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.
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#14401
Spike Jones
1911 - 1965 (54 years)
Lindley Armstrong "Spike" Jones was an American actor, comedian, musician, bandleader and conductor specializing in spoof arrangements of popular songs and classical music. Ballads receiving the Jones treatment were punctuated with gunshots, whistles, cowbells, hiccups, burps, and outlandish and comedic vocals. Jones and his band recorded under the title Spike Jones and His City Slickers from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s, and toured the United States and Canada as "The Musical Depreciation Revue".
Go to Profile#14402
Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa Sr.
1880 - 1958 (78 years)
Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa Sr. , a professor at Stanford University, was an internationally known scholar because of his studies in Spanish and Spanish American folklore and philology. He was especially known for his promotion of the study of the Spanish language and literature.
Go to Profile#14403
Tullio Serafin
1878 - 1968 (90 years)
Tullio Serafin was an Italian conductor and former Musical Director at La Scala. Biography Tullio Serafin was a leading Italian opera conductor with a long career and a very broad repertoire who revived many 19th-century bel canto operas by Bellini, Rossini and Donizetti to become staples of 20th-century repertoire. He had an unparalleled reputation as a coach of young opera singers and famously harnessed and developed both Renata Tebaldi's and Maria Callas's considerable talents.
Go to Profile#14404
Adams Sherman Hill
1833 - 1910 (77 years)
Adams Sherman Hill was an American newspaper journalist and rhetorician. As Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard University from 1876 to 1904, Hill oversaw and implemented curriculum that came to effect first-year composition in classrooms across the United States. His most widely known works include The Principles of Rhetoric, Foundations of Rhetoric, and Our English.
Go to Profile#14405
Iwan Knorr
1853 - 1916 (63 years)
Iwan Otto Armand Knorr was a German composer and music teacher. Life A native of Gniew, he attended the Leipzig Conservatory where he studied with Ignaz Moscheles, Ernst Friedrich Richter and Carl Reinecke. In 1874, he became a teacher and in 1878 director of music theory instruction at the Imperial Kharkiv Conservatory, in what is now Ukraine.
Go to Profile#14406
Hervé
1825 - 1892 (67 years)
Louis-Auguste Florimond Ronger , who used the pseudonym Hervé , was a French singer, composer, librettist, conductor and scene painter, whom Ernest Newman, following Reynaldo Hahn, credited with inventing the genre of operetta in Paris.
Go to Profile#14407
Gregory Ratoff
1897 - 1960 (63 years)
Gregory Ratoff was a Russian-born American film director, actor and producer. As an actor, he was best known for his role as producer "Max Fabian" in All About Eve . Biography Ratoff was born in Samara, Russia, to Jewish parents. His mother was Sophie who claimed to have been born on September 1, 1878, but was married on June 14, 1894, when she would have been 15, to Benjamin Ratner , with whom she had four children, the eldest of whom was Grigory, whose date of birth she gave as April 7, 1895 but later April 20 was cited as Gregory Ratoff's birthdate, and the year given as 1893, 1896 and 1897, variously.
Go to Profile#14408
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
1897 - 1957 (60 years)
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a Moravian-born American composer and conductor. A child prodigy, he became one of the most important and influential composers in Hollywood history. He was a noted pianist and composer of classical music, along with music for Hollywood films, and the first composer of international stature to write Hollywood scores.
Go to Profile#14409
Franklin J. Schaffner
1920 - 1989 (69 years)
Franklin James Schaffner was an American film, television, and stage director. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for Patton , and is known for the films Planet of the Apes , Nicholas and Alexandra , Papillon , and The Boys from Brazil . He served as president of the Directors Guild of America between 1987 and 1989.
Go to Profile#14410
Erhard Mauersberger
1903 - 1982 (79 years)
Erhard Mauersberger was a German choral conductor who conducted the Thomanerchor as the 14th Thomaskantor since Johann Sebastian Bach. He was also an academic teacher and composer. Biography Mauersberger, the son of a cantor in Mauersberg, Saxony, was the younger brother of Rudolf Mauersberger, who was cantor of the Dresdner Kreuzchor. He was a Thomaner from 1914 to 1920 under Gustav Schreck. He studied the organ with Karl Straube at the Leipziger Konservatorium.
Go to Profile#14411
Mitchell Parish
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Mitchell Parish was an American lyricist, notably as a writer of songs for stage and screen. Biography Parish was born to a Jewish family in Lithuania, Russian Empire in July 1900 His family emigrated to the United States, arriving on February 3, 1901, aboard the when he was less than a year old. They settled first in Louisiana where his paternal grandmother had relatives, but later moved to New York City, where he grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and received his education in the public schools.
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Pauline Frederick
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Pauline Frederick was an American journalist in newspapers, radio and television, as well as co-author of a book in 1941 and sole author of a book in 1967. in her nearly 50-year career, she covered numerous stories ranging from politics and articles of particular interest to women to military conflicts, and public interest pieces. Her career extended from the 1930s until 1981; she is considered one of the pioneering women in journalism.
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Benjamin Ide Wheeler
1854 - 1927 (73 years)
Benjamin Ide Wheeler was a professor of Greek and comparative philology at Cornell University, writer, and President of the University of California from 1899 to 1919. Life and career Early years Benjamin Ide Wheeler was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, on July 15, 1854, the son of the Rev. Benjamin and Mary Eliza Wheeler. His father was successively a church pastor in Plaistow, New Hampshire; Pawtucket, Rhode Island; Randolph, Massachusetts; Haverhill, Massachusetts; Saco, Maine; Franklin, New Hampshire. His mother, Mary Eliza Ide, was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, daughter of Ebenezer Ide of the Ide family which had its origin in South Attleborough, then Rehoboth.
Go to Profile#14414
Hubert Phillips
1891 - 1964 (73 years)
Hubert Phillips was a British economist, journalist, broadcaster, bridge player and organiser, composer of puzzles and quizzes, and the author of some 70 books. Life Education and early career Phillips was educated at Sexey's School, Bruton, and Merton College, Oxford, where he read History and Economics, taking a first class degree. He served in the British Army with the Essex Regiment throughout World War I.
Go to Profile#14415
Alfred Deller
1912 - 1979 (67 years)
Alfred George Deller, CBE , was an English singer and one of the main figures in popularising the return of the countertenor voice in Renaissance and Baroque music during the 20th century. He is sometimes referred to as the "godfather of the countertenor". His style in singing lute song, with extensive use of rubato and extemporised ornamentation, was seen as radical and controversial in his day but is now considered the norm.
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J. Stuart Blackton
1875 - 1941 (66 years)
James Stuart Blackton was a British-American film producer and director of the silent era. One of the pioneers of motion pictures, he founded Vitagraph Studios in 1897. He was one of the first filmmakers to use the techniques of stop-motion and drawn animation, is considered a father of American animation, and was the first to bring many classic plays and books to the screen. Blackton was also the commodore of the Motorboat Club of America and the Atlantic Yacht Club.
Go to Profile#14417
Herb Magidson
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Herbert A. Magidson was an American popular lyricist. His work was used in over 23 films and four Broadway revues. He won the first Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1934. Life and career Magidson was born and raised in Braddock, Pennsylvania. He had an early interest in the art of magic and was a member of the Pittsburgh Association of Magicians in his youth. He attended the University of Pittsburgh and then worked briefly for a music publisher in New York City. Magidson then moved to Hollywood, Los Angeles, California in 1929 while under contract to Warner Bros. to write music for films.
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Sergei Taneyev
1856 - 1915 (59 years)
Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev was a Russian composer, pianist, teacher of composition, music theorist and author. Life Taneyev was born in Vladimir, Vladimir Governorate, Russian Empire, to a cultured and literary family of Russian nobility. A distant cousin, Alexander Taneyev, was also a composer, whose daughter, Anna Vyrubova, was highly influential at court. Alexander was drawn closely to the nationalist school of music exemplified by The Five, while Sergei would gravitate toward a more cosmopolitan outlook, as did Tchaikovsky.
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Kathleen Harrison
1892 - 1995 (103 years)
Kathleen Harrison was a prolific English character actress best remembered for her role as Mrs. Huggett in a trio of British post-war comedies about a working-class family's misadventures, The Huggetts. She later played the charwoman Mrs. Dilber opposite Alastair Sim in the 1951 film Scrooge and a Cockney charwoman who inherits a fortune in the television series Mrs Thursday .
Go to Profile#14420
Edwin S. Porter
1870 - 1941 (71 years)
Edwin Stanton Porter was an American film pioneer, most famous as a producer, director, studio manager and cinematographer with the Edison Manufacturing Company and the Famous Players Film Company. Of over 250 films created by Porter, his most important include: What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City ; Jack and the Beanstalk ; Life of an American Fireman ; The Great Train Robbery ; The European Rest Cure ; The Kleptomaniac ; Life of a Cowboy ; Rescued from an Eagle's Nest ; and The Prisoner of Zenda .
Go to Profile#14421
George Szell
1897 - 1970 (73 years)
George Szell , originally György Széll, György Endre Szél, or Georg Szell, was a Hungarian-born American conductor and composer. Considered one of the twentieth century's greatest conductors, he was music director of the Cleveland Orchestra of Cleveland, Ohio, and recorded much of the standard classical repertoire in Cleveland and with other orchestras.
Go to Profile#14422
Christoph Graupner
1683 - 1760 (77 years)
Christoph Graupner was a German composer and harpsichordist of late Baroque music who was a contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Philipp Telemann and George Frideric Handel. Life Born in Hartmannsdorf near Kirchberg in Saxony, Graupner received his first musical instruction from his uncle, an organist named Nicolaus Kuester. Graupner went to the University of Leipzig where he studied law and then completed his musical studies with Johann Kuhnau, the cantor of the Thomasschule .
Go to Profile#14423
James Smith
1820 - 1910 (90 years)
James Smith was an English-born Australian journalist and encyclopedist, leader-writer and drama critic for the Melbourne Age. Early life Smith was born at Loose near Maidstone, Kent, England, son of James Smith, supervisor of inland revenue, and his wife Mary. Smith junior was initially educated for the church, however, he took up journalism and at the age of 20 was editing the Hertfordshire Mercury and County Press. In 1845 he published Rural Records or Glimpses of Village Life, which was followed by Oracles from the British Poets , Wilton and its Associations , and Lights and Shadows of Artist Life and Character .
Go to Profile#14424
Vítězslav Novák
1870 - 1949 (79 years)
Vítězslav Augustín Rudolf Novák was a Czech composer and academic teacher at the Prague Conservatory. Stylistically, he was part of the neo-romantic tradition, and his music is considered an important example of Czech modernism. He worked towards a strong Czech identity in culture after the country became independent in 1918. His compositions include operas and orchestral works.
Go to Profile#14425
Michael Praetorius
1571 - 1621 (50 years)
Michael Praetorius was a German composer, organist, and music theorist. He was one of the most versatile composers of his age, being particularly significant in the development of musical forms based on Protestant hymns.
Go to Profile#14426
Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork
1893 - 1952 (59 years)
Pyotr Nikolayevich Shabelsky-Bork was a Russian officer and writer, active in far-right and anti-Semitic politics in early 20th-century Europe, best known for the attempted assassination of Pavel Milyukov and resulted killing of Vladimir Nabokov, father of the novelist of the same name, in Berlin on 28 March 1922. Shabelsky-Bork collaborated with the Nazi Party until the end of World War II, working thereafter on monarchist and Orthodox Christian publications in South America until his death in 1952.
Go to Profile#14427
Fanny Mendelssohn
1805 - 1847 (42 years)
Fanny Mendelssohn was a German composer and pianist of the early Romantic era who was also known as Fanny Mendelssohn Bartholdy and, after her marriage, Fanny Hensel . Her compositions include a piano trio, a piano quartet, an orchestral overture, four cantatas, more than 125 pieces for the piano and over 250 lieder, most of which were unpublished in her lifetime. Although lauded for her piano technique, she rarely gave public performances outside her family circle.
Go to Profile#14428
Frederik Vermehren
1823 - 1910 (87 years)
Johan Frederik Nikolai Vermehren, also known as Frederik Vermehren , a genre and portrait painter in the realist style. His artistic career took place during the period of Danish art known as the Golden Age of Danish Painting. Vermehren, along with his fellow artists Christen Dalsgaard and Julius Exner , were prominent in the Danish genre of painting; they depicted ordinary people of the country, especially farmers and other country folk. His idealised depictions helped define and encourage Denmark's period of national romanticism.
Go to Profile#14429
Alexander von Zemlinsky
1871 - 1942 (71 years)
Alexander Zemlinsky or Alexander von Zemlinsky was an Austrian composer, conductor, and teacher. Biography Early life Zemlinsky was born in Vienna to a highly diverse family. Zemlinsky's grandfather, Anton Semlinski, emigrated from Žilina, Hungary to Austria and married an Austrian woman. Both were from staunchly Roman Catholic families, and Alexander's father, Adolf, was raised as a Catholic. Alexander's mother was born in Sarajevo to a Sephardic Jewish father and a Bosniak mother. Alexander's entire family converted to the religion of his maternal grandfather, Judaism, and Zemlinsky was born and raised Jewish.
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Pietro Germi
1914 - 1974 (60 years)
Pietro Germi was an Italian film director, screenwriter, and actor, noted for his development of the neorealist and genres. His 1961 film Divorce Italian Style earned him a Best Original Screenplay Oscar and a Best Director nomination at the 35th Academy Awards. Seven of his films competed at the Cannes Film Festival, with his 1966 comedy The Birds, the Bees and the Italians winning the .
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Ben Webster
1909 - 1973 (64 years)
Benjamin Francis Webster was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. Career Early life and career A native of Kansas City, Missouri, he studied violin, learned how to play blues on the piano from Pete Johnson, and received saxophone lessons from Budd Johnson. He played with Lester Young in the Young Family Band. He recorded with Blanche Calloway and became a member of the Bennie Moten Orchestra with Count Basie, Hot Lips Page, and Walter Page. During the 1930s, he played in bands led by Willie Bryant, Benny Carter, Cab Calloway, Fletcher Henderson, Andy Kirk, and Teddy Wilson.
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Ernesto Lecuona
1896 - 1963 (67 years)
Ernesto Lecuona y Casado was a Cuban composer and pianist, many of whose works have become standards of the Latin, jazz and classical repertoires. His over 600 compositions include songs and zarzuelas as well as pieces for piano and symphonic orchestra.
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Ernie Kovacs
1919 - 1962 (43 years)
Ernest Edward Kovacs was an American comedian, actor, and writer. Kovacs's visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs for years after his death. Kovacs has been credited as an influence by many individuals and shows, including Johnny Carson, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Jim Henson, Max Headroom, Chevy Chase, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Pee-wee's Playhouse, The Muppet Show, Dave Garroway, Andy Kaufman, You Can't Do That on Television, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Uncle Floyd, among others.
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Evelyn Laye
1900 - 1996 (96 years)
Evelyn Laye was an English actress and singer. Born into a theatrical family, she made her professional début in 1915 aged fifteen and quickly established herself in musical comedy. By 1920 she was starring in leading roles in the West End at Daly's and other theatres, becoming London's highest-paid star. Her first marriage, in 1926, to the performer Sonnie Hale was brief and ended in divorce after he abandoned her for the singer Jessie Matthews.
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Oliver Nelson
1932 - 1975 (43 years)
Oliver Edward Nelson was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, arranger, composer, and bandleader. His 1961 Impulse! album The Blues and the Abstract Truth is regarded as one of the most significant recordings of its era. The centerpiece of the album is the definitive version of Nelson's composition, "Stolen Moments". Other important recordings from the 1960s are the albums More Blues and the Abstract Truth and Sound Pieces , both also on Impulse!.
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Hans Pfitzner
1869 - 1949 (80 years)
Hans Erich Pfitzner was a German composer, conductor and polemicist who was a self-described anti-modernist. His best known work is the post-Romantic opera Palestrina , loosely based on the life of the sixteenth-century composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and his Missa Papae Marcelli.
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Johann Strauss I
1804 - 1849 (45 years)
Johann Baptist Strauss I , also known as Johann Strauss Sr., the Elder or the Father , was an Austrian composer of the Romantic Period. He was famous for his light music, namely waltzes, polkas, and galops, which he popularized alongside Joseph Lanner, thereby setting the foundations for his sons—Johann, Josef and Eduard—to carry on his musical dynasty. He is best known for his composition of the Radetzky March .
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Maniruzzaman Islamabadi
1875 - 1950 (75 years)
Munīruzzamān Khān Islāmābādī , also known by the epithet Biplobi Maulana , was a Muslim philosopher, nationalist activist and journalist from Islamabad in Bengal Presidency, British India . He was among the founders of the Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind.
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Alma Mahler
1879 - 1964 (85 years)
Alma Mahler-Werfel was an Austrian composer, author, editor, and socialite. Musically active from her early years, she was the composer of nearly fifty songs for voice and piano, and works in other genres as well. 17 songs are known to have survived. At 15, she was mentored by Max Burckhard.
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Donald Crisp
1882 - 1974 (92 years)
Donald William Crisp was an English film actor as well as an early producer, director and screenwriter. His career lasted from the early silent film era into the 1960s. He won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1942 for his performance in How Green Was My Valley.
Go to Profile#14441
Niccolò Jommelli
1714 - 1774 (60 years)
Niccolò Jommelli was an Italian composer of the Neapolitan School. Along with other composers mainly in the Holy Roman Empire and France, he was responsible for certain operatic reforms including reducing ornateness of style and the primacy of star singers somewhat.
Go to Profile#14442
William S. Hart
1864 - 1946 (82 years)
William Surrey Hart was an American silent film actor, screenwriter, director and producer. He is remembered as a foremost Western star of the silent era who "imbued all of his characters with honor and integrity." During the late 1910s and early 1920s, he was one of the most consistently popular movie stars, frequently ranking high among male actors in popularity contests held by movie fan magazines.
Go to Profile#14443
Abby Whiteside
1881 - 1956 (75 years)
Abby Whiteside was an American piano teacher. She challenged the finger-centric approach of much classical piano teaching and instead advocated a holistic attitude in which the arm and torso are the conductors of a musical image conceived first in the mind.
Go to Profile#14444
Cyril M. Kornbluth
1923 - 1958 (35 years)
Cyril M. Kornbluth was an American science fiction author and a member of the Futurians. He used a variety of pen-names, including Cecil Corwin, S. D. Gottesman, Edward J. Bellin, Kenneth Falconer, Walter C. Davies, Simon Eisner, Jordan Park, Arthur Cooke, Paul Dennis Lavond, and Scott Mariner.
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Steve Goodman
1948 - 1984 (36 years)
Steven Benjamin Goodman was an American folk and country singer-songwriter from Chicago. He wrote the song "City of New Orleans", which was recorded by Arlo Guthrie and many others including John Denver, The Highwaymen, and Judy Collins; in 1985, it afforded Goodman the Grammy songwriter award for best country song, as performed by Willie Nelson. Goodman had a small but dedicated group of fans for his albums and concerts during his lifetime. His most frequently sung song, "Go Cubs Go", is about the Chicago Cubs. Goodman died of leukemia in September 1984.
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Leonid Lavrovsky
1905 - 1967 (62 years)
Leonid Mikhailovich Lavrovsky was a Soviet and Russian ballet dancer and choreographer, most famous for choreographing the first full version of Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. Early life Lavrovsky was born in 1905 in St. Petersburg, the son of an industrial worker named Ivanov. Leonid Ivanov changed his surname to Lavrovsky and graduated in 1922 from the Petrograd Ballet Academy, where he had studied under V.I. Ponomaryov. He danced with the former Mariinsky Theatre, performing such roles as Siegfried in Swan Lake, Jean de Brienne in Raymonda, and the lead in Chopiniana. During the same...
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Uttam Kumar
1926 - 1980 (54 years)
Uttam Kumar , widely known as the Mahanayak , was an Indian film actor, producer, director, screenwriter, composer, and playback singer who predominantly worked in Bengali cinema. His career spanned three decades, from the late 1940s until his death in 1980.
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Roger Sessions
1896 - 1985 (89 years)
Roger Huntington Sessions was an American composer, teacher and musicologist. He had initially started his career writing in a neoclassical style, but gradually moved further towards more complex harmonies and postromanticism, and finally the twelve-tone serialism of the Second Viennese School. Sessions' friendship with Arnold Schoenberg influenced this, but he would modify the technique to develop a unique style involving rowss to supply melodic thematic material, while composing the subsidiary parts in a free and dissonant manner.
Go to Profile#14449
Leopold Auer
1845 - 1930 (85 years)
Leopold von Auer was a Hungarian violinist, academic, conductor, composer, and instructor. Many of his students went on to become prominent concert performers and teachers. Early life and career Auer was born in Veszprém, Hungary, 7 June 1845, to a poor Jewish household of painters. He first studied violin with a local concertmaster. He later wrote that the violin was a "logical instrument" for any Hungarian boy to take up because it "didn't cost much." At the age of 8 Auer continued his violin studies with Dávid Ridley Kohne, who also came from Veszprém, at the Budapest Conservatory. Kohne was concertmaster of the orchestra of the National Opera.
Go to Profile#14450
Rex Ingram
1892 - 1950 (58 years)
Rex Ingram was an Irish film director, producer, writer, and actor. Director Erich von Stroheim once called him "the world's greatest director". Early life Born in 58 Grosvenor Square, Rathmines, Dublin, Ireland, , Ingram was educated at Saint Columba's College, near Rathfarnham, County Dublin. He spent much of his adolescence living in the Old Rectory, Kinnitty, Birr, County Offaly, where his father, Reverend Francis Hitchcock, was the Church of Ireland rector. Ingram emigrated to the United States in 1911.
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