The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#13751
René Lévesque
1922 - 1987 (65 years)
René Lévesque was a Canadian politician and journalist who served as the 23rd premier of Quebec from 1976 to 1985. He was the first Québécois political leader since Confederation to attempt, through a referendum, to negotiate the political independence of Quebec. Starting his career as a reporter, and radio and television host, he later became known for his eminent role in Quebec's nationalization of hydro, and as an ardent defender of Quebec sovereignty. He was the founder of the Parti Québécois, and before that, a Liberal minister in the Lesage government from 1960 to 1966.
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Agop Dilâçar
1895 - 1979 (84 years)
Agop Dilâçar was a Turkish-Armenian linguist who specialized in Turkic languages and the first Secretary General and head specialist of the Turkish Language Association. He created the Latin-based modern Turkish alphabet and was proficient in 12 languages, and in addition to Armenian and Turkish, Dilâçar knew English, French, Greek, Spanish, Azerbaijani, Latin, German, Russian and Bulgarian.
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Wilhelm Schmidt
1868 - 1954 (86 years)
Wilhelm Schmidt SVD was a German-Austrian Catholic priest, linguist and ethnologist. He presided over the Fourth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences that was held at Vienna in 1952.
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Nicholas Poppe
1897 - 1991 (94 years)
Nicholas N. Poppe was an important Russian linguist. He is also known as Nikolaus Poppe, with his first name in its German form. He is often cited as N.N. Poppe in academic publications. Poppe was a leading specialist in the Mongolic languages and the hypothetical Altaic language family to which the Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic languages belong. Poppe was open-minded toward the inclusion of Korean in Altaic, but regarded the evidence for the inclusion of Korean as weaker than that for the inclusion of Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic.
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Walter William Skeat
1835 - 1912 (77 years)
Walter William Skeat, was a British philologist and Anglican deacon. The pre-eminent British philologist of his time, he was instrumental in developing the English language as a higher education subject in the United Kingdom.
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Charles Bean
1879 - 1968 (89 years)
Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean , usually identified as C. E. W. Bean, was a historian and one of Australia's official war correspondents. He was editor and principal author of the 12-volume Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, and a primary advocate for establishing the Australian War Memorial .
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Henry Fairfield Osborn
1857 - 1935 (78 years)
Henry Fairfield Osborn, Sr. was an American paleontologist, geologist and eugenics advocate. He was the president of the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years and a cofounder of the American Eugenics Society.
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Robert R. McCormick
1880 - 1955 (75 years)
Robert Rutherford "Colonel" McCormick was an American lawyer, businessman and anti-war activist. A member of the McCormick family of Chicago, McCormick became a lawyer, Republican Chicago alderman, distinguished U.S. Army officer in World War I, and eventually owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune newspaper. A leading Republican and isolationist; McCormick opposed the increase in federal power brought about by the New Deal and later opposed American entry into World War II. His legacy includes what is now the McCormick Foundation philanthropic organization.
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Charles Cotton
1630 - 1687 (57 years)
Charles Cotton was an English poet and writer, best known for translating the work of Michel de Montaigne from French, for his contributions to The Compleat Angler, and for the influential The Compleat Gamester attributed to him.
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Jean-Paul Marat
1743 - 1793 (50 years)
Jean-Paul Marat was a French political theorist, physician, and scientist. A journalist and politician during the French Revolution, he was a vigorous defender of the sans-culottes, a radical voice, and published his views in pamphlets, placards and newspapers. His periodical L'Ami du peuple made him an unofficial link with the radical Jacobin group that came to power after June 1793.
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Cole Porter
1891 - 1964 (73 years)
Cole Albert Porter was an American composer and songwriter. Many of his songs became standards noted for their witty, urbane lyrics, and many of his scores found success on Broadway and in film. Born to a wealthy family in Indiana, Porter defied his grandfather's wishes for him to practice law and took up music as a profession. Classically trained, he was drawn to musical theatre. After a slow start, he began to achieve success in the 1920s, and by the 1930s he was one of the major songwriters for the Broadway musical stage. Unlike many successful Broadway composers, Porter wrote the lyrics a...
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James Larkin
1876 - 1947 (71 years)
James Larkin , sometimes known as Jim Larkin or Big Jim, was an Irish republican, socialist and trade union leader. He was one of the founders of the Irish Labour Party along with James Connolly and William O'Brien, and later the founder of the Irish Worker League , as well as the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union and the Workers' Union of Ireland . Along with Connolly and Jack White, he was also a founder of the Irish Citizen Army . Larkin was a leading figure in the Syndicalist movement.
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Lev Ivanov
1834 - 1901 (67 years)
Lev Ivanovich Ivanov was a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer and later, Second Balletmaster of the Imperial Ballet. As a performer with the Imperial Ballet, he achieved prominence after performing as an understudy in a benefit performance of La Fille Mal Gardée. He is most famous as the choreographer of Acts II and IV of Swan Lake, which include the Dance of the Little Swans, Act II of Cinderella, and The Nutcracker, which he choreographed alongside Marius Petipa.
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Lorenzo de' Medici
1449 - 1492 (43 years)
Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici , known as Lorenzo the Magnificent , was an Italian statesman, banker, de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic, and the most powerful and enthusiastic patron of Renaissance culture in Italy. He was a magnate, diplomat, politician and patron of scholars, artists, and poets. As a patron, he is best known for his sponsorship of artists such as Botticelli and Michelangelo. He held the balance of power within the Italic League, an alliance of states that stabilized political conditions on the Italian peninsula for decades, and his life coincided with the mature phase of the Italian Renaissance and the Golden Age of Florence.
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Dmitri Shostakovich
1906 - 1975 (69 years)
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist who became internationally known after the premiere of his First Symphony in 1926 and was regarded throughout his life as a major composer.
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Hrachia Acharian
1876 - 1953 (77 years)
Hrachia Acharian was an Armenian linguist, lexicographer, etymologist, and philologist. An Istanbul Armenian, Acharian studied at local Armenian schools and at the Sorbonne, under Antoine Meillet, and the University of Strasbourg, under Heinrich Hübschmann. He then taught in various Armenian communities in the Russian Empire and Iran before settling in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1923, working at Yerevan State University until his death.
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Béla Bartók
1881 - 1945 (64 years)
Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer, pianist and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as Hungary's greatest composers. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became known as ethnomusicology.
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Edward Lhuyd
1660 - 1709 (49 years)
Edward Lhuyd was a Welsh naturalist, botanist, herbalist, alchemist, scientist, linguist, geographer and antiquary. He is also named in a Latinate form as Eduardus Luidius. Life Lhuyd was born in 1660, in Loppington, Shropshire, England, the illegitimate son of Edward Lloyd of Llanforda, Oswestry, and Bridget Pryse of Llansantffraid, near Talybont, Cardiganshire in 1660. His family belonged to the gentry of south-west Wales. Though well-established, the family was not wealthy. His father experimented with agriculture and industry in a manner that impinged on the new science of the day. The ...
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Gustave Boulanger
1824 - 1888 (64 years)
Gustave Clarence Rodolphe Boulanger was a French figurative painter and academic artist and teacher known for his Classical and Orientalist subjects. Education and career The Néo-Grecs and the Prix de Rome Boulanger was born in Paris in 1824. He never knew his father, and when his mother's death left him orphaned at the age of fourteen, he became the ward of his uncle, Constant Desbrosses, who in 1840 sent him to study first under the history painter Pierre-Jules Jollivet and then at the atelier of Paul Delaroche, where Boulanger met and befriended his fellow student Jean-Léon Gérôme.
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Cecil B. DeMille
1881 - 1959 (78 years)
Cecil Blount DeMille was an American filmmaker and actor. Between 1914 and 1958, he made 70 features, both silent and sound films. He is acknowledged as a founding father of American cinema and the most commercially successful producer-director in film history. His films were distinguished by their epic scale and by his cinematic showmanship. His silent films included social dramas, comedies, Westerns, farces, morality plays, and historical pageants. He was an active Freemason and member of Prince of Orange Lodge #16 in New York City.
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Theodore Sturgeon
1918 - 1985 (67 years)
Theodore Sturgeon was an American fiction author of primarily fantasy, science fiction, and horror, as well as a critic. He wrote approximately 400 reviews and more than 120 short stories, 11 novels, and several scripts for Star Trek: The Original Series.
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Hermann Osthoff
1847 - 1909 (62 years)
Hermann Osthoff was a German linguist. He was involved in Indo-European studies and the Neogrammarian school. He is known for formulating Osthoff's law, and published widely on Indo-European word-formation and morphology.
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Sergei Prokofiev
1891 - 1953 (62 years)
Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor who later worked in the Soviet Union. As the creator of acknowledged masterpieces across numerous music genres, he is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. His works include such widely heard pieces as the March from The Love for Three Oranges, the suite Lieutenant Kijé, the ballet Romeo and Juliet—from which "Dance of the Knights" is taken—and Peter and the Wolf. Of the established forms and genres in which he worked, he created—excluding juvenilia—seven completed operas, seven symphonies, eight...
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Giacomo Meyerbeer
1791 - 1864 (73 years)
Giacomo Meyerbeer was a German opera composer, "the most frequently performed opera composer during the nineteenth century, linking Mozart and Wagner". With his 1831 opera Robert le diable and its successors, he gave the genre of grand opera 'decisive character'. Meyerbeer's grand opera style was achieved by his merging of German orchestra style with Italian vocal tradition. These were employed in the context of sensational and melodramatic libretti created by Eugène Scribe and were enhanced by the up-to-date theatre technology of the Paris Opéra. They set a standard which helped to maintain ...
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Eino Leino
1878 - 1926 (48 years)
Eino Leino was a Finnish poet and journalist who is considered one of the pioneers of Finnish poetry and a national poet of Finland. His poems combine modern and Finnish folk elements. Much of his work is in the style of the Kalevala and folk songs in general. Nature, love, and despair are frequent themes in Leino's work. He is beloved and widely read in Finland today.
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César Franck
1822 - 1890 (68 years)
César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck was a French Romantic composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher born in present-day Belgium. He was born in Liège . He gave his first concerts there in 1834 and studied privately in Paris from 1835, where his teachers included Anton Reicha. After a brief return to Belgium, and a disastrous reception of an early oratorio Ruth, he moved to Paris, where he married and embarked on a career as teacher and organist. He gained a reputation as a formidable musical improviser, and travelled widely within France to demonstrate new instruments built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll.
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Rita Hayworth
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Rita Hayworth was an American actress. She achieved fame during the 1940s as one of the era's top stars, appearing in 61 films over 37 years. The press coined the term "The Love Goddess" to describe Hayworth after she had become the most glamorous screen idol of the 1940s. She was the top pin-up girl for GIs during World War II.
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Antonio de Nebrija
1444 - 1522 (78 years)
Antonio de Nebrija was the most influential Spanish humanist of his era. He wrote poetry, commented on literary works, and encouraged the study of classical languages and literature, but his most important contributions were in the fields of grammar and lexicography. Nebrija was the author of the Spanish Grammar and the first dictionary of the Spanish language . His grammar is the first published grammar study of any modern European language. His chief works were published and republished many times during and after his life and his scholarship had a great influence for more than a century, ...
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Arthur Sullivan
1842 - 1900 (58 years)
Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan was an English composer. He is best known for 14 operatic collaborations with the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, including H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado. His works include 24 operas, 11 major orchestral works, ten choral works and oratorios, two ballets, incidental music to several plays, and numerous church pieces, songs, and piano and chamber pieces. His hymns and songs include "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and "The Lost Chord".
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Willy Ley
1906 - 1969 (63 years)
Willy Otto Oskar Ley was a German and American science writer and proponent of cryptozoology. The crater Ley on the far side of the Moon is named in his honor. Early life and Berlin years Willy Otto Oskar Ley was the son of Julius Otto Ley, a traveling merchant, and Frida May, the daughter of a Lutheran sexton. Ley grew up in his native Berlin during the First World War under the supervision of two aunts. When war erupted his father was in Great Britain. Consequently, he spent the remainder of the war at a detention camp on the Isle of Man. Meanwhile, his mother worked as milliner in a di...
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David Smith
1906 - 1965 (59 years)
Roland David Smith was an influential and innovative American abstract expressionist sculptor and painter, best known for creating large steel abstract geometric sculptures. Born in Decatur, Indiana, Smith initially pursued painting, receiving training at the Art Students League in New York from 1926 to 1930. However, his artistic journey took a transformative turn in the early 1930s when he shifted his focus to sculpture.
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Vasili Eroshenko
1890 - 1952 (62 years)
Vasili Yakovlevich Eroshenko was a blind writer, translator, esperantist, linguist, traveler, poet and teacher. He wrote in Esperanto and Japanese. Early life At the age of four, he contracted measles and as a result, became blind.
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Alfredo Trombetti
1866 - 1929 (63 years)
Alfredo Trombetti , was an Italian linguist active in the early 20th century. Career overview Trombetti was a professor at the University of Bologna. He was a member of the Italian Academy. He is best known as an advocate of the doctrine of monogenesis, according to which all of the world's languages go back to a single common ancestral language. His arguments for monogenesis were first presented in his book L'unità d'origine del linguaggio, published in 1905. This doctrine is still extremely controversial.
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Johann Strauss II
1825 - 1899 (74 years)
Johann Baptist Strauss II , also known as Johann Strauss Jr., the Younger or the Son , was an Austrian composer of light music, particularly dance music and operettas as well as a violinist. He composed over 500 waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, and other types of dance music, as well as several operettas and a ballet. In his lifetime, he was known as "The Waltz King", and was largely responsible for the popularity of the waltz in Vienna during the 19th century. Some of Johann Strauss's most famous works include "The Blue Danube", "Kaiser-Walzer" , "Tales from the Vienna Woods", "Frühlingsstimmen", and the "Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka".
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Giorgi Akhvlediani
1887 - 1973 (86 years)
Giorgi Akhvlediani was a Georgian linguist whow was member of the Georgian Academy of Sciences and a corresponding member of Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union from 1939. He was one of the founders of the Tbilisi State University . Honored Scientist of the Georgian SSR . A member of the International Society of Experimental Phonetics and Linguistic Society of America . A member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1942.
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George Cukor
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
George Dewey Cukor was an American film director and producer. He mainly concentrated on comedies and literary adaptations. His career flourished at RKO when David O. Selznick, the studio's Head of Production, assigned Cukor to direct several of RKO's major films, including What Price Hollywood? , A Bill of Divorcement , Our Betters , and Little Women . When Selznick moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1933, Cukor followed and directed Dinner at Eight and David Copperfield for Selznick, and Romeo and Juliet and Camille for Irving Thalberg.
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Renato Guttuso
1911 - 1987 (76 years)
Renato Guttuso was an Italian painter and politician. His best-known works include Flight from Etna , Crucifixion and La Vucciria . Guttuso also designed for the theatre and did illustrations for books. Those for Elizabeth David’s Italian Food , introduced him to many in the English-speaking world. A fierce anti-Fascist, "he developed out of Expressionism and the harsh light of his native land to paint landscapes and social commentary".
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Nadia Boulanger
1887 - 1979 (92 years)
Juliette Nadia Boulanger was a French music teacher and conductor. She taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century, and also performed occasionally as a pianist and organist.
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Eugen Dieth
1893 - 1956 (63 years)
Eugen Dieth was a Swiss linguist, phonetician and dialectologist. He is well known for his work in English and German phonetics, and for co-initiating the Survey of English Dialects. Biography Eugen Dieth studied General Linguistics, English and German at the University of Zurich and the University of Geneva. He earned his PhD in 1919 with a dissertation on Middle English syntax. Between 1922 and 1927 he was lecturer in German in Aberdeen. In 1927 he became Professor extraordinarius and in 1947 Professor ordinarius for English, Old Norse and General Phonetics at the University of Zurich. He founded the Phonetics Laboratory of the University of Zurich in 1935.
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Richard Rodgers
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Richard Charles Rodgers was an American composerr who worked primarily in musical theater. With 43 Broadway musicals and over 900 songs to his credit, Rodgers was one of the most well-known American composers of the 20th century, and his compositions had a significant influence on popular music.
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François Couperin
1668 - 1733 (65 years)
François Couperin was a French Baroque composer, organist and harpsichordist. He was known as Couperin le Grand to distinguish him from other members of the musically talented Couperin family. Life Couperin was born in Paris, into a prominent musical family. His father Charles was organist at the Church of Saint-Gervais in the city, a position previously held by Charles's brother Louis Couperin, the esteemed keyboard virtuoso and composer whose career was cut short by an early death. As a boy François must have received his first music lessons from his father, but Charles died in 1679 leavi...
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Gabriel Ferrater
1922 - 1972 (50 years)
Gabriel Ferrater i Soler was an author, translator and scholar of linguistics of the sixties who wrote in Catalan language. His poetical work is one of the most important among the authors of post-war Catalonia and he continues to exert a great deal of influence over authors nowadays. He published three collections of poems: Da nuces pueris , Menja't una cama and Teoria dels cossos , consequently compiled into a single volume called Les dones i els dies , which was a milestone in Catalan literature.
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Ľudovít Štúr
1815 - 1856 (41 years)
Ludevít Štúr , also known as Ľudovít Velislav Štúr, was a Slovak revolutionary, politician, and writer. As a leader of the Slovak national revival in the 19th century, and the author of the Slovak language standard, he is lauded as one of the most important figures in Slovak history.
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Barbara Stanwyck
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Barbara Stanwyck was an American actress, model and dancer. A stage, film, and television star, during her 60-year professional career she was known for her strong, realistic screen presence and versatility. She was a favorite of directors, including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang, and Frank Capra, and made 85 films in 38 years before turning to television.
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Gotthelf Bergsträsser
1886 - 1933 (47 years)
Gotthelf Bergsträsser was a German linguist specializing in Semitic studies, generally considered to be one of the greatest of the twentieth century. Bergsträsser was initially a teacher of classical languages before deciding to approach Semitic.
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Jan de Vries
1890 - 1964 (74 years)
Jan Pieter Marie Laurens de Vries was a Dutch philologist, linguist, religious studies scholar, folklorist, educator, writer, editor and public official who specialized in Germanic studies. A polyglot, de Vries studied Dutch, German, Sanskrit and Pali at the University of Amsterdam from 1907 to 1913, and gained a PhD in Nordic languages from the University of Leiden in 1915 with great distinction. Subsequently, authoring a number of important works on a variety of subjects, de Vries was in 1926 appointed Chair of Ancient Germanic Linguistics and Philology at the University of Leiden. In subse...
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Paul Hindemith
1895 - 1963 (68 years)
Paul Hindemith was a German and American composer, music theorist, teacher, violist and conductor. He founded the Amar Quartet in 1921, touring extensively in Europe. As a composer, he became a major advocate of the Neue Sachlichkeit style of music in the 1920s, with compositions such as Kammermusik, including works with viola and viola d'amore as solo instruments in a neo-Bachian spirit. Other notable compositions include his song cycle Das Marienleben , Der Schwanendreher for viola and orchestra , the opera Mathis der Maler , the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber , and the oratorio When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd , a requiem based on Walt Whitman's poem.
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Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
1844 - 1908 (64 years)
Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was a Russian composer, a member of the group of composers known as The Five. He was a master of orchestration. His best-known orchestral compositions—Capriccio Espagnol, the Russian Easter Festival Overture, and the symphonic suite Scheherazade—are staples of the classical music repertoire, along with suites and excerpts from some of his 15 operas. Scheherazade is an example of his frequent use of fairy-tale and folk subjects.
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Edward Heyman
1907 - 1981 (74 years)
Edward Heyman was an American lyricist and producer, best known for his lyrics to "Body and Soul," "When I Fall in Love," and "For Sentimental Reasons." He also contributed to a number of songs for films.
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Alexander Korda
1893 - 1956 (63 years)
Sir Alexander Korda was a Hungarian–born British film director, producer and screenwriter, who founded his own film production studios and film distribution company. Born in Hungary, where he began his career, he worked briefly in the Austrian and German film industries during the era of silent films, before being based in Hollywood from 1926 to 1930 for the first of his two brief periods there . The change led to a divorce from his first wife, the Hungarian film actress María Corda, who was unable to make the transition from silent films to "talkies" because of her Hungarian accent.
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