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.

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,

#15201

Jean-Paul Marat

Jean-Paul Marat

1743 - 1793 (50 years)

Jean-Paul Marat was a French political theorist, physician, and scientist. A journalist and politician during the French Revolution, he was a vigorous defender of the sans-culottes, a radical voice, and published his views in pamphlets, placards and newspapers. His periodical L'Ami du peuple made him an unofficial link with the radical Jacobin group that came to power after June 1793.

#15202

Cole Porter

1891 - 1964 (73 years)

Cole Albert Porter was an American composer and songwriter. Many of his songs became standards noted for their witty, urbane lyrics, and many of his scores found success on Broadway and in film. Born to a wealthy family in Indiana, Porter defied his grandfather's wishes for him to practice law and took up music as a profession. Classically trained, he was drawn to musical theatre. After a slow start, he began to achieve success in the 1920s, and by the 1930s he was one of the major songwriters for the Broadway musical stage. Unlike many successful Broadway composers, Porter wrote the lyrics a...

#15203

James Larkin

1876 - 1947 (71 years)

James Larkin , sometimes known as Jim Larkin or Big Jim, was an Irish republican, socialist and trade union leader. He was one of the founders of the Irish Labour Party along with James Connolly and William O'Brien, and later the founder of the Irish Worker League , as well as the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union and the Workers' Union of Ireland . Along with Connolly and Jack White, he was also a founder of the Irish Citizen Army . Larkin was a leading figure in the Syndicalist movement.

#15204

Lev Ivanov

1834 - 1901 (67 years)

Lev Ivanovich Ivanov was a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer and later, Second Balletmaster of the Imperial Ballet. As a performer with the Imperial Ballet, he achieved prominence after performing as an understudy in a benefit performance of La Fille Mal Gardée. He is most famous as the choreographer of Acts II and IV of Swan Lake, which include the Dance of the Little Swans, Act II of Cinderella, and The Nutcracker, which he choreographed alongside Marius Petipa.

#15205

Lorenzo de' Medici

Lorenzo de' Medici

1449 - 1492 (43 years)

Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici , known as Lorenzo the Magnificent , was an Italian statesman, banker, de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic, and the most powerful and enthusiastic patron of Renaissance culture in Italy. He was a magnate, diplomat, politician and patron of scholars, artists, and poets. As a patron, he is best known for his sponsorship of artists such as Botticelli and Michelangelo. He held the balance of power within the Italic League, an alliance of states that stabilized political conditions on the Italian peninsula for decades, and his life coincided with the mature phase of the Italian Renaissance and the Golden Age of Florence.

#15206

Dmitri Shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich

1906 - 1975 (69 years)

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist who became internationally known after the premiere of his First Symphony in 1926 and was regarded throughout his life as a major composer.

#15207

Hrachia Acharian

Hrachia Acharian

1876 - 1953 (77 years)

Hrachia Acharian was an Armenian linguist, lexicographer, etymologist, and philologist. An Istanbul Armenian, Acharian studied at local Armenian schools and at the Sorbonne, under Antoine Meillet, and the University of Strasbourg, under Heinrich Hübschmann. He then taught in various Armenian communities in the Russian Empire and Iran before settling in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1923, working at Yerevan State University until his death.

#15208

Béla Bartók

1881 - 1945 (64 years)

Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer, pianist and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as Hungary's greatest composers. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became known as ethnomusicology.

#15209

Edward Lhuyd

1660 - 1709 (49 years)

Edward Lhuyd was a Welsh naturalist, botanist, herbalist, alchemist, scientist, linguist, geographer and antiquary. He is also named in a Latinate form as Eduardus Luidius. Life Lhuyd was born in 1660, in Loppington, Shropshire, England, the illegitimate son of Edward Lloyd of Llanforda, Oswestry, and Bridget Pryse of Llansantffraid, near Talybont, Cardiganshire in 1660. His family belonged to the gentry of south-west Wales. Though well-established, the family was not wealthy. His father experimented with agriculture and industry in a manner that impinged on the new science of the day. The ...

#15210

Gustave Boulanger

Gustave Boulanger

1824 - 1888 (64 years)

Gustave Clarence Rodolphe Boulanger was a French figurative painter and academic artist and teacher known for his Classical and Orientalist subjects. Education and career The Néo-Grecs and the Prix de Rome Boulanger was born in Paris in 1824. He never knew his father, and when his mother's death left him orphaned at the age of fourteen, he became the ward of his uncle, Constant Desbrosses, who in 1840 sent him to study first under the history painter Pierre-Jules Jollivet and then at the atelier of Paul Delaroche, where Boulanger met and befriended his fellow student Jean-Léon Gérôme.

#15211

Cecil B. DeMille

Cecil B. DeMille

1881 - 1959 (78 years)

Cecil Blount DeMille was an American filmmaker and actor. Between 1914 and 1958, he made 70 features, both silent and sound films. He is acknowledged as a founding father of American cinema and the most commercially successful producer-director in film history. His films were distinguished by their epic scale and by his cinematic showmanship. His silent films included social dramas, comedies, Westerns, farces, morality plays, and historical pageants. He was an active Freemason and member of Prince of Orange Lodge #16 in New York City.

#15212

Theodore Sturgeon

Theodore Sturgeon

1918 - 1985 (67 years)

Theodore Sturgeon was an American fiction author of primarily fantasy, science fiction, and horror, as well as a critic. He wrote approximately 400 reviews and more than 120 short stories, 11 novels, and several scripts for Star Trek: The Original Series.

#15213

Hermann Osthoff

Hermann Osthoff

1847 - 1909 (62 years)

Hermann Osthoff was a German linguist. He was involved in Indo-European studies and the Neogrammarian school. He is known for formulating Osthoff's law, and published widely on Indo-European word-formation and morphology.

#15214

Sergei Prokofiev

1891 - 1953 (62 years)

Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor who later worked in the Soviet Union. As the creator of acknowledged masterpieces across numerous music genres, he is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. His works include such widely heard pieces as the March from The Love for Three Oranges, the suite Lieutenant Kijé, the ballet Romeo and Juliet—from which "Dance of the Knights" is taken—and Peter and the Wolf. Of the established forms and genres in which he worked, he created—excluding juvenilia—seven completed operas, seven symphonies, eight...

#15215

Giacomo Meyerbeer

1791 - 1864 (73 years)

Giacomo Meyerbeer was a German opera composer, "the most frequently performed opera composer during the nineteenth century, linking Mozart and Wagner". With his 1831 opera Robert le diable and its successors, he gave the genre of grand opera 'decisive character'. Meyerbeer's grand opera style was achieved by his merging of German orchestra style with Italian vocal tradition. These were employed in the context of sensational and melodramatic libretti created by Eugène Scribe and were enhanced by the up-to-date theatre technology of the Paris Opéra. They set a standard which helped to maintain ...

#15216

Eino Leino

1878 - 1926 (48 years)

Eino Leino was a Finnish poet and journalist who is considered one of the pioneers of Finnish poetry and a national poet of Finland. His poems combine modern and Finnish folk elements. Much of his work is in the style of the Kalevala and folk songs in general. Nature, love, and despair are frequent themes in Leino's work. He is beloved and widely read in Finland today.

#15217

César Franck

1822 - 1890 (68 years)

César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck was a French Romantic composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher born in present-day Belgium. He was born in Liège . He gave his first concerts there in 1834 and studied privately in Paris from 1835, where his teachers included Anton Reicha. After a brief return to Belgium, and a disastrous reception of an early oratorio Ruth, he moved to Paris, where he married and embarked on a career as teacher and organist. He gained a reputation as a formidable musical improviser, and travelled widely within France to demonstrate new instruments built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll.

#15218

Matteo Bartoli

1873 - 1946 (73 years)

Matteo Giulio Bartoli was an Italian linguist from Istria . He obtained a doctorate at the University of Vienna, where his adviser was Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, in 1898. He was influenced by certain theories of the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce and the German linguist Karl Vossler. He later also studied with Jules Gilliéron in Paris. From Gilliéron he acquired a penchant for fieldwork, and from 1900 on he published numerous dialectological studies of Istrian dialects.

#15219

Thelonious Monk

1917 - 1982 (65 years)

Thelonious Sphere Monk was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser", "Ruby, My Dear", "In Walked Bud", and "Well, You Needn't". Monk is the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington.

#15220

Count Basie

1904 - 1984 (80 years)

William James "Count" Basie was an American jazz pianist, organist, bandleader, and composer. In 1935, he formed the Count Basie Orchestra, and in 1936 took them to Chicago for a long engagement and their first recording. He led the group for almost 50 years, creating innovations like the use of two "split" tenor saxophones, emphasizing the rhythm section, riffing with a big band, using arrangers to broaden their sound, and others. Many musicians came to prominence under his direction, including the tenor saxophonists Lester Young and Herschel Evans, the guitarist Freddie Green, trumpeters Bu...

#15221

Ambroise Thomas

1811 - 1896 (85 years)

Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas was a French composer and teacher, best known for his operas Mignon and Hamlet . Born into a musical family, Thomas was a student at the Conservatoire de Paris, winning France's top music prize, the Prix de Rome. He pursued a career as a composer of operas, completing his first opera, La double échelle, in 1837. He wrote twenty further operas over the next decades, mostly comic, but he also treated more serious subjects, finding considerable success with audiences in France and abroad.

#15222

Pauline Viardot

Pauline Viardot

1821 - 1910 (89 years)

Pauline Viardot was a French dramatic mezzo-soprano, composer and pedagogue of Spanish descent. Born Michelle Ferdinande Pauline García, she came from a musical family and took up music at a young age. She began performing as a teenager and had a long and illustrious career as a star performer.

#15223

Frederick Gibberd

1908 - 1984 (76 years)

Sir Frederick Ernest Gibberd CBE was an English architect, town planner and landscape designer. He is particularly known for his work in Harlow, Essex, and for the BISF house, a design for a prefabricated council house that was widely adopted in post-war Britain.

#15224

Maria Callas

1923 - 1977 (54 years)

Maria Callas was an American-born Greek soprano who was one of the most renowned and influential opera singers of the 20th century. Many critics praised her bel canto technique, wide-ranging voice and dramatic interpretations. Her repertoire ranged from classical opera seria to the bel canto operas of Donizetti, Bellini, and Rossini, and further to the works of Verdi and Puccini, and in her early career to the music dramas of Wagner. Her musical and dramatic talents led to her being hailed as La Divina .

#15225

Hermann Möller

1850 - 1923 (73 years)

Hermann Möller was a Danish linguist noted for his work in favor of a genetic relationship between the Indo-European and Semitic language families and his version of the laryngeal theory. Möller grew up in North Frisia after its conquest by Germany in the German–Danish War of 1864 and attended German universities . He began teaching Germanic philology at the University of Copenhagen in 1883 and continued to do so for over thirty-five years . Also in 1883, he published Das altenglische Volksepos in der ursprünglichen strophischen Form, 'The Old English Folk Epic in the Original Strophic Form',...

#15226

Georg Philipp Telemann

1681 - 1767 (86 years)

Georg Philipp Telemann was a German Baroque composer and multi-instrumentalist. He is one of the most prolific composers in history, at least in terms of surviving oeuvre. Telemann was considered by his contemporaries to be one of the leading German composers of the time, and he was compared favourably both to his friend Johann Sebastian Bach, who made Telemann the godfather and namesake of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, and to George Frideric Handel, whom Telemann also knew personally.

#15227

Charles-André Julien

1891 - 1991 (100 years)

Charles-André Julien was a French journalist and historian specialised in the history of the Maghreb, his most famous work is Histoire de l'Afrique du Nord : Des origines à 1830 . Charles-André Julien was born in Caen, northern France and emigrated with his family to Algeria at the age of 15, where he picked up an interest in the history of the region. Julien's History of North Africa served as the standard reference work on the subject for decades. His political commitments and specialized knowledge of North Africa contributed to his place on the Popular Front's Haut Comité méditerranéen et...

#15228

Charles-Marie Widor

1844 - 1937 (93 years)

Charles-Marie-Jean-Albert Widor was a French organist, composer and teacher of the late Romantic era. As a composer he is known for his ten organ symphonies, especially the toccata of his fifth organ symphony, which is frequently played as recessional music at weddings and other celebrations.

#15229

Franz Lehár

1870 - 1948 (78 years)

Franz Lehár was an Austro-Hungarian composer. He is mainly known for his operettas, of which the most successful and best known is The Merry Widow . Life and career Lehár was born in the northern part of Komárom, Kingdom of Hungary , the eldest son of Franz Lehár , an Austrian bandmaster in the Infantry Regiment No. 50 of the Austro-Hungarian Army and Christine Neubrandt , a Hungarian woman from a family of German descent. He grew up speaking only Hungarian until the age of 12. Later he put an acute accent above the "a" of his father's surname "Lehár" to indicate the vowel in the correspond...

#15230

Clifford D. Simak

Clifford D. Simak

1904 - 1988 (84 years)

Clifford Donald Simak was an American science fiction writer. He won three Hugo Awards and one Nebula Award. The Science Fiction Writers of America made him its third SFWA Grand Master, and the Horror Writers Association made him one of three inaugural winners of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. He is associated with the pastoral science fiction subgenre.

#15231

Georg von der Gabelentz

1840 - 1893 (53 years)

Hans Georg Conon von der Gabelentz was a German general linguist and sinologist. His , according to a critic, "remains until today recognized as probably the finest overall grammatical survey of the Classical Chinese language to date."

#15232

Eric Frank Russell

1905 - 1978 (73 years)

Eric Frank Russell was a British writer best known for his science fiction novels and short stories. Much of his work was first published in the United States, in John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction and other pulp magazines. Russell also wrote horror fiction for Weird Tales and non-fiction articles on Fortean topics. Up to 1955 several of his stories were published under pseudonyms, at least Duncan H. Munro and Niall Wilde.

#15233

Gil Evans

1912 - 1988 (76 years)

Ian Ernest Gilmore Evans was a Canadian–American jazz pianist, arranger, composer and bandleader. He is widely recognized as one of the greatest orchestrators in jazz, playing an important role in the development of cool jazz, modal jazz, free jazz, and jazz fusion. He is best known for his acclaimed collaborations with Miles Davis.

#15234

Jacques Tati

1907 - 1982 (75 years)

Jacques Tati was a French mime, filmmaker, actor and screenwriter. In an Entertainment Weekly poll of the Greatest Movie Directors, he was voted the 46th greatest of all time , although he directed only six feature-length films.

#15235

Eric Ravilious

1903 - 1942 (39 years)

Eric William Ravilious was a British painter, designer, book illustrator and wood-engraver. He grew up in Sussex, and is particularly known for his watercolours of the South Downs, Castle Hedingham and other English landscapes, which examine English landscape and vernacular art with an off-kilter, modernist sensibility and clarity. He served as a war artist, and was the first British war artist to die on active service in World War II when the aircraft he was in was lost off Iceland.

#15236

Léopold Leau

1868 - 1943 (75 years)

Léopold Leau was a French mathematician, primarily known for his ties to international auxiliary languages. The Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language was founded on 7 January 1901 on Leau's initiative. He co-wrote with Prof. Louis Couturat the monumental Histoire de la Langue Universelle and its supplement Les Nouvelles Langues Internationales .

#15237

Wilhelm Streitberg

1864 - 1925 (61 years)

Wilhelm August Streitberg was a German Indo-Europeanist, specializing in Germanic languages. Together with Karl Brugmann, he founded the Indogermanische Forschungen journal. He studied Germanistics and Indo-European philology at Münster Academy and at the universities of Berlin and Leipzig, receiving his habilitation for Indo-European linguistics at Münster in 1889. In 1906, he became a full professor, and three years later relocated to the University of Munich as a professor of Indo-European linguistics. In 1920, he returned to Leipzig, where he taught classes up until his death in 1925. Fro...

#15238

Enrico Caruso

1873 - 1921 (48 years)

Enrico Caruso was an Italian operatic first lyric tenor then dramatic tenor. He sang to great acclaim at the major opera houses of Europe and the Americas, appearing in a wide variety of roles that ranged from the lyric to the dramatic. One of the first major singing talents to be commercially recorded, Caruso made 247 commercially released recordings from 1902 to 1920, which made him an internationally popular entertainment star.

#15239

Pierre Laporte

1921 - 1970 (49 years)

Pierre Laporte was a Canadian lawyer, journalist and politician. He was deputy premier of the province of Quebec when he was kidnapped and murdered by members of the Front de libération du Québec during the October Crisis.

#15240

Léon Fleuriot

1923 - 1987 (64 years)

Léon Fleuriot was a French linguist and Celtic scholar, specializing in Celtic languages and the history of Gallo-Roman and Early Medieval Brittany. Biography Born in Morlaix, Brittany, in a family originating in the region of Quintin and having studied Breton in his youth, Fleuriot passed his university history agrégation in 1950. He taught at lycées and collèges in Paris and the surrounding suburbs, as well as at the Prytanée National Militaire in La Flèche. He entered the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in 1958 and earned his doctorate at the Sorbonne University in 1964, defen...

#15241

Jean Gebser

1905 - 1973 (68 years)

Jean Gebser was a Swiss philosopher, linguist, and poet who described the structures of human consciousness. Biography Gebser was born Hans Karl Hermann Rudolph Gebser in Posen in Imperial Germany . His father was lawyer Frederich Gebser and mother was Margaretha Grundmann. He was a cousin of World War I-era chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg.

#15242

Wolfgang Krause

1895 - 1970 (75 years)

Wolfgang Krause was a German philologist and linguist. A professor at the University of Göttingen for many years, Krause specialized in comparative linguistics, and was an authority on Celtic studies, Tocharian languages, Germanic studies, Old Norse and particularly runology.

#15243

Ōtsuki Fumihiko

Ōtsuki Fumihiko

1847 - 1928 (81 years)

Ōtsuki Fumihiko was a Japanese lexicographer, linguist, and historian. He is best known for two Japanese-language dictionaries that he edited, Genkai and its successor Daigenkai , and for his studies of Japanese grammar.

#15244

Marianne Brandt

Marianne Brandt

1893 - 1983 (90 years)

Marianne Brandt was a German painter, sculptor, photographer, metalsmith, and designer who studied at the Bauhaus art school in Weimar and later became head of the Bauhaus Metall-Werkstatt in Dessau in 1928. Today, Brandt's designs for household objects such as lamps and ashtrays are considered timeless examples of modern industrial design. She also created photomontages.

#15245

Wilhelm Scherer

Wilhelm Scherer

1841 - 1886 (45 years)

Wilhelm Scherer was a German philologist and historian of literature. He was known as a positivist because he based much of his work on "hypotheses on detailed historical research, and rooted every literary phenomenon in 'objective' historical or philological facts". His positivism is different due to his involvement with his nationalist goals. His major contribution to the movement was his speculation that culture cycled in a six-hundred-year period.

#15246

Pietro Mascagni

1863 - 1945 (82 years)

Pietro Mascagni was an Italian composer primarily known for his operas. His 1890 masterpiece Cavalleria rusticana caused one of the greatest sensations in opera history and single-handedly ushered in the Verismo movement in Italian dramatic music. While it was often held that Mascagni, like Ruggero Leoncavallo, was a "one-opera man" who could never repeat his first success, L'amico Fritz and Iris have remained in the repertoire in Europe since their premieres.

#15247

Michael Redgrave

Michael Redgrave

1908 - 1985 (77 years)

Sir Michael Scudamore Redgrave CBE was an English actor, director, producer, screenwriter, manager and author. He received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Mourning Becomes Electra , as well as two BAFTA nominations for Best British Actor for his performances in The Night My Number Came Up and Time Without Pity .

#15248

Ralph Lilley Turner

1888 - 1983 (95 years)

Sir Ralph Lilley Turner was a British philologist of Indian languages and a university administrator. He is notable for composing an Indo-Aryan comparative dictionary. He is also the author of some publications concerning the Romani language.

#15249

Léo Delibes

1836 - 1891 (55 years)

Clément Philibert Léo Delibes was a French Romantic composer, best known for his ballets and operas. His works include the ballets Coppélia and Sylvia and the opera Lakmé , which includes the well-known "Flower Duet".

#15250

Henry Villard

1835 - 1900 (65 years)

Henry Villard was an American journalist and financier who was an early president of the Northern Pacific Railway. Born and raised by Ferdinand Heinrich Gustav Hilgard in the Rhenish Palatinate of the Kingdom of Bavaria, Villard clashed with his more conservative father over politics, and was sent to a semi-military academy in northeastern France. As a teenager, he emigrated to the United States without his parents' knowledge. He changed his name to avoid being sent back to Europe, and began making his way west, briefly studying law as he developed a career in journalism. He supported John C....

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