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).

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.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Communications,

#14301

Joseph Suder

1892 - 1980 (88 years)

Joseph Suder was a German composer. His opera Kleider machen Leute was composed 1926–34 but not performed until 1964. In 1952, Suder created the , which was passed down to his son, Alexander L. Suder.

#14302

Marion Bauer

1882 - 1955 (73 years)

Marion Eugénie Bauer was an American composer, teacher, writer, and music critic. She played an active role in shaping American musical identity in the early half of the twentieth century. As a composer, Bauer wrote for piano, chamber ensembles, symphonic orchestra, solo voice, and vocal ensembles. She gained prominence as a teacher, serving on the faculty of Washington Square College of New York University, where she taught music history and composition from 1926 to 1951. In addition to her position at NYU, Bauer was affiliated with Juilliard as a guest lecturer from 1940 until her death in 1955.

#14303

Isobel Baillie

1895 - 1983 (88 years)

Dame Isobel Baillie, , née Isabella Douglas Baillie, was a Scottish soprano. She made a local success in Manchester, where she was brought up, and in 1923 made a successful London debut. Her career, encouraged by the conductor Sir Hamilton Harty, quickly developed, with breaks in the first years for vocal study in Milan. Baillie's career was almost wholly as a concert singer: she only once acted in an opera production on stage. She was associated above all with oratorio, becoming well known for her many performances in Handel's Messiah, Haydn's The Creation, Mendelssohn's Elijah and the chor...

#14304

Heinz Tiessen

1887 - 1971 (84 years)

Richard Gustav Heinz Tiessen was a German composer. Biography Tiessen was born at Königsberg, where he studied with composer Erwin Kroll before moving to Berlin. There, he enrolled at Humboldt University and at the Stern'sches Konservatorium, where he studied composition and music theory. He worked as a music critic for Allgemeine Musikzeitung from 1911 to 1917 before becoming a theater Kapellmeister and composer for Volksbühne in 1918. From 1920 to 1922, he conducted the Akademische Orchester and between 1925 and 1945, he taught music theory and composition at the Berliner Musikhochschule. ...

#14305

Angna Enters

1897 - 1989 (92 years)

Anita "Angna" Enters was an American dancer, mime, painter, writer, novelist and playwright. She studied at the Art Students League of New York and was a 1934 Guggenheim fellow. She wrote a novel and three autobiographies as well as the films Lost Angel and Tenth Avenue Angel .

#14306

M. K. Joseph

1914 - 1981 (67 years)

Michael Kennedy Joseph was a British-born New Zealand poet and novelist in several genres. He studied at Sacred Heart College, Auckland, and at Merton College, Oxford, from 1936 to 1939. During the Second World War he served with the Royal Artillery. His works range from I'll Soldier No More, A Pound of Saffron and A Soldier's Tale to the science fiction works The Hole in the Zero and The Time of Achamoth to a historical novel, Kaspar's Journey, based on the medieval Children's Crusade. The Hole in the Zero includes the first known use of the word "hoverboard".

#14307

Saint Cecilia

180 - 230 (50 years)

Saint Cecilia , also spelled Cecelia, was a Roman virgin martyr and is venerated in Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and some Lutheran churches, such as the Church of Sweden. She became the patroness of music and musicians, it being written that, as the musicians played at her wedding, Cecilia "sang in her heart to the Lord". Musical compositions are dedicated to her, and her feast, on 22 November, is the occasion of concerts and musical festivals. She is also known as Cecilia of Rome.

#14308

François Truffaut

François Truffaut

1932 - 1984 (52 years)

François Roland Truffaut was a French filmmaker, actor, and critic. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. With a career of more than 25 years, he is an icon of the French film industry.

#14309

Joseph Haydn

1732 - 1809 (77 years)

Franz Joseph Haydn was an Austrian composer of the Classical period. He was instrumental in the development of chamber music such as the string quartet and piano trio. His contributions to musical form have led him to be called "Father of the Symphony" and "Father of the String Quartet".

#14310

Bernhard Karlgren

Bernhard Karlgren

1889 - 1978 (89 years)

Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren was a Swedish sinologist and linguist who pioneered the study of Chinese historical phonology using modern comparative methods. In the early 20th century, Karlgren conducted large surveys of the varieties of Chinese and studied historical information on rhyming in ancient Chinese poetry, then used them to create the first ever complete reconstructionss of what are now called Middle Chinese and Old Chinese.

#14311

William Cullen Bryant

William Cullen Bryant

1794 - 1878 (84 years)

William Cullen Bryant was an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post. Born in Massachusetts, he started his career as a lawyer but showed an interest in poetry early in his life. He soon relocated to New York and took up work as an editor at various newspapers. He became one of the most significant poets in early literary America and has been grouped among the fireside poets for his accessible, popular poetry.

#14312

Eric Partridge

1894 - 1979 (85 years)

Eric Honeywood Partridge was a New Zealand–British lexicographer of the English language, particularly of its slang. His writing career was interrupted only by his service in the Army Education Corps and the RAF correspondence department during World War II.

#14313

Aldus Manutius

1449 - 1515 (66 years)

Aldus Pius Manutius was an Italian printer and humanist who founded the Aldine Press. Manutius devoted the later part of his life to publishing and disseminating rare texts. His interest in and preservation of Greek manuscripts mark him as an innovative publisher of his age dedicated to the editions he produced. Aldus Manutius introduced the small portable book format with his enchiridia, which revolutionized personal reading and are the predecessor of the modern paperback book. He also helped to standardize use of punctuation including the comma and the semicolon.

#14314

Alejo Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier

1904 - 1980 (76 years)

Alejo Carpentier y Valmont was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, of French and Russian parentage, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba, and despite his European birthplace, he strongly identified as Cuban throughout his life. He traveled extensively, particularly in France, and to South America and Mexico, where he met prominent members of the Latin American cultural and artistic community. Carpentier took a keen interest in Latin American politics and often aligned himse...

#14315

Priscian

500 - 600 (100 years)

Priscianus Caesariensis , commonly known as Priscian , was a Latin grammarian and the author of the Institutes of Grammar, which was the standard textbook for the study of Latin during the Middle Ages. It also provided the raw material for the field of speculative grammar.

#14316

Georg Forster

1754 - 1794 (40 years)

Johann George Adam Forster, also known as Georg Forster , was a German geographer, naturalist, ethnologist, travel writer, journalist and revolutionary. At an early age, he accompanied his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, on several scientific expeditions, including James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific. His report of that journey, A Voyage Round the World, contributed significantly to the ethnology of the people of Polynesia and remains a respected work. As a result of the report, Forster, who was admitted to the Royal Society at the early age of twenty-two, came to be considered one of t...

#14317

Ulrike Meinhof

1934 - 1976 (42 years)

Ulrike Marie Meinhof was a German left-wing journalist and founding member of the Red Army Faction in West Germany, commonly referred to in the press as the "Baader-Meinhof gang". She is the reputed author of The Urban Guerilla Concept . The manifesto acknowledges the RAF's "roots in the history of the student movement"; condemns "reformism" as "a brake on the anti-capitalist struggle"; and invokes Mao Zedong to define "armed struggle" as "the highest form of Marxism-Leninism".

#14318

Jean-Paul Laurens

Jean-Paul Laurens

1838 - 1921 (83 years)

Jean-Paul Laurens was a French painter and sculptor, and one of the last major exponents of the French Academic style. Biography Laurens was born in Fourquevaux and was a pupil of Léon Cogniet and Alexandre Bida. Strongly anti-clerical and republican, his work was often on historical and religious themes, through which he sought to convey a message of opposition to monarchical and clerical oppression. His erudition and technical mastery were much admired in his time, but in later years his highly realistic technique, coupled to a theatrical mise-en-scène, came to be regarded by some art-historians as overly didactic.

#14319

Isaac Babel

1894 - 1940 (46 years)

Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel was a Russian writer, journalist, playwright, and literary translator. He is best known as the author of Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, and has been acclaimed as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry." Babel was arrested by the NKVD on 15 May 1939 on fabricated charges of terrorism and espionage, and executed on 27 January 1940.

#14320

Ilya Ehrenburg

1891 - 1967 (76 years)

Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg was a Soviet writer, revolutionary, journalist and historian. Ehrenburg was among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist – in particular, as a reporter in three wars . His incendiary articles calling for violence against Germans during the Great Patriotic War won him a huge following among front-line Soviet soldiers, but also caused much controversy due to their perceived anti-German sentiment. Ehrenburg later clarified that his writings wer...

#14321

Jacques Doriot

1898 - 1945 (47 years)

Jacques Doriot was a French politician, initially communist, later fascist, before and during World War II. In 1936, after his exclusion from the Communist Party, he founded the French Popular Party and took over the newspaper La Liberté, which took a stand against the Popular Front.

#14322

Franz Schubert

1797 - 1828 (31 years)

Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short life, Schubert left behind a vast oeuvre, including more than 600 secular vocal works , seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music, and a large body of piano and chamber music. His major works include the art songs Erlkönig, Gretchen am Spinnrade, Ave Maria; the Trout Quintet, the unfinished Symphony No. 8 in B minor, the "Great" Symphony No. 9 in C major, the String Quartet No. 14 "Death and the Maiden", a String Quintet, the two sets of Impromptus for solo ...

#14323

Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović

1946 - Present (80 years)

Marina Abramović is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist. Her work explores body art, endurance art, the relationship between the performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Being active for over four decades, Abramović refers to herself as the "grandmother of performance art". She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body". In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute , a non-profit foundation for performance art.

#14324

Sarah Bernhardt

Sarah Bernhardt

1844 - 1923 (79 years)

Sarah Bernhardt was a French stage actress who starred in some of the more popular French plays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including by Alexandre Dumas fils, Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo, Fédora and La Tosca by Victorien Sardou, and L'Aiglon by Edmond Rostand. She also played male roles, including Shakespeare's Hamlet. Rostand called her "the queen of the pose and the princess of the gesture", and Hugo praised her "golden voice". She made several theatrical tours around the world, and she was one of the early prominent actresses to make sound recordings and to act in motion pictur...

#14325

William Dwight Whitney

William Dwight Whitney

1827 - 1894 (67 years)

William Dwight Whitney was an American linguist, philologist, and lexicographer known for his work on Sanskrit grammar and Vedic philology as well as his influential view of language as a social institution. He was the first president of the American Philological Association and editor-in-chief of The Century Dictionary.

#14326

Serge Lifar

1905 - 1986 (81 years)

Serge Lifar was a Ukrainian dancer and choreographer, and one of the greatest male ballet dancers of the 20th century. Lifar was also a choreographer, director, writer, theoretician about dance, and collector.

#14327

Bennett Cerf

1898 - 1971 (73 years)

Bennett Alfred Cerf was an American writer, publisher, and co-founder of the American publishing firm Random House. Cerf was also known for his own compilations of jokes and puns, for regular personal appearances lecturing across the United States, and for his weekly television appearances for over 17 years on the panel game show What's My Line?

#14328

Jerome K. Jerome

Jerome K. Jerome

1859 - 1927 (68 years)

Jerome Klapka Jerome was an English writer and humourist, best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat . Other works include the essay collections Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow and Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; Three Men on the Bummel, a sequel to Three Men in a Boat; and several other novels. Jerome was born in Walsall, England, and, although he was able to attend grammar school, his family suffered from poverty at times, as did he as a young man trying to earn a living in various occupations. In his twenties, he was able to publish some work, and success followed. He marr...

#14329

John Wyndham

1903 - 1969 (66 years)

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris was an English science fiction writer best known for his works published under the pen name John Wyndham, although he also used other combinations of his names, such as John Beynon and Lucas Parkes. Some of his works were set in post-apocalyptic landscapes. His best known works include The Day of the Triffids , filmed in 1962, and The Midwich Cuckoos , which was filmed in 1960 as Village of the Damned, in 1995 under the same title, and again in 2022 in Sky Max under its original title.

#14330

Gustaf John Ramstedt

Gustaf John Ramstedt

1873 - 1950 (77 years)

Gustaf John Ramstedt was a Finnish diplomat, orientalist and linguist. He was also an early Finnish Esperantist, and chairman of the Esperanto-Association of Finland. Biography Ramstedt was born in Ekenäs in Southern Finland, and was brother of , who was later a professor of Linguistics and Occidentalist, politician , and singer .

#14331

Daniel Jones

1881 - 1967 (86 years)

Daniel Jones was a London-born British phonetician who studied under Paul Passy, professor of phonetics at the École des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne . He was head of the department of phonetics at University College London.

#14332

Johannes Brahms

1833 - 1897 (64 years)

Johannes Brahms was a German composer, pianist, and conductor of the mid-Romantic period. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, he spent much of his professional life in Vienna. He is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.

#14333

James Gillray

1756 - 1815 (59 years)

James Gillray was a British caricaturist and printmaker famous for his etched political and social satires, mainly published between 1792 and 1810. Many of his works are held at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

#14334

Wilhelm Busch

1832 - 1908 (76 years)

Heinrich Christian Wilhelm Busch was a German humorist, poet, illustrator, and painter. He published wildly innovative illustrated tales that remain influential to this day. Busch drew on the tropes of folk humour as well as a profound knowledge of German literature and art to satirize contemporary life, any kind of piety, Catholicism, Philistinism, religious morality, bigotry, and moral uplift.

#14335

L. S. Lowry

1887 - 1976 (89 years)

Laurence Stephen Lowry was an English artist. His drawings and paintings mainly depict Pendlebury, Greater Manchester as well as Salford and its vicinity. Lowry painted scenes of life in the industrial districts of North West England in the mid-20th century. He developed a distinctive style of painting and is best known for his urban landscapes peopled with human figures, often referred to as "matchstick men". He painted mysterious unpopulated landscapes, brooding portraits and the unpublished "marionette" works, which were only found after his death. He was fascinated by the sea, and paint...

#14336

Rouben Mamoulian

Rouben Mamoulian

1897 - 1987 (90 years)

Rouben Zachary Mamoulian was an American film and theater director. Early life Mamoulian was born in Tiflis, Russian Empire , to a family of Armenian descent. His mother, Virginia , was a director of the Armenian theatre, and his father, Zachary Mamoulian, was a bank president. On New Year's Eve, 1920, Mamoulian arrived, in London, worked with émigré actors and directed a play, at St. James Theatre, based on the Russian Revolution, The Beating on the Door, invited by Austin Page and Vladimir Rosing to co-direct.

#14337

Junípero Serra

1713 - 1784 (71 years)

Saint Junípero Serra y Ferrer , popularly known simply as Junipero Serra, was a Spanish Catholic priest and missionary of the Franciscan Order. He is credited with establishing the Franciscan Missions in the Sierra Gorda, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. He founded a mission in Baja California and established eight of the 21 Spanish missions in California from San Diego to San Francisco, in what was then Spanish-occupied Alta California in the Province of Las Californias, New Spain.

#14338

Gioachino Rossini

1792 - 1868 (76 years)

Gioachino Antonio Rossini was an Italian composer who gained fame for his 39 operas, although he also wrote many songs, some chamber music and piano pieces, and some sacred music. He set new standards for both comic and serious opera before retiring from large-scale composition while still in his thirties, at the height of his popularity.

#14339

Kit Carson

1809 - 1868 (59 years)

Christopher Houston Carson was an American frontiersman. He was a fur trapper, wilderness guide, Indian agent and U.S. Army officer. He became a frontier legend in his own lifetime by biographies and news articles; exaggerated versions of his exploits were the subject of dime novels. His understated nature belied confirmed reports of his fearlessness, combat skills, tenacity, as well as profound effect on the westward expansion of the United States. Although he was famous for much of his life, historians in later years have written that Kit Carson did not like, want, or even fully understand ...

#14340

Holger Pedersen

Holger Pedersen

1867 - 1953 (86 years)

Holger Pedersen was a Danish linguist who made significant contributions to language science and wrote about 30 authoritative works concerning several languages. He was born in Gelballe, Denmark, and died in Hellerup, next to Copenhagen.

#14341

Piero della Francesca

Piero della Francesca

1415 - 1492 (77 years)

Piero della Francesca was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. To contemporaries he was also known as a mathematician and geometer. Nowadays Piero della Francesca is chiefly appreciated for his art. His painting is characterized by its serene humanism, its use of geometric forms and perspective. His most famous work is the cycle of frescoes The History of the True Cross in the church of San Francesco in the Tuscan town of Arezzo.

#14342

Robert Schumann

1810 - 1856 (46 years)

Robert Schumann was a German composer, pianist, and influential music critic. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Romantic era. Schumann left the study of law, intending to pursue a career as a virtuoso pianist. His teacher, Friedrich Wieck, a German pianist, had assured him that he could become the finest pianist in Europe, but a hand injury ended this dream. Schumann then focused his musical energies on composing.

#14343

Benjamin Britten

1913 - 1976 (63 years)

Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes , the War Requiem and the orchestral showpiece The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra .

#14344

Raja Ram Mohan Roy

Raja Ram Mohan Roy

1772 - 1833 (61 years)

Raja Ram Mohan Roy was an Indian reformer who was one of the founders of the Brahmo Sabha in 1828, the precursor of the Brahmo Samaj, a social-religious reform movement in the Indian subcontinent. He was given the title of Raja by Akbar II, the Mughal emperor. His influence was apparent in the fields of politics, public administration, education and religion. He was known for his efforts to abolish the practices of sati and child marriage. Roy is considered to be the "Father of Indian Renaissance" by many historians.

#14345

Jean Renoir

1894 - 1979 (85 years)

Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. His films La Grande Illusion and The Rules of the Game are often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made. He was ranked by the BFI's Sight & Sound poll of critics in 2002 as the fourth greatest director of all time. Among numerous honours accrued during his lifetime, he received a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 1975 for his contribution to the motion picture industry. Renoir was the son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the uncle of the cinematographer Claude Renoir.

#14346

Roger Ascham

1515 - 1568 (53 years)

Roger Ascham was an English scholar and didactic writer, famous for his prose style, his promotion of the vernacular, and his theories of education. He served in the administrations of Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, having earlier acted as Elizabeth's tutor in Greek and Latin between 1548 and 1550.

#14347

John O'Hara

1905 - 1970 (65 years)

John Henry O'Hara was one of America's most prolific writers of short stories, credited with helping to invent The New Yorker magazine short story style. He became a best-selling novelist before the age of 30 with Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8. While O'Hara's legacy as a writer is debated, his champions rank him highly among the under-appreciated and unjustly neglected major American writers of the 20th century. Few college students educated after O'Hara's death in 1970 have discovered him, chiefly because he refused to allow his work to be reprinted in anthologies used to teach li...

#14348

Stephanus of Byzantium

501 - 600 (99 years)

Stephanus or Stephen of Byzantium was a Byzantine grammarian and the author of an important geographical dictionary entitled Ethnica . Only meagre fragments of the dictionary survive, but the epitome is extant, compiled by one Hermolaus, not otherwise identified.

#14349

Théodore Rousseau

Théodore Rousseau

1810 - 1867 (57 years)

Étienne Pierre Théodore Rousseau was a French painter of the Barbizon school. Life Youth He was born in Paris, France in a bourgeois family. At first he received a basic level of training, but soon displayed aptitude for painting. Although his father regretted the decision at first, he became reconciled to his son forsaking business, and throughout the artist's career was a sympathizer with him in all his conflicts with the Paris Salon authorities. Théodore Rousseau shared the difficulties of the romantic painters of 1830, in securing for their pictures a place in the annual Paris exhibition.

#14350

Stanley Morison

1889 - 1967 (78 years)

Stanley Arthur Morison was a British typographer, printing executive and historian of printing. Largely self-educated, he promoted higher standards in printing and an awareness of the best printing and typefaces of the past.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions