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,
#14301
Vasily Safonov
1852 - 1918 (66 years)
Vasily Ilyich Safonov , also known as Wassily Safonoff, was a Russian pianist, teacher, conductor and composer. Biography Vasily Safonov, or Safonoff as he was known in the West during his lifetime, was born at , Russian Caucasus , son of the Cossack General Ilya Ivanovich Safonov.
Go to Profile#14302
Pierre Beaumarchais
1732 - 1799 (67 years)
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was a French polymath. At various times in his life, he was a watchmaker, inventor, playwright, musician, diplomat, spy, publisher, horticulturist, arms dealer, satirist, financier and revolutionary .
Go to Profile#14303
Carl Stockdale
1874 - 1953 (79 years)
Carl Stockdale also known as Carlton Stockdale was one of the longest-working Hollywood veteran actors, with a career dating from the early 1910s. He also made the difficult transition from silent films to talkies.
Go to Profile#14304
Lew Fields
1867 - 1941 (74 years)
Lew Fields was an American actor, comedian, vaudeville star, theatre manager, and producer. He was part of a comedy duo with Joe Weber. He also produced shows on his own and starred in comedy films.
Go to Profile#14305
Barney Bigard
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Albany Leon "Barney" Bigard was an American jazz clarinetist known for his 15-year tenure with Duke Ellington. He also played tenor saxophone. Biography Bigard was born in New Orleans to Creole parents, Alexander and Emanuella Bigard. He had two brothers, Alexander Jr. and Sidney. His uncle, Emile Bigard, was a jazz violinist. He attended local schools and studied music and clarinet with Lorenzo Tio.
Go to Profile#14306
Alberta Hunter
1895 - 1984 (89 years)
Alberta Hunter was an American jazz and blues singer and songwriter from the early 1920s to the late 1950s. After twenty years of working as a nurse, Hunter resumed her singing career in 1977. Early life Hunter was born in Memphis, Tennessee, to Laura Peterson, who worked as a maid in a Memphis brothel, and Charles Hunter, a Pullman porter. Hunter said she never knew her father. She attended Grant Elementary School, off Auction Street, which she called Auction School, in Memphis. She attended school until around age 15.
Go to Profile#14307
Arthur Somervell
1863 - 1937 (74 years)
Sir Arthur Somervell was an English composer and educationalist. After Hubert Parry, he was one of the most successful and influential writers of art song in the English music renaissance of the 1890s–1900s. According to Michael Hurd, his most important work is found in the five song cycles, particularly his settings of Tennyson in Maud and Housman in A Shropshire Lad .
Go to Profile#14308
Frank Damrosch
1859 - 1937 (78 years)
Frank Heino Damrosch was a German-born American music conductor and educator. In 1905, Damrosch founded the New York Institute of Musical Art, a predecessor of the Juilliard School. Life and career Damrosch was born on June 22, 1859, in Breslau, Silesia, the son of Helene von Heimburg, a former opera singer, and conductor Leopold Damrosch. He came to the United States with his father, brother, conductor Walter Damrosch, and sister, music teacher Clara Mannes, in 1871. His parents were Lutheran .
Go to Profile#14309
Martin Shaw
1875 - 1958 (83 years)
Martin Edward Fallas Shaw was an English composer, conductor, and theatre producer. His over 300 published works include songs, hymns, carols, oratorios, several instrumental works, a congregational mass setting , and four operas including a ballad opera.
Go to Profile#14311
Alan Wilson
1943 - 1970 (27 years)
Alan Christie Wilson , nicknamed "Blind Owl", was an American musician, best known as the co-founder, leader, co-lead singer, and primary composer of the blues band Canned Heat. He sang and played harmonica and guitar with the group live and on recordings. Wilson was the lead singer for the group's two biggest U.S. hit singles: "On the Road Again" and "Going Up the Country".
Go to Profile#14312
Rouben Abrahamian
1881 - 1951 (70 years)
Rouben Abrahamian was an Armenian Iranologist, linguist and translator. Biography Rouben Abrahamian was born in 1881 in the village of Gnishik , then part of the Russian Empire. He received his secondary education in Etchmiadzin and Yerevan, and then moved abroad for higher education in a number of places. First, he studied at the Faculty of History and Philology at the Kiev University , then at Leipzig University , and then at the Saint Petersburg Imperial University . After his academic spell in Europe, he returned and started teaching Russian, linguistics, and classical philosophy in Yerevan.
Go to Profile#14313
Dorothy Arzner
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
Dorothy Emma Arzner was an American film director whose career in Hollywood spanned from the silent era of the 1920s into the early 1940s. With the exception of longtime silent film director Lois Weber , from 1927 until her retirement from feature directing in 1943, Arzner was the only female director working in Hollywood. She was one of a very few women able to establish a successful and long career in Hollywood as a film director until the 1970s. Arzner made a total of twenty films between 1927 and 1943 and launched the careers of a number of Hollywood actresses, including Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Lucille Ball.
Go to Profile#14314
Don Raye
1909 - 1985 (76 years)
Don Raye was an American songwriter, best known for his songs for The Andrews Sisters such as "Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar", "The House of Blue Lights", "Just for a Thrill" and "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy." The latter was co-written with Hughie Prince.
Go to Profile#14315
Tappan Adney
1868 - 1950 (82 years)
Edwin Tappan Adney , commonly known as Tappan Adney, was an American-Canadian artist, writer, and photographer. Biography Edwin Tappan Adney was born in Athens, Ohio, the eldest child of William Harvey Glenn Adney from Vinton, Ohio, a professor at Ohio University, and Ruth Clementine Shaw Adney. When Tappan was five, the family moved to Washington, Pennsylvania where his father taught at Washington and Jefferson College. In 1879, his father retired from that position for health reasons and bought a tobacco farm near Pittsboro, North Carolina named Gum Spring Plantation. Tappan was exceptional...
Go to Profile#14316
James Douglas
1867 - 1940 (73 years)
James Douglas was a British critic, newspaper editor and author. Douglas edited The Star from 1908 to 1920, then the Sunday Express until 1931. He was a supporter of censorship, and called for several books to be banned, most notably The Well of Loneliness. He was mocked by P. R. Stephensen and Jack Lindsay in The Sink of Solitude .
Go to Profile#14317
Carl Zerrahn
1829 - 1909 (80 years)
Carl Zerrahn was a German-born American flautist and conductor. His widespread activity in the region made him an influential figure in New England and Boston classical music, especially choral music, in the latter half of the 19th century. He was especially successful in the presentation of the great oratorios and the management of large choruses.
Go to Profile#14318
Gordon Bitter Davis
#14319
James Coco
1930 - 1987 (57 years)
James Emil Coco was an American stage and screen actor. He was the recipient of a Primetime Emmy Award, a Drama Desk Award and three Obie Awards, as well as nominations for a Tony Award, an Academy Award and two Golden Globe Awards. Coco is remembered for his supporting roles in the films Man of La Mancha and Only When I Laugh .
Go to Profile#14320
Alexander Siloti
1863 - 1945 (82 years)
Alexander Ilyich Siloti was a Russian virtuoso pianist, conductor and composer. Biography Alexander Siloti was born on his father's estate near Kharkiv, Ukraine . He studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory with Nikolai Zverev from 1871, then from 1875 under Nikolai Rubinstein, brother of the more famous Anton Rubinstein; from that year he also studied counterpoint under Sergei Taneyev, harmony under Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and theory under Nikolai Hubert. He graduated with the gold medal in Piano in 1881. He received some lessons from Anton Rubinstein after the death of Rubinstein's brother, Nikolai.
Go to Profile#14321
Pál Lukács
1919 - 1981 (62 years)
Pál Lukács was a Hungarian viola virtuoso, concert and recording artist, and music educator. Lukács studied voice, and also violin with Imre Waldbauer at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. He switched to viola in 1935 after hearing a viola performance by Lionel Tertis accompanied by pianist Clifford Curzon. In 1936 he became a member of the Hungarian State Opera Orchestra. Lukács joined the faculty of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in 1946 as a music teacher, and the following year was appointed the first Professor of Viola by the academy, a position he held until 1981. In 19...
Go to Profile#14322
Danny Kaye
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Danny Kaye was an American actor, comedian, singer, and dancer. His performances featured physical comedy, idiosyncratic pantomimes, and rapid-fire novelty songs. Kaye starred in 17 films, notably Wonder Man , The Kid from Brooklyn , The Secret Life of Walter Mitty , The Inspector General , Hans Christian Andersen , White Christmas , and The Court Jester . His films were popular, especially for his performances of patter songs and favorites such as "Inchworm" and "The Ugly Duckling".
Go to Profile#14323
Miriam Timothy
1879 - 1950 (71 years)
Miriam Timothy was a British harpist and teacher. She was a soloist, played with many London orchestras and taught harp at the Royal College of Music. Life Miriam Timothy was born in London on 24 February 1879, daughter of Felix Festus Timothy and Jane née Hamblin. From 1890 to 1893 she studied with John Thomas at the Royal Academy of Music, where she gained Bronze and Silver medals. She obtained a scholarship in 1893 to study at the Royal College of Music for three years, and later taught there; her students included the sisters Sidonie and Marie Goossens.
Go to Profile#14324
Daniel Gregory Mason
1873 - 1953 (80 years)
Daniel Gregory Mason was an American composer and music critic. Biography Mason was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. He came from a long line of notable American musicians, including his father Henry Mason, and his grandfather Lowell Mason. His cousin, John B. Mason, was a popular actor on the American and British stage. Daniel Mason studied under John Knowles Paine at Harvard University from 1891 to 1895, continuing his studies with George Chadwick and Percy Goetschius. He also studied with Arthur Whiting and later wrote a biographical journal article about him. In 1894 he published his Opus 1, a set of keyboard waltzes, but soon after began writing about music as his primary career.
Go to Profile#14325
S. D. Burman
1906 - 1975 (69 years)
Sachin Dev Burman was an Indian music director and singer. A member of the Tripura royal family, he started his career with Bengali films in 1937. He later began composing for Hindi movies and became one of the most successful and influential Indian film music composers. Burman composed the soundtracks for over 100 movies, including Bengali films and Hindi. Apart from being a versatile composer, he also sang songs in the light semi-classical and folk style of Bengal. His son, R. D. Burman, was also a celebrated music composer for Bollywood films.
Go to Profile#14326
Anatoly Lyadov
1855 - 1914 (59 years)
Anatoly Konstantinovich Lyadov was a Russian composer, teacher and conductor. Biography Lyadov was born in 1855 in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire, into a family of eminent Russian musicians. He was taught informally by his conductor step-father Konstantin Lyadov from 1860 to 1868, and then in 1870 entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory to study piano and violin.
Go to Profile#14327
John Pritchard
1921 - 1989 (68 years)
Sir John Michael Pritchard, was an English conductor. He was known for his interpretations of Mozart operas and for his support of contemporary music. Life and career Pritchard was born in Walthamstow, Essex, to a musical family. His father, Albert Edward Pritchard, was a violinist with the London Symphony Orchestra. The young Pritchard was educated at the Monoux School and studied violin, piano, and conducting in Italy.
Go to Profile#14328
Hideyo Arisaka
1908 - 1952 (44 years)
Hideyo Arisaka was a Japanese linguist. Biography Born in Kure, Hiroshima, he received his education in Tokyo. He graduated from the Tokyo Imperial University, now University of Tokyo in 1931. He specialized in Historical Japanese phonology and Historical Chinese phonology, making important contribution to the studies of Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai and Middle Chinese.
Go to Profile#14329
Linda Creed
1948 - 1986 (38 years)
Linda Diane Creed , also known by her married name Linda Epstein, was an American songwriter and lyricist who teamed up with Thom Bell to produce some of the most successful Philadelphia soul groups of the 1970s.
Go to Profile#14330
Eva Perón
1919 - 1952 (33 years)
María Eva Duarte de Perón , better known as just Eva Perón or by the nickname Evita , was an Argentine politician, activist, actress, and philanthropist who served as First Lady of Argentina from June 1946 until her death in July 1952, as the wife of Argentine President Juan Domingo Perón . She was born in poverty in the rural village of Los Toldos, in the Pampas, as the youngest of five children. In 1934, at the age of 15, she moved to the nation's capital of Buenos Aires to pursue a career as a stage, radio, and film actress.
Go to Profile#14331
Marie Prevost
1898 - 1937 (39 years)
Marie Prevost was a Canadian-born film actress. During her 20-year career, she made 121 silent and sound films. Prevost began her career during the silent film era. She was discovered by Mack Sennett who signed her to contract and made her one of his "Bathing Beauties" in the late 1910s. Prevost appeared in dozens of Sennett's short comedy films before moving on to feature-length films for Universal. In 1922, she signed with Warner Bros. where her career flourished as a leading lady. She was a favorite of director Ernst Lubitsch who cast her in three of his comedy films: The Marriage Circle ,...
Go to Profile#14332
William Crotch
1775 - 1847 (72 years)
William Crotch was an English composer and organist. According to the American musicologist Nicholas Temperley, Crotch was "a child prodigy without parallel in the history of music", and was certainly the most distinguished English musician in his day.
Go to Profile#14333
Florence Turner
1885 - 1946 (61 years)
Florence Turner was an American actress who became known as the "Vitagraph Girl" in early silent films. Biography Born in New York City, Turner was pushed into appearing on the stage at age three by her ambitious mother. Turner became a regular performer in a variety of productions. In 1906, she joined the fledgling motion picture business, signing with the pioneering Vitagraph Studios and making her film debut in How to Cure a Cold .
Go to Profile#14334
Katherine Kennicott Davis
1892 - 1980 (88 years)
Katherine Kennicott Davis was an American composer, pianist, arranger, and teacher, whose most well-known composition is the Christmas song "Carol of the Drum," later known as "The Little Drummer Boy".
Go to Profile#14335
Carl Flesch
1873 - 1944 (71 years)
Carl Flesch was a Hungarian violinist and teacher. Flesch’s compendium Scale System is a staple of violin pedagogy. Life and career Flesch was born in Moson in Hungary in 1873. He began playing the violin at seven years of age. At 10 he was taken to Vienna to study with Jakob Grün. At 17 he left for Paris, and joined the Conservatoire de Paris, studying with Martin Pierre Marsick. He settled in 1903 in Amsterdam, in 1908 in Berlin, and in 1934 in London.
Go to Profile#14336
William Croft
1678 - 1727 (49 years)
William Croft was an English composer and organist. Life Croft was born at the Manor House, Nether Ettington, Warwickshire. He was educated at the Chapel Royal under the instruction of John Blow, and remained there until 1698. Two years after this departure, he became organist of St. Anne's Church, Soho and he became an organist and 'Gentleman extraordinary' at the Chapel Royal. He shared that post with his friend Jeremiah Clarke.
Go to Profile#14337
David Rose
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
David Daniel Rose was a British-born American songwriter, composer, arranger, pianist, and orchestra leader. His best known compositions were "The Stripper", "Holiday for Strings", and "Calypso Melody". He also wrote music for many television series, including It's a Great Life, The Tony Martin Show, Little House on the Prairie, Highway to Heaven, Bonanza, Leave It to Beaver, and Highway Patrol, some under the pseudonym Ray Llewellyn. Rose's work as a composer for television programs earned him four Emmys. In addition, he was musical director for The Red Skelton Show during its 21-year run on the CBS and NBC networks.
Go to Profile#14338
Eduard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill
1882 - 1961 (79 years)
Eduard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill was an Austrian industrial designer, architect, and fashion designer. He was active in the first half of the 20th century. Wimmer is best known for his work in jewelry and garments for the Wiener Werkstätte, as well as for his contributions to the field of modern architecture.
Go to Profile#14339
Roger Wolfe Kahn
1907 - 1962 (55 years)
Roger Wolfe Kahn was an American jazz and popular musician, composer, bandleader and an aviator. Life and career Roger Wolfe Kahn was born in Morristown, New Jersey, into a wealthy German Jewish banking family. His parents were Adelaide "Addie" and Otto Hermann Kahn, a famous banker and patron of the arts. His maternal grandfather was banker Abraham Wolff. Otto and Roger Kahn were the first father and son to appear separately on the cover of Time magazine: Otto in November 1925 and Roger in September 1927, aged 19.
Go to Profile#14340
Thomas Attwood
1765 - 1838 (73 years)
Thomas Attwood was an English composer and organist. Early life The son of a musician in the royal band, Attwood was born in London, probably in Pimlico. At the age of nine he became a chorister in the Chapel Royal, where he received training in music from James Nares and Edmund Ayrton. In 1783 he was sent to study abroad at the expense of the Prince of Wales , who had been favourably impressed by his skill at the harpsichord. After two years in Naples, Attwood proceeded to Vienna, where he became a favourite pupil of Mozart. On his return to London in 1787 he held for a short time an appoint...
Go to Profile#14341
Sophie Jewett
1861 - 1909 (48 years)
Sophie Jewett , also known under the pseudonym Ellen Burroughs, was an American lyric poet, translator, and professor at Wellesley College. Much of her poetry contains lesbian themes. Family Jewett was born in Moravia, New York, one of four children of Charles Carroll Jewett, a doctor, and Ellen Ransom Jewett. Her mother died when she was 7 and her father when she was 9, after which she was raised by an uncle, Daniel Burroughs, and her grandmother in Buffalo. Her sister Louise became a noted art historian. In Buffalo, she developed a friendship with Mary Whiton Calkins, the daughter of her mi...
Go to Profile#14342
Richard Tucker
1913 - 1975 (62 years)
Richard Tucker was an American operatic tenor and cantor. Long associated with the Metropolitan Opera, Tucker's career was primarily centered in the United States. Early life Tucker was born Rivn Ticker in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of five surviving children of Bessarabian Jewish parents who immigrated to the US in 1911. His father, Ysruel Ticker, and mother Fanya-Tsipa Ticker resisted using the anglicized "Tucker" their children adopted, but by the time their youngest son entered first grade, he was registered under the surname Tucker . His musical aptitude was discovered early, a...
Go to Profile#14343
Sonny Boy Williamson I
1914 - 1948 (34 years)
John Lee Curtis "Sonny Boy" Williamson was an American blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter. He is often regarded as the pioneer of the blues harp as a solo instrument. He played on hundreds of recordings by many pre–World War II blues artists. Under his own name, he was one of the most recorded blues musicians of the 1930s and 1940s and is closely associated with Chicago producer Lester Melrose and Bluebird Records. His popular songs, original or adapted, include "Good Morning, School Girl", "Sugar Mama", "Early in the Morning", and "Stop Breaking Down".
Go to Profile#14344
Elisabeth Treskow
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Elisabeth Treskow was a German goldsmith and jewellery designer, one of the earliest professional women in the field. After serving an apprenticeship under in Munich, in 1923 she worked with the bookbinder Frida Schoy in the artists' colony in the Margarethenhöhe district of Essen. Around 1930, she rediscovered the Etruscan art of granulation and went on to win several first prizes in Germany as well as a Gold Medal at the 1937 Paris World Fair. Her work is in the collections of museums in Germany and abroad, including London's Victoria & Albert Museum and Cologne's Museum für Angewandte Kun...
Go to Profile#14345
Isidore de Lara
1858 - 1935 (77 years)
Isidore de Lara, born Isidore Cohen , was an English composer and singer. After studying in Italy and France, he returned to England, where he taught for several years at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and became a well known singer and composer of art songs. In the early 1880s he began to compose music for the stage, eventually achieving his greatest successes with opera in Monte Carlo from the late 1890s through the outbreak of World War I. His most popular opera, Messaline , enjoyed frequent revivals throughout Europe and in the United States during the first quarter of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#14346
Ferdinand David
1810 - 1873 (63 years)
Ferdinand Ernst Victor Carl David was a German virtuoso violinist and composer. Biography Born in the same house in Hamburg where Felix Mendelssohn had been born the previous year, David was raised Jewish but later converted to Protestant Christianity. David was a pupil of Louis Spohr and Moritz Hauptmann from 1823 to 1824 and in 1826 became a violinist at Königstädtischen Theater in Berlin. In 1829 he was the first violinist of the string quartet of Baron Carl Gotthard von Liphardt in Dorpat, and he undertook concert tours in Riga, Saint Petersburg and Moscow. In 1835 he became concertmaster at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig working with Mendelssohn.
Go to Profile#14347
Duke Pearson
1932 - 1980 (48 years)
Columbus Calvin "Duke" Pearson Jr. was an American jazz pianist and composer. Allmusic describes him as having a "big part in shaping the Blue Note label's hard bop direction in the 1960s as a record producer."
Go to Profile#14348
Hugo Andresen
1844 - 1918 (74 years)
Hugo Andresen was a German Romance philologist and medievalist. He was the son of Germanist Karl Gustaf Andresen . He studied languages at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, receiving his doctorate in 1874 at Bonn. Following graduation, he took an extended study trip to Paris and London , and in 1880 obtained his habilitation for Romance and English philology at the University of Göttingen. In 1892 he relocated to the Münster Academy, where he succeeded Gustav Körting as professor of Romance philology.
Go to Profile#14349
Frank Rosolino
1926 - 1978 (52 years)
Frank Rosolino was an American jazz trombonist. Biography Rosolino was born in Detroit, Michigan, United States, He performed with the big bands of Bob Chester, Glen Gray, Tony Pastor, Herbie Fields, Gene Krupa, and Stan Kenton. After a period with Kenton he settled in Los Angeles, where he performed with Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All-Stars in Hermosa Beach.
Go to Profile#14350
Leon Theremin
1896 - 1993 (97 years)
Lev Sergeyevich Termen , better known as Leon Theremin, was a Russian inventor, most famous for his invention of the theremin, one of the first electronic musical instruments and the first to be mass-produced. He also worked on early television research. His secret listening device, "The Thing", hung for seven years in plain view in the United States ambassador's Moscow office and enabled Soviet agents to eavesdrop on secret conversations.
Go to Profile