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.
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#14851
Robert Helpmann
1909 - 1986 (77 years)
Sir Robert Murray Helpmann CBE was an Australian ballet dancer, actor, director, and choreographer. After early work in Australia he moved to Britain in 1932, where he joined the Vic-Wells Ballet under its creator, Ninette de Valois. He became one of the company's leading men, partnering Alicia Markova and later Margot Fonteyn. When Frederick Ashton, the company's chief choreographer, was called up for military service in the Second World War, Helpmann took over from him while continuing as a principal dancer.
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Antonín Jan Jungmann
1775 - 1854 (79 years)
Antonín Jan Jungmann, sometimes referred to as was a Czech obstetrician and educator born in Hudlice, Beroun District. He was a younger brother to linguist Josef Jungmann . In 1811 he was appointed professor of obstetrics to the medical faculty at Prague, and in 1838 he became university rector. He gave lectures in German and Czech, and collaborated with his brother on the latter's linguistic projects. He remained at the University of Prague until his retirement in 1850.
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Amilcare Ponchielli
1834 - 1886 (52 years)
Amilcare Ponchielli was an Italian opera composer, best known for his opera La Gioconda. He was married to the soprano Teresina Brambilla. Life and work Born in Paderno Fasolaro near Cremona, then Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, Ponchielli won a scholarship at the age of nine to study music at the Milan Conservatory, writing his first symphony by the time he was ten years old.
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Francesco Lamperti
1813 - 1892 (79 years)
Francesco Lamperti was an Italian singing teacher. Biography A native of Savona, Lamperti attended the Milan Conservatory where, beginning in 1850, he taught for a quarter of a century. He was director at the Teatro Filodrammatico in Lodi. In 1875, he left the school and began to teach as a private tutor. Among his pupils were Sophie Cruvelli, Emma Albani, Gottardo Aldighieri, Désirée Artôt, Sona Aslanova, Lillie Berg, David Bispham, Italo Campanini, Virgilio Collini, Samuel Silas Curry, Franz Ferenczy, Friederike Grün, Teresa Stolz, Marie van Zandt, Maria Waldmann, Herbert Witherspoon, Tecla Vigna, and Lizzie Graham.
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Glauber Rocha
1939 - 1981 (42 years)
Glauber de Andrade Rocha was a Brazilian film director, actor and screenwriter. He was one of the most influential moviemakers of Brazilian cinema and a key figure of Cinema Novo. His films Black God, White Devil and Entranced Earth are often considered to be two of the greatest achievements in Brazilian cinematic history, being selected by Abraccine as, respectively, the second and fifth best Brazilian films of all-time. Rocha also the distinction of having the most films on Abraccine's list: 5 films.
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Sammy Lee
1890 - 1968 (78 years)
Sammy Lee , born Samuel Levy, was an American choreographer, dancer, and producer who worked mainly on Broadway and for 20th Century Fox film corporation in Hollywood. Work on Broadway Lee got his start on the Broadway stage as a dancer and choreographer, along with Signor Albertiera, in the Arthur Hammerstein produced Friml operetta, The Firefly. For the next several years Lee worked as a dancer and choreographer in many reviews before he got his big break as the choreographer for the George and Ira Gershwin musical, Lady, Be Good. In Lady, Be Good, Lee was the first to choreograph such hit songs as "Fascinating Rhythm", "Swiss Miss", and "Oh, Lady Be Good!".
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Donald Wolfit
1902 - 1968 (66 years)
Sir Donald Wolfit, CBE was an English actor-manager, known for his touring wartime productions of Shakespeare. He was especially renowned for his portrayal of King Lear. Personal life Wolfit was born at New Balderton, near Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, and attended the Magnus Grammar School. He made his stage début in 1920 and first appeared in the West End in 1924, playing in The Wandering Jew. He was married three times. His first wife was the actress Chris Castor, and their daughter Margaret Wolfit was also an actor. He had two children by his second marriage - Harriet Graham, actor and writer, and Adam Wolfit, a photographer.
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Diran Kelekian
1862 - 1915 (53 years)
Diran Kelekian was an Ottoman Armenian journalist and professor at the Darülfünûn-u Şahâne . He was editor of two newspapers, Cihan and Sabah . He studied in Constantinople and at the French Academy of Sciences at Marseilles, then became a lecturer at Ottoman University of Constantinople. He fled to Europe during the anti-Armenian violence of the 1890s and returned to Istanbul in 1898, becoming the editor of Sabah. He soon fled the country again, spending the middle 1900s in Cairo and returning after the Young Turk Revolution. He also worked as a correspondent of Daily Mail and Presse As...
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Carl Czerny
1791 - 1857 (66 years)
Carl Czerny was an Austrian composer, teacher, and pianist of Czech origin whose music spanned the late Classical and early Romantic eras. His vast musical production amounted to over a thousand works and his books of studies for the piano are still widely used in piano teaching. He was one of Ludwig van Beethoven's best-known pupils and would later on be one of the main teachers of Franz Liszt.
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Mark Sullivan
1874 - 1952 (78 years)
Mark Sullivan was an American journalist and syndicated political columnist. Author of the six-volume, 3,740-page Our Times: The United States, 1900–1925 , he was described as a "giant of American journalism" and the "Jeremiah of the United States Press".
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John Farrow
1904 - 1963 (59 years)
John Villiers Farrow, KGCHS was an Australian film director, producer, and screenwriter. Spending a considerable amount of his career in the United States, in 1942 he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for Wake Island, and in 1957 he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Around the World in Eighty Days. He had seven children by his wife, actress Maureen O'Sullivan, including actress Mia Farrow.
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Glenn Gould
1932 - 1982 (50 years)
Glenn Herbert Gould was a Canadian classical pianist. He was among the most famous and celebrated pianists of the 20th century, renowned as an interpreter of the keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach. His playing was distinguished by remarkable technical proficiency and a capacity to articulate the contrapuntal texture of Bach's music.
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Karl Böhm
1894 - 1981 (87 years)
Karl August Leopold Böhm was an Austrian conductor. He was best known for his performances of the music of Mozart, Wagner, and Richard Strauss. Life and career Education Karl Böhm was born in Graz. The son of a lawyer, he studied law and earned a doctorate in this subject before entering the music conservatory in his home town of Graz, Austria. He later enrolled at the Vienna Conservatory, where he studied under Eusebius Mandyczewski, a friend of Johannes Brahms.
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Larry Teal
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Larry Teal is considered by many to be the father of American orchestral saxophone. Career Laurence Lyon Teal earned a bachelor's degree in pre-dentistry from the University of Michigan. Although he came to the University of Michigan to study dentistry, he soon became involved with Wilson's Wolverines—a jazz band with a more than local following. He toured Europe with them for several years and later returned to the States only to be recruited by Glen Gray's Casa Loma Orchestra of Detroit, one of the important society orchestras of the period. He later earned a Doctor of Music from the Detroi...
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Jiří Polívka
1858 - 1933 (75 years)
Jiří Polívka was a Czech linguist, slavist, literary historian and folklorist. He was a disciple of Jan Gebauer. In 1895 he was appointed professor at Charles University in Prague. He became a corresponding member of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts and corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences . He was a supporter of Theodor Benfey’s migration theory. His major work was the collection Slavic Tales and studies about Slavic dialectology.
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W. C. Handy
1873 - 1958 (85 years)
William Christopher Handy was an American composer and musician who referred to himself as the Father of the Blues. He was one of the most influential songwriters in the United States. One of many musicians who played the distinctively American blues music, Handy did not create the blues genre but was the first to publish music in the blues form, thereby taking the blues from a regional music style with a limited audience to a new level of popularity.
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Alexandru Philippide
1859 - 1933 (74 years)
Alexandru I. Philippide was a Romanian linguist and philologist. Educated in Iași and Halle, he taught high school for several years until 1893, when he secured a professorship at the University of Iași that he would hold until his death forty years later. He began publishing books on the Romanian language around the time he graduated from university, but it was not until he became a professor that he drew wider attention, thanks to a study of the language's history. Although not particularly ideological, he penned sharp, witty polemics directed at various intellectual figures, both at home a...
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Gerald Moore
1899 - 1987 (88 years)
Gerald Moore CBE was an English classical pianist best known for his career as a collaborative pianist for many distinguished musicians. Among those with whom he was closely associated were Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Elisabeth Schumann, Hans Hotter, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Victoria de los Ángeles and Pablo Casals.
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Carel Gabriel Cobet
1813 - 1889 (76 years)
Carel Gabriel Cobet was a Dutch classical scholar. Biography He was born in Paris, but educated in the Netherlands, at the Gymnasium Haganum and the University of Leiden. The university conferred on him an honorary degree, and recommended him to the government for a travelling pension. The ostensible purpose of his journey was to collate the texts of Simplicius of Cilicia, which, however, engaged but little of his time. He contrived to study almost every Greek manuscript in the Italian libraries, and returned after five years with an intimate knowledge of palaeography.
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Thomas van Erpe
1584 - 1624 (40 years)
Thomas van Erpe, also known as Thomas Erpenius , Dutch Orientalist, was born at Gorinchem, in Holland. He was the first European to publish an accurate book of Arabic grammar. After completing his early education at Leiden, he entered the university of that city, and in 1608 took the degree of master of arts. On the advice of Scaliger he studied Oriental languages whilst taking his course of theology. He afterwards travelled in England, France, Italy and Germany, forming connections with learned men, and availing himself of the information which they communicated. During his stay at Paris he c...
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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".
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Tache Papahagi
1892 - 1977 (85 years)
Tache Papahagi was an Aromanian folklorist and linguist. He was born into an Aromanian family in Avdella , a village that formed part of the Ottoman Empire's Manastir Vilayet and is now in Greece. He attended primary school in his native village, followed from 1902 to 1912 by studies at the Romanian high schools in Ioannina and Bitola. From 1912 to 1916, he went to the literature and philosophy faculty of the University of Bucharest in Romania. In 1925, he obtained a doctorate in philology from the same institution; his thesis dealt with the Maramureș dialect and folklore. He was a high school teacher at Târgu Neamț from 1916 to 1918.
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Richard Theodore Greener
1844 - 1922 (78 years)
Richard Theodore Greener was a pioneering African-American scholar, excelling in elocution, philosophy, law and classics in the Reconstruction era. He broke ground as Harvard College's first Black graduate in 1870. Within three years, he had also graduated from law school at the University of South Carolina, only to also be hired as its first Black professor, after briefly serving as associate editor for the New National Era, a newspaper owned and edited by Frederick Douglass.
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Edwin Fischer
1886 - 1960 (74 years)
Edwin Fischer was a Swiss classical pianist and conductor. He is regarded as one of the great interpreters of J.S. Bach and Mozart in the twentieth century. Biography Fischer was born in Basel and studied music first there with Hans Huber, and later in Berlin at the Stern conservatory under Martin Krause. He first came to prominence as a pianist following World War I. In 1926, he became conductor of the Lübeck Musikverein and later conducted in Munich. In 1932, he formed his own chamber orchestra, and was one of the first to be interested in presenting music of the Baroque and Classical periods in a historically accurate way.
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Alan Freed
1921 - 1965 (44 years)
Albert James "Alan" Freed was an American disc jockey. He also produced and promoted large traveling concerts with various acts, helping to spread the importance of rock and roll music throughout North America.
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Francesco Geminiani
1687 - 1762 (75 years)
Francesco Xaverio Geminiani was an Italian violinist, composer, and music theorist. BBC Radio 3 once described him as "now largely forgotten, but in his time considered almost a musical god, deemed to be the equal of Handel and Corelli."
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Jacob Alting
1618 - 1679 (61 years)
Jacob Alting studied in Groningen and was ordained as a Church of England priest. He was named professor of theology at Groningen University in 1667 after holding the chair of oriental languages since 1641. His publications were overseen in 1687 by Balthasar Bekker, and argued with Maresius on biblical exegesis when the latter accused him of heterodoxy .
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Vince Guaraldi
1928 - 1976 (48 years)
Vincent Anthony Guaraldi was an American jazz pianist best known for composing music for animated television adaptations of the Peanuts comic strip. His compositions for this series included their signature melody "Linus and Lucy" and the holiday standard "Christmas Time Is Here". He is also known for his performances on piano as a member of Cal Tjader's 1950s ensembles and for his own solo career. His 1962 composition "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" became a radio hit and won a Grammy Award in 1963 for Best Original Jazz Composition. He died of a sudden heart attack on February 6, 1976, at age ...
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Pearl Bailey
1918 - 1990 (72 years)
Pearl Mae Bailey was an American actress, singer and author. After appearing in vaudeville, she made her Broadway debut in St. Louis Woman in 1946. She received a Special Tony Award for the title role in the all-black production of Hello, Dolly! in 1968. In 1986, she won a Daytime Emmy award for her performance as a fairy godmother in the ABC Afterschool Special Cindy Eller: A Modern Fairy Tale. Her rendition of "Takes Two to Tango" hit the top ten in 1952.
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Ludwig Tobler
1827 - 1895 (68 years)
Johann Ludwig Tobler was a Swiss philologist and folklorist. Born in Hirzel in Zürich, Switzerland, he was an older brother of philologist Adolf Tobler . Ludwig Tobler died in Zürich. He studied theology, philosophy and philology at the universities of Zürich and Leipzig, receiving his doctorate at the latter institution in 1851. In 1864 he obtained his habilitation from the University of Bern and in 1866 became an associate professor of linguistics and German philology. In 1873 he returned to the University of Zürich, where in 1893 he was named a full professor of German language and literat...
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William Henry Reed
1876 - 1942 (66 years)
William Henry Reed MVO was an English violinist, teacher, composer, conductor and biographer of Sir Edward Elgar. He was leader of the London Symphony Orchestra for 23 years , but is best known for his long personal friendship with Elgar and his book Elgar As I Knew Him , in which he goes into great detail about the genesis of the Violin Concerto in B minor.
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Tito Gobbi
1913 - 1984 (71 years)
Tito Gobbi was an Italian operatic baritone with an international reputation. He made his operatic debut in Gubbio in 1935 as Count Rodolfo in Bellini's La sonnambula and quickly appeared in Italy's major opera houses. By the time he retired in 1979 he had acquired a repertoire of almost 100 operatic roles. They ranged from Mozart's mid-range baritone roles through Rossini's Barber through Donizetti and the standard Verdi and Puccini baritone roles to Alban Berg's Wozzeck. He had a worldwide career as operatic baritone, appearing in for over 25 films and, from the mid-1960s onward, was the s...
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Howard Hanson
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Howard Harold Hanson was an American composer, conductor, educator, music theorist, and champion of American classical music. As director for 40 years of the Eastman School of Music, he built a high-quality school and provided opportunities for commissioning and performing American music. In 1944, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 4, and received numerous other awards including the George Foster Peabody Award for Outstanding Entertainment in Music in 1946.
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Frederick Lonsdale
1881 - 1954 (73 years)
Frederick Lonsdale was a British playwright known for his librettos to several successful musicals early in the 20th century, including King of Cadonia , The Balkan Princess , Betty , The Maid of the Mountains , Monsieur Beaucaire and Madame Pompadour . He also wrote comedy plays, including The Last of Mrs. Cheyney and On Approval and the murder melodrama But for the Grace of God . Some of his plays and musicals were made into films, and he also wrote a few screenplays.
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Maurice Chevalier
1888 - 1972 (84 years)
Maurice Auguste Chevalier was a French singer, actor, and entertainer. He is perhaps best known for his signature songs, including "Livin' In The Sunlight", "Valentine", "Louise", "Mimi", and "Thank Heaven for Little Girls", and for his films, including The Love Parade, The Big Pond, The Smiling Lieutenant, One Hour with You, and Love Me Tonight. His trademark attire was a boater hat and tuxedo.
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Vivian Vance
1909 - 1979 (70 years)
Vivian Vance was an American actress best known for playing Ethel Mertz on the sitcom I Love Lucy , for which she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress, among other accolades. She also starred alongside Lucille Ball in The Lucy Show from 1962 until she left the series at the end of its third season in 1965. In 1991, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She is most commonly identified as Lucille Ball’s longtime comedic foil from 1951 until her death in 1979.
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César Chesneau Dumarsais
1676 - 1756 (80 years)
César Chesneau, sieur Dumarsais or Du Marsais was a French philosophe, grammarian and contributor to the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. He was a prominent figure in what became known as the Enlightenment, and contributed to Diderot's Encyclopédie. After his death, Jacques-Philippe-Augustin Douchet and Nicolas Beauzée, who were both teachers at the École royale militaire, took over his work.
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Sammy Fain
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Sammy Fain was an American composer of popular music. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he contributed numerous songs that form part of The Great American Songbook, and to Broadway theatre. Fain was also a popular musician and vocalist.
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A. E. Meeussen
1912 - 1978 (66 years)
Achille Emile Meeussen, also spelled Achiel Emiel Meeussen, or simply A.E. Meeussen was a distinguished Belgian specialist in Bantu languages, particularly those of the Belgian Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. Together with the British scholar Malcolm Guthrie he is regarded as one of the two leading experts in Bantu languages in the second half of the 20th century.
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Vsevolod Pudovkin
1893 - 1953 (60 years)
Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin was a Soviet film director, screenwriter and actor who developed influential theories of montage. Pudovkin's masterpieces are often contrasted with those of his contemporary Sergei Eisenstein, but whereas Eisenstein utilized montage to glorify the power of the masses, Pudovkin preferred to concentrate on the courage and resilience of individuals. He was granted the title of People's Artist of the USSR in 1948.
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Big Bill Broonzy
1893 - 1958 (65 years)
Big Bill Broonzy was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. His career began in the 1920s, when he played country music to mostly African-American audiences. In the 1930s and 1940s, he navigated a change in style to a more urban blues sound popular with working-class black audiences. In the 1950s, a return to his traditional folk-blues roots made him one of the leading figures of the emerging American folk music revival and an international star. His long and varied career marks him as one of the key figures in the development of blues music in the 20th century.
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Morita Sōhei
1881 - 1949 (68 years)
Morita Yonematsu , known under pen name Morita Sōhei , was a novelist and translator of Western literature active during the late Meiji, Taishō and early Shōwa periods of Japan. Early life Morita was born into a farming family what is now Gifu, Gifu Prefecture. At the age of 15, he was selected for the Imperial Japanese Navy's preparatory course, and sent to boarding school in Tokyo. He managed to avoid conscription into the military, and attended what is now Kanazawa University, where he met his future wife, and then went on to graduate from Tokyo Imperial University. He returned to Gifu, but...
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Rutland Boughton
1878 - 1960 (82 years)
Rutland Boughton was an English composer who became well known in the early 20th century as a composer of opera and choral music. He was also an influential communist activist within the Communist Party of Great Britain .
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Boris Unbegaun
1898 - 1973 (75 years)
Boris Ottokar Unbegaun was a Russian-born German linguist and philologist, expert in Slavic studies: Slavic languages and literature. He worked in universities of France, Great Britain and the United States.
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Fedor Polikarpov-Orlov
1665 - 1731 (66 years)
Fedor Polikarpov-Orlov was a Russian writer, translator, and printer. He is most noted for his Slavonic Bukvar that was widely used by Slavic-speakers both in Europe and throughout the Russian Empire. The historic significance of the 1701 Primer as a sample of book-printing trade lies in the fact that it was the first time in the history of Moscow book-printing that it was attempted to teach students the elements of not only one language but of three at the same time: Slavic, Greek and Latin.
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William Alwyn
1905 - 1985 (80 years)
William Alwyn , was an English composer, conductor, and music teacher. Life and music William Alwyn was born William Alwyn Smith in Northampton, the son of Ada Tyler and William James Smith. He showed an early interest in music and began to learn to play the piccolo. At the age of 15 he entered the Royal Academy of Music in London where he studied flute and composition. He was a virtuoso flautist and for a time was a flautist with the London Symphony Orchestra. Alwyn served as professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music from 1926 to 1955.
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Carl Marstrander
1883 - 1965 (82 years)
Carl Johan Sverdrup Marstrander was a Norwegian linguist, known for his work on the Irish language. His works, largely written in Norwegian, on the Celtic and Norse components in Norwegian culture, are considered important for modern Norway.
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Kirsten Flagstad
1895 - 1962 (67 years)
Kirsten Malfrid Flagstad was a Norwegian opera singer, who was the outstanding Wagnerian soprano of her era. Her triumphant debut in New York on 2 February 1935 is one of the legends of opera. Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the longstanding General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera said, “I have given America two great gifts — Caruso and Flagstad.”
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Jill Ireland
1936 - 1990 (54 years)
Jill Dorothy Ireland was an English actress and singer. She appeared in 16 films with husband Charles Bronson, and was involved in two of Bronson’s other films as a producer. Early life Born in Hounslow, Ireland was the daughter of a wine importer.
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Moritz Moszkowski
1854 - 1925 (71 years)
Moritz Moszkowski was a German composer, pianist, and teacher of Polish-Jewish descent. His brother Alexander Moszkowski was a famous writer and satirist in Berlin. Ignacy Paderewski said: "After Chopin, Moszkowski best understands how to write for the piano, and his writing embraces the whole gamut of piano technique." Although less known today, Moszkowski was well respected and popular during the late nineteenth century.
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