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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Communications,
#14201
Gerald Finzi
1901 - 1956 (55 years)
Gerald Raphael Finzi was a British composer. Finzi is best known as a choral composer, but also wrote in other genres. Large-scale compositions by Finzi include the cantata Dies natalis for solo voice and string orchestra, and his concertos for cello and clarinet.
Go to Profile#14202
Ernie Royal
1921 - 1983 (62 years)
Ernest Andrew Royal was a jazz trumpeter. His older brother was clarinetist and alto saxophonist Marshal Royal, with whom he appears on the classic Ray Charles big band recording The Genius of Ray Charles .
Go to Profile#14203
Luigi Boccherini
1743 - 1805 (62 years)
Ridolfo Luigi Boccherini was an Italian composer and cellist of the Classical era whose music retained a courtly and galante style even while he matured somewhat apart from the major European musical centers. He is best known for a minuet from his String Quintet in E, Op. 11, No. 5 , and the Cello Concerto in B flat major . The latter work was long known in the heavily altered version by German cellist and prolific arranger Friedrich Grützmacher, but has recently been restored to its original version.
Go to Profile#14204
Eugene Aynsley Goossens
1893 - 1962 (69 years)
Sir Eugene Aynsley Goossens was an English conductor and composer. Biography He was born in Camden Town, London, the son of the Belgian conductor and violinist Eugène Goossens and Annie Cook, a Carl Rosa Opera Company singer. He was the grandson of the conductor Eugène Goossens . His younger sisters and brothers, all musicians, were Marie, Adolphe, Leon and Sidonie.
Go to Profile#14205
Nikolay Kashkin
1839 - 1920 (81 years)
Nikolay Dmitriyevich Kashkin was a Russian music critic as well as a professor of piano and music theory at the Moscow Conservatory for 33 years . The son of a Voronezh bookseller, Kashkin was a self-taught musician who had started giving piano lessons by the time he was 13 years old. In 1860 he travelled to Moscow for further study in piano with Alexandre Dubuque. There he met Herman Laroche, Nikolai Rubinstein and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Go to Profile#14206
Gram Parsons
1946 - 1973 (27 years)
Ingram Cecil Connor III , known professionally as Gram Parsons, was an American singer, songwriter, guitarist, and pianist. He recorded as a solo artist and with the International Submarine Band, the Byrds, and the Flying Burrito Brothers, popularizing what he called "Cosmic American Music", a hybrid of country, rhythm and blues, soul, folk, and rock.
Go to Profile#14207
Francesco Cilea
1866 - 1950 (84 years)
Francesco Cilea was an Italian composer. Today he is particularly known for his operas L'arlesiana and Adriana Lecouvreur. Biography Born in Palmi near Reggio di Calabria, Cilea was the son of a prominent lawyer and originally intended to follow his father into a law career. He gave an early indication of an aptitude for music when at the age of four he heard a performance of Vincenzo Bellini's Norma and was greatly affected by it. He was sent to study music at the Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella in Naples, where he quickly demonstrated his diligence and precocious talent, earning a gol...
Go to Profile#14208
Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon
1854 - 1917 (63 years)
Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon was a Norwegian linguist and historian. He was a professor of Semitic Languages at the University of Oslo from 1907. Knudtzon was born in Trondheim, the son of consul Hans Nicolay Knudtzon and his wife Catharina née Trampe. Having finished his secondary education in 1872, he enrolled at the Royal Frederick University in Christiania. After a short spell at the Cathedral School in Trondheim, he returned to Christiania to study Semitic languages, in particular Akkadian, Arabian and Hebrew, the last of which he also gave lectures on. His first scholarly contribution was Textkritische Bemerkungen zu Lay 17,18, which was published in 1882.
Go to Profile#14209
Ethel Smyth
1858 - 1944 (86 years)
Dame Ethel Mary Smyth was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works and operas.
Go to Profile#14210
Billie Burke
1884 - 1970 (86 years)
Mary William Ethelbert Appleton Burke was a Canadian-American actress who was famous on Broadway and radio, and in silent and sound films. She is best known to modern audiences as Glinda the Good Witch of the North in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie musical The Wizard of Oz .
Go to Profile#14211
Hans Bauer
1878 - 1937 (59 years)
Hans Bauer was a German semitist and professor at the University of Halle in the early 1930s. He was involved in the decipherment of Ugaritic cuneiform on clay tablets discovered in Ras Shamra, Ugarit.
Go to Profile#14212
Janet Craxton
1929 - 1981 (52 years)
Janet Helen Rosemary Craxton was an English oboe player and teacher. She was the youngest of the six children and the only daughter of the pianist and teacher Harold Craxton. Her older brothers included the artist John Craxton. She married the composer Alan Richardson in 1961.
Go to Profile#14213
Rudolph Snellius
1546 - 1613 (67 years)
Rudolph Snel van Royen , Latinized as Rudolphus Snellius, was a Dutch linguist and mathematician who held appointments at the University of Marburg and the University of Leiden. Snellius was an influence on some of the leading political and intellectual forces of the Dutch Golden Age.
Go to Profile#14214
Sergei Parajanov
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
Sergei Parajanov was an Armenian film director and screenwriter. Parajanov is regarded by film critics, film historians and filmmakers to be one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in cinema history.
Go to Profile#14215
Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg was a German conductor. He began his career in Munich as an assistant to Hans Knappertsbusch at the Bavarian State Opera. After several appointments in Essen, Dortmund, and Kiel, in 1934 he succeeded Herbert von Karajan as first Kapellmeister in Ulm. In 1937 he conducted a complete Beethoven cycle at the invitation of Furtwängler. In 1938 he became director of the Hamburg Lehrergesangsverein and received an appointment at the Hamburg State Opera. In Hamburg he conducted over 700 concerts for schoolchildren. He frequently worked with the Hamburger Symphoniker and the...
Go to Profile#14216
Felix Aylmer
1889 - 1979 (90 years)
Sir Felix Edward Aylmer Jones, OBE was an English stage actor who also appeared in the cinema and on television. Aylmer made appearances in films with comedians such as Will Hay and George Formby. Early life Felix Aylmer was born in Corsham, Wiltshire, the son of Lilian and Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Edward Aylmer Jones. He was educated at King James's Grammar School, Almondbury, near Huddersfield, where he was a boarder from 1897 to 1900, Magdalen College School, and Exeter College, Oxford, where he was a member of Oxford University Dramatic Society . He trained under the Victorian-era actre...
Go to Profile#14217
Ściapan Niekraševič
1883 - 1937 (54 years)
Ściapan Niekraševič , also known as Stepan Nekrashevich was a Belarusian academic, political figure and a victim of Stalin's purges. Early years Niekraševič was born in the estate of Daniłoŭka in Minsk province of the Russian Empire into the family of a petty nobleman. He graduated from the Vilna Teachers' Institute in 1913 and embarked on a teaching career.
Go to Profile#14218
Eva Le Gallienne
1899 - 1991 (92 years)
Eva Le Gallienne was a British-born American stage actress, producer, director, translator, and author. A Broadway star by age 21, Le Gallienne gave up her Broadway appearances to devote herself to founding the Civic Repertory Theatre, in which she was director, producer, and lead actress. Noted for her boldness and idealism, she became a pioneering figure in the American repertory movement, which enabled today's off-Broadway. A versatile and eloquent actress herself , Le Gallienne also became a respected stage director, coach, producer and manager.
Go to Profile#14219
Hedley Donovan
1914 - 1990 (76 years)
Hedley Donovan was editor in chief of Time Inc. from 1964 to 1979. In this capacity, he oversaw all of the company's magazine publications, including Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Money, and People. Hand-picked by founder Henry Luce, Donovan redirected the magazine from its historically conservative orientation to a more objective editorial stance, particularly with respect to the Vietnam War. The Hedley Donovan Award was created in 1999 by the Minnesota Magazines and Publications Association to recognize individuals who have shown outstanding lifelong dedication and contributions ...
Go to Profile#14220
Daws Butler
1916 - 1988 (72 years)
Charles Dawson Butler , professionally known as Daws Butler, was an American voice actor. He worked mostly for the Hanna-Barbera animation production company, where he originated the voices of many familiar characters, including Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss, Auggie Doggie, Loopy De Loop, Wally Gator, Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey, Snooper and Blabber, Hokey Wolf, Elroy Jetson, Peter Potamus, The Funky Phantom and Hair Bear.
Go to Profile#14221
Arthur Nikisch
1855 - 1922 (67 years)
Arthur Nikisch was a Hungarian conductor who performed internationally, holding posts in Boston, London, Leipzig and—most importantly—Berlin. He was considered an outstanding interpreter of the music of Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Liszt. Johannes Brahms praised Nikisch's performance of his Fourth Symphony as "quite exemplary, it's impossible to hear it any better."
Go to Profile#14222
Zhang Ruoming
1902 - 1958 (56 years)
Zhang Ruoming was a Chinese scholar of French literature, translator and journalist. She was a professor at Yunnan University and considered an authority on the French author André Gide. She was one of the first Chinese women to earn a doctorate in France, graduating from the University of Lyon. In her youth, she was a leader in the May Fourth Movement in Tianjin and was known for her political association with Zhou Enlai and the Chinese Communist Party in France in the early 1920s.
Go to Profile#14223
Olav Beito
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Olav Toreson Beito was a Norwegian linguist and professor of Nordic studies at the University of Oslo. Beito was born in Øystre Slidre, the son of the farmer Thore Andreas Beito and Marit Beito . He married Marit Eker in 1930. Beito earned his candidatus philologiæ degree in 1932 from the University of Oslo, and then taught at schools in Fredrikstad and Oslo. From 1936 to 1939 and in 1948 he taught at the University of Oslo. He received a doctorate in 1942 with a dissertation on r-declension of Old Norse consonant stems. He taught Norwegian at the University of Iceland from 1954 to 1955. He ...
Go to Profile#14224
Fred Niblo
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
Fred Niblo was an American pioneer film actor, director and producer. Biography He was born Frederick Liedtke in York, Nebraska to a French mother and a father who had served as a captain in the American Civil War and was wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg. Using the stage name Fred Niblo, Liedtke began his show business career performing in vaudeville and in live theater. After more than 20 years doing live performing as a monologist, during which he traveled extensively around the globe, he worked in Australia from 1912 through 1915, where he turned to the burgeoning motion picture indus...
Go to Profile#14225
Aira Kaal
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Aira Kaal was an Estonian writer. From 1931 to 1940, she studied in Tartu University, focusing on philosophy, but also learning Estonian literature, world literature and English. From 1938 to 1939, she worked in Great Britain, where she met her husband Arthur Robert Hone, with whom she returned to Estonia. From 1945 to 1950, she was a lecturer in the Tartu State University, teaching the foundations of Marxism-Leninism.
Go to Profile#14226
Egon Petri
1881 - 1962 (81 years)
Egon Petri was a Dutch-American pianist. Life and career Petri's family was Dutch. He was born a Dutch citizen in Hanover, Germany, and grew up in Dresden, where he attended the Kreuzschule. His father, a professional violinist, taught him to play the violin. While still a teenager, Petri played with the Dresden Court Orchestra and with his father's string quartet. He studied composition and theory with Hermann Kretzschmar and Felix Draeseke at the Dresden Conservatory.
Go to Profile#14227
Max Steiner
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
Maximilian Raoul Steiner was an Austrian composer and conductor who emigrated to America and became one of Hollywood's greatest musical composers. Steiner was a child prodigy who conducted his first operetta when he was twelve and became a full-time professional, proficient at composing, arranging, and conducting, by the time he was fifteen. Threatened with internment in England during World War I, he fled to Broadway; and in 1929 he moved to Hollywood, where he became one of the first composers to write music scores for films. He is often referred to as "the father of film music", as Steiner...
Go to Profile#14228
Mykola Lysenko
1842 - 1912 (70 years)
Mykola Vitaliyovych Lysenko was a Ukrainian composer, pianist, conductor and ethnomusicologist of the late Romantic period. In his time he was the central figure of Ukrainian music, with an oeuvre that includes operas, art songs, choral works, orchestral and chamber pieces, and a wide variety of solo piano music. He is often credited with founding a national music tradition during the Ukrainian national revival, in the vein of contemporaries such as Grieg in Norway, The Five in Russia as well as Smetana and Dvořák in what is now the Czech Republic.
Go to Profile#14229
Henry Koster
1905 - 1988 (83 years)
Henry Koster was a German-born film director. He was the husband of actress Peggy Moran. Early life Koster was born to Jewish parents in Berlin, Germany. He was introduced to cinema around the year 1910 when his uncle opened a movie theater in Berlin. Koster's mother played the piano to accompany the films, leaving the young boy to occupy himself by watching the films. After working initially as a short story writer, Kosterlitz was hired by a Berlin movie company as scenarist, becoming an assistant to director Curtis Bernhardt. Bernhardt became sick one day and asked Kosterlitz to take over a...
Go to Profile#14230
Robert Newton
1905 - 1956 (51 years)
Robert Guy Newton was an English actor. Along with Errol Flynn, Newton was one of the more popular actors among the male juvenile audience of the 1940s and early 1950s, especially with British boys. Known for his hard-living life, he was cited as a role model by the actor Oliver Reed and the Who's drummer Keith Moon.
Go to Profile#14231
William Sterndale Bennett
1816 - 1875 (59 years)
Sir William Sterndale Bennett was an English composer, pianist, conductor and music educator. At the age of ten Bennett was admitted to the London Royal Academy of Music , where he remained for ten years. By the age of twenty, he had begun to make a reputation as a concert pianist, and his compositions received high praise. Among those impressed by Bennett was the German composer Felix Mendelssohn, who invited him to Leipzig. There Bennett became friendly with Robert Schumann, who shared Mendelssohn's admiration for his compositions. Bennett spent three winters composing and performing in Lei...
Go to Profile#14232
Tomás Luis de Victoria
1548 - 1611 (63 years)
Tomás Luis de Victoria was the most famous Spanish composer of the Renaissance. He stands with Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Orlande de Lassus as among the principal composers of the late Renaissance, and was "admired above all for the intensity of some of his motets and of his Offices for the Dead and for Holy Week". His surviving oeuvre, unlike that of his colleagues, is almost exclusively sacred and polyphonic vocal music, set to Latin texts. As a Catholic priest, as well as an accomplished organist and singer, his career spanned both Spain and Italy. However, he preferred the life ...
Go to Profile#14233
Bob Brown
1886 - 1959 (73 years)
Robert Carlton Brown II was an American writer and publisher in many forms from comic squibs to magazine fiction to advertising to avant-garde poetry to business news to cookbooks to political tracts to novelized memoirs to parodies and much more.
Go to Profile#14234
Dorothy Swaine Thomas
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Dorothy Swaine Thomas was an American sociologist and economist. She was the 42nd President of the American Sociological Association, the first woman in that role. Life and career Thomas was born on October 24, 1899, in Baltimore, Maryland to John Knight and Sarah Swaine Thomas.
Go to Profile#14235
Karl Aben
1896 - 1976 (80 years)
Karl Aben was an Estonian and Latvian linguist and translator. In Estonia, he became known as the country's foremost translator from Latvian at the time , but he also translated from Estonian into Latvian . Aben was born into an Estonian family in Northern Latvia, he studied at the University of Tartu, graduating with a degree in philology in 1940.
Go to Profile#14236
Edmund Rubbra
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Edmund Rubbra was a British composer. He composed both instrumental and vocal works for soloists, chamber groups and full choruses and orchestras. He was greatly esteemed by fellow musicians and was at the peak of his fame in the mid-20th century. The best known of his pieces are his eleven symphonies. Although he was active at a time when many people wrote twelve-tone music, he decided not to write in this idiom; instead, he devised his own distinctive style. His later works were not as popular with the concert-going public as his previous ones had been, although he never lost the respect of his colleagues.
Go to Profile#14237
Vincent Youmans
1898 - 1946 (48 years)
Vincent Millie Youmans was an American Broadway composer and producer. A leading Broadway composer of his day, Youmans collaborated with virtually all the greatest lyricists on Broadway: Ira Gershwin, Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, Irving Caesar, Anne Caldwell, Leo Robin, Howard Dietz, Clifford Grey, Billy Rose, Edward Eliscu, Edward Heyman, Harold Adamson, Buddy DeSylva and Gus Kahn. Youmans' early songs are remarkable for their economy of melodic material: two-, three- or four-note phrases are constantly repeated and varied by subtle harmonic or rhythmic changes. In later years, however, he turned to longer musical sentences and more rhapsodic melodic lines.
Go to Profile#14238
Fernão de Oliveira
1507 - 1581 (74 years)
Fernão de Oliveira , sometimes named Fernando de Oliveira or Fernando Oliveira, was a Portuguese grammarian, Dominican friar, historian, cartographer, naval pilot and theorist on naval warfare and shipbuilding. An adventurous humanist and renaissance man, he studied and published the first grammar of the Portuguese language, the Grammatica da lingoagem portuguesa, in 1536. He was an early critic of slavery and the slave trade.
Go to Profile#14239
Thomas Campion
1567 - 1620 (53 years)
Thomas Campion was an English composer, poet, and physician. He was born in London, educated at Cambridge, studied law in Gray's inn. He wrote over a hundred lute songs, masques for dancing, and an authoritative technical treatise on music.
Go to Profile#14240
Norman Petty
1927 - 1984 (57 years)
Norman Petty was an American musician, record producer, publisher, and radio station owner. He is considered to be one of the founding fathers of early rock & roll. With Vi Ann Petty—his wife and vocalist—he founded the Norman Petty Trio.
Go to Profile#14241
Humphrey Searle
1915 - 1982 (67 years)
Humphrey Searle was an English composer and writer on music. His music combines aspects of late Romanticism and modernist serialism, particularly reminiscent of his primary influences, Franz Liszt, Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, who was briefly his teacher. As a writer on music, Searle published texts on numerous topics; he was an authority on the music of Franz Liszt, and created the initial cataloguing system for his works.
Go to Profile#14242
Joseph Devlin
1871 - 1934 (63 years)
Joseph Devlin was an Irish journalist and influential nationalist politician. He was a Member of Parliament for the Irish Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom . Later Devlin was an MP and leader of the Nationalist Party in the Parliament of Northern Ireland. He was referred to as "the duodecimo Demosthenes" by the Irish politician Tim Healy which Devlin took as a compliment.
Go to Profile#14243
Meredith Willson
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Robert Reiniger Meredith Willson was an American flutist, composer, conductor, musical arranger, bandleader, playwright, and writer. He is perhaps best known for writing the book, music, and lyrics for the 1957 hit Broadway musical The Music Man and "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" . Willson wrote three other Broadway musicals and composed symphonies and popular songs. He was twice nominated for Academy Awards for film scores.
Go to Profile#14244
Luigi Nono
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
Luigi Nono was an Italian avant-garde composer of classical music. Biography Early years Nono, born in Venice, was a member of a wealthy artistic family; his grandfather was a notable painter. Nono began music lessons with Gian Francesco Malipiero at the Venice Conservatory in 1941, where he acquired knowledge of the Renaissance madrigal tradition, amongst other styles. After graduating with a degree in law from the University of Padua, he was given encouragement in composition by Bruno Maderna. Through Maderna, he became acquainted with Hermann Scherchen—then Maderna's conducting teacher—wh...
Go to Profile#14245
Bud Powell
1924 - 1966 (42 years)
Earl Rudolph "Bud" Powell was an American jazz pianist and composer. A pioneer in the development of bebop, jazz critics have commented that his compositions and playing style "greatly extended the range of jazz harmony," and his application of complex bebop phrasing to the piano influenced both his contemporaries and later pianists including Walter Davis, Jr., Toshiko Akiyoshi, and Barry Harris. Although a severe beating by police in 1945, followed by years of electroconvulsive therapy treatments and hospitalization, impacted his health during the latter half of his career, he continued to compose, record, and perform until shortly before his death in 1966.
Go to Profile#14246
Kai Winding
1922 - 1983 (61 years)
Kai Chresten Winding was a Danish-born American trombonist and jazz composer. He is known for his collaborations with fellow trombonist J. J. Johnson. His version of "More", the theme from the movie Mondo Cane, reached in 1963 number 8 in the Billboard Hot 100 and remained his only entry here.
Go to Profile#14247
Don Ellis
1934 - 1978 (44 years)
Donald Johnson Ellis was an American jazz trumpeter, drummer, composer, and bandleader. He is best known for his extensive musical experimentation, particularly in the area of time signatures. Later in his life he worked as a film composer, contributing a score to 1971's The French Connection and 1973's The Seven-Ups.
Go to Profile#14248
Patsy Cline
1932 - 1963 (31 years)
Patsy Cline was an American singer. She is considered one of the most influential vocalists of the 20th century and was one of the first country music artists to cross over into pop music. Cline had several major hits during her eight-year recording career, including two number-one hits on the Billboard Hot Country and Western Sides chart.
Go to Profile#14249
Lionel Tertis
1876 - 1975 (99 years)
Lionel Tertis, CBE was an English violist. He was one of the first viola players to achieve international fame and a noted teacher. Career Tertis was born in West Hartlepool, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants. He first studied violin in Leipzig, Germany and at the Royal Academy of Music in London. There he was encouraged by the principal, Alexander Mackenzie, to take up the viola instead. Under the additional influence of Oskar Nedbal, he did so and rapidly became one of the best known violists of his time, touring Europe and the US as a soloist.
Go to Profile#14250
Karl Richter
1926 - 1981 (55 years)
Karl Richter was a German conductor, choirmaster, organist, and harpsichordist. Early life and education Karl Richter was born in Plauen to Christian Johannes Richter, a Protestant pastor, and Clara Hedwig Richter. He studied first in Dresden, where he was a member of the Dresdner Kreuzchor and later in Leipzig, where he received his degree in 1949. He studied with Günther Ramin , Karl Straube and Rudolf Mauersberger.
Go to Profile