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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,

#16001

Takashi Shimura

Takashi Shimura

1905 - 1982 (77 years)

Takashi Shimura was a Japanese actor who appeared in over 200 films between 1934 and 1981. He appeared in 21 of Akira Kurosawa's 30 films , including as a lead actor in Drunken Angel , Rashomon , Ikiru and Seven Samurai . He played Professor Kyohei Yamane in Ishirō Honda's original Godzilla . For his contributions to the arts, the Japanese government decorated Shimura with the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 1974 and the Order of the Rising Sun, 4th Class, Gold Rays with Rosette in 1980.

#16002

W. S. Van Dyke

1889 - 1943 (54 years)

Woodbridge Strong Van Dyke II was an American film director and writer who made several successful early sound films, including Tarzan the Ape Man in 1932, The Thin Man in 1934, San Francisco in 1936, and six popular musicals with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. He received two Academy Award nominations for Best Director for The Thin Man and San Francisco, and directed four actors to Oscar nominations: William Powell, Spencer Tracy, Norma Shearer, and Robert Morley. Known as a reliable craftsman who made his films on schedule and under budget, he earned the name "One Take Woody" for his q...

#16003

Alfred Lyall

1796 - 1865 (69 years)

Alfred Lyall was an English philosopher, editor, clergyman and traveller. Early life Alfred Lyall was the youngest son of John Lyall , of Findon, Sussex, and Jane Comyn . His eldest brother George Lyall, sometime member of parliament for the City of London, became chairman of the East India Company. Of his other brothers to reach maturity, John Lyall was a lieutenant-colonel in the Bombay Army, at that time under the command of the East India Company, Haseldine Lyall joined the Royal Navy, while William Rowe Lyall entered the church and became Dean of Canterbury.

#16004

George Lewis

1900 - 1968 (68 years)

George Lewis was an American jazz clarinetist who achieved his highest profile in the later decades of his life. Ancestry Lewis was born in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Through his mother, Alice Zeno, his maternal great-great-grandmother was a Senegalese slave who was brought to Louisiana around 1803. Zeno's family retained some knowledge of Senegalese language and customs until Alice's generation.

#16005

Preston Barba

1883 - 1971 (88 years)

Preston Albert Barba was a major figure in 20th-century Pennsylvania German linguistics, folklore studies, and social history. He was born in Hellertown, Pennsylvania, and received degrees at Muhlenberg College , Yale University , and the University of Pennsylvania . Barba taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University, and, from 1921 to 1951 as professor and head of the Department of German Language and Literature at Muhlenberg.

#16006

Robert Russell Bennett

Robert Russell Bennett

1894 - 1981 (87 years)

Robert Russell Bennett was an American composer and arranger, best known for his orchestration of many well-known Broadway and Hollywood musicals by other composers such as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers.

#16007

Granville Bantock

Granville Bantock

1868 - 1946 (78 years)

Sir Granville Ransome Bantock was a British composer of classical music. Biography Granville Ransome Bantock was born in London. His father was an eminent Scottish surgeon. His younger brother was the dramatist and film director Leedham Bantock. Granville Bantock was intended by his parents for the Indian Civil Service but he suffered poor health and initially turned to chemical engineering. At the age of 20, when he began studying composers' manuscripts, at South Kensington Museum Library, he was drawn into the musical world.

#16008

Hierocles

500 - 600 (100 years)

Hierocles was a Byzantine geographer of the sixth century and the attributed author of the Synecdemus or Synekdemos, which contains a table of administrative divisions of the Byzantine Empire and lists of the cities of each. The work is dated to the reign of Justinian but prior to 535, as it divides the 912 listed cities in the Empire among 64 Eparchies. The Synecdemus is thus one of the most invaluable monuments which we have to study the political geography of the sixth century East. The work of Hierocles along with that of Stephanus of Byzantium were the principal sources of Constantine VII's work on the Themess .

#16009

Larry Parks

1914 - 1975 (61 years)

Samuel Lawrence Klusman Parks was an American stage and film actor. His career arced from bit player and supporting roles to top billing, before it was virtually ended when he admitted to having once been a member of a Communist Party cell, which led to his blacklisting by all Hollywood studios. His best known role was Al Jolson, whom he portrayed in two films: The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again .

#16010

Frances Marion

1888 - 1973 (85 years)

Frances Marion was an American screenwriter, director, journalist and author often cited as one of the most renowned female screenwriters of the 20th century alongside June Mathis and Anita Loos. During the course of her career, she wrote over 325 scripts. She was the first writer to win two Academy Awards. Marion began her film career working for filmmaker Lois Weber. She wrote numerous silent film scenarios for actress Mary Pickford, before transitioning to writing sound films.

#16011

Elliott D. Canonge

1921 - 1971 (50 years)

Elliott D. Canonge was an author and linguist who worked closely with the Comanche and Alaskan Inuit and Athabaskan groups in documenting their language and culture. Canonge worked primarily through grants by Wycliffe Bible Translators as well as related coursework with the Summer Institute of Linguistics on the campus of Oklahoma State University where he was a staff member and an alumnist. Notably, Canonge instructed Native American students to also conduct their own fieldwork, including documenting and speaking the language while many of his contemporaries were only translating the text in...

#16012

Guru Dutt

1925 - 1964 (39 years)

Guru Dutt , was an Indian film director, producer, actor, choreographer, and writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of Indian cinema. Dutt was lauded for his artistry, notably his usage of close-up shots, lighting, and depictions of melancholia. He directed a total of 8 Hindi films, several of which have gained a cult following internationally. This includes Pyaasa , which made its way onto Time magazine's 100 Greatest Movies list, as well as Kaagaz Ke Phool , Chaudhvin Ka Chand , and Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam , all of which are frequently listed among the greatest films in Hindi cinema.

#16013

Alma Cogan

1932 - 1966 (34 years)

Alma Angela Cohen Cogan was an English singer of traditional pop in the 1950s and early 1960s. Dubbed the "Girl with the Giggle in Her Voice", she was the highest paid British female entertainer of her era.

#16014

Johann Kuhnau

1660 - 1722 (62 years)

Johann Kuhnau was a German polymath, known primarily as a composer today. He was also active as a novelist, translator, lawyer, and music theorist, and was able to combine these activities with his duties in his official post as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, which he occupied for 21 years. Much of his music, including operas, masses, and other large-scale vocal works, is lost. His reputation today rests on his Biblical Sonatas, a set of programmatic keyboard sonatas published in 1700, in which each sonata depicted in detail a particular story from the Bible. After his death, Kuhnau was succeeded a...

#16015

Bill Mitchell

1912 - 1988 (76 years)

William L. Mitchell was an American automobile designer. Mitchell worked briefly as an advertising illustrator and as the official illustrator of the Automobile Racing Club of America before being recruited by Harley Earl to join the Art and Color Section of General Motors in 1935.

#16016

Pepper Adams

1930 - 1986 (56 years)

Park Frederick "Pepper" Adams III was an American jazz baritone saxophonist and composer. He composed 42 pieces, was the leader on eighteen albums spanning 28 years, and participated in 600 sessions as a sideman. He worked with an array of musicians, and had especially fruitful collaborations with trumpeter Donald Byrd and as a member of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band.

#16017

Carleton Hobbs

1898 - 1978 (80 years)

Carleton Percy Hobbs, OBE was an English actor with many film, radio and television appearances. He portrayed Sherlock Holmes in 80 radio adaptations in a series of Sherlock Holmes radio dramas , and also starred in the radio adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour.

#16018

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

1875 - 1912 (37 years)

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a British-Sierra Leonean composer and conductor. Of mixed-race, Coleridge-Taylor achieved such success that he was referred to by white New York musicians as the "African Mahler" when he had three tours of the United States in the early 1900s. He was particularly known for his three cantatas on the epic 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha by American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Coleridge-Taylor premiered the first section in 1898, when he was 23.

#16019

Tomaso Albinoni

Tomaso Albinoni

1671 - 1751 (80 years)

Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni was an Italian composer of the Baroque era. His output includes operas, concertos, sonatas for one to six instruments, sinfonias, and solo cantatas. While famous in his day as an opera composer, he is known today for his instrumental music, especially his concertos. He is best remembered today for a work called "Adagio in G minor", attributed to him but largely written by Remo Giazotto, a 20th century musicologist and composer, who was a cataloger of the works of Albinoni.

#16020

Gregory La Cava

Gregory La Cava

1892 - 1952 (60 years)

Gregory La Cava was an American film director of Italian descent best known for his films of the 1930s, including My Man Godfrey and Stage Door, which earned him nominations for Academy Award for Best Director.

#16021

Carl Froelich

1875 - 1953 (78 years)

Carl August Hugo Froelich was a German film pioneer and film director. He was born and died in Berlin. Biography Apparatus builder and cameraman From 1903 Froelich was a colleague of Oskar Messter, one of the advance guard of German cinema, for whom initially he worked on the construction of cinematographic equipment. As cameraman for Messter's weekly newsreels he filmed among many other things the aftermath of a train accident on the Berlin elevated railway on 28 September 1908, one of the worst transport disasters of the time.

#16022

Katharine Lee Bates

Katharine Lee Bates

1863 - 1929 (66 years)

Katharine Lee Bates was an American author and poet, chiefly remembered for her anthem "America the Beautiful", but also for her many books and articles on social reform, on which she was a noted speaker.

#16023

Maria Torrence Wishart

1893 - 1982 (89 years)

Maria Torrence Wishart was a Canadian medical illustrator and the founder of the University of Toronto's Art as Applied to Medicine program. She was educated at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine under Max Brödel, and in 1925 returned to Canada to found the Department of Medical Art Service in the Faculty of Medicine.

#16024

June Christy

1925 - 1990 (65 years)

June Christy was an American singer, known for her work in the cool jazz genre and for her silky smooth vocals. Her success as a singer began with The Stan Kenton Orchestra. She pursued a solo career from 1954 and is best known for her debut album Something Cool. After her death, she was hailed as "one of the finest and most neglected singers of her time."

#16025

Komitas

1869 - 1935 (66 years)

Soghomon Soghomonian, ordained and commonly known as Komitas, was an Armenian priest, musicologist, composer, arranger, singer, and choirmaster, who is considered the founder of the Armenian national school of music. He is recognized as one of the pioneers of ethnomusicology.

#16026

Dan Duryea

1907 - 1968 (61 years)

Dan Duryea was an American actor in film, stage, and television. Known for portraying a vast range of character roles as a villain, he nonetheless had a long career in a wide variety of leading and secondary roles.

#16027

Jaroslav Hašek

1883 - 1923 (40 years)

Jaroslav Hašek was a Czech writer, humorist, satirist, journalist, bohemian, first anarchist and then communist, and commissar of the Red Army against the Czechoslovak Legion. He is best known for his novel The Fate of the Good Soldier Švejk during the World War, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in World War I and a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures. The novel has been translated into about 60 languages, making it the most translated novel in Czech literature.

#16028

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

1710 - 1784 (74 years)

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach was a German composer, organist and harpsichordist. He was the second child and eldest son of Johann Sebastian Bach and Maria Barbara Bach. Despite his acknowledged genius as an improviser and composer, his income and employment were unstable, and he died in poverty.

#16029

Nikolai Medtner

Nikolai Medtner

1879 - 1951 (72 years)

Nikolai Karlovich Medtner was a Russian composer and virtuoso pianist. After a period of comparative obscurity in the 25 years immediately after his death, he is now becoming recognized as one of the most significant Russian composers for the piano.

#16030

Dorothy Kilgallen

Dorothy Kilgallen

1913 - 1965 (52 years)

Dorothy Mae Kilgallen was an American columnist, journalist, and television game show panelist. After spending two semesters at the College of New Rochelle, she started her career shortly before her 18th birthday as a reporter for the Hearst Corporation's New York Evening Journal. In 1938, she began her newspaper column "The Voice of Broadway", which was eventually syndicated to more than 140 papers. In 1950, she became a regular panelist on the television game show What's My Line?, continuing in the role until her death.

#16031

Anita Loos

1889 - 1981 (92 years)

Corinne Anita Loos was an American actress, novelist, playwright and screenwriter. In 1912, she became the first female staff screenwriter in Hollywood, when D. W. Griffith put her on the payroll at Triangle Film Corporation. She is best known for her 1925 comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and her 1951 Broadway adaptation of Colette's novella Gigi.

#16032

Giovanni Gabrieli

1557 - 1612 (55 years)

Giovanni Gabrieli was an Italian composer and organist. He was one of the most influential musicians of his time, and represents the culmination of the style of the Venetian School, at the time of the shift from Renaissance to Baroque idioms.

#16033

Igor Markevitch

Igor Markevitch

1912 - 1983 (71 years)

Igor Borisovich Markevitch was a Russian-born composer and conductor who studied and worked in Paris and became a naturalized Italian and French citizen in 1947 and 1982 respectively. He was commissioned in 1929 for a piano concerto by impresario Serge Diaghilev of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

#16034

Theodor Leschetizky

Theodor Leschetizky

1830 - 1915 (85 years)

Theodor Leschetizky Life Theodor Leschetizky was born on 22 June 1830 at the estate of the family of Count Potocki in Landshut, Austrian Galicia. Joseph Leschetizky, his father, was a gifted pianist and music teacher of Viennese birth. His mother Thérèse von Ullmann was a gifted singer of German origin. His father gave him his first piano lessons and then took him to Vienna to study with Carl Czerny. At age eleven, he performed a Czerny piano concerto in Landshut, with Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, the son of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, conducting. At the age of fifteen he started to tutor his first students.

#16035

Richard Mansfield

Richard Mansfield

1857 - 1907 (50 years)

Richard Mansfield was an English actor-manager best known for his performances in Shakespeare plays, Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and the play Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Life and career Mansfield was born in Berlin and spent his early childhood on Heligoland, Germany, an island in the North Sea, then under British rule. His parents were Hermine Küchenmeister-Rudersdorf, a Russian-born operatic soprano, and Maurice Mansfield, a British London-based wine merchant . His grandfather was the violinist Joseph Rudersdorff. Mansfield was educated at Derby School, in Derby, England, where he studied painting in London.

#16036

Max Levien

1885 - 1937 (52 years)

Max Levien was a leading German-Russian communist politician. He was one of the co-founders of the Communist Party of Germany . As the first party chairman of the KPD in Bavaria, he was in April 1919 one of the protagonists of the Bavarian Soviet Republic that emerged in the wake of the German November Revolution of 1918.

#16037

Erich Berneker

1874 - 1937 (63 years)

Erich Berneker was a German linguist, Slavicist and Balticist, follower of the Neogrammarian school. He was born in Königsberg. He studied in Leipzig under August Leskien, receiving a doctorate in 1895 with a thesis on Old Prussian language, covering its texts, grammar and an etymological dictionary. Afterwards he went to Russia for a one-year study period. He habilitated in 1899 with a paper on word order in Slavic languages . He worked as a private assistant professor in Berlin from 1902, as an associate professor in Prague, as a full professor since 1908 in Wrocław , and since 1911 in Muni...

#16038

Larry Williams

1935 - 1980 (45 years)

Larry Williams was an American rhythm and blues and rock and roll singer, songwriter, producer, and pianist from New Orleans, Louisiana. Williams is best known for writing and recording some rock and roll classics from 1957 to 1959 for Specialty Records, including "Bony Moronie", "Short Fat Fannie", "Slow Down", "Dizzy, Miss Lizzy" , "Bad Boy" and "She Said Yeah" . John Lennon was a fan, and the Beatles and several other British Invasion groups recorded several of his songs.

#16039

Maurice Greene

1696 - 1755 (59 years)

Maurice Greene was an English composer and organist. Biography Born in London, the son of a clergyman, Greene became a choirboy at St Paul's Cathedral under Jeremiah Clarke and Charles King. He studied the organ under Richard Brind, and after Brind died, Greene became organist at St Paul's.

#16040

Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker

1906 - 1975 (69 years)

Freda Josephine Baker , naturalised as Joséphine Baker, was an American-born French dancer, singer and actress. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in France. She was the first black woman to star in a major motion picture, the 1927 silent film Siren of the Tropics, directed by and .

#16041

Alexander Mackenzie

1847 - 1935 (88 years)

Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie KCVO was a Scottish composer, conductor and teacher best known for his oratorios, violin and piano pieces, Scottish folk music and works for the stage. Mackenzie was a member of a musical family and was sent for his musical education to Germany. He had many successes as a composer, producing over 90 compositions, but from 1888 to 1924, he devoted a great part of his energies to running the Royal Academy of Music. Together with Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford, he was regarded as one of the fathers of the British musical renaissance in the late nine...

#16042

Alan Crosland

1894 - 1936 (42 years)

Frederick Alan Crosland was an American stage actor and film director. He is noted for having directed the first feature film using spoken dialogue, The Jazz Singer . Early life and career Born in New York City, New York to a well-to-do Jewish family, Crosland attended Dartmouth College. After graduation, he took a job as a writer with the New York Globe magazine. Interested in the theatre, he began acting on stage, appearing in several productions with Shakespearian actress Annie Russell.

#16043

Edward Alleyn

1566 - 1626 (60 years)

Edward "Ned" Alleyn was an English actor who was a major figure of the Elizabethan theatre and founder of the College of God's Gift in Dulwich. Early life Alleyn was born on 1 September 1566 in Bishopsgate, London; or so it was recorded in the Biographia Britannica as a product of Alleyn's own writing. Alleyn does record his birth date in a diary several times but does not distinctly identify his birthplace as Bishopsgate. In the St. Botolph parish registers it is recorded that he was baptized on the day after his birth. He was born a younger son of Edward Alleyn with three brothers named John, William, and Edward.

#16044

Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov

Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov

1859 - 1935 (76 years)

Mikhail Mikhailovich Ippolitov-Ivanov was a Russian and Soviet composer, conductor and teacher. His music ranged from the late-Romantic era into the 20th century era. Biography He was born in 1859 at Gatchina, near St. Petersburg, where his father was a mechanic employed at the palace. His birth name was Mikhail Mikhailovich Ivanov; later he added Ippolitov, his mother's maiden name, to distinguish himself from a composer and music critic with an identical name . He studied music at home and was a choirboy at the cathedral of St. Isaac, where he also had musical instruction, before entering the St.

#16045

Alfred Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg

1893 - 1946 (53 years)

Alfred Ernst Rosenberg was a Baltic German Nazi theorist and ideologue. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart and he held several important posts in the Nazi government. He was the head of the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs during the entire rule of Nazi Germany , and led Amt Rosenberg , an official Nazi body for cultural policy and surveillance, between 1934 and 1945. During World War II, Rosenberg was the head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories . After the war, he was convicted of crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials in 1946.

#16046

Friedrich Silcher

Friedrich Silcher

1789 - 1860 (71 years)

Philipp Friedrich Silcher , was a German composer, mainly known for his lieder , and an important Volkslied collector. Life Silcher was meant to be a school teacher, but dedicated himself entirely to music in the seminary in Ludwigsburg after he met Carl Maria von Weber. He was taught composition and piano by Conradin Kreutzer and Johann Nepomuk Hummel. In 1817 he was named musical director at the University of Tübingen. He is regarded as one of the most important protagonists of choir singing. He arranged many German Volkslieder and international folk songs that have remained standard repertoire of many choirs in Germany and became an integral part of German daily life.

#16047

Charles Henry Galloway

1871 - 1931 (60 years)

Charles Henry Galloway was a St. Louis, Missouri church and concert organist, choral conductor, educator, and composer. At tall, Galloway was a large man with a commanding presence. His hands were so large, in fact, that his reach on the piano was supposedly twelve keys, or just over eleven inches. A child prodigy, Galloway was employed as a church organist by the age of nine. Over the course of his life, he was employed at various churches in St. Louis, including St. Peter's Episcopal Church, where he served as organist and choirmaster for more than thirty-five years. From 1895 to 1898, Gal...

#16048

Jean de Reszke

1850 - 1925 (75 years)

Jean de Reszke was a Polish dramatic tenor and opera star. Reszke came from a wealthy Polish family with classical and operatic musical traditions. His mother gave him his first singing lessons and provided a home that was a recognized music centre. His sister Josephine and younger brother Édouard performed in Western Europe, and Reszke would perform with each of them throughout his career.

#16049

Johnny Burke

1908 - 1964 (56 years)

John Francis Burke was an American lyricist, successful and prolific between the 1920s and 1950s. His work is considered part of the Great American Songbook. His song "Swinging on a Star", from the Bing Crosby film Going My Way, won an Academy Award for Best Song in 1944.

#16050

Memphis Slim

1915 - 1988 (73 years)

John Len Chatman , known professionally as Memphis Slim, was an American blues pianist, singer, and composer. He led a series of bands that, reflecting the popular appeal of jump blues, included saxophones, bass, drums, and piano. A song he first cut in 1947, "Every Day I Have the Blues", has become a blues standard, recorded by many other artists. He made over 500 recordings.

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