Search People Result | Academic Influence

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,

#14001

Skip James

1902 - 1969 (67 years)

Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James was an American Delta blues singer, guitarist, pianist and songwriter. AllMusic stated: "This emotional, lyrical performer was a talented blues guitarist and arranger with an impressive body of work."

#14002

Alessandro Stradella

Alessandro Stradella

1643 - 1682 (39 years)

Antonio Alessandro Boncompagno Stradella was an Italian composer of the middle Baroque period. He enjoyed a dazzling career as a freelance composer, writing on commission, and collaborating with distinguished poets, producing over three hundred works in a variety of genres.

#14003

Fred Astaire

1899 - 1987 (88 years)

Fred Astaire was an American dancer, actor, singer, choreographer and presenter. He is widely regarded as the "greatest popular-music dancer of all time". He received numerous accolades including an Honorary Academy Award, three Primetime Emmy Awards, a BAFTA Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and a Grammy Award. He was honored with the Film Society of Lincoln Center tribute in 1973, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1978, and AFI Life Achievement Award in 1980. He was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960, American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1972, and the Television Hall of Fame in 1989.

#14004

John Scofield

1951 - Present (75 years)

John Scofield is an American guitarist and composer whose music over a long career has blended jazz, jazz fusion, funk, blues, soul and rock. He first came to mainstream attention in the band of Miles Davis, and has toured and recorded with many prominent jazz artists, including saxophonists Eddie Harris, Dave Liebman, Joe Henderson and Joe Lovano; keyboardists George Duke, Joey DeFrancesco, Herbie Hancock, Larry Goldings and Robert Glasper; fellow guitarists Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie, Pat Martino and Bill Frisell; bassists Marc Johnson and Jaco Pastorius; and drummers Billy Cobham and Dennis Chambers.

#14005

Gordon Jenkins

1910 - 1984 (74 years)

Gordon Hill Jenkins was an American arranger, composer, and pianist who was influential in popular music in the 1940s and 1950s. Jenkins worked with The Andrews Sisters, Johnny Cash, The Weavers, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Harry Nilsson, Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald.

#14006

Walter Gieseking

Walter Gieseking

1895 - 1956 (61 years)

Walter Wilhelm Gieseking was a French-born German pianist and composer. Gieseking was renowned for his subtle touch, pedaling, and dynamic control—particularly in the music of Debussy and Ravel; he made integral recordings of all their published works which were extant during his life. He also recorded most of Mozart's solo piano works.

#14007

Lawrence Tibbett

Lawrence Tibbett

1896 - 1960 (64 years)

Lawrence Mervil Tibbett was an American opera singer and recording artist who also performed as a film actor and radio personality. A baritone, he sang leading roles with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City more than 600 times from 1923 to 1950. He performed diverse musical theatre roles, including Captain Hook in Peter Pan in a touring show.

#14008

Leslie Cole

1910 - 1976 (66 years)

Leslie James Cole was a British artist and teacher. He served as a war artist from 1942 to 1946 during which time he recorded events in several theatres of war and also the aftermath of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

#14009

Stuart Sutcliffe

Stuart Sutcliffe

1940 - 1962 (22 years)

Stuart Fergusson Victor Sutcliffe was a British painter and musician best known as the original bass guitarist of the Beatles. Sutcliffe left the band to pursue his career as a painter, having previously attended the Liverpool College of Art. Sutcliffe and John Lennon are credited with inventing the name "Beetles" , as they both liked Buddy Holly's band, the Crickets. They also had a fascination of group names with double meanings , so Lennon then came up with "The Beatles", from the word beat . As a member of the group when it was a five-piece band, Sutcliffe is one of several people sometim...

#14010

Helena Modjeska

Helena Modjeska

1840 - 1909 (69 years)

Helena Modrzejewska , known professionally as Helena Modjeska, was a Polish actress who specialized in Shakespearean and tragic roles. She was successful first on the Polish stage. After emigrating to the United States , she also succeeded on stage in America and London. She is regarded as the greatest actress in the history of theatre in Poland.

#14011

Sidney Lanier

1842 - 1881 (39 years)

Sidney Clopton Lanier was an American musician, poet and author. He served in the Confederate States Army as a private, worked on a blockade-running ship for which he was imprisoned , taught, worked at a hotel where he gave musical performances, was a church organist, and worked as a lawyer. As a poet he sometimes used dialects. Many of his poems are written in heightened, but often archaic, American English. He became a flautist and sold poems to publications. He eventually became a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and is known for his adaptation of musical meter to poetry.

#14012

Dimitri Mitropoulos

Dimitri Mitropoulos

1896 - 1960 (64 years)

Dimitri Mitropoulos was a Greek and American conductor, pianist, and composer. Life and career Mitropoulos was born in Athens, the son of Yannis and Angelikē Mitropoulos. His father owned a leather goods shop in downtown Athens. He was musically precocious, demonstrating his abilities at an early age. From the ages of eleven to fourteen, when Mitropoulos was in secondary school, he would host and preside over informal musical gatherings at his house every Saturday afternoon. His earliest acknowledged composition – a sonata for violin and piano, now lost – dates from this period. His opera S...

#14013

William Grant Still

1895 - 1978 (83 years)

William Grant Still Jr. was an American composer of nearly two hundred works, including five symphonies, four ballets, nine operas, over thirty choral works, art songs, chamber music, and solo works. Born in Mississippi and growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, Still attended Wilberforce University and Oberlin Conservatory of Music as a student of George Whitefield Chadwick and then Edgard Varèse. Because of his close association and collaboration with prominent African-American literary and cultural figures, Still is considered to be part of the Harlem Renaissance.

#14014

Albert Bachmann

Albert Bachmann

1863 - 1934 (71 years)

Johann Albert Bachmann was a Swiss lexicographer and dialectologist, professor for Germanic philology at Zürich University from 1896. From 1892 he was an editor of the Schweizerisches Idiotikon dictionary, acting as editor-in-chief from 1896 until his death. Bachmann specialized on Swiss German dialects. He edited the series Beiträge zur Schweizerdeutschen Grammatik and founded, together with Louis Gauchat, the Phonographic Archive of Zurich University in 1913.

#14015

Paul Chambers

1935 - 1969 (34 years)

Paul Laurence Dunbar Chambers Jr. was an American jazz double bassist. A fixture of rhythm sections during the 1950s and 1960s, he has become one of the most widely-known jazz bassists of the hard bop era. He was also known for his bowed solos. Chambers recorded about a dozen albums as a leader or co-leader, and over 100 more as a sideman, especially as the anchor of trumpeter Miles Davis's "first great quintet" and with pianist Wynton Kelly .

#14016

Mark Noble

1754 - 1827 (73 years)

Mark Noble was an English clergyman, biographer and antiquary. Life He was born in Digbeth, Birmingham, the third surviving son of William Heatley Noble, a merchant there. His father sold, among many other commodities, beads, knives, toys, and other trifles which he distributed wholesale among slave traders, and he had also a large mill for rolling silver and for plating purposes. Mark was educated at schools at Yardley, Worcestershire, and Ashbourne, Derbyshire. On the death of his father he inherited a modest fortune, and was articled to Mr. Barber, a solicitor of Birmingham. On the expira...

#14017

Karl Richter

1926 - 1981 (55 years)

Karl Richter was a German conductor, choirmaster, organist, and harpsichordist. Early life and education Karl Richter was born in Plauen to Christian Johannes Richter, a Protestant pastor, and Clara Hedwig Richter. He studied first in Dresden, where he was a member of the Dresdner Kreuzchor and later in Leipzig, where he received his degree in 1949. He studied with Günther Ramin , Karl Straube and Rudolf Mauersberger.

#14018

Henryk Szeryng

1918 - 1988 (70 years)

Henryk Szeryng was a Polish-Mexican violinist. Early years He was born in Warsaw, Poland on 22 September 1918 into a wealthy Jewish family. The surname "Szeryng" is a Polish transliteration of his Yiddish surname, which nowadays would be spelled "Shering" in the modern Yiddish-to-English transliteration.

#14019

Joe Venuti

1903 - 1978 (75 years)

Giuseppe "Joe" Venuti was an American jazz musician and pioneer jazz violinist. Considered the father of jazz violin, he pioneered the use of string instruments in jazz along with the guitaristist Eddie Lang, a friend since childhood. Through the 1920s and early 1930s, Venuti and Lang made many recordings as leader and as featured soloists. He and Lang became so well known for their 'hot' violin and guitar solos that on many commercial dance recordings they were hired to do 12- or 24-bar duos towards the end of otherwise stock dance arrangements. In 1926, Venuti and Lang started recording for...

#14020

Samuel Silas Curry

1847 - 1921 (74 years)

Samuel Silas Curry was an American professor of elocution and vocal expression. He is the namesake of Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts. Early life and education Born on a small farm in Chatata, Tennessee, he was the son of James Campbell Curry and Nancy Young Curry, and shared kinship with famed frontiersmen Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Growing up on a frontier farm, he learned what it meant to work hard and gained a love of the natural world which would influence his later work. He was a teenager during the tumultuous years of the American Civil War, and experienced hardships when ...

#14021

Alan Bush

1900 - 1995 (95 years)

Alan Dudley Bush was a British composer, pianist, conductor, teacher and political activist. A committed communist, his uncompromising political beliefs were often reflected in his music. He composed prolifically across a range of genres, but struggled through his lifetime for recognition from the British musical establishment, which largely ignored his works.

#14022

John Stainer

1840 - 1901 (61 years)

Sir John Stainer was an English composer and organist whose music, though seldom performed today , was very popular during his lifetime. His work as choir trainer and organist set standards for Anglican church music that are still influential. He was also active as an academic, becoming Heather Professor of Music at Oxford.

#14023

Myra Hess

1890 - 1965 (75 years)

Dame Julia Myra Hess, was an English pianist best known for her performances of the works of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms. Career Early life Julia Myra Hess was born on 25 February 1890 to a Jewish family in South Hampstead, London. She was the youngest of four children and began piano lessons at the age of five. She studied at the Guildhall School of Music and at the Royal Academy of Music under Tobias Matthay, after winning a scholarship to the latter in 1903 at age 12.

#14024

Lee Morgan

1938 - 1972 (34 years)

Edward Lee Morgan was an American jazz trumpeter and composer. One of the key hard bop musicians of the 1960s and a cornerstone of the Blue Note label, Morgan came to prominence in his late teens, recording with bandleaders like John Coltrane, Curtis Fuller, Dizzy Gillespie, Hank Mobley and Wayne Shorter, and playing in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.

#14025

Matthias Lexer

1830 - 1892 (62 years)

Matthias Lexer , later Matthias von Lexer , was a German lexicographer, author of the principal dictionary of the Middle High German language, Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch von Matthias Lexer, completed in 1878 in three volumes. This dictionary was founded upon the base of the Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch by Benecke, Müller and Zarncke, completed in 1866 in three volumes.

#14026

Ludwig Minkus

1826 - 1917 (91 years)

Ludwig Minkus , also known as Léon Fyodorovich Minkus , was an Austrian composer of ballet music, a violinist and teacher of music. Minkus is noted for the music he composed during his career in St. Petersburg, Russia. Beginning in 1871 Minkus served in the official post of Composer of Ballet Music to the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres, a position he held until it was abolished upon his retirement in 1886. During his long career in St. Petersburg, Minkus composed for the original works and revivals staged by the ballet masters Arthur Saint-Léon and Marius Petipa. Among the composer's most celebrated compositions is his score for La source , Don Quixote ; and La Bayadère .

#14027

Ed Wood

1924 - 1978 (54 years)

Edward Davis Wood Jr. was an American filmmaker, actor, and pulp novel author. In the 1950s, Wood directed several low-budget science fiction, crime and horror films that later became cult classics, notably Glen or Glenda , Jail Bait , Bride of the Monster , Plan 9 from Outer Space and Night of the Ghouls . In the 1960s and 1970s, he moved towards sexploitation and pornographic films such as The Sinister Urge , Orgy of the Dead and Necromania , and wrote over 80 lurid pulp crime and sex novels.

#14028

Mieczysław Horszowski

Mieczysław Horszowski

1892 - 1993 (101 years)

Mieczysław Horszowski was a Polish-American pianist who had one of the longest careers in the history of the performing arts. Life Early life Horszowski was born in Lwów , Austria-Hungary . He was first taught piano by his mother, a pupil of Karol Mikuli, who had himself been a pupil of Frédéric Chopin. He became a pupil of Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna at the age of seven; Leschetizky had studied with Beethoven's pupil Carl Czerny. Leschetizky's sister-in-law, Angele Potocka, referred to Horszowski as "a wunderkind of high order".

#14029

Thomas Cooper

1517 - 1594 (77 years)

Thomas Cooper was an English bishop, lexicographer, theologian, and writer. Life Cooper was born in Oxford, England, where he was educated at Magdalen College. He became Master of Magdalen College School and afterwards practised as a physician in Oxford.

#14030

Lowell George

1945 - 1979 (34 years)

Lowell Thomas George was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer, who was the primary guitarist, vocalist, songwriter and founder/leader for the rock band Little Feat.

#14031

Michael Haydn

1737 - 1806 (69 years)

Johann Michael Haydn was an Austrian composer of the Classical period, the younger brother of Joseph Haydn. Life Michael Haydn was born in 1737 in the Austrian village of Rohrau, near the Hungarian border. His father was Mathias Haydn, a wheelwright who also served as "Marktrichter", an office akin to village mayor. Haydn's mother Maria, Koller, had previously worked as a cook in the palace of Count Harrach, the presiding aristocrat of Rohrau. Mathias was an enthusiastic folk musician, who during the journeyman period of his career had taught himself to play the harp, and he also made sure t...

#14032

Balraj Sahni

1913 - 1973 (60 years)

Balraj Sahni was an Indian film and stage actor, who is best known for , Do Bigha Zameen , Chhoti Bahen , Kabuliwala , Waqt and Garam Hawa . He was the brother of Bhisham Sahni, noted Hindi writer, playwright, and actor.

#14033

Charles Vidor

1900 - 1959 (59 years)

Charles Vidor was a Hungarian film director. Among his film successes are The Bridge , The Tuttles of Tahiti , The Desperadoes , Cover Girl , Together Again , A Song to Remember , Over 21 , Gilda , The Loves of Carmen , Rhapsody , Love Me or Leave Me , The Swan , The Joker Is Wild , and A Farewell to Arms .

#14034

Veit Harlan

1899 - 1964 (65 years)

Veit Harlan was a German film director and actor. Harlan reached the highpoint of his career as a director in the Nazi era; most notably his antisemitic film Jud Süß makes him controversial. While viewed critically for his ideologies, a number of critics consider him a capable director on the grounds of such work as his Opfergang .

#14035

Sigismond Thalberg

Sigismond Thalberg

1812 - 1871 (59 years)

Sigismond Thalberg was an Austrian composer and one of the most distinguished virtuoso pianists of the 19th century. Family Thalberg was born in Pâquis near Geneva on 8 January 1812. According to his own account, he was the illegitimate son of Moritz, Prince of Dietrichstein and Maria Julia Bydeskuty von Ipp, from a Hungarian family of lower nobility. In 1820, Julia married Baron Alexander Ludwig . However, according to his birth certificate, he was the son of Joseph Thalberg and Fortunée Stein, both from Frankfurt-am-Main.

#14036

Colin Cherry

1914 - 1979 (65 years)

Edward Colin Cherry was a British cognitive scientist whose main contributions were in focused auditory attention, specifically the cocktail party problem regarding the capacity to follow one conversation while many other conversations are going on in a noisy room. Cherry used shadowing tasks to study this problem, which involve playing two different auditory messages to a participant's left and right ears and instructing them to attend to only one. The participant must then shadow this attended message.

#14037

Kurt Eisner

1867 - 1919 (52 years)

Kurt Eisner was a German politician, revolutionary, journalist, and theatre critic. As a socialist journalist, he organized the socialist revolution that overthrew the Wittelsbach monarchy in Bavaria in November 1918, which led to his being described as "the symbol of the Bavarian revolution". He is used as an example of charismatic authority by Max Weber. Eisner subsequently proclaimed the People's State of Bavaria but was assassinated by far-right German nationalist Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley in Munich on 21 February 1919.

#14038

Leopold Godowsky

Leopold Godowsky

1870 - 1938 (68 years)

Leopold Mordkhelovich Godowsky Sr. was a Lithuanian-born American virtuoso pianist, composer and teacher. He was one of the most highly regarded performers of his time, known for his theories concerning the application of relaxed weight and economy of motion within pianistic technique – principles later propagated by his pupils, such as Heinrich Neuhaus.

#14039

Vincent Persichetti

1915 - 1987 (72 years)

Vincent Ludwig Persichetti was an American composer, teacher, and pianist. An important musical educator and writer, he was known for his integration of various new ideas in musical composition into his own work and teaching, as well as for training many noted composers in composition at the Juilliard School.

#14040

Robert J. Flaherty

Robert J. Flaherty

1884 - 1951 (67 years)

Robert Joseph Flaherty, was an American filmmaker who directed and produced the first commercially successful feature-length documentary film, Nanook of the North . The film made his reputation and nothing in his later life fully equaled its success, although he continued the development of this new genre of narrative documentary with Moana , set in the South Seas, and Man of Aran , filmed in Ireland's Aran Islands. Flaherty is considered the father of both the documentary and the ethnographic film.

#14041

André Levinson

1887 - 1933 (46 years)

André Yacovlev Levinson, Андрей Яковлевич Левинсон [Andrey Yakovl'evich Levinson], November 1, 1887, St. Petersburg - December 3, 1933, Paris At the University of Sankt Peterburg he had been a professor of Romance languages. With regard to ballet, he then championed "pure academic dance". Accordingly, he opposed many innovations advanced by choreographer Michel Fokine and impresario Sergei Diaghilev of Ballets Russes. In 1918 Levinson left Russia for Lithuania, then Germany, arriving in Paris in 1921. He taught a course in Russian literature at the Sorbonne. Then Ballets Russes regularly perf...

#14042

Ernst Fraenkel

1881 - 1957 (76 years)

Ernst Eduard Samuel Fraenkel was a German linguist who made major contributions to the fields of Indo-European linguistics and Baltic studies. Life Fraenkel was born in Berlin. He began his studies in 1899 in classical philology, Sanskrit, and Indo-European linguistics with Johannes Schmidt at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In 1905 he defended his dissertation on ancient Greek denominal verbs. From 1906 to 1908 he studied with August Leskien, an expert on the Baltic languages, in Leipzig. He became Privatdozent at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel in 1909, and was promoted to "außerordentlicher Professor" in 1916 and to "ordentlicher Professor" in 1920.

#14043

Albert Ayler

1936 - 1970 (34 years)

Albert Ayler was an American avant-garde jazz saxophonist, singer and composer. After early experience playing R&B and bebop, Ayler began recording music during the free jazz era of the 1960s. However, some critics argue that while Ayler's style is undeniably original and unorthodox, it does not adhere to the generally accepted critical understanding of free jazz. In fact, Ayler's style is difficult to categorize in any way, and it evoked incredibly strong and disparate reactions from critics and fans alike. His innovations have inspired subsequent jazz musicians.

#14044

Nicolas Slonimsky

1894 - 1995 (101 years)

Nicolas Slonimsky , born Nikolai Leonidovich Slonimskiy , was a Russian-born American musicologist, conductor, pianist, and composer. Best known for his writing and musical reference work, he wrote the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns and the Lexicon of Musical Invective, and edited Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians.

#14045

Paavo Ravila

1902 - 1974 (72 years)

Paavo Ilmari Ravila was a Finnish linguist and rector of the University of Helsinki. Biography Ravila started his studies at the University of Turku in 1921, the same year the university was founded. He received his master's degree in philosophy 1924 and continued his education in Finno-Ugric languages at the University of Helsinki under professors Yrjö Wichmann, Frans Äimä and J. J. Mikkola. He earned his PhD in 1932 and was professor of Finnish and related languages at the University of Turku from 1934 to 1949. He spent the rest of his career at the University of Helsinki, first as professo...

#14046

Ben Lyon

1901 - 1979 (78 years)

Ben Lyon was an American film actor and a studio executive at 20th Century-Fox who later acted in British radio, films and TV. Early life and career Lyon was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Alvine W. and Ben Lyon, a travelling salesman. His family was Jewish. Lyon entered films in 1918 after a successful appearance on Broadway opposite Jeanne Eagels. He attracted attention in the highly successful film Flaming Youth and steadily developed into a leading man. He was successfully paired with some of the leading actresses of the silent era, including Pola Negri, Gloria Swanson, Colleen Moore, Barbara La Marr, Viola Dana, Anna Q.

#14047

Silas Bent

1882 - 1945 (63 years)

Silas Bent IV , son of Silas Bent III and Ann Elizabeth Bent was an American journalist, author, and lecturer. He spent nearly three decades as a journalist, including time as a freelance writer, and spent a year as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Bent authored several books and articles, many critiquing the practices of newspapers in their reporting. He was married to Elizabeth Sims.

#14048

Emil Gilels

1916 - 1985 (69 years)

Emil Grigoryevich Gilels was a Soviet pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest pianists of all time. His sister Elizaveta, three years his junior, was a renowned violinist. His daughter Elena became a successful pianist.

#14049

Alan Civil

1929 - 1989 (60 years)

Alan Civil OBE was a British horn player. Civil began to play the horn at a young age, and joined the famous Royal Artillery Band and Orchestra at Woolwich, while still in his teens. He studied the instrument under Aubrey Brain, father of Dennis Brain.

#14050

Robert Z. Leonard

Robert Z. Leonard

1889 - 1968 (79 years)

Robert Zigler Leonard was an American film director, actor, producer, and screenwriter. Biography He was born in Chicago, Illinois. At one time, he was married to silent star Mae Murray with the two forming Tiffany Pictures to film eight motion pictures that were released by MGM.

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