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).
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#14701
Gyula Farkas
1894 - 1958 (64 years)
Farkas Gyula de Kisbarnak, or Julius von Farkas de Kisbarnak Biography He was born into the Roman Catholic Transdanubian Hungarian noble family Farkas de Kisbarnak. His father was Ferenc Farkas de Kisbarnak , captain of the Hungarian Royal army, notary of Kismarton and his mother was Gizella Pottyondy de Potyond und Csáford . His paternal grandfather was Farkas Ferenc de Kisbarnak , administrator of the states of Réde, property of the county Esterházys, and his paternal grandmother was Cecília Hoffmann . His maternal grandparents were dr. Ágoston Pottyondy de Potyond et Csáford, lawyer, and Mária Grohmann .
Go to Profile#14702
Henry Holst
1899 - 1991 (92 years)
Henry Holst was a Danish violinist. In his early career he was leader of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Wilhelm Furtwängler. From the 1930s to the mid-1950s he was based in England, as a soloist and teacher. He held professorships at the Royal Manchester College of Music and the Royal College of Music in London. After 1954 he was based in his native Denmark, where he was professor of violin at the Royal Danish Academy of Music.
Go to Profile#14703
Doris Humphrey
1895 - 1958 (63 years)
Doris Batcheller Humphrey was an American dancer and choreographer of the early twentieth century. Along with her contemporaries Martha Graham and Katherine Dunham, Humphrey was one of the second generation modern dance pioneers who followed their forerunners – including Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn – in exploring the use of breath and developing techniques still taught today. As many of her works were annotated, Humphrey continues to be taught, studied and performed.
Go to Profile#14704
Douglas Moore
1893 - 1969 (76 years)
Douglas Stuart Moore was an American composer, songwriter, organist, pianist, conductor, educator, actor, and author. A composer who mainly wrote works with an American subject, his music is generally characterized by lyricism in a popular or conservative style which generally eschewed the more experimental progressive trends of musical modernism. Composer Virgil Thomson described Moore as a neoromantic composer who was influenced by American folk music. While several of his works enjoyed popularity during his lifetime, only his folk opera The Ballad of Baby Doe has remained well known into ...
Go to Profile#14705
Hans Ernst Pinsker
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Hans Pinsker was an Austrian linguist. He was Professor and Chair at the Department of English at the University of Vienna. Pinsker is perhaps best known for his introduction to English historical grammar , which appeared in multiple editions . He is also noted as an accomplished member of the Vienna School of English Linguistics and held the "Luick Chair" before Herbert Koziol and Herbert Schendl. Pinsker worked on Indo-European in addition to English historical linguistics.
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Philip J. Lang
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
Philip J. Lang was an American musical arranger, orchestrator and composer of band music, as well as a musical educator. He is credited for writing the orchestral arrangements for over 50 Broadway theatre shows, including many landmark productions, such as Li'l Abner , Hello, Dolly! , Mame , George M , Annie and 42nd Street . Together with Robert Russell Bennett, he orchestrated the record-breaking productions of Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady and Camelot . Russell Bennett, the dean of musical orchestrators, remarked that the original arrangements Lang had prepared for Annie Get Your Gun...
Go to Profile#14707
Kaj Franck
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
Kaj Gabriel Franck was one of the leading figures of Finnish design and an influential figure in design and applied arts between 1940 and 1980. Franck's parents were Kurt Franck and Genéviève "Vevi" Ahrenberg. He was a Swedish-speaking Finn, and he was of German descent through his father.
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Walter Braunfels
1882 - 1954 (72 years)
Walter Braunfels was a German composer, pianist, and music educator. Life Walter Braunfels was born in Frankfurt. His first music teacher was his mother, the great-niece of the composer Louis Spohr. He continued his piano studies in Frankfurt at the Hoch Conservatory with James Kwast.
Go to Profile#14709
Walter Draeger
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Walter Draeger was a German composer and music educator. Er war Professor an der and the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar. In 1955, war er Mitinitiator der ersten Hallische Musiktage. Life Draeger was born in 1888 as the son of a teacher and organist in Batzlow near Freienwalde in the Province of Brandenburg. From 1898, he lived in Berlin, where he lived until the Reifeprüfung from the . Von 1908 bis 1913 studierte er Geschichte, Romance studies and musicology an der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin. In 1913, he was awarded his doctorate there with the dissertation Das alte l...
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Fritz Mahler
1901 - 1973 (72 years)
Fritz Mahler was an Austrian conductor. Mahler's father was a cousin of the composer Gustav Mahler. In Europe he became a leading conductor with such ensembles as the Berlin Radio Symphony, the Dresden Philharmonic and the Danish State Symphony. He fled Europe in 1936 for the United States. He was married, from 1939 until his death, to dancer Pauline Koner and taught at summer sessions of the Juilliard School in New York for many years . In 1940-41, he was the city's director of music for the National Youth Administration as well. Mahler was music director of the Erie Philharmonic from 1947 to 1953 and the Hartford Symphony Orchestra from 1953 to 1962.
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Amado Alonso
1896 - 1952 (56 years)
Amado Alonso was a Spanish philologist, linguist and literary critic, who became a naturalised citizen of Argentina and one of the founders of stylistics. He was a pupil of Ramón Menéndez Pidal at the Center for Historical Studies in Madrid, where he worked on phonetic and geographical linguistics. Between 1927 and 1946 he lived in Buenos Aires, where he headed the Institute of Philology. He then went to Harvard University and lived in America until his death.
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Paul Pimsleur
1927 - 1976 (49 years)
Paul Pimsleur was a French-American linguist and scholar in the field of applied linguistics. He developed the Pimsleur language learning system, which, along with his many publications, had a significant effect upon theories of language learning and teaching. Pimsleur Language Programs is an American language learning company that develops and publishes courses based on the Pimsleur Method.
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Norman O'Neill
1875 - 1934 (59 years)
Norman Houston O'Neill was an English composer and conductor of Irish background who specialised largely in works for the theatre. Life O'Neill was born at 16 Young Street in Kensington, London, the youngest son of the Irish painter George Bernard O'Neill and Emma Stuart Callcott. He studied in London with Arthur Somervell and with Iwan Knorr at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt from 1893 to 1897. His studies there were facilitated by Eric Stenbock. He belonged to the Frankfurt Group, a circle of composers who studied at Hoch's Conservatory in the late 1890s.
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Louise Kaiser
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Louise Kaiser was a Dutch phonetician and linguist and the first female lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and became known for her research into the phonetic and physical-anthropological measurements on the people of Urk in the Netherlands.
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Philip Greeley Clapp
1888 - 1954 (66 years)
Philip Greeley Clapp was an American educator, conductor, pianist, and composer of classical music. He served as Director of the School of Music at the University of Iowa for more than three decades , helping to establish that school's strong reputation in music and in the arts overall. He worked especially hard in advocating that music and the other arts should be an integral part of a liberal arts education, and succeeded in creating strong graduate programs that awarded degrees not just in scholarship and research but also in performance and creation. Among his students was Gene Gutchë.
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Heinrich Lemacher
1891 - 1966 (75 years)
Heinrich Lemacher was a German composer and music educator. Life Born in Solingen, Lemacher studied from 1911 to 1916 at the Cologne Conservatory and at Bonn University, where he received his doctorate in musicology in 1916. From 1925 to 1965 he taught composition, theory and music history at the Hochschule für Musik Köln, where he had been professor since 1928.
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Fred Lohse
1908 - 1987 (79 years)
Fred Lohse was a German composer and music educator. Life Born in Leipzig, Lohse studierte von 1928 bis 1931 musical composition and counterpoint bei Hermann Grabner in Leipzig. From 1928 to 1952, he worked mainly as a music educator. In 1952 he became a docent and in 1973 a Professor for composition and musical theory in musicology at the Universität Leipzig.
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Guy Maier
1891 - 1956 (65 years)
Guy Maier was an American pianist, composer, arranger, teacher, and writer. From about 1919 to 1931, he was a member of the two-piano team of Maier and Pattison. Early life Guy Maier was born in Buffalo, New York, the son of John Maier, a retail shoe dealer, and his wife, Eva D. Maier. As a boy, he aspired to be a Presbyterian minister, but his musical talent turned him in the direction of the piano and the organ. He enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where he studied piano with Carl Baermann , a friend and pupil of Franz Liszt. In Boston Maier met Lee Pattison , a recent New England Conservatory graduate who was also a fine pianist.
Go to Profile#14719
Ottorino Respighi
1879 - 1936 (57 years)
Ottorino Respighi was an Italian composer, violinist, teacher, and musicologist and one of the leading Italian composers of the early 20th century. His compositions range over operas, ballets, orchestral suites, choral songs, chamber music, and transcriptions of Italian compositions of the 16th–18th centuries, but his best known and most performed works are his three orchestral tone poems which brought him international fame: Fountains of Rome , Pines of Rome , and Roman Festivals .
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Edmund Crosby Quiggin
1875 - 1920 (45 years)
Edmund Crosby Quiggin was a British linguist and scholar. Born in Cheadle, Staffordshire, he was educated at Kingswood School in Bath. In 1893 he matriculated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University, to read Modern and Medieval Languages. He graduated with first-class honours. The fellows of Caius included the lawyer and legal historian Charles Henry Monro, who spoke Irish and encouraged Quiggin to study in this area.
Go to Profile#14721
Denis Matthews
1919 - 1988 (69 years)
Denis Matthews was an English pianist and musicologist whose performing career flourished after the war, during the 1950s and into the 1960s. He later turned increasingly to broadcasting, writing and teaching.
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Witold Doroszewski
1899 - 1976 (77 years)
Witold Doroszewski was a Polish lexicographer and linguist. External links
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Wells Root
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Wells Crosby Root was an American screenwriter and lecturer. In the mid-1930s he was involved with the Screen Writers Guild and in the 1950s the University of Southern California asked him to teach Film and Television Writing Technique, where he worked during the next twenty years.
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Walter Williams
1864 - 1935 (71 years)
Walter Williams was an American journalist and educator. He founded the world's first journalism school at the University of Missouri, and later served as the university's president. An internationalist, he promoted the ideals of journalism globally and is often referred to as "The Father of Journalism Education".
Go to Profile#14725
Victor Hely-Hutchinson
1901 - 1947 (46 years)
Christian Victor Noel Hope Hely-Hutchinson was a British composer, conductor, pianist and music administrator. He is best known for the Carol Symphony and for humorous song-settings. Early life Hely-Hutchinson was born in Cape Town, Cape Colony . His parents were Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson, Governor of Cape Colony from 1901 to 1910 during and after the Boer War, and May Hely-Hutchinson. He initially lived in Kent, then moved back to South Africa in 1907. He was taught the piano by Dr Thomas Barrow Dowling , the organist of Cape Town cathedral. Victor was a child prodigy, composing many pieces...
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Emanuel Feuermann
1902 - 1942 (40 years)
Emanuel Feuermann was an internationally celebrated cellist in the first half of the 20th century. Life Feuermann was born in 1902 in Kolomyja, Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire to Jewish parents. Both of his parents were amateur musicians. His father, who played the violin and cello, was his first teacher. His older brother Sigmund was also musically talented, and their little sister, Sophie was the piano prodigy in the family. Their father decided to move the family to Vienna in 1907 for Sigmund to start his professional career there. At the age of nine, Emanuel received lessons from Frie...
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Gerardus Johannes Geers
1891 - 1965 (74 years)
Gerardus Johannes Geers, , was a Dutch linguist and Hispanist. He wrote his thesis on the language of the Blackfoot Indians in North America but spent his career studying the Spanish language and Spanish culture.
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Johannes Voldemar Veski
1873 - 1968 (95 years)
Johannes Voldemar Veski was an Estonian linguist. From 1896 until 1899, he studied at the University of Tartu; at the beginning he studied religion and thereafter nature sciences. From 1920 until 1938, he taught at the University of Tartu.
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Tibor Ney
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
Tibor Ney was a Hungarian violinist and music teacher. Tibor Ney was the professor of violin at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, the concertmaster of the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and a founding member of the Hungarian String Trio.
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Camille Nickerson
1888 - 1982 (94 years)
Camille Lucie Nickerson was an American pianist, composer, arranger, collector, and Howard University professor from 1926 to 1962. She was influenced by Creole folksongs of Louisiana, which she arranged and sang.
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Ernst-Lothar von Knorr
1896 - 1973 (77 years)
Ernst-Lothar von Knorr was a German composer, music educator and civil servant. The years until 1933 Born in Eitorf, Knorr grew up in Bonn. His parents were the pharmacist Dr. chem. Karl Ferdinand von Knorr and Eugenie Sophie Merten. From 1902 he had his first violin lessons. In 1907 he was admitted to the Cologne Conservatory. After graduating from high school, conservatory examination and military service, he became a violin teacher at the Heidelberg Music Academy in 1919, and in 1920 he founded the Heidelberg Chamber Orchestra Association with P. Gies. On 6 October 1923 he married in Gummersbach Elise Siebel, a granddaughter of , the co-founder of the paper mill .
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Orlando Morgan
1865 - 1956 (91 years)
Robert Orlando Morgan was an English music teacher, composer and musicologist. He is best remembered as an influential teacher at the Guildhall School of Music in London, where he taught for 64 years, from 1887 to 1951, as Professor of Pianoforte and Composition. His pupils included the composer Benjamin Frankel and the pianist Dame Myra Hess.
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Hans Ehelolf
1881 - 1939 (58 years)
Hans Wilhelm Heinrich Ehelolf was a German Hittitologist. He was born in Hanover, Lower Saxony. He began his oriental studies in Marburg, focusing on Assyriology, Semitic linguistics, Indology, and Biblical exegesis. He wrote a PhD thesis entitled Ein Wortfolgeprinzip im Assyrisch-Babylonischen and received his degree on July 29, 1914. Ehelolf served in World War I and was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class and the Turkish Iron Crescent.
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Jean Haust
1868 - 1946 (78 years)
Jean Haust was a Belgian academic, linguist and philologist. He was a professor at the University of Liège en became known for his publication of several dictionaries containing the Walloon dialect of Liège.
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Albert Sechehaye
1870 - 1946 (76 years)
Albert Sechehaye was a Swiss linguist. He is known for editing Ferdinand de Saussure's lectures, Course in General Linguistics. Biography Sechehaye studied at the University of Geneva under Ferdinand de Saussure. From 1893 to 1902 he trained at Göttingen, where he wrote a thesis in German about the French imperfect subjunctive. After that, he taught in Geneva until his death, though not becoming a professor until 1939, when he succeeded his colleague Charles Bally. His wife Marguerite Sechehaye was a psychotherapist and a pioneer in the psychoanalytic treatment of schizophrenics.
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August Leskien
1840 - 1916 (76 years)
August Leskien was a German linguist active in the field of comparative linguistics, particularly relating to the Baltic and Slavic languages. Biography Leskien was born in Kiel. He studied philology at the universities of Kiel and Leipzig, receiving his doctorate from the latter in 1864. He taught Latin and Ancient Greek at the from 1864 to 1866. In 1866, he began studying comparative linguistics under August Schleicher at the University of Jena. He completed his habilitation in 1867 and went on to lecture at the University of Göttingen.
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Harrison Russell
1881 - 1968 (87 years)
Henry Harrison Russell was an American football, basketball and baseball coach. He was the eighth head football coach at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, serving from 1912 to 1922 and compiling a record of 15–43–10.
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Arthur Fickenscher
1871 - 1954 (83 years)
Arthur Fickenscher was an American composer and academic. The first head of the music department of the University of Virginia, he is credited with being an early 20th-century pioneer of microtonal music.
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Mikhail Raukhverger
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Mikhail Rafailovich Raukhverger was a Jewish–Soviet pianist and composer. Career Mikhail Raukhverger was born in Odessa. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory under Felix Blumenfeld in 1927 and in 1929–1941 taught there.
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Torsten Evert Karsten
1870 - 1942 (72 years)
Torsten Evert Karsten was a Finnish philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. Biography Torsten Evert Karsten was born in Orivesi, Grand Duchy of Finland, the son of Pastor Klas Edvin Karsten and Maria Augusta Emilia Cajanus. His family were Finland Swedes. He was the brother of philosopher Rafael Karsten.
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Hazel Harrison
1883 - 1969 (86 years)
Hazel Harrison was an American concert pianist. She was the first fully American-trained musician to appear with a European orchestra. Harrison was born in La Porte, Indiana, and spent most of her childhood home schooled; but she attended La Porte High School, and graduated. She began private piano training as a child of four or five years old with Richard Warren Pellow, an English organist at the First Presbyterian Church who taught music in the local public schools. In high school she began studies under German musician Victor Heinze, eventually commuting between La Porte and Chicago to continue lessons with him.
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Gordon Jacob
1895 - 1984 (89 years)
Gordon Percival Septimus Jacob CBE was an English composer and teacher. He was a professor at the Royal College of Music in London from 1924 until his retirement in 1966, and published four books and many articles about music. As a composer he was prolific: the list of his works totals more than 700, mostly compositions of his own, but a substantial minority of orchestrations and arrangements of other composers' works. Those whose music he orchestrated range from William Byrd to Edward Elgar to Noël Coward.
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Jac. van Ginneken
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Jacobus Joannes Antonius van Ginneken S.J. was a Dutch linguist, priest and Jesuit, professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen since its start in 1923. He taught Dutch Language and Dutch Literature, comparative linguistics of the Indo-european languages, and Sanskrit.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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. ...
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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 .
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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".
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Rasmus Rask
1787 - 1832 (45 years)
Rasmus Kristian Rask was a Danish linguist and philologist. He wrote several grammars and worked on comparative phonology and morphology. Rask traveled extensively to study languages, first to Iceland, where he wrote the first grammar of Icelandic, and later to Russia, Persia, India, and Ceylon . Shortly before his death, he was hired as professor of Eastern languages at the University of Copenhagen. Rask is especially known for his contributions to comparative linguistics, including an early formulation of what would later be known as Grimm's Law. He was elected as a member to the American P...
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