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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,

#13551

John La Touche

1915 - 1956 (41 years)

John Treville Latouche was a lyricist and bookwriter in American musical theater. Biography John Treville Latouche was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His family moved to Richmond, Virginia, when he was four months old. There he attended school, before going north to Columbia University. He became involved in music and theater, writing for the Varsity Show and joining the Philolexian Society. He did not graduate.

#13552

Giacinto Scelsi

1905 - 1988 (83 years)

Giacinto Francesco Maria Scelsi was an Italian composer who also wrote surrealist poetry in French. He is best known for having composed music based around only one pitch, altered in all manners through microtonal oscillations, harmonic allusions, and changes in timbre and dynamics, as paradigmatically exemplified in his Quattro pezzi su una nota sola . This composition remains his most famous work and one of the few performed to significant recognition during his lifetime. His musical output, which encompassed all Western classical genres except scenic music, remained largely undiscovered even within contemporary musical circles during most of his life.

#13553

Mel Lewis

1929 - 1990 (61 years)

Melvin Sokoloff , known professionally as Mel Lewis, was an American jazz drummer, session musician, professor, and author. He received fourteen Grammy Award nominations. Biography Early years Lewis was born in Buffalo, New York, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents Samuel and Mildred Sokoloff. He started playing professionally as a teen, eventually joining Stan Kenton in 1954. His musical career brought him to Los Angeles in 1957 and New York City in 1963.

#13554

Ivory Joe Hunter

1914 - 1974 (60 years)

Ivory Joe Hunter was an American rhythm-and-blues singer, songwriter, and pianist. After a series of hits on the US R&B chart starting in the mid-1940s, he became more widely known for his hit recording "Since I Met You Baby" . He was billed as The Baron of the Boogie, and also known as The Happiest Man Alive. His musical output ranged from R&B to blues, boogie-woogie, and country music, and Hunter made a name in all of those genres. Uniquely, he was honored at both the Monterey Jazz Festival and the Grand Ole Opry.

#13555

John Knowles Paine

1839 - 1906 (67 years)

John Knowles Paine was the first American-born composer to achieve fame for large-scale orchestral music. The senior member of a group of composers collectively known as the Boston Six, Paine was one of those responsible for the first significant body of concert music by composers from the United States. The Boston Six's other five members were Amy Beach, Arthur Foote, Edward MacDowell, George Chadwick, and Horatio Parker.

#13556

Joseph Henry

1823 - 1870 (47 years)

Joseph Henry became one of the most important bowmakers of the golden era of French bowmaking, working and collaborating with his master and employer Dominique Peccatte and business partner Pierre Simon

#13557

Norman Taurog

1899 - 1981 (82 years)

Norman Rae Taurog was an American film director and screenwriter. From 1920 to 1968, Taurog directed 180 films. At the age of 32, he received the Academy Award for Best Director for Skippy , becoming the youngest person to win the award for eight and a half decades until Damien Chazelle won for La La Land in 2017. He was later nominated for Best Director for the film Boys Town . He directed some of the best-known actors of the twentieth century, including his nephew Jackie Cooper, Spencer Tracy, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Deanna Durbin, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Deborah Kerr, Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and Elvis Presley.

#13558

Grant Green

1931 - 1979 (48 years)

Grant Green was an American jazz guitarist and composer. Recording prolifically for Blue Note Records as both leader and sideman, Green performed in the hard bop, soul jazz, bebop, and Latin-tinged idioms throughout his career. Critic Michael Erlewine wrote, "A severely underrated player during his lifetime, Grant Green is one of the great unsung heroes of jazz guitar ... Green's playing is immediately recognizable – perhaps more than any other guitarist." Critic Dave Hunter described his sound as "lithe, loose, slightly bluesy and righteously groovy".

#13559

Pierre Johanns

1881 - 1955 (74 years)

Pierre Johanns was a Luxemburger Jesuit priest, missionary in India and Indologist. Education Johanns was ordained priest on 1 August 1914 at Louvain, three days before World War I broke out and Germany invaded Belgium. He had studied philosophy under the prestigious metaphysician and mystic, Pierre Scheuer. Johanns' superior intelligence, nearing genius, had been recognized and he was destined to further studies while awaiting a still impeded passage to India. He took a full Licentiate in Philosophy from the Catholic University of Leuven , and was then sent to Oxford as soon as the end of the war permitted it, in 1919.

#13560

Arnold Ridley

1896 - 1984 (88 years)

William Arnold Ridley, OBE was an English playwright and actor, earlier in his career known for writing the play The Ghost Train and later in life in the British TV sitcom Dad's Army as the elderly bumbling Private Godfrey, as well as in spin-offs including the feature film version and the stage production.

#13561

Franz Schreker

1878 - 1934 (56 years)

Franz Schreker was an Austrian composer, conductor, librettist, teacher and administrator. Primarily a composer of operas, Schreker developed a style characterized by aesthetic plurality , timbral experimentation, strategies of extended tonality and conception of total music theatre into the narrative of 20th-century music.

#13562

Isham Jones

1894 - 1956 (62 years)

Isham Edgar Jones was an American bandleader, saxophonist, bassist and songwriter. Career Jones was born in Coalton, Ohio, United States, to a musical and mining family. His father, Richard Isham Jones , was a violinist. The family moved to Saginaw, Michigan, where Jones grew up and started his first ensemble for church concerts. In 1911 one of Jones's earliest compositions "On the Alamo" was published by Tell Taylor Inc.

#13563

Peter Cornelius

1824 - 1874 (50 years)

Carl August Peter Cornelius was a German composer, writer about music, poet and translator. Life He was born in Mainz to Carl Joseph Gerhard and Friederike Cornelius, actors in Mainz and Wiesbaden. From an early age he played the violin and composed, eventually studying with Tekla Griebel-Wandall and composition with Heinrich Esser in 1841. He lived with his painter uncle Peter von Cornelius in Berlin from 1844 to 1852, and during this time he met prominent figures such as Alexander von Humboldt, the Brothers Grimm, Friedrich Rückert and Felix Mendelssohn.

#13564

Robert Fuchs

1847 - 1927 (80 years)

Robert Fuchs was an Austrian composer and music teacher. As Professor of music theory at the Vienna Conservatory, Fuchs taught many notable composers, while he was himself a highly regarded composer in his lifetime.

#13565

Nikolai Tomsky

1900 - 1984 (84 years)

Nikolai Vasilyevich Tomsky was a much-decorated Soviet sculptor, designer of many well-known ceremonial monuments of the Socialist Realism era. Biography Born in the village of Staro Ramushevo in Novgorod province, into a blacksmith's family, Tomsky studied in Leningrad. In 1927, graduated from the Arts and Crafts College.

#13566

Wendy Barrie

1912 - 1978 (66 years)

Wendy Barrie was a British-American film and television actress. Early life Barrie was born in London to English parents. Her father, Francis Charles John Graigoe Jenkin KC, was an employee of the Great Western Railway , who then joined the Royal Fusiliers in 1902. Her mother was Ellen McDonagh. Hollywood gave her a more exotic parentage with her father being a King's Counsel. She received her education at a convent school in England and a finishing school in Switzerland.

#13567

Jan Michał Rozwadowski

Jan Michał Rozwadowski

1867 - 1935 (68 years)

Jan Michał Rozwadowski was a Polish linguist and a professor at the Jagiellonian University. He was also the president of the Polish Academy of Learning.

#13568

Monte Blue

1887 - 1963 (76 years)

Gerard Montgomery Blue was an American film actor who began his career as a romantic lead in the silent era; and for decades after the advent of sound, he continued to perform as a supporting player in a wide range of motion pictures.

#13569

Red Nichols

1905 - 1965 (60 years)

Ernest Loring "Red" Nichols was an American jazz cornetist, composer, and jazz bandleader. Biography Early life and career Nichols was born in Ogden, Utah, United States. His father was a college music professor, and Nichols was something of a child prodigy, playing difficult set pieces for his father's brass band by the age of 12. Young Nichols heard the early recordings of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and later those of Bix Beiderbecke, and these had a strong influence on him. His style became polished, clean, and incisive.

#13570

J. Lloyd Williams

1854 - 1945 (91 years)

John Lloyd Williams was a Welsh botanist, author, and musician. He was one of the founders of the Welsh Folk-Song Society , established in 1906 to promote the collection and study of traditional Welsh folk songs, and became the first editor of the society's journal.

#13571

John Burke

1786 - 1848 (62 years)

John Burke was an Irish genealogist, and the original publisher of Burke's Peerage. He was the father of Sir Bernard Burke, a British officer of arms and genealogist. Origins He was the elder son of Peter Burke of Elm Hall, Tipperary, by his first wife, Anne, daughter and coheiress of Matthew Dowdall, M.D., of Mullingar. In accordance with a family arrangement, his younger brother Joseph succeeded to the estate at the father's death on 13 January 1836. The Burke family were descendants of the Earl of Clanricarde via Dominick Burke , of Clondagoff Castle, County Galway. Later generations have ...

#13572

Walter Parratt

1841 - 1924 (83 years)

Sir Walter Parratt was an English organist and composer. Biography Born in Huddersfield, son of a parish organist, Parratt began to play the pipe organ from an early age, and held posts as an organist while still a child. He was a child prodigy: on one occasion he played Bach's complete The Well-Tempered Clavier by heart, without notice, at age ten.

#13573

Ernest Farrar

1885 - 1918 (33 years)

Ernest Bristow Farrar was an English composer, pianist and organist. Life Ernest Farrar was born in Lewisham, London, but moved in 1887 to Micklefield in Yorkshire, where his father was a clergyman. The rest of his life was very much centred in the north of England. He was educated at Leeds Grammar School, where he began organ studies. His studies at Durham University did not progress beyond his matriculation.

#13574

Papanasam Sivan

1890 - 1973 (83 years)

Paapanaasam Raamayya Sivan was an Indian composer of Carnatic music and a singer. He was awarded the Madras Music Academy's Sangeetha Kalanidhi in 1971. He was also a film score composer in Kannada cinema as well as Tamil cinema in the 1930s and 1940s.

#13575

Prabodh Pandit

1923 - 1975 (52 years)

Prabodh Bechardas Pandit was an Indian linguist from Gujarat, India. He published a total of ten books in the Gujarati language, along with many research papers published in various journals. In 1967, he received the Sahitya Akademi Award, and in 1973, the Ranjitram Suvarna Chandrak, for his contribution to the study of Gujarati language and linguistics.

#13576

Santa Rita Durão

Santa Rita Durão

1722 - 1784 (62 years)

José de Santa Rita Durão , known simply as Santa Rita Durão, was a Colonial Brazilian Neoclassic poet, orator and Augustinian friar. He is considered a forerunner of "Indianism" in Brazilian literature, with his epic poem Caramuru.

#13577

Jens Andreas Friis

Jens Andreas Friis

1821 - 1896 (75 years)

Jens Andreas Friis was a Norwegian philologist, lexicographer and author. He was a university professor and a prominent linguist in the languages spoken by the Sami people. He is widely recognized as the founder of the studies of the Sami languages. Today he is also commonly associated with his novel Lajla: A New Tale of Finmark, which became the basis for Laila, a 1929 silent film.

#13578

Lewis Ossie Swingler

1906 - 1962 (56 years)

Lewis Ossie Swingler was a pioneering African-American journalist, editor, and newspaper publisher from Crittenden County, Arkansas. He was editor of the Memphis World and editor in chief and copublisher of the Tri-State Defender.

#13579

Franz Schmidt

1874 - 1939 (65 years)

Franz Schmidt, also Ferenc Schmidt was an Austro-Hungarian composer, cellist and pianist. Life Schmidt was born in Pozsony/Pressburg, in the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary to a half-Hungarian father – with the same name, born in the same city – and to a Hungarian mother, Mária Ravasz. He was a Roman Catholic.

#13580

Lennie Tristano

1919 - 1978 (59 years)

Leonard Joseph Tristano was an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and teacher of jazz improvisation. Tristano studied for bachelor's and master's degrees in music in Chicago before moving to New York City in 1946. He played with leading bebop musicians and formed his own small bands, which soon displayed some of his early interests – contrapuntal interaction of instruments, harmonic flexibility, and rhythmic complexity. His quintet in 1949 recorded the first free group improvisations. Tristano's innovations continued in 1951, with the first overdubbed, improvised jazz recordings, and ...

#13581

Carl Radle

1942 - 1980 (38 years)

Carl Dean Radle was an American bassist who toured and recorded with many of the most influential recording artists of the late 1960s and 1970s. He was posthumously inducted to the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 2006.

#13582

Erle Elsworth Clippinger

1875 - 1939 (64 years)

Erle Elsworth Clippinger was a professor of English and a scholar of children's literature in early 20th-century Indiana. He was one of the founding faculty members at Ball State University, where he chaired the English department for many years.

#13583

Alfredo Catalani

Alfredo Catalani

1854 - 1893 (39 years)

Alfredo Catalani was an Italian operatic composer. He is best remembered for his operas Loreley and La Wally . La Wally was composed to a libretto by Luigi Illica, and features Catalani's most famous aria "Ebben? Ne andrò lontana." This aria, sung by American soprano Wilhelmenia Fernandez, was at the heart of Jean-Jacques Beineix's 1981 film Diva. Catalani's other operas were much less successful.

#13584

York Bowen

1884 - 1961 (77 years)

Edwin York Bowen was an English composer and pianist. Bowen's musical career spanned more than fifty years during which time he wrote over 160 works. As well as being a pianist and composer, Bowen was a talented conductor, organist, violist and horn player. Despite achieving considerable success during his lifetime, many of the composer's works remained unpublished and unperformed until after his death in 1961. Bowen's compositional style is widely considered as ‘Romantic’ and his works are often characterized by their rich harmonic language.

#13585

Alexander Vasilyevich Alexandrov

1883 - 1946 (63 years)

Alexander Vasilyevich Alexandrov was a Soviet and Russian composer and founder of the Alexandrov Ensemble, who wrote the music for the State Anthem of the Soviet Union, which in 2000 became the national anthem of Russia . During his career, he also worked as a professor of the Moscow Conservatory, and became a Doctor of Arts. His work was recognized by the awards of the title of People's Artist of the USSR and two Stalin Prizes.

#13586

Pernel Strachey

Pernel Strachey

1876 - 1951 (75 years)

Pernel Strachey or Joan Pernel Strachey was an English scholar of French and Principal of Newnham College. Life Strachey was born in Clapham Common in London in 1876. She came from a large family led by Lieutenant General Sir Richard Strachey and the suffragist Jane Maria Strachey. Her mother was a friend of Millicent Garrett Fawcett who had co-founded Newnham College in Cambridge. Her brothers included Lytton Strachey and Oliver Strachey, husband of Ray Costelloe.

#13587

Roy Brown

1925 - 1981 (56 years)

Roy James Brown was an American blues singer who had a significant influence on the early development of rock and roll and the direction of R&B. His original song and hit recording "Good Rockin' Tonight" has been covered by many artists including Wynonie Harris, Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Joe Ely, Ricky Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Pat Boone, James Brown, the Doors, and the rock group Montrose. Brown was one of the first popular R&B singers to perform songs with a gospel-steeped delivery, which was then considered taboo by many churches. In addition, his melismatic, pleading vocal style influenced notable artists such as B.B.

#13588

Leif Erickson

1911 - 1986 (75 years)

Leif Erickson was an American stage, film, and television actor. Early life Erickson was born in Alameda, California, near San Francisco. He worked as a soloist in a band as vocalist and trombone player, performed in Max Reinhardt's productions, and then gained a small amount of stage experience in a comedy vaudeville act. Initially billed by Paramount Pictures as Glenn Erickson, he began his screen career as a leading man in Westerns.

#13589

Edwin Maxwell

1886 - 1948 (62 years)

Edwin Maxwell was an Irish character actor in Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s, frequently cast as businessmen and shysters, though often ones with a pompous or dignified bearing. Prior to that, he was an actor on the Broadway stage and a director of plays.

#13590

Billy West

1892 - 1975 (83 years)

Billy West was a silent film actor, producer, and director. Active during the silent film era, he is best known as a semi-successful Charlie Chaplin impersonator. Beyond acting, he also directed shorts in the 1910s and 20s, as well as produced films. West ultimately retired in 1935.

#13591

Allen Collins

1952 - 1990 (38 years)

Larkin Allen Collins Jr. was an American guitarist, and one of the founding members of the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. He co-wrote many of the band's songs with frontman and original lead singer Ronnie Van Zant.

#13592

Ebenezer Prout

1835 - 1909 (74 years)

Ebenezer Prout was an English musical theorist, writer, music teacher and composer, whose instruction, afterwards embodied in a series of standard works still used today, underpinned the work of many British classical musicians of succeeding generations.

#13593

George Henschel

George Henschel

1850 - 1934 (84 years)

Sir Isidor George Henschel was a German-born British baritone, pianist, conductor, composer and academic teacher. First trained as a pianist, he was a concert singer who sometimes sang to his own accompaniment. He was a close friend of Johannes Brahms. His first wife Lillian was also a singer. He was the first conductor of both the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. He taught at the Institute of Musical Art in New York City.

#13594

Harold Bauer

1873 - 1951 (78 years)

Harold Victor Bauer was an English-born pianist of Jewish heritage who began his musical career as a violinist. Biography Harold Bauer was born in Kingston upon Thames; his father was a German violinist and his mother was English. He took up the study of the violin under the direction of his father and Adolf Pollitzer. He made his debut as a violinist in London in 1883, and for nine years toured England. In 1892, however, he went to Paris and studied the piano under Ignacy Jan Paderewski for a year, though still maintaining his interest in the violin. An anecdote reports that Paderewski jokingly told Bauer to concentrate on the piano because "You have such beautiful hair".

#13595

Woody Shaw

1944 - 1989 (45 years)

Woody Herman Shaw Jr. was an American jazz trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer, arranger, band leader, and educator. Shaw is widely known as one of the most important and influential jazz trumpeters and composers of the twentieth century. He is often credited with revolutionizing the technical and harmonic language of modern jazz trumpet playing, and to this day is regarded by many as one of the major innovators of the instrument. He was an acclaimed virtuoso, mentor, and spokesperson for jazz and worked and recorded alongside many of the leading musicians of his time.

#13596

George Chandler

George Chandler

1898 - 1985 (87 years)

George Chandler was an American actor who starred in over 140 feature films, usually in smaller supporting roles, and he is perhaps best known for playing the character of Uncle Petrie Martin on the television series Lassie, and as the unfortunate young man who drank The Fatal Glass of Beer in a 1933 short comedy starring W.C. Fields.

#13597

Jimmy Maelen

1940 - 1988 (48 years)

Jimmy Maelen was an American percussionist from the 1960s to 1980s, who worked with many artists including Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry, Peter Gabriel, James Taylor, Dire Straits, Barry Manilow, Alice Cooper, Kiss, Madonna, Bryan Adams, Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, David Bowie and John Lennon. He also played on hit records by Bob James, Duran Duran, Carly Simon, Barbra Streisand, Yoko Ono, Meatloaf, Alice Cooper, BJ Thomas, and many others.

#13598

Big Mama Thornton

1926 - 1984 (58 years)

Willie Mae Thornton , better known as Big Mama Thornton because of her height and weight , was an American singer and songwriter of the blues and R&B. She was the first to record Leiber and Stoller's "Hound Dog", in 1952, which was written for her and became her biggest hit, staying seven weeks at number one on the Billboard R&B chart in 1953. According to Maureen Mahon, a music professor at New York University, "the song is seen as an important beginning of rock-and-roll, especially in its use of the guitar as the key instrument".

#13599

Tubby Hayes

1935 - 1973 (38 years)

Edward Brian "Tubby" Hayes was an English jazz multi-instrumentalist, best known for his virtuosic musicianship on tenor saxophone and for performing in jazz groups with fellow sax player Ronnie Scott and trumpeter Jimmy Deuchar. He is widely considered to be one of the finest jazz saxophonists to have emerged from Britain.

#13600

Philippe Sarchi

1764 - 1830 (66 years)

François Philippe Sarchi originally Samuel Morpurgo, born in Gradisca d'Isonzo in Italy in 1764 and died in Paris in 1830, was a lawyer, linguist, philologist of Illyrian origin, specializing in Italian and Hebrew.

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