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,
#15601
Carl Orff
1895 - 1982 (87 years)
Carl Heinrich Maria Orff was a German composer and music educator, who composed the cantata Carmina Burana . The concepts of his Schulwerk were influential for children's music education. Life Early life Carl Heinrich Maria Orff was born in Munich on 10 July 1895, the son of Paula Orff and Heinrich Orff . His family was Bavarian and was active in the Imperial German Army; his father was an army officer with strong musical interests, and his mother was a trained pianist. His grandfathers, Carl von Orff and Karl Köstler , were both major generals and also scholars. His paternal grandmother, Fanny Orff , was Catholic of Jewish descent.
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Herbert Matter
1907 - 1984 (77 years)
Herbert Matter was a Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer known for his pioneering use of photomontage in commercial art. Matter's innovative and experimental work helped shape the vocabulary of 20th-century graphic design.
Go to Profile#15603
Kenji Tomiki
1900 - 1979 (79 years)
was a Japanese martial artist who specialized in aikido and judo family of martial arts. He was a pedagogue of martial arts theory . He is the founder of Japan Aikido Association and the competitive aikido style.
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Ernst Victor Wolff
1889 - 1960 (71 years)
Ernst Victor Wolff was a German-born concert pianist and harpsichordist, who maintained a career not only as a soloist but also as a respected accompanist. Singers with whom he performed included Dorothy Maynor and Alexander Kipnis; he accompanied the latter in the Hugo Wolf Society recording project of the 1930s. As a harpsichordist, on February 20, 1938, he participated in the Carnegie Hall premiere of J.S. Bach's Coffee Cantata under the direction of Walter Damrosch; the other performers on that occasion included singers Charles Kullman, Helen Jepson, and Lawrence Tibbett; flutist France...
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Aleksey Dmitrievich Popov
1892 - 1961 (69 years)
#15606
John Barbirolli
1899 - 1970 (71 years)
Sir John Barbirolli was a British conductor and cellist. He is remembered above all as conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, which he helped save from dissolution in 1943 and conducted for the rest of his life. Earlier in his career he was Arturo Toscanini's successor as music director of the New York Philharmonic, serving from 1936 to 1943. He was also chief conductor of the Houston Symphony from 1961 to 1967, and was a guest conductor of many other orchestras, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna...
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Stuart Novins
1914 - 1989 (75 years)
Stuart Novins was an American television journalist. He was a CBS News correspondent for 35 years. Novins covered Fidel Castro's ascent to power in Cuba and later reported on the Bay of Pigs invasion. From 1958 to 1961 Novins was the CBS network's United Nations correspondent. In the 1960s as a Moscow correspondent, he covered the political collapse of Nikita Khrushchev. He was the chief of the CBS News bureau in Moscow from 1962 to 1965. As the second moderator for Face the Nation, he interviewed national as well as international world leaders. In 1960, the year he left his position on Fac...
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Emily Daymond
1866 - 1949 (83 years)
Emily Rosa Daymond was an English musician. Daymond was born in Framlingham, Suffolk, the daughter of the Reverend Albert Cooke Daymond, headmaster of a boys’ school – Timsbury. She entered the Royal College of Music as a Foundation Scholar on 7 May 1883, when the College first opened, studying with Ernst Pauer , Richard Gompertz , Dr. Frederick Bridge and Dr. Hubert Parry, eventually becoming devoted disciple of Parry.
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Ricardo Carballo
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Ricardo Carballo Calero , self-styled as Ricardo Carvalho Calero from 1981 onward, was a Spanish philologist, academic and writer. He was the first Professor of Galician Language and Literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela. He was a member of the Royal Galician Academy, the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, and also an honorary member of the Galician Language Association. He was one of the main theorists of contemporary Galician reintegrationism and his works on this field are considered a primary reference. Many consider Carballo Calero as one of the most prominent figures of the twe...
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Lev Shcherba
1880 - 1944 (64 years)
Lev Vladimirovich Shcherba was a Russian Empire and Soviet linguist and lexicographer specializing in phonetics and phonology. Early life and education Born in Igumen to the family of an engineer. Shcherba went to secondary school in Kiev, where he graduated in 1898, and briefly attended Kiev University before he moved to the capital and entered St. Petersburg University. There, he studied under Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and graduated in 1903. In 1906 he traveled abroad, first to Leipzig and then to northern Italy, where he studied Tuscan dialects.
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Alexander Moyzes
1906 - 1984 (78 years)
Alexander Moyzes was a Slovak neoromantic composer. Biography Moyzes was born into a musical family in 1906 at Kláštor pod Znievom, Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was the composer and educator Mikuláš Moyzes. After earlier technical studies, in 1925 he entered the Prague Conservatory, where he studied organ, conducting and composition. He graduated in 1929 and went on to study in the master class of Vítězslav Novák, from which he graduated in the following year with his Overture for Orchestra, Opus 10. It was Novák who directed his attention to Slovak music, the source of his inspiratio...
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Ferdinand de Saussure
1857 - 1913 (56 years)
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.
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Pāṇini
500 BC - Present (2526 years)
was a logician, Sanskrit philologist, grammarian, and revered scholar in ancient India, variously dated between the 6th and 4th century BCE. Since the discovery and publication of his work Aṣṭādhyāyī by European scholars in the nineteenth century, Pāṇini has been considered the "first descriptive linguist", and even labelled as “the father of linguistics”. His approach to grammar was influential on such foundational linguists as Ferdinand de Saussure and Leonard Bloomfield.
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Claude Monet
1840 - 1926 (86 years)
Oscar-Claude Monet was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During his long career, he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of impressionism's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein air landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant, exhibited in 1874 initiated by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon.
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Le Corbusier
1887 - 1965 (78 years)
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret , known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner and writer, who was one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and acquired French nationality by naturalization on 19 September 1930. His career spanned five decades, in which he designed buildings in Europe, Japan, India, as well as North and South America. He considered that "the roots of modern architecture are to be found in Viollet-le-Duc".
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John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough
1650 - 1722 (72 years)
General John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, 1st Prince of Mindelheim, 1st Count of Nellenburg, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, was an English soldier and statesman. From a gentry family, he served first as a page at the court of the House of Stuart under James, Duke of York, through the 1670s and early 1680s, earning military and political advancement through his courage and diplomatic skill. He is known for never having lost a battle.
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Roman Jakobson
1896 - 1982 (86 years)
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist. A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century. With Nikolai Trubetzkoy, he developed revolutionary new techniques for the analysis of linguistic sound systems, in effect founding the modern discipline of phonology. Jakobson went on to extend similar principles and techniques to the study of other aspects of language such as syntax, morphology and semantics. He made numerous contributions to Slavic linguistics, most notably two studies of Russian case and an analysis of the categories of the Russian verb.
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Michelangelo
1475 - 1564 (89 years)
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , known mononymously as Michelangelo , was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, his work was inspired by models from classical antiquity and had a lasting influence on Western art. Michelangelo's creative abilities and mastery in a range of artistic arenas define him as an archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and elder contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci. Given the sheer volume of surviving correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences, Michelangelo is one of the best-documented artists of the 16th century.
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Walt Whitman
1819 - 1892 (73 years)
Walter Whitman Jr. was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American history. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in his time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described by some as obscene for its overt sensuality.
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Quintilian
35 - 96 (61 years)
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus was a Roman educator and rhetorician born in Hispania, widely referred to in medieval schools of rhetoric and in Renaissance writing. In English translation, he is usually referred to as Quintilian , although the alternate spellings of Quintillian and Quinctilian are occasionally seen, the latter in older texts.
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François Rabelais
1494 - 1553 (59 years)
François Rabelais , has been called the first great French prose author. A humanist of the French Renaissance and Greek scholar, he attracted opposition from both John Calvin and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Though in his day he was best known as a physician, scholar, and diplomat, later he became better known as a satirist, for his depictions of the grotesque, and for his larger-than-life characters.
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Victor Horta
1861 - 1947 (86 years)
Victor Pierre Horta was a Belgian architect and designer, and one of the founders of the Art Nouveau movement. He was a fervent admirer of the French architectural theorist Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and his Hôtel Tassel in Brussels , often considered the first Art Nouveau house, is based on the work of Viollet-le-Duc. The curving stylized vegetal forms that Horta used in turn influenced many others, including the French architect Hector Guimard, who used it in the first Art Nouveau apartment building he designed in Paris and in the entrances he designed for the Paris Metro. He is also considered ...
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Isocrates
436 BC - 338 BC (98 years)
Isocrates was an ancient Greek rhetorician, one of the ten Attic orators. Among the most influential Greek rhetoricians of his time, Isocrates made many contributions to rhetoric and education through his teaching and written works.
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Georges Méliès
1861 - 1938 (77 years)
Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès was a French illusionist, actor, and film director. He led many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema. Méliès was well known for the use of special effects, popularizing such techniques as substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted colour. He was also one of the first filmmakers to use storyboards. His films include A Trip to the Moon and The Impossible Voyage , both involving strange, surreal journeys somewhat in the style of Jules Verne, and are considered among the most important ear...
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Edward Sapir
1884 - 1939 (55 years)
Edward Sapir was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States. Sapir was born in German Pomerania, in what is now northern Poland. His family emigrated to the United States of America when he was a child. He studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia, where he came under the influence of Franz Boas, who inspired him to work on Native American languages. While finishing his Ph.D. he went to California to work with Alfred Kroeber documenting the indigenous languages there.
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Saint Patrick
385 - 461 (76 years)
Saint Patrick was a fifth-century Romano-British Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland. Known as the "Apostle of Ireland", he is the primary patron saint of Ireland, the other patron saints being Brigid of Kildare and Columba. Patrick was never formally canonised, having lived before the current laws of the Catholic Church in these matters. Nevertheless, he is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, the Church of Ireland , and in the Eastern Orthodox Church, where he is regarded as equal-to-the-apostles and Enlightener of Ireland.
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Louis Hjelmslev
1899 - 1965 (66 years)
Louis Trolle Hjelmslev was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family , Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris . In 1931, he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. Together with Hans Jørgen Uldall he developed a structuralist theory of language which he called glossematics, which further developed the semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. Glossematics as a theory of language is characterized by a high degree of formalism. It is interested in describing the formal and semant...
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Otto Jespersen
1860 - 1943 (83 years)
Jens Otto Harry Jespersen was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language. Steven Mithen described him as "one of the greatest language scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
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H. L. Mencken
1880 - 1956 (76 years)
Henry Louis Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. His satirical reporting on the Scopes Trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial", also gained him attention. The term "Menckenian" has entered multiple dictionaries to describe anything of or pertaining to Mencken, including his combative rhetorical and prose style.
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Annie Besant
1847 - 1933 (86 years)
Annie Besant was a British socialist, theosophist, freemason, women's rights and Home Rule activist, educationist, and campaigner for Indian nationalism. She was an ardent supporter of both Irish and Indian self-rule. She became the first female president of the Indian National Congress in 1917.
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Jacob Grimm
1785 - 1863 (78 years)
Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm , also known as Ludwig Karl, was a German author, linguist, philologist, jurist, and folklorist. He formulated Grimm's law of linguistics, and was the co-author of the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the author of Deutsche Mythologie, and the editor of Grimms' Fairy Tales. He was the older brother of Wilhelm Grimm; together, they were the literary duo known as the Brothers Grimm.
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Erasmus
1466 - 1536 (70 years)
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus was a Dutch Christian humanist, Catholic theologian, educationalist, satirist and philosopher. Through his vast number of translations, books, essays and letters, he is considered one of the most influential thinkers of the Northern Renaissance and one of the major figures of Dutch and Western culture.
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Josef Hoffmann
1870 - 1956 (86 years)
Josef Hoffmann was an Austrian-Moravian architect and designer. He was among the founders of Vienna Secession and co-establisher of the Wiener Werkstätte. His most famous architectural work is the Stoclet Palace, in Brussels, a pioneering work of Modern Architecture, Art Deco and peak of Vienna Secession architecture.
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Virginia Woolf
1882 - 1941 (59 years)
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf was born into a very affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen in a blended family of eight that included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. She was home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature from a young age. From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied cla...
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Marshall McLuhan
1911 - 1980 (69 years)
Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is known as the "father of media studies".
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Maurice Denis
1870 - 1943 (73 years)
Maurice Denis was a French painter, decorative artist, and writer. An important figure in the transitional period between impressionism and modern art, he is associated with Les Nabis, symbolism, and later neo-classicism. His theories contributed to the foundations of cubism, fauvism, and abstract art. Following the First World War, he founded the Ateliers d'Art Sacré , decorated the interiors of churches, and worked for a revival of religious art.
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Ford Madox Ford
1873 - 1939 (66 years)
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review were important in the development of early 20th-century English and American literature.
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Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
1876 - 1944 (68 years)
Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti was an Italian poet, editor, art theorist, and founder of the Futurist movement. He was associated with the utopian and Symbolist artistic and literary community Abbaye de Créteil between 1907 and 1908. Marinetti is best known as the author of the first Futurist Manifesto, which was written and published in 1909, and as a co-author of the Fascist Manifesto, in 1919.
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Walter Lippmann
1889 - 1974 (85 years)
Walter Lippmann was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator. With a career spanning 60 years, he is famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of the Cold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological meaning, as well as critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books, most notably his 1922 Public Opinion.
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Octave Mirbeau
1848 - 1917 (69 years)
Octave Mirbeau was a French novelist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, journalist and playwright, who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, whilst still appealing to the literary and artistic avant-garde with highly transgressive novels that explored violence, abuse and psychological detachment. His work has been translated into 30 languages.
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William Morris
1834 - 1896 (62 years)
William Morris was a British textile designer, poet, artist, fantasy writer, and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts movement. He was a major contributor to the revival of traditional British textile arts and methods of production. His literary contributions helped to establish the modern fantasy genre, while he helped win acceptance of socialism in fin de siècle Great Britain.
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Luchino Visconti
1906 - 1976 (70 years)
Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo was an Italian filmmaker, theatre and opera director, and screenwriter. He was one of the fathers of cinematic neorealism, but later moved towards luxurious, sweeping epics dealing with themes of beauty, decadence, death, and European history, especially the decay of the nobility and the bourgeoisie. Critic Jonathan Jones wrote that “no one did as much to shape Italian cinema as Luchino Visconti.”
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Louis Comfort Tiffany
1848 - 1933 (85 years)
Louis Comfort Tiffany was an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass. He is the American artist most associated with the Art Nouveau and Aesthetic movements. He was affiliated with a prestigious collaborative of designers known as the Associated Artists, which included Lockwood de Forest, Candace Wheeler, and Samuel Colman. Tiffany designed stained glass windows and lamps, glass mosaics, blown glass, ceramics, jewellery, enamels, and metalwork. He was the first design director at his family company, Tiffany & Co., founded ...
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Aesop
620 BC - 564 BC (56 years)
Aesop was a Greek fabulist and storyteller credited with a number of fables now collectively known as Aesop's Fables. Although his existence remains unclear and no writings by him survive, numerous tales credited to him were gathered across the centuries and in many languages in a storytelling tradition that continues to this day. Many of the tales associated with him are characterized by anthropomorphic animal characters.
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Édouard Vuillard
1868 - 1940 (72 years)
Jean-Édouard Vuillard was a French painter, decorative artist, and printmaker. From 1891 through 1900, Vuillard was a prominent member of the avant garde artistic group Les Nabis, creating paintings that assembled areas of pure color. His interior scenes, influenced by Japanese prints, explored the spatial effects of flattened planes of color, pattern, and form. As a decorative artist, Vuillard painted theater sets, panels for interior decoration, and designed plates and stained glass. After 1900, when the Nabis broke up, Vuillard adopted a more realistic style, approaching landscapes and interiors with greater detail and vivid colors.
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William Wyler
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
William Wyler was a German-born American film director and producer who won the Academy Award for Best Director three times, those being for Mrs. Miniver , The Best Years of Our Lives , and Ben-Hur , all of which also won for Best Picture. In total, he holds a record twelve nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director.
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Théodore Géricault
1791 - 1824 (33 years)
Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault was a French painter and lithographer, whose best-known painting is The Raft of the Medusa. Despite his short life, he was one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement.
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Edward R. Murrow
1908 - 1965 (57 years)
Edward Roscoe Murrow was an American broadcast journalist and war correspondent. He first gained prominence during World War II with a series of live radio broadcasts from Europe for the news division of CBS. During the war he recruited and worked closely with a team of war correspondents who came to be known as the Murrow Boys.
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Thomas Chatterton
1752 - 1770 (18 years)
Thomas Chatterton was an English poet whose precocious talents ended in suicide at age 17. He was an influence on Romantic artists of the period such as Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Although fatherless and raised in poverty, Chatterton was an exceptionally studious child, publishing mature work by the age of 11. He was able to pass off his work as that of an imaginary 15th-century poet called Thomas Rowley, chiefly because few people at the time were familiar with medieval poetry, though he was denounced by Horace Walpole.
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George Balanchine
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
George Balanchine was a Georgian ballet choreographer, recognized as one of the most influential choreographers of the 20th-century. Styled as the father of American ballet, he co-founded the New York City Ballet and remained its artistic director for more than 35 years. His choreography is characterized by plotless ballets with minimal costume and décor, performed to classical and neoclassical music.
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