Search People Result | Academic Influence

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,

#14201

Fritz Mahler

1901 - 1973 (72 years)

Fritz Mahler was an Austrian conductor. Mahler's father was a cousin of the composer Gustav Mahler. In Europe he became a leading conductor with such ensembles as the Berlin Radio Symphony, the Dresden Philharmonic and the Danish State Symphony. He fled Europe in 1936 for the United States. He was married, from 1939 until his death, to dancer Pauline Koner and taught at summer sessions of the Juilliard School in New York for many years . In 1940-41, he was the city's director of music for the National Youth Administration as well. Mahler was music director of the Erie Philharmonic from 1947 to 1953 and the Hartford Symphony Orchestra from 1953 to 1962.

#14202

Amado Alonso

1896 - 1952 (56 years)

Amado Alonso was a Spanish philologist, linguist and literary critic, who became a naturalised citizen of Argentina and one of the founders of stylistics. He was a pupil of Ramón Menéndez Pidal at the Center for Historical Studies in Madrid, where he worked on phonetic and geographical linguistics. Between 1927 and 1946 he lived in Buenos Aires, where he headed the Institute of Philology. He then went to Harvard University and lived in America until his death.

#14203

Paul Pimsleur

1927 - 1976 (49 years)

Paul Pimsleur was a French-American linguist and scholar in the field of applied linguistics. He developed the Pimsleur language learning system, which, along with his many publications, had a significant effect upon theories of language learning and teaching. Pimsleur Language Programs is an American language learning company that develops and publishes courses based on the Pimsleur Method.

#14204

Lincoln Steffens

Lincoln Steffens

1866 - 1936 (70 years)

Lincoln Austin Steffens was an American investigative journalist and one of the leading muckrakers of the Progressive Era in the early 20th century. He launched a series of articles in McClure's, called "Tweed Days in St. Louis", that would later be published together in a book titled The Shame of the Cities. He is remembered for investigating corruption in municipal government in American cities and for his leftist values.

#14205

John Lennon

1940 - 1980 (40 years)

John Winston Ono Lennon was an English singer, songwriter, and musician who gained worldwide fame as the founder, co-songwriter, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. Lennon's work included music, writing, drawings, and film. His songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney remains the most successful in history.

#14206

Frank Harris

1856 - 1931 (75 years)

Frank Harris was an Irish-American editor, novelist, short story writer, journalist and publisher, who was friendly with many well-known figures of his day. Born in Ireland, he emigrated to the United States early in life, working in a variety of unskilled jobs before attending the University of Kansas to study law. After graduation, he quickly tired of his legal career and returned to Europe in 1882. He traveled in continental Europe before settling in London to pursue a career in journalism. In 1921, in his sixties, he became a US citizen. Though he attracted much attention during his life ...

#14207

Joseph Pulitzer

Joseph Pulitzer

1847 - 1911 (64 years)

Joseph Pulitzer was a Hungarian-American politician and newspaper publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World. He became a leading national figure in the Democratic Party and was elected congressman from New York.

#14208

Upton Sinclair

1878 - 1968 (90 years)

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. was an American writer, muckraker, political activist and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for governor of California. He wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair's work was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943.

#14209

Cecil Beaton

1904 - 1980 (76 years)

Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was a British fashion, portrait and war photographer, diarist, painter, and interior designer, as well as an Oscar–winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre.

#14210

Arthur Ransome

1884 - 1967 (83 years)

Arthur Michell Ransome was an English author and journalist. He is best known for writing and illustrating the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books about the school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. The entire series remains in print, and Swallows and Amazons is the basis for a tourist industry around Windermere and Coniston Water, the two lakes Ransome adapted as his fictional North Country lake.

#14211

Lytton Strachey

Lytton Strachey

1880 - 1932 (52 years)

Giles Lytton Strachey was an English writer and critic. A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of Eminent Victorians, he established a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. His biography Queen Victoria was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

#14212

Loie Fuller

1862 - 1928 (66 years)

Loie Fuller , also known as Louie Fuller and Loïe Fuller, was an American dancer and a pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting techniques. Early life and debut Marie Louise Fuller was born on January 15, 1862 in Fullersburg, Illinois, on a remote farm conveniently linked to Chicago by a newly-constructed plank road. When Fuller was two, her parents Reuben Fuller and Delilah Eaton moved to Chicago and opened a boarding house. Fuller's parents took her to the Progressive Lyceum, a hub of Freethought, on Sunday mornings.

#14213

Horace Vernet

1789 - 1868 (79 years)

Émile Jean-Horace Vernet more commonly known as simply Horace Vernet, was a French painter of battles, portraits, and Orientalist subjects. Biography Vernet was born to Carle Vernet, another famous painter, who was himself a son of Claude Joseph Vernet. He was born in the Paris Louvre, while his parents were staying there during the French Revolution. Vernet quickly developed a disdain for the high-minded seriousness of academic French art work which was distinguished by art influenced by Classicism, and decided to paint subjects taken mostly from contemporary life. During his early career, ...

#14214

Mihai Eminescu

1850 - 1889 (39 years)

Mihai Eminescu was a Romanian Romantic poet from Moldavia, novelist, and journalist, generally regarded as the most famous and influential Romanian poet. Eminescu was an active member of the Junimea literary society and worked as an editor for the newspaper Timpul , the official newspaper of the Conservative Party . His poetry was first published when he was 16 and he went to Vienna, Austria to study when he was 19. The poet's manuscripts, containing 46 volumes and approximately 14,000 pages, were offered by Titu Maiorescu as a gift to the Romanian Academy during the meeting that was held on 25 January 1902.

#14215

Frederick Ashton

Frederick Ashton

1904 - 1988 (84 years)

Sir Frederick William Mallandaine Ashton was a British ballet dancer and choreographer. He also worked as a director and choreographer in opera, film and revue. Determined to be a dancer despite the opposition of his conventional middle-class family, Ashton was accepted as a pupil by Léonide Massine and then by Marie Rambert. In 1926 Rambert encouraged him to try his hand at choreography, and though he continued to dance professionally, with success, it was as a choreographer that he became famous.

#14216

Georges Rouault

Georges Rouault

1871 - 1958 (87 years)

Georges Henri Rouault was a French painter, draughtsman, and print artist, whose work is often associated with Fauvism and Expressionism. Childhood and education Rouault born in Paris to a poor family. He was born in a Parisian cellar after his family's home was destroyed in the Paris insurrection of 1871. His mother encouraged his love for the arts, and, in 1885, the fourteen-year-old Rouault embarked on an apprenticeship as a glass painter and restorer, which lasted until 1890. This early experience as a glass painter has been suggested as a likely source of the heavy black contouring and glowing colors, likened to leaded glass, which characterize Rouault's mature painting style.

#14217

Nellie Bly

1864 - 1922 (58 years)

Elizabeth Cochran Seaman , better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was an American journalist, who was widely known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days in emulation of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé in which she worked undercover to report on a mental institution from within. She was a pioneer in her field and launched a new kind of investigative journalism.

#14218

Ida Tarbell

1857 - 1944 (87 years)

Ida Minerva Tarbell was an American writer, investigative journalist, biographer and lecturer. She was one of the leading muckrakers and reformers of the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was a pioneer of investigative journalism.

#14219

John Gunther

1901 - 1970 (69 years)

John Gunther was an American journalist and writer. His success came primarily by a series of popular sociopolitical works, known as the "Inside" books , including the best-selling Inside U.S.A. in 1947. However, he is now best known for his memoir Death Be Not Proud , on the death of his teenage son, Johnny Gunther, from a brain tumor.

#14220

Martha Graham

1894 - 1991 (97 years)

Martha Graham was an American modern dancer and choreographer. Her style, the Graham technique, reshaped American dance and is still taught worldwide. Graham danced and taught for over seventy years. She was the first dancer to perform at the White House, travel abroad as a cultural ambassador, and receive the highest civilian award of the US: the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction. In her lifetime she received honors ranging from the Key to the City of Paris to Japan's Imperial Order of the Precious Crown. She said, in the 1994 documentary The Dancer Revealed: "I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer.

#14221

Henry Morton Stanley

Henry Morton Stanley

1841 - 1904 (63 years)

Sir Henry Morton Stanley was a Welsh-American explorer, journalist, soldier, colonial administrator, author and politician who was famous for his exploration of Central Africa and his search for missionary and explorer David Livingstone. Besides his discovery of Livingstone, he is mainly known for his search for the sources of the Nile and Congo rivers, the work he undertook as an agent of King Leopold II of the Belgians which enabled the occupation of the Congo Basin region, and his command of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. He was knighted in 1897, and served in Parliament as a Liberal U...

#14222

Paul Sérusier

1864 - 1927 (63 years)

Paul Sérusier was a French painter who was a pioneer of abstract art and an inspiration for the avant-garde Nabis movement, Synthetism and Cloisonnism. Education Sérusier was born in Paris. He studied at the Académie Julian and was a monitor there in the mid-1880s. In the summer of 1888 he travelled to Pont-Aven and joined the small group of artists centered there around Paul Gauguin. While at the Pont-Aven artist's colony he painted a picture that became known as The Talisman, under the close supervision of Gauguin. The picture was an extreme exercise in Cloisonnism that approximated to pure abstraction.

#14223

Alvar Aalto

1898 - 1976 (78 years)

Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto was a Finnish architect and designer. His work includes architecture, furniture, textiles and glassware, as well as sculptures and paintings. He never regarded himself as an artist, seeing painting and sculpture as "branches of the tree whose trunk is architecture." Aalto's early career ran in parallel with the rapid economic growth and industrialization of Finland during the first half of the 20th century. Many of his clients were industrialists, among them the Ahlström-Gullichsen family, who became his patrons. The span of his career, from the 1920s to the 1970s, is ...

#14224

Giorgio Vasari

1511 - 1574 (63 years)

Giorgio Vasari was an Italian Renaissance painter and architect, who is best known for his work The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, considered the ideological foundation of all art-historical writing, and still much cited in modern biographies of the many Italian Renaissance artists he covers, including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, although he is now regarded as including many factual errors, especially when covering artists from before he was born.

#14225

Edith Wharton

1862 - 1937 (75 years)

Edith Wharton was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.

#14226

Edward Bernays

1891 - 1995 (104 years)

Edward Louis Bernays was an American theorist, considered a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, and referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations". His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He worked for dozens of major American corporations, including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government...

#14227

Yuen Ren Chao

1892 - 1982 (90 years)

Yuen Ren Chao , also known as Zhao Yuanren, was a Chinese-American linguist, educator, scholar, poet, and composer, who contributed to the modern study of Chinese phonology and grammar. Chao was born and raised in China, then attended university in the United States, where he earned degrees from Cornell University and Harvard University. A naturally gifted polyglot and linguist, his Mandarin Primer was one of the most widely used Mandarin Chinese textbooks in the 20th century. He invented the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization scheme, which, unlike pinyin and other romanization systems, transcribe...

#14228

Vladimir Propp

1895 - 1970 (75 years)

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was a Soviet folklorist and scholar who analysed the basic structural elements of Russian folk taless to identify their simplest irreducible structural units. Biography Vladimir Propp was born on 29 April 1895 in Saint Petersburg to an assimilated Russian family of German descent. His parents, Yakov Philippovich Propp and Anna-Elizaveta Fridrikhovna Propp , were Volga German wealthy peasants from Saratov Governorate. He attended Saint Petersburg University , majoring in Russian and German philology. Upon graduation he taught Russian and German at a secondary school...

#14229

James Thurber

1894 - 1961 (67 years)

James Grover Thurber was an American cartoonist, writer, humorist, journalist and playwright. He was best known for his cartoons and short stories, published mainly in The New Yorker and collected in his numerous books.

#14230

Yves Tanguy

1900 - 1955 (55 years)

Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy , known as just Yves Tanguy , was a French surrealist painter. Biography Tanguy was the son of a retired navy captain, and was born January 5, 1900, at the Ministry of Naval Affairs on Place de la Concorde in Paris, France] His parents were both of Breton origin. After his father's death in 1908, his mother moved back to her native Locronan, Finistère, and he ended up spending much of his youth living with various relatives.

#14231

Isadora Duncan

1877 - 1927 (50 years)

Angela Isadora Duncan was an American-born dancer and choreographer, who was a pioneer of modern contemporary dance, who performed to great acclaim throughout Europe and the US. Born and raised in California, she lived and danced in Western Europe, the US and Soviet Russia from the age of 22. She died when her scarf became entangled in the wheel and axle of the car in which she was travelling in Nice, France.

#14232

Paul Celan

1920 - 1970 (50 years)

Paul Celan , born Paul Antschel, was a Romanian poet and translator, regarded as one of the major German-language poets of the post-World War II era. His poetry is characterized by a complicated and cryptic style that deviates from poetic conventions.

#14233

George Frideric Handel

1685 - 1759 (74 years)

George Frideric Handel was a German-British Baroque composer well known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, concerti grossi, and organ concertos. Handel received his training in Halle and worked as a composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712, where he spent the bulk of his career and became a naturalised British subject in 1727. He was strongly influenced both by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition and by composers of the Italian Baroque. In turn, Handel's music forms one of the peaks of the "high baroque" style, bringing Italian opera to its highest developme...

#14234

Franz Liszt

1811 - 1886 (75 years)

Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, and teacher of the Romantic period. With a diverse body of work spanning more than six decades, he is considered to be one of the most prolific and influential composers of his era and remains one of the most popular composers in modern concert piano repertoire.

#14235

Claude Debussy

1862 - 1918 (56 years)

Claude Debussy was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

#14236

George Herbert

1593 - 1633 (40 years)

George Herbert was an English poet, orator, and priest of the Church of England. His poetry is associated with the writings of the metaphysical poets, and he is recognised as "one of the foremost British devotional lyricists." He was born in Wales into an artistic and wealthy family and largely raised in England. He received a good education that led to his admission to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1609. He went there with the intention of becoming a priest, but he became the University's Public Orator and attracted the attention of King James I. He sat in the Parliament of England in 1624 ...

#14237

Stefan George

1868 - 1933 (65 years)

Stefan Anton George was a German symbolist poet and a translator of Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Hesiod, and Charles Baudelaire. He is also known for his role as leader of the highly influential literary circle called the George-Kreis and for founding the literary magazine . From the inception of his circle, George and his followers represented a literary and cultural revolt against the literary realism trend in German literature during the last decades of the German Empire.

#14238

Giuseppe Verdi

1813 - 1901 (88 years)

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian composer best known for his operas. He was born near Busseto to a provincial family of moderate means, receiving a musical education with the help of a local patron. Verdi came to dominate the Italian opera scene after the era of Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, and Gaetano Donizetti, whose works significantly influenced him.

#14239

Georgette Heyer

Georgette Heyer

1902 - 1974 (72 years)

Georgette Heyer was an English novelist and short-story writer, in both the Regency romance and detective fiction genres. Her writing career began in 1921, when she turned a story conceived for her ailing younger brother into the novel The Black Moth. In 1925 Heyer married George Ronald Rougier, a mining engineer. The couple spent several years living in Tanganyika Territory and Macedonia before returning to England in 1929. After her novel These Old Shades became popular despite its release during the General Strike, Heyer determined that publicity was not necessary for good sales. For the r...

#14240

Ninette de Valois

Ninette de Valois

1898 - 2001 (103 years)

Dame Ninette de Valois was an Irish-born British dancer, teacher, choreographer, and director of classical ballet. Most notably, she danced professionally with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, later establishing the Royal Ballet, one of the foremost ballet companies of the 20th century and one of the leading ballet companies in the world. She also established the Royal Ballet School and the touring company which became the Birmingham Royal Ballet. She is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of ballet and as the "godmother" of English and Irish ballet.

#14241

Émile Littré

1801 - 1881 (80 years)

Émile Maximilien Paul Littré was a French lexicographer, freemason and philosopher, best known for his , commonly called . Biography Littré was born in Paris. His father, Michel-François Littré, had been a gunner and, later, a sergeant-major of marine artillery in the French navy who was deeply imbued with revolutionary ideas of the day. Settling down as a tax collector, he married Sophie Johannot, a free-thinker like himself, and devoted himself to the education of his son Émile. The boy was sent to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where Louis Hachette and Eugène Burnouf became his friends. After h...

#14242

Charles Kay Ogden

Charles Kay Ogden

1889 - 1957 (68 years)

Charles Kay Ogden was an English linguist, philosopher, and writer. Described as a polymath but also an eccentric and outsider, he took part in many ventures related to literature, politics, the arts, and philosophy, having a broad effect particularly as an editor, translator, and activist on behalf of a reformed version of the English language. He is typically defined as a linguistic psychologist, and is now mostly remembered as the inventor and propagator of Basic English.

#14243

Yves Klein

1928 - 1962 (34 years)

Yves Klein was a French artist and an important figure in post-war European art. He was a leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany. Klein was a pioneer in the development of performance art, and is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of minimal art, as well as pop art. He is known for the development and use of International Klein Blue.

#14244

Charles Wilkins

Charles Wilkins

1749 - 1836 (87 years)

Sir Charles Wilkins was an English typographer and Orientalist, and founding member of The Asiatic Society. He is notable as the first translator of Bhagavad Gita into English. He is also the first person to introduce the term Hinduism which would refer to all the different mythologies and cultures of which were existing in India as one. He supervised Panchanan Karmakar to create one of the first Bengali typefaces. In 1788, Wilkins was elected a member of the Royal Society.

#14245

Libanius

314 - 393 (79 years)

Libanius was a teacher of rhetoric of the Sophist school in the Eastern Roman Empire. His prolific writings make him one of the best documented teachers of higher education in the ancient world and a critical source of history of the Greek East during the 4th century AD. During the rise of Christian hegemony in the later Roman Empire, he remained unconverted and in religious matters was a pagan Hellene.

#14246

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder

1867 - 1957 (90 years)

Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder was an American writer. The Little House on the Prairie series of children's books, published between 1932 and 1943, were based on her childhood in a settler and pioneer family.

#14247

Igor Stravinsky

1882 - 1971 (89 years)

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian composer and conductor with French nationality and United States citizenship . He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century and a pivotal figure in modernist music.

#14248

Lorenzo Da Ponte

Lorenzo Da Ponte

1749 - 1838 (89 years)

Lorenzo Da Ponte was a Venetian, later American, opera librettist, poet and Roman Catholic priest. He wrote the libretti for 28 operas by 11 composers, including three of Mozart's most celebrated operas: The Marriage of Figaro , Don Giovanni , and Così fan tutte . He was the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia University, and with Manuel Garcia, the first to introduce Italian opera to America. Da Ponte was also a close friend of Mozart and Casanova.

#14249

André Lhote

1885 - 1962 (77 years)

André Lhote was a French Cubist painter of figure subjects, portraits, landscapes and still life. He was also active and influential as a teacher and writer on art. Early life and education Lhote was born 5 July 1885 in Bordeaux, France, and learned wood carving and sculpture from the age of 12, when his father apprenticed him to a local furniture maker to be trained as a sculptor in wood. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux in 1898 and studied decorative sculpture until 1904.

#14250

Hector Berlioz

1803 - 1869 (66 years)

Louis-Hector Berlioz was a French Romantic composer and conductor. His output includes orchestral works such as the Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy, choral pieces including the Requiem and L'Enfance du Christ, his three operas Benvenuto Cellini, Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict, and works of hybrid genres such as the "dramatic symphony" Roméo et Juliette and the "dramatic legend" La Damnation de Faust.

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