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,
#13951
Frank Skinner
1897 - 1968 (71 years)
Frank Skinner was an American film composer and arranger. Career In 2014, Dallas pre-swing orchestra The Singapore Slingers released a fifteen-track CD homage to Skinner's arrangements. Partial filmography The Rage of Paris Son of Frankenstein Big Town Czar Charlie McCarthy, Detective The Spirit of Culver The Sun Never Sets Rio Destry Rides Again The Invisible Man Returns The House of the Seven Gables Green Hell My Little Chickadee Hired Wife When the Daltons Rode Seven Sinners Back Street The Wolf Man South of Tahiti Appointment for Love Hellzapoppin Too Many Blondes The Lady from Cheyenne ...
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Walter Davis
1912 - 1963 (51 years)
Walter Davis was an American blues singer, pianist, and songwriter who was one of the most prolific blues recording artists from the early 1930s to the early 1950s. He was unrelated to the jazz pianist Walter Davis, Jr.
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Bill Graham
1918 - 1975 (57 years)
William Henry Graham was an American jazz saxophonist. Biography Graham was born in Kansas City, Missouri in September 1918 and grew up in Denver, Colorado, where he led his own ensemble which included Paul Quinichette among its members. He studied at Tuskegee University and then Lincoln University of Missouri after a stint in the Army during World War II. He worked with Count Basie, Lucky Millinder, Herbie Fields, and Erskine Hawkins early in his career. From 1946 to 1953, he worked with Dizzy Gillespie as a baritone saxophonist; among his compositions for Gillespie was the tune "Oh-Sho-Be-D...
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Paul Ulanowsky
1908 - 1968 (60 years)
Paul Alexander Theodore Ulanowsky was an Austrian-American pianist, accompanist, vocal coach, and music educator of Austrian Jewish and Ukrainian-Jewish descent. He began his career as the pianist for the Vienna Philharmonic from 1927 to 1935. He then embarked on a long career as an accompanist, notably enjoying a particularly close relationship with soprano Lotte Lehmann during the last fourteen years of her career. He played in concerts with many of the world's best singers and instrumentalists during the 1940s and 1950s.
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James Carew
1876 - 1938 (62 years)
James Usselman , known professionally as James Carew, was an American actor who appeared in many films, mainly in Britain. He was born in Goshen, Indiana in 1876 and began work as a clerk in a publishing firm. He began acting on stage in Chicago in 1897 in Damon and Pythias.
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Heinz Friedrich Hartig
1907 - 1969 (62 years)
Heinz Friedrich Hartig was a German composer and harpsichordist. In 1948 he began teaching at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik. Seven years later, he took up a professorship there. He became acquainted with Boris Blacher, a composer with whom he collaborated extensively.
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Andrei Mironov
1941 - 1987 (46 years)
Andrei Aleksandrovich Mironov was a Soviet and Russian stage and film actor who played lead roles in some of the most popular Soviet films, such as The Diamond Arm, Beware of the Car and Twelve Chairs. Mironov was also a popular singer.
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Lloyd Powell
1888 - 1975 (87 years)
Lloyd Powell was an English, later Canadian pianist and teacher. Career Lloyd Ioan Powell was born in Ironbridge, Shropshire in 1888. His parents were Welsh. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London from the age of 10. His teachers were Marmaduke Barton , Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and Sir Frederick Bridge . He won the Hopkinson Gold Medal for piano performance and the Dannreuther Prize for the best piano concerto performance. Further studies were undertaken with Ferruccio Busoni in Basel, and in Berlin.
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James Ford
1903 - 1977 (74 years)
James Ford was an American actor in silent and sound films. Selected filmography Outcast , directed by William SeiterNaughty Baby Wizard of the Saddle Prisoners Making the Grade House of Horror Children of the Ritz
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Relly Raffman
1921 - 1988 (67 years)
Relly Raffman was a composer and professor of music at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Early biography Raffman was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, September 4, 1921. He entered Dartmouth College in 1939, by which time he had been performing as a jazz pianist for several years. At Dartmouth, he was pianist, arranger, leader, singer, and saxophonist of the Barbary Coast Orchestra. His Dartmouth education was interrupted by four years in the U.S. Navy in World War II, during which he had a distinguished career as a carrier pilot, flying more than 75 missions and receiving the D...
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Johannes Weyrauch
1897 - 1977 (80 years)
Johannes Weyrauch was a German composer and cantor. Life Childhood Weyrauch was born on 20 February 1897 in Leipzig. His mother, Maria Große, who had received a thorough musical education and worked in several cantor houses, introduced her son to sacred music at an early age. His father, Friedrich Louis Weyrauch, was a merchant by profession and was able to finance his son's attendance of the . Through his stepbrother , Weyrauch got in touch with the music of Richard Wagner, which had a decisive influence on his musical life:My brother sent me into the Ring when I was 14 years old - with the success that I became Wagner mad.
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Else Schmitz-Gohr
1901 - 1987 (86 years)
Else Schmitz-Gohr was a German composer, pianist, and teacher who is best remembered for her Elegy for the Left Hand for piano, her successful students, and her recordings of Max Reger’s works for piano.
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Karl Piutti
1846 - 1902 (56 years)
Karl Piutti was a German composer and organist. Piutti studied at the Leipzig Conservatory. He taught at his alma mater from 1875 onwards, and also became the organist at the Thomaskirche after 1880.
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John Spikes
1881 - 1955 (74 years)
John Curry Spikes was an American jazz musician and entrepreneur. Along with his brother Reb Spikes, John ran a traveling show band in early 1900s. At one point, Jelly Roll Morton was a member of the band. The Spikes brothers were performing in San Francisco around 1915, under the name The Original So-Different Orchestra, with Reb Spikes billed as the "World's Greatest Saxophonist". Around 1919, they settled in Los Angeles, where they started a music store, a nightclub, an agency and a publishing house.
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Zhu Zaiyu
1536 - 1611 (75 years)
Zhu Zaiyu was a Chinese mathematician, physicist, choreographer, and music theorist. He was a prince of the Chinese Ming dynasty. In 1584, Prince Zhu innovatively described the equal temperament via accurate mathematical calculation.
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Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti
1814 - 1882 (68 years)
Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti was an Italian composer, music educator, and college administrator. Born in Asti, he joined the faculty of the Milan Conservatory in 1850 as a professor of counterpoint. He was appointed the school's director in 1878, a post he held until illness forced him to resign in November 1881. He died the following year in Casale Monferrato. His notable pupils included Franco Faccio, Giacomo Puccini, and Ivan Zajc. His compositional output mainly consists of sacred music. His opera Pergolese premiered at La Scala on 16 March 1857. It used a libretto by Temistocle Solera and...
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Mashiho Chiri
1909 - 1961 (52 years)
Mashiho Chiri was an Ainu linguist and anthropologist. He was best known for creating Ainu-Japanese dictionaries. Biography Chiri was born on February 24, 1909, in what is now Noboribetsu, Hokkaido, Japan. His older sister is Yukie Chiri and his aunt is Imekanu. Though they were both native Ainu speakers, Chiri was not. He was taught Japanese, and learned the Ainu language when he was in high school.
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Franz Sauer
1894 - 1962 (68 years)
Franz Sauer was an Austrian organist and music educator. Life Born in the Bielitz-Bialaer Sprachinsel in Austrian Silesia, Sauer learned music from his father at a very early age. He began with violin and piano and found his way to organ at the age of ten. He continued his education in Ziegenhals at the teacher training seminar and at the Berlin University of the Arts and the church music school in Regensburg. Sauer had his first position as choir director and organist in Kolsko. In 1914 he applied for the position of first Salzburg Cathedral organist. During his probationary period there in...
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Maria Korchinska
1895 - 1979 (84 years)
Maria Korchinska was a distinguished 20th-century Russian harpist and one of the leading 20th-century harpists in Great Britain. Early life Korchinska entered the Moscow Conservatory to study both piano and harp in 1903 but on the advice of her father decided to concentrate on the harp from 1907 on. Her father believed that Russia was entering a time of great change and that given the relatively high number of pianists in Russia it would be easier for his daughter to find work as a harpist than as a pianist. In 1911 she won the first Gold Medal given to a harpist by the Moscow Conservatory.
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Joseph Vézina
1849 - 1924 (75 years)
François-Joseph Vézina was a Quebec conductor, composer, organist and music professor. Vézina is buried in the Cimetière Notre-Dame-de-Belmont in Sainte-Foy. Early life Vézina, born in 1849, was the son of François Vézina, a house painter and amateur musician who taught his son to play the piano. As a youngster, Vézina briefly studied under Calixa Lavallée but, for the most part, he was a self-taught musician.
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Vincent Fanelli
1883 - 1966 (83 years)
Vincent Fanelli, Jr. was an American harpist, teacher, and handball enthusiast. Biography Fanelli was born in New York City. His father, a Neapolitan, was his first harp teacher. By 1908 he was on the orchestra faculty at New York's Institute of Musical Art, now the Juilliard School, Dr. Frank Damrosch, director.
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Lazzaro Uzielli
1861 - 1943 (82 years)
Lazzaro Uzielli was an Italian pianist and music educator. Life Born in Florence, Uzielli studied in his home town with Luigi Vannuccini und Giuseppe Buonamici, then with Ernst Rudorff in Berlin, and with Clara Schumann and Joachim Raff at Dr. Hoch's Konservatorium in Frankfurt.
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Hayward Keniston
1883 - 1970 (87 years)
Hayward Keniston was a linguist who served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1948 and as dean of the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science and the Arts from 1945 to 1951. He received his PhD from Harvard University. His work focused predominantly on Spanish syntax and 16th century Spanish history.
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Carl Perkins
1928 - 1958 (30 years)
Carl Perkins was an American jazz pianist. Biography Perkins was born in Indianapolis but worked mainly in Los Angeles. He is best remembered for his performances with the Curtis Counce Quintet, which also featured Harold Land, Jack Sheldon and drummer Frank Butler. He also performed with Tiny Bradshaw, Big Jay McNeely in 1948–49, and played dates with Miles Davis in 1950. Following a short stint in the Army , he worked intermittently with the Oscar Moore Trio and the Clifford Brown–Max Roach group in 1954. He recorded with Frank Morgan in 1955, and with his own group in 1956. Perkins compos...
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William M. Runyan
1870 - 1957 (87 years)
William Marion Runyan was a Christian composer from the United States who wrote the music to the well-known hymn Great Is Thy Faithfulness. In 1870, William Marion Runyan was born in Marion, New York, to a Methodist minister Rev. William White Runyan and his wife Hannah Runyan . At age fourteen, Runyan and his family moved to Marion, Kansas. As a youth, Runyan served as a church organist and graduated from Marion High School in Kansas. Runyan was ordained as a Methodist minister at age twenty-one and then pastored various congregations in Kansas.
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J. Matthew Ennis
1864 - 1921 (57 years)
John Matthew Ennis , invariably referred to as Matthew Ennis or J. Matthew Ennis, was an English pianist and organist who had a substantial academic career in Adelaide, South Australia. History Ennis was born a son of Matthew Ennis in Dover, but grew up in London where he was educated at the University College School. He sang as a choirboy and gained sufficient expertise in organ playing to take his first church appointment as organist at the age of 14, serving at the Church of St Barnabas, King Square, London, from 1878, then the Church of St Philip, Clerkenwell, from 1883 to 1887 .
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Ettore Desderi
1892 - 1974 (82 years)
Ettore Desderi was an Italian composer. Born in Asti, He studied composition at the conservatory in Turin, graduating in 1921, as well as undertaking studies in architecture, which he completed in 1920. He subsequently studied with Ildebrando Pizzetti in Florence. After trying to make a living as an architect, Desderi embarked on a musical career: he directed the conservatory at Alessandria from 1933 to 1941, and then worked as a professor of composition at the conservatories of Milan and Bologna. He retired in 1963. Desderi died in Florence.
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Disma Fumagalli
1826 - 1893 (67 years)
Disma Fumagalli was an Italian composer and teacher of music. He was a graduate of the Milan Conservatory, where he began teaching piano in 1853. He composed more than 300 études for piano, as well as other exercises; he also wrote a concerto for piano and string orchestra.
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Olaf Christiansen
1901 - 1984 (83 years)
Olaf C. Christiansen was an American composer, professor, and conductor in the Lutheran choral tradition. He succeeded his father as the second conductor of the St. Olaf Choir, which he led for 27 years.
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Shovkat Mammadova
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Shovkat Hasan qizi Mammadova was an Azerbaijani opera singer and music instructor. People's Artist of the USSR . Early life and musical career Mammadova was born in Tiflis to the low-class Azeri family of Hasan Mammadov and Khurshid . She had a younger brother named Mugbil. Her father, a shoemaker who hailed from the village of Goshakilsa , noticed her musical gift when Shovkat was six years old.
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Ron Wilson
1944 - 1989 (45 years)
Ronald Lee Wilson was an American musician and recording artist, best known as an original member and drummer of The Surfaris, an early surf music group of the 1960s. Wilson's energetic drum solo on "Wipe Out" made it one of the best-known instrumental songs of the period.
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Gilardo Gilardi
1889 - 1963 (74 years)
Gilardo Gilardi was an Argentine composer, pianist, and conductor who was the eponym of the Gilardo Gilardi Conservatory of Music in La Plata, Buenos Aires. He was born in San Fernando, Argentina and first learned music from his father before studying with the composer Arturo Berutti in Buenos Aires. He began composing as a teenager and he premiered his first opera, Ilse, at Teatro Colón opera house, aged 23. He co-founded the group Renovación in 1929, but left three years later, in 1932. He was professor at the University of La Plata and wrote an elementary course on harmony. Gilardi experimented with the pentatonic scale and Americas' Indigenous music.
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John Prince
1643 - 1723 (80 years)
Rev. John Prince , vicar of Totnes and Berry Pomeroy in Devon, England, was a biographer. He is best known for his Worthies of Devon, a series of biographies of Devon-born notables covering the period before the Norman Conquest to his own era. He became the subject of a sexual scandal, the court records of which were made into a book in 2001 and a play in 2005.
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Ernst Naumann
1832 - 1910 (78 years)
Carl Ernst Naumann was a German organist, composer, conductor, editor, arranger and musicologist. He is best known now as an arranger and editor of the music of J.S. Bach, Mozart and Mendelssohn. He was a friend of Schumann and Brahms, and conducted the first performance of the latter's Alto Rhapsody in 1870.
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Lockrem Johnson
1924 - 1977 (53 years)
Seattle-based Lockrem Johnson was an American composer. He studied at The Cornish School from 1931-38 with Berthe Poncy Jacobson and at the University of Washington from 1938-42 with George McKay. His one-act chamber opera A Letter to Emily was runner up for the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1952. Regarding an incident in the life of poet Emily Dickinson, the libretto was adapted by the composer from the play Consider the Lilies by Robert Hupton. Johnson returned to Seattle in 1962 to become head of the music department at The Cornish School, remaining in that position until 1969. He founded P...
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William Christian Sellé
1813 - 1898 (85 years)
William Christian Sellé, was a Victorian doctor of music, composer and for forty years Musician in Ordinary to Queen Victoria. Biography William Christian Sellé was born in Benhall, Suffolk in 1813. His parents were Elizabeth Underwood, from a farming family in Suffolk, and Christian Sellé, a musician who had left Hanover with Viotti, a celebrated violinist, to join the private band of the 15th Light Dragoons of Ernest Augustus Duke of Cumberland who was then living at the royal residence in Kew and was forming a band of mainly German musicians. Sellé was bilingual from an early age.
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Lucia Sturdza-Bulandra
1873 - 1961 (88 years)
Lucia Sturdza-Bulandra was a Romanian actress and acting teacher. She is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of Romanian theater. In addition to her acting career, she played an important role in shaping an entire generation of Romanian actors and directors, her students including the likes of George Calboreanu, Dina Cocea, Haig Acterian, Radu Beligan and Victor Rebengiuc. She is the namesake of the Bulandra Theatre in Bucharest.
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Joseph Beaulieu
1895 - 1965 (70 years)
Joseph Beaulieu was a Canadian composer, folklorist, and music educator. He traveled extensively throughout Canada collecting folk songs, which he compiled in several published books. As a composer, his works reflect his strong interest in folk music in there structure and melody. He wrote over 200 works, most of them folk-inspired songs or sacred songs. Also of note is his operetta Le Trésor du pauvre and his mass for four mixed voices, the Vatican II Mass, which was written for ceremonies held during the Second Vatican Council. A number of his pieces have been published by La Bonne Chanson ...
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Fritz Cohen
1904 - 1967 (63 years)
Frederick A. "Fritz" Cohen was a German composer best known for writing the music for Kurt Jooss's ballets. Career Cohen was born in Bonn, Germany, on June 23, 1904, to Friedrich Cohen and Hedwig Cohen. He studied at the Leipzig and Cologne conservatories and the University of Bonn, focusing on musical theater.
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Charles West
1885 - 1943 (58 years)
Charles West was an American film actor of the silent film era. He appeared in more than 300 films between 1908 and 1937. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and died in Los Angeles, California.
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William Foster Apthorp
1848 - 1913 (65 years)
William Foster Apthorp was an American writer, drama and music critic, editor and musician. Biography He was born in 1848. He was the "son of Robert East Apthorp and Eliza Hunt, grandson of John T. Apthorp and direct descendant of Charles Apthorp, named after his maternal great grandfather William Foster. Since before the American Revolution, Apthorp's ancestors had participated in the mercantile and intellectual life of Boston." He graduated from Harvard in 1869 having taken musical classes with J. K. Paine. He then took piano from B. J. Lang for 7 or 8 years longer. "Coming from an old Bos...
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Jean Louis Nicodé
1853 - 1919 (66 years)
Jean Louis Nicodé was a Prussian pianist, composer and conductor. Biography He was born in Jersitz . He was initially taught by his father, an amateur violinist, pianist, conductor and composer. He entered the New Academy of Music in Berlin in 1869, where he studied piano under Theodor Kullak, harmony under Würst and counterpoint and composition with Kiel.
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Elisabeth Karg-Gasterstädt
1886 - 1964 (78 years)
Klara Elisabeth Karg-Gasterstädt was a German medievalist, professor of German philology at the University of Leipzig and head of the effort to publish the Old High German Dictionary. Biography Karg-Gasterstädt was the daughter of Karl Gasterstädt, a factory director from Swabia, and his wife, Sophie, née Schönleber. Klara attended a teachers' college in Stuttgart from 1909 to 1912, and after graduation she was allowed to teach middle and higher grades. From there she went on to work as a substitute teacher at the Königin-Katharina-Stift, and then became a full-time teacher at the Prieser Hig...
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Siraj al-Din al-Sajawandi
1200 - 1300 (100 years)
Sirāj ud-Dīn Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn 'Abd ur-Rashīd Sajāwandī also known as Abū Tāhir Muhammad al-Sajāwandī al-Hanafī and the honorific Sirāj ud-Dīn was a 12th-century Hanafi scholar of Islamic inheritance jurisprudence, mathematics astrology and geography. He is primarily known for his work Kitāb al-Farāʼiḍ al-Sirājīyah , commonly known simply as "the Sirājīyah", which is a principal work on Hanafi inheritance law. The work was translated into English by Sir William Jones in 1792 for subsequent use in the courts of British India. He was the grand-nephew of qari Muhammad ibn Tayfour Sajawandi.
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Emil Mattiesen
1875 - 1939 (64 years)
Emil Karl Gustav Alfred Mattiesen was a Baltic Germans musician, music pedagogue, composer and philosopher. He composed lieder, song cycles, ballads, chamber music and organ music, but is better known for standard works in German on parapsychology. He was a professor of church music at the University of Rostock from 1929.
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Felix von Kraus
1870 - 1937 (67 years)
Felix von Kraus was an Austrian dramatic bass. Born in Vienna, he received a doctorate in musicology from the University of Vienna in 1894; as a singer, however, he was mainly self-taught. He made his debut at Bayreuth as Hagen in Götterdämmerung in 1899 and was heard thereafter at numerous Bayreuth Festivals and at other opera houses throughout Europe; he specialized in the works of Richard Wagner. In 1908 he became the artistic director of the Munich Opera; that same year he became a professor at the Munich Conservatory. Among his students was the Swiss tenor and early music specialist Max Meili and heldentenor Karel Burian.
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Carlo Albanesi
1856 - 1926 (70 years)
Carlo Albanesi was an Italian-born composer, pianist, teacher and examiner who spent most of his working life in England. His Exercises for Fingering, first published in the early 1900s, are still in use today.
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Henry Schradieck
1846 - 1918 (72 years)
Henry Schradieck was a German violinist, music pedagogue and composer. He was one of the foremost violin teachers of his day. He wrote a series of etude books for the violin which are still in common use today.
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Stuart N. Wolfenden
1889 - 1938 (49 years)
Stuart Norris Wolfenden was a linguist who worked at the University of California, Berkeley during the first part of the 20th century. During the New Deal he was titular head of the Sino-Tibetan philology project, which both Robert Shafer and Paul K. Benedict were directors of. In the 1970s the 'Stuart Wolfenden Society' was founded in his honor, together with a monograph series 'Occasional papers of the Wolfenden Society', in which James Matisoff published many of his early works.
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Boris Koutzen
1901 - 1966 (65 years)
Boris Koutzen was a Russian-American violinist composer and music educator. Biography Koutzen was born in Uman, Southern Russia. He began composing at the age of six and studied violin with his father. In 1918 his family moved to Moscow, where Boris entered the Moscow Conservatory to study violin with Lew Moissejewitsch Zeitlin, and composition with Reinhold Glière. That same year, he won the national competition for the position of first violin in the State Opera House Orchestra, and later joined the Moscow Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky.
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