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,
#14001
Charles Leslie Wrenn
1895 - 1969 (74 years)
Charles Leslie Wrenn was an English scholar. After taking an MA at the University of Oxford, he worked for a year as a lecturer in the department of English Language and Literature at the University of Leeds in 1928–29. Following his return to Oxford, he became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in 1945, the successor in the chair of J.R.R. Tolkien, and held the position until 1963. Wrenn was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. He was also a member of the Oxford literary discussion group known as the "Inklings", which included C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, and met for nearly two decades between the early 1930s and late 1949.
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Harold Wentworth
1904 - 1965 (61 years)
Harold Wentworth was an American lexicographer and specialist in English usage and slang in the United States. Born in Cortland, New York, he studied at Cornell University and taught at Cornell University and the University of West Virginia.
Go to Profile#14003
Charles Bally
1865 - 1947 (82 years)
Charles Bally was a Swiss linguist from the Geneva School. He lived from 1865 to 1947 and was, like Ferdinand de Saussure, from Switzerland. His parents were Jean Gabriel, a teacher, and Henriette, the owner of a cloth store. Bally was married three times: first to Valentine Leirens, followed by Irma Baptistine Doutre, who was sent into a mental institution in 1915, and finally with Alice Bellicot. In addition to his edition of de Saussure's lectures, Course in General Linguistics , Charles Bally also played an important role in linguistics.
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Ingolf Dahl
1912 - 1970 (58 years)
Ingolf Dahl was a German-born American composer, pianist, conductor, and educator. Biography Dahl was born Walter Ingolf Marcus in Hamburg, Germany, to a German Jewish father, attorney Paul Marcus, and his Swedish wife Hilda Maria Dahl. He had two brothers, Gert Marcus , and Holger, and one sister Anna-Britta.
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Arthur Garfield Kennedy
1880 - 1954 (74 years)
Arthur Garfield Kennedy was an American philologist who served as Professor of English at Stanford University from 1914 to 1945. Biography Kennedy was born in Weeping Water, Nebraska on June 29, 1880, and attended Doane College at Crete, Nebraska. He received his master's degree from the University of Nebraska and his doctor's degree from Stanford University. From 1914 to 1945 Kennedy was Professor of English at Stanford University. He was the author of several books on the English language. In 1925 he, with Kemp Malone and Louise Pound, founded the journal American Speech and he was a frequent contributor.
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Diana Archangeli
1900 - Present (126 years)
Diana B. Archangeli is an American linguist and Professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. She earned her M.A. at the University of Texas-Austin in 1981, and her PhD from MIT in 1984, with a dissertation entitled, "Underspecification in Yawelmani Phonology and Morphology." Her dissertation was selected for publication in Garland's Outstanding Dissertation series .
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Elizabeth Wiskemann
1899 - 1971 (72 years)
Elizabeth Meta Wiskemann was an English journalist and historian of Anglo-German ancestry. She was an intelligence officer in World War II, and the Montagu Burton Chair in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh.
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Mandy Simons
Mandy Simons is a linguist and professor in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University . She researches semantics and pragmatics, in particular phenomena like presupposition and projection.
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John Sydenham Furnivall
1878 - 1960 (82 years)
John Sydenham Furnivall was a British-born colonial public servant and writer in Burma. He is credited with coining the concept of the plural society and had a noted career as an influential historian of Southeast Asia, particularly of the Dutch East Indies and British Burma. He published several books over a long career, including the influential Colonial Policy and Practice and wrote for more than 20 major journals, although his work is now criticized as being Eurocentric and biased in favor of continued colonialism.
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Michel DeGraff
Michel Frederic DeGraff is a Haitian creolist who has served on the board of the Journal of Haitian Studies. He is a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy. His field of scholarship is Creole language, also known as Lang Kreyòl Linguistics. He is known for his advocacy towards the recognition of Haitian Creole as a full-fledged language. In the fall of 2012, he received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to introduce online Creole language materials in the teaching of STEM in Haiti. He believes th...
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David Dowty
David Roach Dowty is a linguist known primarily for his work in semantic and syntactic theory, and especially in Montague grammar and Categorial grammar. Dowty is a professor emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University, and his research interests mainly lie in Semantic and Syntactic Theory, Lexical semantics and Thematic roles, Categorial grammar, and Semantics of Tense and Aspect.
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George Kingsley Zipf
1902 - 1950 (48 years)
George Kingsley Zipf , was an American linguist and philologist who studied statistical occurrences in different languages. Zipf earned his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees from Harvard University, although he also studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin. He was chairman of the German department and university lecturer at Harvard University. He worked with Chinese and demographics, and much of his effort can explain properties of the Internet, distribution of income within nations, and many other collections of data.
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Roland Grubb Kent
1877 - 1952 (75 years)
Roland Grubb Kent was an American educator and a founder of the Linguistic Society of America . He was the first person to translate Marcus Terentius Varro's De Lingua Latina into English. Ken's 1903 doctoral thesis on the history of Thessaly traces the history of the country with particular attention to the times between 600 and 300 BC. Unfortunately, only Chapter V and two appendices were published, and the bulk of his dissertation is currently lost. His Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon is one of the seminal works on the subject.
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Frank Luther Mott
1886 - 1964 (78 years)
Frank Luther Mott was an American academic, historian and journalist, who won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for History for Volumes II and III of his series, A History of American Magazines. Early life and education Mott was born in Rose Hill, Iowa. His parents were Mary E. and David Charles Mott, publishers of the weekly What Cheer, Iowa Patriot. The Mott family owned a print shop in Keokuk County. He was a practicing Quaker. When he was 10 his father began publishing the Audubon, Iowa Republican and he assisted in the typesetting.
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Morris Swadesh
1909 - 1967 (58 years)
Morris Swadesh was an American linguist who specialized in comparative and historical linguistics. Swadesh was born in Massachusetts to Bessarabian Jewish immigrant parents. He completed bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Chicago, studying under Edward Sapir, and then followed Sapir to Yale University where he completed a Ph.D. in 1933. Swadesh taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1937 to 1939, and then during World War II worked on projects with the United States Army and Office of Strategic Services. He became a professor at the City College of New York after the war's end, but was fired in 1949 due to his membership in the Communist Party.
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Eric Lenneberg
1921 - 1975 (54 years)
Eric Heinz Lenneberg was a linguist and neurologist who pioneered ideas on language acquisition and cognitive psychology, particularly in terms of the concept of innateness. Life and career He was born in Düsseldorf, Germany. Ethnically Jewish, he left Nazi Germany because of rising Nazi persecution. He initially fled to Brazil with his family and then to the United States where he attended the University of Chicago and Harvard University. A professor of psychology and neurobiology, he taught at the Harvard Medical School, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Cornell University and Med...
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Leonard Bloomfield
1887 - 1949 (62 years)
Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He is considered to be the father of American distributionalism. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics. He made significant contributions to Indo-European historical linguistics, the description of Austronesian languages, and description of languages of the Algonquian family.
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Uriel Weinreich
1926 - 1967 (41 years)
Uriel Weinreich was a Jewish–American linguist. Life Uriel Weinreich was born in Wilno, Poland , the first child of Max Weinreich and Regina Szabad, to a family that paternally hailed from Courland in Latvia and maternally came from a well-respected and established Wilno Jewish family. He earned his BA, MA, and PhD from Columbia University and went on to teach there, specializing in Yiddish studies, sociolinguistics, and dialectology. He advocated the increased acceptance of semantics and compiled the iconic Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary, published shortly after his death...
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Benjamin Lee Whorf
1897 - 1941 (44 years)
Benjamin Lee Whorf was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer who is famous for proposing the "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis." He believed that the structures of different languages shape how their speakers perceive and conceptualize the world. Whorf saw this idea, named after him and his mentor Edward Sapir, as having implications similar to Einstein's principle of physical relativity. However, the concept originated from 19th-century philosophy and thinkers like Wilhelm von Humboldt and Wilhelm Wundt.
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Pierre Chantraine
1899 - 1974 (75 years)
Pierre Louis Chantraine was a French linguist. He was born in Lille and died in Paris. A student of, among others, Antoine Meillet, Joseph Vendryes and Paul Mazon, Chantraine became one of the most renowned authorities on Ancient Greek philology of his generation. After teaching at the University of Lyon between 1925 and 1928, he became Directeur d'études de philologie grecque at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris, and also taught at the Sorbonne from 1938, continuing in both functions until his retirement in 1969. For the Collection des Universités de France, he edited and translated Xenophon and Arrian .
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Hans Kurath
1891 - 1992 (101 years)
Hans Kurath was an American linguist of Austrian origin. He was full professor for English and Linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The many varieties of regional English that he encountered during his trips convinced him of the necessity of completing a systematic study of American English.
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Mark Brunswick
1902 - 1971 (69 years)
Mark Brunswick was an American composer of the twentieth century. He had only recently completed the second act of an opera based on Ibsen's The Master Builder when he died suddenly in London in May 1971, at the start of what was to have been an extended tour of Europe with his wife, Natascha Artin Brunswick. Brunswick had been at work on the opera for several years, and Act I had not long before received a concert performance as a work in progress at the City College of New York.
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Yechezkel Kutscher
1909 - 1971 (62 years)
Edward Yechezkel Kutscher or Yechezkel Kutscher was an Israeli philologist and Hebrew linguist. Biography Kutscher was born in 1909 in Topoľčany, Slovakia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied at the yeshiva in his home town and, later, in Frankfurt. In 1931 he emigrated to Mandatory Palestine and continued with his studies at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva and at a Mizrachi Movement teachers seminary. For several years subsequently, he taught at various schools in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
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Tadeusz Lehr-Spławiński
1891 - 1965 (74 years)
Tadeusz Lehr-Spławiński was a Polish linguist, scholar, and professor of Slavonic studies. He was twice elected rector of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków before and after the Nazi German occupation of Poland.
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Witold Taszycki
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Witold Taszycki was a Polish linguist. He specialized in Polish onomastics and historical dialectology. Life and career Taszycki was born on 20 June 1898 in Zagórzany, Austria-Hungary. Between 1917 and 1921, he was a student of Polish and Slavic philology at Jagiellonian University, where he started to work as an assistant after defending his doctorate in 1922. He received his postdoctoral degree in 1925. He was employed as a lecturer at Stefan Batory University of Wilno and awarded a professorship at Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów . He remained in Lwów after the outbreak of World War II ...
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Charles Otto Blagden
1864 - 1949 (85 years)
Charles Otto Blagden was an English Orientalist and linguist who specialised in the Malay, Mon and Pyu languages. He is particularly known for his studies of Burmese epigraphic inscriptions in the Mon and Pyu scripts.
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George Stanley Turnbull
1882 - 1977 (95 years)
George Stanley Turnbull was an English-American scholar and educator. He began a career of newspaper work in 1894 and helped found the University of Oregon School of Journalism in 1917, later serving as acting dean and, from 1944 to 1948, as dean. He founded and edited Oregon Exchanges, a newspaper for Oregon's "newspaper folk," which was at least initially produced by students at the School of Journalism.
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Hjalmar Frisk
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Hjalmar Frisk was a Swedish linguist and etymologist in Indo-European studies. He was also rector of the University of Göteborg from 1951 to 1966. Early on, he became interested in Indo-European studies. Thus, as early as 1927, he published a translation of the historical account The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written in Greek under the title Περίπλους τῆς Ἐρυθρᾶς θαλάσσης.
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David Dodge Boyden
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
David Dodge Boyden was an American musicologist and violinist specializing in organology and performance practice. Education Boyden received a BA and MA from Harvard University; he also studied at Columbia University and Hartt School of Music .
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Franzpeter Goebels
1920 - 1988 (68 years)
Franzpeter Goebels was a German pianist, harpsichordist and music educator. Life and career Goebels was born in Mülheim an der Ruhr, the son of a church musician. He received piano lessons, and then studied piano and harpsichord at the Musikhochschule Köln with teachers including Karl Hermann Pillney. He also studied musicology, Romance studies and philosophy at the University of Cologne. He was a solo pianist with the Deutschlandsender broadcaster from 1940, and studied piano further with Raoul von Koczalski. He was drafted for military service in 1942, but due to an injury he was soon transferred to Prague where he led a symphony orchestra of the Wehrmacht.
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Paul Constantinescu
1909 - 1963 (54 years)
Paul Constantinescu was a Romanian composer. Two of his main influences are Romanian folk music and Byzantine chant, both of which he used in his teaching. One of his students was composer Margareta Xenopol.
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Wang Li
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Wang Li , courtesy name Wang Liaoyi and birth name Wang Xiangying , was a Chinese linguist, educator, translator and poet, described as "the founder of Chinese Linguistics". His work expands a wide range in Chinese linguistics, including phonology, grammar and lexicography, historical linguistics and dialectal studies. He was also the founder of the first Chinese Linguistics Department at Tsinghua University. He brought the western modern linguistic methodologies back to China and strove for the modernization and reformation of Chinese grammar throughout his whole life. His most famous books ...
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Émile Legouis
1861 - 1937 (76 years)
Émile Hyacinthe Legouis was a French scholar of English literature and translator. Biography Son of a haberdasher, member of a family of five children, he began his career teaching one year at the college in Avranches. He became a student at the École pratique des hautes études in 1883, he subsequently received first at the agrégation of English in 1885. He was then appointed lecturer in English language and literature at the University of Lyon. Between 1904 and 1932, he taught English language and literature at the Sorbonne , first as a lecturer in 1904, then as a professor in 1906 and he obtained the chair in 1919.
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Carl Clewing
1884 - 1954 (70 years)
Theodor Rudolph Carl Clewing was a German operatic tenor/heldentenor, stage and film actor, composer of the song Alle Tage ist kein Sonntag and professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Life Born in Schwerin, Clewing originates from an old Westphalian Schulzengeschlecht, which is first mentioned in documents in 1486 on the Schulte-Klevinghof in the parish Pelkum. In his birthplace Schwerin, his father was the owner of the Löwenapotheke there. Clewing studied in Prague and joined the Burschenschaft there, Constantia, which was absorbed into the Munich fraternity Sudetia in 1952. From 19...
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Yuri Yankelevich
1909 - 1973 (64 years)
Yuri Yankelevich was a Soviet violin pedagogue who taught many internationally known virtuosos during his long tenure at the Moscow Conservatory. Life and career Yuri Yankelevich was born in Basel, Switzerland. His father, Isay Leontyevich Yankelevich, a prominent lawyer, was one of the founders of the Omsk Philharmonic Society. In Omsk, young Yuri studied with Leopold Auer's student, Anisim Berlin, a grandfather of Natalia Gutman. In 1923 he entered Leningrad Conservatory, the class of Hovhaness Nalbandian . On Yankelevich's graduation composer Alexander Glazunov commented: "a career of a virtuoso violinist would certainly be his calling".
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Abraham Yahuda
1877 - 1951 (74 years)
Abraham Shalom Yahuda was a Jewish Palestinian polymath, teacher, writer, researcher, linguist, and collector of rare documents. Biography Abraham Shalom Yahuda was born in Jerusalem to a Jewish family originally from Baghdad. During his early life he studied under his brother Isaac Ezekial Yahuda. In 1895, at the age of fifteen, he wrote his first book entitled Arab Antiquities. Two years later, in 1897 he attended the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. Afterwards he began teaching in Berlin from 1905 to 1914. Later, during the First World War, he relocated to Madrid where he was...
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Norbert Jokl
1877 - 1942 (65 years)
Norbert Jokl was an Austrian Albanologist of Jewish descent who has been called the father of Albanology. Early life Jokl was born in Bzenec , Southern Moravia , to Heinrich, a merchant, and Emilie née Haas. His older brother, Willhlem, died in 1895 at the age of 21. He graduated from high school cum laude and entered the University of Vienna to study law. He graduated summa cum laude on June 23, 1901.
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Muhammad Abdul Hye
1919 - 1969 (50 years)
Muhammad Abdul Hye also known as Muhammad Abdul Hai was a Bengali educationist, litterateur, researcher and linguist who was and is remembered as a notable figure in the Bengali language movement. He was awarded Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1961 and Ekushey Padak in 1996 by the Government of Bangladesh.
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Keith Falkner
1900 - 1994 (94 years)
Sir Donald Keith Falkner , known simply as Keith Falkner, was a distinguished English bass-baritone singer especially associated with oratorio and concert recital, who later became Director of the Royal College of Music in London.
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Charles Eames
1907 - 1978 (71 years)
Charles Ormond Eames Jr. was an American designer, architect and filmmaker. In professional partnership with his spouse Ray Kaiser Eames, he was responsible for groundbreaking contributions in the field of architecture, furniture design, industrial design, manufacturing and the photographic arts.
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Isadore Freed
1900 - 1960 (60 years)
Isadore Freed was a Jewish composer of Belarusian birth. Biography Born in Brest-Litovsk, now Brest, Belarus, Freed's family emigrated to the United States when Freed was three years old and settled in Philadelphia, where his father owned a music store. Freed began playing piano at age seven, and began composing at age nine.
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Frederick Converse
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
Frederick Shepherd Converse , was an American composer of classical music, whose works include four operas and five symphonies. Life and career Converse was born in Newton, Massachusetts, the son of Edmund Winchester and Charlotte Augusta Converse. His father was a successful merchant, and president of the National Tube Works and the Conanicut Mills. Frederick Converse's higher education was at Harvard College, where he came under the influence of the composer John K. Paine. Converse had already received instruction in piano playing, and the study of musical theory was a most important part of his college course.
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Osborn Bergin
1873 - 1950 (77 years)
Osborn Joseph Bergin was a scholar of the Irish language and early Irish literature, who discovered Bergin's Law. He was born in Cork, sixth child and eldest son of Osborn Roberts Bergin and Sarah Reddin, and was educated at Queen's College Cork . He then went to Germany for advanced studies in Celtic languages, working with Heinrich Zimmer at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin and later with Rudolf Thurneysen at the University of Freiburg, where he wrote his dissertation on palatalization in 1906. He then returned to Ireland and taught at the School of Irish Learning and at Universi...
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Heinrich Werlé
1887 - 1955 (68 years)
Heinrich Werlé was a German choir director, organist and music critic. Life Born in Bensheim, Werlé, son of a civil servant, was first a music teacher at a school in Leipzig, and from 1926 in the rank of a study council. From 1928 to 1945 he taught music at the Pädagogisches Institut of the Leipzig University.
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Juho August Hollo
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Juho August Hollo , also known as J. A. Hollo, was a Finnish scholar and professor of education at the University of Helsinki from 1930 to 1954. He was one of the most prolific translators into Finnish, translating a range of genres and from several languages. He himself said in 1953 that he had translated 170 books; some sources list over 300. Among the authors he translated were Miguel de Cervantes, Anatole France, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Voltaire, Charles Dickens, Jonathan Swift, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Knut Hamsun and Friedrich Nietzsche. He was als...
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Helmuth Osthoff
1896 - 1983 (87 years)
Helmuth Osthoff was a German musicologist and composer. Much of his career was spent at Frankfurt University, prior to which he held posts at Halle University and Berlin University. He wrote the first major biography on the composer Josquin des Prez, published as a two volume monograph in 1962 and 1965
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Harry Farjeon
1878 - 1948 (70 years)
Harry Farjeon was a British composer and an influential teacher of harmony and composition at the Royal Academy of Music for more than 45 years. Early life and studies Harry Farjeon was born in Hohokus Township, New Jersey, United States, the eldest son of author Benjamin Farjeon, who was from the East End of London, and Margaret, the daughter of American actor Joseph Jefferson. His parents returned to Britain when he was a baby, and he lived in Hampstead in London for the rest of his life. His younger sister, Eleanor Farjeon , with whom he shared a rich imaginary life, wrote children's books and poetry, including the hymn, Morning Has Broken.
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Donald Tyerman
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
Donald Tyerman was an English journalist and editor. Early life Tyerman was born in Middlesbrough, England. He contracted polio at the age of three and was paralysed from the neck down, although over the next ten years he did eventually get back full use of the whole of his body except his legs - he needed splintss to walk for the rest of his life. He was educated at Great Ayton Friends' School and Gateshead Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford and from 1930 to 1936 lectured in history at University College, Southampton.
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Boris Kremenliev
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Boris Kremenliev was a Bulgarian-American composer and professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA. Early life He emigrated from his native Bulgaria in 1929. Kremenliev studied at De Paul University and later the University of Rochester, where he earned his doctorate in 1942. He served in the U.S. Army.
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David Barnett
1907 - 1985 (78 years)
David Barnett was an American composer. He graduated from Columbia University and later studied music at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and Juilliard School in New York City. Barnett then studied piano with Alfred Cortot in Paris, where he received his teaching degree. At this time, he also made his debut as a concert pianist and composer. Returning to the U.S., Barnett taught piano and music theory, and continued touring and composing.
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