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.
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
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Ferdinand Brunot
1860 - 1938 (78 years)
Ferdinand-Eugène-Jean-Baptiste Brunot was a French linguist and philologist, editor of the ground-breaking Histoire de la langue française des origines à 1900 . Brunot was born in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges. He found his first faculty position and published his first book from the Faculté des lettres de Lyon, now the Lumière University Lyon 2. In October 1891 he became a lecturer at the Sorbonne at the age of 31. Here he began his long collaboration with fellow linguist Louis Petit de Julleville and produced the first volume of his monumental History, dealing with medieval French. It would eventually stretch to nine volumes published in his lifetime, and 13 volumes altogether.
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Charles Bally
1865 - 1947 (82 years)
Charles Bally was a Swiss linguist from the Geneva School. He lived from 1865 to 1947 and was, like Ferdinand de Saussure, from Switzerland. His parents were Jean Gabriel, a teacher, and Henriette, the owner of a cloth store. Bally was married three times: first to Valentine Leirens, followed by Irma Baptistine Doutre, who was sent into a mental institution in 1915, and finally with Alice Bellicot. In addition to his edition of de Saussure's lectures, Course in General Linguistics , Charles Bally also played an important role in linguistics.
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Ingolf Dahl
1912 - 1970 (58 years)
Ingolf Dahl was a German-born American composer, pianist, conductor, and educator. Biography Dahl was born Walter Ingolf Marcus in Hamburg, Germany, to a German Jewish father, attorney Paul Marcus, and his Swedish wife Hilda Maria Dahl. He had two brothers, Gert Marcus , and Holger, and one sister Anna-Britta.
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George Frederick McKay
1899 - 1970 (71 years)
George Frederick McKay was a prolific modern American composer. Biography McKay was born in the small frontier wheat farming town of Harrington, Washington. His family later moved to Spokane, where he attended school up to his college years. He was attracted to American folk-song, including jazz and blues and Native American themes, and to a great degree, his music contains a poignant evocation of the West Coast American spirit, including glimpses of a populist era of street marches, honky-tonk dance halls and social chaos along with a recognition of the great natural beauty of his home region and the vitality of its people .
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Lorenzo Dow Turner
1890 - 1972 (82 years)
Lorenzo Dow Turner was an African-American academic and linguist who did seminal research on the Gullah language of the Low Country of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. His studies included recordings of Gullah speakers in the 1930s. As head of the English departments at Howard University and Fisk University for a combined total of nearly 30 years, he strongly influenced their programs. He created the African Studies curriculum at Fisk, was chair of the African Studies Program at Roosevelt University, and in the early 1960s, cofounded a training program for Peace Corps volunteers going to A...
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Eilert Ekwall
1877 - 1964 (87 years)
Bror Oscar Eilert Ekwall , known as Eilert Ekwall, was Professor of English at Sweden's Lund University from 1909 to 1942 and was one of the outstanding scholars of the English language in the first half of the 20th century. He wrote works on the history of English, but he is best known as the author of numerous important books on English placenames and personal names.
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Arthur Garfield Kennedy
1880 - 1954 (74 years)
Arthur Garfield Kennedy was an American philologist who served as Professor of English at Stanford University from 1914 to 1945. Biography Kennedy was born in Weeping Water, Nebraska on June 29, 1880, and attended Doane College at Crete, Nebraska. He received his master's degree from the University of Nebraska and his doctor's degree from Stanford University. From 1914 to 1945 Kennedy was Professor of English at Stanford University. He was the author of several books on the English language. In 1925 he, with Kemp Malone and Louise Pound, founded the journal American Speech and he was a frequent contributor.
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Diana Archangeli
1900 - Present (126 years)
Diana B. Archangeli is an American linguist and Professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. She earned her M.A. at the University of Texas-Austin in 1981, and her PhD from MIT in 1984, with a dissertation entitled, "Underspecification in Yawelmani Phonology and Morphology." Her dissertation was selected for publication in Garland's Outstanding Dissertation series .
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Richmond C. Beatty
1905 - 1961 (56 years)
Richmond C. Beatty was an American academic, biographer and critic. He was the author of several books. Early life Richmond C. Beatty was born on January 6, 1905, in Shawnee, Oklahoma. He grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, where his father, William Henry Beatty, was a "cotton buyer." His mother was Caroline Barbour. He had a brother and two sisters.
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Norman Cousins
1915 - 1990 (75 years)
Norman Cousins was an American political journalist, author, professor, and world peace advocate. Early life Cousins was born to Jewish immigrant parents Samuel Cousins and Sarah Babushkin Cousins, in West Hoboken, New Jersey . At age 11, he was misdiagnosed with tuberculosis and placed in a sanatorium. Despite this, he was an athletic youth, and he claimed that as a young boy he "set out to discover exuberance."
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Elizabeth Wiskemann
1899 - 1971 (72 years)
Elizabeth Meta Wiskemann was an English journalist and historian of Anglo-German ancestry. She was an intelligence officer in World War II, and the Montagu Burton Chair in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh.
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Henri Ramirez
Henri Ramirez is a French-Brazilian linguist known especially for his research on Arawakan languages and other language families of the Amazonian region. He is currently a professor at the Federal University of Rondônia, Guajará-Mirim.
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George Kingsley Zipf
1902 - 1950 (48 years)
George Kingsley Zipf , was an American linguist and philologist who studied statistical occurrences in different languages. Zipf earned his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees from Harvard University, although he also studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin. He was chairman of the German department and university lecturer at Harvard University. He worked with Chinese and demographics, and much of his effort can explain properties of the Internet, distribution of income within nations, and many other collections of data.
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Reginald Ruggles Gates
1882 - 1962 (80 years)
Reginald Ruggles Gates , was a Canadian-born geneticist who published widely in the fields of botany and eugenics. Early life Reginald Ruggles Gates was born on May 1, 1882, near Middleton, Nova Scotia, to a family of English ancestry. He had a twin sister named Charlotte.
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Franzpeter Goebels
1920 - 1988 (68 years)
Franzpeter Goebels was a German pianist, harpsichordist and music educator. Life and career Goebels was born in Mülheim an der Ruhr, the son of a church musician. He received piano lessons, and then studied piano and harpsichord at the Musikhochschule Köln with teachers including Karl Hermann Pillney. He also studied musicology, Romance studies and philosophy at the University of Cologne. He was a solo pianist with the Deutschlandsender broadcaster from 1940, and studied piano further with Raoul von Koczalski. He was drafted for military service in 1942, but due to an injury he was soon transferred to Prague where he led a symphony orchestra of the Wehrmacht.
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Wilbur Schramm
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Wilbur Lang Schramm was a scholar and "authority on mass communications". He founded the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1936 and served as its first director until 1941. Schramm was hugely influential in establishing communications as a field of study in the United States, and the establishing of departments of communication studies across U.S. universities. Wilbur Schramm is considered the founder of the field of Communication Studies. He was the first individual to identify himself as a communication scholar; he created the first academic degree-granting programs with communication in their name; and he trained the first generation of communication scholars.
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I. A. Richards
1893 - 1979 (86 years)
Ivor Armstrong Richards CH , known as I. A. Richards, was an English educator, literary critic, poet, and rhetorician. His work contributed to the foundations of the New Criticism, a formalist movement in literary theory which emphasized the close reading of a literary text, especially poetry, in an effort to discover how a work of literature functions as a self-contained and self-referential æsthetic object.
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Ernest Campbell Mossner
1907 - 1986 (79 years)
Ernest Campbell Mossner professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and biographer of the Scottish philosopher, essayist and historian David Hume . He was a specialist also on Hume's friend and contemporary, Adam Smith.
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Uriel Weinreich
1926 - 1967 (41 years)
Uriel Weinreich was a Jewish–American linguist. Life Uriel Weinreich was born in Wilno, Poland , the first child of Max Weinreich and Regina Szabad, to a family that paternally hailed from Courland in Latvia and maternally came from a well-respected and established Wilno Jewish family. He earned his BA, MA, and PhD from Columbia University and went on to teach there, specializing in Yiddish studies, sociolinguistics, and dialectology. He advocated the increased acceptance of semantics and compiled the iconic Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary, published shortly after his death...
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Joshua Whatmough
1897 - 1964 (67 years)
Joshua Whatmough was an English linguist, professor, and writer from Rochdale, Lancashire who served as the president of the Linguistics Society of America in 1951. He was also the chairman of the department of linguistics at Harvard University from 1926 to his retirement in 1963. He studied comparative philology and classics at the University of Manchester and the University of Cambridge.
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Edgar Howard Sturtevant
1875 - 1952 (77 years)
Edgar Howard Sturtevant was an American linguist. Biography Sturtevant was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, the older brother of Alfred Sturtevant and grandson of educator Julian Monson Sturtevant. He studied at Illinois College, where his grandfather was president, and obtained an A.B. from Indiana University, then the University of Chicago receiving there in 1901 a Ph.D. with a dissertation on Latin case forms. He became an assistant professor of classical philology at Columbia University before joining the linguistics faculty at Yale University in 1923. In 1924, he was a member of the organizing committee for the founding, with Leonard Bloomfield and George M.
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Hans Kurath
1891 - 1992 (101 years)
Hans Kurath was an American linguist of Austrian origin. He was full professor for English and Linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The many varieties of regional English that he encountered during his trips convinced him of the necessity of completing a systematic study of American English.
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Paul Constantinescu
1909 - 1963 (54 years)
Paul Constantinescu was a Romanian composer. Two of his main influences are Romanian folk music and Byzantine chant, both of which he used in his teaching. One of his students was composer Margareta Xenopol.
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Wang Li
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Wang Li , courtesy name Wang Liaoyi and birth name Wang Xiangying , was a Chinese linguist, educator, translator and poet, described as "the founder of Chinese Linguistics". His work expands a wide range in Chinese linguistics, including phonology, grammar and lexicography, historical linguistics and dialectal studies. He was also the founder of the first Chinese Linguistics Department at Tsinghua University. He brought the western modern linguistic methodologies back to China and strove for the modernization and reformation of Chinese grammar throughout his whole life. His most famous books ...
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Émile Legouis
1861 - 1937 (76 years)
Émile Hyacinthe Legouis was a French scholar of English literature and translator. Biography Son of a haberdasher, member of a family of five children, he began his career teaching one year at the college in Avranches. He became a student at the École pratique des hautes études in 1883, he subsequently received first at the agrégation of English in 1885. He was then appointed lecturer in English language and literature at the University of Lyon. Between 1904 and 1932, he taught English language and literature at the Sorbonne , first as a lecturer in 1904, then as a professor in 1906 and he obtained the chair in 1919.
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Carl Clewing
1884 - 1954 (70 years)
Theodor Rudolph Carl Clewing was a German operatic tenor/heldentenor, stage and film actor, composer of the song Alle Tage ist kein Sonntag and professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Life Born in Schwerin, Clewing originates from an old Westphalian Schulzengeschlecht, which is first mentioned in documents in 1486 on the Schulte-Klevinghof in the parish Pelkum. In his birthplace Schwerin, his father was the owner of the Löwenapotheke there. Clewing studied in Prague and joined the Burschenschaft there, Constantia, which was absorbed into the Munich fraternity Sudetia in 1952. From 19...
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Yuri Yankelevich
1909 - 1973 (64 years)
Yuri Yankelevich was a Soviet violin pedagogue who taught many internationally known virtuosos during his long tenure at the Moscow Conservatory. Life and career Yuri Yankelevich was born in Basel, Switzerland. His father, Isay Leontyevich Yankelevich, a prominent lawyer, was one of the founders of the Omsk Philharmonic Society. In Omsk, young Yuri studied with Leopold Auer's student, Anisim Berlin, a grandfather of Natalia Gutman. In 1923 he entered Leningrad Conservatory, the class of Hovhaness Nalbandian . On Yankelevich's graduation composer Alexander Glazunov commented: "a career of a virtuoso violinist would certainly be his calling".
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Abraham Yahuda
1877 - 1951 (74 years)
Abraham Shalom Yahuda was a Jewish Palestinian polymath, teacher, writer, researcher, linguist, and collector of rare documents. Biography Abraham Shalom Yahuda was born in Jerusalem to a Jewish family originally from Baghdad. During his early life he studied under his brother Isaac Ezekial Yahuda. In 1895, at the age of fifteen, he wrote his first book entitled Arab Antiquities. Two years later, in 1897 he attended the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. Afterwards he began teaching in Berlin from 1905 to 1914. Later, during the First World War, he relocated to Madrid where he was...
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Norbert Jokl
1877 - 1942 (65 years)
Norbert Jokl was an Austrian Albanologist of Jewish descent who has been called the father of Albanology. Early life Jokl was born in Bzenec , Southern Moravia , to Heinrich, a merchant, and Emilie née Haas. His older brother, Willhlem, died in 1895 at the age of 21. He graduated from high school cum laude and entered the University of Vienna to study law. He graduated summa cum laude on June 23, 1901.
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Muhammad Abdul Hye
1919 - 1969 (50 years)
Muhammad Abdul Hye also known as Muhammad Abdul Hai was a Bengali educationist, litterateur, researcher and linguist who was and is remembered as a notable figure in the Bengali language movement. He was awarded Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1961 and Ekushey Padak in 1996 by the Government of Bangladesh.
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Keith Falkner
1900 - 1994 (94 years)
Sir Donald Keith Falkner , known simply as Keith Falkner, was a distinguished English bass-baritone singer especially associated with oratorio and concert recital, who later became Director of the Royal College of Music in London.
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Charles Eames
1907 - 1978 (71 years)
Charles Ormond Eames Jr. was an American designer, architect and filmmaker. In professional partnership with his spouse Ray Kaiser Eames, he was responsible for groundbreaking contributions in the field of architecture, furniture design, industrial design, manufacturing and the photographic arts.
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Isadore Freed
1900 - 1960 (60 years)
Isadore Freed was a Jewish composer of Belarusian birth. Biography Born in Brest-Litovsk, now Brest, Belarus, Freed's family emigrated to the United States when Freed was three years old and settled in Philadelphia, where his father owned a music store. Freed began playing piano at age seven, and began composing at age nine.
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Frederick Converse
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
Frederick Shepherd Converse , was an American composer of classical music, whose works include four operas and five symphonies. Life and career Converse was born in Newton, Massachusetts, the son of Edmund Winchester and Charlotte Augusta Converse. His father was a successful merchant, and president of the National Tube Works and the Conanicut Mills. Frederick Converse's higher education was at Harvard College, where he came under the influence of the composer John K. Paine. Converse had already received instruction in piano playing, and the study of musical theory was a most important part of his college course.
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Osborn Bergin
1873 - 1950 (77 years)
Osborn Joseph Bergin was a scholar of the Irish language and early Irish literature, who discovered Bergin's Law. He was born in Cork, sixth child and eldest son of Osborn Roberts Bergin and Sarah Reddin, and was educated at Queen's College Cork . He then went to Germany for advanced studies in Celtic languages, working with Heinrich Zimmer at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin and later with Rudolf Thurneysen at the University of Freiburg, where he wrote his dissertation on palatalization in 1906. He then returned to Ireland and taught at the School of Irish Learning and at Universi...
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Heinrich Werlé
1887 - 1955 (68 years)
Heinrich Werlé was a German choir director, organist and music critic. Life Born in Bensheim, Werlé, son of a civil servant, was first a music teacher at a school in Leipzig, and from 1926 in the rank of a study council. From 1928 to 1945 he taught music at the Pädagogisches Institut of the Leipzig University.
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Juho August Hollo
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Juho August Hollo , also known as J. A. Hollo, was a Finnish scholar and professor of education at the University of Helsinki from 1930 to 1954. He was one of the most prolific translators into Finnish, translating a range of genres and from several languages. He himself said in 1953 that he had translated 170 books; some sources list over 300. Among the authors he translated were Miguel de Cervantes, Anatole France, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Voltaire, Charles Dickens, Jonathan Swift, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Knut Hamsun and Friedrich Nietzsche. He was als...
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Helmuth Osthoff
1896 - 1983 (87 years)
Helmuth Osthoff was a German musicologist and composer. Much of his career was spent at Frankfurt University, prior to which he held posts at Halle University and Berlin University. He wrote the first major biography on the composer Josquin des Prez, published as a two volume monograph in 1962 and 1965
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Harry Farjeon
1878 - 1948 (70 years)
Harry Farjeon was a British composer and an influential teacher of harmony and composition at the Royal Academy of Music for more than 45 years. Early life and studies Harry Farjeon was born in Hohokus Township, New Jersey, United States, the eldest son of author Benjamin Farjeon, who was from the East End of London, and Margaret, the daughter of American actor Joseph Jefferson. His parents returned to Britain when he was a baby, and he lived in Hampstead in London for the rest of his life. His younger sister, Eleanor Farjeon , with whom he shared a rich imaginary life, wrote children's books and poetry, including the hymn, Morning Has Broken.
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Donald Tyerman
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
Donald Tyerman was an English journalist and editor. Early life Tyerman was born in Middlesbrough, England. He contracted polio at the age of three and was paralysed from the neck down, although over the next ten years he did eventually get back full use of the whole of his body except his legs - he needed splintss to walk for the rest of his life. He was educated at Great Ayton Friends' School and Gateshead Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford and from 1930 to 1936 lectured in history at University College, Southampton.
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Boris Kremenliev
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Boris Kremenliev was a Bulgarian-American composer and professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA. Early life He emigrated from his native Bulgaria in 1929. Kremenliev studied at De Paul University and later the University of Rochester, where he earned his doctorate in 1942. He served in the U.S. Army.
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László Lajtha
1892 - 1963 (71 years)
László Lajtha was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist and conductor. Career Born to Ida Wiesel, a Transsylvanian-Hungarian and Pál Lajtha, an owner of a leather factory. The father Pál had ambitions to become a conductor, played the violin well and also composed. Lajtha studied with Viktor Herzfeld in the Academy of Music in Budapest and then in Leipzig, Geneva and finally Paris where he was a pupil of Vincent d'Indy. Before the First World War, in collaboration with Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, he undertook the study and transcription of Hungarian folk song, heading up a project to produce a series of folk music recordings.
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Franco Albini
1905 - 1977 (72 years)
Franco Albini was an Italian Neo-Rationalist architect, designer and university instructor in design. Education and career A native of Robbiate, near Milan, Albini obtained his degree in architecture at Politecnico di Milano University in 1929 and began his professional career working for Gio Ponti. He started displaying his works at the Milan Triennale, and in 1930 he opened his own practice.
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Louis Gauchat
1866 - 1942 (76 years)
Louis Gauchat was a Swiss linguist. Career He studied at the University of Zürich under Heinrich Morf and in Paris as a pupil of Gaston Paris, receiving his doctorate in 1890 with the dissertation Le patois de Dompierre. He later worked as a lecturer at Bern and Zürich . In 1902 was named a professor of Romance philology at the University of Bern. In 1907 he succeeded Jakob Ulrich at the University of Zürich, where he taught classes until 1931. In 1909, with Albert Bachmann, he founded the phonogram archives at the university. In 1926–28 he served as academic rector.
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Jean Deny
1879 - 1963 (84 years)
Jean Deny was a French grammarian, specialist of oriental languages. Biography Born to a French father and a Polish mother settled in Kiev, Jean Deny became familiar with the French, Polish, Ukrainian and Russian languages at a young age. After the baccalaureate, he specialized in Oriental languages . He became professor of turkology at the Sorbonne after he taught at the École nationale des langues orientales vivantes of which he was administrator from 1937 to 1948.
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Maximilian Lambertz
1882 - 1963 (81 years)
Maximilian Lambertz was an Austrian linguist, folklorist, and a major personality of Albanology. Biography In the years 1900 to 1905, he studied comparative linguistics and classical philology in Vienna, and subsequently received his doctorate with a dissertation on the "Greek slave name" . A government scholarship enabled him to travel to Italy and Greece. While in Greece, he overheard the conversation of some fishermen from Attica. He got curious when he was told that it was the Arvanitika dialect of the Albanian .This would change his course of work from that moment on. After his return h...
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Grigori Kozintsev
1905 - 1973 (68 years)
Grigori Mikhailovich Kozintsev was a Soviet theatre and film director, screenwriter and pedagogue. He was named People's Artist of the USSR in 1964. In 1965 he was a member of the jury at the 4th Moscow International Film Festival. Two years later he was a member of the jury of the 5th Moscow International Film Festival. In 1971 he was the President of the Jury at the 7th Moscow International Film Festival.
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Hermann Teuchert
1880 - 1972 (92 years)
Hermann August Teuchert was a German historical linguist. Teuchert was born in Loppow In 1920 he was granted the newly created professorship for Low German Philology at the University of Rostock and served in this position until 1946. He died in Heidelberg at the age of 91.
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Hervey Alan
1910 - 1982 (72 years)
Hervey Alan was an English operatic bass and voice teacher. During his career he sang leading roles with most of Great Britain's major opera institutions, including the Edinburgh Festival, the Glyndebourne Festival, the Royal Opera House, the Sadler's Wells Opera, and the Welsh National Opera. He is best known for creating the role of Mr. Redburn in the world premiere of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd at the Royal Opera House, London, on 1 December 1951. Music critic Elizabeth Forbes wrote that his voice was "dark toned, resonant", and "especially effective as Zaccaria in Nabucco.
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Felix Prohaska
1912 - 1987 (75 years)
Felix Prohaska was an Austrian conductor and professor of musicology in Hanover. Education Felix Prohaska, born in Vienna, was the son of the composer and professor Carl Prohaska . He received his music education from his father; he studied piano with Eduard Steuermann and music theory with Egon Kornauth and Hans Gál.
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