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,
#14101
Anton Bruckner
1824 - 1896 (72 years)
Josef Anton Bruckner was an Austrian composer and organist best known for his symphonies and sacred music, which includes Masses, Te Deum and motets. The symphonies are considered emblematic of the final stage of Austro-German Romanticism because of their rich harmonic language, strongly polyphonic character, and considerable length. Bruckner's compositions helped to define contemporary musical radicalism, owing to their dissonances, unprepared modulations, and roving harmonies.
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Eiji Yoshikawa
1892 - 1962 (70 years)
Eiji Yoshikawa was a Japanese historical novelist. Among his best-known novels are revisions of older classics. He was mainly influenced by classics such as The Tale of the Heike, Tale of Genji, Water Margin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, many of which he retold in his own style. As an example, Yoshikawa took up Taiko's original manuscript in 15 volumes to retell it in a more accessible tone and reduce it to only two volumes. His other books also serve similar purposes and, although most of his novels are not original works, he created a huge amount of work and a renewed interest in the past.
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James Franklin
1697 - 1735 (38 years)
James Franklin was an early American printer, publisher and author of newspapers and almanacs in the American colonies. James published the New England Courant, one of the oldest and the first truly independent American newspapers, and the short lived Rhode Island Gazette.
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Jacob Israël de Haan
1881 - 1924 (43 years)
Jacob Israël de Haan was a Dutch Jewish literary writer, lawyer and journalist who immigrated to Palestine in 1919, and was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1924 by the Zionist paramilitary organization Haganah for his anti-Zionist political activities.
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Louis Jouvet
1887 - 1951 (64 years)
Jules Eugène Louis Jouvet was a French actor, theatre director and filmmaker. Early life Jouvet was born in Crozon. He had a stutter as a young man and originally trained as a pharmacist. He received an advanced degree in pharmacy in 1913, though he never actually practiced, instead pursuing a career in theatre.:91
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Leoš Janáček
1854 - 1928 (74 years)
Leoš Janáček was a Czech composer, musical theorist, folklorist, publicist, and teacher. He was inspired by Moraviann and other Slavic music, including Eastern European folk music, to create an original, modern musical style.
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Johan August Lundell
1851 - 1940 (89 years)
Johan August Lundell was a Swedish linguist, professor of Slavic languages at Uppsala University. He is known for his work on Swedish dialects and for developing Landsmålsalfabetet, a phonetic alphabet used in dialect research.
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Mykola Burachek
1871 - 1942 (71 years)
Mykola Burachek or Buraček , was a Ukrainian Impressionist painter and pedagogue. Biography Burachek studied at the Kiev School of Drawing with Khariton Platonov and with Jan Stanisławski at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts . He also studied in Paris, in the studio of Henri Matisse . His first exhibition was in 1907.
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Reynaldo Hahn
1874 - 1947 (73 years)
Reynaldo Hahn de Echenagucia was a Venezuelan-born French composer, conductor, music critic, and singer. He is best known for his songs – mélodies – of which he wrote more than 100. Hahn was born in Caracas but his family moved to Paris when he was a child, and he lived most of his life there. Following the success of his song "Si mes vers avaient des ailes" , written when he was aged 14, he became a prominent member of fin de siècle French society. Among his closest friends were Sarah Bernhardt and Marcel Proust. After the First World War, in which he served in the army, Hahn adapted to new ...
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Manuel de Falla
1876 - 1946 (70 years)
Manuel de Falla y Matheu was an Andalusian Spanish composer and pianist. Along with Isaac Albéniz, Francisco Tárrega, and Enrique Granados, he was one of Spain's most important musicians of the first half of the 20th century. He has a claim to being Spain's greatest composer of the 20th century, although the number of pieces he composed was relatively modest.
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Jacques Demy
1931 - 1990 (59 years)
Jacques Demy was a French director, lyricist, and screenwriter. He appeared at the height of the French New Wave alongside contemporaries like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Demy's films are celebrated for their visual style, which drew upon diverse sources such as classic Hollywood musicals, the plein-air realism of his French New Wave colleagues, fairy tales, jazz, Japanese manga, and the opera. His films contain overlapping continuity , lush musical scores and motifs like teenage love, labor rights, chance encounters, incest, and the intersection between dreams and reality. He was married to Agnès Varda, another prominent director of the French New Wave.
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Zenobia Camprubí
1887 - 1956 (69 years)
Zenobia Camprubí Aymar was a Spanish-born writer and poet; she was also a noted translator of the works of Rabindranath Tagore. She was born in Malgrat de Mar to a Puerto Rican mother and a Spanish father.
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Alexander Scriabin
1872 - 1915 (43 years)
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and virtuoso pianist. Before 1903, Scriabin was greatly influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin and composed in a relatively tonal, late-Romantic idiom. Later, and independently of his influential contemporary Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed a much more dissonant musical language that had transcended usual tonality but was not atonal, which accorded with his personal brand of metaphysics. Scriabin found significant appeal in the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk as well as synesthesia, and associated colours with the various harmonic tones of his scale, while his colour-coded circle of fifths was also inspired by theosophy.
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Alan S. C. Ross
1907 - 1980 (73 years)
Alan Strode Campbell Ross was a British academic specialising in linguistics. He is best remembered as the ultimate source and inspiration for author Nancy Mitford's "U and non-U" forms of behaviour and language usage as class indicators.
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Helen Hayes
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Helen Hayes MacArthur was an American actress whose career spanned eighty-two years. She eventually received the nickname "First Lady of American Theatre" and was the second person and first woman to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony Award . She was also the first person to win the Triple Crown of Acting. Hayes also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor, from President Ronald Reagan in 1986. In 1988, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
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Aleksandar Teodorov-Balan
1859 - 1959 (100 years)
Aleksandar Stoyanov Teodorov-Balan was a Bulgarian linguist, historian and bibliographer. Balan was born in the village of Kubey in the Russian Empire, today in Odesa Oblast, Ukraine, to a Bessarabian Bulgarian family. The Bulgarian general Georgi Todorov was his brother. Balan studied in Prague and Leipzig graduating in Slavistics from the Charles University in Prague. In 1884 he settled in Sofia, the capital of the Principality of Bulgaria, spending four years working for the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment. He became professor of Slavic ethnography and dialectology and history of the Bul...
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Edward German
1862 - 1936 (74 years)
Sir Edward German was an English musician and composer of Welsh descent, best remembered for his extensive output of incidental music for the stage and as a successor to Arthur Sullivan in the field of English comic opera. Some of his light operas, especially Merrie England, are still performed.
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Jerome Kern
1885 - 1945 (60 years)
Jerome David Kern was an American composer of musical theatre and popular music. One of the most important American theatre composers of the early 20th century, he wrote more than 700 songs, used in over 100 stage works, including such classics as "Ol' Man River", "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", "A Fine Romance", "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "The Song Is You", "All the Things You Are", "The Way You Look Tonight" and "Long Ago ". He collaborated with many of the leading librettists and lyricists of his era, including George Grossmith Jr., Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerste...
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Alexander Hamilton
1762 - 1824 (62 years)
Alexander Hamilton was a British linguist who was one of the first Europeans to study the Sanskrit language. He taught the language to most of the earliest European scholars of Indo-European linguistics. He became the first professor of Sanskrit in Europe.
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Benjamin Tucker
1854 - 1939 (85 years)
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker was an American individualist anarchist. Tucker was the editor and publisher of the American individualist anarchist periodical Liberty . Tucker was a member of the First International, with his publication Liberty represented as the English language organ for the Socialistic-Revolutionary Congress. Tucker described his form of anarchism as "consistent Manchesterism" and stated that "the Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats."
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Lillian Gish
1893 - 1993 (100 years)
Lillian Diana Gish was an American actress, director, and screenwriter. Her film-acting career spanned 75 years, from 1912, in silent film shorts, to 1987. Gish was called the "First Lady of American Cinema", and is credited with pioneering fundamental film performance techniques. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Gish as the 17th greatest female movie star of Classic Hollywood cinema.
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Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck
1866 - 1951 (85 years)
Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck was a Dutch linguist and anthropologist with a wide variety of research interests. His published work included books and articles on Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages, Sanskrit, Basque, and the Blackfoot language of North American Indians. He served as a lecturer at Leiden University.
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Pierre Monteux
1875 - 1964 (89 years)
Pierre Benjamin Monteux was a French conductor. After violin and viola studies, and a decade as an orchestral player and occasional conductor, he began to receive regular conducting engagements in 1907. He came to prominence when, for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company between 1911 and 1914, he conducted the world premieres of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and other prominent works including Petrushka, The Nightingale, Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, and Debussy's Jeux. Thereafter he directed orchestras around the world for more than half a century.
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Fromental Halévy
1799 - 1862 (63 years)
Jacques-François-Fromental-Élie Halévy, usually known as Fromental Halévy , was a French composer. He is known today largely for his opera La Juive. Early career Halévy was born in Paris, son of the cantor Élie Halfon Halévy, who was the secretary of the Jewish community of Paris and a writer and teacher of Hebrew, and a French Jewish mother. The name Fromental , by which he was generally known, reflects his birth on the day dedicated to that plant: 7 Prairial in the French Revolutionary calendar, which was still operative at that time. He entered the Conservatoire de Paris at the age of nine or ten , in 1809, becoming a pupil and later protégé of Cherubini.
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Jacques Feyder
1885 - 1948 (63 years)
Jacques Feyder was a Belgian actor, screenwriter and film director who worked principally in France, but also in the US, Britain and Germany. He was a director of silent films during the 1920s, and in the 1930s he became associated with the style of poetic realism in French cinema. He adopted French nationality in 1928.
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Elli Alexiou
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Elli Alexiou was a Greek author, playwright and journalist. The daughter of a printer and publisher, Alexiou was born in Heraklion, Crete. She taught French in a high school, and was politically active, joining the Communist Party in 1928 and working with the National Liberation Front resistance during World War II. After the war, she received a scholarship from the French government and studied in Paris. She was stripped of Greek citizenship in 1950, living as an exile until it was restored in 1965.
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Hanya Holm
1893 - 1992 (99 years)
Hanya Holm is known as one of the "Big Four" founders of American modern dance. She was a dancer, choreographer, and above all, a dance educator. Early life, connection with Mary Wigman Born as Johanna Eckert on 3 March 1893 in Worms, Rhineland-Palatinate, German Empire. Holm was drawn to music and drama at an early age, she attended the Dalcroze Institute of Applied Rhythm in Frankfurt, studying under Emile Jaques-Dalcroze throughout her childhood and young adult life.
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Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
1710 - 1736 (26 years)
Giovanni Battista Draghi , usually referred to as Giovanni Battista Pergolesi , was an Italian Baroque composer, violinist, and organist, leading exponent of the Baroque; he is considered one of the greatest Italian musicians of the first half of the 18th century and one of the most important representatives of the Neapolitan school.
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Jakob Jud
1882 - 1952 (70 years)
Jakob Jud [ju:t] was a Swiss Romance linguist . From 1922 to 1950 he taught classes in Romance philology and Old French literature at the University of Zürich. With Karl Jaberg, he was the author of Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz . In 1936, with Arnald Steiger, he founded the magazine Vox Romanica.
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Otto Behaghel
1854 - 1936 (82 years)
Otto Behaghel was a germanist and professor in Heidelberg, Basel, and Gießen. He added theoretical contributions to the German and Middle High German language. He formulated Behaghel's laws. His work is still important in Theme and rheme research.
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Madeleine Carroll
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Edith Madeleine Carroll was an English actress, popular both in Britain and America in the 1930s and 1940s. At the peak of her success in 1938, she was the world's highest-paid actress. Carroll is remembered for starring in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps where she originated the "ice cold blonde" role in Hitchcock films. The director stated, "how very well Madeleine fitted into the part. I had heard a lot about her as a tall, cold, blonde beauty. After meeting her, I made up my mind to present her to the public as her natural self". She is also noted for largely abandoning her acting career...
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David W. Maurer
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
David Warren Maurer was a professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville from 1937 to 1972. He was the writer of numerous studies of the language of the American underworld. Biography Maurer received a doctorate from the Ohio State University in Comparative Literature in 1935. He spent much of his academic career studying the language of criminals, drug addicts, and other marginal subcultures.
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Emmanuel Chabrier
1841 - 1894 (53 years)
Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier was a French Romantic composer and pianist. His bourgeois family did not approve of a musical career for him, and he studied law in Paris and then worked as a civil servant until the age of thirty-nine while immersing himself in the modernist artistic life of the French capital and composing in his spare time. From 1880 until his final illness he was a full-time composer.
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Georg Wenker
1852 - 1911 (59 years)
Georg Wenker was a German linguist who began documenting German dialect geography during the late nineteenth century. He is considered a pioneer in this field and contributed several groundbreaking publications, most notably, the Deutscher Sprachatlas.
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Ted Koehler
1894 - 1973 (79 years)
Ted L. Koehler was an American lyricist. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972. Life and career Koehler was born in 1894 in Washington, D.C. He started out as a photo-engraver, but was attracted to the music business, where he started out as a theater pianist for silent films.
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Niccolò Paganini
1782 - 1840 (58 years)
Niccolò Paganini was an Italian violinist and composer. He was the most celebrated violin virtuoso of his time, and left his mark as one of the pillars of modern violin technique. His 24 Caprices for Solo Violin Op. 1 are among the best known of his compositions and have served as an inspiration for many prominent composers.
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Trevor Howard
1913 - 1988 (75 years)
Trevor Wallace Howard-Smith was an English stage, film, and television actor. After varied work in the theatre, he achieved star status with his role in the film Brief Encounter , followed by The Third Man .
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Hans Marchand
1907 - 1978 (71 years)
Hans Marchand was a German linguist. He studied Romance languages, English and Latin, and after fleeing Germany during the Third Reich was a lecturer of linguistics at Istanbul, Yale University, and Bard College. From 1957 to 1973 he was a professor at the University of Tübingen.
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Solomon Birnbaum
1891 - 1989 (98 years)
Solomon Asher Birnbaum, also Salomo Birnbaum was a Yiddish linguist and Hebrew palaeographer. Biography Birnbaum , born in Vienna, was the oldest son of Nathan Birnbaum and Rosa Korngut. He was an Austrian Jew of West Galician descent.
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Raoul Walsh
1887 - 1980 (93 years)
Raoul Walsh was an American film director, actor, founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , and the brother of silent screen actor George Walsh. He was known for portraying John Wilkes Booth in the silent film The Birth of a Nation and for directing such films as the widescreen epic The Big Trail starring John Wayne in his first leading role, The Roaring Twenties starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, High Sierra starring Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart, and White Heat starring James Cagney and Edmond O'Brien. He directed his last film in 1964. His work has b...
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Zainul Abedin
1914 - 1976 (62 years)
Zainul Abedin , also known as Shilpacharya was a prominent Bangladeshi painter. He became well known in 1944 through his series of paintings depicting some of the great famines in Bengal during its British colonial period. After the Partition of Indian subcontinent he moved to East Pakistan . In 1948, he helped to establish the Institute of Arts and Crafts at the University of Dhaka. The Indian Express has described him as a legendary Bangladeshi painter and activist. Like many of his contemporaries, his paintings on the Bengal famine of 1943 are viewed as his most characteristic works. His ...
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Théodore Dubois
1837 - 1924 (87 years)
Clément François Théodore Dubois was a French Romantic composer, organist, and music teacher. After study at the Paris Conservatoire, Dubois won France's premier musical prize, the Prix de Rome in 1861. He became an organist and choirmaster at several well-known churches in Paris, and at the same time was a professor in the Conservatoire, teaching harmony from 1871 to 1891 and composition from 1891 to 1896, when he succeeded Ambroise Thomas as the Conservatoire's director. He continued his predecessor's strictly conservative curriculum and was forced to retire early after a scandal erupted ov...
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Hank Williams
1923 - 1953 (30 years)
Hiram "Hank" Williams was an American singer-songwriter. He is regarded as one of the most significant and influential American singers and songwriters of the 20th century. Williams recorded 55 singles that reached the top 10 of the Billboard Country & Western Best Sellers chart, five of which were released posthumously, and 12 of which reached No.1.
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Andrei Tarkovsky
1932 - 1986 (54 years)
Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky was a Russian film director and screenwriter. Widely considered one of the greatest and most influential directors in cinema history, Tarkovsky's films explore spiritual and metaphysical themes, and are noted for their slow pacing and long takes, dreamlike visual imagery, and preoccupation with nature and memory.
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Walther von Wartburg
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
Walther von Wartburg was a Swiss philologist and lexicographer. He was the editor-in-chief of the Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch . After studying at the universities of Berne, Zurich, Florence and Paris , in 1918 he presented his doctoral thesis . In 1921 he became Privatdozent at Berne. He worked in the method of Lausanne, and later studied, from 1929 to 1939, at the University of Leipzig. From 1940 to 1959, he was Professor of French Philology at the University of Basle.
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Eduard Prokosch
1876 - 1938 (62 years)
Eduard Prokosch was an Austrian historical linguist who specialized in Indo-European and, specifically, Proto-Germanic studies. He was the father of Gertrude Prokosch Kurath, Frederic Prokosch and Walther Prokosch.
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Muddy Waters
1913 - 1983 (70 years)
McKinley Morganfield , known professionally as Muddy Waters, was an American blues singer and musician who was an important figure in the post-World War II blues scene, and is often cited as the "father of modern Chicago blues". His style of playing has been described as "raining down Delta beatitude".
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Marion Davies
1897 - 1961 (64 years)
Marion Davies was an American actress, producer, screenwriter, and philanthropist. Educated in a religious convent, Davies fled the school to pursue a career as a chorus girl. As a teenager, she appeared in several Broadway musicals and one film, Runaway Romany . She soon became a featured performer in the Ziegfeld Follies.
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Edgard Varèse
1883 - 1965 (82 years)
Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse was a French composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States. Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm; he coined the term "organized sound" in reference to his own musical aesthetic. Varèse's conception of music reflected his vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded". He conceived the elements of his music in terms of "sound-masses", likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has al...
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Paul Renner
1878 - 1956 (78 years)
Paul Friedrich August Renner was a German typeface designer, author, and founder of the Master School for Germany's Printers in Munich. In 1927, he designed the Futura typeface, which became one of the most successful and most-used types of the 20th century.
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