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,
#13951
Elliott D. Canonge
1921 - 1971 (50 years)
Elliott D. Canonge was an author and linguist who worked closely with the Comanche and Alaskan Inuit and Athabaskan groups in documenting their language and culture. Canonge worked primarily through grants by Wycliffe Bible Translators as well as related coursework with the Summer Institute of Linguistics on the campus of Oklahoma State University where he was a staff member and an alumnist. Notably, Canonge instructed Native American students to also conduct their own fieldwork, including documenting and speaking the language while many of his contemporaries were only translating the text in...
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Guru Dutt
1925 - 1964 (39 years)
Guru Dutt , was an Indian film director, producer, actor, choreographer, and writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of Indian cinema. Dutt was lauded for his artistry, notably his usage of close-up shots, lighting, and depictions of melancholia. He directed a total of 8 Hindi films, several of which have gained a cult following internationally. This includes Pyaasa , which made its way onto Time magazine's 100 Greatest Movies list, as well as Kaagaz Ke Phool , Chaudhvin Ka Chand , and Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam , all of which are frequently listed among the greatest films in Hindi cinema.
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Alma Cogan
1932 - 1966 (34 years)
Alma Angela Cohen Cogan was an English singer of traditional pop in the 1950s and early 1960s. Dubbed the "Girl with the Giggle in Her Voice", she was the highest paid British female entertainer of her era.
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Johann Kuhnau
1660 - 1722 (62 years)
Johann Kuhnau was a German polymath, known primarily as a composer today. He was also active as a novelist, translator, lawyer, and music theorist, and was able to combine these activities with his duties in his official post as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, which he occupied for 21 years. Much of his music, including operas, masses, and other large-scale vocal works, is lost. His reputation today rests on his Biblical Sonatas, a set of programmatic keyboard sonatas published in 1700, in which each sonata depicted in detail a particular story from the Bible. After his death, Kuhnau was succeeded a...
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Bill Mitchell
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
William L. Mitchell was an American automobile designer. Mitchell worked briefly as an advertising illustrator and as the official illustrator of the Automobile Racing Club of America before being recruited by Harley Earl to join the Art and Color Section of General Motors in 1935.
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Pepper Adams
1930 - 1986 (56 years)
Park Frederick "Pepper" Adams III was an American jazz baritone saxophonist and composer. He composed 42 pieces, was the leader on eighteen albums spanning 28 years, and participated in 600 sessions as a sideman. He worked with an array of musicians, and had especially fruitful collaborations with trumpeter Donald Byrd and as a member of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band.
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Carleton Hobbs
1898 - 1978 (80 years)
Carleton Percy Hobbs, OBE was an English actor with many film, radio and television appearances. He portrayed Sherlock Holmes in 80 radio adaptations in a series of Sherlock Holmes radio dramas , and also starred in the radio adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour.
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Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
1875 - 1912 (37 years)
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a British-Sierra Leonean composer and conductor. Of mixed-race, Coleridge-Taylor achieved such success that he was referred to by white New York musicians as the "African Mahler" when he had three tours of the United States in the early 1900s. He was particularly known for his three cantatas on the epic 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha by American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Coleridge-Taylor premiered the first section in 1898, when he was 23.
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Tomaso Albinoni
1671 - 1751 (80 years)
Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni was an Italian composer of the Baroque era. His output includes operas, concertos, sonatas for one to six instruments, sinfonias, and solo cantatas. While famous in his day as an opera composer, he is known today for his instrumental music, especially his concertos. He is best remembered today for a work called "Adagio in G minor", attributed to him but largely written by Remo Giazotto, a 20th century musicologist and composer, who was a cataloger of the works of Albinoni.
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Gregory La Cava
1892 - 1952 (60 years)
Gregory La Cava was an American film director of Italian descent best known for his films of the 1930s, including My Man Godfrey and Stage Door, which earned him nominations for Academy Award for Best Director.
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Carl Froelich
1875 - 1953 (78 years)
Carl August Hugo Froelich was a German film pioneer and film director. He was born and died in Berlin. Biography Apparatus builder and cameraman From 1903 Froelich was a colleague of Oskar Messter, one of the advance guard of German cinema, for whom initially he worked on the construction of cinematographic equipment. As cameraman for Messter's weekly newsreels he filmed among many other things the aftermath of a train accident on the Berlin elevated railway on 28 September 1908, one of the worst transport disasters of the time.
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Katharine Lee Bates
1863 - 1929 (66 years)
Katharine Lee Bates was an American author and poet, chiefly remembered for her anthem "America the Beautiful", but also for her many books and articles on social reform, on which she was a noted speaker.
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Maria Torrence Wishart
1893 - 1982 (89 years)
Maria Torrence Wishart was a Canadian medical illustrator and the founder of the University of Toronto's Art as Applied to Medicine program. She was educated at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine under Max Brödel, and in 1925 returned to Canada to found the Department of Medical Art Service in the Faculty of Medicine.
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June Christy
1925 - 1990 (65 years)
June Christy was an American singer, known for her work in the cool jazz genre and for her silky smooth vocals. Her success as a singer began with The Stan Kenton Orchestra. She pursued a solo career from 1954 and is best known for her debut album Something Cool. After her death, she was hailed as "one of the finest and most neglected singers of her time."
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Komitas
1869 - 1935 (66 years)
Soghomon Soghomonian, ordained and commonly known as Komitas, was an Armenian priest, musicologist, composer, arranger, singer, and choirmaster, who is considered the founder of the Armenian national school of music. He is recognized as one of the pioneers of ethnomusicology.
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Dan Duryea
1907 - 1968 (61 years)
Dan Duryea was an American actor in film, stage, and television. Known for portraying a vast range of character roles as a villain, he nonetheless had a long career in a wide variety of leading and secondary roles.
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Jaroslav Hašek
1883 - 1923 (40 years)
Jaroslav Hašek was a Czech writer, humorist, satirist, journalist, bohemian, first anarchist and then communist, and commissar of the Red Army against the Czechoslovak Legion. He is best known for his novel The Fate of the Good Soldier Švejk during the World War, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in World War I and a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures. The novel has been translated into about 60 languages, making it the most translated novel in Czech literature.
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Wilhelm Friedemann Bach
1710 - 1784 (74 years)
Wilhelm Friedemann Bach was a German composer, organist and harpsichordist. He was the second child and eldest son of Johann Sebastian Bach and Maria Barbara Bach. Despite his acknowledged genius as an improviser and composer, his income and employment were unstable, and he died in poverty.
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Nikolai Medtner
1879 - 1951 (72 years)
Nikolai Karlovich Medtner was a Russian composer and virtuoso pianist. After a period of comparative obscurity in the 25 years immediately after his death, he is now becoming recognized as one of the most significant Russian composers for the piano.
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Dorothy Kilgallen
1913 - 1965 (52 years)
Dorothy Mae Kilgallen was an American columnist, journalist, and television game show panelist. After spending two semesters at the College of New Rochelle, she started her career shortly before her 18th birthday as a reporter for the Hearst Corporation's New York Evening Journal. In 1938, she began her newspaper column "The Voice of Broadway", which was eventually syndicated to more than 140 papers. In 1950, she became a regular panelist on the television game show What's My Line?, continuing in the role until her death.
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Anita Loos
1889 - 1981 (92 years)
Corinne Anita Loos was an American actress, novelist, playwright and screenwriter. In 1912, she became the first female staff screenwriter in Hollywood, when D. W. Griffith put her on the payroll at Triangle Film Corporation. She is best known for her 1925 comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and her 1951 Broadway adaptation of Colette's novella Gigi.
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Giovanni Gabrieli
1557 - 1612 (55 years)
Giovanni Gabrieli was an Italian composer and organist. He was one of the most influential musicians of his time, and represents the culmination of the style of the Venetian School, at the time of the shift from Renaissance to Baroque idioms.
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Igor Markevitch
1912 - 1983 (71 years)
Igor Borisovich Markevitch was a Russian-born composer and conductor who studied and worked in Paris and became a naturalized Italian and French citizen in 1947 and 1982 respectively. He was commissioned in 1929 for a piano concerto by impresario Serge Diaghilev of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.
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Theodor Leschetizky
1830 - 1915 (85 years)
Theodor Leschetizky Life Theodor Leschetizky was born on 22 June 1830 at the estate of the family of Count Potocki in Landshut, Austrian Galicia. Joseph Leschetizky, his father, was a gifted pianist and music teacher of Viennese birth. His mother Thérèse von Ullmann was a gifted singer of German origin. His father gave him his first piano lessons and then took him to Vienna to study with Carl Czerny. At age eleven, he performed a Czerny piano concerto in Landshut, with Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, the son of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, conducting. At the age of fifteen he started to tutor his first students.
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Richard Mansfield
1857 - 1907 (50 years)
Richard Mansfield was an English actor-manager best known for his performances in Shakespeare plays, Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and the play Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Life and career Mansfield was born in Berlin and spent his early childhood on Heligoland, Germany, an island in the North Sea, then under British rule. His parents were Hermine Küchenmeister-Rudersdorf, a Russian-born operatic soprano, and Maurice Mansfield, a British London-based wine merchant . His grandfather was the violinist Joseph Rudersdorff. Mansfield was educated at Derby School, in Derby, England, where he studied painting in London.
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Max Levien
1885 - 1937 (52 years)
Max Levien was a leading German-Russian communist politician. He was one of the co-founders of the Communist Party of Germany . As the first party chairman of the KPD in Bavaria, he was in April 1919 one of the protagonists of the Bavarian Soviet Republic that emerged in the wake of the German November Revolution of 1918.
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Erich Berneker
1874 - 1937 (63 years)
Erich Berneker was a German linguist, Slavicist and Balticist, follower of the Neogrammarian school. He was born in Königsberg. He studied in Leipzig under August Leskien, receiving a doctorate in 1895 with a thesis on Old Prussian language, covering its texts, grammar and an etymological dictionary. Afterwards he went to Russia for a one-year study period. He habilitated in 1899 with a paper on word order in Slavic languages . He worked as a private assistant professor in Berlin from 1902, as an associate professor in Prague, as a full professor since 1908 in Wrocław , and since 1911 in Muni...
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Larry Williams
1935 - 1980 (45 years)
Larry Williams was an American rhythm and blues and rock and roll singer, songwriter, producer, and pianist from New Orleans, Louisiana. Williams is best known for writing and recording some rock and roll classics from 1957 to 1959 for Specialty Records, including "Bony Moronie", "Short Fat Fannie", "Slow Down", "Dizzy, Miss Lizzy" , "Bad Boy" and "She Said Yeah" . John Lennon was a fan, and the Beatles and several other British Invasion groups recorded several of his songs.
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William Miller
1838 - 1923 (85 years)
William Miller was a Scottish educationalist and Free Church of Scotland missionary to Madras. He was also a member of Madras Legislative Council for four terms—in 1893, 1895, 1899, and 1902. He was chiefly notable for transforming Madras Christian College into an ecumenical enterprise and imbuing the minds of Madras Province South Indians with Fulfilment theology, with an idea of "Christ the fulfiller"—in a sense, he is considered not only the pioneer of Fulfilment theology, but also of Hindu Renaissance by making Indian converts to think Christianity in Indian context. He was the recipient...
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Harry Andrews
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
Harry Stewart Fleetwood Andrews, CBE was an English actor known for his film portrayals of tough military officers. His performance as Regimental Sergeant Major Wilson in The Hill alongside Sean Connery earned Andrews the National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actor and a nomination for the 1966 BAFTA Award for Best British Actor. The first of his more than 80 film appearances was in The Red Beret in 1953.
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Anton Diabelli
1781 - 1858 (77 years)
Anton Diabelli was an Austrian music publisher, editor and composer. Best known in his time as a publisher, he is most familiar today as the composer of the waltz on which Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his set of thirty-three Diabelli Variations.
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Valentin Avrorin
1907 - 1977 (70 years)
Valentin Aleksandrovich Avrorin was a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and an expert in languages. He was born in Tambov, Russian Empire to a family of teachers. He was outstanding in the sphere of Tungusic languages, and was one of the active creators of the Nanai written language. In 1925 Avrorin graduated from one of the Tambov schools.
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Adela Rogers St. Johns
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Adela Nora Rogers St. Johns was an American journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. She wrote a number of screenplays for silent movies, but is best remembered for her groundbreaking exploits as "The World's Greatest Girl Reporter" during the 1920s and 1930s and her celebrity interviews for Photoplay magazine.
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Cliff Burton
1962 - 1986 (24 years)
Clifford Lee Burton was an American musician who was the bassist for thrash metal band Metallica from 1982 until his death in 1986. He performed on the band's first three albums, Kill 'Em All , Ride the Lightning , and Master of Puppets . Burton also received a posthumous writing credit on ...And Justice for All for the song "To Live Is to Die".
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Violeta Parra
1917 - 1967 (50 years)
Violeta del Carmen Parra Sandoval was a Chilean composer, singer-songwriter, folklorist, ethnomusicologist and visual artist. She pioneered the Nueva Canción Chilena , a renewal and a reinvention of Chilean folk music that would extend its sphere of influence outside Chile.
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Sy Oliver
1910 - 1988 (78 years)
Melvin James "Sy" Oliver was an American jazz arranger, trumpeter, composer, singer and bandleader. Life Sy Oliver was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, United States. His mother was a piano teacher, and his father was a multi-instrumentalist, who demonstrated saxophones at a time when instrument was seldom played other than by marching bands.
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Leatrice Joy
1893 - 1985 (92 years)
Leatrice Joy was an American actress most prolific during the silent film era. Early life Joy was born in New Orleans, Louisiana to dentist Edward Joseph Zeidler, who was of Austrian and French descent, and Mary Joy Crimens, who was of German and Irish descent. She had a brother, Billy, who later worked at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
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Gigi Gryce
1925 - 1983 (58 years)
Gigi Gryce , later Basheer Qusim, was an American jazz saxophonist, flautist, clarinetist, composer, arranger, and educator. While his performing career was relatively short, much of his work as a player, composer, and arranger was quite influential and well-recognized during his time. However, Gryce abruptly ended his jazz career in the 1960s. This, in addition to his nature as a very private person, has resulted in very little knowledge of Gryce today. Several of his compositions have been covered extensively and have become minor jazz standards. Gryce's compositional bent includes harmonic choices similar to those of contemporaries Benny Golson, Tadd Dameron and Horace Silver.
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Uday Shankar
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Uday Shankar was an Indian dancer and choreographer, best known for creating a fusion style of dance, adapting European theatrical techniques to Indian classical dance, imbued with elements of Indian classical, folk, and tribal dance, which he later popularised in India, Europe, and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. He was a pioneer of modern dance in India.
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Una Merkel
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Una Merkel was an American stage, film, radio, and television actress. Merkel was born in Kentucky and acted on stage in New York in the 1920s. She went to Hollywood in 1930 and became a popular film actress. Two of her best-known performances are in the films 42nd Street and Destry Rides Again. She won a Tony Award in 1956 and was nominated for an Oscar in 1961.
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Carl Reinecke
1824 - 1910 (86 years)
Carl Heinrich Carsten Reinecke was a German composer, conductor, and pianist in the mid-Romantic era. Biography Reinecke was born in what is today the Hamburg district of Altona; technically he was born a Dane, as until 1864 the town was under Danish rule. He received all his musical instruction from his father, Rudolf Reinecke , a music teacher and writer on musical subjects. Carl first devoted himself to violin-playing, but later on turned his attention to the piano. He began to compose at the age of seven, and his first public appearance as a pianist was when he was twelve years old.
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Bruno Migliorini
1896 - 1975 (79 years)
Bruno Migliorini was an Italian linguist and philologist. He was the author of one of the first scientific histories of Italian language and was president of the Accademia della Crusca. Biography Migliorini was born in Rovigo.
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Cornelius Cardew
1936 - 1981 (45 years)
Cornelius Cardew was an English experimental music composer, and founder of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected experimental music, explaining why he had "discontinued composing in an avantgarde idiom" in his own programme notes to his Piano Album 1973.
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Tadd Dameron
1917 - 1965 (48 years)
Tadley Ewing Peake Dameron was an American jazz composer, arranger, and pianist. Biography Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Dameron was the most influential arranger of the bebop era, but also wrote charts for swing and hard bop players. The bands he arranged for included those of Count Basie, Artie Shaw, Jimmie Lunceford, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, and Sarah Vaughan. In 1940-41 he was the piano player and arranger for the Kansas City band Harlan Leonard and his Rockets. He and lyricist Carl Sigman wrote "If You Could See Me Now" for Sarah Vaughan and it became one of her first signature songs.
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Frank Tuttle
1892 - 1963 (71 years)
Frank Wright Tuttle was a Hollywood film director and writer who directed films from 1922 to 1959 . Biography Frank Tuttle was educated at Yale University, where he edited campus humor magazine The Yale Record.
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Delmer Daves
1904 - 1977 (73 years)
Delmer Lawrence Daves was an American screenwriter, film director and film producer. He worked in many genres, including film noir and warfare, but he is best known for his Western movies, especially Broken Arrow , The Last Wagon , 3:10 to Yuma and The Hanging Tree . He was forced to work on studio-based films only after heart trouble in 1959 but one of these, A Summer Place, was nevertheless a huge commercial success.
Go to Profile#13997
Lester Flatt
1914 - 1979 (65 years)
Lester Raymond Flatt was an American bluegrass guitarist and mandolinist, best known for his collaboration with banjo picker Earl Scruggs in the duo Flatt and Scruggs. Flatt's career spanned multiple decades, breaking out as a member of Bill Monroe's band during the 1940s and including multiple solo and collaboration works exclusive of Scruggs. He first reached a mainstream audience through his performance on "The Ballad of Jed Clampett", the theme for the network television series The Beverly Hillbillies, in the early 1960s.
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Mack Gordon
1904 - 1959 (55 years)
Mack Gordon was an American composer and lyricist for the stage and film. He was nominated for the best original song Oscar nine times in 11 years, including five consecutive years between 1940 and 1944, and won the award once, for "You'll Never Know". That song, along with "The More I See You," has proved among his most enduring, and remains popular in films and television commercials to this day. "At Last" is another of his best-known songs.
Go to Profile#13999
Jacopo Peri
1561 - 1633 (72 years)
Jacopo Peri was an Italian composer, singer and instrumentalist of the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods. He wrote what is considered the first opera, the mostly lost Dafne , and also the earliest extant opera, Euridice .
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Ma Rainey
1886 - 1939 (53 years)
Gertrude "Ma" Rainey was an American blues singer and influential early-blues recording artist. Dubbed the "Mother of the Blues", she bridged earlier vaudeville and the authentic expression of southern blues, influencing a generation of blues singers. Rainey was known for her powerful vocal abilities, energetic disposition, majestic phrasing, and a "moaning" style of singing. Her qualities are present and most evident in her early recordings "Bo-Weevil Blues" and "Moonshine Blues".
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