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,
#15851
Gerhard Scholz
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Gerhard Scholz was a German university professor and writer. The focus of his work was on Philology, German language and culture and literary history. Life Gerhard Scholz was born early in the twentieth century at Liegnitz, a mid-sized city in Lower Silesia. His father was a teacher. He passed his school leaving exams in 1924 and embarked on an extended period of university-level study at Tübingen, Heidelberg, Berlin and Breslau. Subjects addressed included German studies, History, Art history and the History of religions. In 1932 he joined the Tertiary Education Service as a Referendary. Af...
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Roger Fulford
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Sir Roger Thomas Baldwin Fulford was an English journalist, historian, writer and politician. In the 1930s, he completed the editing of the standard edition of the diaries of Charles Greville. From the 1930s to the 1960s, he wrote several important biographies and other works. Between 1964 and 1981 he edited five volumes of letters between Queen Victoria and the Princess Royal. He was President of the Liberal Party from 1964 to 1965.
Go to Profile#15853
Lee Hee-seung
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
#15854
George T. Flom
1871 - 1960 (89 years)
George Tobias Flom was an American professor of linguistics and author of numerous reference books. Background George Tobias Flom was born in Utica, Dane County, Wisconsin. His grandfather had immigrated to the U.S. from Aurland in Sogn og Fjordane in Norway at the beginning of the 1840s. Flom studied at the University of Wisconsin in Madison from 1889 to 1893, received his master's degree from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1894, and studied in Copenhagen and Leipzig from 1898 to 1899. He received his doctorate from Columbia University in 1900 for a thesis on the Nordic inf...
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Ruben Nirvi
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Ruben Erik Nirvi was a Finnish linguist. He was the deputy of Finnish philology at the University of Helsinki from 1955 to 1957 and the personal additional professor of the Finnish language from 1957 to 1972. He was a special expert on Finnish, especially the Ingrian dialects. He defended his thesis Sanankieltoja ja niihin liittyviä kielenilmiöitä itämerensuomalaisissa kielissä: Riista- ja kotieläintalous .
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Vilém Mathesius
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Vilém Mathesius was a Czech linguist, literary historian and co-founder of the Prague Linguistic Circle. He is considered one of the founders of structural functionalism in linguistics. Mathesius was the editor-in-chief of two linguistic journals, Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague and Slovo a slovesnost , and the co-founder of a third, Nové Athenaeum. His extensive publications in these journals and elsewhere cover a range of topics, including the history of English literature, syntax, Czech stylistics, and cultural activism.
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Harold Orton
1898 - 1975 (77 years)
Harold Orton was a British dialectologist and professor of English Language and Medieval Literature at the University of Leeds. Early life Orton was born in Byers Green, County Durham, on 23 October 1898 and was educated at King James I Grammar School, in Bishop Auckland, and at the University of Durham. He left university in 1917 to enrol in the Durham Light Infantry in which he was commissioned as a lieutenant. He was wounded severely in 1918, never regaining full use of his right arm, and was invalided out of the army in 1919. He insisted to army surgeons that his arm not be amputated.
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Irving Fine
1914 - 1962 (48 years)
Irving Gifford Fine was an American composer. Fine's work assimilated neoclassical, romantic, and serial elements. Composer Virgil Thomson described Fine's "unusual melodic grace" while Aaron Copland noted the "elegance, style, finish and...convincing continuity" of Fine's music.
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Milton Mayer
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Milton Sanford Mayer , a journalist and educator, was best known for his long-running column in The Progressive magazine, founded by Robert M. La Follette Sr., in Madison, Wisconsin. Early life Mayer, reared in Reform Judaism, was born in Chicago, the son of Morris Samuel Mayer and Louise . He graduated from Englewood High School, where he received a classical education with an emphasis on Latin and languages. He studied at the University of Chicago but did not earn a degree; in 1942, he told the Saturday Evening Post that he was "placed on permanent probation in 1928 for throwing beer bottle...
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Emil Votoček
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Emil Votoček was a Czech chemist, composer and music theorist. He is noted for his chemistry textbooks and multilingual dictionaries in both chemistry and music. Chemistry career Votoček studied at the Czech Institute of Technology later in Mulhouse and received his PhD with Bernhard Tollens at the University of Göttingen for his chemistry of sugar.
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Margaret H'Doubler
1889 - 1982 (93 years)
Margaret Newell H'Doubler was a dance instructor who created the first dance major at the University of Wisconsin. Her dance pedagogy was a blend of expressing emotions and scientific description. She used her knowledge about the body to help create movement to express what the dancers were feeling. She wrote five books about her pedagogy and about the importance of dance in education. Among H'Doubler's students was Anna Halprin, a post-modern dance pioneer.
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Nikolai Rakov
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Nikolai Petrovich Rakov , was a Soviet violinist, composer, conductor, and academic at the Moscow Conservatory where he had studied. He composed mostly instrumental works, for orchestra, chamber music and piano music, especially pedagogic works. In 1946, he received the Stalin Prize for his first violin concerto, which became known internationally.
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Otto Luening
1900 - 1996 (96 years)
Otto Clarence Luening was a German-American composer and conductor, and an early pioneer of tape music and electronic music. Luening was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to German parents, Eugene, a conductor and composer, and Emma , an amateur singer. When he was 12, his family moved to Munich, where he studied music at the State Academy of Music. At age 17, he moved to Switzerland and attended the Municipal Conservatory of Music in Zurich and University of Zurich, where he studied with Ferruccio Busoni and Philipp Jarnach, and was also an actor and stage manager for James Joyce's English Players Company.
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Jost Trier
1894 - 1970 (76 years)
Jost Trier was a German philologist who was Chair of German Philology at the University of Münster from 1932 to 1961. Biography Jost Trier was born in Schlitz, Hesse, Germany on 15 December 1894, the son of physician Jost Christian Ludwig Trier and Else Nehrkorn. After graduating from gymnasium in Barmen in 1914, Trier studied Roman philology, German philology, comparative linguistics and art history at the University of Freiburg. His studies were interrupted by World War I, during which Trier served in the Imperial German Army. He was eventually captured by the French, and was since February 1915 interned in a prisoner of war camp in French Algeria.
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Donald Woodward Lee
1910 - 1971 (61 years)
Donald Woodward Lee was an American philologist who served until 1975 as Professor of English at the University of Houston. Biography Donald Woodward Lee was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on April 17, 1910. He earned his bachelor of arts degree from the Pennsylvania State University, his master's degree from Duke University and his doctor of philosophy from Columbia University. Throughout his career Lee taught at the University of Connecticut, the United States Naval Academy, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Vermont and Virginia State College, and was eventually appointed...
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Warren Cowgill
1929 - 1985 (56 years)
Warren Cowgill was an American linguist. He was a professor of linguistics at Yale University and the Encyclopædia Britannica's authority on Indo-European linguistics. Two separate Indo-European sound laws are named after him, both called Cowgill's law in Greek and Germanic respectively.
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William Cornyn
1906 - 1971 (65 years)
William Stewart Cornyn was a Canadian-born American linguist and author, noted for his expertise in Burmese and Russian language studies, as well as for his research on Athabaskan and Burman etymology.
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Buckminster Fuller
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion" , "ephemeralization", "synergetics", and "tensegrity".
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Vittorio Giannini
1903 - 1966 (63 years)
Vittorio Giannini was an American neoromantic composer of operas, songs, symphonies, and band works. Life and work Giannini was born in Philadelphia on October 19, 1903. He began as a violinist under the tutelage of his mother Antonietta Briglia; he would go on to study violin and composition at the Milan Conservatory on scholarship, and then to take his graduate degree at the Juilliard School. He returned to Juilliard to teach, moving on to the Manhattan School of Music, the Juilliard School of Music, and the Curtis Institute of Music. His students included Herbie Hancock, Nicolas Flagello, David Amram, Mark Bucci, Alfred Reed, Anthony Iannaccone, M.
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Robert Livingston Allen
1916 - 1982 (66 years)
Robert Livinston Allen , was an American professor of linguistics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University known for his development of Sector Analysis, a grammatical system used in the teaching and analysis of languages in the United States and around the world.
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Hubert Pernot
1870 - 1946 (76 years)
Hubert Octave Pernot was a French linguist, specializing in Modern Greek studies. He studied at the École des langues orientales in Paris as a pupil of and Jean Psichari, and from 1895 to 1912 worked as a répétiteur of Modern Greek at the school. In 1912 he became a lecturer at the University of Paris, where from 1930 he served as a professor of post-classical and Modern Greek and of neo-Hellenic literature.
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Günter Raphael
1903 - 1960 (57 years)
Günter Raphael was a German composer. Born in Berlin, Raphael was the grandson of composer Albert Becker. His first symphony was premiered by Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1926 in Leipzig with the Gewandhaus Orchestra. From 1926 to 1934 he taught in Leipzig, but illness and the rise of Fascism – he was declared a "half-Jew" – made this difficult for him. He received the Franz Liszt Award for composition in 1948. His students include Kurt Hessenberg.
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Cedric Thorpe Davie
1913 - 1983 (70 years)
Cedric Thorpe Davie OBE was a musician and composer, most notably of film scores such as The Green Man in 1956. A high proportion of his film and documentary music and his concert pieces have a Scottish theme.
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Maurice Grammont
1866 - 1946 (80 years)
Maurice Grammont was a French linguist. He studied linguistics in Paris as a student of Michel Bréal, Arsène Darmesteter, Jules Gilliéron, Gaston Paris and Ferdinand de Saussure. Also, he studied Indo-European languages in Germany; at Freiburg as a pupil of Rudolf Thurneysen and at the University of Berlin under Johannes Schmidt. From 1892 taught classes in linguistics, Gothic and Lithuanian at the Faculty of Letters in Dijon. In 1895 he was appointed chair of grammar and philology at the Faculty of Letters in Montpellier, where he remained up until his retirement in 1939.
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Carl Seemann
1910 - 1983 (73 years)
Carl Seemann was a German church musician, pianist, piano teacher and director of the Musikhochschule Freiburg. Life Born in Bremen, after the Abitur Seemann initially vacillated between studying theology and music. He decided to study church music in Leipzig. His teachers were Karl Straube, Günther Ramin, Kurt Thomas and Carl Adolf Martienssen. After his exams, Seemann worked as organist in Flensburg and Verden. From 1935 he devoted himself mainly to his career as a pianist and to teaching - Seemann subsequently held professorships and master classes in Kiel, Strasbourg and Freiburg im Breisgau.
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Kita Chkhenkeli
1895 - 1963 (68 years)
Kita "Petre" Chkhenkeli was a Georgian linguist and lexicographer based in Germany and Switzerland. He is best known for his Georgisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch, which is "widely regarded as the most comprehensive Georgian dictionary in any western language."
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Ivan Monteiro de Barros Lins
1904 - 1975 (71 years)
Ivan Monteiro de Barros Lins was a Brazilian writer and intellectual. He was born in Belo Horizonte, the son of Edmundo Pereira Lins and Maria Leonor Monteiro de Barros Lins. He studied at Colégio Anglo-Americano and Colégio Arnaldo in Belo Horizonte, before moving to Rio de Janeiro in 1917, where he studied medicine. He was a major promoter of positivist philosophy in Brazil, and frequently wrote and lectured on the subject.
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Julian E. Levi
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Julian Edwin Levi was an American painter. He was a 1968 Resident of the American Academy in Rome. He should not be confused with the New York art dealer Julien Levy, who introduced Salvador Dalí to American patrons at his Julien Levy Gallery.
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Slam Stewart
1914 - 1987 (73 years)
Leroy Eliot "Slam" Stewart was an American jazz double bass player, whose trademark style was his ability to bow the bass and simultaneously hum or sing an octave higher. He was a violinist before switching to bass at the age of 20.
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Kurt Baschwitz
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
Siegfried Kurt Baschwitz , was a journalist, a professor of press, propaganda and public opinion, scholar on newspapers, and crowd psychology. Baschwitz, who, as was customary in German middle class, was known by his second name Kurt, was a German Jew and a friend of Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank. Baschwitz was called upon as an expert to advise on the publication of the Diary of Anne Frank and later again authenticate it.
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Charles Mingus
1922 - 1979 (57 years)
Charles Mingus Jr. was an American jazz upright bassist, composer, bandleader, pianist, and author. A major proponent of collective improvisation, he is considered to be one of the greatest jazz musicians and composers in history, with a career spanning three decades and collaborations with other jazz greats such as Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Eric Dolphy. Mingus's work ranged from advanced bebop and avant-garde jazz with small and midsize ensembles, to pioneering the post-bop style on seminal recordings like Pithecanthropus Erectus and Mingus Ah Um , and progressive big b...
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Isaak Revzin
1923 - 1974 (51 years)
Isaak Iosifovic Revzin was a Russian linguist and semiotician associated with the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School. Life Isaac Revzin was born in Istanbul. He worked at the Institute of Foreign Languages. A structural linguist, he proposed that linguistics be developed as a formal axiomatic theory. Despite the fact that he was a specialist in machine translation, he only saw a computer once in his life. He also wrote in collaboration with his wife, Olga Revzina. He died in Moscow.
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Maurice Coindreau
1892 - 1990 (98 years)
Maurice-Edgar Coindreau was a literary critic and translator of fiction from English into French and Spanish. He is notable for having introduced many canonical American authors of the 20th century—such as William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway—to the French-speaking public.
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William Lovelock
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
William Lovelock was an English classical composer and pedagogue who spent many years in Australia. He was the first Director of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music in Brisbane, and later became the chief music critic for The Courier-Mail newspaper while developing an independent career as a composer.
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Katharine Lloyd-Williams
1896 - 1973 (77 years)
Katharine Georgina Lloyd-Williams CBE was a British anaesthetist, general practitioner and medical educator. She was a consultant anaesthetist at the Royal Free Hospital from 1934 and dean of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine from 1945, retiring from both posts in 1962.
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Robert Reitz
1884 - 1951 (67 years)
Robert Karl Friedrich Reitz was a Swiss violinist and university lecturer. He was concert master of the Staatskapelle Weimar, first violinist of the Reitz Quartet and professor at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar.
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Peter C. Lutkin
1858 - 1931 (73 years)
Peter Christian Lutkin was an American organist, choral conductor, and composer. Career Peter Lutkin was born in Thompsonville, Wisconsin on March 27, 1858. His parents, Peter Christian and Hannah Lutkin, emigrated to the U.S. from Denmark in 1844. He attended Chicago public schools and was a chorister and organist at St. Peter and St. Paul's Episcopal Church. At age thirteen he began formal music training, studying organ with Clarence Eddy, piano with Regina Watson, and theory with Frederick Grant Gleason.
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Samuel French Morse
1916 - 1985 (69 years)
Samuel French Morse was an American poet and teacher. He had the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize named in his honor, which lasted from 1983–2009. The prize was for a first or second book of poems by a U.S. poet, with a $1000 cash award, and publication of the winning manuscript by Northeastern University Press/UPNE.
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Ernesto Montenegro
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Ernesto Montenegro was a Chilean journalist and writer associated with the Generation of 1912. Career Ernesto Montenegro spent much of his life in the United States, where he served as a journalist and founded a magazine named Chile.
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Elias Wessén
1889 - 1981 (92 years)
Elias Wessén was a prominent Swedish linguist and a professor of Scandinavian languages at Stockholm University . In 1947, he was honoured with one of the 18 seats at the Swedish Academy . His earliest work concerned morphological problems in the Germanic languages, Onomasiology and Norse mythology. He published parts of Sveriges runinskrifter, editions of medieval texts and together with Åke Holmbäck, a translation of the Swedish medieval province laws . He published several reference works, such as Svensk språkhistoria in three tomes, and a grammar for modern Swedish Vårt svenska språk. In ...
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Boris Blacher
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Boris Blacher was a German composer and librettist. Life Blacher was born when his parents were living within a Russian-speaking community in the Manchurian town of Niuzhuang . He spent his first years in China and in the Asian parts of Russia, and in 1919, he eventually came to live in Harbin.
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Godfrey Ridout
1918 - 1984 (66 years)
Godfrey Ridout was a Canadian composer, conductor, music educator, and writer. Life and career Ridout was a descendant of Thomas Ridout, the first Surveyor General of Upper Canada during the administration of Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe. He attended University of Toronto with John Beckwith. During his time at the Toronto University, he was a pupil of Ettore Mazzoleni , Weldon Kilburn , and Charles Peaker at its Conservatory of Music. He then taught on the conservatory faculty from 1940 to 1948. He left there to join the faculty at Toronto University, where he taught until 1982. Am...
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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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