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,
#13901
George Marshall
1891 - 1975 (84 years)
George E. Marshall was an American actor, screenwriter, producer, film and television director, active through the first six decades of film history. Relatively few of Marshall's films are well-known today, with Destry Rides Again , The Ghost Breakers , The Blue Dahlia , The Sheepman , and How the West Was Won being the biggest exceptions. John Houseman called him "one of the old maestros of Hollywood ... he had never become one of the giants but he held a solid and honorable position in the industry."
Go to Profile#13902
Josef Mysliveček
1737 - 1781 (44 years)
Josef Mysliveček was a Czech composer who contributed to the formation of late eighteenth-century classicism in music. Mysliveček provided his younger friend Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with significant compositional models in the genres of symphony, Italian serious opera, and violin concerto; both Wolfgang and his father Leopold Mozart considered him an intimate friend from the time of their first meetings in Bologna in 1770 until he betrayed their trust over the promise of an operatic commission for Wolfgang to be arranged with the management of the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. His closeness to ...
Go to Profile#13903
Slim Harpo
1924 - 1970 (46 years)
Slim Harpo was an American blues musician, a leading exponent of the swamp blues style, and "one of the most commercially successful blues artists of his day". He played guitar and was a master of the blues harmonica, known in blues circles as a "harp". His most successful and influential recordings included "I'm a King Bee" , "Rainin' in My Heart" , and "Baby Scratch My Back" , which reached number one on Billboards R&B chart and number 16 on its broader Hot 100 singles chart.
Go to Profile#13904
Lefty Frizzell
1928 - 1975 (47 years)
William Orville "Lefty" Frizzell was an American country and honky-tonk singer-songwriter. Frizell is known as one of the most influential country music vocal stylists of all time. He has been cited as influencing prominent country singers like George Jones, Merle Haggard, and Willie Nelson. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1982 as well as the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In his prime, Frizzell was the first artist to achieve four songs in the top ten on the Country Music Billboard charts at one time. Frizzell went on to have more success, releasing many songs that charted in the Top 10 of the Hot Country Songs charts as an artist and songwriter.
Go to Profile#13905
Jonas Kazlauskas
1930 - 1970 (40 years)
Jonas Kazlauskas was a Lithuanian linguist, expert on the Baltic languages. In 1954, he graduated from the University of Vilnius. He was the Dean of the Humanities faculty at University of Vilnius. He was one of the founders of the journal, Baltistica.
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Joe Raposo
1937 - 1989 (52 years)
Joseph Guilherme Raposo, OIH was an American composer, lyricist, songwriter, singer, and pianist, best known for his work on the children's television series Sesame Street, for which he wrote the theme song, as well as classic songs such as "Bein' Green", "C Is For Cookie" and "Sing" . He also wrote music for television shows such as The Electric Company, Shining Time Station and the sitcoms Three's Company and The Ropers, including their theme songs. In addition to these works, Raposo also composed extensively for three Dr. Seuss TV specials in collaboration with the DePatie-Freleng Enterpri...
Go to Profile#13907
Peter Knight
1917 - 1985 (68 years)
Peter Knight was an English musical arranger, conductor and composer. Early career Knight was born in Exmouth, Devon, England. He was educated at Sutton High School in Plymouth and studied piano, harmony and counterpoint privately. His first broadcast was in 1924 at the age of seven, a piano solo on Children's Hour from the BBC's studio in Plymouth. Before the war he was an active semi-professional musician while working at the Inland Revenue in Torquay, and then in London.
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Christian Jakob Kraus
1753 - 1807 (54 years)
Christian Jakob Kraus was a German comparative and historical linguist. Biography A native of Osterode , Kraus studied at the universities of Königsberg and Göttingen. In 1782 he became a professor of practical philosophy and cameralism in Königsberg. A student of Immanuel Kant, Kraus was famous for importing the ideas of Adam Smith into the German academic scene. He was also a librarian of the Königsberg Public Library from 1786 to 1804. Kraus encouraged the East Prussian officials and nobility to improve rural conditions in the province; some of his ideas were later adapted in the era of Prussian reforms.
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Marcin Szlachciński
1515 - Present (511 years)
Marcin Szlachciński was a Polish renaissance scholar; Polish, Latin and Ancient Greek translator; poet; philosopher and professor at the Jagiellonian University. Personal life Szlachciński was born in the village of Szlachcin in the Greater Poland as part of the Polish Szlachta, and used the Nowina coat of arms. He studied at the Jagiellonian University . He married a noble-born woman, Zofia Zberkowska of the Wczele coat of arms.
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Heinrich Marschner
1795 - 1861 (66 years)
Heinrich August Marschner was a German composer best known for his operas. He is considered to be the most important composer of German opera between Weber and Wagner. Biography Marschner was born in Zittau and was originally intended for a legal career. After a meeting with Beethoven around 1815–16, he decided to devote himself to music and became a private music teacher in Bratislava. From 1821 he worked as a stage composer and conductor at the municipal theatres in Dresden , Leipzig , and the Court Theatre at Hanover , where the opera Hans Heiling established his name among the leading German opera composers of the time.
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Guido Brignone
1886 - 1959 (73 years)
Guido Brignone was an Italian film director and actor. He was the father of actress Lilla Brignone and younger brother of actress Mercedes Brignone. Brignone was born in Milan, Italy. He was the first Italian Director to win the Venice Film Festival or Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica, the oldest film festival in the world, with Best Italian Film, Teresa Confalonieri .
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Radulphus Brito
1270 - 1320 (50 years)
Radulphus Brito was an influential grammarian and philosopher, based in Paris. He is usually identified as Raoul le Breton, though this is disputed by some. Besides works of grammatical speculation he wrote on Aristotle, Boethius and Priscian.
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Anton Arensky
1861 - 1906 (45 years)
Anton Stepanovich Arensky was a Russian composer of Romantic classical music, a pianist and a professor of music. Biography Arensky was born into an affluent, music-loving family in Novgorod, Russia. He was musically precocious and had composed a number of songs and piano pieces by the age of nine. With his mother and father, he moved to Saint Petersburg in 1879, after which he studied composition at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
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Guitar Slim
1926 - 1959 (33 years)
Eddie Jones , better known as Guitar Slim, was an American guitarist in the 1940s and 1950s, best known for the million-selling song "The Things That I Used to Do", for Specialty Records. It is listed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll. Slim had a major impact on rock and roll and experimented with distorted tones on the electric guitar a full decade before Jimi Hendrix.
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Terry Kath
1946 - 1978 (32 years)
Terry Alan Kath was an American guitarist and singer-songwriter who is best known as a founding member of the rock band Chicago. He played lead guitar and sang lead vocals on many of the band's early hit singles alongside Robert Lamm and Peter Cetera. He has been praised by his bandmates and other musicians for his guitar skills and his Ray Charles–influenced vocal style. Jimi Hendrix cited Terry Kath as one of his favorite guitarists, and considered Kath to be "the best guitarist in the universe".
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Pierre Larquey
1884 - 1962 (78 years)
Pierre Larquey was a French film actor. He appeared in more than 200 films between 1913 and 1962. Born in Cénac, Gironde, France, he died in Maisons-Laffitte at the age of 77. Selected filmography Patrie Monsieur le directeur Alone - Le comandantTout s'arrange - Un ami de M. RibadetAmerican Love - Le maître d'hôtel à la barbiche Le disparu de l'ascenseur - Michaud - le secrétairePrisonnier de mon coeur Vive la classe - L'adjudantThe Miracle Child - Durieux pèreLe chien jaune - Topaze - TamiseOnce Upon a Time - RednoKnock - Le tambour de ville - BouzinMadame Bovary - HippolyteMariage à responsabilité limitée - Georges Lambert - le mariWe Are Not Children - M.
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Josef Hofmann
1876 - 1957 (81 years)
Josef Casimir Hofmann was a Polish-American pianist, composer, music teacher, and inventor. Biography Josef Hofmann was born in Podgórze , in Austro-Hungarian Galicia in 1876. His father was the composer, conductor and pianist Kazimierz Hofmann, and his mother the singer Matylda Pindelska. He had an older sister – Zofia Wanda . Throughout their childhood, their father, Kazimierz, was married to Aniela Teofila née Kwiecińska , who, after moving to Warsaw in 1878 with her husband, died there on October 12, 1885. Then the next year Kazimierz Mikołaj Hofmann married on June 17, 1886, Matylda Fra...
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Kim Gannon
1900 - 1974 (74 years)
James Kimball "Kim" Gannon was an American songwriter, more commonly a lyricist than a composer. Biography Gannon was born in Brooklyn, New York to an Irish-American family from Fort Ann in upstate New York, but grew up in New Jersey where he attended Montclair High School and was a member of The Omega Gamma Delta Fraternity. He graduated from St. Lawrence University and, intending to become a lawyer, attended the Albany Law School, passing the bar examination in New York State in 1934.
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Jules White
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Jules White was an American film director and producer best known for his short-subject comedies starring The Three Stooges. Early years White began working in motion pictures in the 1910s, as a child actor, for Pathé Studios. He appears in a small role as a Confederate soldier in the landmark silent feature The Birth of a Nation . By the 1920s his brother Jack White had become a successful comedy producer at Educational Pictures, and Jules worked for him as a film editor. Jules became a director in 1926, specializing in comedies such as The Battling Kangaroo .
Go to Profile#13920
Marjorie Daw
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Marjorie Daw was an American film actress of the silent film era. She appeared in more than 70 films between 1914 and 1929. Career Born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Daw was the daughter of John H. House. She took her stage name from Marjorie Daw, a short story by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Daw began acting as a teen to support her younger brother and herself after the death of their parents. She made her film debut in 1914 and worked steadily during the 1920s. She retired from acting after the advent of sound film.
Go to Profile#13921
Spencer Williams
1889 - 1965 (76 years)
Spencer Williams was an American jazz and popular music composer, pianist, and singer. He is best known for his hit songs "Basin Street Blues", "I Ain't Got Nobody", "Royal Garden Blues", "I've Found a New Baby", "Everybody Loves My Baby", "Tishomingo Blues", and many others.
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Walford Davies
1869 - 1941 (72 years)
Sir Henry Walford Davies was an English composer, organist, and educator who held the title Master of the King's Music from 1934 until 1941. He served with the Royal Air Force during the First World War, during which he composed the Royal Air Force March Past, and was music adviser to the British Broadcasting Corporation, for whom he gave commended talks on music between 1924 and 1941.
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Anton Horner
1877 - 1971 (94 years)
Anton Horner was an American horn player. He was part of the Philadelphia Orchestra for 44 years and served for 28 years as its solo horn player. He is credited for introducing the double horn to the United States.
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Lloyd Bacon
1889 - 1955 (66 years)
Lloyd Francis Bacon was an American screen, stage, and vaudeville actor and film director. As a director, he made films in virtually all genres, including westerns, musicals, comedies, gangster films, and crime dramas. He was one of the directors at Warner Bros. in the 1930s who helped give that studio its reputation for gritty, fast-paced "torn from the headlines" action films. And, in directing Warner Bros.' 42nd Street, he joined the movie's song-and-dance-number director, Busby Berkeley, in contributing to "an instant and enduring classic [that] transformed the musical genre".
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Augustus Harris
1852 - 1896 (44 years)
Sir Augustus Henry Glossop Harris was a British actor, impresario, and dramatist, a dominant figure in the West End theatre of the 1880s and 1890s. Born into a theatrical family, Harris briefly pursued a commercial career before becoming an actor and subsequently a stage-manager. At the age of 27 he became the lessee of the large Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where he mounted popular melodramas and annual pantomimes on a grand and spectacular scale. The pantomimes featured leading music hall stars such as Dan Leno, Marie Lloyd, Little Tich and Vesta Tilley. The profits from these productions subsidised his opera seasons, equally lavish, starrily cast and with an innovative repertoire.
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Felix Pappalardi
1939 - 1983 (44 years)
Felix A. Pappalardi Jr. was an American music producer, songwriter, vocalist, and bassist. He is best known as the bassist and co-lead vocalist of the band Mountain, whose song "Mississippi Queen" peaked at number 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 and has become a classic rock radio staple. Originating in the eclectic music scene in New York's Greenwich Village, he became closely attached to the British power trio Cream, writing, arranging, and producing for their second album Disraeli Gears. As a producer for Atlantic Records, he worked on several projects with guitarist Leslie West; in 1969 their partnership evolved into the band Mountain.
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Wolfgang Liebeneiner
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
Wolfgang Georg Louis Liebeneiner was a German actor, film director and theatre director. Beginnings He was born in Liebau in Prussian Silesia. In 1928, he was taught by Otto Falckenberg, the director of the Munich Kammerspiele, in acting and directing.
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J. Lloyd Williams
1854 - 1945 (91 years)
John Lloyd Williams was a Welsh botanist, author, and musician. He was one of the founders of the Welsh Folk-Song Society , established in 1906 to promote the collection and study of traditional Welsh folk songs, and became the first editor of the society's journal.
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John Burke
1786 - 1848 (62 years)
John Burke was an Irish genealogist, and the original publisher of Burke's Peerage. He was the father of Sir Bernard Burke, a British officer of arms and genealogist. Origins He was the elder son of Peter Burke of Elm Hall, Tipperary, by his first wife, Anne, daughter and coheiress of Matthew Dowdall, M.D., of Mullingar. In accordance with a family arrangement, his younger brother Joseph succeeded to the estate at the father's death on 13 January 1836. The Burke family were descendants of the Earl of Clanricarde via Dominick Burke , of Clondagoff Castle, County Galway. Later generations have ...
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Walter Parratt
1841 - 1924 (83 years)
Sir Walter Parratt was an English organist and composer. Biography Born in Huddersfield, son of a parish organist, Parratt began to play the pipe organ from an early age, and held posts as an organist while still a child. He was a child prodigy: on one occasion he played Bach's complete The Well-Tempered Clavier by heart, without notice, at age ten.
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Ernest Farrar
1885 - 1918 (33 years)
Ernest Bristow Farrar was an English composer, pianist and organist. Life Ernest Farrar was born in Lewisham, London, but moved in 1887 to Micklefield in Yorkshire, where his father was a clergyman. The rest of his life was very much centred in the north of England. He was educated at Leeds Grammar School, where he began organ studies. His studies at Durham University did not progress beyond his matriculation.
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Papanasam Sivan
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
Paapanaasam Raamayya Sivan was an Indian composer of Carnatic music and a singer. He was awarded the Madras Music Academy's Sangeetha Kalanidhi in 1971. He was also a film score composer in Kannada cinema as well as Tamil cinema in the 1930s and 1940s.
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Prabodh Pandit
1923 - 1975 (52 years)
Prabodh Bechardas Pandit was an Indian linguist from Gujarat, India. He published a total of ten books in the Gujarati language, along with many research papers published in various journals. In 1967, he received the Sahitya Akademi Award, and in 1973, the Ranjitram Suvarna Chandrak, for his contribution to the study of Gujarati language and linguistics.
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Santa Rita Durão
1722 - 1784 (62 years)
José de Santa Rita Durão , known simply as Santa Rita Durão, was a Colonial Brazilian Neoclassic poet, orator and Augustinian friar. He is considered a forerunner of "Indianism" in Brazilian literature, with his epic poem Caramuru.
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Jens Andreas Friis
1821 - 1896 (75 years)
Jens Andreas Friis was a Norwegian philologist, lexicographer and author. He was a university professor and a prominent linguist in the languages spoken by the Sami people. He is widely recognized as the founder of the studies of the Sami languages. Today he is also commonly associated with his novel Lajla: A New Tale of Finmark, which became the basis for Laila, a 1929 silent film.
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Lewis Ossie Swingler
1906 - 1962 (56 years)
Lewis Ossie Swingler was a pioneering African-American journalist, editor, and newspaper publisher from Crittenden County, Arkansas. He was editor of the Memphis World and editor in chief and copublisher of the Tri-State Defender.
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Franz Schmidt
1874 - 1939 (65 years)
Franz Schmidt, also Ferenc Schmidt was an Austro-Hungarian composer, cellist and pianist. Life Schmidt was born in Pozsony/Pressburg, in the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary to a half-Hungarian father – with the same name, born in the same city – and to a Hungarian mother, Mária Ravasz. He was a Roman Catholic.
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Lennie Tristano
1919 - 1978 (59 years)
Leonard Joseph Tristano was an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and teacher of jazz improvisation. Tristano studied for bachelor's and master's degrees in music in Chicago before moving to New York City in 1946. He played with leading bebop musicians and formed his own small bands, which soon displayed some of his early interests – contrapuntal interaction of instruments, harmonic flexibility, and rhythmic complexity. His quintet in 1949 recorded the first free group improvisations. Tristano's innovations continued in 1951, with the first overdubbed, improvised jazz recordings, and ...
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Carl Radle
1942 - 1980 (38 years)
Carl Dean Radle was an American bassist who toured and recorded with many of the most influential recording artists of the late 1960s and 1970s. He was posthumously inducted to the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 2006.
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Erle Elsworth Clippinger
1875 - 1939 (64 years)
Erle Elsworth Clippinger was a professor of English and a scholar of children's literature in early 20th-century Indiana. He was one of the founding faculty members at Ball State University, where he chaired the English department for many years.
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Alfredo Catalani
1854 - 1893 (39 years)
Alfredo Catalani was an Italian operatic composer. He is best remembered for his operas Loreley and La Wally . La Wally was composed to a libretto by Luigi Illica, and features Catalani's most famous aria "Ebben? Ne andrò lontana." This aria, sung by American soprano Wilhelmenia Fernandez, was at the heart of Jean-Jacques Beineix's 1981 film Diva. Catalani's other operas were much less successful.
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York Bowen
1884 - 1961 (77 years)
Edwin York Bowen was an English composer and pianist. Bowen's musical career spanned more than fifty years during which time he wrote over 160 works. As well as being a pianist and composer, Bowen was a talented conductor, organist, violist and horn player. Despite achieving considerable success during his lifetime, many of the composer's works remained unpublished and unperformed until after his death in 1961. Bowen's compositional style is widely considered as ‘Romantic’ and his works are often characterized by their rich harmonic language.
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Alexander Vasilyevich Alexandrov
1883 - 1946 (63 years)
Alexander Vasilyevich Alexandrov was a Soviet and Russian composer and founder of the Alexandrov Ensemble, who wrote the music for the State Anthem of the Soviet Union, which in 2000 became the national anthem of Russia . During his career, he also worked as a professor of the Moscow Conservatory, and became a Doctor of Arts. His work was recognized by the awards of the title of People's Artist of the USSR and two Stalin Prizes.
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Pernel Strachey
1876 - 1951 (75 years)
Pernel Strachey or Joan Pernel Strachey was an English scholar of French and Principal of Newnham College. Life Strachey was born in Clapham Common in London in 1876. She came from a large family led by Lieutenant General Sir Richard Strachey and the suffragist Jane Maria Strachey. Her mother was a friend of Millicent Garrett Fawcett who had co-founded Newnham College in Cambridge. Her brothers included Lytton Strachey and Oliver Strachey, husband of Ray Costelloe.
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Roy Brown
1925 - 1981 (56 years)
Roy James Brown was an American blues singer who had a significant influence on the early development of rock and roll and the direction of R&B. His original song and hit recording "Good Rockin' Tonight" has been covered by many artists including Wynonie Harris, Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Joe Ely, Ricky Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Pat Boone, James Brown, the Doors, and the rock group Montrose. Brown was one of the first popular R&B singers to perform songs with a gospel-steeped delivery, which was then considered taboo by many churches. In addition, his melismatic, pleading vocal style influenced notable artists such as B.B.
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Leif Erickson
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
Leif Erickson was an American stage, film, and television actor. Early life Erickson was born in Alameda, California, near San Francisco. He worked as a soloist in a band as vocalist and trombone player, performed in Max Reinhardt's productions, and then gained a small amount of stage experience in a comedy vaudeville act. Initially billed by Paramount Pictures as Glenn Erickson, he began his screen career as a leading man in Westerns.
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Edwin Maxwell
1886 - 1948 (62 years)
Edwin Maxwell was an Irish character actor in Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s, frequently cast as businessmen and shysters, though often ones with a pompous or dignified bearing. Prior to that, he was an actor on the Broadway stage and a director of plays.
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Billy West
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
Billy West was a silent film actor, producer, and director. Active during the silent film era, he is best known as a semi-successful Charlie Chaplin impersonator. Beyond acting, he also directed shorts in the 1910s and 20s, as well as produced films. West ultimately retired in 1935.
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Allen Collins
1952 - 1990 (38 years)
Larkin Allen Collins Jr. was an American guitarist, and one of the founding members of the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. He co-wrote many of the band's songs with frontman and original lead singer Ronnie Van Zant.
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Ebenezer Prout
1835 - 1909 (74 years)
Ebenezer Prout was an English musical theorist, writer, music teacher and composer, whose instruction, afterwards embodied in a series of standard works still used today, underpinned the work of many British classical musicians of succeeding generations.
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