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,

#14651

Maybelle Carter

1909 - 1978 (69 years)

"Mother" Maybelle Carter was an American country musician and "among the first" to use the Carter scratch, with which she "helped to turn the guitar into a lead instrument." It was named after her. She was a member of the original Carter Family act from the late 1920s until the early 1940s and a member of the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle group.

#14652

Memphis Minnie

1897 - 1973 (76 years)

Lizzie Douglas , better known as Memphis Minnie, was a blues guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter whose recording career lasted for over three decades. She recorded around 200 songs, some of the best known being "When the Levee Breaks", "Me and My Chauffeur Blues", "Bumble Bee" and "Nothing in Rambling".

#14653

Ernst von Dohnányi

1877 - 1960 (83 years)

Ernst von Dohnányi was a Hungarian composer, pianist and conductor. He used a German form of his name on most published compositions. Biography Dohnányi was born in Pozsony, Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary . He was the son of Frigyes Dohnányi and his wife Ottilia Szlabey. He first studied music with his father, a professor of mathematics and an amateur cellist, and then when he was eight years old, with Carl Forstner, organist at the local cathedral. In 1894, in his 17th year, he moved to Budapest and enrolled in the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music, studying piano with István Th...

#14654

Tampa Red

1904 - 1981 (77 years)

Hudson Whittaker , known as Tampa Red, was an American Chicago blues musician. His distinctive single-string slide guitar style, songwriting and bottleneck technique influenced other Chicago blues guitarists such as Big Bill Broonzy, Robert Nighthawk, Muddy Waters, and Elmore James. In a career spanning over 30 years, he also recorded pop, R&B and hokum songs. His best-known recordings include "Anna Lou Blues", "Black Angel Blues", "Crying Won't Help You", "It Hurts Me Too", and "Love Her with a Feeling".

#14655

Dorothy Ashby

1932 - 1986 (54 years)

Dorothy Jeanne Thompson , better known as Dorothy Ashby, was an American jazz harpist, singer and composer. Hailed as one of the most "unjustly under loved jazz greats of the 1950s" and the "most accomplished modern jazz harpist," Ashby established the harp as an improvising jazz instrument, beyond earlier use as a novelty or background orchestral instrument, proving the harp could play bebop as adeptly as the instruments commonly associated with jazz, such as the saxophone or piano.

#14656

Gunnar Rudberg

1880 - 1954 (74 years)

Gunnar Rudberg was an internationally renowned Swedish classical philologist. He was the father of geomorphologist Sten Rudberg. Life In 1919, after being Associate Professor of Greek Language and Literature in Uppsala, Rudberg became Professor of Classical Philology in Oslo. From 1933 until his retirement in 1945 he was Professor of Greek Language and Literature in Uppsala.

#14657

Johan Storm

1836 - 1920 (84 years)

Johan Fredrik Breda Storm was a Norwegian professor, linguist and philologist. He is known for his development of the Norvegia transcription. Biography Johan Storm was born at Lom in Gudbrandsdalen. His father, Ole Johan Storm was the chaplain in Lom at the time of his birth. In 1838, the family moved to Rendalen in Hedmark where his father was the parish priest and subsequently to Lardal in Vestfold. After the death of his father, his family moved to Christiania . He was from a family of six, including his brother, historian and professor Gustav Storm.

#14658

Bennie Moten

1894 - 1935 (41 years)

Benjamin Moten was an American jazz pianist and band leader born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, United States. He led his Kansas City Orchestra, the most important of the regional, blues-based orchestras active in the Midwest in the 1920s, and helped to develop the riffing style that would come to define many of the 1930s big bands. The jazz standard "Moten Swing" bears his name.

#14659

Joe Harriott

1928 - 1973 (45 years)

Joseph Arthurlin Harriott was a Jamaican jazz musician and composer, whose principal instrument was the alto saxophone. Initially a bebopper, he became a pioneer of free-form jazz. Born in Kingston, Harriott moved to the United Kingdom as a working musician in 1951 and lived in the country for the rest of his life. He was part of a wave of Caribbean jazz musicians who arrived in Britain during the 1950s, including Dizzy Reece, Harold McNair, Harry Beckett and Wilton Gaynair.

#14660

Joe Morris

1922 - 1958 (36 years)

Joseph Lee Morris was an American jazz and rhythm and blues trumpeter. Biography Born in Montgomery, Alabama, United States, Morris began his career as a jazz trumpeter, working and recording with Earl Bostic, Milt Buckner, Arnett Cobb, Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Griffin, Buddy Rich, Dinah Washington, Big Joe Turner, and Lionel Hampton.

#14661

Josef Swickard

1866 - 1940 (74 years)

Josef Swickard was a Prussian-born veteran stage and screen character actor, who had toured with stock companies in Europe, South Africa, and South America. Career Swickard emigrated to the United States from the German Empire in 1882. He was a stage actor for several years before entering films with D.W. Griffith in 1912 and by 1914 was playing supporting roles for Mack Sennett. He appeared in Charles Chaplin's Laughing Gas and Caught in a Cabaret. He remained with Sennett until 1917, when he settled into his prolific career of playing mostly aristocratic characters.

#14662

Marcella Sembrich

Marcella Sembrich

1858 - 1935 (77 years)

Prakseda Marcelina Kochańska , known professionally as Marcella Sembrich, was a Polish dramatic coloratura soprano. She is known for her extensive range of two and a half octaves, precise intonation, charm, portamento, vocal fluidity, and impressive coloratura. Her voice was regarded as flute-like, sweet, pure, light, and brilliant. She had an important international singing career, chiefly at the New York Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House, in London.

#14663

Hampton Hawes

1928 - 1977 (49 years)

Hampton Barnett Hawes Jr. was an American jazz pianist. He was the author of the memoir Raise Up Off Me, which won the Deems-Taylor Award for music writing in 1975. Early life Hampton Hawes was born on November 13, 1928, in Los Angeles, California. His father, Hampton Hawes Sr., was minister of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles. His mother, the former Gertrude Holman, was Westminster's church pianist. Hawes' first experience with the piano was as a toddler sitting on his mother's lap while she practiced. He was reportedly able to pick out fairly complex tunes by the age of three.

#14664

Moritz Heyne

1837 - 1906 (69 years)

Moritz Heyne was a German Germanic linguist . He taught as a professor at the University of Halle , University of Basel , University of Göttingen . He worked with Jakob Grimm to edit his dictionary after 1867.

#14665

Riccardo Zandonai

1883 - 1944 (61 years)

Riccardo Zandonai was an Italian composer and conductor. Biography Zandonai was born in Borgo Sacco, Rovereto, then part of Austria-Hungary. As a young man, he showed such an aptitude for music that he entered the Pesaro Conservatorio in 1899 and completed his studies in 1902; he completed the nine-year curriculum in only three years. Among his teachers was Pietro Mascagni, who regarded him highly.

#14666

Lauri J. Karttunen

#14667

Alan Hale Sr.

1892 - 1950 (58 years)

Alan Hale Sr. was an American actor and director. He is best remembered for his many character roles, in particular as a frequent sidekick of Errol Flynn, as well as films supporting Lon Chaney, Wallace Beery, Douglas Fairbanks, James Cagney, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, and Ronald Reagan. Hale was usually billed as Alan Hale and his career in film lasted 40 years. His son, Alan Hale Jr., also became an actor and remains most famous for playing "the Skipper" on the television series Gilligan's Island.

#14668

Otto Goldschmidt

1829 - 1907 (78 years)

Otto Moritz David Goldschmidt was a composer, conductor, pianist and educator, whose works included a piano concerto and other piano pieces, and an oratorio, Ruth, on a biblical theme, written for the Three Choirs Festival. From a prosperous mercantile family in Hamburg, he studied under Felix Mendelssohn at the Leipzig Conservatoire and quickly established himself as a pianist. Among the singers whom he accompanied was "the Swedish Nightingale", the soprano Jenny Lind. They married in 1852, after which she insisted on being billed as "Madame Lind-Goldschmidt".

#14669

Denzil Best

1917 - 1965 (48 years)

Denzil DaCosta Best was an American jazz percussionist and composer born in New York City. He was a prominent bebop drummer in the 1950s and early 1960s. Biography Best was born in New York City, into a musical Caribbean family originally from Barbados. Trained on piano, trumpet, and bass, he concentrated on the drums starting in 1943. Between 1943 and 1944, he worked with Ben Webster, and subsequently with Coleman Hawkins , Illinois Jacquet and Chubby Jackson. The drummer was known to sit in at Minton's Playhouse. He took part in a recording with George Shearing in 1948 and was a founding member of his Quartet, remaining there until 1952.

#14670

Henry Fillmore

1881 - 1956 (75 years)

Henry Fillmore was an American musician, composer, publisher, and bandleader, best known for his many marches and screamers, a few of which he wrote for the Band of the Hour at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.

#14671

Ivan Galamian

1903 - 1981 (78 years)

Ivan Alexander Galamian was an Armenian-American violin teacher of the twentieth century who was the violin teacher of many seminal violin players including Itzhak Perlman. Biography Galamian was born in Tabriz, Iran to an Armenian family. Soon after his birth, the family immigrated to Moscow, Russia. He studied with Konstantin Mostras at the School of the Philharmonic Society from 1916 to 1922. He was jailed at age fifteen by the Bolshevik government. The opera manager at the Bolshoi Theatre rescued Galamian; the manager argued that Galamian was a necessary part of the opera orchestra, and subsequently the government released him.

#14672

Charles K. French

Charles K. French

1860 - 1952 (92 years)

Charles K. French was an American film actor, screenwriter and director who appeared in more than 240 films between 1909 and 1945. Biography French was born in Columbus, Ohio, and graduated from Columbus High School. He married Isabelle Gurton.

#14673

Didrik Arup Seip

1884 - 1963 (79 years)

Didrik Arup Seip was a professor of North Germanic languages at the University of Oslo. He earned his doctorate in 1916 and was appointed professor the same year, retiring in 1954. Together with Herman Jæger, he edited and published the collected works of Henrik Wergeland in 23 volumes . From 1937 until 1945, he served as the rector of the university.

#14674

Claude Vivier

1948 - 1983 (35 years)

Claude Vivier was a Canadian composer, pianist, poet and ethnomusicologist of Québécois origin. After studying with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne, Vivier became an innovative member of the "German Feedback" movement, a subset of what is now known as spectral music. He was also among the first composers in either Europe or the Americas to integrate elements of Balinese music and gamelan in his compositions, alongside Lou Harrison, John Cage and fellow Québécois Colin McPhee.

#14675

Edward Lively

1545 - 1605 (60 years)

Edward Lively was an English linguist and biblical scholar. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a Fellow, He was Regius Professor of Hebrew from 1575 to 1605. His published works include Latin expositions of some of the minor prophets, as well as a work on the chronology of monarchs of Persia.

#14676

Jennie Tourel

1900 - 1973 (73 years)

Jennie Tourel was an American operatic mezzo-soprano, known for her work in both opera and recital performances. Early years Tourel was born in Vitebsk in the Russian Empire , with the surname Davidovich. As a young girl she played the flute, then studied piano. After the Russian Revolution, her Jewish family left Russia and settled temporarily near Danzig. They later moved to Paris, where she continued to study piano and contemplated a concert career. She then began to take voice lessons with Reynaldo Hahn and Anna El-Tour, and decided to devote herself to professional singing. She was sai...

#14677

Bill Bailey

1912 - 1978 (66 years)

Willie Eugene Bailey , known professionally as Bill Bailey, was an American tap dancer. The older brother of actress and singer Pearl Bailey, Bill was considered to be one of the best rhythm dancers of his time and was the first person to be recorded doing the Moonwalk, although he referred to it as the "Backslide," in the film Cabin in the Sky , starring Ethel Waters, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson and Lena Horne.

#14678

Frank McDonald

1899 - 1980 (81 years)

Frank Burgess McDonald was an American film and television director, active from 1935 to 1966. He directed more than 100 films, including many Westerns starring Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, and numerous TV show episodes. He is interred at Conejo Mountain Memorial Park in Camarillo, California.

#14679

Marcel Richard

1907 - 1976 (69 years)

Marcel Richard was a French Catholic priest and a Greek paleographer. He was the founder of the Greek section of the Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes in Paris. He was primarily interested in establishing the text of patristic Greek authors. To this effect he conducted several missions to the Libraries of Mount Athos.

#14680

Bernardino Molinari

Bernardino Molinari

1880 - 1952 (72 years)

Bernardino Molinari was an Italian conductor. Molinari studied under Renzi and Falchi at the Accademia of Santa Cecilia in his home town of Rome. In 1912, he was appointed artistic director of the Augusteo Orchestra, Rome, later renamed l'Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, a position he held until the end of the Second World War. Since this was then, like now, the leading symphony orchestra position in Italy, it aroused the envy of several rivals. He was engaged as a guest conductor, including for the St. Louis Symphony in 1930.

#14681

Hans Gál

1890 - 1987 (97 years)

Hans Gál OBE was an Austrian composer, pedagogue, musicologist, and author, who emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1938. Life Gál was born to a Jewish family in the small village of Brunn am Gebirge, Lower Austria, just outside Vienna, the son of a doctor, Josef Gál. In 1909, his piano teacher Richard Robert appointed Gál as a teacher when he became director of the New Vienna Conservatory. From 1909 to 1913, Gál studied music history at the University of Vienna under music historian Guido Adler, who published Gál's doctoral dissertation on the style of the young Beethoven in his own Studien zur Musikwissenschaft.

#14682

Italo Pizzi

1849 - 1920 (71 years)

Italo Pizzi was an Italian academic and scholar of Persian language and literature. He was the first to establish the academic field of Persian language and literature in Italy. Biography From a noble family, at age fifteen Pizzi showed a particular interest in studies of oriental languages and in high school he was encouraged by his Latin and Greek teacher, a Sanskritist, to deepen those studies.

#14683

Leonardo Vinci

1690 - 1730 (40 years)

Leonardo Vinci was an Italian composer known chiefly for his 40 or so operas; comparatively little of his work in other genres survives. A central proponent of the Neapolitan School of opera, his influence on subsequent opera composers such as Johann Adolph Hasse and Giovanni Battista Pergolesi was considerable.

#14684

Lars-Erik Larsson

Lars-Erik Larsson

1908 - 1986 (78 years)

Lars-Erik Vilner Larsson was a Swedish composer, conductor, radio producer, and educator. He wrote three of the most popular works in Swedish art music: A Winter's Tale , the Pastoral Suite , and God in Disguise . Other notable works by Larsson include three symphonies, a sinfonietta, and numerous concertante works.

#14685

Ernst Bacon

1898 - 1990 (92 years)

Ernst Lecher Bacon was an American composer, pianist, and conductor. A prolific author, Bacon composed over 250 songs over his career. He was awarded three Guggenheim Fellowships and a Pulitzer Scholarship in 1932 for his Second Symphony.

#14686

Dietmar Rosenthal

1900 - 1994 (94 years)

Dietmar Elyashevich Rosenthal was a Russian linguist. Rosenthal created several Russian-Italian dictionaries and also translated the works of Italian writers into Russian. Together with Prof. Bylinsky he introduced practical stylistics. He is most famous for the creation of multiple guidebooks and dictionaries of the Russian language.

#14687

Richard Batka

1868 - 1922 (54 years)

Richard Batka was an Austrian musicologist, music critic and librettist. Educated at German Charles-Ferdinand University in his native city of Prague, he began his career as a lecturing academic at that institution in 1900; leaving that post in 1906 to teach on the faculty of the Prague Conservatory. In 1908 he moved to Vienna where he taught courses in the history of opera at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna from 1909 to 1914.

#14688

Luca Marenzio

1553 - 1599 (46 years)

Luca Marenzio was an Italian composer and singer of the late Renaissance. He was one of the most renowned composers of madrigals, and wrote some of the most famous examples of the form in its late stage of development, prior to its early Baroque transformation by Monteverdi. In all, Marenzio wrote around 500 madrigals, ranging from the lightest to the most serious styles, packed with word-painting, chromaticism, and other characteristics of the late madrigal style. Marenzio was influential as far away as England, where his earlier, lighter work appeared in 1588 in the Musica Transalpina, the...

#14689

John Walker

1732 - 1807 (75 years)

John Walker was an English stage actor, philologist and lexicographer. Life Early in life Walker became an actor, his theatrical engagements including one with David Garrick at Drury Lane, and a long season in Dublin, Ireland. In 1768 he left the stage.

#14690

Max Lorenz

1901 - 1975 (74 years)

Max Lorenz was a German heldentenor famous for Wagnerian roles. Career Lorenz was born in Düsseldorf, and studied with Ernst Grenzebach in Berlin in the 1920s. He later was a pupil of Estelle Liebling in New York City. He made his debut at the Semperoper in Dresden in 1927, becoming a principal tenor. From 1929 to 1944 he was a member of the ensemble at the Berlin State Opera, appearing also at the New York Metropolitan Opera , the Bayreuth Festspielhaus and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden . He sang, too, at the Vienna State Opera .

#14691

Roy Buchanan

1939 - 1988 (49 years)

Leroy "Roy" Buchanan was an American guitarist and blues musician. A pioneer of the Telecaster sound, Buchanan worked as a sideman and as a solo artist, with two gold albums early in his career and two later solo albums that made it to the Billboard chart. He never achieved stardom, but is considered a highly influential guitar player. Guitar Player praised him as having one of the "50 Greatest Tones of All Time." He appeared on the PBS music program Austin City Limits in 1977 .

#14692

Tom Evans

1947 - 1983 (36 years)

Thomas Evans was an English musician. He is best known for his work as the bassist of the band Badfinger. Evans sang lead vocals on "Come and Get It," the band's breakthrough hit. He also co-wrote their 1970 song "Without You," which has been recorded by over 180 artists — most notably Harry Nilsson and Mariah Carey.

#14693

Rafael Hernández Marín

Rafael Hernández Marín

1891 - 1965 (74 years)

Rafael Hernández Marín was a Puerto Rican songwriter, author of hundreds of popular songs in the Latin American repertoire. He specialized in Cuban styles such as the canción, bolero and guaracha. Among his most famous compositions are "Lamento Borincano", "Capullito de alhelí", "Campanitas de cristal", "Cachita", "Silencio", "El cumbanchero", "Ausencia" and "Perfume de gardenias".

#14694

Ivor Novello

1893 - 1951 (58 years)

Ivor Novello was a Welsh actor, dramatist, singer and composer who became one of the most popular British entertainers of the first half of the 20th century. He was born into a musical family, and his first successes were as a songwriter. His first big hit was "Keep the Home Fires Burning" , which was enormously popular during the First World War. His 1917 show, Theodore & Co, was a wartime hit. After the war, Novello contributed numbers to several successful musical comedies and was eventually commissioned to write the scores of complete shows. He wrote his musicals in the style of operetta ...

#14695

Nicola Vaccai

1790 - 1848 (58 years)

Nicola Vaccai was an Italian composer, particularly of operas, and a singing teacher. Life and career as a composer Born at Tolentino, he grew up in Pesaro, and studied music there until his parents sent him to Rome to study law. Having no intention of becoming a lawyer, he took voice lessons and eventually studied counterpoint with Giuseppe Jannaconi, an important Roman composer. When Vaccai turned twenty one, he went to Naples and became a disciple of Paisiello, whose Barber of Seville was considered a comic masterpiece until Rossini's Barber swept it from the stage 35 years later.

#14696

Lajos Bárdos

1899 - 1986 (87 years)

Lajos Bárdos was a composer, conductor, music theorist, and professor of music at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, in Budapest, Hungary, where he had previously studied under Albert Siklós and Zoltán Kodály. His younger brother, György Deák-Bárdos, was also a composer.

#14697

Glen Gray

1906 - 1963 (57 years)

Glenn Gray Knoblauch , known professionally as Glen Gray, was an American jazz saxophonist and leader of the Casa Loma Orchestra. Early years Gray was born to Lurdie P. and Agnes Knoblauch in Roanoke, Illinois, United States. His father was a saloon keeper and railroad worker who died when Glen was two years of age. He had an older sister. His widowed mother married George H. DeWilde, a coal miner, and moved her family to Roanoke. Gray graduated from Roanoke High School, in 1917 where he played basketball and acquired his nickname, "Spike".

#14698

Henri Marteau

1874 - 1934 (60 years)

Henri Marteau was a French violinist and composer, who obtained Swedish citizenship in 1915. Life and career Marteau was born in Reims. He was of German and French ancestry. His father, a Frenchman, was a well known amateur violinist in Reims, and took a great interest in musical affairs. His mother, a Berliner, was an excellent pianist, who had studied under Clara Schumann. Through the influence of Camillo Sivori, Marteau's parents were easily persuaded to allow their son to adopt a musical career, and he showed remarkable aptitude in his studies, first under Bunzl, later under Hubert Léonar...

#14699

Thomas Jones

1810 - 1849 (39 years)

Thomas Jones was a Welsh Christian missionary, who worked among the Khasi people of Meghalaya and Assam in India and of Bangladesh. He recorded the Khasi language in Roman script, and the inscription on his gravestone calls him "The founding father of the Khasi alphabet and literature".

#14700

Brent Mydland

1952 - 1990 (38 years)

Brent Mydland was an American keyboardist and singer. He was a member of the rock band The Grateful Dead from 1979 to 1990, a longer tenure than any other keyboardist in the band. Growing up in Concord, California, Mydland took up music while in elementary school. After graduation, he played with a number of bands and recorded one album with Silver before joining Bobby and the Midnites with Bob Weir and jazz veterans Billy Cobham and Alphonso Johnson. This led to an invitation to join the Dead in 1979, replacing Keith Godchaux who had decided to leave. Mydland quickly became an important memb...

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