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,

#15001

Leif Erickson

1911 - 1986 (75 years)

Leif Erickson was an American stage, film, and television actor. Early life Erickson was born in Alameda, California, near San Francisco. He worked as a soloist in a band as vocalist and trombone player, performed in Max Reinhardt's productions, and then gained a small amount of stage experience in a comedy vaudeville act. Initially billed by Paramount Pictures as Glenn Erickson, he began his screen career as a leading man in Westerns.

#15002

Edwin Maxwell

1886 - 1948 (62 years)

Edwin Maxwell was an Irish character actor in Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s, frequently cast as businessmen and shysters, though often ones with a pompous or dignified bearing. Prior to that, he was an actor on the Broadway stage and a director of plays.

#15003

Billy West

1892 - 1975 (83 years)

Billy West was a silent film actor, producer, and director. Active during the silent film era, he is best known as a semi-successful Charlie Chaplin impersonator. Beyond acting, he also directed shorts in the 1910s and 20s, as well as produced films. West ultimately retired in 1935.

#15004

Allen Collins

1952 - 1990 (38 years)

Larkin Allen Collins Jr. was an American guitarist, and one of the founding members of the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. He co-wrote many of the band's songs with frontman and original lead singer Ronnie Van Zant.

#15005

Ebenezer Prout

1835 - 1909 (74 years)

Ebenezer Prout was an English musical theorist, writer, music teacher and composer, whose instruction, afterwards embodied in a series of standard works still used today, underpinned the work of many British classical musicians of succeeding generations.

#15006

George Henschel

George Henschel

1850 - 1934 (84 years)

Sir Isidor George Henschel was a German-born British baritone, pianist, conductor, composer and academic teacher. First trained as a pianist, he was a concert singer who sometimes sang to his own accompaniment. He was a close friend of Johannes Brahms. His first wife Lillian was also a singer. He was the first conductor of both the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. He taught at the Institute of Musical Art in New York City.

#15007

Harold Bauer

1873 - 1951 (78 years)

Harold Victor Bauer was an English-born pianist of Jewish heritage who began his musical career as a violinist. Biography Harold Bauer was born in Kingston upon Thames; his father was a German violinist and his mother was English. He took up the study of the violin under the direction of his father and Adolf Pollitzer. He made his debut as a violinist in London in 1883, and for nine years toured England. In 1892, however, he went to Paris and studied the piano under Ignacy Jan Paderewski for a year, though still maintaining his interest in the violin. An anecdote reports that Paderewski jokingly told Bauer to concentrate on the piano because "You have such beautiful hair".

#15008

Woody Shaw

1944 - 1989 (45 years)

Woody Herman Shaw Jr. was an American jazz trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer, arranger, band leader, and educator. Shaw is widely known as one of the most important and influential jazz trumpeters and composers of the twentieth century. He is often credited with revolutionizing the technical and harmonic language of modern jazz trumpet playing, and to this day is regarded by many as one of the major innovators of the instrument. He was an acclaimed virtuoso, mentor, and spokesperson for jazz and worked and recorded alongside many of the leading musicians of his time.

#15009

George Chandler

George Chandler

1898 - 1985 (87 years)

George Chandler was an American actor who starred in over 140 feature films, usually in smaller supporting roles, and he is perhaps best known for playing the character of Uncle Petrie Martin on the television series Lassie, and as the unfortunate young man who drank The Fatal Glass of Beer in a 1933 short comedy starring W.C. Fields.

#15010

Jimmy Maelen

1940 - 1988 (48 years)

Jimmy Maelen was an American percussionist from the 1960s to 1980s, who worked with many artists including Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry, Peter Gabriel, James Taylor, Dire Straits, Barry Manilow, Alice Cooper, Kiss, Madonna, Bryan Adams, Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, David Bowie and John Lennon. He also played on hit records by Bob James, Duran Duran, Carly Simon, Barbra Streisand, Yoko Ono, Meatloaf, Alice Cooper, BJ Thomas, and many others.

#15011

Big Mama Thornton

1926 - 1984 (58 years)

Willie Mae Thornton , better known as Big Mama Thornton because of her height and weight , was an American singer and songwriter of the blues and R&B. She was the first to record Leiber and Stoller's "Hound Dog", in 1952, which was written for her and became her biggest hit, staying seven weeks at number one on the Billboard R&B chart in 1953. According to Maureen Mahon, a music professor at New York University, "the song is seen as an important beginning of rock-and-roll, especially in its use of the guitar as the key instrument".

#15012

Tubby Hayes

1935 - 1973 (38 years)

Edward Brian "Tubby" Hayes was an English jazz multi-instrumentalist, best known for his virtuosic musicianship on tenor saxophone and for performing in jazz groups with fellow sax player Ronnie Scott and trumpeter Jimmy Deuchar. He is widely considered to be one of the finest jazz saxophonists to have emerged from Britain.

#15013

Philippe Sarchi

1764 - 1830 (66 years)

François Philippe Sarchi originally Samuel Morpurgo, born in Gradisca d'Isonzo in Italy in 1764 and died in Paris in 1830, was a lawyer, linguist, philologist of Illyrian origin, specializing in Italian and Hebrew.

#15014

Ernest Bullock

1890 - 1979 (89 years)

Sir Ernest Bullock was an English organist, composer, and teacher. He was organist of Exeter Cathedral from 1917 to 1928 and of Westminster Abbey from 1928 to 1941. In the latter post he was jointly responsible for the music at the coronation of George VI in 1937.

#15015

Kurt Edelhagen

1920 - 1982 (62 years)

Kurt Edelhagen was a German big band leader. He was born in Herne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Edelhagen studied conducting and piano in Essen. In 1945, he started a trio, then a big band a year later. He performed on the radio station in Frankfurt am Main, then for three years beginning in 1949 led the Bayerischer Rundfunk in Nuremberg. From 1952 to 1957 he led the Südwestfunk big band. In 1954, he participated in the Concerto for jazz band and orchestra by Rolf Libermann. Three years later, he began leading the radio station Westdeutscher Rundfunk big band in Cologne. Members included Dusko Goykovich and Jiggs Whigham.

#15016

John David Loder

1788 - 1846 (58 years)

John David Loder was an English violinist. He was a member of a musical family in Bath, Somerset; his career, beginning in Bath, developed beyond the city and he was later a professor of the violin at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

#15017

Mukesh

1923 - 1976 (53 years)

Mukesh Chand Mathur , better known mononymously as Mukesh, was an Indian playback singer. Mukesh is considered to be one of the most popular and acclaimed playback singers of the Hindi film industry. Amongst the numerous nominations and awards he won, his song "Kai Baar Yuhi Dekha Hai" from the film Rajnigandha won him the National Film Award for Best Male Playback Singer.

#15018

Will Earhart

1871 - 1960 (89 years)

Will Earhart was a pioneering American music educator. Overview Born in Franklin, Ohio, Earhart studied violin, piano, counterpoint and harmony. He began teaching in Miamisburg, Ohio and later became music supervisor in the public schools of Greenville, Ohio.

#15019

H. B. Warner

1875 - 1958 (83 years)

Henry Byron Warner was an English film and theatre actor. He was popular during the silent era and played Jesus Christ in The King of Kings. In later years, he successfully moved into supporting roles and appeared in numerous films directed by Frank Capra. Warner's most recognizable role to modern audiences is Mr. Gower in It's a Wonderful Life, directed by Capra. He appeared in the original 1937 version of Lost Horizon as Chang, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

#15020

Michael Wilson

1914 - 1978 (64 years)

Michael Wilson was an American screenwriter. Life and career Early life Wilson was born and raised Roman Catholic in McAlester, Oklahoma. He graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1936 and did post-graduate fellowship work between 1937 and 1939. He taught English and began his writing career with short stories for magazines. Then, starting in 1941, he wrote or co-wrote 22 screenplays.

#15021

Henry Levin

1909 - 1980 (71 years)

#15022

Gustav Ucicky

1898 - 1961 (63 years)

Gustav Ucicky was an Austrian film director, screenwriter, and cinematographer. He was one of the more successful directors in Austria and Germany from the 1930s through to the early 1960s. His work covered a wide variety of genres, but he is most acclaimed for his work in romantic drama and drama films.

#15023

Bronisław Kaper

1902 - 1983 (81 years)

Bronisław Kaper was a Polish film composer who scored films and musical theater in Germany, France, and the USA. The American immigration authorities misspelled his name as Bronislau Kaper. He was also variously credited as Bronislaw Kaper, Bronislaw Kapper, Benjamin Kapper, and Edward Kane.

#15024

Fernandel

1903 - 1971 (68 years)

Fernand Joseph Désiré Contandin , better known as Fernandel, was a French comic actor. Born near Marseille, France, to Désirée Bedouin and Denis Contandin, originating in Perosa Argentina, an Occitan town located in the province of Turin, Italy, he became a comedy star, first gaining popularity in French vaudeville, operettas, and music-hall revues. His stage name originated from his marriage to Henriette Manse, the sister of his best friend and frequent cinematic collaborator Jean Manse. So attentive was he to his wife that his mother-in-law amusingly referred to him as Fernand d'elle .

#15025

Antony of Tagrit

801 - 900 (99 years)

Anthony of Tagrit was a 9th-century West Syrian Syriac theologian and rhetor. Anthony was based in Tagrit and is best remembered for his contribution to Syriac literature. One of his few surviving works The Book of the Rhetoric was translated to several languages including English.

#15026

Reginald Barker

Reginald Barker

1886 - 1945 (59 years)

Reginald C. Barker was a pioneer film director. Biography Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Barker's family moved to Scotland when he was an infant and then to the United States. Living in California, Barker wrote, produced, and acted in his first play known as Granna Uile at the age of sixteen following which he acted and handled stage manager duties with a traveling stock company. When he was eighteen he was the leading man and played in many stock companies. Then he worked with Robert Hilliard in the production of the play named A Fool There Was. At age nineteen, he went to New York City where he worked as a stage manager for Henry Miller.

#15027

Paul Gonsalves

1920 - 1974 (54 years)

Paul Gonsalves was an American jazz tenor saxophonist best known for his association with Duke Ellington. At the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, Gonsalves played a 27-chorus solo in the middle of Ellington's "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," a performance credited with revitalizing Ellington's waning career in the 1950s.

#15028

Doris Lloyd

1896 - 1968 (72 years)

Hessy Doris Lloyd was an English–American film and stage actress. She is perhaps best known for her roles in The Time Machine and The Sound of Music . Lloyd appeared in two Academy Award winners and four other nominees.

#15029

Bert Berns

1929 - 1967 (38 years)

Bertrand Russell Berns , also known as Bert Russell and Russell Byrd, was an American songwriter and record producer of the 1960s. His songwriting credits include "Twist and Shout", "Piece of My Heart", "Here Comes the Night", "Hang on Sloopy", "Cry to Me" and "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", and his productions include "Baby, Please Don't Go", "Brown Eyed Girl" and "Under the Boardwalk".

#15030

Vladimir Bakaleinikov

1885 - 1953 (68 years)

Vladimir Romanovich Bakaleinikov, also Bakaleynikov and Bakaleinikoff was a Russian-American violist, music educator, conductor and composer. Life and career Bakaleinikov, the son of a noted clarinetist, was from a large musical family who lived in poverty. His elder brother was flautist, composer and conductor Nikolai Bakaleinikov , his younger brothers, both composers, were Mikhail Bakaleinikoff and Constantin Bakaleinikoff . "My father earned very little. We children helped him by playing at weddings, in restaurants, giving lessons, and later concertizing. We did not refuse any type of work.

#15031

Nada Klaić

1920 - 1988 (68 years)

Nada Klaić was a Croatian historian. She was a Croatian medievalist of the 20th century. A substantial part of the work was devoted to criticism of medieval sources. Academic career Nada Klaić was born in Zagreb, the granddaughter of the historian Vjekoslav Klaić and sister of landscape architect Smiljan Klaić. She was a university professor and a prominent Croatian medievalist, graduated at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb, the same faculty where she was involved in teaching for 45 years. She started her teaching and scientific career at the faculty's Department of History in 1943, to become a full professor of the Croatian medieval history in 1969.

#15032

Barry Gray

1908 - 1984 (76 years)

Barry Gray was a British musician and composer best known for his collaborations with television and film producer Gerry Anderson. Life and career Born into a musical family in Blackburn, Lancashire, Gray was encouraged to pursue a musical career from an early age. Starting at the age of five – with piano lessons – he studied diligently and became a student at the Manchester Royal College of Music and at Blackburn Cathedral. He studied composition under the Hungarian born émigré composer Matyas Seiber. Gray's first professional job was for B. Feldman & Co. in London, where he gained experience in scoring for theatre and variety orchestras.

#15033

Joseph Marx

1882 - 1964 (82 years)

Joseph Rupert Rudolf Marx was an Austrian composer, teacher and critic. Life and career Marx was born in Graz and pursued studies in philosophy, art history, German studies, and music at Graz University, earning several degrees including a doctorate in 1909. His thesis was an expansion of a 1907 scholarly study of tonality, in which he coined the term "atonality". He began composing seriously in 1908 and over the next four years he produced around 120 songs. In 1914 he joined the faculty of the Vienna Music Academy, later becoming the institution's director in 1922. When the school was reorga...

#15034

Seán Ó Riada

1931 - 1971 (40 years)

Seán Ó Riada , was an Irish composer and arranger of Irish traditional music. Through his incorporation of modern and traditional techniques he became the single most influential figure in the revival of Irish traditional music during the 1960s.

#15035

John English

1903 - 1969 (66 years)

John Wilkinson English was a British film editor and film director. He is most famous for the film serials he co-directed with William Witney for Republic Pictures such as Zorro's Fighting Legion and Drums of Fu Manchu.

#15036

Vittorio Rieti

1898 - 1994 (96 years)

Vittorio Rieti was a Jewish-Italian-American composer. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Rieti moved to Milan to study economics. He subsequently studied music in Rome under Respighi and Casella, and lived there until 1940.

#15037

Henry B. Walthall

Henry B. Walthall

1878 - 1936 (58 years)

Henry Brazeale Walthall was an American stage and film actor. He appeared as the Little Colonel in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation . Early life Henry B. Walthall was born March 16, 1878 on a cotton plantation owned by his father in Shelby County, Alabama. His father Junius Leigh Walthall had been a captain in the Confederate States Army. His sister, Anna Mae Walthall had a film career in the 1920s.

#15038

Joseph Parry

1841 - 1903 (62 years)

Joseph Parry was a Welsh composer and musician. Born in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, he is best known as the composer of "Myfanwy" and the hymn tune "Aberystwyth". Parry was also the first Welshman to compose an opera; his composition, Blodwen, was the first opera in the Welsh language.

#15039

Sergei Gerasimov

1906 - 1985 (79 years)

Sergei Appolinarievich Gerasimov was a Soviet film director and screenwriter. The oldest film school in the world, the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography , bears his name. Early life and education Gerasimov was born on 21 May 1906.

#15040

Charlie Rouse

1924 - 1988 (64 years)

Charlie Rouse was an American hard bop tenor saxophonist and flautist. His career is marked by his collaboration with Thelonious Monk, which lasted for more than ten years. Biography Rouse was born in Washington, D.C., United States. At first he worked with the clarinet, before turning to the tenor saxophone.

#15041

Isaac Rülf

1831 - 1902 (71 years)

Isaac Rülf was a Jewish teacher, journalist and philosopher. He became widely known for his aid work and as a prominent early Zionist. Rülf was born in Rauischholzhausen, Hesse, Germany. He received a teaching certificate in 1849, became an assistant to the county rabbi and then taught in other small communities. He received his rabbinical certificate in 1854 from the University of Marburg and his Ph.D in 1865 at the University of Rostock. That year he became the rabbi of Memel, East Prussia.

#15042

Willie "The Lion" Smith

Willie "The Lion" Smith

1897 - 1973 (76 years)

William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholf Smith , nicknamed "The Lion", was an American jazz and stride pianist. Early life William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholf, known as Willie, was born in 1893 in Goshen, New York. His mother and grandmother chose his names to reflect different parts of his heritage: Joseph after Saint Joseph , Bonaparte , and Bertholf . William and Henry which were added for "spiritual balance". When he was three, his mother married John Smith, and Smith was added as the boy's surname, after his stepfather.

#15043

J. Warren Kerrigan

J. Warren Kerrigan

1879 - 1947 (68 years)

George Jack Warren Kerrigan was an American silent film actor and film director. Controversy In May 1917, Kerrigan was nearing the end of a four-month-long personal appearance publicity tour that had taken him across the United States and into Canada. At one of the final stops, a reporter for The Denver Times asked Kerrigan if he would be joining the war. Kerrigan replied:

#15044

Johann Winter von Andernach

Johann Winter von Andernach

1505 - 1574 (69 years)

Johann Winter von Andernach was a German Renaissance physician, university professor, humanist, translator of ancient, mostly medical works, and writer of his own medical, philological and humanities works.

#15045

Leonard Rose

1918 - 1984 (66 years)

Leonard Joseph Rose was an American cellist and pedagogue. Biography Rose was born in Washington, D.C. His parents were Jewish immigrants, his father from Bragin, Belarus, and his mother from Kyiv, Ukraine. Rose took lessons from Walter Grossman, Frank Miller and Felix Salmond. After completing his studies at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music at age 20, he joined Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra, and almost immediately became associate principal. At 21 he was principal cellist of the Cleveland Orchestra and at 26 became the principal of the New York Philharmonic.

#15046

Machito

1912 - 1984 (72 years)

Machito was a Latin jazz musician who helped refine Afro-Cuban jazz and create both Cubop and salsa music. He was raised in Havana with the singer Graciela, his foster sister. In New York City, Machito formed the Afro-Cubans in 1940, and with Mario Bauzá as musical director, brought together Cuban rhythms and big band arrangements in one group. He made numerous recordings from the 1940s to the 1980s, many with Graciela as singer. Machito changed to a smaller ensemble format in 1975, touring Europe extensively. He brought his son and daughter into the band, and received a Grammy Award in 1983,...

#15047

Blue Mitchell

1930 - 1979 (49 years)

Richard Allen "Blue" Mitchell was an American trumpeter and composer who worked in jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, rock and funk. He recorded albums as leader and sideman for Riverside, Mainstream Records, and Blue Note.

#15048

Anna Papst

#15049

Fred Rose

1898 - 1954 (56 years)

Knowles Fred Rose was an American musician, Hall of Fame songwriter, and music publishing executive. Biography Born in Evansville, Indiana, United States, Rose started playing piano and singing as a small boy. In his teens, he moved to Chicago, Illinois where he worked in bars busking for tips, and finally vaudeville. Eventually, he became successful as a songwriter, penning his first hit for entertainer Sophie Tucker.

#15050

Leo Meyer

1830 - 1910 (80 years)

Leo Karl Heinrich Meyer was a German philologist who spent much of his career in the Governorate of Livonia . Biography He was born at , a village in the present-day district of Hildesheim, near Hanover. He was educated at Göttingen and Berlin, where he was a student of the Brothers Grimm. From 1862 to 1865, he was professor in Göttingen, and in 1865 he became professor of comparative philology at Dorpat . One of his students there was Nikolai Anderson. From 1869 to 1899 he was the president of the Learned Estonian Society. In 1898 he again accepted a chair at Göttingen. He died in Göttingen.

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