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.
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#13651
Kirill Kondrashin
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Kirill Petrovich Kondrashin was a Soviet and Russian conductor. People's Artist of the USSR . Early life Kondrashin was born in Moscow to a family of orchestral musicians. Having spent many hours at rehearsals, he made a firm decision at the age of 14 to become a conductor. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory from 1931 to 1936 under the conductor Boris Khaikin. Kondrashin began conducting in the Young People's Theatre in Moscow in 1931, continuing in the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theatre three years later. He conducted at the Maly Opera Theatre in Leningrad from 1938 to 1942 and the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow from 1943.
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Bobby Timmons
1935 - 1974 (39 years)
Robert Henry Timmons was an American jazz pianist and composer. He was a sideman in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers for two periods , between which he was part of Cannonball Adderley's band. Several of Timmons' compositions written when part of these bands – including "Moanin'", "Dat Dere", and "This Here" – enjoyed commercial success and brought him more attention. In the early and mid-1960s he led a series of piano trios that toured and recorded extensively.
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Daniel Bonade
1896 - 1976 (80 years)
Daniel Bonade was a French classical clarinetist and professor of clarinet. He was the most influential teacher of the first generation of American-born professional clarinetists. Biography Daniel Bonade was born in Geneva, Switzerland on April 4, 1896. His father, Louis Bonade, was a clarinetist and received the Premier Prix from the Paris Conservatory in 1870. His mother, Esther Poissenot, was a pianist and a vocalist.
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Howard Lindsay
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Howard Lindsay, born Herman Nelke, was an American playwright, librettist, director, actor and theatrical producer. He is best known for his writing work as part of the collaboration of Lindsay and Crouse, and for his performance, with his wife Dorothy Stickney, in the long-running play Life with Father.
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Dinu Lipatti
1917 - 1950 (33 years)
Constantin "Dinu" Lipatti was a Romanian classical pianist and composer whose career was cut short by his death from effects related to Hodgkin's disease at age 33. He was elected posthumously to the Romanian Academy. He composed few works, all of which demonstrated a strong influence from Bartok.
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Juliette Alvin
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Juliette Louise Alvin was a French-British cellist, viola da gamba player, and pioneering music therapist. Biograph She was born in Limoges, France, and studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, where she was awarded the Premier Prix d'Excellence and the Mèdaille d'Or. She studied under a master class arrangement with Pablo Casals. Her debut recital took place in 1927 at London's Wigmore Hall.
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Usmar Ismail
1921 - 1971 (50 years)
Usmar Ismail was an Indonesian film director, author, journalist and revolutionary of Minangkabau descent. He is widely regarded as the native Indonesian pioneer of the cinema of Indonesia. Biography Ismail was born in 1921 in Bukittinggi, West Sumatra. His father, Datuk Tumenggung Ismail, taught at the medical school in Padang. His brother Abu Hanifah was also a well-known revolutionary and writer. Ismail attended ASM-A Yogyakarta and later obtained a B.A. in cinematography from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1952.
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Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis
1875 - 1911 (36 years)
Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis was a Lithuanian composer, painter, choirmaster, cultural figure, and writer in Polish. Čiurlionis contributed to symbolism and art nouveau, and was representative of the fin de siècle epoch. He has been considered one of the pioneers of abstract art in Europe. During his short life, he composed about 400 pieces of music and created about 300 paintings, as well as many literary works and poems. The majority of his paintings are housed in the M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum in Kaunas, Lithuania. His works have had a profound influence on modern Lithuanian...
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James Booker
1939 - 1983 (44 years)
James Carroll Booker III was a New Orleans rhythm and blues keyboardist. His 1960 recording "Gonzo" reached No. 43 on the Billboard magazine record chart and No. 3 in R&B, and he toured internationally in the 1970s. After being mainly a rhythm and blues player, Booker later fused this genre with jazz and with popular music such as The Beatles, playing these in his signature backbeat. His influence is profound in the New Orleans music scene, where his renditions and originals are most often performed. Flamboyant, and having an extraordinary technical facility, he was known as "the Black Libera...
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Frank Benson
1858 - 1939 (81 years)
Sir Francis Robert Benson was an English actor-manager. He founded his own company in 1883 and produced all but two of Shakespeare's plays. His thirty-year association with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and the annual Shakespeare Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon laid down foundations for the creation of the Royal Shakespeare Company after his death.
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Caspar Whitney
1864 - 1929 (65 years)
Caspar William Whitney was an American author, editor, explorer, outdoorsman and war correspondent. He originated the concept of the All-American team in college football in 1889 when he worked for Harper's Magazine.
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Paul Ritter
1829 - 1907 (78 years)
Paul Ritter was a German architectural painter and etcher. Biography Ritter was born at Nuremberg. He was deaf from the fourth year of his life. A pupil of Heideloff, he engraved for publishers in Berlin, Stuttgart, and Nuremberg. About 1870 he took up painting in oil. In 1888 the title of royal professor was conferred on him. He died in Nuremberg.
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Lowell Mason
1792 - 1872 (80 years)
Lowell Mason was an American music director and banker who was a leading figure in 19th-century American church music. Lowell composed over 1600 hymn tunes, many of which are often sung today. His best-known work includes an arrangement of Joy to the World and the tune Bethany, which sets the hymn text Nearer, My God, to Thee. Mason also set music to Mary Had A Little Lamb. He is largely credited with introducing music into American public schools, and is considered the first important U.S. music educator. He has also been criticized for helping to largely eliminate the robust tradition of p...
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Ian Hendry
1931 - 1984 (53 years)
Ian Mackendrick Hendry was a British actor. He worked on several British TV series of the 1960s and 1970s, including the lead in the first series of The Avengers and The Lotus Eaters, and played roles in the films The Hill , Repulsion , Get Carter , and Theatre of Blood .
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Joe Farrell
1937 - 1986 (49 years)
Joseph Carl Firrantello , known as Joe Farrell, was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist who primarily performed as a saxophonist and flutist. He is best known for a series of albums under his own name on the CTI record label and for playing in the initial incarnation of Chick Corea's Return to Forever.
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Jock Mahoney
1919 - 1989 (70 years)
Jacques Joseph O'Mahoney , known professionally as Jock Mahoney, was an American actor and stuntman. He starred in two Action/Adventure television series, The Range Rider and Yancy Derringer. He played Tarzan in two feature films and was associated in various capacities with several other Tarzan productions. He was credited variously as Jacques O'Mahoney, Jock O'Mahoney, Jack Mahoney, and finally Jock Mahoney.
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Franco Faccio
1840 - 1891 (51 years)
Francesco Antonio Faccio was an Italian composer and conductor. Born in Verona, he studied music at the Milan Conservatory from 1855 where he was a pupil of Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti and, as scholar William Ashbrook notes, "where he struck up a lifelong friendship with Arrigo Boito, two years his junior" and with whom he was to collaborate in many ways.
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Orlando di Lasso
1533 - 1594 (61 years)
Orlando di Lasso was a composer of the late Renaissance. The chief representative of the mature polyphonic style in the Franco-Flemish school, Lassus stands with William Byrd, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, and Tomás Luis de Victoria as the leading composers of the later Renaissance. Immensely prolific, his music varies considerably in style and genres, which gave him unprecedented popularity throughout Europe.
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Thomas Meighan
1879 - 1936 (57 years)
Thomas Meighan was an American actor of silent films and early talkies. He played several leading-man roles opposite popular actresses of the day, including Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson. At one point he commanded $10,000 per week.
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Franco Alfano
1875 - 1954 (79 years)
Franco Alfano was an Italian composer and pianist, best known today for his opera Risurrezione and for having completed Puccini's opera Turandot in 1926. He had considerable success with several of his own works during his lifetime.
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Alfred Cellier
1844 - 1891 (47 years)
Alfred Cellier was an English composer, orchestrator and conductor. In addition to conducting and music directing the original productions of several of the most famous Gilbert and Sullivan works and writing the overtures to some of them, Cellier conducted at many theatres in London, New York and on tour in Britain, America and Australia. He composed over a dozen operas and other works for the theatre, as well as for orchestra, but his 1886 comic opera, Dorothy, was by far his most successful work. It became the longest-running piece of musical theatre in the nineteenth century.
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Arthur O'Connell
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
Arthur Joseph O'Connell was an American stage, film and television actor, who achieved prominence in character roles in the 1950s. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for both Picnic and Anatomy of a Murder .
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Julius Prüwer
1874 - 1943 (69 years)
Julius Prüwer was an Austrian conductor, pianist and academic teacher. Life Born in Vienna, Prüwer studied piano at the Vienna Conservatory from 1886 to 1891 with Arthur Friedheim and Moriz Rosenthal and music theory with Robert Fuchs, Franz Krenn, and with Johannes Brahms. As a conductor, he was trained by Hans Richter and worked first at the Bielitz Municipal Theater in 1892/93, at the Esseg Municipal Theater in 1893/94, and at the Cologne Opera in 1894/95. From 1895 to 1923, he was Kapellmeister at the Stadttheater Breslau, and from 1913 to 1923, he was also director of the opera there. A...
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Albert Shaw
1857 - 1947 (90 years)
Albert Shaw was an American journalist and academic. Life Born in Shandon, Ohio, to the family of Dr. Griffin M. Shaw, Albert Shaw moved to Iowa in the spring of 1875, where he attended Iowa College specializing in constitutional history and economic science and graduated in 1879. While a student, Shaw also worked as a journalist at the Grinnell Herald. In 1881 he entered Johns Hopkins University as a graduate student.
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Mildred Bailey
1907 - 1951 (44 years)
Mildred Bailey was a Native American jazz singer during the 1930s, known as "The Queen of Swing", "The Rockin' Chair Lady" and "Mrs. Swing". She recorded the songs "For Sentimental Reasons", "It's So Peaceful in the Country", "Doin' The Uptown Lowdown", "Trust in Me", "Where Are You?", "I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart", "Small Fry", "Please Be Kind", "Darn That Dream", "Rockin' Chair", "Blame It on My Last Affair", and "Says My Heart". She had three records that reached number one on the popular charts.
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Mario Bonnard
1889 - 1965 (76 years)
Mario Bonnard was an Italian actor and film director. Career Bonnard was born and died in Rome. He began his cinematic career as an actor becoming a popular romantic lead in numerous silent films made before World War I. In 1917, he ventured into film directing for the first time. Before the arrival of sound films he worked for a period in Germany in films directed by Luis Trenker.
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Alfred E. Green
1889 - 1960 (71 years)
Alfred Edward Green was an American film director. Green entered film in 1912 as an actor for the Selig Polyscope Company. He became an assistant to director Colin Campbell. He then started to direct two-reelers until he started features in 1917.
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Paul Dessau
1894 - 1979 (85 years)
Paul Dessau was a German composer and conductor. He collaborated with Bertolt Brecht and composed incidental music for his plays, and several operas based on them. Biography Dessau was born in Hamburg into a musical family. His grandfather, Moses Berend Dessau , was a cantor in the Hamburg synagogue. His uncle, , was Konzertmeister at the Staatskapelle Berlin; his cousin, Max Winterfeld, became known under the name Jean Gilbert as a composer of operettas; and his second cousin, Robert Gerson Müller-Hartmann, was a composer and collaborator with Ralph Vaughan Williams.
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Al Christie
1881 - 1951 (70 years)
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Tommy Bolin
1951 - 1976 (25 years)
Thomas Richard Bolin was an American guitarist who played with Zephyr , The James Gang , and Deep Purple , in addition to maintaining a notable career as a solo artist and session musician. Career Early years Tommy Bolin was born in Sioux City, Iowa, and began playing with a band called The Miserlous before he was asked to join another band called Denny and The Triumphs in 1964 at age 13. The band included Dave Stokes on lead vocals, Brad Miller on guitar and vocals, Bolin on lead guitar, Steve Bridenbaugh on organ and vocals, Denny Foote on bass, and Brad Larvick on drums. They played a ble...
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Cootie Williams
1911 - 1985 (74 years)
Charles Melvin "Cootie" Williams was an American jazz, jump blues, and rhythm and blues trumpeter. Biography Born in Mobile, Alabama, Williams began his professional career at the age of 14 with the Young Family band, which included saxophonist Lester Young. According to Williams he acquired his nickname as a boy when his father took him to a band concert. When it was over his father asked him what he'd heard and he replied, "Cootie, cootie, cootie."
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Willy Fleckhaus
1925 - 1983 (58 years)
Wilhelm August Fleckhaus was a German designer and art director, perhaps best known as art director of Twen magazine throughout its 1959 to 1970 existence. He was a prolific designer of book covers.
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Jimmie Lunceford
1902 - 1947 (45 years)
James Melvin Lunceford was an American jazz alto saxophonist and bandleader in the swing era. Early life Lunceford was born on a farm in the Evergreen community, west of the Tombigbee River, near Fulton, Mississippi, United States. The farm was owned by his father, James. His mother was Idella Shumpert of Oklahoma City, an organist of "more than average ability". Seven months after James Melvin was born, the family moved to Oklahoma City.
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Lionel Monckton
1861 - 1924 (63 years)
Lionel John Alexander Monckton was an English composer of musical theatre. He became Britain's most popular composer of Edwardian musical comedy in the early years of the 20th century. Life and career
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Professor Longhair
1918 - 1980 (62 years)
Henry Roeland "Roy" Byrd , better known as Professor Longhair or "Fess" for short, was an American singer and pianist who performed New Orleans blues. He was active in two distinct periods, first in the heyday of early rhythm and blues and later in the resurgence of interest in traditional jazz after the founding of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1970. His piano style has been described as "instantly recognizable, combining rumba, mambo, and calypso".
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Efrem Zimbalist
1889 - 1985 (96 years)
Efrem Zimbalist was a Russian and American concert violinist, composer, conductor and director of the Curtis Institute of Music. Early life Efrem Zimbalist Sr. was born on April 9, 1889, O.S., equivalent to April 21, 1889, in the Gregorian calendar, as reported in many newspaper obituaries, in the southwestern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, the son of Jewish parents Maria and Aron Zimbalist , who was a conductor. By the age of nine, Efrem Zimbalist was first violin in his father's orchestra. At age 12 he entered the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and studied under Leopold Auer. He graduated f...
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Jerry Livingston
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Jerry Livingston was an American songwriter and dance orchestra pianist. Life and career Born in Denver, Colorado to Sam and Dora Levinson, Jerry Livingston studied music at the University of Arizona. While there he composed his first score for a college musical. He moved to New York City in the 1930s, initially working as a pianist for dance orchestras. Livingston served in the Army's Special Services division during World War II.
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Doris R. Entwisle
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Al Cohn
1925 - 1988 (63 years)
Al Cohn was an American jazz saxophonist, arranger and composer. He came to prominence in the band of clarinetist Woody Herman and was known for his longtime musical partnership with fellow saxophonist Zoot Sims.
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Hans Steinhoff
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Hans Steinhoff was a German film director, best known for the propaganda films he made in the Nazi era. Life and career Steinhoff started his career as a stage actor in the 1900s and later worked as a stage director. He directed his first silent film Clothes Make the Man, the adaption of a novel by Gottfried Keller, in 1921.
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Luigi Denza
1846 - 1922 (76 years)
Luigi Denza was an Italian composer. Career Denza was born at Castellammare di Stabia, near Naples. He studied music with Saverio Mercadante and Paolo Serrao at the Naples Conservatory. In 1884, he moved to London, taught singing privately and became a professor of singing at the Royal Academy of Music in 1898, where he taught for two decades. He died in London in 1922.
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Nicolas Cleynaerts
1493 - 1542 (49 years)
Nicolas Cleynaerts was a Flemish grammarian and traveler. He was born in Diest, in the Duchy of Brabant. Life Cleynaerts was a follower of Jan Driedo. Educated at the University of Leuven, he became a professor of Latin, which he taught by the conversational method.
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Ferdinand Ries
1784 - 1838 (54 years)
Ferdinand Ries was a German composer. Ries was a friend, pupil and secretary of Ludwig van Beethoven. He composed eight symphonies, a violin concerto, nine piano concertos , three operas, and numerous other works, including 26 string quartets. In 1838 he published a collection of reminiscences of his teacher Beethoven, co-written with Beethoven's friend, Franz Wegeler. Ries' symphonies, some chamber works—most of them with piano—his violin concerto and his piano concertos have been recorded, exhibiting a style which, given his connection to Beethoven, lies between the Classical and early Rom...
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Alfred De Sève
1858 - 1927 (69 years)
Alfred De Sève was a Canadian violinist, composer, and music educator. His compositional output includes works for violin and piano, solo piano, and orchestra; many of which were published by Arthur P. Schmidt and Charles H. Ditson.
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Alice Joyce
1890 - 1955 (65 years)
Alice Joyce Brown was an American actress who appeared in more than 200 films during the 1910s and 1920s. She is known for her roles in the 1923 film The Green Goddess and its 1930 remake of the same name.
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Giuseppe Sarti
1729 - 1802 (73 years)
Giuseppe Sarti was an Italian opera composer. Biography He was born at Faenza. His date of birth is not known, but he was baptised on 1 December 1729. Some earlier sources say he was born on 28 December, but his baptism certificate proves the later date impossible. Already organist at Faenza at age 13, he was invited to receive an education by Padre Martini in Bologna. Resigning his appointment in Faenza in 1750, Sarti devoted himself to the study of dramatic music, becoming director of the Faenza theatre in 1752.
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Reed Hadley
1911 - 1974 (63 years)
Reed Hadley was an American film, television and radio actor. Early life Hadley was born in Petrolia, Texas, to Bert Herring, an oil well driller, and his wife Minnie. Hadley had one sister, Bess Brenner. He was reared in Buffalo, New York, where he attended and graduated from Bennett High School.
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Edward Tyrrel Channing
1790 - 1856 (66 years)
Edward Tyrrel Channing was an American rhetorician. He was a professor at Harvard College, brother to William Ellery Channing and Walter Channing, and cousin of Richard Henry Dana Sr. Biography Channing was born in Newport, Rhode Island, the son of William and Lucy Channing. In 1807 he graduated from Harvard College, and began the practice of law in Boston, but devoted his attention chiefly to literature. From 1818–1819 he was the second editor of the North American Review after William Tudor , and remained a regular contributor through much of his life.
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George Whitefield Chadwick
1854 - 1931 (77 years)
George Whitefield Chadwick was an American composer. Along with John Knowles Paine, Horatio Parker, Amy Beach, Arthur Foote, and Edward MacDowell, he was a representative composer of what is called the Second New England School of American composers of the late 19th century—the generation before Charles Ives. Chadwick's works are influenced by the Realist movement in the arts, characterized by a down-to-earth depiction of people's lives.
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Francisco Tárrega
1852 - 1909 (57 years)
Francisco de Asís Tárrega Eixea was a Spanish composer and classical guitarist of the late Romantic period. He is known for such pieces as Capricho Árabe and Recuerdos de la Alhambra. Biography Tárrega was born on 21 November 1852, in Villarreal, Province of Castellón, Spain. It is said that Francisco's father played flamenco and several other music styles on his guitar; when his father was away working as a watchman at the Convent of San Pascual, Francisco would take his father's guitar and attempt to make the beautiful sounds he had heard. Francisco's nickname as a child was "Quiquet".
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