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,
#14151
Li Fang-Kuei
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Li Fang-Kuei was a Chinese linguist known for his studies of the varieties of Chinese, his reconstructionss of Old Chinese and Proto-Tai, and his documentation of Dene languages in North America. Biography Li Fang-Kuei was born on 20 August 1902 in Guangzhou during the final years of the Qing dynasty to a minor scholarly family from Xiyang, a small town in Shanxi roughly south of Yangquan. Li's father Li Guangyu received his jinshi degree in 1880 and served in minor official posts in the late 19th to early 20th century.
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Margaret Masterman
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Margaret Masterman was a British linguist and philosopher, most known for her pioneering work in the field of computational linguistics and especially machine translation. She founded the Cambridge Language Research Unit.
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Maria Luisa Zubizarreta
1900 - Present (126 years)
Maria Luisa Zubizarreta is professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Southern California. Education and personal life Zubizarreta was born and raised in Asunción, Paraguay. She obtained her Maîtrise in General Linguistics from Paris 8 University in 1978 and her PhD in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982, with a dissertation entitled On the Relationship of the Lexicon to Syntax. She held various academic positions before arriving at the University of Southern California , where she held a position from 1988 until her retirement.
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Horst Rittel
1930 - 1990 (60 years)
Horst Wilhelm Johannes Rittel was a design theorist and university professor. He is best known for popularizing the concept of wicked problem, but his influence on design theory and practice was much wider.
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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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Thomas Thompson
1933 - 1982 (49 years)
Thomas Thompson was a journalist and author. Career Thompson was born in Fort Worth, Texas, to Clarence Arnold Thompson and Ruth Oswalt . He graduated from the University of Texas in 1955. He then worked as a reporter and editor at the Houston Press.
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Diedrich Hermann Westermann
1875 - 1956 (81 years)
Diedrich Hermann Westermann was a German missionary, Africanist, and linguist. He substantially extended and revised the work of Carl Meinhof, his teacher, although he rejected some of Meinhof's theories only implicitly. Westermann is seen as one of the founders of modern African linguistics.
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Reginald Ruggles Gates
1882 - 1962 (80 years)
Reginald Ruggles Gates , was a Canadian-born geneticist who published widely in the fields of botany and eugenics. Early life Reginald Ruggles Gates was born on May 1, 1882, near Middleton, Nova Scotia, to a family of English ancestry. He had a twin sister named Charlotte.
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Robert Gjerdingen
Robert O. Gjerdingen is a scholar of music theory and music perception, and is an emeritus professor at Northwestern University. His most influential work focuses on the application of ideas from cognitive science, especially theories about schemas, as an analytical tool in an attempted "archaeology" of style and composition methods in galant European music of the eighteenth century. Gjerdingen received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 after studying with Leonard B. Meyer and Eugene Narmour. His 2007 book Music in the Galant Style, an authoritative study on galant schemata, ...
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Wilbur Schramm
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Wilbur Lang Schramm was a scholar and "authority on mass communications". He founded the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1936 and served as its first director until 1941. Schramm was hugely influential in establishing communications as a field of study in the United States, and the establishing of departments of communication studies across U.S. universities. Wilbur Schramm is considered the founder of the field of Communication Studies. He was the first individual to identify himself as a communication scholar; he created the first academic degree-granting programs with communication in their name; and he trained the first generation of communication scholars.
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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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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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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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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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Mario Pei
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Mario Andrew Pei was an Italian-born American linguist and polyglot who wrote a number of popular books known for their accessibility to readers without a professional background in linguistics. His book The Story of Language was acclaimed for its presentation of technical linguistics concepts in ways that were entertaining and accessible to a general audience.
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Albert C. Baugh
1891 - 1981 (90 years)
Albert Croll Baugh was a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, best known as the author of a textbook for History of the English language . His A History of the English Language was first published in 1935 and praised as "worthy to take a place with the other great histories of single languages". It was revised by Baugh for a second edition published in 1957 and it remains in print, edited by Thomas Cable .
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Clement Martyn Doke
1893 - 1980 (87 years)
Clement Martyn Doke was a South African linguist working mainly on African languages. Realizing that the grammatical structures of Bantu languages are quite different from those of European languages, he was one of the first African linguists of his time to abandon the Euro-centric approach to language description for a more locally grounded one. A most prolific writer, he published a string of grammars, several dictionaries, comparative work, and a history of Bantu linguistics.
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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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László Lajtha
1892 - 1963 (71 years)
László Lajtha was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist and conductor. Career Born to Ida Wiesel, a Transsylvanian-Hungarian and Pál Lajtha, an owner of a leather factory. The father Pál had ambitions to become a conductor, played the violin well and also composed. Lajtha studied with Viktor Herzfeld in the Academy of Music in Budapest and then in Leipzig, Geneva and finally Paris where he was a pupil of Vincent d'Indy. Before the First World War, in collaboration with Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, he undertook the study and transcription of Hungarian folk song, heading up a project to produce a series of folk music recordings.
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Franco Albini
1905 - 1977 (72 years)
Franco Albini was an Italian Neo-Rationalist architect, designer and university instructor in design. Education and career A native of Robbiate, near Milan, Albini obtained his degree in architecture at Politecnico di Milano University in 1929 and began his professional career working for Gio Ponti. He started displaying his works at the Milan Triennale, and in 1930 he opened his own practice.
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Louis Gauchat
1866 - 1942 (76 years)
Louis Gauchat was a Swiss linguist. Career He studied at the University of Zürich under Heinrich Morf and in Paris as a pupil of Gaston Paris, receiving his doctorate in 1890 with the dissertation Le patois de Dompierre. He later worked as a lecturer at Bern and Zürich . In 1902 was named a professor of Romance philology at the University of Bern. In 1907 he succeeded Jakob Ulrich at the University of Zürich, where he taught classes until 1931. In 1909, with Albert Bachmann, he founded the phonogram archives at the university. In 1926–28 he served as academic rector.
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Jean Deny
1879 - 1963 (84 years)
Jean Deny was a French grammarian, specialist of oriental languages. Biography Born to a French father and a Polish mother settled in Kiev, Jean Deny became familiar with the French, Polish, Ukrainian and Russian languages at a young age. After the baccalaureate, he specialized in Oriental languages . He became professor of turkology at the Sorbonne after he taught at the École nationale des langues orientales vivantes of which he was administrator from 1937 to 1948.
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Maximilian Lambertz
1882 - 1963 (81 years)
Maximilian Lambertz was an Austrian linguist, folklorist, and a major personality of Albanology. Biography In the years 1900 to 1905, he studied comparative linguistics and classical philology in Vienna, and subsequently received his doctorate with a dissertation on the "Greek slave name" . A government scholarship enabled him to travel to Italy and Greece. While in Greece, he overheard the conversation of some fishermen from Attica. He got curious when he was told that it was the Arvanitika dialect of the Albanian .This would change his course of work from that moment on. After his return h...
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Grigori Kozintsev
1905 - 1973 (68 years)
Grigori Mikhailovich Kozintsev was a Soviet theatre and film director, screenwriter and pedagogue. He was named People's Artist of the USSR in 1964. In 1965 he was a member of the jury at the 4th Moscow International Film Festival. Two years later he was a member of the jury of the 5th Moscow International Film Festival. In 1971 he was the President of the Jury at the 7th Moscow International Film Festival.
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Hermann Teuchert
1880 - 1972 (92 years)
Hermann August Teuchert was a German historical linguist. Teuchert was born in Loppow In 1920 he was granted the newly created professorship for Low German Philology at the University of Rostock and served in this position until 1946. He died in Heidelberg at the age of 91.
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Hervey Alan
1910 - 1982 (72 years)
Hervey Alan was an English operatic bass and voice teacher. During his career he sang leading roles with most of Great Britain's major opera institutions, including the Edinburgh Festival, the Glyndebourne Festival, the Royal Opera House, the Sadler's Wells Opera, and the Welsh National Opera. He is best known for creating the role of Mr. Redburn in the world premiere of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd at the Royal Opera House, London, on 1 December 1951. Music critic Elizabeth Forbes wrote that his voice was "dark toned, resonant", and "especially effective as Zaccaria in Nabucco.
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Felix Prohaska
1912 - 1987 (75 years)
Felix Prohaska was an Austrian conductor and professor of musicology in Hanover. Education Felix Prohaska, born in Vienna, was the son of the composer and professor Carl Prohaska . He received his music education from his father; he studied piano with Eduard Steuermann and music theory with Egon Kornauth and Hans Gál.
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Halsey Stevens
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Halsey Stevens was a music professor, biographer, and composer of American music. Life Halsey Stevens was born in Scott, New York and educated at Syracuse University and the University of California, Berkeley. He studied with William Berwald at Syracuse and with the composer Ernest Bloch at Berkeley.
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Sandor Harmati
1892 - 1936 (44 years)
Sandor Harmati was a Hungarian-American violinist, conductor and composer, best known for his song "Bluebird of Happiness" written in 1934 for Jan Peerce. Biography Sandor Harmati was born into a Jewish family in Budapest on 9 July 1892.
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Fela Sowande
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
Chief Olufela Obafunmilayo "Fela" Sowande MBE was a Nigerian musician and composer. Considered the father of modern Nigerian art music, Sowande is perhaps the most internationally known African composer of works in the European "classical" idiom.
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Friedrich Klose
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
Friedrich Klose was a German composer. He studied with Vinzenz Lachner in Karlsruhe, and then with Anton Bruckner in Vienna, and recorded his impressions of his time with Bruckner in a book. His Mass in d-minor was written in response to Franz Liszt's death. His opera Ilsebill is inspired by the music of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, and the plot is based on the Brothers Grimm tale of a fisherman who catches a huge fish which grants ever increasingly more greedy wishes and this is reflected in the increasing complexity of orchestration during the opera. It was premiered in 1903 in Karlsruhe under the direction of Felix Mottl.
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Eugene List
1918 - 1985 (67 years)
Eugene List was an American concert pianist and teacher. Early life Eugene List was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He spent his formative years in Los Angeles, where his father Louis List was a language teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District and his mother, Rose, a pharmacist. Louis Lisnitzer had immigrated to America from Odessa, Ukraine and settled in Philadelphia, where he met and married Rose, whose family had also come from the same region. In 1937, Louis decided officially to change his name and that of his family to "List". The family soon relocated to California.
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Josep Renau
1907 - 1982 (75 years)
Josep Renau Berenguer was an artist and communist revolutionary, notable for his propaganda work during the Spanish Civil War. Among his production, he is remarkable for his art deco period, his political propaganda during the Spanish Civil War, the photomurals of the Spanish Pavilion in the International Exhibition of 1937 in Paris, a series of photomontages titled Fata Morgana or The American Way of Life, and murals and paintings made in Mexico, such as Tropic, dated in 1945.
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Gladys Pitcher
1890 - 1996 (106 years)
Gladys Pitcher was an American music editor, teacher, and composer. Biography Pitcher was born in Belfast, Maine in 1890. She attended high school in Belfast and was considered for the Boston Globe scholarship contest in 1906 and received many votes towards it, including from people who were not from Belfast. She graduated from the New England Conservatory and completed postgraduate work in theory, composition, and cello. Pitcher taught at Beloit College and directed music at schools in Bennington, Vermont and Manchester, New Hampshire. She was the music editor for C.C. Birchard Company in Boston before moving back to Belfast, Maine.
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Gyula Farkas
1894 - 1958 (64 years)
Farkas Gyula de Kisbarnak, or Julius von Farkas de Kisbarnak Biography He was born into the Roman Catholic Transdanubian Hungarian noble family Farkas de Kisbarnak. His father was Ferenc Farkas de Kisbarnak , captain of the Hungarian Royal army, notary of Kismarton and his mother was Gizella Pottyondy de Potyond und Csáford . His paternal grandfather was Farkas Ferenc de Kisbarnak , administrator of the states of Réde, property of the county Esterházys, and his paternal grandmother was Cecília Hoffmann . His maternal grandparents were dr. Ágoston Pottyondy de Potyond et Csáford, lawyer, and Mária Grohmann .
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Henry Holst
1899 - 1991 (92 years)
Henry Holst was a Danish violinist. In his early career he was leader of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Wilhelm Furtwängler. From the 1930s to the mid-1950s he was based in England, as a soloist and teacher. He held professorships at the Royal Manchester College of Music and the Royal College of Music in London. After 1954 he was based in his native Denmark, where he was professor of violin at the Royal Danish Academy of Music.
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Doris Humphrey
1895 - 1958 (63 years)
Doris Batcheller Humphrey was an American dancer and choreographer of the early twentieth century. Along with her contemporaries Martha Graham and Katherine Dunham, Humphrey was one of the second generation modern dance pioneers who followed their forerunners – including Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn – in exploring the use of breath and developing techniques still taught today. As many of her works were annotated, Humphrey continues to be taught, studied and performed.
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Douglas Moore
1893 - 1969 (76 years)
Douglas Stuart Moore was an American composer, songwriter, organist, pianist, conductor, educator, actor, and author. A composer who mainly wrote works with an American subject, his music is generally characterized by lyricism in a popular or conservative style which generally eschewed the more experimental progressive trends of musical modernism. Composer Virgil Thomson described Moore as a neoromantic composer who was influenced by American folk music. While several of his works enjoyed popularity during his lifetime, only his folk opera The Ballad of Baby Doe has remained well known into ...
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Hans Ernst Pinsker
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Hans Pinsker was an Austrian linguist. He was Professor and Chair at the Department of English at the University of Vienna. Pinsker is perhaps best known for his introduction to English historical grammar , which appeared in multiple editions . He is also noted as an accomplished member of the Vienna School of English Linguistics and held the "Luick Chair" before Herbert Koziol and Herbert Schendl. Pinsker worked on Indo-European in addition to English historical linguistics.
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Philip J. Lang
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
Philip J. Lang was an American musical arranger, orchestrator and composer of band music, as well as a musical educator. He is credited for writing the orchestral arrangements for over 50 Broadway theatre shows, including many landmark productions, such as Li'l Abner , Hello, Dolly! , Mame , George M , Annie and 42nd Street . Together with Robert Russell Bennett, he orchestrated the record-breaking productions of Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady and Camelot . Russell Bennett, the dean of musical orchestrators, remarked that the original arrangements Lang had prepared for Annie Get Your Gun...
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Kaj Franck
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
Kaj Gabriel Franck was one of the leading figures of Finnish design and an influential figure in design and applied arts between 1940 and 1980. Franck's parents were Kurt Franck and Genéviève "Vevi" Ahrenberg. He was a Swedish-speaking Finn, and he was of German descent through his father.
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Walter Braunfels
1882 - 1954 (72 years)
Walter Braunfels was a German composer, pianist, and music educator. Life Walter Braunfels was born in Frankfurt. His first music teacher was his mother, the great-niece of the composer Louis Spohr. He continued his piano studies in Frankfurt at the Hoch Conservatory with James Kwast.
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Walter Draeger
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Walter Draeger was a German composer and music educator. Er war Professor an der and the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar. In 1955, war er Mitinitiator der ersten Hallische Musiktage. Life Draeger was born in 1888 as the son of a teacher and organist in Batzlow near Freienwalde in the Province of Brandenburg. From 1898, he lived in Berlin, where he lived until the Reifeprüfung from the . Von 1908 bis 1913 studierte er Geschichte, Romance studies and musicology an der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin. In 1913, he was awarded his doctorate there with the dissertation Das alte l...
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