Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

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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,

#13501

John Wilkes

1725 - 1797 (72 years)

John Wilkes was an English radical journalist and politician, as well as a magistrate, essayist and soldier. He was first elected a Member of Parliament in 1757. In the Middlesex election dispute, he fought for the right of his voters—rather than the House of Commons—to determine their representatives. In 1768, angry protests of his supporters were suppressed in the Massacre of St George's Fields. In 1771, he was instrumental in obliging the government to concede the right of printers to publish verbatim accounts of parliamentary debates. In 1776, he introduced the first bill for parliamenta...

#13502

Pablo Casals

1876 - 1973 (97 years)

Pau Casals i Defilló , known in English by his Spanish name Pablo Casals, was a Spanish and Puerto Rican cellist, composer, and conductor. He made many recordings throughout his career of solo, chamber, and orchestral music, including some as conductor, but he is perhaps best remembered for the recordings he made of the Cello Suites by Bach. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy .

#13503

José Limón

1908 - 1972 (64 years)

José Arcadio Limón was a dancer and choreographer from Mexico and who developed what is now known as 'Limón technique'. In the 1940s, he founded the José Limón Dance Company , and in 1968 he created the José Limón Foundation to carry on his work.

#13504

Johan Hendrik Caspar Kern

Johan Hendrik Caspar Kern

1833 - 1917 (84 years)

Johan Hendrik Caspar Kern was a Dutch linguist and Orientalist. In the literature, he is usually referred to as H. Kern or Hendrik Kern; a few other scholars bear the same surname. Life Hendrik Kern was born to Dutch parents in the Central-Javanese town of Purworejo in the Dutch East Indies,; however, when he was six, his family repatriated to the Netherlands. When he entered grammar school, he added the extra-curricular subjects of English and Italian to his studies.

#13505

Bruno Walter

1876 - 1962 (86 years)

Bruno Walter was a German-born conductor, pianist and composer. Born in Berlin, he escaped Nazi Germany in 1933, was naturalised as a French citizen in 1938, and settled in the United States in 1939. He worked closely with Gustav Mahler, whose music he helped to establish in the repertory, held major positions with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Salzburg Festival, Vienna State Opera, Bavarian State Opera, Staatsoper Unter den Linden and Deutsche Oper Berlin, among others, made recordings of historical and artistic significance, and is widely ...

#13506

Wilhelm Bacher

1850 - 1913 (63 years)

Wilhelm Bacher was a Jewish Hungarian scholar, rabbi, Orientalist and linguist, born in Liptó-Szent-Miklós, Hungary to the Hebrew writer Simon Bacher. Wilhelm was himself a prolific writer, authoring or co-authoring approximately 750 works. He was a contributor to many encyclopedias, and was a major contributor to the landmark Jewish Encyclopedia throughout all its 12 volumes . Although almost all of Bacher's works were written in German or Hungarian, at the urging of Hayyim Nahman Bialik many were subsequently translated into Hebrew by Alexander Siskind Rabinovitz.

#13507

Sarah Vaughan

1924 - 1990 (66 years)

Sarah Lois Vaughan was an American jazz singer and pianist. Nicknamed "Sassy" and "The Divine One", she won two Grammy Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, and was nominated for a total of nine Grammy Awards. She was given an NEA Jazz Masters Award in 1989. Critic Scott Yanow wrote that she had "one of the most wondrous voices of the 20th century".

#13508

Sidney Bechet

1897 - 1959 (62 years)

Sidney Joseph Bechet was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer. He was one of the first important soloists in jazz, and first recorded several months before trumpeter Louis Armstrong. His erratic temperament hampered his career, and not until the late 1940s did he earn wide acclaim. Bechet spent much of his later life in France.

#13509

Friedrich Kurschat

1806 - 1884 (78 years)

Friedrich Kurschat was a Prussian Lithuanian linguist and professor at the University of Königsberg. He studied the Lithuanian language and published its grammar in 1876 in which he was the first to describe Lithuanian accentuation in detail.

#13510

Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin

1889 - 1977 (88 years)

Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, the Tramp, and is considered one of the film industry's most important figures. His career spanned more than 75 years, from childhood in the Victorian era until a year before his death in 1977, and encompassed both adulation and controversy.

#13511

Clara Schumann

1819 - 1896 (77 years)

Clara Josephine Schumann was a German pianist, composer, and piano teacher. Regarded as one of the most distinguished pianists of the Romantic era, she exerted her influence over the course of a 61-year concert career, changing the format and repertoire of the piano recital by lessening the importance of purely virtuosic works. She also composed solo piano pieces, a piano concerto , chamber music, choral pieces, and songs.

#13512

Mikhail Glinka

1804 - 1857 (53 years)

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka was the first Russian composer to gain wide recognition within his own country and is often regarded as the fountainhead of Russian classical music. His compositions were an important influence on other Russian composers, notably the members of The Five, who produced a distinctive Russian style of music.

#13513

Henry Wood

1869 - 1944 (75 years)

Sir Henry Joseph Wood was an English conductor best known for his association with London's annual series of promenade concerts, known as the Proms. He conducted them for nearly half a century, introducing hundreds of new works to British audiences. After his death, the concerts were officially renamed in his honour as the "Henry Wood Promenade Concerts", although they continued to be generally referred to as "the Proms".

#13514

Nicholas Ray

1911 - 1979 (68 years)

Nicholas Ray was an American film director, screenwriter, and actor best known for the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause. He is appreciated for many narrative features produced between 1947 and 1963, including They Live By Night , In A Lonely Place , Johnny Guitar , and Bigger Than Life , as well as an experimental work produced throughout the 1970s titled We Can't Go Home Again, which was unfinished at the time of Ray's death.

#13515

Virgil Thomson

1896 - 1989 (93 years)

Virgil Thomson was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music. He has been described as a modernist, a neoromantic, a neoclassicist, and a composer of "an Olympian blend of humanity and detachment" whose "expressive voice was always carefully muted" until his late opera Lord Byron which, in contrast to all his previous work, exhibited an emotional content that rises to "moments of real passion".

#13516

Mario Bava

1914 - 1980 (66 years)

Mario Bava was an Italian filmmaker who worked variously as a director, cinematographer, special effects artist and screenwriter, frequently referred to as the "Master of Italian Horror" and the "Master of the Macabre". His low-budget genre films, known for their distinctive visual flair and stylish technical ingenuity, feature recurring themes and imagery concerning the conflict between illusion and reality, as well as the destructive capacity of human nature. He was a pioneer of Italian genre cinema, and is regarded as one of the most influential auteurs of the horror film genre.

#13517

Harinath De

1877 - 1911 (34 years)

Harinath De was an Indian historian, scholar and a polyglot, who later became the first Indian librarian of the National Library of India from 1907 to 1911. In a life span of thirty four years, he learned 34 languages.

#13518

Zoltán Kodály

1882 - 1967 (85 years)

Zoltán Kodály was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, music pedagogue, linguist, and philosopher. He is well known internationally as the creator of the Kodály method of music education. Life Born in Kecskemét, Hungary, Kodály learned to play the violin as a child. In 1900, he entered the Department of Languages at the University of Budapest and at the same time Hans von Kössler's composition class at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Music. After completing his studies, he studied in Paris with Charles Widor for a year.

#13519

Anton Webern

1883 - 1945 (62 years)

Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern , better known as Anton Webern , was an Austrian composer and conductor. His music was among the most radical of its milieu in its stark concision and steadfast embrace and application of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques in an increasingly rigorous manner, somewhat after the Franco-Flemish School of his studies under Guido Adler. With his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern was at the core of those within the broader circle of the Second Viennese School. He was arguably the first and certainly the last of the three to wri...

#13520

Robert Siodmak

1900 - 1973 (73 years)

Robert Siodmak was a German film director who also worked in the United States. He is best remembered as a thriller specialist and for a series of films noir he made in the 1940s, such as The Killers .

#13521

Arthur Rubinstein

Arthur Rubinstein

1887 - 1982 (95 years)

Arthur Rubinstein KBE OMRI was a Polish-American pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest pianists of all time. He received international acclaim for his performances of the music written by a variety of composers and many regard him as one of the greatest Chopin interpreters of his time. He played in public for eight decades.

#13522

Nicolás Avellaneda

Nicolás Avellaneda

1837 - 1885 (48 years)

Nicolás Remigio Aurelio Avellaneda Silva was an Argentine politician and journalist, and President of Argentina from 1874 to 1880. Avellaneda's main projects while in office were banking and education reform, leading to Argentina's economic growth. The most important events of his government were the Conquest of the Desert and the transformation of the Buenos Aires into a federal district.

#13523

Ivan Zakharov

1816 - 1885 (69 years)

Ivan Ilyich Zakharov was a Russian diplomat who worked in the Peking Orthodox Mission between 1839 and 1850. As the first Russian consul in China he prepared the Treaty of Kulja and helped delineate the Russo-Chinese borders in 1864.

#13524

Hanuš Wihan

1855 - 1920 (65 years)

Hanuš Wihan was a Czech cellist. Some considered him the greatest of his time. He was strongly associated with the works of Antonín Dvořák, whose Cello Concerto in B minor, Rondo in G minor, and the short piece Silent Woods were all dedicated to him. He was the founder and later cellist of the Czech String Quartet, which was world-famous throughout its 40-year existence.

#13525

John Hammond

1910 - 1987 (77 years)

John Henry Hammond II was an American record producer, civil rights activist, and music critic active from the 1930s to the early 1980s. In his service as a talent scout, Hammond became one of the most influential figures in 20th-century popular music. He is the father of blues musician John P. Hammond.

#13526

Louise Brooks

1906 - 1985 (79 years)

Mary Louise Brooks was an American film actress and dancer during the 1920s and 1930s. She is regarded today as an icon of the flapper culture, in part due to the bob hairstyle that she helped popularize during the prime of her career.

#13527

Adolphe Adam

1803 - 1856 (53 years)

Adolphe Charles Adam was a French composer, teacher and music critic. A prolific composer for the theatre, he is best known today for his ballets Giselle and Le corsaire , his operas Le postillon de Lonjumeau and Si j'étais roi and his Christmas carol "Minuit, chrétiens!" .

#13528

Charles Koechlin

1867 - 1950 (83 years)

Charles-Louis-Eugène Koechlin , commonly known as Charles Koechlin, was a French composer, teacher and musicologist. Among his better known works is Les Heures persanes, a set of piano pieces based on the novel Vers Ispahan by Pierre Loti and The Seven Stars Symphony, a 7 movement symphony where each movement is themed around a different film star who were popular at the time of the piece's writing .

#13529

Shinkichi Hashimoto

1882 - 1945 (63 years)

Shinkichi Hashimoto was a Japanese linguist, born in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture, Japan. Biography Hashimoto is especially noted for the discovery of Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai, which makes it clear that Old Japanese made more syllabic distinctions than later periods of the language. This discovery led him to hypothesize that Old Japanese had eight vowels, while modern Japanese has only five. His systematic description of the Japanese grammar also laid the foundations of language education for Japanese children.

#13530

Michel Simon

1895 - 1975 (80 years)

Michel Simon was a Swiss-French actor. He appeared in many notable French films, including La Chienne , Boudu Saved from Drowning , L'Atalante , Port of Shadows , The Head , and The Train . Early years Simon was born on 9 April 1895 in Geneva, Switzerland to a Catholic butcher and a Protestant mother. He left his family and moved to Paris, where he first lived at the Hotel Renaissance, Saint-Martin Street, then in Montmartre. He worked many different jobs to survive, such as giving boxing lessons and peddling smuggled lighters.

#13531

John Cassavetes

John Cassavetes

1929 - 1989 (60 years)

John Nicholas Cassavetes was an American actor and filmmaker. He began as a television and film actor before helping to pioneer modern American independent cinema as a director and writer, often financing and distributing his films with his own income. AllMovie called him "an iconoclastic maverick", while The New Yorker suggested in 2013 that he "may be the most influential American director of the last half century."

#13532

Jean Epstein

1897 - 1953 (56 years)

Jean Epstein was a French filmmaker, film theorist, literary critic, and novelist. Although he is remembered today primarily for his adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, he directed three dozen films and was an influential critic of literature and film from the early 1920s through the late 1940s. He is often associated with French Impressionist Cinema and the concept of photogénie.

#13533

Jenny Lind

1820 - 1887 (67 years)

Johanna Maria Lind was a Swedish opera singer, often called the "Swedish Nightingale". One of the most highly regarded singers of the 19th century, she performed in soprano roles in opera in Sweden and across Europe, and undertook an extraordinarily popular concert tour of the United States beginning in 1850. She was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music from 1840.

#13534

Louis M. Lyons

1897 - 1982 (85 years)

Louis Martin Lyons was an American journalist in Massachusetts and curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Biography Lyons was born in Boston in 1897 and was a graduate of Massachusetts Agricultural College, now known as the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Lyons was a reporter for The Boston Globe in 1919 and from 1923 to 1946; In 1971, he published a history of the first 100 years of that newspaper. In 1940, he took the position of curator for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, where he worked until retiring in 1964. Lyons also wro...

#13535

Tetsuji Morohashi

Tetsuji Morohashi

1883 - 1982 (99 years)

Tetsuji Morohashi was an important figure in the field of Japanese language studies and Sinology. He is best known as chief editor of the Dai Kan-Wa jiten, a comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters, or kanji.

#13536

Ruggero Leoncavallo

Ruggero Leoncavallo

1857 - 1919 (62 years)

Ruggero Leoncavallo was an Italian opera composer and librettist. Although he produced numerous operas and other songs throughout his career it is his opera Pagliacci that remained his lasting contribution, despite attempts to escape the shadow of his greatest success.

#13537

Sam Peckinpah

1925 - 1984 (59 years)

David Samuel Peckinpah was an American film director and screenwriter. His 1969 Western epic The Wild Bunch received an Academy Award nomination and was ranked No. 80 on the American Film Institute's top 100 list. His films employed a visually innovative and explicit depiction of action and violence as well as a revisionist approach to the Western genre.

#13538

Jacques Ibert

1890 - 1962 (72 years)

Jacques François Antoine Marie Ibert was a French composer of classical music. Having studied music from an early age, he studied at the Paris Conservatoire and won its top prize, the Prix de Rome at his first attempt, despite studies interrupted by his service in World War I.

#13539

Florent Schmitt

1870 - 1958 (88 years)

Florent Schmitt was a French composer. He was part of the group known as Les Apaches. His most famous pieces are La tragédie de Salome and Psaume XLVII . He has been described as "one of the most fascinating of France's lesser-known classical composers".

#13540

John Ross

1777 - 1856 (79 years)

Sir John Ross was a Scottish Royal Navy officer and polar explorer. He was the uncle of Sir James Clark Ross, who explored the Arctic with him, and later led expeditions to Antarctica. Biography Early life John Ross was born in Balsarroch, West Galloway, Scotland, on , the son of the Reverend Andrew Ross of Balsarroch, Minister of Inch in Wigtownshire, and Elizabeth Corsane, daughter of Robert Corsane, the Provost of Dumfries. His family home was on the shore of Loch Ryan, at Stranraer.

#13541

Percy French

1854 - 1920 (66 years)

William Percy French was an Irish songwriter, author, poet, entertainer and painter. Life French was born at Clooneyquinn House, near Tulsk, County Roscommon, the son of an Anglo-Irish landlord, Christopher French, and Susan Emma French . He was the third of nine children. His younger sister, Emily later Emily de Burg Daly was also a writer.

#13542

Paul Muni

1895 - 1967 (72 years)

Paul Muni was an American stage and film actor from Chicago. He started his acting career in the Yiddish theater and during the 1930s, he was considered one of the most prestigious actors at the Warner Bros. studio and was given the rare privilege of choosing his own parts.

#13543

Anton Rubinstein

Anton Rubinstein

1829 - 1894 (65 years)

Anton Grigoryevich Rubinstein was a Russian pianist, composer and conductor who became a pivotal figure in Russian culture when he founded the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. He was the elder brother of Nikolai Rubinstein, who founded the Moscow Conservatory.

#13544

Graham Thurgood

1900 - Present (126 years)

Graham Thurgood is a retired professor of linguistics at California State University, Chico. Thurgood graduated with a Ph.D. in linguistics from University of California, Berkeley, where he studied under James Matisoff.

#13545

William Allan Neilson

William Allan Neilson

1869 - 1946 (77 years)

William Allan Neilson was a Scottish-American educator, writer and lexicographer, graduated in the University of Edinburgh in 1891 and became a PhD in Harvard University in 1898. He was president of Smith College between 1917 and 1939.

#13546

Adolf Tobler

1835 - 1910 (75 years)

Adolf Tobler was a Swiss-German linguist and philologist. Born in Hirzel in Zürich, Switzerland, he was the brother of linguist Ludwig Tobler . Adolf Tobler died in Berlin, Germany. He studied Romance philology at the universities of Zürich and Bonn, receiving his doctorate in 1857. At Bonn, he was influenced by the teachings of Friedrich Christian Diez and Nicolaus Delius. After graduation, he worked as a schoolteacher at the Solothurn cantonal school, then at the gymnasium in Bern. In 1867, he relocated to the University of Berlin, where from 1871 up until his death, he held the chair of Romance philology.

#13547

Otis Redding

1941 - 1967 (26 years)

Otis Ray Redding Jr. was an American singer and songwriter. He is regarded as one of the greatest singer-songwriters in the history of American popular music and a seminal artist in soul music and rhythm and blues. Nicknamed the "King of Soul", Redding's style of singing gained inspiration from the gospel music that preceded the genre. His singing style influenced many other soul artists of the 1960s.

#13548

Nellie Melba

1861 - 1931 (70 years)

Dame Nellie Melba was an Australian operatic lyric coloratura soprano. She became one of the most famous singers of the late Victorian era and the early 20th century, and was the first Australian to achieve international recognition as a classical musician. She took the pseudonym "Melba" from Melbourne, her home town.

#13549

Edward Denison Ross

Edward Denison Ross

1871 - 1940 (69 years)

Sir Edward Denison Ross was an orientalist and linguist, specializing in languages of the Middle East, Central and East Asia. He was the first director of the University of London's School of Oriental Studies from 1916 to 1937.

#13550

Bohuslav Martinů

1890 - 1959 (69 years)

Bohuslav Jan Martinů was a Czech composer of modern classical music. He wrote 6 symphonies, 15 operas, 14 ballet scores and a large body of orchestral, chamber, vocal and instrumental works. He became a violinist in the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, and briefly studied under Czech composer and violinist Josef Suk. After leaving Czechoslovakia in 1923 for Paris, Martinů deliberately withdrew from the Romantic style in which he had been trained. During the 1920s he experimented with modern French stylistic developments, exemplified by his orchestral works Half-time and La Bagarre. He also adop...

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