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,
#14751
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 ...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 .
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Pompeu Fabra
1868 - 1948 (80 years)
Pompeu Fabra i Poch was a Catalan engineer and grammarian from Spain. He was the main author of the normative reform of contemporary Catalan language. Life Pompeu Fabra was born in Gràcia, which at that time was still separate from Barcelona, in 1868. He was the last of twelve children born to Josep Fabra i Roca and his wife Carolina Poch i Martí. When Pompeu was six, the family moved to Barcelona.
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Émile Zola
1840 - 1902 (62 years)
Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola was a French novelist, journalist, playwright, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in his renowned newspaper opinion headlined J'Accuse…! Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902.
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Čestmír Loukotka
1895 - 1966 (71 years)
Čestmír Loukotka was a Czechoslovak linguist and ethnologist. His daughter was Jarmila Loukotková. Career Loukotka proposed a classification for the languages of South America based on several previous works. This classification contained a lot of unpublished material and was therefore superior to all previous classifications. He divided the languages of South America and the Caribbean into 77 different families, based upon similarities of vocabulary and available lists. His classification of 1968 is the most influential and was based upon two previous schemes , which were similar to those pr...
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Pierre Marie
1853 - 1940 (87 years)
Pierre Marie was a French neurologist and political journalist close to the SFIO. Medical career After finishing medical school, he served as an interne , working as an assistant to neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière and Bicêtre Hospitals in Paris. In 1883 he received his medical doctorate with a graduate thesis on Basedow’s disease, being promoted to médecin des hôpitaux several years later . In 1907 he attained the chair of pathological anatomy at the Faculty of Medicine, and in 1917 was appointed to the chair of neurology, a position he held until 1925. In 1911 Marie becam...
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Jacques Offenbach
1819 - 1880 (61 years)
Jacques Offenbach was a German-born French composer, cellist and impresario of the Romantic period. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s to the 1870s, and his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann. He was a powerful influence on later composers of the operetta genre, particularly Johann Strauss Jr. and Arthur Sullivan. His best-known works were continually revived during the 20th century, and many of his operettas continue to be staged in the 21st. The Tales of Hoffmann remains part of the standard opera repertory.
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Georges Sadoul
1904 - 1967 (63 years)
Georges Sadoul was a French film critic, journalist and cinema writer. He is known for writing encyclopedias of film and filmmakers, many of which have been translated into English. Biography Sadoul was born in Nancy. He was trained at the Sorbonne and the IDHEC, a French cinema school. His father, Charles Sadoul, was a well-known ethnologist.
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Aleksandra Ekster
1882 - 1949 (67 years)
Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Ekster , also known as Alexandra Exter, was a Russian and French painter and designer. As a young woman, her studio in Kiev attracted all the city's creative luminaries, and she became a figure of the Paris salons, mixing with Picasso, Braque and others. She is identified with the Russian/Ukrainian avant-garde, as a Cubo-futurist, Constructivist, and influencer of the Art Deco movement.
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Antonio Gramsci
1891 - 1937 (46 years)
Antonio Francesco Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, linguist, journalist, writer, and politician. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party. A vocal critic of Benito Mussolini and fascism, he was imprisoned in 1926 where he remained until his death in 1937.
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John W. Campbell
1910 - 1971 (61 years)
John Wood Campbell Jr. was an American science fiction writer and editor. He was editor of Astounding Science Fiction from late 1937 until his death and was part of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Campbell wrote super-science space opera under his own name and stories under his primary pseudonym, Don A. Stuart. Campbell also used the pen names Karl Van Kampen and Arthur McCann. His novella Who Goes There? was adapted as the films The Thing from Another World , The Thing , and The Thing .
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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
1840 - 1893 (53 years)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. Tchaikovsky wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the current classical repertoire, including the ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, his First Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, the Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy, several symphonies, and the opera Eugene Onegin.
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Joel Chandler Harris
1848 - 1908 (60 years)
Joel Chandler Harris was an American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years, Harris spent most of his adult life in Atlanta working as an associate editor at The Atlanta Constitution.
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Vilhelm Thomsen
1842 - 1927 (85 years)
Vilhelm Ludwig Peter Thomsen was a Danish linguist and Turkologist. He successfully deciphered the Orkhon inscriptions which were discovered during the expedition of Nikolai Yadrintsev in 1889. Early life and education Vilhelm Thomsen was born in Copenhagen. He was the son of Chamber Councillor Ludvig Frederik Thomsen and the elder brother of painter and illustrator Carl Thomsen .
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Brion Gysin
1916 - 1986 (70 years)
Brion Gysin was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices. He is best known for his use of the cut-up technique, alongside his close friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs. With the engineer Ian Sommerville he also invented the Dreamachine, a flicker device designed as an art object to be viewed with the eyes closed. It was in painting and drawing, however, that Gysin devoted his greatest efforts, creating calligraphic works inspired by cursive Japanese "grass" script and Arabic script. Burroughs later stated that "Brion Gysin ...
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Ralph Vaughan Williams
1872 - 1958 (86 years)
Ralph Vaughan Williams was an English composer. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.
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Johannes Schmidt
1843 - 1901 (58 years)
Johannes Friedrich Heinrich Schmidt was a German linguist. He developed the Wellentheorie of language development. Biography Schmidt was born in Prenzlau, Province of Brandenburg. He was educated at Bonn and at Jena where he studied philology with August Schleicher and specialized in Indo-European, especially Slavic, languages. He earned a doctorate in 1865 and worked from 1866 as a teacher at a gymnasium in Berlin.
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Akseli Gallen-Kallela
1865 - 1931 (66 years)
Akseli Gallen-Kallela was a Finnish painter who is best known for his illustrations of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. His work is considered a very important aspect of the Finnish national identity. He changed his name from Gallén to Gallen-Kallela in 1907.
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Julius Pokorny
1887 - 1970 (83 years)
Julius Pokorny was an Austrian-Czech linguist and scholar of the Celtic languages, particularly Irish, and a supporter of Irish nationalism. He held academic posts in Austrian and German universities.
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Vladimir Stasov
1824 - 1906 (82 years)
Vladimir Vasilievich Stasov , was a Russian critic of music and art. Born into a wealthy, noble family, Stasov became a prominent figure in mid-19th-century Russian culture. He discovered a large number of its greatest talents, inspired many of their works and fought their battles in numerous articles and letters to the press. As such, he carried on a lifelong debate with Russian novelist and playwright Ivan Turgenev, who considered Stasov "our great all-Russian critic." He wanted Russian art to liberate itself from what he saw as Europe's hold. By copying the west, he felt, Russian artists could be, at best, second-rate.
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Paul Delvaux
1897 - 1994 (97 years)
Paul Delvaux was a Belgian painter noted for his dream-like scenes of women, classical architecture, trains and train stations, and skeletons, often in combination. He is often considered a surrealist, although he only briefly identified with the Surrealist movement. He was influenced by the works of Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte, but developed his own fantastical subjects and hyper-realistic styling, combining the detailed classical beauty of academic painting with the bizarre juxtapositions of surrealism.
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Malcolm Guthrie
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Malcolm Guthrie was an English linguist who specialized in Bantu languages. Guthrie was a foremost professor of Bantu languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He is known primarily for his classification of Bantu languages, Guthrie 1971. The classification, though based more on geography than linguistic relatedness, is nonetheless the most widely used. Together with the Belgian linguist Achille Émile Meeussen , he is regarded as one of the two leading Bantu specialists of the second half of the 20th century.
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Robert Burns
1759 - 1796 (37 years)
Robert Burns , also known familiarly as Rabbie Burns, was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is in a "light Scots dialect" of English, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these writings his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest.
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Diogenes Laertius
180 - 240 (60 years)
Diogenes Laërtius was a biographer of the Greek philosophers. Nothing is definitively known about his life, but his surviving Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is a principal source for the history of ancient Greek philosophy. His reputation is controversial among scholars because he often repeats information from his sources without critically evaluating it. He also frequently focuses on trivial or insignificant details of his subjects' lives while ignoring important details of their philosophical teachings and he sometimes fails to distinguish between earlier and later teachings of specific philosophical schools.
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Cornelius Ryan
1920 - 1974 (54 years)
Cornelius Ryan was an Irish journalist and author known mainly for writing popular military history. He was especially known for his histories of World War II events: The Longest Day: 6 June 1944 D-Day , The Last Battle , and A Bridge Too Far .
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Sidney Lee
1859 - 1926 (67 years)
Sir Sidney Lee was an English biographer, writer, and critic. Biography Lee was born Solomon Lazarus Lee in 1859 at 12 Keppel Street, Bloomsbury, London. He was educated at the City of London School and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in Modern History in 1882. In 1883, Lee became assistant-editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. In 1890 he became joint editor and, on the retirement of Sir Leslie Stephen in 1891, succeeded him as editor.
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Felix Mendelssohn
1809 - 1847 (38 years)
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy , widely known as Felix Mendelssohn, was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period. Mendelssohn's compositions include symphonies, concertos, piano music, organ music and chamber music. His best-known works include the overture and incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream , the Italian Symphony, the Scottish Symphony, the oratorio St. Paul, the oratorio Elijah, the overture The Hebrides, the mature Violin Concerto and the String Octet. The melody for the Christmas carol "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" is also his.
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Winsor McCay
1867 - 1934 (67 years)
Zenas Winsor McCay was an American cartoonist and animator. He is best known for the comic strip Little Nemo and the animated film Gertie the Dinosaur . For contractual reasons, he worked under the pen name Silas on the comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend.
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Joseph Wright
1855 - 1930 (75 years)
Joseph Wright FBA was an English Germanic philologist who rose from humble origins to become Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford. Early life Wright was born in Idle, near Bradford in the former West Riding of Yorkshire, the second son of Dufton Wright, a woollen cloth weaver and quarryman, and his wife Sarah Ann . He started work as a "donkey-boy" in a quarry around 1862, at the age of six, leading a donkey-drawn cart full of tools to the smithy to be sharpened. He later became a bobbin doffer – responsible for removing and replacing full bobbins – in a mill in Sir Titus Salt's model village of Saltaire in Yorkshire.
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Jacob Jordaens
1593 - 1678 (85 years)
Jacob Jordaens was a Flemish painter, draughtsman and a designer of tapestries and prints. He was a prolific artist who created biblical, mythological, and allegorical compositions, genre scenes, landscapes, illustrations of Flemish sayings and portraits. After the death of Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, he became the leading Flemish Baroque painter of his time. Unlike those illustrious contemporaries he never travelled abroad to study the Antique and Italian painting and, except for a few short trips to locations elsewhere in the Low Countries, he resided in Antwerp his entire life. He also remained largely indifferent to Rubens and van Dyck's intellectual and courtly aspirations.
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Stobaeus
430 - 470 (40 years)
Joannes Stobaeus , from Stobi in Macedonia, was the compiler of a valuable series of extracts from Greek authors. The work was originally divided into two volumes containing two books each. The two volumes became separated in the manuscript tradition, and the first volume became known as the Extracts and the second volume became known as the Anthology . Modern editions now refer to both volumes as the Anthology. The Anthology contains extracts from hundreds of writers, especially poets, historians, orators, philosophers and physicians. The subjects range from natural philosophy, dialectics, and ethics, to politics, economics, and maxims of practical wisdom.
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Pierre Larousse
1817 - 1875 (58 years)
Pierre Athanase Larousse was a French grammarian, lexicographer and encyclopaedist. He published many of the outstanding educational and reference works of 19th-century France, including the 15-volume .
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Milton Caniff
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
Milton Arthur Paul Caniff was an American cartoonist famous for the Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon comic strips. Biography Caniff was born in Hillsboro, Ohio. He was an Eagle Scout and a recipient of the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award from the Boy Scouts of America. Caniff did cartoons for local newspapers while studying at Stivers High School in Dayton Ohio. At Ohio State University, Caniff joined the Sigma Chi fraternity and later illustrated for The Magazine of Sigma Chi and The Norman Shield . Graduating in 1930, Caniff began at the Columbus Dispatch where he worked with the not...
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Jonas Jablonskis
1860 - 1930 (70 years)
Jonas Jablonskis was a distinguished Lithuanian linguist and one of the founders of the standard Lithuanian language. He used the pseudonym Rygiškių Jonas, taken from the small town named Rygiškiai where he spent his childhood.
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Bedřich Hrozný
1879 - 1952 (73 years)
Bedřich Hrozný , also known as , was a Czech orientalist and linguist. He contributed to the decipherment of the ancient Hittite language, identified it as an Indo-European language, and laid the groundwork for the development of Hittitology.
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Howard Dietz
1896 - 1983 (87 years)
Howard Dietz was an American publicist, lyricist, and librettist, best remembered for his songwriting collaboration with Arthur Schwartz. Biography Dietz was born in New York City. He attended Columbia College and then studied journalism at Columbia University. He also served as publicist/director of advertising for Goldwyn Pictures and later MGM and is often credited with creating Leo the Lion, its lion mascot, and choosing their slogan Ars Gratia Artis. In 1942, he was made MGM's Vice President in Charge of Publicity. He held that position until his retirement in 1957.
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Lawren Harris
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
Lawren Stewart Harris LL. D. was a Canadian painter, best known as a leading member of the Group of Seven. He played a key role as a catalyst in Canadian art and as a visionary in Canadian landscape art.
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Edward FitzGerald
1809 - 1883 (74 years)
Edward FitzGerald or Fitzgerald was an English poet and writer. His most famous poem is the first and best-known English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which has kept its reputation and popularity since the 1860s.
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Mahmud al-Kashgari
1029 - 1101 (72 years)
Mahmud ibn Husayn ibn Muhammad al-Kashgari was an 11th-century Kara-Khanid scholar and lexicographer of the Turkic languages from Kashgar. His father, Husayn, was the mayor of Barsgan, a town in the southeastern part of the lake of Issyk-Kul and related to the ruling dynasty of Kara-Khanid Khanate. Around 1057 C.E. Mahmud al-Kashgari became a political refugee, before settling down in Baghdad.
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Philippe Quinault
1635 - 1688 (53 years)
Philippe Quinault , French dramatist and librettist, was born in Paris. Biography Quinault was educated by the liberality of François Tristan l'Hermite, the author of Marianne. Quinault's first play was produced at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1653, when he was only eighteen. The piece succeeded, and Quinault followed it up, but he also read for the bar; and in 1660, when he married a widow with money, he bought himself a place in the Cour des Comptes. Then he tried tragedies with more success.
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