The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#13601
Robert Benchley
1889 - 1945 (56 years)
Robert Charles Benchley was an American humorist best known for his work as a newspaper columnist and film actor. From his beginnings at The Harvard Lampoon while attending Harvard University, through his many years writing essays and articles for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and his acclaimed short films, Benchley's style of humor brought him respect and success during his life, from his peers at the Algonquin Round Table in New York City to contemporaries in the burgeoning film industry.
Go to Profile#13602
Richard Oswald
1880 - 1963 (83 years)
Richard Oswald was an Austrian film director, producer, screenwriter, and father of German-American film director Gerd Oswald. Early career Richard Oswald, born in Vienna as Richard W. Ornstein, began his career as an actor on the Viennese stage. He made his film directorial debut at age 34 with The Iron Cross and worked a number of times for Jules Greenbaum. In 1916, Oswald set up his own production company in Germany, writing and directing most of his films himself. His pre-1920 efforts include such literary adaptations as The Picture of Dorian Gray , Peer Gynt , the once scandalous Different from the Others and Around the World in Eighty Days .
Go to Profile#13603
Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji
1892 - 1988 (96 years)
Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was an English composer, music critic, pianist and writer whose music, written over a period of seventy years, ranges from sets of miniatures to works lasting several hours. One of the most prolific 20th-century composers, he is best known for his piano pieces, notably nocturnes such as Gulistān and Villa Tasca, and large-scale, technically intricate compositions, which include seven symphonies for piano solo, four toccatas, Sequentia cyclica and 100 Transcendental Studies. He felt alienated from English society by reason of his homosexuality and mixed ancestry, and...
Go to Profile#13604
Théophile Cart
1855 - 1931 (76 years)
Théophile Cart was a French Esperantist professor and linguist. Beginning in 1907, Cart was an editor for Lingvo Internacia.
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Giovanni Battista Viotti
1755 - 1824 (69 years)
Giovanni Battista Viotti was an Italian violinist whose virtuosity was famed and whose work as a composer featured a prominent violin and an appealing lyrical tunefulness. He was also a director of French and Italian opera companies in Paris and London. He personally knew Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven.
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Nikolai Shelgunov
1824 - 1891 (67 years)
Nikolai Vasil'evich Shelgunov was a Russian forestry professor, journalist, and literary critic, who became a notable figure of the Russian nihilist movement. Nikolai was born the son of a nobleman, on in Saint Petersburg. He studied at the Imperial Forestry Institute in Saint Petersburg, graduating in 1841 and joining the staff of the forestry department of the Ministry of State Domains. By the late 1850s he was appointed professor at the Forestry Institute.
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John Robert Moore
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
John Robert Moore was an American biographer and bibliographer of Daniel Defoe. Early life and education John Robert Moore was born in Pueblo, Colorado, the son of an Episcopalian minister. Moore attended the University of Missouri where he received an A.B. in 1910 and an A.M. in 1914. After completing his degrees at the University of Missouri, he went to Harvard University where he earned a Ph.D. in 1917 with a dissertation on ballads.
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Mahalia Jackson
1911 - 1972 (61 years)
Mahalia Jackson was an American gospel singer, widely considered one of the most influential vocalists of the 20th century. With a career spanning 40 years, Jackson was integral to the development and spread of gospel blues in black churches throughout the U.S. During a time when racial segregation was pervasive in American society, she met considerable and unexpected success in a recording career, selling an estimated 22 million records and performing in front of integrated and secular audiences in concert halls around the world.
Go to Profile#13609
Giuseppe Guarneri
1698 - 1744 (46 years)
Bartolomeo Giuseppe "del Gesù" Guarneri was an Italian luthier from the Guarneri family of Cremona. He rivals Antonio Stradivari with regard to the respect and reverence accorded his instruments, and for many prominent players and collectors his instruments are the most coveted of all. Instruments made by Guarneri are often referred to as Del Gesùs.
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Emilio Fernández
1904 - 1986 (82 years)
Emilio "El Indio" Fernández Romo was a Mexican film director, actor and screenwriter. He was one of the most prolific film directors of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. He is best known for his work as director of the film María Candelaria , which won the Palme d'Or award at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival. As an actor, he worked in numerous film productions in Mexico and in Hollywood. He was the father of the Mexican actor Jaime Fernández.
Go to Profile#13611
Giovanni Pacini
1796 - 1867 (71 years)
Giovanni Pacini was an Italian composer, best known for his operas. Pacini was born in Catania, Sicily, the son of the buffo Luigi Pacini, who was to appear in the premieres of many of Giovanni's operas. The family was of Tuscan origin, living in Catania when the composer was born.
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Antal Doráti
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
Antal Doráti was a Hungarian-born conductor and composer who became a naturalized American citizen in 1943. Biography Antal Doráti was born in Budapest, where his father Alexander Doráti was a violinist with the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra and his mother Margit Kunwald was a piano teacher.
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Victor Herbert
1859 - 1924 (65 years)
Victor August Herbert was an American composer, cellist and conductor of English and Irish ancestry and German training. Although Herbert enjoyed important careers as a cello soloist and conductor, he is best known for composing many successful operettas that premiered on Broadway from the 1890s to World War I. He was also prominent among the Tin Pan Alley composers and was later a founder of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers . A prolific composer, Herbert produced two operas, a cantata, 43 operettas, incidental music to 10 plays, 31 compositions for orchestra, nine b...
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Leo McCarey
1898 - 1969 (71 years)
Thomas Leo McCarey was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He was involved in nearly 200 films, including the critically acclaimed Duck Soup, Make Way for Tomorrow, The Awful Truth, Going My Way, The Bells of St. Mary's, My Son John and An Affair To Remember.
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Carl August Hagberg
1810 - 1864 (54 years)
Carl August Hagberg , was a Swedish linguist and translator. He was a member of the Swedish Academy, occupying a seat from 1851 until his death. He was the son of Carl Peter Hagberg. Hagberg is most famous for being the first person to produce a Swedish translation of the Complete Works of Shakespeare, the twelve volumes of his translation was issued between 1847 and 1851. Several of his translations were, however, based on the work of Johan Henrik Thomander, who had produced a collected edition of Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Richard II and Twelfth Night i...
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Gabdulkhay Akhatov
1927 - 1986 (59 years)
Gabdulkhay Khuramovich Akhatov was a Soviet Tatar Linguist, Turkologist and an organizer of science and then a second doctorate of Philology in 1965, attaining professorship in 1970. Akhatov graduated with honors from Kazan State Pedagogical Institute in 1951 and later from graduate school in 1954. He became a member of the Higher Attestation Commission of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and was also chairman of the specialized boards for doctoral and master's theses in a number of universities across the now-defunct USSR.
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Buddy Rich
1917 - 1987 (70 years)
Bernard "Buddy" Rich was an American jazz drummer, songwriter, conductor, and bandleader. He is considered one of the most influential drummers of all time. Rich was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He discovered his affinity for jazz music at a young age and began drumming at the age of two. He began playing jazz in 1937, working with acts such as Bunny Berigan, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, and Harry James. From 1942 to 1944, Rich served in the U.S. Marines. From 1945 to 1948, he led the Buddy Rich Orchestra. In 1966, he recorded a big-band style arrangement of songs from West Side Story.
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Terence MacDonagh
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
John Alfred Terence MacDonagh was an English oboist and cor anglais player, particularly known as one of the four members of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's so-called "Royal Family" of woodwind players.
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Farinelli
1705 - 1782 (77 years)
Farinelli was the stage name of Carlo Maria Michelangelo Nicola Broschi , a celebrated Italian castrato singer of the 18th century and one of the greatest singers in the history of opera. Farinelli has been described as having had soprano vocal range and as having sung the highest note customary at the time, C6.
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Victor Sjöström
1879 - 1960 (81 years)
Victor David Sjöström , also known in the United States as Victor Seastrom, was a pioneering Swedish film director, screenwriter, and actor. He began his career in Sweden, before moving to Hollywood in 1924. Sjöström worked primarily in the silent era; his best known films include The Phantom Carriage , He Who Gets Slapped , and The Wind . Sjöström was Sweden's most prominent director in the "Golden Age of Silent Film" in Europe. Later in life, he played the leading role in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries .
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Albert Henry Ross
1881 - 1950 (69 years)
Albert Henry Ross , , was an English advertising agent and freelance writer known for writing the Christian apologetics book Who Moved the Stone? and And Pilate Said. Biography Ross was born on 1 January 1881 in Kings Norton, Worcestershire just slightly south of Birmingham. His father, John Charles Ross was a wine merchant who operated different businesses in Birmingham. His mother was Mary Ann Ross and she was born in Hollingbourne, Kent in 1850. His parents were married in 1878. His mother died in Aston, Birmingham in 1912, and his father died in Aston, Birmingham in 1914.
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Mike Todd
1909 - 1958 (49 years)
Michael Todd was an American theater and film producer, celebrated for his 1956 Around the World in 80 Days, which won an Academy Award for Best Picture. Actress Elizabeth Taylor was his third wife. Todd was the third of Taylor's seven husbands, and the only one whom Taylor did not divorce - Todd died in a private plane accident a year after their marriage. He was the driving force behind the development of the eponymous Todd-AO widescreen film format.
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Carlos Chávez
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Carlos Antonio de Padua Chávez y Ramírez was a Mexican composer, conductor, music theorist, educator, journalist, and founder and director of the Mexican Symphonic Orchestra. He was influenced by native Mexican cultures. Of his six symphonies, the second, or Sinfonía india, which uses native Yaqui percussion instruments, is probably the most popular.
Go to Profile#13624
Lennox Berkeley
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Sir Lennox Randal Francis Berkeley CBE was an English composer. Biography Berkeley was born on 12 May 1903 in Oxford, England, the younger child and only son of Aline Carla , daughter of Sir James Charles Harris, former British consul in Monaco, and Royal Navy Captain Hastings George FitzHardinge Berkeley , the illegitimate and eldest son of George Lennox Rawdon Berkeley, the 7th Earl of Berkeley . He attended the Dragon School in Oxford, going on to Gresham's School, in Holt, Norfolk and St George's School in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. He studied French at Merton College, Oxford, graduating with a fourth class degree in 1926.
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George Jones
1811 - 1891 (80 years)
George Jones was an American journalist who, with Henry Jarvis Raymond, co-founded the New-York Daily Times, now The New York Times. Biography Jones was born in 1811 in Poultney, Vermont, and moved to Granville, Ohio, for a time. He moved back to Vermont after his parents died. Jones was employed at the Northern Spectator.
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Baldassare Galuppi
1706 - 1785 (79 years)
Baldassare Galuppi was an Italian composer, born on the island of Burano in the Venetian Republic. He belonged to a generation of composers, including Johann Adolph Hasse, Giovanni Battista Sammartini, and C. P. E. Bach, whose works are emblematic of the prevailing galant music that developed in Europe throughout the 18th century. He achieved international success, spending periods of his career in Vienna, London and Saint Petersburg, but his main base remained Venice, where he held a succession of leading appointments.
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Thomas Betterton
1635 - 1710 (75 years)
Thomas Betterton , the leading male actor and theatre manager during Restoration England, son of an under-cook to King Charles I, was born in London. Apprentice and actor Betterton was born in August 1635 in Tothill Street, Westminster. He was apprenticed to John Holden, Sir William Davenant's publisher, and possibly later to a bookseller named John Rhodes, who had been wardrobe-keeper at the Blackfriars Theatre. In 1659, Rhodes obtained a license to set up a company of players at the Cockpit Theatre in Drury Lane; and on the reopening of this theatre in 1660, Betterton made his first appearan...
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Richard Amsel
1947 - 1985 (38 years)
Richard Amsel was an American illustrator and graphic designer. His career was brief but prolific, including movie posters, album covers, and magazine covers. His portrait of comedian Lily Tomlin for the cover of Time is now part of the permanent collection at the Smithsonian Institution. He was associated with TV Guide for thirteen years.
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Theodor Capidan
1879 - 1953 (74 years)
Theodor Capidan was an Ottoman-born Romanian linguist. An ethnic Aromanian from the Macedonia region, he studied at Leipzig before teaching school at Thessaloniki. Following the creation of Greater Romania at the end of World War I, Capidan followed his friend Sextil Pușcariu to the Transylvanian capital Cluj, where he spent nearly two decades, the most productive part of his career. He then taught in Bucharest for a further ten years and was marginalized late in life under the nascent communist regime. Capidan's major contributions involve studies of the Aromanians and the Megleno-Romanians, as well as their respective languages.
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Maria Malibran
1808 - 1836 (28 years)
Maria Felicia Malibran was a Spanish singer who commonly sang both contralto and soprano parts, and was one of the best-known opera singers of the 19th century. Malibran was known for her stormy personality and dramatic intensity, becoming a legendary figure after her death in Manchester, England, at age 28. Contemporary accounts of her voice describe its range, power and flexibility as extraordinary.
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Johannes Friedrich
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Johannes Friedrich was a German hittitologist who published the Hethitisches Elementarbuch , and the Kurzgefasstes Hethitisches Wörterbuch . A translation of his book "Entzifferung Verschollener Schriften und Sprachen" was published by Philosophical Library New York 1957: a study of Ancient Orient languages, including Egyptian hieroglyphics, cuneiform writing, Hittite hieroglyphics and other scripts and languages of the Old world.
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Max Margolis
1866 - 1932 (66 years)
Max Leopold Margolis was a Lithuanian Jewish and American philologist. Son of Isaac Margolis; educated at the elementary school of his native town, the Leibniz gymnasium, Berlin, and Columbia University, New York City . In 1891 he was appointed to a fellowship in Semitic languages at Columbia University, and from 1892 to 1897 he was instructor, and later assistant professor, of Hebrew language and Biblical exegesis at the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati. In 1897 he became assistant professor of Semitic languages in the University of California; in 1898, associate professor; and from 1902 the head of the Semitic department.
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Clarence Brown
1890 - 1987 (97 years)
Clarence Leon Brown was an American film director. Early life Born in Clinton, Massachusetts, to Larkin Harry Brown, a cotton manufacturer, and Katherine Ann Brown , Brown moved to Tennessee when he was 11 years old. He attended Knoxville High School and the University of Tennessee, both in Knoxville, Tennessee, graduating from the university at the age of 19 with two degrees in engineering. An early fascination in automobiles led Brown to a job with the Stevens-Duryea Company, then to his own Brown Motor Car Company in Alabama. He later abandoned the car dealership after developing an interest in motion pictures around 1913.
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Franz Brendel
1811 - 1868 (57 years)
Karl Franz Brendel was a German music critic, journalist and musicologist born in Stolberg, the son of a successful mining engineer named Christian Friedrich Brendel. Biography He was a student at the University of Leipzig, University of Berlin, and University of Freiburg up until the year 1840. In 1846 he began teaching music history at the Leipzig Conservatory, and in 1852 he published a well-regarded general history of European music. Brendel also published a book on Franz Liszt.
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Sergio Corbucci
1927 - 1990 (63 years)
Sergio Corbucci was an Italian film director, screenwriter and producer. He directed both very violent Spaghetti Westerns and bloodless Bud Spencer and Terence Hill action comedies. He is the older brother of screenwriter and film director Bruno Corbucci.
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Mikołaj Rudnicki
1881 - 1978 (97 years)
Mikołaj Rudnicki - was a Polish linguist. He finished his studies in Kraków. In 1911 he became a docent in Indoeuropean linguistics. In 1919 he became a professor at Uniwersytet Poznański. From 1945 he was a member of the Polish Academy of Learning.
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A. L. Lloyd
1908 - 1982 (74 years)
Albert Lancaster Lloyd , usually known as A. L. Lloyd or Bert Lloyd, was an English folk singer and collector of folk songs, and as such was a key figure in the British folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. While Lloyd is most widely known for his work with British folk music, he had a keen interest in the music of Spain, Latin America, Southeastern Europe and Australia. He recorded at least six discs of Australian Bush ballads and folk music.
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John Gilbert
1897 - 1936 (39 years)
John Gilbert was an American actor, screenwriter and director. He rose to fame during the silent era and became a popular leading man known as "The Great Lover". His breakthrough came in 1925 with his starring roles in The Merry Widow and The Big Parade. At the height of his career, Gilbert rivaled Rudolph Valentino as a box office draw.
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Domenico Cimarosa
1749 - 1801 (52 years)
Domenico Cimarosa was an Italian composer of the Neapolitan School and of the Classical period. He wrote more than eighty operas, the best known of which is Il matrimonio segreto ; most of his operas are comedies. He also wrote instrumental works and church music.
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Antonio Caldara
1671 - 1736 (65 years)
Antonio Caldara was an Italian Baroque composer. Life Caldara was born in Venice , the son of a violinist. He became a chorister at St Mark's in Venice, where he learned several instruments, probably under the instruction of Giovanni Legrenzi. In 1699 he relocated to Mantua, where he became maestro di cappella to the inept Charles IV, Duke of Mantua, a pensionary of France with a French wife, who took the French side in the War of the Spanish Succession. Caldara removed from Mantua in 1707, after the French were expelled from Italy, then moved on to Barcelona as chamber composer to Charles III, the pretender to the Spanish throne and who kept a royal court at Barcelona.
Go to Profile#13641
Abu Sulayman Sijistani
932 - 1000 (68 years)
Abu Sulayman Muhammad Sijistani, also called al-Mantiqi , named for his origins in Sijistan or Sistan province in present-day Eastern Iran and Southern Afghanistan, became the leading Persian Islamic humanist philosopher in Baghdad.
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Vincent Starrett
1886 - 1974 (88 years)
Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett , known as Vincent Starrett, was a Canadian-born American writer, newspaperman, and bibliophile. Biography Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett was born above his grandfather's bookshop in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His father moved the family to Chicago in 1889 where Starrett attended John Marshall High School.
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Samuel Clarke
1599 - 1683 (84 years)
Samuel Clarke was an English clergyman and significant Puritan biographer. Life He was born 10 October 1599 at Wolston, Warwickshire, the son of Hugh Clarke , who was vicar of Wolston for forty years. Clarke was educated by his father till he was thirteen; then at the free school in Coventry; and when seventeen was entered at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was ordained about 1622, and held charges at Knowle in Warwickshire, Thornton-le-Moors in Cheshire, and Shotwick on the estuary of the Dee. Here, 2 February 1626, he married Katherine, daughter of Valentine Overton, rector of Bedworth, Wa...
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Benjamin Godard
1849 - 1895 (46 years)
Benjamin Louis Paul Godard was a French violinist and Romantic-era composer of Jewish extraction, best known for his opera Jocelyn. Godard composed eight operas, five symphonies, two piano and two violin concertos, string quartets, sonatas for violin and piano, piano pieces and etudes, and more than a hundred songs. He died at the age of 45 in Cannes of tuberculosis and was buried in the family tomb in Taverny in the French department of Val-d'Oise.
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Engelbert Humperdinck
1854 - 1921 (67 years)
Engelbert Humperdinck was a German composer. He is known widely for his opera Hansel and Gretel . Biography Humperdinck was born at Siegburg in the Rhine Province in 1854. After receiving piano lessons, he produced his first composition at the age of seven. His first attempts at works for the stage were two singspiele written when he was 13. His parents disapproved of his plans for a career in music and encouraged him to study architecture.
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Thomas Morley
1559 - 1602 (43 years)
Thomas Morley was an English composer, theorist, singer and organist of the Renaissance. He was one of the foremost members of the English Madrigal School. Referring to the strong Italian influence on the English madrigal, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians states that Morley was "chiefly responsible for grafting the Italian shoot on to the native stock and initiating the curiously brief but brilliant flowering of the madrigal that constitutes one of the most colourful episodes in the history of English music."
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Thea von Harbou
1888 - 1954 (66 years)
Thea Gabriele von Harbou was a German screenwriter, novelist, film director, and actress. She is remembered as the screenwriter of the science fiction film classic Metropolis and for the 1925 novel on which it was based. von Harbou collaborated as a screenwriter with film director Fritz Lang, her husband, during the period of transition from silent to sound films.
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Yakov Protazanov
1881 - 1945 (64 years)
Yakov Alexandrovich Protazanov was a Russian and Soviet film director and screenwriter, and one of the founding fathers of cinema of Russia. He was an Honored Artist of the Russian SFSR and Uzbek SSR .
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Victor Saville
1895 - 1979 (84 years)
Victor Saville was an English film director, producer, and screenwriter. He directed 39 films between 1927 and 1954. He also produced 36 films between 1923 and 1962. Biography Saville produced his first film, Woman to Woman, with Michael Balcon in 1923, and on the back of its success produced pictures for the veteran director Maurice Elvey, including the classic British silent Hindle Wakes . His first picture as director was The Arcadians . In 1929 he and Balcon worked together again on a talkie remake of Woman to Woman for Balcon's company, Gainsborough Pictures. This time Saville directed i...
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Emmerich Kálmán
1882 - 1953 (71 years)
Emmerich Kálmán was a Hungarian composer of operettas and a prominent figure in the development of Viennese operetta in the 20th century. Among his most popular works are Die Csárdásfürstin and Gräfin Mariza . Influences on his compositional style include Hungarian folk music , the Viennese style of precursors such as Johann Strauss II and Franz Lehár, and, in his later works, American jazz. As a result of the Anschluss, Kálmán and his family fled to Paris and then to the United States. He eventually returned to Europe in 1949 and died in Paris in 1953.
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