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,
#13751
Thomas Täglichsbeck
1799 - 1867 (68 years)
Thomas Täglichsbeck was a German violinist and composer. Täglichsbeck was born in Ansbach. His family settled in the region of the Vogtland between Bavaria, Thuringia and Saxony, in 1800. Following violin lessons from his father, Johann Täglichsbeck, young Thomas moved to Munich where he studied with Pietro Rovelli. In 1817 a mass of his, written under the supervision of Josef Gratz, was performed in Munich. That same year, Täglichsbeck became a violinist in the Isarthortheater orchestra. Two years later, at the age of 20, he succeeded Lindpaintner as music director, making him one of the youngest conductors of the theater orchestra in Lower Saxony.
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Hans Schläger
1820 - 1885 (65 years)
Hans Schläger was an Austrian conductor and composer, important in the musical life of Salzburg in the 1860s. He was particularly involved in choral music. Life Schläger was born in Feldkirchen an der Donau, Upper Austria, in 1810. His father Johann Schläger, a teacher, gave him early music lessons, and he was a choirboy at St. Florian Monastery, where he received violin lessons. In Linz he trained from 1836 to 1838 to be a teacher; he became an assistant teacher in Regau, and afterwards in Sankt Florian, where he was the predecessor of Anton Bruckner. .
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Sergei Rozanov
1870 - 1937 (67 years)
Sergei Vasilievich Rozanov was a Russian Empire clarinetist and teacher, considered to be the founder of modern Russian clarinet school. In 1886, he entered Moscow Conservatory, where his teacher was Franz Zimmermann , solo clarinet of Bolshoi theatre. After graduating in 1890, Rozanov began his career as an orchestral musician in different opera theatres of Moscow. In 1894 he was engaged as a second clarinet in Bolshoi theatre, and three years later became the solo clarinet. He kept this place up to 1929. Rozanov also performed frequently as a soloist and chamber musician, he was the first R...
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Gusztáv Szerémi
1877 - 1952 (75 years)
Gusztáv Szerémi was a Hungarian violinist, violist and composer. Szerémi was professor of violin and viola at the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music in Budapest around the turn of the 20th century. His pedagogical works for viola were introduced as the official curriculum of the Academy.
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Muggsy Spanier
1901 - 1967 (66 years)
Francis Joseph "Muggsy" Spanier was an American jazz cornetist based in Chicago. He was a member of the Bucktown Five, pioneers of the "Chicago style" that straddled traditional Dixieland jazz and swing.
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John C. Merrill
John Calhoun Merrill was an American author and professor of journalism. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and taught at a number of other colleges and universities, and was the author of 30 books and over 100 articles in journals, and has been considered one of the leading scholars in journalism during his time. In 2007, a festschrift, Freedom Fighter, was issued in his honor.
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Roland Grubb Kent
1877 - 1952 (75 years)
Roland Grubb Kent was an American educator and a founder of the Linguistic Society of America . He was the first person to translate Marcus Terentius Varro's De Lingua Latina into English. Ken's 1903 doctoral thesis on the history of Thessaly traces the history of the country with particular attention to the times between 600 and 300 BC. Unfortunately, only Chapter V and two appendices were published, and the bulk of his dissertation is currently lost. His Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon is one of the seminal works on the subject.
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George Kingsley Zipf
1902 - 1950 (48 years)
George Kingsley Zipf , was an American linguist and philologist who studied statistical occurrences in different languages. Zipf earned his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees from Harvard University, although he also studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin. He was chairman of the German department and university lecturer at Harvard University. He worked with Chinese and demographics, and much of his effort can explain properties of the Internet, distribution of income within nations, and many other collections of data.
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Henri Ramirez
Henri Ramirez is a French-Brazilian linguist known especially for his research on Arawakan languages and other language families of the Amazonian region. He is currently a professor at the Federal University of Rondônia, Guajará-Mirim.
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David Dowty
David Roach Dowty is a linguist known primarily for his work in semantic and syntactic theory, and especially in Montague grammar and Categorial grammar. Dowty is a professor emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University, and his research interests mainly lie in Semantic and Syntactic Theory, Lexical semantics and Thematic roles, Categorial grammar, and Semantics of Tense and Aspect.
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Uriel Weinreich
1926 - 1967 (41 years)
Uriel Weinreich was a Jewish–American linguist. Life Uriel Weinreich was born in Wilno, Poland , the first child of Max Weinreich and Regina Szabad, to a family that paternally hailed from Courland in Latvia and maternally came from a well-respected and established Wilno Jewish family. He earned his BA, MA, and PhD from Columbia University and went on to teach there, specializing in Yiddish studies, sociolinguistics, and dialectology. He advocated the increased acceptance of semantics and compiled the iconic Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary, published shortly after his death...
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Maria Luisa Zubizarreta
1900 - Present (126 years)
Maria Luisa Zubizarreta is professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Southern California. Education and personal life Zubizarreta was born and raised in Asunción, Paraguay. She obtained her Maîtrise in General Linguistics from Paris 8 University in 1978 and her PhD in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982, with a dissertation entitled On the Relationship of the Lexicon to Syntax. She held various academic positions before arriving at the University of Southern California , where she held a position from 1988 until her retirement.
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Georg Morgenstierne
1892 - 1978 (86 years)
Georg Valentin von Munthe af Morgenstierne was a Norwegian professor of linguistics with the University of Oslo . He specialized in Indo-Iranian languages. Studies During the years 1923 to 1971, Morgenstierne carried out fieldwork in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Iran. In 1924, he undertook the first of his two major linguistic expeditions. He arrived in Kabul with a personal letter of introduction to the King of Afghanistan, from the King of Norway. Together with studying the languages, Morgenstierne collected remarkable scientific materials from the culture of the regional people, like ...
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Morton Feldman
1926 - 1987 (61 years)
Morton Feldman was an American composer. A major figure in 20th-century classical music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown. Feldman's works are characterized by notational innovations that he developed to create his characteristic sound: rhythms that seem to be free and floating, pitch shadings that seem softly unfocused, a generally quiet and slowly evolving music, and recurring asymmetric patterns. His later works, after 1977, also explore extrem...
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Leon Klepper
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Leon Klepper was a Romanian composer of classical music. Born to a Jewish family in Iași, Klepper studied in Vienna with Joseph Marx, in Berlin with Franz Schreker and with Paul Dukas and Alfred Cortot in Paris, where he lived until 1939. From 1949 to 1959, he was a composition professor at the National University of Music Bucharest. Afterwards, he lived as a freelance composer and music teacher in Freiburg im Breisgau where he died in 1991 aged 91.
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Yechezkel Kutscher
1909 - 1971 (62 years)
Edward Yechezkel Kutscher or Yechezkel Kutscher was an Israeli philologist and Hebrew linguist. Biography Kutscher was born in 1909 in Topoľčany, Slovakia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied at the yeshiva in his home town and, later, in Frankfurt. In 1931 he emigrated to Mandatory Palestine and continued with his studies at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva and at a Mizrachi Movement teachers seminary. For several years subsequently, he taught at various schools in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
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Tadeusz Lehr-Spławiński
1891 - 1965 (74 years)
Tadeusz Lehr-Spławiński was a Polish linguist, scholar, and professor of Slavonic studies. He was twice elected rector of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków before and after the Nazi German occupation of Poland.
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Witold Taszycki
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Witold Taszycki was a Polish linguist. He specialized in Polish onomastics and historical dialectology. Life and career Taszycki was born on 20 June 1898 in Zagórzany, Austria-Hungary. Between 1917 and 1921, he was a student of Polish and Slavic philology at Jagiellonian University, where he started to work as an assistant after defending his doctorate in 1922. He received his postdoctoral degree in 1925. He was employed as a lecturer at Stefan Batory University of Wilno and awarded a professorship at Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów . He remained in Lwów after the outbreak of World War II ...
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Charles Otto Blagden
1864 - 1949 (85 years)
Charles Otto Blagden was an English Orientalist and linguist who specialised in the Malay, Mon and Pyu languages. He is particularly known for his studies of Burmese epigraphic inscriptions in the Mon and Pyu scripts.
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George Stanley Turnbull
1882 - 1977 (95 years)
George Stanley Turnbull was an English-American scholar and educator. He began a career of newspaper work in 1894 and helped found the University of Oregon School of Journalism in 1917, later serving as acting dean and, from 1944 to 1948, as dean. He founded and edited Oregon Exchanges, a newspaper for Oregon's "newspaper folk," which was at least initially produced by students at the School of Journalism.
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Hjalmar Frisk
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Hjalmar Frisk was a Swedish linguist and etymologist in Indo-European studies. He was also rector of the University of Göteborg from 1951 to 1966. Early on, he became interested in Indo-European studies. Thus, as early as 1927, he published a translation of the historical account The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written in Greek under the title Περίπλους τῆς Ἐρυθρᾶς θαλάσσης.
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David Dodge Boyden
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
David Dodge Boyden was an American musicologist and violinist specializing in organology and performance practice. Education Boyden received a BA and MA from Harvard University; he also studied at Columbia University and Hartt School of Music .
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Lee Hee-seung
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
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George T. Flom
1871 - 1960 (89 years)
George Tobias Flom was an American professor of linguistics and author of numerous reference books. Background George Tobias Flom was born in Utica, Dane County, Wisconsin. His grandfather had immigrated to the U.S. from Aurland in Sogn og Fjordane in Norway at the beginning of the 1840s. Flom studied at the University of Wisconsin in Madison from 1889 to 1893, received his master's degree from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1894, and studied in Copenhagen and Leipzig from 1898 to 1899. He received his doctorate from Columbia University in 1900 for a thesis on the Nordic inf...
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Ruben Nirvi
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Ruben Erik Nirvi was a Finnish linguist. He was the deputy of Finnish philology at the University of Helsinki from 1955 to 1957 and the personal additional professor of the Finnish language from 1957 to 1972. He was a special expert on Finnish, especially the Ingrian dialects. He defended his thesis Sanankieltoja ja niihin liittyviä kielenilmiöitä itämerensuomalaisissa kielissä: Riista- ja kotieläintalous .
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Vilém Mathesius
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Vilém Mathesius was a Czech linguist, literary historian and co-founder of the Prague Linguistic Circle. He is considered one of the founders of structural functionalism in linguistics. Mathesius was the editor-in-chief of two linguistic journals, Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague and Slovo a slovesnost , and the co-founder of a third, Nové Athenaeum. His extensive publications in these journals and elsewhere cover a range of topics, including the history of English literature, syntax, Czech stylistics, and cultural activism.
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Harold Orton
1898 - 1975 (77 years)
Harold Orton was a British dialectologist and professor of English Language and Medieval Literature at the University of Leeds. Early life Orton was born in Byers Green, County Durham, on 23 October 1898 and was educated at King James I Grammar School, in Bishop Auckland, and at the University of Durham. He left university in 1917 to enrol in the Durham Light Infantry in which he was commissioned as a lieutenant. He was wounded severely in 1918, never regaining full use of his right arm, and was invalided out of the army in 1919. He insisted to army surgeons that his arm not be amputated.
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Irving Fine
1914 - 1962 (48 years)
Irving Gifford Fine was an American composer. Fine's work assimilated neoclassical, romantic, and serial elements. Composer Virgil Thomson described Fine's "unusual melodic grace" while Aaron Copland noted the "elegance, style, finish and...convincing continuity" of Fine's music.
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Milton Mayer
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Milton Sanford Mayer , a journalist and educator, was best known for his long-running column in The Progressive magazine, founded by Robert M. La Follette Sr., in Madison, Wisconsin. Early life Mayer, reared in Reform Judaism, was born in Chicago, the son of Morris Samuel Mayer and Louise . He graduated from Englewood High School, where he received a classical education with an emphasis on Latin and languages. He studied at the University of Chicago but did not earn a degree; in 1942, he told the Saturday Evening Post that he was "placed on permanent probation in 1928 for throwing beer bottle...
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Emil Votoček
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Emil Votoček was a Czech chemist, composer and music theorist. He is noted for his chemistry textbooks and multilingual dictionaries in both chemistry and music. Chemistry career Votoček studied at the Czech Institute of Technology later in Mulhouse and received his PhD with Bernhard Tollens at the University of Göttingen for his chemistry of sugar.
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Buckminster Fuller
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion" , "ephemeralization", "synergetics", and "tensegrity".
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Vittorio Giannini
1903 - 1966 (63 years)
Vittorio Giannini was an American neoromantic composer of operas, songs, symphonies, and band works. Life and work Giannini was born in Philadelphia on October 19, 1903. He began as a violinist under the tutelage of his mother Antonietta Briglia; he would go on to study violin and composition at the Milan Conservatory on scholarship, and then to take his graduate degree at the Juilliard School. He returned to Juilliard to teach, moving on to the Manhattan School of Music, the Juilliard School of Music, and the Curtis Institute of Music. His students included Herbie Hancock, Nicolas Flagello, David Amram, Mark Bucci, Alfred Reed, Anthony Iannaccone, M.
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Robert Livingston Allen
1916 - 1982 (66 years)
Robert Livinston Allen , was an American professor of linguistics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University known for his development of Sector Analysis, a grammatical system used in the teaching and analysis of languages in the United States and around the world.
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Hubert Pernot
1870 - 1946 (76 years)
Hubert Octave Pernot was a French linguist, specializing in Modern Greek studies. He studied at the École des langues orientales in Paris as a pupil of and Jean Psichari, and from 1895 to 1912 worked as a répétiteur of Modern Greek at the school. In 1912 he became a lecturer at the University of Paris, where from 1930 he served as a professor of post-classical and Modern Greek and of neo-Hellenic literature.
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Günter Raphael
1903 - 1960 (57 years)
Günter Raphael was a German composer. Born in Berlin, Raphael was the grandson of composer Albert Becker. His first symphony was premiered by Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1926 in Leipzig with the Gewandhaus Orchestra. From 1926 to 1934 he taught in Leipzig, but illness and the rise of Fascism – he was declared a "half-Jew" – made this difficult for him. He received the Franz Liszt Award for composition in 1948. His students include Kurt Hessenberg.
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Cedric Thorpe Davie
1913 - 1983 (70 years)
Cedric Thorpe Davie OBE was a musician and composer, most notably of film scores such as The Green Man in 1956. A high proportion of his film and documentary music and his concert pieces have a Scottish theme.
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Maurice Grammont
1866 - 1946 (80 years)
Maurice Grammont was a French linguist. He studied linguistics in Paris as a student of Michel Bréal, Arsène Darmesteter, Jules Gilliéron, Gaston Paris and Ferdinand de Saussure. Also, he studied Indo-European languages in Germany; at Freiburg as a pupil of Rudolf Thurneysen and at the University of Berlin under Johannes Schmidt. From 1892 taught classes in linguistics, Gothic and Lithuanian at the Faculty of Letters in Dijon. In 1895 he was appointed chair of grammar and philology at the Faculty of Letters in Montpellier, where he remained up until his retirement in 1939.
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Carl Seemann
1910 - 1983 (73 years)
Carl Seemann was a German church musician, pianist, piano teacher and director of the Musikhochschule Freiburg. Life Born in Bremen, after the Abitur Seemann initially vacillated between studying theology and music. He decided to study church music in Leipzig. His teachers were Karl Straube, Günther Ramin, Kurt Thomas and Carl Adolf Martienssen. After his exams, Seemann worked as organist in Flensburg and Verden. From 1935 he devoted himself mainly to his career as a pianist and to teaching - Seemann subsequently held professorships and master classes in Kiel, Strasbourg and Freiburg im Breisgau.
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Kita Chkhenkeli
1895 - 1963 (68 years)
Kita "Petre" Chkhenkeli was a Georgian linguist and lexicographer based in Germany and Switzerland. He is best known for his Georgisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch, which is "widely regarded as the most comprehensive Georgian dictionary in any western language."
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Ivan Monteiro de Barros Lins
1904 - 1975 (71 years)
Ivan Monteiro de Barros Lins was a Brazilian writer and intellectual. He was born in Belo Horizonte, the son of Edmundo Pereira Lins and Maria Leonor Monteiro de Barros Lins. He studied at Colégio Anglo-Americano and Colégio Arnaldo in Belo Horizonte, before moving to Rio de Janeiro in 1917, where he studied medicine. He was a major promoter of positivist philosophy in Brazil, and frequently wrote and lectured on the subject.
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Julian E. Levi
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Julian Edwin Levi was an American painter. He was a 1968 Resident of the American Academy in Rome. He should not be confused with the New York art dealer Julien Levy, who introduced Salvador Dalí to American patrons at his Julien Levy Gallery.
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Slam Stewart
1914 - 1987 (73 years)
Leroy Eliot "Slam" Stewart was an American jazz double bass player, whose trademark style was his ability to bow the bass and simultaneously hum or sing an octave higher. He was a violinist before switching to bass at the age of 20.
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Kurt Baschwitz
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
Siegfried Kurt Baschwitz , was a journalist, a professor of press, propaganda and public opinion, scholar on newspapers, and crowd psychology. Baschwitz, who, as was customary in German middle class, was known by his second name Kurt, was a German Jew and a friend of Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank. Baschwitz was called upon as an expert to advise on the publication of the Diary of Anne Frank and later again authenticate it.
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Charles Mingus
1922 - 1979 (57 years)
Charles Mingus Jr. was an American jazz upright bassist, composer, bandleader, pianist, and author. A major proponent of collective improvisation, he is considered to be one of the greatest jazz musicians and composers in history, with a career spanning three decades and collaborations with other jazz greats such as Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Eric Dolphy. Mingus's work ranged from advanced bebop and avant-garde jazz with small and midsize ensembles, to pioneering the post-bop style on seminal recordings like Pithecanthropus Erectus and Mingus Ah Um , and progressive big b...
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Isaak Revzin
1923 - 1974 (51 years)
Isaak Iosifovic Revzin was a Russian linguist and semiotician associated with the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School. Life Isaac Revzin was born in Istanbul. He worked at the Institute of Foreign Languages. A structural linguist, he proposed that linguistics be developed as a formal axiomatic theory. Despite the fact that he was a specialist in machine translation, he only saw a computer once in his life. He also wrote in collaboration with his wife, Olga Revzina. He died in Moscow.
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Maurice Coindreau
1892 - 1990 (98 years)
Maurice-Edgar Coindreau was a literary critic and translator of fiction from English into French and Spanish. He is notable for having introduced many canonical American authors of the 20th century—such as William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway—to the French-speaking public.
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William Lovelock
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
William Lovelock was an English classical composer and pedagogue who spent many years in Australia. He was the first Director of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music in Brisbane, and later became the chief music critic for The Courier-Mail newspaper while developing an independent career as a composer.
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Katharine Lloyd-Williams
1896 - 1973 (77 years)
Katharine Georgina Lloyd-Williams CBE was a British anaesthetist, general practitioner and medical educator. She was a consultant anaesthetist at the Royal Free Hospital from 1934 and dean of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine from 1945, retiring from both posts in 1962.
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Robert Reitz
1884 - 1951 (67 years)
Robert Karl Friedrich Reitz was a Swiss violinist and university lecturer. He was concert master of the Staatskapelle Weimar, first violinist of the Reitz Quartet and professor at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar.
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Peter C. Lutkin
1858 - 1931 (73 years)
Peter Christian Lutkin was an American organist, choral conductor, and composer. Career Peter Lutkin was born in Thompsonville, Wisconsin on March 27, 1858. His parents, Peter Christian and Hannah Lutkin, emigrated to the U.S. from Denmark in 1844. He attended Chicago public schools and was a chorister and organist at St. Peter and St. Paul's Episcopal Church. At age thirteen he began formal music training, studying organ with Clarence Eddy, piano with Regina Watson, and theory with Frederick Grant Gleason.
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