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,
#13901
Albert Tessier
1895 - 1976 (81 years)
Albert Tessier was a French-speaking Canadian priest, historian and a film maker. He was born on in Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade, Mauricie. Life as a Priest and Educator He was ordained priest by Monsignor François-Xavier Cloutier in June 1920 and received a PhD in Theology in Rome in 1922. He moved back to his native area in 1924 and began a career as a teacher and professor of history and literature. In 1937, he replaced Thomas Chapais and took over the Chair in History of Canada at the Université Laval.
Go to Profile#13902
Milka Ternina
1863 - 1941 (78 years)
Milka Ternina was a Croatian dramatic soprano who enjoyed a high reputation in major American and European opera houses. Praised by audiences and music critics alike for the electrifying force of her acting and the excellence of her singing in both German and Italian works, her career was curtailed at its peak in 1906 by a medical condition which paralyzed a nerve in her face.
Go to Profile#13903
William Russell
1884 - 1929 (45 years)
William Russell was an American actor, film director, film producer and screenwriter. He appeared in over two hundred silent-era motion pictures between 1910 and 1929, directing five of them in 1916 and producing two through his own production company in 1918 and 1925.
Go to Profile#13904
Jan Krzysztof Damel
1780 - 1840 (60 years)
Jan Krzysztof Damel, also known as Jonas Damelis and Johann Damehl in other languages was a Polish neoclassicist artist in the age of Partitions, associated with the School of Art at Vilnius University .
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Walter Long
1879 - 1952 (73 years)
Walter Huntley Long was an American stage and film character actor who between 1909 and the late 1940s performed in nearly 200 screen productions. Early life and career Born in Nashua, New Hampshire, in 1879, Long was the youngest of six children of Catherine Lucia Jane and Francis Long, who was a farmer.
Go to Profile#13906
Joseph Schillinger
1895 - 1943 (48 years)
Joseph Moiseyevich Schillinger was a composer, music theorist, and composition teacher who originated the Schillinger System of Musical Composition. He was born in Kharkov, in the Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire and died in New York City.
Go to Profile#13907
Ben Pollack
1903 - 1971 (68 years)
Ben Pollack was an American drummer and bandleader from the mid-1920s through the swing era. His eye for talent led him to employ musicians such as Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Glenn Miller, Jimmy McPartland, and Harry James. This ability earned him the nickname the "Father of Swing".
Go to Profile#13908
Antonio Cotogni
1831 - 1918 (87 years)
Antonio "Toto" Cotogni was an Italian baritone of the first magnitude. Regarded internationally as being one of the greatest male opera singers of the 19th century, he was particularly admired by the composer Giuseppe Verdi. Cotogni forged an important second career as a singing teacher after his retirement from the stage in 1894.
Go to Profile#13909
Lumsden Hare
1874 - 1964 (90 years)
Francis Lumsden Hare was an American film and theatre actor. He was also a theatre director and theatrical producer. Early years Hare studied at St. Dunstan's College in London. Career Hare appeared in more than 35 Broadway productions between 1900 and 1942. In 1908 he first appeared on Broadway in the hit play What Every Woman Knows starring Maude Adams. He served as director and/or producer for various productions, some starring himself.
Go to Profile#13910
Camillo Mastrocinque
1901 - 1969 (68 years)
Camillo Mastrocinque was an Italian film director and screenwriter. He directed more than 60 films between 1937 and 1968, and is known to horror film fans for directing Terror in the Crypt starring Christopher Lee, and An Angel for Satan starring Barbara Steele.
Go to Profile#13911
Maxine Sullivan
1911 - 1987 (76 years)
Maxine Sullivan , born Marietta Williams in Homestead, Pennsylvania, United States, was an American jazz vocalist and performer. As a vocalist, Sullivan was active for half a century, from the mid-1930s to just before her death in 1987. She is best known for her 1937 recording of a swing version of the Scottish folk song "Loch Lomond". Throughout her career, Sullivan also appeared as a performer on film as well as on stage. A precursor to better-known later vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, Sullivan is considered one of the best jazz vocalists of the 1930s. Singer Peggy Lee ...
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Johnny Bond
1915 - 1978 (63 years)
Cyrus Whitfield "Johnny" Bond was an American country music singer-songwriter, guitarist and composer and publisher, who co-founded a music publishing firm, he was active in the music industry from 1940 until the late 1970s.
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Peppino De Filippo
1903 - 1980 (77 years)
Peppino De Filippo was an Italian actor. De Filippo was born in Naples, brother of actor and dramatist Eduardo De Filippo and of Titina De Filippo. He made his stage debut at the age of six. He played in several movies such as Rome-Paris-Rome, Variety Lights, A Day in Court, Ferdinand I, King of Naples and Boccaccio '70. He is however most remembered for his several artistic partnerships with Totò, on movies such as Totò, Peppino e la malafemmina and La banda degli onesti. He died in Rome at age 76.
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Heinrich Neuhaus
1888 - 1964 (76 years)
Heinrich Gustav Neuhaus was a Russian pianist and teacher. Part of a musical dynasty, he grew up in a Polish-speaking household. He taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1922 to 1964. People's Artist of the RSFSR .
Go to Profile#13915
Fartein Valen
1887 - 1952 (65 years)
Olav Fartein Valen was a Norwegian composer, notable for his work in atonal polyphonic music. He developed a polyphony similar to Bach's counterpoint, but based on motivic working and dissonance rather than harmonic progression.
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Jimmy Lyons
1933 - 1986 (53 years)
Jimmy Lyons was an American alto saxophone player. He is best known for his long tenure in the Cecil Taylor Unit. Lyons was the only constant member of the band from the mid-1960s until his death. Taylor never worked with another musician as frequently as he did with Lyons. Lyons' playing, influenced by Charlie Parker, kept Taylor's avant-garde music tethered to the jazz tradition.
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Michael Deffner
1848 - 1934 (86 years)
Joseph Michael Deffner was a German classical philologist and linguist, known for his studies exploring the Tsakonian language. Biography He studied classical philology and linguistics in Munich and Leipzig, and went to Athens in 1871 as a Latin teacher. From 1872 to 1878 he was a lecturer in comparative literature at the University of Athens. Under the auspices of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, one of the predecessors to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities went to the Peloponnese to study the Maniot and Tsakonian dialects. He did mostly archaeological work, except for his studies of Tsakonian while he was in the Peloponnese.
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Edward Gwynn
1868 - 1941 (73 years)
Edward John Gwynn was an Irish scholar of Old Irish and Celtic literature, Provost of Trinity College Dublin from 1927 to 1937 and President of the Royal Irish Academy from 1934 to 1937. Biography Edward John Gwynn , the second son of the Very Reverend Dr John Gwynn D.D. and Lucy Josephine O'Brien, was born at Aughnagaddy in Ramelton, County Donegal while his father was Rector of Tullyaughnish . As a teenager he attended St Columba's College, Rathfarnham, where his father had earlier been headmaster.
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Lev Oborin
1907 - 1974 (67 years)
Lev Nikolayevich Oborin was a Soviet and Russian pianist, composer and pedagogue. He was the winner of the first International Chopin Piano Competition in 1927. Life and career Oborin's family moved frequently during his early childhood. When they settled down in Moscow in 1914, he was sent to music school. He studied with Elena Gnesina, a pupil of Ferruccio Busoni. At the same time, he studied composition with Alexander Gretchaninov and achieved admirable results.
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Richard A. Whiting
1891 - 1938 (47 years)
Richard Armstrong Whiting was an American composer of popular songs, including the standards "Hooray for Hollywood", "Ain't We Got Fun?" and "On the Good Ship Lollipop". He also wrote lyrics occasionally, and film scores most notably for the standard "She's Funny That Way".
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Abraham Wheelocke
1593 - 1653 (60 years)
Abraham Wheelock was an English linguist. He was the first Cambridge professor of Arabic. Cambridge He graduated MA from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1618, and became Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge in 1619. He was the first Adams Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge, from around 1632. According to Robert Irwin, he regarded it as part of his academic duty to discourage students from taking up the subject. Thomas Hyde was one of his pupils.
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Friedrich Karl Julius Schütz
1779 - 1844 (65 years)
Friedrich Karl Julius Schütz was a German historian. He was the son of philologist Christian Gottfried Schütz . He studied history at the universities of Jena, Erlangen and Göttingen, obtaining his habilitation in 1801 at Jena. From 1804 onward, he was an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Halle. He was the husband of actress Henriette Hendel-Schütz, with whom he accompanied on her theatrical tours — on occasion he also performed on stage.
Go to Profile#13923
Robert Post
1910 - 1943 (33 years)
Robert Perkins Post worked as a reporter for the New York Times during World War II. He was part of a group of eight reporters, known as the Legion of the Doomed or the Writing 69th, selected to fly bomber missions with United States Eighth Air Force.
Go to Profile#13924
Tom Keene
1896 - 1963 (67 years)
Tom Keene was an American actor known mostly for his roles in B Westerns. During his almost 40-year career in motion pictures Tom Keene worked under three different names. From 1923, when he made his first picture, until 1930 he worked under his birth name, George Duryea. The last film he made under this name was Pardon My Gun. Beginning with the 1930 film Tol'able David, he used Tom Keene as his moniker. This name he used up to 1944 when he changed it to Richard Powers. The first film he used this name in was Up in Arms. He continued to use this name for the rest of his film career.
Go to Profile#13925
Richard Austin
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Richard Dennis Oliver Austin FRCM was the chief conductor of the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra from 1934 until 1940 and later a Professor of the Royal College of Music. Early life The son of Frederic and Amy Austin, Austin was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, the Royal College of Music, and in Munich. At Gresham's, he acted in school plays, in 1921 playing Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing and in 1922 Hortensio in The Taming of the Shrew, opposite W. H. Auden as Katherina.
Go to Profile#13926
Tobias Matthay
1858 - 1945 (87 years)
Tobias Augustus Matthay was an English pianist, teacher, and composer. Biography Matthay was born in Clapham, Surrey, in 1858 to parents who had come from northern Germany and eventually became naturalised British subjects. He entered London's Royal Academy of Music in 1871 and eight months later he received the first scholarship given to honour the knighthood of its principal, Sir William Sterndale Bennett. At the academy, Matthay studied composition under Sir William Sterndale Bennett and Arthur Sullivan, and piano with William Dorrell and Walter Macfarren. He served as a sub-professor ther...
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Elizabeth Hill
1900 - 1996 (96 years)
Dame Elizabeth Mary Hill DBE was a Russian-born British academic linguist. In addition to a career with the London University School of Slavonic Studies, she was course director of the Joint Services School for Linguists , a UK Government training programme to produce linguists and interpreters of Russian, for military and intelligence purposes.
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O. J. Matthijs Jolles
1911 - 1968 (57 years)
Otto Jolle Matthijs Jolles performed a major service to strategic studies in the United States by providing the first American translation of Carl von Clausewitz's magnum opus, On War. Jolles himself is a bit obscure to students of military affairs, largely because his translation of On War was his only published effort in that field. Even his nationality has been misidentified—he has been variously identified as Hungarian, Czech, and Dutch. Military historian Jay Luvaas once quoted an unidentified Israeli professor as saying "whereas the first English translation was by an Englishman who did...
Go to Profile#13929
Sam Jones
1924 - 1981 (57 years)
Samuel Jones was an American jazz double bassist, cellist, and composer. Background Sam Jones was born in Jacksonville, Florida, United States, to a musical family. His father played piano and drums and his aunt played organ in church. In 1955, he moved to New York City and began his recording career with Tiny Bradshaw, before working with Bill Evans, Bobby Timmons, Les Jazz Modes, Kenny Dorham, Illinois Jacquet, Freddie Hubbard, Dizzy Gillespie , and Thelonious Monk. He is probably best known for his work with Cannonball Adderley, performing in his quintet from 1955 to 1956 and then again from 1959 to 1964, and recording extensively for Riverside Records as both a leader and sideman.
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Freddie Green
1911 - 1987 (76 years)
Frederick William Green was an American swing jazz guitarist who played rhythm guitar with the Count Basie Orchestra for almost fifty years. Early life and education Green was born in Charleston, South Carolina on March 31, 1911. He was exposed to music from an early age, and learned the banjo before picking up the guitar in his early teenage years.
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Izumo no Okuni
1572 - Present (454 years)
Izumo no Okuni was a Japanese entertainer and shrine maiden who is believed to have invented the theatrical art form of kabuki. She is thought to have begun performing her new art style of theatre in the dry riverbed of the Kamo River in Kyoto. Okuni's troupe quickly gained immense popularity, and were known for their performers, who were often lower-class women Okuni had recruited to act in her all-female theatre group.
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John Fryer
1839 - 1928 (89 years)
John Fryer , also known as Fu Lanya , was an English sinologist who was first Louis Agassiz Professor of Oriental Languages and Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He was professor of English at Tung-Wen College , Peking, China and head of the Anglo-Chinese School in Shanghai, China, and established the Shanghai Polytechnic and Institute for the Chinese Blind there. He was president of the Oriental Institute of California, United States.
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George Bancroft
1882 - 1956 (74 years)
George Bancroft was an American film actor, whose career spanned seventeen years from 1925 to 1942. He was cast in many notable films alongside major film stars throughout his Hollywood years. Early years Bancroft was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1882. He attended Tomes Institute in Port Deposit, Maryland.
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Budd Johnson
1910 - 1984 (74 years)
Albert J. "Budd" Johnson III was an American jazz saxophonist and clarinetist who worked extensively with, among others, Ben Webster, Benny Goodman, Big Joe Turner, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Quincy Jones, Count Basie, Billie Holiday and, especially, Earl Hines.
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Charlotte Greenwood
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Frances Charlotte Greenwood was an American actress and dancer. Born in Philadelphia, Greenwood started in vaudeville, and starred on Broadway, movies and radio. Standing almost six feet tall , she was best known for her long legs and high kicks. She earned the unique praise of being, in her words, the "only woman in the world who could kick a giraffe in the eye."
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Kazimierz Nitsch
1874 - 1958 (84 years)
Kazimierz Ignacy Nitsch was a Polish Slavic linguist, historian of the Polish language and dialectologist. He was one of the co-founders of the Society of Polish Language Enthusiasts and in the years 1919–1958 he edited the organ of the society "Polish Language".. In 1901, he began dialectological research in Kashubia. President of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Giovanni Sgambati
1841 - 1914 (73 years)
Giovanni Sgambati was an Italian pianist and composer. Biography Born in Rome, to an Italian father and an English mother, Sgambati, who lost his father early, received his early education at Trevi, in Umbria, where he wrote some church music and obtained experience as a singer and conductor. In 1860 he settled in Rome, and took up the work of winning acceptance for the best German music, then little known in Italy. The influence and support of Franz Liszt, who was in Rome from 1861, was naturally of great advantage to him, and concerts were given in which Sgambati conducted as well as playi...
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Johan Peter Emilius Hartmann
1805 - 1900 (95 years)
Johan Peter Emilius Hartmann was, together with his son-in-law Niels W. Gade, the leading Danish composer of the 19th century, a period known as the Danish Golden Age. According to Alfred Einstein, he was "the real founder of the Romantic movement in Denmark and even in all Scandinavia". J.P.E. Hartmann was the third generation of composers in the Danish musical Hartmann family.
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Ewan MacColl
1915 - 1989 (74 years)
James Henry Miller , better known by his stage name Ewan MacColl, was a British folk singer-songwriter, folk song collector, labour activist and actor. Born in England to Scottish parents, he is known as one of the instigators of the 1960s folk revival as well as for writing such songs as "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and "Dirty Old Town".
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William Hannibal Thomas
1843 - 1935 (92 years)
William Hannibal Thomas was an American teacher, journalist, judge, writer and legislator. He battled racism throughout his life. In 1861, he was rejected entry from the Union's Army until 1863 when he served, and was wounded by gunshot, leading to the amputation of his right arm. He published "Land and Education," in 1890, promoting avenues for Black people to obtain land and largely criticizing white people for troubles brought onto Black people. He garnered heavy attention from the Black community when he published his most famous work, The American Negro, which took a large conceptual le...
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Henry Stephenson
1871 - 1956 (85 years)
Henry Stephenson was a British actor. He portrayed friendly and wise gentlemen in many films of the 1930s and 1940s. Among his roles were Sir Joseph Banks in Mutiny on the Bounty and Mr. Brownlow in Oliver Twist .
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Hans Schnoor
1893 - 1976 (83 years)
Hans Schnoor was a German musicologist, journalist and music critic. In the late 1950s, he attracted media attention with his denunciation of Arnold Schönberg's A Survivor from Warsaw. living and work
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Patrick Hadley
1899 - 1973 (74 years)
Patrick Arthur Sheldon Hadley was a British composer. Biography Patrick Sheldon Hadley was born on 5 March 1899 in Cambridge. His father, William Sheldon Hadley, was at that time a fellow of Pembroke College. His mother, Edith Jane, was the daughter of the Revd Robert Foster, chaplain to the Royal Hibernian Military School in Dublin.
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Nikolai Nevsky
1892 - 1937 (45 years)
Nikolai Aleksandrovich Nevsky was a Russian and Soviet linguist, an expert on a number of East Asian languages. He was one of the founders of the modern study of the Tangut language of the Western Xia Empire, the work for which he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Science in Philology during his life, and Lenin Prize posthumously. He spent most of his research career in Japan before returning to the USSR. He was arrested and executed during the Great Purge; his surviving manuscripts were published much later, starting in 1960.
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Ken "Snakehips" Johnson
1914 - 1941 (27 years)
Kenrick Reginald Hijmans Johnson , known as Ken "Snakehips" Johnson, was a swing band leader and dancer. He was a leading figure in black British music of the 1930s and early 1940s before his death while performing at the Café de Paris, London, when it was hit by a German bomb in the Blitz during the Second World War.
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Sam Newfield
1899 - 1964 (65 years)
Sam Newfield, born Samuel Neufeld , also known as Sherman Scott or Peter Stewart, was an American B-movie director, one of the most prolific in American film history—he is credited with directing over 250 feature films in a career which began during the silent era and ended in 1958. In addition to his staggering feature output, he also directed one -and two-reel comedy shortss, training films, industrial films, TV episodes and pretty much anything anyone would pay him for. Because of this massive output—he would sometimes direct more than 20 films in a single year—he has been called the most p...
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Chuck Norris
1921 - 1989 (68 years)
Charles Eldridge Norris was an American jazz and blues guitarist. Biography Norris was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in Chicago, where he was tutored in music composition and performance by Walter Dyett. He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1940s, played in nightclubs, and developed a reputation as a session musician in Hollywood. He released some recordings under his own name in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He also accompanied the singers Percy Mayfield and Floyd Dixon and for some time played in the Johnny Otis Orchestra. He also worked with such performers as Amos Milburn, Dinah Washington, and Little Richard.
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Pinetop Smith
1904 - 1929 (25 years)
Clarence Smith , better known as Pinetop Smith or Pine Top Smith, was an American boogie-woogie style blues pianist. His hit tune "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie" featured rhythmic "breakss" that were an essential ingredient of ragtime music, but also a fundamental foreshadowing of rock and roll. The song was also the first known use of the term "boogie woogie" on a record, and cemented that term as the moniker for the genre.
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Theobald Stein
1829 - 1901 (72 years)
Theobald Stein was a Danish sculptor. He was a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and served as its director from 1883 to 1886. Among his most well-known works are the Niels Juel statue at Holmens Kanal and the Ludvig Holberg statue outside the Royal Danish Theatre, both in Copenhagen.
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Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis
1922 - 1986 (64 years)
Edward F. Davis , known professionally as Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. It is unclear how he acquired the moniker "Lockjaw" : it is either said that it came from the title of a tune or from his way of biting hard on the saxophone mouthpiece. Other theories have been put forward.
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