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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Communications,
#14951
Max Vasmer
1886 - 1962 (76 years)
Max Julius Friedrich Vasmer was a Russian-German linguist. He studied problems of etymology in Indo-European, Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages and worked on the history of Slavic, Baltic, Iranian, and Finno-Ugric peoples.
Go to Profile#14952
Mark Brunswick
1902 - 1971 (69 years)
Mark Brunswick was an American composer of the twentieth century. He had only recently completed the second act of an opera based on Ibsen's The Master Builder when he died suddenly in London in May 1971, at the start of what was to have been an extended tour of Europe with his wife, Natascha Artin Brunswick. Brunswick had been at work on the opera for several years, and Act I had not long before received a concert performance as a work in progress at the City College of New York.
Go to Profile#14953
Harold Wentworth
1904 - 1965 (61 years)
Harold Wentworth was an American lexicographer and specialist in English usage and slang in the United States. Born in Cortland, New York, he studied at Cornell University and taught at Cornell University and the University of West Virginia.
Go to Profile#14954
William Vennard
1909 - 1971 (62 years)
William Vennard was a famous American vocal pedagogist who devoted his life to researching the human voice and its use in singing. He was one of the driving forces behind a major shift within the field of vocal pedagogy during the middle of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#14955
Charles Siepmann
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Charles Siepmann was a British-born media scholar and policy advocate who spent much of his career in the United States where he was a professor at New York University's graduate communication program for over two decades. Siepmann was instrumental in drafting the FCC document "Public Service Responsibility of Broadcast Licensees", which became known as the "Blue Book" for its distinctive colour. Though he was an academic, Siepmann remained an advocate for the democratic potentials of radio and television and was "overtly political and engaged with media policy interventions" during his career.
Go to Profile#14956
Richard Rössler
1880 - 1962 (82 years)
Richard Rössler, also Roessler or Rößler was a Baltic German pianist, organist, composer and music educator . In 1910, he married the pianist Dora Charlotte Mayer , a Württemberg pastor's daughter who had studied in Berlin with Ernst von Dohnányi and Max Bruch. The couple had three children.
Go to Profile#14957
Gabriel Turville-Petre
1908 - 1978 (70 years)
Edward Oswald Gabriel Turville-Petre was an English philologist who specialized in Old Norse studies. Born at Bosworth Hall, Leicestershire to a prominent Roman Catholic family, Turville-Petre was educated in English at the University of Oxford under the tutelage of J. R. R. Tolkien. He eventually became Professor of Ancient Icelandic Literature and Antiquities at the University of Oxford and a leading member of the Viking Society for Northern Research. He was the husband of fellow philologist Joan Turville-Petre, who was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse studies at Oxford. Turville-Pet...
Go to Profile#14958
Henry Cowell
1897 - 1965 (68 years)
Henry Dixon Cowell was an American composer, writer, pianist, publisher, teacher and the husband of Sidney Robertson Cowell. Earning a reputation as an extremely controversial performer and eccentric composer, Cowell became a leading figure of American avant-garde music for the first half of the 20th century — his writings and music serving as a great influence to similar artists at the time, including Lou Harrison, George Antheil, and John Cage, among others. He is considered one of America's most important and influential composers.
Go to Profile#14959
Leon Klepper
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Leon Klepper was a Romanian composer of classical music. Born to a Jewish family in Iași, Klepper studied in Vienna with Joseph Marx, in Berlin with Franz Schreker and with Paul Dukas and Alfred Cortot in Paris, where he lived until 1939. From 1949 to 1959, he was a composition professor at the National University of Music Bucharest. Afterwards, he lived as a freelance composer and music teacher in Freiburg im Breisgau where he died in 1991 aged 91.
Go to Profile#14960
Morton Feldman
1926 - 1987 (61 years)
Morton Feldman was an American composer. A major figure in 20th-century classical music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown. Feldman's works are characterized by notational innovations that he developed to create his characteristic sound: rhythms that seem to be free and floating, pitch shadings that seem softly unfocused, a generally quiet and slowly evolving music, and recurring asymmetric patterns. His later works, after 1977, also explore extrem...
Go to Profile#14961
Georg Morgenstierne
1892 - 1978 (86 years)
Georg Valentin von Munthe af Morgenstierne was a Norwegian professor of linguistics with the University of Oslo . He specialized in Indo-Iranian languages. Studies During the years 1923 to 1971, Morgenstierne carried out fieldwork in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Iran. In 1924, he undertook the first of his two major linguistic expeditions. He arrived in Kabul with a personal letter of introduction to the King of Afghanistan, from the King of Norway. Together with studying the languages, Morgenstierne collected remarkable scientific materials from the culture of the regional people, like ...
Go to Profile#14962
Charles Leslie Wrenn
1895 - 1969 (74 years)
Charles Leslie Wrenn was an English scholar. After taking an MA at the University of Oxford, he worked for a year as a lecturer in the department of English Language and Literature at the University of Leeds in 1928–29. Following his return to Oxford, he became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in 1945, the successor in the chair of J.R.R. Tolkien, and held the position until 1963. Wrenn was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. He was also a member of the Oxford literary discussion group known as the "Inklings", which included C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, and met for nearly two decades between the early 1930s and late 1949.
Go to Profile#14963
Ferdinand Brunot
1860 - 1938 (78 years)
Ferdinand-Eugène-Jean-Baptiste Brunot was a French linguist and philologist, editor of the ground-breaking Histoire de la langue française des origines à 1900 . Brunot was born in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges. He found his first faculty position and published his first book from the Faculté des lettres de Lyon, now the Lumière University Lyon 2. In October 1891 he became a lecturer at the Sorbonne at the age of 31. Here he began his long collaboration with fellow linguist Louis Petit de Julleville and produced the first volume of his monumental History, dealing with medieval French. It would eventually stretch to nine volumes published in his lifetime, and 13 volumes altogether.
Go to Profile#14964
A. C. Gimson
1917 - 1985 (68 years)
Alfred Charles "Gim" Gimson was an English phonetician. Life Gimson was educated at Emanuel School London, and University College London, where later in 1966 he became Professor of Phonetics, and in 1971 head of the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics.
Go to Profile#14965
Charles Bally
1865 - 1947 (82 years)
Charles Bally was a Swiss linguist from the Geneva School. He lived from 1865 to 1947 and was, like Ferdinand de Saussure, from Switzerland. His parents were Jean Gabriel, a teacher, and Henriette, the owner of a cloth store. Bally was married three times: first to Valentine Leirens, followed by Irma Baptistine Doutre, who was sent into a mental institution in 1915, and finally with Alice Bellicot. In addition to his edition of de Saussure's lectures, Course in General Linguistics , Charles Bally also played an important role in linguistics.
Go to Profile#14966
Ingolf Dahl
1912 - 1970 (58 years)
Ingolf Dahl was a German-born American composer, pianist, conductor, and educator. Biography Dahl was born Walter Ingolf Marcus in Hamburg, Germany, to a German Jewish father, attorney Paul Marcus, and his Swedish wife Hilda Maria Dahl. He had two brothers, Gert Marcus , and Holger, and one sister Anna-Britta.
Go to Profile#14967
Suniti Kumar Chatterji
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Bhashacharya Acharya Suniti Kumar Chatterjee was an Indian linguist, educationist and litterateur. He was a recipient of the second-highest Indian civilian honour of Padma Vibhushan. Life Childhood Chatterji was born on 26 November 1890 at Shibpur in Howrah. He was the son of Haridas Chattopadhyay, an affluent Bengali Kulin Brahmin. According to the family history, their ancestors were originally residents of a village named chatuti in the Rarh region of present-day West Bengal. During the Turkic invasion of Bengal in the thirteenth century, the Chatterji family left their ancestral village in West Bengal and took shelter in East Bengal.
Go to Profile#14968
Edward Bailey Birge
1868 - 1952 (84 years)
Edward Bailey Birge was a founding member of the Music Supervisors National Conference, which later became the Music Educators National Conference . Birge served as president of the organization from 1910–1911, and also as chairmen of the editorial board for the Music Educators Journal for many years. He originated the "MEJ Clubs" on college campuses that made possible student memberships. Though the clubs, the Journal was used in classes with prospective teachers. This greatly increased the circulation of the magazine. In recognition of his long service to the Journal and to the Conference, the MENC board of directors named him chairman emeritus.
Go to Profile#14969
Arthur Garfield Kennedy
1880 - 1954 (74 years)
Arthur Garfield Kennedy was an American philologist who served as Professor of English at Stanford University from 1914 to 1945. Biography Kennedy was born in Weeping Water, Nebraska on June 29, 1880, and attended Doane College at Crete, Nebraska. He received his master's degree from the University of Nebraska and his doctor's degree from Stanford University. From 1914 to 1945 Kennedy was Professor of English at Stanford University. He was the author of several books on the English language. In 1925 he, with Kemp Malone and Louise Pound, founded the journal American Speech and he was a frequent contributor.
Go to Profile#14970
Norman Cousins
1915 - 1990 (75 years)
Norman Cousins was an American political journalist, author, professor, and world peace advocate. Early life Cousins was born to Jewish immigrant parents Samuel Cousins and Sarah Babushkin Cousins, in West Hoboken, New Jersey . At age 11, he was misdiagnosed with tuberculosis and placed in a sanatorium. Despite this, he was an athletic youth, and he claimed that as a young boy he "set out to discover exuberance."
Go to Profile#14971
David Dowty
David Roach Dowty is a linguist known primarily for his work in semantic and syntactic theory, and especially in Montague grammar and Categorial grammar. Dowty is a professor emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University, and his research interests mainly lie in Semantic and Syntactic Theory, Lexical semantics and Thematic roles, Categorial grammar, and Semantics of Tense and Aspect.
Go to Profile#14972
Henri Ramirez
Henri Ramirez is a French-Brazilian linguist known especially for his research on Arawakan languages and other language families of the Amazonian region. He is currently a professor at the Federal University of Rondônia, Guajará-Mirim.
Go to Profile#14973
George Kingsley Zipf
1902 - 1950 (48 years)
George Kingsley Zipf , was an American linguist and philologist who studied statistical occurrences in different languages. Zipf earned his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees from Harvard University, although he also studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin. He was chairman of the German department and university lecturer at Harvard University. He worked with Chinese and demographics, and much of his effort can explain properties of the Internet, distribution of income within nations, and many other collections of data.
Go to Profile#14974
Robert Gjerdingen
Robert O. Gjerdingen is a scholar of music theory and music perception, and is an emeritus professor at Northwestern University. His most influential work focuses on the application of ideas from cognitive science, especially theories about schemas, as an analytical tool in an attempted "archaeology" of style and composition methods in galant European music of the eighteenth century. Gjerdingen received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 after studying with Leonard B. Meyer and Eugene Narmour. His 2007 book Music in the Galant Style, an authoritative study on galant schemata, ...
Go to Profile#14975
Roland Grubb Kent
1877 - 1952 (75 years)
Roland Grubb Kent was an American educator and a founder of the Linguistic Society of America . He was the first person to translate Marcus Terentius Varro's De Lingua Latina into English. Ken's 1903 doctoral thesis on the history of Thessaly traces the history of the country with particular attention to the times between 600 and 300 BC. Unfortunately, only Chapter V and two appendices were published, and the bulk of his dissertation is currently lost. His Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon is one of the seminal works on the subject.
Go to Profile#14976
Wilbur Schramm
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Wilbur Lang Schramm was a scholar and "authority on mass communications". He founded the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1936 and served as its first director until 1941. Schramm was hugely influential in establishing communications as a field of study in the United States, and the establishing of departments of communication studies across U.S. universities. Wilbur Schramm is considered the founder of the field of Communication Studies. He was the first individual to identify himself as a communication scholar; he created the first academic degree-granting programs with communication in their name; and he trained the first generation of communication scholars.
Go to Profile#14977
Gerhard Scholz
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Gerhard Scholz was a German university professor and writer. The focus of his work was on Philology, German language and culture and literary history. Life Gerhard Scholz was born early in the twentieth century at Liegnitz, a mid-sized city in Lower Silesia. His father was a teacher. He passed his school leaving exams in 1924 and embarked on an extended period of university-level study at Tübingen, Heidelberg, Berlin and Breslau. Subjects addressed included German studies, History, Art history and the History of religions. In 1932 he joined the Tertiary Education Service as a Referendary. Af...
Go to Profile#14978
Morris Swadesh
1909 - 1967 (58 years)
Morris Swadesh was an American linguist who specialized in comparative and historical linguistics. Swadesh was born in Massachusetts to Bessarabian Jewish immigrant parents. He completed bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Chicago, studying under Edward Sapir, and then followed Sapir to Yale University where he completed a Ph.D. in 1933. Swadesh taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1937 to 1939, and then during World War II worked on projects with the United States Army and Office of Strategic Services. He became a professor at the City College of New York after the war's end, but was fired in 1949 due to his membership in the Communist Party.
Go to Profile#14979
Vallabh Sambamurthy
Vallabh Sambamurthy is the Albert O. Nicholas Dean of the Wisconsin School of Business of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Education Vallabh Sambamurthy received his Bachelor of Engineering with honors in mechanical engineering from National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli in 1981. He received his Post Graduate Diploma in Management from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta in 1983 and Doctorate of Philosophy degree from Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota.
Go to Profile#14980
Benn Konsynski
Benn Konsynski has been the George S. Craft Distinguished University Professor of Information Systems and Operations Management at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University since 1994. Previously, he spent six years on the faculty at the Harvard Business School, where he taught in the MBA program and several executive programs. He also served as professor at the University of Arizona, where he was a co-founder of the university's multimillion-dollar group decision support laboratory. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University. He did a dissertation on "Computer Aided Logical Applications Software Design" under advisors Jay Frank Nunamaker, Jr.
Go to Profile#14981
Raven I. McDavid Jr.
1911 - 1984 (73 years)
Raven Ioor McDavid Jr. was an American linguist who specialized in dialectology. His works include The Structure of American English, Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States, The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States , and the 1963 single-volume edition of H. L. Mencken's The American Language.
Go to Profile#14982
Joshua Whatmough
1897 - 1964 (67 years)
Joshua Whatmough was an English linguist, professor, and writer from Rochdale, Lancashire who served as the president of the Linguistics Society of America in 1951. He was also the chairman of the department of linguistics at Harvard University from 1926 to his retirement in 1963. He studied comparative philology and classics at the University of Manchester and the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#14983
Pierre Chantraine
1899 - 1974 (75 years)
Pierre Louis Chantraine was a French linguist. He was born in Lille and died in Paris. A student of, among others, Antoine Meillet, Joseph Vendryes and Paul Mazon, Chantraine became one of the most renowned authorities on Ancient Greek philology of his generation. After teaching at the University of Lyon between 1925 and 1928, he became Directeur d'études de philologie grecque at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris, and also taught at the Sorbonne from 1938, continuing in both functions until his retirement in 1969. For the Collection des Universités de France, he edited and translated Xenophon and Arrian .
Go to Profile#14984
Edgar Howard Sturtevant
1875 - 1952 (77 years)
Edgar Howard Sturtevant was an American linguist. Biography Sturtevant was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, the older brother of Alfred Sturtevant and grandson of educator Julian Monson Sturtevant. He studied at Illinois College, where his grandfather was president, and obtained an A.B. from Indiana University, then the University of Chicago receiving there in 1901 a Ph.D. with a dissertation on Latin case forms. He became an assistant professor of classical philology at Columbia University before joining the linguistics faculty at Yale University in 1923. In 1924, he was a member of the organizing committee for the founding, with Leonard Bloomfield and George M.
Go to Profile#14985
Hans Kurath
1891 - 1992 (101 years)
Hans Kurath was an American linguist of Austrian origin. He was full professor for English and Linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The many varieties of regional English that he encountered during his trips convinced him of the necessity of completing a systematic study of American English.
Go to Profile#14986
Mario Pei
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Mario Andrew Pei was an Italian-born American linguist and polyglot who wrote a number of popular books known for their accessibility to readers without a professional background in linguistics. His book The Story of Language was acclaimed for its presentation of technical linguistics concepts in ways that were entertaining and accessible to a general audience.
Go to Profile#14987
Albert C. Baugh
1891 - 1981 (90 years)
Albert Croll Baugh was a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, best known as the author of a textbook for History of the English language . His A History of the English Language was first published in 1935 and praised as "worthy to take a place with the other great histories of single languages". It was revised by Baugh for a second edition published in 1957 and it remains in print, edited by Thomas Cable .
Go to Profile#14988
Clement Martyn Doke
1893 - 1980 (87 years)
Clement Martyn Doke was a South African linguist working mainly on African languages. Realizing that the grammatical structures of Bantu languages are quite different from those of European languages, he was one of the first African linguists of his time to abandon the Euro-centric approach to language description for a more locally grounded one. A most prolific writer, he published a string of grammars, several dictionaries, comparative work, and a history of Bantu linguistics.
Go to Profile#14989
Elizabeth Wiskemann
1899 - 1971 (72 years)
Elizabeth Meta Wiskemann was an English journalist and historian of Anglo-German ancestry. She was an intelligence officer in World War II, and the Montagu Burton Chair in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#14990
Hans Krahe
1898 - 1965 (67 years)
Hans Krahe was a German philologist and linguist, specializing over many decades in the Illyrian languages. He was born in Gelsenkirchen. Work Between 1936 and 1946 he was a professor at the University of Würzburg, where he founded the Archiv für die Gewässernamen Deutschlands in 1942. Between 1947 and 1949 he held a chair at Heidelberg and from 1949 to the time of his death he was Professor für vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft und Slavistik and Leiter des indologischen und slavischen Seminars in the University of Tübingen.
Go to Profile#14991
Ernst Krenek
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Ernst Heinrich Krenek was an Austrian, later American, composer. He explored atonality and other modern styles and wrote a number of books, including Music Here and Now , a study of Johannes Ockeghem , and Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music . Krenek wrote two pieces using the pseudonym Thornton Winsloe.
Go to Profile#14992
T. F. O'Rahilly
1882 - 1953 (71 years)
Thomas Francis O'Rahilly was an influential Irish scholar of the Celtic languages, particularly in the fields of historical linguistics and Irish dialects. He was a member of the Royal Irish Academy and died in Dublin in 1953. He is the creator of O'Rahilly's historical model, which has since been discredited.
Go to Profile#14993
Roger Fulford
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Sir Roger Thomas Baldwin Fulford was an English journalist, historian, writer and politician. In the 1930s, he completed the editing of the standard edition of the diaries of Charles Greville. From the 1930s to the 1960s, he wrote several important biographies and other works. Between 1964 and 1981 he edited five volumes of letters between Queen Victoria and the Princess Royal. He was President of the Liberal Party from 1964 to 1965.
Go to Profile#14994
Yechezkel Kutscher
1909 - 1971 (62 years)
Edward Yechezkel Kutscher or Yechezkel Kutscher was an Israeli philologist and Hebrew linguist. Biography Kutscher was born in 1909 in Topoľčany, Slovakia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied at the yeshiva in his home town and, later, in Frankfurt. In 1931 he emigrated to Mandatory Palestine and continued with his studies at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva and at a Mizrachi Movement teachers seminary. For several years subsequently, he taught at various schools in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#14995
Tadeusz Lehr-Spławiński
1891 - 1965 (74 years)
Tadeusz Lehr-Spławiński was a Polish linguist, scholar, and professor of Slavonic studies. He was twice elected rector of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków before and after the Nazi German occupation of Poland.
Go to Profile#14996
Witold Taszycki
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Witold Taszycki was a Polish linguist. He specialized in Polish onomastics and historical dialectology. Life and career Taszycki was born on 20 June 1898 in Zagórzany, Austria-Hungary. Between 1917 and 1921, he was a student of Polish and Slavic philology at Jagiellonian University, where he started to work as an assistant after defending his doctorate in 1922. He received his postdoctoral degree in 1925. He was employed as a lecturer at Stefan Batory University of Wilno and awarded a professorship at Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów . He remained in Lwów after the outbreak of World War II ...
Go to Profile#14997
Charles Otto Blagden
1864 - 1949 (85 years)
Charles Otto Blagden was an English Orientalist and linguist who specialised in the Malay, Mon and Pyu languages. He is particularly known for his studies of Burmese epigraphic inscriptions in the Mon and Pyu scripts.
Go to Profile#14998
George Stanley Turnbull
1882 - 1977 (95 years)
George Stanley Turnbull was an English-American scholar and educator. He began a career of newspaper work in 1894 and helped found the University of Oregon School of Journalism in 1917, later serving as acting dean and, from 1944 to 1948, as dean. He founded and edited Oregon Exchanges, a newspaper for Oregon's "newspaper folk," which was at least initially produced by students at the School of Journalism.
Go to Profile#14999
Hjalmar Frisk
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Hjalmar Frisk was a Swedish linguist and etymologist in Indo-European studies. He was also rector of the University of Göteborg from 1951 to 1966. Early on, he became interested in Indo-European studies. Thus, as early as 1927, he published a translation of the historical account The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written in Greek under the title Περίπλους τῆς Ἐρυθρᾶς θαλάσσης.
Go to Profile#15000
David Dodge Boyden
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
David Dodge Boyden was an American musicologist and violinist specializing in organology and performance practice. Education Boyden received a BA and MA from Harvard University; he also studied at Columbia University and Hartt School of Music .
Go to Profile