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,
#13801
Henry Brinley Richards
1819 - 1885 (66 years)
Henry Brinley Richards was a Welsh composer, who also published some works under the pseudonym 'Carl Luini'. Richards was born in Hall Street, Carmarthen, his father being organist at St Peter's Church in the town and an organiser of local musical events. Richards won a prize at the Gwent-Morgannwg Eisteddfod of 1834, held at Cardiff, for his arrangement of the popular folk song, "The Ash Grove". As a result, he received the patronage of the Duke of Newcastle; this enabled him to study at the Royal Academy of Music. After completing his studies, he went to Paris where he became a pupil of Frédéric Chopin.
Go to Profile#13802
Leroy Robertson
1896 - 1971 (75 years)
Leroy Robertson was an American composer and music educator. Robertson was born in Fountain Green, Utah. One of his earliest instructors was Anthony C. Lund. He graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music with a certificate in public school music and diplomas in composition, violin , and piano in 1923, the same year he was awarded the Endicott prize for "Overture in E Minor". Following his graduation, Robertson taught music at North Cache High School in Richmond, Utah and at Pleasant Grove High School in Pleasant Grove, Utah, where he also supervised music in the Alpine School Dist...
Go to Profile#13803
Richard Tucker
1884 - 1942 (58 years)
Richard Tucker was an American actor. Tucker was born in Brooklyn, New York. Appearing in more than 260 films between 1911 and 1940, he was the first official member of the Screen Actors Guild and a founding member of SAG's Board of Directors. Tucker died in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles from a heart attack. He is interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in an unmarked niche in Great Mausoleum, Columbarium of Faith.
Go to Profile#13804
James Blomfield
1879 - 1951 (72 years)
James Jervis Blomfield was an English-born Canadian artist and designer. He is best known for his design of the coat of arms of Vancouver and as a pioneer in the field of stained glass art in Canada, with an extensive body of works completed in British Columbia and Ontario, including the Beechwood Cemetery Mausoleum in Canada's national cemetery in Ottawa. He lived in Toronto for the last 30 years of his life.
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Paul Juon
1872 - 1940 (68 years)
Paul Juon was a Russian-born Swiss composer. Life Juon was born in Moscow, where his father was an insurance official. His parents were Swiss, and he attended a German primary school in Moscow. In 1889, he entered the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied violin with Jan Hřímalý and composition with Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev. He completed his studies at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, under Woldemar Bargiel. His first printed works, two Romanzen appeared in 1894, the year he began studies with Bargiel. During his time in Berlin he was a composition professor, employed by Joseph ...
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Lindley Fraser
1904 - 1963 (59 years)
Lindley Macnaghten Fraser was a Scottish academic, author, broadcaster and economist. After an academic career, during which he successfully switched from classics to economics, holding university posts in America, England and Scotland, Fraser was recruited by the BBC to join, and later head, its German service, in which his broadcasts to listeners in Nazi Germany won him a large following.
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John Goss
1800 - 1880 (80 years)
Sir John Goss was an English organist, composer and teacher. Born to a musical family, Goss was a boy chorister of the Chapel Royal, London, and later a pupil of Thomas Attwood, organist of St Paul's Cathedral. After a brief period as a chorus member in an opera company he was appointed organist of a chapel in south London, later moving to more prestigious organ posts at St Luke's Church, Chelsea and finally St Paul's Cathedral, where he struggled to improve musical standards.
Go to Profile#13808
Dan Dailey
1915 - 1978 (63 years)
Daniel James Dailey Jr. was an American actor and dancer. He is best remembered for a series of popular musicals he made at 20th Century Fox such as Mother Wore Tights . Biography Early life Dailey was born on December 14, 1915, in New York City, to Daniel James Dailey Sr. and Helen Theresa Dailey. His younger sister was actress Irene Dailey.
Go to Profile#13809
Franz Simandl
1840 - 1912 (72 years)
Franz Simandl was a Czech double-bassist and pedagogue most remembered for his book New Method for the Double Bass, known as the "Simandl book", which is to this day used as a standard study of double bass technique and hand positions.
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Jay Leyda
1910 - 1988 (78 years)
Jay Leyda was an American avant-garde filmmaker and film historian, noted for his work on U.S, Soviet, and Chinese cinema, as well as his documentary compilations on the day-to-day lives of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson.
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Friedrich Wührer
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Friedrich Wührer was an Austrian-German pianist and piano pedagogue. He was a close associate and advocate of composer Franz Schmidt, whose music he edited and, in the case of the works for left hand alone, revised for performance with two hands; he was also a champion of the Second Viennese School and other composers of the early 20th century. His recorded legacy, however, centers on German romantic literature, particularly the music of Franz Schubert.
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Jean-Marie Beaudet
1908 - 1971 (63 years)
Jean-Marie Beaudet was a Canadian conductor, organist, pianist, radio producer, and music educator. He had a long career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, serving variously as a music producer, programing director, conductor, and administrator. With the CBC Symphony Orchestra he conducted the premiere recordings of works by many Canadian composers, including pieces by Maurice Blackburn, Claude Champagne, J.-J. Gagnier, Clermont Pépin, and Healey Willan.
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Bade Ghulam Ali Khan
1902 - 1968 (66 years)
Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan was an Indian vocalist, from the Kasur Gharana. Early life and background Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan was born in Kasur, of the erstwhile Punjab Province, British India in 1902. Following partition of India in 1947, Kasur Tehsil was allocated to Pakistan. At the age of five, Bade Ghulam began training in vocal music from his chacha Kale Khan, and later from his father. He had three younger brothers namely Barkat Ali Khan, Mubarak Ali Khan and Amanat Ali Khan.
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Guido Agosti
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Guido Agosti was an Italian pianist and piano teacher. Agosti was born in Forlì in 1901. He studied piano with Ferruccio Busoni, Bruno Mugellini and Filippo Ivaldi, earning his diploma at age 13. He studied counterpoint under Benvenuti and literature at Bologna University. He commenced his professional career as a pianist in 1921. Although he never entirely abandoned concert-giving, nerves made it difficult for him to appear on stage, and he concentrated on teaching. He taught piano at the Venice Conservatoire and at the Santa Cecilia Academy in Rome. In 1947 he was appointed Professor of piano at the Accademia Chigiana .
Go to Profile#13815
Gerhard Hüsch
1901 - 1984 (83 years)
Gerhard Heinrich Wilhelm Fritz Hüsch was one of the most important German singers of modern times. A lyric baritone, he specialized in Lieder but also sang, to a lesser extent, German and Italian opera.
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Tom Fitzgerald
1912 - 1983 (71 years)
Thomas Joseph Fitzgerald was an American sports journalist. He worked for The Boston Globe, reported regularly on the Boston Bruins for more than 30 years, and wrote as a golf correspondent for the Masters Tournament and the U.S. Open. He was the first president of the Professional Hockey Writers' Association and the first sportswriter to receive the Lester Patrick Trophy for service to ice hockey in the United States. He was a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame selection committee for ten years and was the first journalist to be chairman of the committee. His hockey journalism career was post...
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Chung Chil-sung
1897 - 1958 (61 years)
Chung Chil-sung , also known by her pen name Geumjuk , was a Korean dancer, feminist, and independence activist. Biography She was born in Daegu province, one of twenty three provinces of the Joseon kingdom. It was said that she came from a poor family. Her exact birth year is questioned often as others say she was born in 1902, 1905, and 1908, but others say that 1897 seems to be more appropriate. There are no details about her childhood or her family clan.
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John Keep
1781 - 1870 (89 years)
Rev. John Keep was a trustee of Oberlin College from 1834 to 1870. Keep and William Dawes toured England in 1839 and 1840 gathering funds for Oberlin College in Ohio. They both attended the 1840 anti-slavery convention in London.
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Lawrence Brown
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
Lawrence Brown was a jazz trombonist from California best remembered for his work with the Duke Ellington orchestra. He was a session musician throughout his career, and also recorded albums under his own name.
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Josip Hamm
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Josip Hamm was a Croatian Slavist best known for his research on Old Church Slavonic language and literature. Biography Hamm was born in the village of Gat near Belišće and Valpovo. In 1924 he finished the classical gymnasium in Osijek, and in 1929 he graduated in Slavic and Germanic studies at the University of Zagreb.
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Mordecai Sandberg
1897 - 1973 (76 years)
Mordecai Sandberg was a composer and physician. He was a creative and prolific composer, a musical theorist, and an innovative physician in the area of alternative and natural medicine in 1920s and 1930s Jerusalem. Sandberg was a pioneer in the field of microtonal theory and music. He believed that a microtonal system of music could be the basis of making “a music of humanity” that would bring people together from all cultures and transcend local traditions. He argued that although there seemed to be a conflict between the western and eastern tonal systems, there was in reality one music and one humanity.
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Arthur Shepherd
1880 - 1958 (78 years)
Arthur Shepherd was an American composer and conductor in the 20th century. Life and career Shepherd was born in Paris, Idaho, into a Mormon family. His family loved to sing and his father, William N. B. Shepherd, wrote the hymn “Give Us Room That We May Dwell.” Shepherd performed with both the Paris Brass Band and the Bear Lake Stake Choir.
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Adriaen Verwer
1655 - 1717 (62 years)
Adriaen Verwer was a Dutch Mennonite merchant, scholar, philosopher and linguist. He wrote books on language, religion and maritime law. He is best known for his grammar Linguae Belgicae, published anonymously in 1707. He is often regarded as the linguistic mentor of his younger friend Lambert ten Kate.
Go to Profile#13824
Hisato Ohzawa
1907 - 1953 (46 years)
Hisato Ohzawa , known in Japan as Hisato Ōsawa, was a Japanese composer. Renewed interest in his work reflects the view that he was one of the preeminent Japanese composers of his day. Biography One of the foremost Japanese composers of the first half of the twentieth century, he grew up in Kobe, studying piano, organ and choral singing. He moved to the United States in 1930 to study composition with Frederick Converse and Carl McKinley at Boston University and the New England Conservatory of Music, also taking some lessons with Arnold Schoenberg. It was in America that his early works were co...
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Raymond Longford
1878 - 1959 (81 years)
Raymond Longford was a prolific Australian film director, writer, producer, and actor during the silent era. Longford was a major director of the silent film era of the Australian cinema. He formed a production team with Lottie Lyell. His contributions to Australian cinema with his ongoing collaborations with Lyell, including The Sentimental Bloke and The Blue Mountains Mystery , prompted the Australian Film Institute's AFI Raymond Longford Award, inaugurated in 1968, to be named in his honour.
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Pál Kadosa
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Pál Kadosa was a pianist and Hungarian composer of the post-Bartók generation. His early style was influenced by Hungarian folklore while his later works were more toward Hindemith and expressively forceful idioms. He was born in Levice. He studied at the national Hungarian Royal Academy of Music under Zoltán Székely and Zoltán Kodály. He was appointed to the faculty of the Fodor School in 1927 where he taught until 1943 when he was forced out due to wartime political issues.
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William Aikman
1824 - 1909 (85 years)
William Aikman was an American writer and pastor. Biography Aikman was born in New York City, on August 12, 1824, son of Robert and Sarah Aikman. He was graduated at the University of the City of New York in 1846, and attended the Union Theological Seminary, from 1846 to 1849.
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Jonel Perlea
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Ionel Perlea was a Romanian conductor particularly associated with the Italian and German opera repertories. Biography Born Ionel Perlea to a Romanian father, Victor Perlea, and a German mother, Margarethe Haberlein, in Ograda, Romania, he moved to Germany with his mother and his brothers after his father died. Perlea was five years old, or according to some sources, ten years old.
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Paul Doktor
1919 - 1989 (70 years)
Paul Doktor was a notable violist and orchestra conductor. The son of singer-pianist Georgine and violist Karl Doktor, at the age of five, Paul began violin studies with his father, and received his diploma from the State Academy of Music in 1938. While still in his teens, he toured as a violinist with the Adolf Busch Chamber Orchestra, but the youthful performer's mastery of the viola came to the fore when, at a few days' notice, he was asked to take over from the ailing second violist in a performance of a Mendelssohn Quintet with the Busch Quartet. His achievement was so remarkable that h...
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Marie Tempest
1864 - 1942 (78 years)
Dame Mary Susan Etherington, , known professionally as Marie Tempest, was an English singer and actress. Tempest became a famous soprano in late Victorian light opera and Edwardian musical comedies. Later, she became a leading comic actress and toured widely in North America and elsewhere. She was, at times, her own theatre manager during a career spanning 55 years. She was also instrumental in the founding of the actors' union Equity in Britain.
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Claude Almand
1915 - 1957 (42 years)
Claude Marion Almand was a musician and professor of music at several American universities. Almand was a professor at the University of Louisville from 1948 to 1953. In 1953, he was appointed the dean of Stetson University's School of Music.
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George Frederick Root
1820 - 1895 (75 years)
George Frederick Root was an American songwriter, who found particular fame during the American Civil War, with songs such as "Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!" and "The Battle Cry of Freedom". He is regarded as the first American to compose a secular cantata.
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Arthur Loesser
1894 - 1969 (75 years)
Arthur Adolph Loesser was an American classical pianist, musicologist, and writer. Early life Born into a musical family in New York City, Loesser received early piano training from his German-born father until he began lessons with Zygmunt Stojowski at the Institute of Musical Art, now called the Juilliard School.
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Dorsey Burnette
1932 - 1979 (47 years)
Dorsey William Burnett Jr. was an American early rockabilly singer. With his younger brother Johnny Burnette and a friend named Paul Burlison, he was a founder member of The Rock and Roll Trio. He is also the father of country musician and former Fleetwood Mac member Billy Burnette.
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Fridrikh Ermler
1898 - 1967 (69 years)
Fridrikh Markovich Ermler was a Soviet film director, actor, and screenwriter. He was a four-time recipient of the Stalin Prize . After studying pharmacology, he joined the Czarist army in 1917 and soon took part in the October revolution on the side of the Bolshevists. Captured and tortured by the White army, he only became a full party member at the end of the Civil War.
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Victor Schertzinger
1888 - 1941 (53 years)
Victor L. Schertzinger was an American composer, film director, film producer, and screenwriter. His films include Paramount on Parade , Something to Sing About with James Cagney, and the first two "Road" pictures Road to Singapore and Road to Zanzibar . His two best-known songs are "I Remember You" and "Tangerine", both with lyrics by Johnny Mercer and both featured in Schertzinger's final film, The Fleet's In .
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James Hamilton Howe
1856 - 1934 (78 years)
James Hamilton Howe was a pianist and the first Dean of the Music School at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana when it was founded in 1884. Education James Hamilton Howe graduated from the College of Music of Boston University.
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Abram Chasins
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Abram Chasins was an American composer, pianist, piano teacher, lecturer, musicologist, music broadcaster, radio executive and author. Born in Manhattan, New York, he attended the Ethical Culture schools and undertook additional studies through the Columbia University Extension School. He studied piano with Ernest Hutcheson and Bertha Tapper, and composition with Rubin Goldmark at the Juilliard School of Music before proceeding to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia where he undertook further piano studies with Józef Hofmann. In 1931 he studied music analysis with Sir Donald Tovey i...
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Alexander Libermann
1896 - 1978 (82 years)
Alexander Libermann was a Bay Area-based pianist and educator who taught piano at Mills College. He completed his early musical training in Kiev, Russian Empire, before fleeing to Germany, where he studied with Egon Petri and Ferrucio Busoni, and France, where he was forced to live in hiding from Nazis. In 1947, he accepted an invitation from Petri to join the faculty at Mills College. He and his wife Stefa settled permanently in California, and he taught at Mills for 31 years until his death. Libermann has a far-reaching influence, and is linked as an instructor to many professional musician...
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Siegmund von Hausegger
1872 - 1948 (76 years)
Siegmund von Hausegger was an Austrian composer and conductor. Early life Siegmund was born in Graz, the son of Friedrich von Hausegger , a lawyer and writer on music. According to Siegmund's own account, Friedrich was "one of the first in Austria to recognize the greatness of Richard Wagner and to exert himself to the utmost in propagating his music and his ideas". According to one account, the young von Hausegger may have been made the vehicle of his critic-father's ideals. Siegmund studied music initially under his father, and a strong Wagnerian tinge is found in his own compositions, w...
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Dandapani Desikar
1908 - 1972 (64 years)
M M Dandapani Desikar was a Carnatic vocalist, actor and composer. 'Isai Arasu' Dandapani Desikar was born in Tiruchengattangudi, near Nannilam in Madras Presidency. He got training from Manicka Desikar and Kumbakonam Rajamanickam Pillai. He was the son of Muthiah Desikar. He gave his first performance in Tirumarugal. He was a Professor and Head of the Department of Music, Annamalai University for fifteen years. He acted in Tamil films including Nandanar which was produced by S. S. Vasan.
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Blind Roosevelt Graves
1909 - 1962 (53 years)
Le Moise Roosevelt Graves , credited as Blind Roosevelt Graves, was an American blues guitarist and singer, who recorded both sacred and secular music in the 1920s and 1930s. Biography Roosevelt Graves was born in either Rose Hill or Summerland, Mississippi. On all his recordings, he played with his brother Uaroy Graves , who was also nearly blind and played the tambourine. They were credited as "Blind Roosevelt Graves and Brother". Their first recordings were made in 1929 for Paramount Records. Theirs is the earliest version recorded of "Guitar Boogie", and they exemplified the best in gospel singing with "I'll Be Rested".
Go to Profile#13843
Sidney Harrison
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Sidney Harrison was a British pianist, composer, broadcaster and educationalist who taught at the Guildhall School of Music for many years. His students included Norma Fisher and John Lill, and one of his protégés was Sir George Martin.
Go to Profile#13844
Edward Jones
1752 - 1824 (72 years)
Edward Jones was a Welsh harpist, bard, performer, composer, arranger, and collector of music. He was commonly known by the bardic name of "Bardd y Brenin" , which he took in 1820 when his patron King George IV came to the throne.
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Branka Musulin
1917 - 1975 (58 years)
Branka Musulin was a German-Croatian classical pianist and teacher. Life Musulin was born in Croatia in Zagreb. As from the age of eight, she studied with celebrated Croatian pianist Svetislav Stančić in Zagreb and played in public at that time. After her concert diploma, she travelled to Paris in 1936 to study with Alfred Cortot and Yvonne Lefébure. As from 1938, she studied with Alfredo Casella in Siena and after 1941 with Max von Pauer in South Germany .
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Stanley Bate
1911 - 1959 (48 years)
Stanley Bate was an English composer and pianist. Life Bate was born in Milehouse, Devonshire, a suburb of Plymouth, and received his first musical education from local teachers. He took to the piano early and by the age of 12 had secured a post as organist at Herbert Street Methodist Church in Devonport. His first opera, The Forest Enchanted, was completed in 1928 when he was 17, and produced locally with Bate conducting. Winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, he studied under Ralph Vaughan Williams, R.O. Morris, Gordon Jacob, and Arthur Benjamin. Compositions from this time in...
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Walter Tobagi
1947 - 1980 (33 years)
Walter Tobagi was an Italian journalist and writer. He was killed in a terrorist attack by the Brigade XXVIII March, a left-wing terrorist group. Biography Youth Walter Tobagi was born on 18 March 1947 in San Brizio, a neighborhood of the Italian district of Spoleto in Umbria, Italy. As an eight-year-old child he moved with his family in Bresso, close to the Italian city of Milan, mainly because of his father's work as a railway worker. His career as a journalist began during his early high school years, as the editor of the Parini high school's newspaper La zanzara, which became notorious f...
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Charles King
1895 - 1957 (62 years)
Charles Lafayette King was an American actor who appeared in more than 400 films between 1915 and 1956. King was born in Dallas, Texas, and died in Hollywood, California, from cirrhosis of the liver.
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Charles Draper
1869 - 1952 (83 years)
Charles Draper was a British classical clarinetisttist, sometimes described as the grandfather of English clarinetists. Early life and education Draper was born in Odcombe, Somerset. His father and brother, having been cellists and clarinetists, respectively. In 1888, he studied with Henry Lazarus and he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where he continued as a student of Lazarus until the latter's retirement. He also studied for a year under Julian Egerton.
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Ernesto Cavallini
1807 - 1874 (67 years)
Ernesto Cavallini was an Italian clarinetist and composer. Born in Milan, Cavallini studied at the Milan Conservatory under Carulli. He performed at the Conservatoire Concerts in 1830 with his brother, violinist Eugenio Cavallini. He became the principal clarinetist of La Scala under Giacomo Panizza. He also taught at the Milan Conservatory and spent 15 years performing in St Petersburg from 1852 to 1867.
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