The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Communications,
#15301
Martin Ritt
1914 - 1990 (76 years)
Martin Ritt was an American director and actor who worked in both film and theater, noted for his socially conscious films. Some of the films he directed include The Long, Hot Summer , The Black Orchid , Paris Blues , Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man , Hud , The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , Hombre , The Great White Hope , Sounder , The Front , Norma Rae , Cross Creek , Murphy's Romance , Nuts , and Stanley & Iris .
Go to Profile#15302
Henry Cecil Kennedy Wyld
1870 - 1945 (75 years)
Henry Cecil Kennedy Wyld was a notable English lexicographer and philologist. Early life Wyld was born in 1870 and attended Charterhouse School from 1883 to 1885; he was then privately educated in Lausanne from 1885 to 1888. He studied at the University of Bonn, the University of Heidelberg and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#15303
Thomas Tallis
1505 - 1585 (80 years)
Thomas Tallis was an English composer of High Renaissance music. His compositions are primarily vocal, and he occupies a primary place in anthologies of English choral music. Tallis is considered one of England's greatest composers, and is honoured for his original voice in English musicianship.
Go to Profile#15304
Fritz Kreisler
1875 - 1962 (87 years)
Friedrich "Fritz" Kreisler was an Austrian-born American violinist and composer. One of the most noted violin masters of his day, and regarded as one of the greatest violinists of all time, he was known for his sweet tone and expressive phrasing. Like many great violinists of his generation, he produced a characteristic sound which was immediately recognizable as his own. Although it derived in many respects from the Franco-Belgian school, his style is nonetheless reminiscent of the gemütlich lifestyle of pre-war Vienna.
Go to Profile#15305
Jacques de Baroncelli
1881 - 1951 (70 years)
Jacques de Baroncelli was a French film director best known for his silent films from 1915 to the late 1930s. He came from a Florentine family who had settled in Provence in the 15th century, occupying a building in the centre of Avignon then called the Baroncelli Palace . His father's side of the family were of Tuscan origin and part of the Ghibelline tradition, and they were hereditary Marquises of Javon. Though somewhat aristocratic, the family spoke Provençal, which was rather controversial at a time when it was considered to be a language of the common people. His older brother was Folco...
Go to Profile#15306
William A. Wellman
1896 - 1975 (79 years)
William Augustus Wellman was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and military pilot. He was known for his work in crime, adventure, and action genre films, often focusing on aviation themes, a particular passion. He also directed several well-regarded satirical comedies. His 1927 film, Wings, was the first film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture at the 1st Academy Awards ceremony.
Go to Profile#15307
Johannes Agricola
1494 - 1566 (72 years)
Johann or Johannes Agricola was a German Protestant Reformer during the Protestant Reformation. He was a follower and friend of Martin Luther, who became his antagonist in the matter of the binding obligation of the law on Christians.
Go to Profile#15308
Charles Dullin
1885 - 1949 (64 years)
Charles Dullin was a French actor, theater manager and director. Career Dullin began his career as an actor in melodrama:185 In 1908, he started his first troupe with Saturnin Fabre, the Théâtre de Foire, where they staged works by Alexandre Arnoux.:185
Go to Profile#15309
Vladimir Horowitz
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Vladimir Samoylovich Horowitz was a Russian-born American classical pianist. Considered one of the greatest pianists of all time, he was known for his virtuoso technique, timbre, and the public excitement engendered by his playing.
Go to Profile#15310
Rodolphe Kreutzer
1766 - 1831 (65 years)
Rodolphe Kreutzer was a French violinist, teacher, conductor, and composer of forty French operas, including La mort d'Abel . He is probably best known as the dedicatee of Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9, Op. 47 , known as the Kreutzer Sonata, though he never played the work. Kreutzer made the acquaintance of Beethoven in 1798, when at Vienna in the service of the French ambassador, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte . Beethoven originally dedicated the sonata to George Bridgetower, the violinist at its first performance, but after a quarrel he revised the dedication in favour of Kreutzer.
Go to Profile#15311
Tommy Dorsey
1905 - 1956 (51 years)
Thomas Francis Dorsey Jr. was an American jazz trombonist, composer, conductor and bandleader of the big band era. He was known as the "Sentimental Gentleman of Swing" because of his smooth-toned trombone playing. His theme song was "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You". His technical skill on the trombone gave him renown among other musicians. He was the younger brother of bandleader Jimmy Dorsey. After Dorsey broke with his brother in the mid-1930s, he led an extremely successful band from the late 1930s into the 1950s. He is best remembered for standards such as "Opus One", "Song of India", "...
Go to Profile#15312
Alfredo Casella
1883 - 1947 (64 years)
Alfredo Casella was an Italian composer, pianist and conductor. Life and career Casella was born in Turin, the son of Maria and Carlo Casella. His family included many musicians: his grandfather, a friend of Paganini, was first cello in the San Carlo Theatre in Lisbon and eventually became soloist in the Royal Chapel in Turin. Alfredo's father, Carlo, was also a professional cellist, as were Carlo's brothers Cesare and Gioacchino; his mother was a pianist, who gave the boy his first music lessons.
Go to Profile#15313
Anthony Quayle
1913 - 1989 (76 years)
Sir John Anthony Quayle was a British actor, theatre director and novelist. He was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe for his supporting role as Thomas Wolsey in the film Anne of the Thousand Days . He also played important roles in such major studio productions as The Guns of Navarone , Lawrence of Arabia , The Fall of the Roman Empire , Operation Crossbow , QB VII and The Eagle Has Landed . Quayle was knighted in the 1985 New Years Honours List.
Go to Profile#15314
Pablo de Sarasate
1844 - 1908 (64 years)
Pablo Martín Melitón de Sarasate y Navascués , commonly known as Pablo de Sarasate, was a Spanish violin virtuoso, composer and conductor of the Romantic period. His best known works include Zigeunerweisen , the Spanish Dances, and the Carmen Fantasy.
Go to Profile#15315
Ferdinand Hiller
1811 - 1885 (74 years)
Ferdinand Hiller was a German composer, conductor, pianist, writer and music director. Biography Ferdinand Hiller was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main, where his father Justus was a merchant in English textiles – a business eventually continued by Ferdinand's brother Joseph. Hiller's talent was discovered early and he was taught piano by the leading Frankfurt musician Alois Schmitt, violin by Jörg Hofmann, and harmony and counterpoint by Georg Jacob Vollweiler; at 10 he performed a Mozart concerto in public; and two years later, he produced his first composition.
Go to Profile#15316
Totò
1898 - 1967 (69 years)
Antonio Griffo Focas Flavio Angelo Ducas Comneno Porfirogenito Gagliardi De Curtis di Bisanzio , best known by his stage name Totò , or simply as Antonio de Curtis, and nicknamed il principe della risata , was an Italian actor, comedian, screenwriter, dramatist, poet, singer and lyricist. He was commonly referred to as one of the most popular Italian performers of all time. He is best known for his funny and sometimes cynical character as a comedian in theatre and then in many successful films shot from the 1940s to the 1960s, but he also worked with many iconic Italian film directors in drama...
Go to Profile#15317
Marin Marais
1656 - 1728 (72 years)
Marin Marais was a French composer and viol player. He studied composition with Jean-Baptiste Lully, often conducting his operas, and with master of the bass viol Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe for six months. In 1676 he was hired as a musician to the royal court of Versailles and was moderately successful there, being appointed in 1679 as ordinaire de la chambre du roy pour la viole, a title he kept until 1725.
Go to Profile#15318
George M. Cohan
1878 - 1942 (64 years)
George Michael Cohan was an American entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and theatrical producer. Cohan began his career as a child, performing with his parents and sister in a vaudeville act known as "The Four Cohans". Beginning with Little Johnny Jones in 1904, he wrote, composed, produced, and appeared in more than three dozen Broadway musicals. Cohan wrote more than 50 shows and published more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including the standards "Over There", "Give My Regards to Broadway", "The Yankee Doodle Boy" and "You're a Grand Old Flag". As a co...
Go to Profile#15319
James Aronson
1915 - 1988 (73 years)
James Aronson was an American journalist. He founded the National Guardian. He was a graduate of Harvard College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Career Aronson, known as "Jim" to his friends, worked at several publications prior to founding the National Guardian. He worked on the staffs of the Boston Evening Transcript, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Post and The New York Times from 1946 to 1948.
Go to Profile#15320
Julius Watkins
1921 - 1977 (56 years)
Julius Watkins was an American jazz musician who played French horn. Described by AllMusic as "virtually the father of the jazz French horn", Watkins won the Down Beat critics poll in 1960 and 1961 for Miscellaneous Instrument.
Go to Profile#15321
Jean Vigo
1905 - 1934 (29 years)
Jean Vigo was a French film director who helped establish poetic realism in film in the 1930s. His work influenced French New Wave cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Biography Vigo was born to Emily Clero and the militant anarchist Miguel Almereyda. Much of Vigo's early life was spent on the run with his parents. His father was imprisoned and probably murdered in Fresnes Prison on 13 August 1917, although the death was officially a suicide. Some speculated that Almereyda's death was hushed up on orders of the Radical politicians Louis Malvy and Joseph Caillaux, who were later punished for wartime treason.
Go to Profile#15322
Ernest Bloch
1880 - 1959 (79 years)
Ernest Bloch was a Swiss-born American composer. Bloch was a preeminent artist in his day, and left a lasting legacy. He is recognized as one of the greatest Swiss composers in history. As well as producing musical scores, Bloch had an academic career that culminated in his recognition as Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley in 1952.
Go to Profile#15323
Sarah Siddons
1755 - 1831 (76 years)
Sarah Siddons was a Welsh actress, the best-known tragedienne of the 18th century. Contemporaneous critic William Hazlitt dubbed Siddons as "tragedy personified". She was the elder sister of John Philip Kemble, Charles Kemble, Stephen Kemble, Ann Hatton, and Elizabeth Whitlock, and the aunt of Fanny Kemble. She was most famous for her portrayal of the Shakespearean character Lady Macbeth, a character she made her own.
Go to Profile#15324
Donny Hathaway
1945 - 1979 (34 years)
Donny Edward Hathaway was an American soul singer, keyboardist, songwriter, backing vocalist, and arranger who Rolling Stone described as a "soul legend". His most popular songs include "The Ghetto", "This Christmas", "Someday We'll All Be Free", and "Little Ghetto Boy". Hathaway is also renowned for his renditions of "A Song for You", "For All We Know", and "I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know", along with "Where Is the Love" and "The Closer I Get to You", two of many collaborations with Roberta Flack. He has been inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame and won one Grammy Award from four nominations.
Go to Profile#15325
Hisui Sugiura
1876 - 1965 (89 years)
was a Japanese graphic designer who was a pioneer of modern Japanese graphic design. Early life He was born in Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture in 1876. He graduated from the Japanese-style painting department of Tokyo School of Art, which is the present Tokyo University of the Arts, in 1901.
Go to Profile#15326
Gertrude Buck
1871 - 1922 (51 years)
Gertrude Buck was one of a group of powerful female rhetoricians of her time. She strived to inspire young women to take on leadership roles within the democracy using the written word. She wrote many books, plays, articles, and poems relating to her cause. Buck dedicated her life to "challenging the patriarchal paradigm with her reformist views of pedagogy and rhetoric".
Go to Profile#15327
Tod Browning
1880 - 1962 (82 years)
Tod Browning was an American film director, film actor, screenwriter, vaudeville performer, and carnival sideshow and circus entertainer. He directed a number of films of various genres between 1915 and 1939, but was primarily known for horror films, and was often cited in the trade press as the Edgar Allan Poe of cinema.
Go to Profile#15328
Guillaume de Machaut
1300 - 1377 (77 years)
Guillaume de Machaut was a French composer and poet who was the central figure of the style in late medieval music. His dominance of the genre is such that modern musicologists use his death to separate the from the subsequent movement. Regarded as the most significant French composer and poet of the 14th century, he is often seen as the century's leading European composer.
Go to Profile#15329
Max Bruch
1838 - 1920 (82 years)
Max Bruch was a German Romantic composer, violinist, teacher, and conductor who wrote more than 200 works, including three violin concertos, the first of which has become a prominent staple of the standard violin repertoire.
Go to Profile#15330
Louis Prima
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Louis Leo Prima was an American trumpeter, singer, entertainer, and bandleader. While rooted in New Orleans jazz, swing music, and jump blues, Prima touched on various genres throughout his career: he formed a seven-piece New Orleans-style jazz band in the late 1920s, fronted a swing combo in the 1930s and a big band group in the 1940s, helped to popularize jump blues in the late 1940s and early to mid 1950s, and performed frequently as a Vegas lounge act beginning in the 1950s.
Go to Profile#15331
Frank Kearns
1917 - 1986 (69 years)
Frank Kearns was an American broadcast journalist for CBS News from 1958 until 1971, although he first began with CBS in 1953 as a freelance correspondent, or "stringer", stationed in Cairo, Egypt.
Go to Profile#15332
Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa Sr.
1880 - 1958 (78 years)
Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa Sr. , a professor at Stanford University, was an internationally known scholar because of his studies in Spanish and Spanish American folklore and philology. He was especially known for his promotion of the study of the Spanish language and literature.
Go to Profile#15333
Tullio Serafin
1878 - 1968 (90 years)
Tullio Serafin was an Italian conductor and former Musical Director at La Scala. Biography Tullio Serafin was a leading Italian opera conductor with a long career and a very broad repertoire who revived many 19th-century bel canto operas by Bellini, Rossini and Donizetti to become staples of 20th-century repertoire. He had an unparalleled reputation as a coach of young opera singers and famously harnessed and developed both Renata Tebaldi's and Maria Callas's considerable talents.
Go to Profile#15334
Adams Sherman Hill
1833 - 1910 (77 years)
Adams Sherman Hill was an American newspaper journalist and rhetorician. As Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard University from 1876 to 1904, Hill oversaw and implemented curriculum that came to effect first-year composition in classrooms across the United States. His most widely known works include The Principles of Rhetoric, Foundations of Rhetoric, and Our English.
Go to Profile#15335
Iwan Knorr
1853 - 1916 (63 years)
Iwan Otto Armand Knorr was a German composer and music teacher. Life A native of Gniew, he attended the Leipzig Conservatory where he studied with Ignaz Moscheles, Ernst Friedrich Richter and Carl Reinecke. In 1874, he became a teacher and in 1878 director of music theory instruction at the Imperial Kharkiv Conservatory, in what is now Ukraine.
Go to Profile#15336
Hervé
1825 - 1892 (67 years)
Louis-Auguste Florimond Ronger , who used the pseudonym Hervé , was a French singer, composer, librettist, conductor and scene painter, whom Ernest Newman, following Reynaldo Hahn, credited with inventing the genre of operetta in Paris.
Go to Profile#15337
Gregory Ratoff
1897 - 1960 (63 years)
Gregory Ratoff was a Russian-born American film director, actor and producer. As an actor, he was best known for his role as producer "Max Fabian" in All About Eve . Biography Ratoff was born in Samara, Russia, to Jewish parents. His mother was Sophie who claimed to have been born on September 1, 1878, but was married on June 14, 1894, when she would have been 15, to Benjamin Ratner , with whom she had four children, the eldest of whom was Grigory, whose date of birth she gave as April 7, 1895 but later April 20 was cited as Gregory Ratoff's birthdate, and the year given as 1893, 1896 and 1897, variously.
Go to Profile#15338
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
1897 - 1957 (60 years)
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a Moravian-born American composer and conductor. A child prodigy, he became one of the most important and influential composers in Hollywood history. He was a noted pianist and composer of classical music, along with music for Hollywood films, and the first composer of international stature to write Hollywood scores.
Go to Profile#15339
Franklin J. Schaffner
1920 - 1989 (69 years)
Franklin James Schaffner was an American film, television, and stage director. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for Patton , and is known for the films Planet of the Apes , Nicholas and Alexandra , Papillon , and The Boys from Brazil . He served as president of the Directors Guild of America between 1987 and 1989.
Go to Profile#15340
Erhard Mauersberger
1903 - 1982 (79 years)
Erhard Mauersberger was a German choral conductor who conducted the Thomanerchor as the 14th Thomaskantor since Johann Sebastian Bach. He was also an academic teacher and composer. Biography Mauersberger, the son of a cantor in Mauersberg, Saxony, was the younger brother of Rudolf Mauersberger, who was cantor of the Dresdner Kreuzchor. He was a Thomaner from 1914 to 1920 under Gustav Schreck. He studied the organ with Karl Straube at the Leipziger Konservatorium.
Go to Profile#15341
Mitchell Parish
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Mitchell Parish was an American lyricist, notably as a writer of songs for stage and screen. Biography Parish was born to a Jewish family in Lithuania, Russian Empire in July 1900 His family emigrated to the United States, arriving on February 3, 1901, aboard the when he was less than a year old. They settled first in Louisiana where his paternal grandmother had relatives, but later moved to New York City, where he grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and received his education in the public schools.
Go to Profile#15342
Pauline Frederick
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Pauline Frederick was an American journalist in newspapers, radio and television, as well as co-author of a book in 1941 and sole author of a book in 1967. in her nearly 50-year career, she covered numerous stories ranging from politics and articles of particular interest to women to military conflicts, and public interest pieces. Her career extended from the 1930s until 1981; she is considered one of the pioneering women in journalism.
Go to Profile#15343
Benjamin Ide Wheeler
1854 - 1927 (73 years)
Benjamin Ide Wheeler was a professor of Greek and comparative philology at Cornell University, writer, and President of the University of California from 1899 to 1919. Life and career Early years Benjamin Ide Wheeler was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, on July 15, 1854, the son of the Rev. Benjamin and Mary Eliza Wheeler. His father was successively a church pastor in Plaistow, New Hampshire; Pawtucket, Rhode Island; Randolph, Massachusetts; Haverhill, Massachusetts; Saco, Maine; Franklin, New Hampshire. His mother, Mary Eliza Ide, was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, daughter of Ebenezer Ide of the Ide family which had its origin in South Attleborough, then Rehoboth.
Go to Profile#15344
Hubert Phillips
1891 - 1964 (73 years)
Hubert Phillips was a British economist, journalist, broadcaster, bridge player and organiser, composer of puzzles and quizzes, and the author of some 70 books. Life Education and early career Phillips was educated at Sexey's School, Bruton, and Merton College, Oxford, where he read History and Economics, taking a first class degree. He served in the British Army with the Essex Regiment throughout World War I.
Go to Profile#15345
Alfred Deller
1912 - 1979 (67 years)
Alfred George Deller, CBE , was an English singer and one of the main figures in popularising the return of the countertenor voice in Renaissance and Baroque music during the 20th century. He is sometimes referred to as the "godfather of the countertenor". His style in singing lute song, with extensive use of rubato and extemporised ornamentation, was seen as radical and controversial in his day but is now considered the norm.
Go to Profile#15346
J. Stuart Blackton
1875 - 1941 (66 years)
James Stuart Blackton was a British-American film producer and director of the silent era. One of the pioneers of motion pictures, he founded Vitagraph Studios in 1897. He was one of the first filmmakers to use the techniques of stop-motion and drawn animation, is considered a father of American animation, and was the first to bring many classic plays and books to the screen. Blackton was also the commodore of the Motorboat Club of America and the Atlantic Yacht Club.
Go to Profile#15347
Herb Magidson
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Herbert A. Magidson was an American popular lyricist. His work was used in over 23 films and four Broadway revues. He won the first Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1934. Life and career Magidson was born and raised in Braddock, Pennsylvania. He had an early interest in the art of magic and was a member of the Pittsburgh Association of Magicians in his youth. He attended the University of Pittsburgh and then worked briefly for a music publisher in New York City. Magidson then moved to Hollywood, Los Angeles, California in 1929 while under contract to Warner Bros. to write music for films.
Go to Profile#15348
Sergei Taneyev
1856 - 1915 (59 years)
Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev was a Russian composer, pianist, teacher of composition, music theorist and author. Life Taneyev was born in Vladimir, Vladimir Governorate, Russian Empire, to a cultured and literary family of Russian nobility. A distant cousin, Alexander Taneyev, was also a composer, whose daughter, Anna Vyrubova, was highly influential at court. Alexander was drawn closely to the nationalist school of music exemplified by The Five, while Sergei would gravitate toward a more cosmopolitan outlook, as did Tchaikovsky.
Go to Profile#15349
Kathleen Harrison
1892 - 1995 (103 years)
Kathleen Harrison was a prolific English character actress best remembered for her role as Mrs. Huggett in a trio of British post-war comedies about a working-class family's misadventures, The Huggetts. She later played the charwoman Mrs. Dilber opposite Alastair Sim in the 1951 film Scrooge and a Cockney charwoman who inherits a fortune in the television series Mrs Thursday .
Go to Profile#15350
Edwin S. Porter
1870 - 1941 (71 years)
Edwin Stanton Porter was an American film pioneer, most famous as a producer, director, studio manager and cinematographer with the Edison Manufacturing Company and the Famous Players Film Company. Of over 250 films created by Porter, his most important include: What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City ; Jack and the Beanstalk ; Life of an American Fireman ; The Great Train Robbery ; The European Rest Cure ; The Kleptomaniac ; Life of a Cowboy ; Rescued from an Eagle's Nest ; and The Prisoner of Zenda .
Go to Profile