pictur...
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William Dwight Whitney
1827 - 1894 (67 years)
William Dwight Whitney was an American linguist, philologist, and lexicographer known for his work on Sanskrit grammar and Vedic philology as well as his influential view of language as a social institution. He was the first president of the American Philological Association and editor-in-chief of The Century Dictionary.
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Serge Lifar
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Serge Lifar was a Ukrainian dancer and choreographer, and one of the greatest male ballet dancers of the 20th century. Lifar was also a choreographer, director, writer, theoretician about dance, and collector.
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Bennett Cerf
1898 - 1971 (73 years)
Bennett Alfred Cerf was an American writer, publisher, and co-founder of the American publishing firm Random House. Cerf was also known for his own compilations of jokes and puns, for regular personal appearances lecturing across the United States, and for his weekly television appearances for over 17 years on the panel game show What's My Line?
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Jerome K. Jerome
1859 - 1927 (68 years)
Jerome Klapka Jerome was an English writer and humourist, best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat . Other works include the essay collections Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow and Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; Three Men on the Bummel, a sequel to Three Men in a Boat; and several other novels. Jerome was born in Walsall, England, and, although he was able to attend grammar school, his family suffered from poverty at times, as did he as a young man trying to earn a living in various occupations. In his twenties, he was able to publish some work, and success followed. He marr...
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John Wyndham
1903 - 1969 (66 years)
John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris was an English science fiction writer best known for his works published under the pen name John Wyndham, although he also used other combinations of his names, such as John Beynon and Lucas Parkes. Some of his works were set in post-apocalyptic landscapes. His best known works include The Day of the Triffids , filmed in 1962, and The Midwich Cuckoos , which was filmed in 1960 as Village of the Damned, in 1995 under the same title, and again in 2022 in Sky Max under its original title.
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Gustaf John Ramstedt
1873 - 1950 (77 years)
Gustaf John Ramstedt was a Finnish diplomat, orientalist and linguist. He was also an early Finnish Esperantist, and chairman of the Esperanto-Association of Finland. Biography Ramstedt was born in Ekenäs in Southern Finland, and was brother of , who was later a professor of Linguistics and Occidentalist, politician , and singer .
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Daniel Jones
1881 - 1967 (86 years)
Daniel Jones was a London-born British phonetician who studied under Paul Passy, professor of phonetics at the École des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne . He was head of the department of phonetics at University College London.
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