Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

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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,

#14951

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.

#14952

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...

#14953

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.

#14954

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...

#14955

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.

#14956

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.

#14957

Maurice Chevalier

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.

#14958

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.

#14959

César Chesneau Dumarsais

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.

#14960

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.

#14961

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.

#14962

Vsevolod Pudovkin

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.

#14963

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.

#14964

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...

#14965

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 .

#14966

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.

#14967

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.

#14968

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.

#14969

Carl Marstrander

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.

#14970

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.”

#14971

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.

#14972

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.

#14973

Wakamatsu Shizuko

Wakamatsu Shizuko

1864 - 1896 (32 years)

Wakamatsu Shizuko was a Japanese educator, translator, and novelist best known for translating Little Lord Fauntleroy written by Frances Hodgson Burnett. She is also known for introducing literature with Christianity for children's novels.

#14974

Barbu Solacolu

1897 - 1976 (79 years)

Barbu Solacolu was a Romanian poet, translator, civil servant and social scientist. Born into a prosperous and intellectual family, he became a late affiliate of the Symbolist movement, bringing to it his own leftist sympathies and agrarianism. Despite spending the early stages of World War I among non-interventionists such as Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești and Ioan Slavici, he eventually servd with distinctions as a cavalry commander, and also participated in the Hungarian–Romanian War. Solacolu trained as an economist in Weimar Germany, returning to serve the Romanian state as a civil servant. He...

#14975

William Castle

1914 - 1977 (63 years)

William Castle was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. Orphaned at 11, Castle dropped out of high school at 15 to work in the theater. He came to the attention of Columbia Pictures for his talent for promotion and was hired. He learned the trade of filmmaking and became a director, acquiring a reputation for being able to churn out competent B-movies quickly and on budget. He eventually struck out on his own, producing and directing thrillerss, which, despite their low budgets, he effectively promoted using gimmicks, a trademark for which he is best known. He was als...

#14976

Tim Hardin

1941 - 1980 (39 years)

James Timothy Hardin was an American folk and blues songwriter. As well as releasing his own material, several of his songs, including "If I Were a Carpenter" and "Reason to Believe", became hits for other artists.

#14977

Johnnie Ray

1927 - 1990 (63 years)

John Alvin Ray was an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. Highly popular for most of the 1950s, Ray has been cited by critics as a major precursor to what became rock and roll, for his jazz and blues-influenced music, and his animated stage personality. Tony Bennett called Ray the "father of rock and roll", and historians have noted him as a pioneering figure in the development of the genre.

#14978

P. L. Travers

1899 - 1996 (97 years)

Pamela Lyndon Travers was an Australian-British writer who spent most of her career in England. She is best known for the Mary Poppins series of books, which feature the eponymous magical nanny. Goff was born in Maryborough, Queensland, and grew up in the Australian bush before being sent to boarding school in Sydney. Her writing was first published when she was a teenager, and she also worked briefly as a professional Shakespearean actress. Upon emigrating to England at the age of 24, she took the name "Pamela Lyndon Travers" and adopted the pen name P. L. Travers in 1933 while writing the ...

#14979

Henri Vieuxtemps

Henri Vieuxtemps

1820 - 1881 (61 years)

Henri François Joseph Vieuxtemps was a Belgian composer and violinist. He occupies an important place in the history of the violin as a prominent exponent of the Franco-Belgian violin school during the mid-19th century. He is also known for playing what is now known as the Vieuxtemps Guarneri del Gesù, a violin of superior workmanship.

#14980

Jean Painlevé

1902 - 1989 (87 years)

Jean Painlevé was a photographer and filmmaker who specialized in underwater fauna. He was the son of mathematician and twice prime minister of France Paul Painlevé. Upbringing A few days after Painlevé was born, his mother, Marguerite Petit de Villeneuve, died from complications arising from an infection contracted during childbirth. Painlevé, an only son, was raised by his father's sister Marie, a widow.

#14981

Beniamino Gigli

Beniamino Gigli

1890 - 1957 (67 years)

Beniamino Gigli was an Italian opera singer . He is widely regarded as one of the greatest tenors of his generation. Early life Gigli was born in Recanati, in the Marche, the son of a shoemaker who loved opera. His parents did not, however, view music as a secure career. Beniamino's brother Lorenzo became a well-known painter.

#14982

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco

1895 - 1968 (73 years)

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was an Italian composer, pianist and writer. He was known as one of the foremost guitar composers in the twentieth century with almost one hundred compositions for that instrument. In 1939 he immigrated to the United States and became a film composer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for some 200 Hollywood movies for the next fifteen years. He also wrote concertos for Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky.

#14983

Shelly Manne

1920 - 1984 (64 years)

Sheldon "Shelly" Manne was an American jazz drummer. Most frequently associated with West Coast jazz, he was known for his versatility and also played in a number of other styles, including Dixieland, swing, bebop, avant-garde jazz, and later fusion. He also contributed to the musical background of hundreds of Hollywood films and television programs.

#14984

Michael Chekhov

Michael Chekhov

1891 - 1955 (64 years)

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Chekhov , known as Michael Chekhov, was a Russian-American actor, director, author, and theatre practitioner. He was a nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov and a student of Konstantin Stanislavski. Stanislavski referred to him as his most brilliant student.

#14985

René Binet

1732 - 1812 (80 years)

René Binet was a French professor and translator. He was born near Beauvais and became professor of rhetoric at the collège du Plessis, rector of the Université de Paris in 1791, then proviseur of the lycée Bonaparte.

#14986

Felix Weingartner

1863 - 1942 (79 years)

Paul Felix Weingartner, Edler von Münzberg was an Austrian conductor, composer and pianist. Life and career Weingartner was born in Zara, Dalmatia, Austrian Empire , to Austrian parents. The family moved to Graz in 1868, and his father died later that year. He studied with Wilhelm Mayer . In 1881 he went to Leipzig to study philosophy, but soon devoted himself entirely to music, entering the Conservatory in 1883 and studying in Weimar as one of Franz Liszt's last pupils. Liszt helped produce the world premiere of Weingartner's opera Sakuntala in 1884 with the Weimar orchestra. According to L...

#14987

Lili Boulanger

1893 - 1918 (25 years)

Marie-Juliette Olga "Lili" Boulanger was a French composer and the first female winner of the Prix de Rome composition prize. Her older sister was the noted composer and composition teacher Nadia Boulanger.

#14988

Richard Long

Richard Long was an American sound designer. He is known as the preeminent sound designer of the disco era, having installed systems at clubs including Paradise Garage, Dorian Gray, Studio 54, City Hall, and Max's Kansas City.

#14989

William Penny

1809 - 1892 (83 years)

Captain William Penny was a Scottish shipmaster, whaler and Arctic explorer. He undertook the first maritime search for the ships of Sir John Franklin. In 1840, Penny established the first whaling station in the Cumberland Sound area on Kekerten Island.

#14990

Daniel Adam z Veleslavína

Daniel Adam z Veleslavína

1546 - 1599 (53 years)

Daniel Adam z Veleslavína , was a Czech lexicographer, publisher, translator, and writer. Adam Veleslavín studied at the University of Prague, and from 1569 to 1576 he was professor there. When he married the daughter of the publisher Jiří Melantrich z Aventina , he was forced to leave the university . He started working at the print press and later took it over.

#14991

Sylvester Primer

1842 - 1913 (71 years)

Sylvester Primer was an American linguist and philologist known for his pioneering work in 1887 on the dialect of the European-American residents of Charleston, South Carolina. He published language studies in both English and German, and an 1880 work in German was reprinted in 2010. He also published several annotated scholarly editions of important German-language and Spanish-language dramas from the 18th and 19th centuries. He taught for more than 20 years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also headed the Romance language department as well as a new German-language department.

#14992

Betty Compson

1897 - 1974 (77 years)

Betty Compson was an American actress and film producer who got her start during Hollywood's silent era. She is best known for her performances in The Docks of New York and The Barker, the latter of which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

#14993

Johann Kaspar Zeuss

Johann Kaspar Zeuss

1806 - 1856 (50 years)

Johann Kaspar Zeuss was a German historian and founder of Celtic philology. He is credited with demonstrating that the Celtic languages belong to the Indo-European group. Life Zeuss was born in Kronach, Upper Franconia, and studied at the gymnasium of Bamberg. His parents wished him to enter the priesthood, but he chose a scholarly career, inclining particularly to historical and linguistic studies. He entered the University of Munich and after graduating, taught at the gymnasium there. In 1837 his book Die Herkunft der Baiern von den Markomannen , which brought him an honorary PhD from the University of Erlangen.

#14994

Son House

1902 - 1988 (86 years)

Edward James "Son" House Jr. was an American Delta blues singer and guitarist, noted for his highly emotional style of singing and slide guitar playing. After years of hostility to secular music, as a preacher and for a few years also working as a church pastor, he turned to blues performance at the age of 25. He quickly developed a unique style by applying the rhythmic drive, vocal power and emotional intensity of his preaching to the newly learned idiom. In a short career interrupted by a spell in Parchman Farm penitentiary, he developed his musicianship to the point that Charley Patton, th...

#14995

Felix Hirsch

1902 - 1982 (80 years)

Felix Eduard Hirsch was a journalist for the Berliner Tageblatt and latterly; historian, librarian and professor at Bard College in New York. As a journalist in Berlin, Hirsch was involved in the infamous libel case of Kurt Soelling.

#14996

William Boyce

1711 - 1779 (68 years)

William Boyce was an English composer and organist. Like Beethoven later on, he became deaf but continued to compose. He knew Handel, Arne, Gluck, Bach, Abel, and a very young Mozart, all of whom respected his work.

#14997

Tex Ritter

$Tex Ritter$

1905 - 1974 (69 years)

Woodward Maurice "Tex" Ritter was a pioneer of American country music, a popular singer and actor from the mid-1930s into the 1960s, and the patriarch of the Ritter acting family . He is a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame.

#14998

Johann Friedrich Reichardt

Johann Friedrich Reichardt

1752 - 1814 (62 years)

Johann Friedrich Reichardt was a German composer, writer and music critic. Early life Reichardt was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, to lutenist and Stadtmusiker Johann Reichardt . Johann Friedrich began his musical training, in violin, keyboard, and lute, as a child. He was a student of Timofey Belogradsky, who in turn was a student of Sylvius Leopold Weiss. When Reichardt was ten years old, his father took the choir in which he sang, the "Wunderknaben", on a concert tour in East Prussia.

#14999

Alexander Freiman

1879 - 1968 (89 years)

Alexander Arnoldovich Freiman was a Polish-Soviet researcher of the Iranian languages. Literary works The editor of Sogdiysky sbornik, 1934Zadachi iranskoy filologii, 1946Chorezmsky yazyk. Materially i issledovaniya, 1959Osetinsko-russko-nemetsky slovar, 3 vols., 1927–1934

#15000

Chris Wood

1944 - 1983 (39 years)

Christopher Gordon Blandford Wood was a British rock musician, best known as a founding member of the rock band Traffic, along with Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi and Dave Mason. Career Born in Quinton, a suburb of Birmingham, Chris Wood had an interest in music and painting from early childhood. Self-taught on flute and saxophone, which he began playing at the age of 15, he began to play locally with other Birmingham musicians who would later find international fame in music: Christine Perfect , Carl Palmer, Stan Webb and Mike Kellie. Wood played with Perfect in 1964 in the band Shades of Blue a...

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