The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#15151
Jacob Israël de Haan
1881 - 1924 (43 years)
Jacob Israël de Haan was a Dutch Jewish literary writer, lawyer and journalist who immigrated to Palestine in 1919, and was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1924 by the Zionist paramilitary organization Haganah for his anti-Zionist political activities.
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Louis Jouvet
1887 - 1951 (64 years)
Jules Eugène Louis Jouvet was a French actor, theatre director and filmmaker. Early life Jouvet was born in Crozon. He had a stutter as a young man and originally trained as a pharmacist. He received an advanced degree in pharmacy in 1913, though he never actually practiced, instead pursuing a career in theatre.:91
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Leoš Janáček
1854 - 1928 (74 years)
Leoš Janáček was a Czech composer, musical theorist, folklorist, publicist, and teacher. He was inspired by Moraviann and other Slavic music, including Eastern European folk music, to create an original, modern musical style.
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Johan August Lundell
1851 - 1940 (89 years)
Johan August Lundell was a Swedish linguist, professor of Slavic languages at Uppsala University. He is known for his work on Swedish dialects and for developing Landsmålsalfabetet, a phonetic alphabet used in dialect research.
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Mykola Burachek
1871 - 1942 (71 years)
Mykola Burachek or Buraček , was a Ukrainian Impressionist painter and pedagogue. Biography Burachek studied at the Kiev School of Drawing with Khariton Platonov and with Jan Stanisławski at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts . He also studied in Paris, in the studio of Henri Matisse . His first exhibition was in 1907.
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Reynaldo Hahn
1874 - 1947 (73 years)
Reynaldo Hahn de Echenagucia was a Venezuelan-born French composer, conductor, music critic, and singer. He is best known for his songs – mélodies – of which he wrote more than 100. Hahn was born in Caracas but his family moved to Paris when he was a child, and he lived most of his life there. Following the success of his song "Si mes vers avaient des ailes" , written when he was aged 14, he became a prominent member of fin de siècle French society. Among his closest friends were Sarah Bernhardt and Marcel Proust. After the First World War, in which he served in the army, Hahn adapted to new ...
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Manuel de Falla
1876 - 1946 (70 years)
Manuel de Falla y Matheu was an Andalusian Spanish composer and pianist. Along with Isaac Albéniz, Francisco Tárrega, and Enrique Granados, he was one of Spain's most important musicians of the first half of the 20th century. He has a claim to being Spain's greatest composer of the 20th century, although the number of pieces he composed was relatively modest.
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Jacques Demy
1931 - 1990 (59 years)
Jacques Demy was a French director, lyricist, and screenwriter. He appeared at the height of the French New Wave alongside contemporaries like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Demy's films are celebrated for their visual style, which drew upon diverse sources such as classic Hollywood musicals, the plein-air realism of his French New Wave colleagues, fairy tales, jazz, Japanese manga, and the opera. His films contain overlapping continuity , lush musical scores and motifs like teenage love, labor rights, chance encounters, incest, and the intersection between dreams and reality. He was married to Agnès Varda, another prominent director of the French New Wave.
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Zenobia Camprubí
1887 - 1956 (69 years)
Zenobia Camprubí Aymar was a Spanish-born writer and poet; she was also a noted translator of the works of Rabindranath Tagore. She was born in Malgrat de Mar to a Puerto Rican mother and a Spanish father.
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Alexander Scriabin
1872 - 1915 (43 years)
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and virtuoso pianist. Before 1903, Scriabin was greatly influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin and composed in a relatively tonal, late-Romantic idiom. Later, and independently of his influential contemporary Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed a much more dissonant musical language that had transcended usual tonality but was not atonal, which accorded with his personal brand of metaphysics. Scriabin found significant appeal in the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk as well as synesthesia, and associated colours with the various harmonic tones of his scale, while his colour-coded circle of fifths was also inspired by theosophy.
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Alan S. C. Ross
1907 - 1980 (73 years)
Alan Strode Campbell Ross was a British academic specialising in linguistics. He is best remembered as the ultimate source and inspiration for author Nancy Mitford's "U and non-U" forms of behaviour and language usage as class indicators.
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Helen Hayes
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Helen Hayes MacArthur was an American actress whose career spanned eighty-two years. She eventually received the nickname "First Lady of American Theatre" and was the second person and first woman to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony Award . She was also the first person to win the Triple Crown of Acting. Hayes also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor, from President Ronald Reagan in 1986. In 1988, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
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Aleksandar Teodorov-Balan
1859 - 1959 (100 years)
Aleksandar Stoyanov Teodorov-Balan was a Bulgarian linguist, historian and bibliographer. Balan was born in the village of Kubey in the Russian Empire, today in Odesa Oblast, Ukraine, to a Bessarabian Bulgarian family. The Bulgarian general Georgi Todorov was his brother. Balan studied in Prague and Leipzig graduating in Slavistics from the Charles University in Prague. In 1884 he settled in Sofia, the capital of the Principality of Bulgaria, spending four years working for the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment. He became professor of Slavic ethnography and dialectology and history of the Bul...
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Edward German
1862 - 1936 (74 years)
Sir Edward German was an English musician and composer of Welsh descent, best remembered for his extensive output of incidental music for the stage and as a successor to Arthur Sullivan in the field of English comic opera. Some of his light operas, especially Merrie England, are still performed.
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Jerome Kern
1885 - 1945 (60 years)
Jerome David Kern was an American composer of musical theatre and popular music. One of the most important American theatre composers of the early 20th century, he wrote more than 700 songs, used in over 100 stage works, including such classics as "Ol' Man River", "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", "A Fine Romance", "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "The Song Is You", "All the Things You Are", "The Way You Look Tonight" and "Long Ago ". He collaborated with many of the leading librettists and lyricists of his era, including George Grossmith Jr., Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerste...
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Alexander Hamilton
1762 - 1824 (62 years)
Alexander Hamilton was a British linguist who was one of the first Europeans to study the Sanskrit language. He taught the language to most of the earliest European scholars of Indo-European linguistics. He became the first professor of Sanskrit in Europe.
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Benjamin Tucker
1854 - 1939 (85 years)
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker was an American individualist anarchist. Tucker was the editor and publisher of the American individualist anarchist periodical Liberty . Tucker was a member of the First International, with his publication Liberty represented as the English language organ for the Socialistic-Revolutionary Congress. Tucker described his form of anarchism as "consistent Manchesterism" and stated that "the Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats."
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Lillian Gish
1893 - 1993 (100 years)
Lillian Diana Gish was an American actress, director, and screenwriter. Her film-acting career spanned 75 years, from 1912, in silent film shorts, to 1987. Gish was called the "First Lady of American Cinema", and is credited with pioneering fundamental film performance techniques. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Gish as the 17th greatest female movie star of Classic Hollywood cinema.
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Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck
1866 - 1951 (85 years)
Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck was a Dutch linguist and anthropologist with a wide variety of research interests. His published work included books and articles on Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages, Sanskrit, Basque, and the Blackfoot language of North American Indians. He served as a lecturer at Leiden University.
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Pierre Monteux
1875 - 1964 (89 years)
Pierre Benjamin Monteux was a French conductor. After violin and viola studies, and a decade as an orchestral player and occasional conductor, he began to receive regular conducting engagements in 1907. He came to prominence when, for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company between 1911 and 1914, he conducted the world premieres of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and other prominent works including Petrushka, The Nightingale, Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, and Debussy's Jeux. Thereafter he directed orchestras around the world for more than half a century.
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Fromental Halévy
1799 - 1862 (63 years)
Jacques-François-Fromental-Élie Halévy, usually known as Fromental Halévy , was a French composer. He is known today largely for his opera La Juive. Early career Halévy was born in Paris, son of the cantor Élie Halfon Halévy, who was the secretary of the Jewish community of Paris and a writer and teacher of Hebrew, and a French Jewish mother. The name Fromental , by which he was generally known, reflects his birth on the day dedicated to that plant: 7 Prairial in the French Revolutionary calendar, which was still operative at that time. He entered the Conservatoire de Paris at the age of nine or ten , in 1809, becoming a pupil and later protégé of Cherubini.
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Jacques Feyder
1885 - 1948 (63 years)
Jacques Feyder was a Belgian actor, screenwriter and film director who worked principally in France, but also in the US, Britain and Germany. He was a director of silent films during the 1920s, and in the 1930s he became associated with the style of poetic realism in French cinema. He adopted French nationality in 1928.
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Elli Alexiou
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Elli Alexiou was a Greek author, playwright and journalist. The daughter of a printer and publisher, Alexiou was born in Heraklion, Crete. She taught French in a high school, and was politically active, joining the Communist Party in 1928 and working with the National Liberation Front resistance during World War II. After the war, she received a scholarship from the French government and studied in Paris. She was stripped of Greek citizenship in 1950, living as an exile until it was restored in 1965.
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Ivan Zakharov
1816 - 1885 (69 years)
Ivan Ilyich Zakharov was a Russian diplomat who worked in the Peking Orthodox Mission between 1839 and 1850. As the first Russian consul in China he prepared the Treaty of Kulja and helped delineate the Russo-Chinese borders in 1864.
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Hanuš Wihan
1855 - 1920 (65 years)
Hanuš Wihan was a Czech cellist. Some considered him the greatest of his time. He was strongly associated with the works of Antonín Dvořák, whose Cello Concerto in B minor, Rondo in G minor, and the short piece Silent Woods were all dedicated to him. He was the founder and later cellist of the Czech String Quartet, which was world-famous throughout its 40-year existence.
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John Hammond
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
John Henry Hammond II was an American record producer, civil rights activist, and music critic active from the 1930s to the early 1980s. In his service as a talent scout, Hammond became one of the most influential figures in 20th-century popular music. He is the father of blues musician John P. Hammond.
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Louise Brooks
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Mary Louise Brooks was an American film actress and dancer during the 1920s and 1930s. She is regarded today as an icon of the flapper culture, in part due to the bob hairstyle that she helped popularize during the prime of her career.
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Adolphe Adam
1803 - 1856 (53 years)
Adolphe Charles Adam was a French composer, teacher and music critic. A prolific composer for the theatre, he is best known today for his ballets Giselle and Le corsaire , his operas Le postillon de Lonjumeau and Si j'étais roi and his Christmas carol "Minuit, chrétiens!" .
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Charles Koechlin
1867 - 1950 (83 years)
Charles-Louis-Eugène Koechlin , commonly known as Charles Koechlin, was a French composer, teacher and musicologist. Among his better known works is Les Heures persanes, a set of piano pieces based on the novel Vers Ispahan by Pierre Loti and The Seven Stars Symphony, a 7 movement symphony where each movement is themed around a different film star who were popular at the time of the piece's writing .
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Shinkichi Hashimoto
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Shinkichi Hashimoto was a Japanese linguist, born in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture, Japan. Biography Hashimoto is especially noted for the discovery of Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai, which makes it clear that Old Japanese made more syllabic distinctions than later periods of the language. This discovery led him to hypothesize that Old Japanese had eight vowels, while modern Japanese has only five. His systematic description of the Japanese grammar also laid the foundations of language education for Japanese children.
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Michel Simon
1895 - 1975 (80 years)
Michel Simon was a Swiss-French actor. He appeared in many notable French films, including La Chienne , Boudu Saved from Drowning , L'Atalante , Port of Shadows , The Head , and The Train . Early years Simon was born on 9 April 1895 in Geneva, Switzerland to a Catholic butcher and a Protestant mother. He left his family and moved to Paris, where he first lived at the Hotel Renaissance, Saint-Martin Street, then in Montmartre. He worked many different jobs to survive, such as giving boxing lessons and peddling smuggled lighters.
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John Cassavetes
1929 - 1989 (60 years)
John Nicholas Cassavetes was an American actor and filmmaker. He began as a television and film actor before helping to pioneer modern American independent cinema as a director and writer, often financing and distributing his films with his own income. AllMovie called him "an iconoclastic maverick", while The New Yorker suggested in 2013 that he "may be the most influential American director of the last half century."
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Jean Epstein
1897 - 1953 (56 years)
Jean Epstein was a French filmmaker, film theorist, literary critic, and novelist. Although he is remembered today primarily for his adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, he directed three dozen films and was an influential critic of literature and film from the early 1920s through the late 1940s. He is often associated with French Impressionist Cinema and the concept of photogénie.
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Jenny Lind
1820 - 1887 (67 years)
Johanna Maria Lind was a Swedish opera singer, often called the "Swedish Nightingale". One of the most highly regarded singers of the 19th century, she performed in soprano roles in opera in Sweden and across Europe, and undertook an extraordinarily popular concert tour of the United States beginning in 1850. She was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music from 1840.
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Louis M. Lyons
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Louis Martin Lyons was an American journalist in Massachusetts and curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Biography Lyons was born in Boston in 1897 and was a graduate of Massachusetts Agricultural College, now known as the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Lyons was a reporter for The Boston Globe in 1919 and from 1923 to 1946; In 1971, he published a history of the first 100 years of that newspaper. In 1940, he took the position of curator for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, where he worked until retiring in 1964. Lyons also wro...
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Tetsuji Morohashi
1883 - 1982 (99 years)
Tetsuji Morohashi was an important figure in the field of Japanese language studies and Sinology. He is best known as chief editor of the Dai Kan-Wa jiten, a comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters, or kanji.
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Ruggero Leoncavallo
1857 - 1919 (62 years)
Ruggero Leoncavallo was an Italian opera composer and librettist. Although he produced numerous operas and other songs throughout his career it is his opera Pagliacci that remained his lasting contribution, despite attempts to escape the shadow of his greatest success.
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Sam Peckinpah
1925 - 1984 (59 years)
David Samuel Peckinpah was an American film director and screenwriter. His 1969 Western epic The Wild Bunch received an Academy Award nomination and was ranked No. 80 on the American Film Institute's top 100 list. His films employed a visually innovative and explicit depiction of action and violence as well as a revisionist approach to the Western genre.
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Jacques Ibert
1890 - 1962 (72 years)
Jacques François Antoine Marie Ibert was a French composer of classical music. Having studied music from an early age, he studied at the Paris Conservatoire and won its top prize, the Prix de Rome at his first attempt, despite studies interrupted by his service in World War I.
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Florent Schmitt
1870 - 1958 (88 years)
Florent Schmitt was a French composer. He was part of the group known as Les Apaches. His most famous pieces are La tragédie de Salome and Psaume XLVII . He has been described as "one of the most fascinating of France's lesser-known classical composers".
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John Ross
1777 - 1856 (79 years)
Sir John Ross was a Scottish Royal Navy officer and polar explorer. He was the uncle of Sir James Clark Ross, who explored the Arctic with him, and later led expeditions to Antarctica. Biography Early life John Ross was born in Balsarroch, West Galloway, Scotland, on , the son of the Reverend Andrew Ross of Balsarroch, Minister of Inch in Wigtownshire, and Elizabeth Corsane, daughter of Robert Corsane, the Provost of Dumfries. His family home was on the shore of Loch Ryan, at Stranraer.
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Percy French
1854 - 1920 (66 years)
William Percy French was an Irish songwriter, author, poet, entertainer and painter. Life French was born at Clooneyquinn House, near Tulsk, County Roscommon, the son of an Anglo-Irish landlord, Christopher French, and Susan Emma French . He was the third of nine children. His younger sister, Emily later Emily de Burg Daly was also a writer.
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Paul Muni
1895 - 1967 (72 years)
Paul Muni was an American stage and film actor from Chicago. He started his acting career in the Yiddish theater and during the 1930s, he was considered one of the most prestigious actors at the Warner Bros. studio and was given the rare privilege of choosing his own parts.
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Anton Rubinstein
1829 - 1894 (65 years)
Anton Grigoryevich Rubinstein was a Russian pianist, composer and conductor who became a pivotal figure in Russian culture when he founded the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. He was the elder brother of Nikolai Rubinstein, who founded the Moscow Conservatory.
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Graham Thurgood
1900 - Present (126 years)
Graham Thurgood is a retired professor of linguistics at California State University, Chico. Thurgood graduated with a Ph.D. in linguistics from University of California, Berkeley, where he studied under James Matisoff.
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William Allan Neilson
1869 - 1946 (77 years)
William Allan Neilson was a Scottish-American educator, writer and lexicographer, graduated in the University of Edinburgh in 1891 and became a PhD in Harvard University in 1898. He was president of Smith College between 1917 and 1939.
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Adolf Tobler
1835 - 1910 (75 years)
Adolf Tobler was a Swiss-German linguist and philologist. Born in Hirzel in Zürich, Switzerland, he was the brother of linguist Ludwig Tobler . Adolf Tobler died in Berlin, Germany. He studied Romance philology at the universities of Zürich and Bonn, receiving his doctorate in 1857. At Bonn, he was influenced by the teachings of Friedrich Christian Diez and Nicolaus Delius. After graduation, he worked as a schoolteacher at the Solothurn cantonal school, then at the gymnasium in Bern. In 1867, he relocated to the University of Berlin, where from 1871 up until his death, he held the chair of Romance philology.
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Otis Redding
1941 - 1967 (26 years)
Otis Ray Redding Jr. was an American singer and songwriter. He is regarded as one of the greatest singer-songwriters in the history of American popular music and a seminal artist in soul music and rhythm and blues. Nicknamed the "King of Soul", Redding's style of singing gained inspiration from the gospel music that preceded the genre. His singing style influenced many other soul artists of the 1960s.
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Nellie Melba
1861 - 1931 (70 years)
Dame Nellie Melba was an Australian operatic lyric coloratura soprano. She became one of the most famous singers of the late Victorian era and the early 20th century, and was the first Australian to achieve international recognition as a classical musician. She took the pseudonym "Melba" from Melbourne, her home town.
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Edward Denison Ross
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
Sir Edward Denison Ross was an orientalist and linguist, specializing in languages of the Middle East, Central and East Asia. He was the first director of the University of London's School of Oriental Studies from 1916 to 1937.
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