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
Anthony Mann
1906 - 1967 (61 years)
Anthony Mann was an American film director and stage actor. Mann initially started as a theatre actor appearing in numerous stage productions. In 1937, he moved to Hollywood where he worked as a talent scout and casting director. He then became an assistant director, most notably working for Preston Sturges. His directorial debut was Dr. Broadway . He directed several feature films for numerous production companies, including RKO Pictures, Eagle-Lion Films, Universal Pictures, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. His first major success was T-Men , garnering notable recognition for producing several films in the film noir genre through modest budgets and short shooting schedules.
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Carl Theodor Dreyer
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Carl Theodor Dreyer , commonly known as Carl Th. Dreyer, was a Danish film director and screenwriter. Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, his movies are noted for emotional austerity and slow, stately pacing, frequent themes of social intolerance, the inseparability of fate and death, and the power of evil in earthly life.
Go to Profile#15853
John Dowland
1563 - 1626 (63 years)
John Dowland was an English Renaissance composer, lutenist, and singer. He is best known today for his melancholy songs such as "Come, heavy sleep", "Come again", "Flow my tears", "I saw my Lady weepe", "Now o now I needs must part" and "In darkness let me dwell". His instrumental music has undergone a major revival, and with the 20th century's early music revival, has been a continuing source of repertoire for lutenists and classical guitarists.
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Pola Negri
1897 - 1987 (90 years)
Pola Negri was a Polish stage and film actress and singer. She achieved worldwide fame during the silent and golden eras of Hollywood and European film for her tragedienne and femme fatale roles. She was also acknowledged as a sex symbol.
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Mary Garden
1874 - 1967 (93 years)
Mary Garden was a Scottish-American operatic lyric soprano, then mezzosoprano with a substantial career in France and America in the first third of the 20th century. She spent the latter part of her childhood and youth in the United States and eventually became an American citizen, although she lived in France for many years and eventually retired to Scotland, where she spent the last 30 years of her life and died.
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Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
1714 - 1788 (74 years)
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach , also formerly spelled Karl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, and commonly abbreviated C. P. E. Bach, was a German Classical period composer and musician, the fifth child and second surviving son of Johann Sebastian Bach and Maria Barbara Bach.
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Heitor Villa-Lobos
1887 - 1959 (72 years)
Heitor Villa-Lobos was a Brazilian composer, conductor, cellist, and classical guitarist described as "the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music". Villa-Lobos has become the best-known South American composer of all time. A prolific composer, he wrote numerous orchestral, chamber, instrumental and vocal works, totaling over 2,000 works by his death in 1959. His music was influenced by both Brazilian folk music and stylistic elements from the European classical tradition, as exemplified by his Bachianas Brasileiras and his Chôros. His Etudes for classical...
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Raymond Chandler
1888 - 1959 (71 years)
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime . All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he wa...
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Antonio Janigro
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Antonio Janigro was an Italian cellist and conductor. Biography Born in Milan, he began studying piano when he was six and cello when he was eight. Initially taught by Giovanni Berti, Janigro enrolled in the Verdi Conservatory of Milan, where he was instructed by Gilberto Crepax. By 1934 Janigro was studying under Diran Alexanian and Pablo Casals at the École Normale in Paris. He graduated from the school in 1934 and began performing solo and in recitals with Dinu Lipatti, Paul Badura-Skoda and Alfredo Rossi.
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Henry Wheaton
1785 - 1848 (63 years)
Henry Wheaton was a United States lawyer, jurist and diplomat. He was the third reporter of decisions for the United States Supreme Court, the first U.S. minister to Denmark, and the second U.S. minister to Prussia.
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Ignaz Moscheles
1794 - 1870 (76 years)
Isaac Ignaz Moscheles was a Bohemian piano virtuoso and composer. He was based initially in London and later at Leipzig, where he joined his friend and sometime pupil Felix Mendelssohn as professor of piano in the Conservatory.
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Marcel Dupré
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Marcel Jean-Jules Dupré was a French organist, composer, and pedagogue. Biography Born in Rouen into a wealthy musical family, Marcel Dupré was a child prodigy. His father Aimable Albert Dupré was titular organist of Saint-Ouen Abbey from 1911 til his death and a friend of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, who built an organ in the family house when Marcel was 10 years old. His mother Marie-Alice Dupré-Chauvière was a cellist who also gave music lessons, and his paternal uncle Henri Auguste Dupré was a violinist and violist. Both of his grandfathers, Étienne-Pierre Chauvière and Aimable Auguste-Pompé...
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Charles Lecocq
1832 - 1918 (86 years)
Alexandre Charles Lecocq was a French composer, known for his opérettes and opéras comiques. He became the most prominent successor to Jacques Offenbach in this sphere, and enjoyed considerable success in the 1870s and early 1880s, before the changing musical fashions of the late 19th century made his style of composition less popular. His few serious works include the opera Plutus , which was not a success, and the ballet Le cygne . His only piece to survive in the regular modern operatic repertory is his 1872 opéra comique La fille de Madame Angot . Others of his more than forty stage work...
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Giorgio Levi Della Vida
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
Giorgio Levi Della Vida was an Italian Jewish linguist whose expertise lay in Hebrew, Arabic, and other Semitic languages, as well as on the history and culture of the Near East. Biography Born in Venice to a Jewish family originally from Ferrara, he moved with them first to Genoa and then to Rome, from whose university he graduated in 1909 with the Hebraist Ignazio Guidi. Immediately after graduation, he participated in numerous research expeditions to Cairo, Athens , and Crete.
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Johann Mattheson
1681 - 1764 (83 years)
Johann Mattheson was a German composer, critic lexicographer and music theorist. His writings on the late Baroque and early Classical period were highly influential, specifically, "his biographical and theoretical works were widely disseminated and served as the source for all subsequent lexicographers and historians".
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Jan Otrębski
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Jan Szczepan Otrębski was a Polish philologist, linguist, and author of 350 scientific papers in the field of Slavic and Baltic studies. He is particularly noted for his study of the Lithuanian language. He held the Chair of Baltic Philology in the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and was the founder of the Lingua Posnaniensis journal. His three-volume work Gramatyka języka litewskiego is considered his magnum opus.
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Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples
1450 - 1537 (87 years)
Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples was a French theologian and a leading figure in French humanism. He was a precursor of the Protestant movement in France. The "d'Étaples" was not part of his name as such, but used to distinguish him from Jacques Lefèvre of Deventer, a less significant contemporary who was a friend and correspondent of Erasmus. Both are also sometimes called by the German version of their name, Jacob/Jakob Faber. He himself had a sometimes tense relationship with Erasmus, whose work on Biblical translation and in theology closely paralleled his own.
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Lu Zhiwei
1894 - 1970 (76 years)
Lu Zhiwei , also known as C. W. Luh, was an influential Chinese psychologist and linguist from Wuxing, Zhejiang. He was also an important figure in Chinese poetry, both for his critical ideas and as a poet being one of the early poets to work in the Modern Chinese poetry, influenced by a more vernacular style and by international developments in poetry.
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Webb Miller
1891 - 1940 (49 years)
Webb Miller was an American journalist and war correspondent. He covered the Pancho Villa Expedition, World War I, the Spanish Civil War, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the Phoney War, and the Russo-Finnish War of 1939. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the execution of the French serial killer Henri Désiré Landru in 1922. His reporting of the Salt Satyagraha raid on the Dharasana Salt Works was credited for helping turn world opinion against British colonial rule of India.
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James Agee
1909 - 1955 (46 years)
James Rufus Agee was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, writing for Time Magazine, he was one of the most influential film critics in the United States. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family , won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize. Agee is also known as a co-writer of the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and as the screenwriter of the film classics The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter.
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Nelson Riddle
1921 - 1985 (64 years)
Nelson Smock Riddle Jr. was an American arranger, composer, bandleader and orchestrator whose career stretched from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s. He worked with many vocalists at Capitol Records, including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Judy Garland, Dean Martin, Peggy Lee, Johnny Mathis, Rosemary Clooney and Keely Smith. He scored and arranged music for many films and television shows, earning an Academy Award and three Grammy Awards. He found commercial and critical success with a new generation in the 1980s, in a trio of Platinum albums with Linda Ronstadt.
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Art Blakey
1919 - 1990 (71 years)
Arthur Blakey was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. He was also known as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina after he converted to Islam for a short time in the late 1940s. Blakey made a name for himself in the 1940s in the big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Billy Eckstine. He then worked with bebop musicians Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. In the mid-1950s, Horace Silver and Blakey formed the Jazz Messengers, a group that the drummer was associated with for the next 35 years. The group was formed as a collective of contemporaries, but over the years the band became known as an...
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Johan Henrik Thomander
1798 - 1865 (67 years)
Johan Henrik Thomander was a Swedish professor, bishop, translator and author. He received his doctorate in theology in 1836 and was elected to the eighteenth chair of the Swedish Academy in 1856. After his father's death, Thomander's daughters bequeathed a house on Sandgatan in Lund to Lund University to be used as a student residence. The dormitory still exists today and is called .
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Margaret Rutherford
1892 - 1972 (80 years)
Dame Margaret Taylor Rutherford, was an English actress of stage, television and film. She came to national attention following World War II in the film adaptations of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. She won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for her role as the Duchess of Brighton in The V.I.P.s . In the early 1960s, She starred as Agatha Christie's character Miss Marple in a series of four George Pollock films. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1961 and a Dame Commander in 1967.
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Anthony Asquith
1902 - 1968 (66 years)
Anthony Asquith was an English film director. He collaborated successfully with playwright Terence Rattigan on The Winslow Boy and The Browning Version , among other adaptations. His other notable films include Pygmalion , French Without Tears , The Way to the Stars and a 1952 adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.
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Augustus Henry Keane
1833 - 1912 (79 years)
Augustus Henry Keane was an Irish Roman Catholic journalist and linguist, known for his ethnological writings. Early life He was born in Cork, Ireland. He was educated in Cork, Dublin and Jersey, and graduated at the Roman Catholic College, Dublin.
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Anna Magnani
1908 - 1973 (65 years)
Anna Maria Magnani was an Italian actress. She was known for her explosive acting and earthy, realistic portrayals of characters. Born in Rome, she worked her way through Rome's Academy of Dramatic Art by singing at night clubs. During her career, her only child was stricken by polio when he was 18 months old and remained disabled. She was referred to as "La Lupa", the "perennial toast of Rome" and a "living she-wolf symbol" of the cinema. Time described her personality as "fiery", and drama critic Harold Clurman said her acting was "volcanic". In the realm of Italian cinema, she was "passion...
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George V. Bobrinskoy
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
George Vladimir Bobrinskoy was a Russian-born American sanskritist. He was professor emeritus in the departments of linguistics, Slavic languages and South Asian literature and civilization at the University of Chicago.
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Orson Welles
1915 - 1985 (70 years)
George Orson Welles was an American actor, director, screenwriter, and producer who is remembered for his innovative work in film, radio, and theatre. He is considered to be among the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time.
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Joseph Joachim
1831 - 1907 (76 years)
Joseph Joachim was a Hungarian violinist, conductor, composer and teacher who made an international career, based in Hanover and Berlin. A close collaborator of Johannes Brahms, he is widely regarded as one of the most significant violinists of the 19th century.
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Edith Evans
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Dame Edith Mary Evans, was an English actress. She was best known for her work on the stage, but also appeared in films at the beginning and towards the end of her career. Between 1964 and 1968, she was nominated for three Academy Awards.
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Germaine Tailleferre
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Germaine Tailleferre was a French composer and the only female member of the group of composers known as Les Six. Biography Marcelle Germaine Taillefesse was born at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Val-de-Marne, France, but as a young woman she changed her last name from "Taillefesse" to "Tailleferre" to spite her father, who had refused to support her musical studies. She studied piano with her mother at home, composing short works of her own, after which she began studying at the Paris Conservatory where she met Louis Durey, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, and Arthur Honegger. At the Paris Conservatory her skills were rewarded with prizes in several categories.
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Ethel Barrymore
1879 - 1959 (80 years)
Ethel Barrymore was an American actress and a member of the Barrymore family of actors. Barrymore was a stage, screen and radio actress whose career spanned six decades, and was regarded as "The First Lady of the American Theatre". She received four nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, winning for None but the Lonely Heart .
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Zhu Wenxiong
1883 - 1961 (78 years)
Zhu Wenxiong was a Chinese linguist and scholar of the early 20th century. He is known books such as New Jiangsu letters , which was an influential works in modern Chinese linguistics. In regarding to language reform in early 20th century China, he once said in 1906: "What I expect of my country's people is for us to be able to stand on our own in this competitive world. It is impossible to achieve universal education if the writing system is not easy to use, and it is impossible to attain strong unity if there is no uniform national language."
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Otto Klemperer
1885 - 1973 (88 years)
Otto Nossan Klemperer was a conductor and composer, originally based in Germany, and then the US, Hungary and finally Britain. His early career was in opera houses, but he became better known as a concert-hall conductor.
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David Crystal
#15888
Arcangelo Corelli
1653 - 1713 (60 years)
Arcangelo Corelli was an Italian composer and violinist of the Baroque era. His music was key in the development of the modern genres of sonata and concerto, in establishing the preeminence of the violin, and as the first coalescing of modern tonality and functional harmony.
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Saul K. Padover
1905 - 1981 (76 years)
Saul Kussiel Padover was a historian and political scientist at the New School for Social Research in New York City who wrote biographies of philosophers and politicians such as Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson.
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John Payne
1842 - 1916 (74 years)
John Payne was an English poet and translator. Initially he pursued a legal career and had associated with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Later he became involved with limited edition publishing and the Villon Society.
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Ernst Kuhn
1846 - 1920 (74 years)
Ernst Wilhelm Adalbert Kuhn was a German Indologist and Indo-Europeanist. He was the son of philologist Adalbert Kuhn. He studied at the universities of Berlin and Tübingen, receiving his doctorate in 1869 with a dissertation-thesis on Kaccāyana, the grammarian, Kaccâyanappakaraṇae specimen. In 1871 he obtained his habilitation for Sanskrit and comparative grammar at the University of Halle, and during the following year relocated to Leipzig as a lecturer. In 1875, he became a full professor at the University of Heidelberg, and from 1877 to 1917 served as a professor of Aryan philology and c...
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Cecil Aronowitz
1916 - 1978 (62 years)
Cecil Aronowitz was a British viola player, a founding member of the Melos Ensemble, a leading chamber musician, and an influential teacher at the Royal College of Music and the Royal Northern College of Music.
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Chet Baker
1929 - 1988 (59 years)
Chesney Henry "Chet" Baker Jr. was an American jazz trumpeter and vocalist. He is known for major innovations in cool jazz that led him to be nicknamed the "Prince of Cool". Baker earned much attention and critical praise through the 1950s, particularly for albums featuring his vocals: Chet Baker Sings and It Could Happen to You . Jazz historian Dave Gelly described the promise of Baker's early career as "James Dean, Sinatra, and Bix, rolled into one". His well-publicized drug habit also drove his notoriety and fame. Baker was in and out of jail frequently before enjoying a career resurgence...
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Ernst Oswald Johannes Westphal
1919 - 1990 (71 years)
Ernst Oswald Johannes Gotthard Gotthilf Westphal was a South African linguist and an expert in Bantu and Khoisan languages. From 1949 to 1962 he taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies , University of London.
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Lillie Langtry
1853 - 1929 (76 years)
Emilie Charlotte, Lady de Bathe , known as Lillie Langtry and nicknamed "The Jersey Lily", was a British socialite, stage actress and producer. Born on the island of Jersey, upon marrying she moved to London in 1876. Her looks and personality attracted interest, commentary, and invitations from artists and society hostesses, and she was celebrated as a young woman of great beauty and charm. During the aesthetic movement in England she was painted by aesthete artists, and in 1882 she became the poster-girl for Pears Soap, becoming the first celebrity to endorse a commercial product.
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Jacques Tourneur
1904 - 1977 (73 years)
Jacques Tourneur was a French film director known for the classic film noir Out of the Past and a series of low-budget horror films he made for RKO Radio Pictures by Val Lewton, including Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man. He is also known for directing Night of the Demon, which was released by Columbia Pictures. While in Hollywood, he was usually addressed by his anglicized name "Jack Turner", a literal and phonetic translation of his name in English.
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Carl Seashore
1866 - 1949 (83 years)
Carl Emil Seashore, born Sjöstrand was a prominent American psychologist and educator. He was the author of numerous books and articles principally regarding the fields of speech–language pathology, music education, and the psychology of music and art. He served as Dean of the Graduate College of University of Iowa from 1908–1937. He is most commonly associated with the development of the Seashore Tests of Musical Ability.
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Nikolai Bachtin
1894 - 1950 (56 years)
Nikolai Bachtin was a lecturer in classics and linguistics at the University of Birmingham, England. Bachtin was a friend of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Bachtin's papers are held at the University of Birgminham archive.
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William Dieterle
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
William Dieterle was a German-born actor and film director who emigrated to the United States in 1930 to leave a worsening political situation. He worked in Hollywood primarily as a director for much of his career, becoming a United States citizen in 1937. He moved back to Germany in the late 1950s.
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Aaron Florian
1805 - 1887 (82 years)
Aaron Florian was an Imperial Austrian-born Romanian historian, journalist and revolutionary. Biography Early years and teaching The son of Romanian Orthodox priest Ioan Florian, he was born in Rod, a village located in the Mărginimea Sibiului region which at the time belonged to the Austrian Empire’s Principality of Transylvania and is now in Romania. After attending primary school in Sibiu, he studied at the gymnasium in Blaj. He then enrolled at the Royal University of Pest. In 1826, the Wallachian boyar intellectual Dinicu Golescu invited Florian to teach Latin at the school in Golești, where he remained until 1830.
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