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
Nikolai Nikolayevich Durnovo
1876 - 1937 (61 years)
Nikolai Nikolayevich Durnovo was a Russian linguist. He was sentenced to death and shot during the Great Purge. Biography Durnovo was born into the Durnovo family. His father was also named Nikolai Nikolayevich Durnovo, and his paternal grandmother was a member of the noble House of Saltykov.
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Ritchie Valens
1941 - 1959 (18 years)
Richard Steven Valenzuela , better known by his stage name Ritchie Valens, was an American guitarist, singer and songwriter. A rock and roll pioneer and a forefather of the Chicano rock movement, Valens died in a plane crash just eight months into his music career.
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André Hunebelle
1896 - 1985 (89 years)
André Hunebelle was a French maître verrier and film director. Master Glass Artist After attending polytechnic school for mathematics, he became a decorator, a designer, and then a master glass maker in the mid-1920s . His work is known for its clean lines, which are elegant and singularly strong. He exhibited his own glass in a luxurious store located at 2 Avenue Victor-Emmanuel III, at the roundabout of the Champs Èlysées in Paris. Etienne Franckhauser, who also made molds for Lalique and Sabino, made the molds for Hunebelle's glass which was fabricated by the crystal factory in Choisy-le-Roi, France.
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André Messager
1853 - 1929 (76 years)
André Charles Prosper Messager was a French composer, organist, pianist and conductor. His compositions include eight ballets and thirty opéras comiques, opérettes and other stage works, among which his ballet Les Deux Pigeons and opéra comique Véronique have had lasting success; Les P'tites Michu and Monsieur Beaucaire were also popular internationally.
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Charles Villiers Stanford
1852 - 1924 (72 years)
Sir Charles Villiers Stanford was an Anglo-Irish composer, music teacher, and conductor of the late Romantic era. Born to a well-off and highly musical family in Dublin, Stanford was educated at the University of Cambridge before studying music in Leipzig and Berlin. He was instrumental in raising the status of the Cambridge University Musical Society, attracting international stars to perform with it.
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Sukumar Sen
1900 - 1992 (92 years)
Sukumar Sen was an Indian linguist and historian of the Bengali literature, who was also well versed in Pāli, Prakrit and Sanskrit. Life Sen was born in 1900 to Harendra Nath Sen, a lawyer and Nabanalini Devi. His hometown was Gotan, near Shyamsundar in the Purba Bardhaman district. Sen was educated at the Burdwan Municipal High School, Burdwan, 1917. He obtained an F.A. in 1919 from Burdwan Raj College, then affiliated with the University of Calcutta. He received a divisional scholarship and earned first class honours in Sanskrit from the Government Sanskrit College in 1921. He studied Comparative Philology in Kolkata, scoring the highest marks in 1923.
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Charles Bruneau
1883 - 1969 (86 years)
Charles Bruneau was a French grammarian, linguist and philologist. Biography Bruneau grew up in a village where the language of communication was Walloon, but surrounded by areas where the regional language was Champenois. This prompted him, at the instigation of Jules Gilliéron, to conduct dialectological surveys throughout the region around Givet, both in France and Belgium. He was a grammar scholar and doctor of letters .
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Aaron Douglas
1899 - 1979 (80 years)
Aaron Douglas was an American painter, illustrator and visual arts educator. He was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He developed his art career painting murals and creating illustrations that addressed social issues around race and segregation in the United States by utilizing African-centric imagery. Douglas set the stage for young, African-American artists to enter the public-arts realm through his involvement with the Harlem Artists Guild. In 1944, he concluded his art career by founding the Art Department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He taught visual art classes at Fisk until his retirement in 1966.
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Kasper Niesiecki
1682 - 1744 (62 years)
Kasper Niesiecki , also known as Kacper Niesiecki, was a Polish heraldist, Jesuit, lexicographer, writer, theologian and preacher. Biography Niesiecki was born in Greater Poland to a burgher family. In 1699 he began training as a Jesuit in Kraków. From 1701 to 1704 he studied philosophy in Lublin, earning a master's degree. In 1707 Niesiecki started his studies in theology at the Jagiellonian University, graduating in 1711. He undertook further study in Lutsk, Krosno, Bydgoszcz, Chojnice and Kalisz.
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William Wentworth
1790 - 1872 (82 years)
William Charles Wentworth was an Australian statesman, pastoralist, explorer, newspaper editor, lawyer, politician and author, who became one of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in colonial New South Wales.
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Adrian Boult
1889 - 1983 (94 years)
Sir Adrian Cedric Boult, CH was a British conductor. Brought up in a prosperous mercantile family, he followed musical studies in England and at Leipzig, Germany, with early conducting work in London for the Royal Opera House and Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company. His first prominent post was conductor of the City of Birmingham Orchestra in 1924. When the British Broadcasting Corporation appointed him director of music in 1930, he established the BBC Symphony Orchestra and became its chief conductor. The orchestra set standards of excellence that were rivalled in Britain only by the London Ph...
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Charlie Parker
1920 - 1955 (35 years)
Charles Parker Jr. , nicknamed "Bird" or "Yardbird", was an American jazz saxophonist, band leader and composer. Parker was a highly influential soloist and leading figure in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique, and advanced harmonies. He was a virtuoso and introduced revolutionary rhythmic and harmonic ideas into jazz, including rapid passing chords, new variants of altered chords, and chord substitutions. Primarily a player of the alto saxophone, Parker's tone ranged from clean and penetrating to sweet and somber.
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Groff Conklin
1904 - 1968 (64 years)
Edward Groff Conklin was an American science fiction anthologist. He edited 40 anthologies of science fiction, one of mystery stories , wrote books on home improvement and was a freelance writer on scientific subjects as well as a published poet. From 1950 to 1955, he was the book critic for Galaxy Science Fiction.
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Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
1525 - 1594 (69 years)
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was an Italian composer of late Renaissance music. The central representative of the Roman School, with Orlande de Lassus and Tomás Luis de Victoria, Palestrina is considered the leading composer of late 16th-century Europe.
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Wacław Cimochowski
1912 - 1982 (70 years)
Wacław Cimochowski was a Polish philologist who specialized in Indo-European linguistics, especially in Albanology. Career Cimochowski studied linguistics at Stefan Batory University, where his teacher was among others Jan Otrębski. He also studied in Vienna, where he was specialized in Albanian and in Sanskrit.
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Friedrich Carl Andreas
1846 - 1930 (84 years)
Friedrich Carl Andreas was an orientalist of German, Malay, and Armenian parentage . He was the husband of psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé. He received his education in Iranian and other oriental studies at several German universities, obtaining his doctorate at Erlangen in 1868 with a thesis on the Pahlavi language. Following graduation, he continued his research of Pahlavi in Copenhagen. From 1875 he spent several years conducting field studies in Persia and India, during which time, he also worked as a postmaster.
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John Barrymore
1882 - 1942 (60 years)
John Barrymore was an American actor on stage, screen and radio. A member of the Drew and Barrymore theatrical families, he initially tried to avoid the stage, and briefly attempted a career as an artist, but appeared on stage together with his father Maurice in 1900, and then his sister Ethel the following year. He began his career in 1903 and first gained attention as a stage actor in light comedy, then high drama, culminating in productions of Justice , Richard III and Hamlet ; his portrayal of Hamlet led to him being called the "greatest living American tragedian".
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Jānis Endzelīns
1873 - 1961 (88 years)
Jānis Endzelīns was a Latvian linguist. He graduated from the University of Tartu. In 1908, he and Kārlis Mīlenbahs developed the modern Latvian alphabet, which slowly replaced the old orthography used before.
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Robert Smithson
1938 - 1973 (35 years)
Robert Smithson was an American artist known for sculpture and land art who often used drawing and photography in relation to the spatial arts. His work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and museums and is held in public collections. He was one of the founders of the land art movement whose best known work is the Spiral Jetty .
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Josef von Sternberg
1894 - 1969 (75 years)
Josef von Sternberg was an Austrian-born filmmaker whose career successfully spanned the transition from the silent to the sound era, during which he worked with most of the major Hollywood studios. He is best known for his film collaboration with actress Marlene Dietrich in the 1930s, including the highly regarded Paramount/UFA production, The Blue Angel .
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Tiberius Hemsterhuis
1685 - 1766 (81 years)
Tiberius Hemsterhuis was a Dutch philologist and critic. Life He was born in Groningen. His father, a learned physician, gave him a good early education and he entered the university of his native city in his fifteenth year, where he proved himself the best student of mathematics. After a year or two at Groningen, he was attracted to the University of Leiden by the fame of Perizonius. While there, he was entrusted with the duty of arranging the manuscripts in the library. Though he accepted an appointment as professor of mathematics and philosophy at Amsterdam in his twentieth year, he had a...
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Erich von Stroheim
1885 - 1957 (72 years)
Erich Oswald Hans Carl Maria von Stroheim was an Austrian-American director, screenwriter, actor, and producer, most noted as a film star and avant-garde, visionary director of the silent era. His 1924 film Greed is considered one of the finest and most important films ever made. After clashes with Hollywood studio bosses over budget and workers' rights problems, Stroheim found it difficult to find work as a director and subsequently became a well-respected character actor, particularly in French cinema.
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John Burns
1858 - 1943 (85 years)
John Elliot Burns was an English trade unionist and politician, particularly associated with London politics and Battersea. He was a socialist and then a Liberal Member of Parliament and Minister. He was anti-alcohol and a keen sportsman. When the Liberal cabinet made a decision for war on 2 August 1914, he resigned and played no further role in politics. After retiring from politics, he developed an expertise in London history and coined the phrase "The Thames is liquid history".
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Paul Whiteman
1891 - 1967 (76 years)
Paul Samuel Whiteman was an American bandleader, composer, orchestral director, and violinist. As the leader of one of the most popular dance bands in the United States during the 1920s and early 1930s, Whiteman produced recordings that were immensely successful, and press notices often referred to him as the "King of Jazz". His most popular recordings include "Whispering", "Valencia", "Three O'Clock in the Morning", "In a Little Spanish Town", and "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers". Whiteman led a usually large ensemble and explored many styles of music, such as blending symphonic music and jaz...
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Hans Vogt
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Hans Kamstrup Vogt was a Norwegian linguist who specialized in the Caucasian languages, especially Georgian. He also did significant early work on the Kalispel language and produced an interesting dictionary of the Ubykh language.
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Carol Reed
1906 - 1976 (70 years)
Sir Carol Reed was an English film director and producer, best known for Odd Man Out , The Fallen Idol , The Third Man , and Oliver! , for which he was awarded the Academy Award for Best Director. Odd Man Out was the first recipient of the BAFTA Award for Best British Film. The Fallen Idol won the second BAFTA Award for Best British Film. The British Film Institute voted The Third Man the greatest British film of the 20th century.
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Max Ophüls
1902 - 1957 (55 years)
Maximillian Oppenheimer , known as Max Ophüls or simply Ophuls, was a German-born film director who worked in Germany , France , and the United States . He made nearly 30 films, the latter ones being especially notable: La Ronde , Le Plaisir , The Earrings of Madame de… and Lola Montès . He was credited as Max Opuls on several of his American films, including The Reckless Moment, Caught, Letter from an Unknown Woman, and The Exile. The annual Filmfestival Max Ophüls Preis in Saarbrücken is named after him.
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Mily Balakirev
1836 - 1910 (74 years)
Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor known today primarily for his work promoting musical nationalism and his encouragement of more famous Russian composers, notably Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. He began his career as a pivotal figure, extending the fusion of traditional folk music and experimental classical music practices begun by composer Mikhail Glinka. In the process, Balakirev developed musical patterns that could express overt nationalistic feeling. After a nervous breakdown and consequent sabbatical, he returned to classical music but did not wield th...
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G. W. Pabst
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Georg Wilhelm Pabst was an Austrian film director and screenwriter. He started as an actor and theater director, before becoming one of the most influential German-language filmmakers during the Weimar Republic.
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Franklin Edgerton
1885 - 1963 (78 years)
Franklin Edgerton was an American linguistic scholar. He was Salisbury Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at Yale University and visiting professor at Benares Hindu University . Between 1913 and 1926, he was the Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Pennsylvania. He is well known for his exceptionally literal translation of the Bhagavad Gita which was published as volume 38-39 of the Harvard Oriental Series in 1944. He also edited the parallel edition of four recensions of the Simhāsana Dvātrṃśika , and a reconstruction of the original Sanskrit text of the Panchatantra. Ed...
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Peter Erasmus Müller
1776 - 1834 (58 years)
Peter Erasmus Müller , was a Danish historian, linguist, theologian, and bishop of the Diocese of Zealand from 1830 until his death. Career Müller studied at the University of Copenhagen, where he passed his theological examination in 1791. After spending some time at various German universities, he visited France and England. Returning to Denmark, he wrote numerous works and was appointed professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen in 1801. During his time as a professor, he produced a large number of essays and books about theology, history, and linguistics. As a result of the fame...
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A. V. Williams Jackson
1862 - 1937 (75 years)
Abraham Valentine Williams Jackson, L.H.D., Ph.D., LL.D. was an American specialist on Indo-European languages. Biography He was born in New York City on February 9, 1862. He graduated from Columbia University in 1883. He was a fellow in letters there from 1883 to 1886, and an instructor in Anglo-Saxon and the Iranian languages from 1887 to 1890. After studying at the University of Halle from 1887 to 1889 he became an adjunct professor of English language and literature. In 1895, he was appointed public lecturer and also appointed to the newly founded professorship of Indo-Iranian languages ...
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Woody Guthrie
1912 - 1967 (55 years)
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was an American singer-songwriter and composer who was one of the most significant figures in American folk music. His work focused on themes of American socialism and anti-fascism. He inspired several generations both politically and musically with songs such as "This Land Is Your Land".
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Joseph Loth
1847 - 1934 (87 years)
Joseph Loth was a French linguist and historian who specialised in the study of Celtic languages. Early life Loth was born in Guémené-sur-Scorff, Brittany. After his studies at Sainte-Anne-d'Auray, he became a teacher at Pontivy, then Quimper and Saumur until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. After the end of the conflict, he worked in various institutions in Paris. At this time he made the acquaintance of Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville, who encouraged him to study Celtic languages.
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Shinmura Izuru
1876 - 1967 (91 years)
was a Japanese linguist and essayist. He is best known for his many contributions to Japanese linguistics and lexicography. In honor of him, the Shinmura Izuru Prize is annually awarded for contributions to linguistics.
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Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn
1612 - 1653 (41 years)
Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn was a Dutch scholar . Born in Bergen op Zoom, he was professor at the University of Leiden. He discovered the similarity among Indo-European languages, and supposed the existence of a primitive common language which he called 'Scythian'. He included in his hypothesis Dutch, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, later adding Slavic, Celtic and Baltic languages. He excluded languages such as Hebrew from his hypothesis. He died in Leiden.
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Roy Orbison
1936 - 1988 (52 years)
Roy Kelton Orbison was an American singer, songwriter, and musician known for his impassioned singing style, complex song structures, and dark, emotional ballads. His music was described by critics as operatic, earning him the nicknames "The Caruso of Rock" and "The Big O". Many of Orbison's songs conveyed vulnerability at a time when most male rock-and-roll performers chose to project machismo. He performed while standing motionless and wearing black clothes to match his dyed black hair and dark sunglasses.
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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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