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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,

#16101

Hans Pfitzner

1869 - 1949 (80 years)

Hans Erich Pfitzner was a German composer, conductor and polemicist who was a self-described anti-modernist. His best known work is the post-Romantic opera Palestrina , loosely based on the life of the sixteenth-century composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and his Missa Papae Marcelli.

#16102

Johann Strauss I

Johann Strauss I

1804 - 1849 (45 years)

Johann Baptist Strauss I , also known as Johann Strauss Sr., the Elder or the Father , was an Austrian composer of the Romantic Period. He was famous for his light music, namely waltzes, polkas, and galops, which he popularized alongside Joseph Lanner, thereby setting the foundations for his sons—Johann, Josef and Eduard—to carry on his musical dynasty. He is best known for his composition of the Radetzky March .

#16103

Maniruzzaman Islamabadi

1875 - 1950 (75 years)

Munīruzzamān Khān Islāmābādī , also known by the epithet Biplobi Maulana , was a Muslim philosopher, nationalist activist and journalist from Islamabad in Bengal Presidency, British India . He was among the founders of the Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind.

#16104

Alma Mahler

1879 - 1964 (85 years)

Alma Mahler-Werfel was an Austrian composer, author, editor, and socialite. Musically active from her early years, she was the composer of nearly fifty songs for voice and piano, and works in other genres as well. 17 songs are known to have survived. At 15, she was mentored by Max Burckhard.

#16105

Donald Crisp

1882 - 1974 (92 years)

Donald William Crisp was an English film actor as well as an early producer, director and screenwriter. His career lasted from the early silent film era into the 1960s. He won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1942 for his performance in How Green Was My Valley.

#16106

Niccolò Jommelli

Niccolò Jommelli

1714 - 1774 (60 years)

Niccolò Jommelli was an Italian composer of the Neapolitan School. Along with other composers mainly in the Holy Roman Empire and France, he was responsible for certain operatic reforms including reducing ornateness of style and the primacy of star singers somewhat.

#16107

William S. Hart

William S. Hart

1864 - 1946 (82 years)

William Surrey Hart was an American silent film actor, screenwriter, director and producer. He is remembered as a foremost Western star of the silent era who "imbued all of his characters with honor and integrity." During the late 1910s and early 1920s, he was one of the most consistently popular movie stars, frequently ranking high among male actors in popularity contests held by movie fan magazines.

#16108

Abby Whiteside

1881 - 1956 (75 years)

Abby Whiteside was an American piano teacher. She challenged the finger-centric approach of much classical piano teaching and instead advocated a holistic attitude in which the arm and torso are the conductors of a musical image conceived first in the mind.

#16109

Cyril M. Kornbluth

Cyril M. Kornbluth

1923 - 1958 (35 years)

Cyril M. Kornbluth was an American science fiction author and a member of the Futurians. He used a variety of pen-names, including Cecil Corwin, S. D. Gottesman, Edward J. Bellin, Kenneth Falconer, Walter C. Davies, Simon Eisner, Jordan Park, Arthur Cooke, Paul Dennis Lavond, and Scott Mariner.

#16110

Steve Goodman

1948 - 1984 (36 years)

Steven Benjamin Goodman was an American folk and country singer-songwriter from Chicago. He wrote the song "City of New Orleans", which was recorded by Arlo Guthrie and many others including John Denver, The Highwaymen, and Judy Collins; in 1985, it afforded Goodman the Grammy songwriter award for best country song, as performed by Willie Nelson. Goodman had a small but dedicated group of fans for his albums and concerts during his lifetime. His most frequently sung song, "Go Cubs Go", is about the Chicago Cubs. Goodman died of leukemia in September 1984.

#16111

Leonid Lavrovsky

1905 - 1967 (62 years)

Leonid Mikhailovich Lavrovsky was a Soviet and Russian ballet dancer and choreographer, most famous for choreographing the first full version of Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. Early life Lavrovsky was born in 1905 in St. Petersburg, the son of an industrial worker named Ivanov. Leonid Ivanov changed his surname to Lavrovsky and graduated in 1922 from the Petrograd Ballet Academy, where he had studied under V.I. Ponomaryov. He danced with the former Mariinsky Theatre, performing such roles as Siegfried in Swan Lake, Jean de Brienne in Raymonda, and the lead in Chopiniana. During the same...

#16112

Uttam Kumar

1926 - 1980 (54 years)

Uttam Kumar , widely known as the Mahanayak , was an Indian film actor, producer, director, screenwriter, composer, and playback singer who predominantly worked in Bengali cinema. His career spanned three decades, from the late 1940s until his death in 1980.

#16113

Roger Sessions

1896 - 1985 (89 years)

Roger Huntington Sessions was an American composer, teacher and musicologist. He had initially started his career writing in a neoclassical style, but gradually moved further towards more complex harmonies and postromanticism, and finally the twelve-tone serialism of the Second Viennese School. Sessions' friendship with Arnold Schoenberg influenced this, but he would modify the technique to develop a unique style involving rowss to supply melodic thematic material, while composing the subsidiary parts in a free and dissonant manner.

#16114

Leopold Auer

1845 - 1930 (85 years)

Leopold von Auer was a Hungarian violinist, academic, conductor, composer, and instructor. Many of his students went on to become prominent concert performers and teachers. Early life and career Auer was born in Veszprém, Hungary, 7 June 1845, to a poor Jewish household of painters. He first studied violin with a local concertmaster. He later wrote that the violin was a "logical instrument" for any Hungarian boy to take up because it "didn't cost much." At the age of 8 Auer continued his violin studies with Dávid Ridley Kohne, who also came from Veszprém, at the Budapest Conservatory. Kohne was concertmaster of the orchestra of the National Opera.

#16115

Rex Ingram

1892 - 1950 (58 years)

Rex Ingram was an Irish film director, producer, writer, and actor. Director Erich von Stroheim once called him "the world's greatest director". Early life Born in 58 Grosvenor Square, Rathmines, Dublin, Ireland, , Ingram was educated at Saint Columba's College, near Rathfarnham, County Dublin. He spent much of his adolescence living in the Old Rectory, Kinnitty, Birr, County Offaly, where his father, Reverend Francis Hitchcock, was the Church of Ireland rector. Ingram emigrated to the United States in 1911.

#16116

Gerald Finzi

1901 - 1956 (55 years)

Gerald Raphael Finzi was a British composer. Finzi is best known as a choral composer, but also wrote in other genres. Large-scale compositions by Finzi include the cantata Dies natalis for solo voice and string orchestra, and his concertos for cello and clarinet.

#16117

Ernie Royal

1921 - 1983 (62 years)

Ernest Andrew Royal was a jazz trumpeter. His older brother was clarinetist and alto saxophonist Marshal Royal, with whom he appears on the classic Ray Charles big band recording The Genius of Ray Charles .

#16118

Luigi Boccherini

1743 - 1805 (62 years)

Ridolfo Luigi Boccherini was an Italian composer and cellist of the Classical era whose music retained a courtly and galante style even while he matured somewhat apart from the major European musical centers. He is best known for a minuet from his String Quintet in E, Op. 11, No. 5 , and the Cello Concerto in B flat major . The latter work was long known in the heavily altered version by German cellist and prolific arranger Friedrich Grützmacher, but has recently been restored to its original version.

#16119

Eugene Aynsley Goossens

1893 - 1962 (69 years)

Sir Eugene Aynsley Goossens was an English conductor and composer. Biography He was born in Camden Town, London, the son of the Belgian conductor and violinist Eugène Goossens and Annie Cook, a Carl Rosa Opera Company singer. He was the grandson of the conductor Eugène Goossens . His younger sisters and brothers, all musicians, were Marie, Adolphe, Leon and Sidonie.

#16120

Nikolay Kashkin

Nikolay Kashkin

1839 - 1920 (81 years)

Nikolay Dmitriyevich Kashkin was a Russian music critic as well as a professor of piano and music theory at the Moscow Conservatory for 33 years . The son of a Voronezh bookseller, Kashkin was a self-taught musician who had started giving piano lessons by the time he was 13 years old. In 1860 he travelled to Moscow for further study in piano with Alexandre Dubuque. There he met Herman Laroche, Nikolai Rubinstein and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

#16121

Gram Parsons

1946 - 1973 (27 years)

Ingram Cecil Connor III , known professionally as Gram Parsons, was an American singer, songwriter, guitarist, and pianist. He recorded as a solo artist and with the International Submarine Band, the Byrds, and the Flying Burrito Brothers, popularizing what he called "Cosmic American Music", a hybrid of country, rhythm and blues, soul, folk, and rock.

#16122

Francesco Cilea

1866 - 1950 (84 years)

Francesco Cilea was an Italian composer. Today he is particularly known for his operas L'arlesiana and Adriana Lecouvreur. Biography Born in Palmi near Reggio di Calabria, Cilea was the son of a prominent lawyer and originally intended to follow his father into a law career. He gave an early indication of an aptitude for music when at the age of four he heard a performance of Vincenzo Bellini's Norma and was greatly affected by it. He was sent to study music at the Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella in Naples, where he quickly demonstrated his diligence and precocious talent, earning a gol...

#16123

Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon

Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon

1854 - 1917 (63 years)

Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon was a Norwegian linguist and historian. He was a professor of Semitic Languages at the University of Oslo from 1907. Knudtzon was born in Trondheim, the son of consul Hans Nicolay Knudtzon and his wife Catharina née Trampe. Having finished his secondary education in 1872, he enrolled at the Royal Frederick University in Christiania. After a short spell at the Cathedral School in Trondheim, he returned to Christiania to study Semitic languages, in particular Akkadian, Arabian and Hebrew, the last of which he also gave lectures on. His first scholarly contribution was Textkritische Bemerkungen zu Lay 17,18, which was published in 1882.

#16124

Ethel Smyth

1858 - 1944 (86 years)

Dame Ethel Mary Smyth was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works and operas.

#16125

Billie Burke

1884 - 1970 (86 years)

Mary William Ethelbert Appleton Burke was a Canadian-American actress who was famous on Broadway and radio, and in silent and sound films. She is best known to modern audiences as Glinda the Good Witch of the North in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie musical The Wizard of Oz .

#16126

Hans Bauer

1878 - 1937 (59 years)

Hans Bauer was a German semitist and professor at the University of Halle in the early 1930s. He was involved in the decipherment of Ugaritic cuneiform on clay tablets discovered in Ras Shamra, Ugarit.

#16127

Janet Craxton

1929 - 1981 (52 years)

Janet Helen Rosemary Craxton was an English oboe player and teacher. She was the youngest of the six children and the only daughter of the pianist and teacher Harold Craxton. Her older brothers included the artist John Craxton. She married the composer Alan Richardson in 1961.

#16128

Rudolph Snellius

Rudolph Snellius

1546 - 1613 (67 years)

Rudolph Snel van Royen , Latinized as Rudolphus Snellius, was a Dutch linguist and mathematician who held appointments at the University of Marburg and the University of Leiden. Snellius was an influence on some of the leading political and intellectual forces of the Dutch Golden Age.

#16129

Sergei Parajanov

Sergei Parajanov

1924 - 1990 (66 years)

Sergei Parajanov was an Armenian film director and screenwriter. Parajanov is regarded by film critics, film historians and filmmakers to be one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in cinema history.

#16130

Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg

1906 - 1985 (79 years)

Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg was a German conductor. He began his career in Munich as an assistant to Hans Knappertsbusch at the Bavarian State Opera. After several appointments in Essen, Dortmund, and Kiel, in 1934 he succeeded Herbert von Karajan as first Kapellmeister in Ulm. In 1937 he conducted a complete Beethoven cycle at the invitation of Furtwängler. In 1938 he became director of the Hamburg Lehrergesangsverein and received an appointment at the Hamburg State Opera. In Hamburg he conducted over 700 concerts for schoolchildren. He frequently worked with the Hamburger Symphoniker and the...

#16131

Felix Aylmer

1889 - 1979 (90 years)

Sir Felix Edward Aylmer Jones, OBE was an English stage actor who also appeared in the cinema and on television. Aylmer made appearances in films with comedians such as Will Hay and George Formby. Early life Felix Aylmer was born in Corsham, Wiltshire, the son of Lilian and Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Edward Aylmer Jones. He was educated at King James's Grammar School, Almondbury, near Huddersfield, where he was a boarder from 1897 to 1900, Magdalen College School, and Exeter College, Oxford, where he was a member of Oxford University Dramatic Society . He trained under the Victorian-era actre...

#16132

Ściapan Niekraševič

Ściapan Niekraševič

1883 - 1937 (54 years)

Ściapan Niekraševič , also known as Stepan Nekrashevich was a Belarusian academic, political figure and a victim of Stalin's purges. Early years Niekraševič was born in the estate of Daniłoŭka in Minsk province of the Russian Empire into the family of a petty nobleman. He graduated from the Vilna Teachers' Institute in 1913 and embarked on a teaching career.

#16133

Eva Le Gallienne

Eva Le Gallienne

1899 - 1991 (92 years)

Eva Le Gallienne was a British-born American stage actress, producer, director, translator, and author. A Broadway star by age 21, Le Gallienne gave up her Broadway appearances to devote herself to founding the Civic Repertory Theatre, in which she was director, producer, and lead actress. Noted for her boldness and idealism, she became a pioneering figure in the American repertory movement, which enabled today's off-Broadway. A versatile and eloquent actress herself , Le Gallienne also became a respected stage director, coach, producer and manager.

#16134

Hedley Donovan

1914 - 1990 (76 years)

Hedley Donovan was editor in chief of Time Inc. from 1964 to 1979. In this capacity, he oversaw all of the company's magazine publications, including Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Money, and People. Hand-picked by founder Henry Luce, Donovan redirected the magazine from its historically conservative orientation to a more objective editorial stance, particularly with respect to the Vietnam War. The Hedley Donovan Award was created in 1999 by the Minnesota Magazines and Publications Association to recognize individuals who have shown outstanding lifelong dedication and contributions ...

#16135

Daws Butler

1916 - 1988 (72 years)

Charles Dawson Butler , professionally known as Daws Butler, was an American voice actor. He worked mostly for the Hanna-Barbera animation production company, where he originated the voices of many familiar characters, including Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss, Auggie Doggie, Loopy De Loop, Wally Gator, Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey, Snooper and Blabber, Hokey Wolf, Elroy Jetson, Peter Potamus, The Funky Phantom and Hair Bear.

#16136

Arthur Nikisch

1855 - 1922 (67 years)

Arthur Nikisch was a Hungarian conductor who performed internationally, holding posts in Boston, London, Leipzig and—most importantly—Berlin. He was considered an outstanding interpreter of the music of Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Liszt. Johannes Brahms praised Nikisch's performance of his Fourth Symphony as "quite exemplary, it's impossible to hear it any better."

#16137

Zhang Ruoming

1902 - 1958 (56 years)

Zhang Ruoming was a Chinese scholar of French literature, translator and journalist. She was a professor at Yunnan University and considered an authority on the French author André Gide. She was one of the first Chinese women to earn a doctorate in France, graduating from the University of Lyon. In her youth, she was a leader in the May Fourth Movement in Tianjin and was known for her political association with Zhou Enlai and the Chinese Communist Party in France in the early 1920s.

#16138

Olav Beito

1901 - 1989 (88 years)

Olav Toreson Beito was a Norwegian linguist and professor of Nordic studies at the University of Oslo. Beito was born in Øystre Slidre, the son of the farmer Thore Andreas Beito and Marit Beito . He married Marit Eker in 1930. Beito earned his candidatus philologiæ degree in 1932 from the University of Oslo, and then taught at schools in Fredrikstad and Oslo. From 1936 to 1939 and in 1948 he taught at the University of Oslo. He received a doctorate in 1942 with a dissertation on r-declension of Old Norse consonant stems. He taught Norwegian at the University of Iceland from 1954 to 1955. He ...

#16139

Fred Niblo

1874 - 1948 (74 years)

Fred Niblo was an American pioneer film actor, director and producer. Biography He was born Frederick Liedtke in York, Nebraska to a French mother and a father who had served as a captain in the American Civil War and was wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg. Using the stage name Fred Niblo, Liedtke began his show business career performing in vaudeville and in live theater. After more than 20 years doing live performing as a monologist, during which he traveled extensively around the globe, he worked in Australia from 1912 through 1915, where he turned to the burgeoning motion picture indus...

#16140

Aira Kaal

1911 - 1988 (77 years)

Aira Kaal was an Estonian writer. From 1931 to 1940, she studied in Tartu University, focusing on philosophy, but also learning Estonian literature, world literature and English. From 1938 to 1939, she worked in Great Britain, where she met her husband Arthur Robert Hone, with whom she returned to Estonia. From 1945 to 1950, she was a lecturer in the Tartu State University, teaching the foundations of Marxism-Leninism.

#16141

Egon Petri

1881 - 1962 (81 years)

Egon Petri was a Dutch-American pianist. Life and career Petri's family was Dutch. He was born a Dutch citizen in Hanover, Germany, and grew up in Dresden, where he attended the Kreuzschule. His father, a professional violinist, taught him to play the violin. While still a teenager, Petri played with the Dresden Court Orchestra and with his father's string quartet. He studied composition and theory with Hermann Kretzschmar and Felix Draeseke at the Dresden Conservatory.

#16142

Max Steiner

1888 - 1971 (83 years)

Maximilian Raoul Steiner was an Austrian composer and conductor who emigrated to America and became one of Hollywood's greatest musical composers. Steiner was a child prodigy who conducted his first operetta when he was twelve and became a full-time professional, proficient at composing, arranging, and conducting, by the time he was fifteen. Threatened with internment in England during World War I, he fled to Broadway; and in 1929 he moved to Hollywood, where he became one of the first composers to write music scores for films. He is often referred to as "the father of film music", as Steiner...

#16143

Mykola Lysenko

1842 - 1912 (70 years)

Mykola Vitaliyovych Lysenko was a Ukrainian composer, pianist, conductor and ethnomusicologist of the late Romantic period. In his time he was the central figure of Ukrainian music, with an oeuvre that includes operas, art songs, choral works, orchestral and chamber pieces, and a wide variety of solo piano music. He is often credited with founding a national music tradition during the Ukrainian national revival, in the vein of contemporaries such as Grieg in Norway, The Five in Russia as well as Smetana and Dvořák in what is now the Czech Republic.

#16144

Henry Koster

1905 - 1988 (83 years)

Henry Koster was a German-born film director. He was the husband of actress Peggy Moran. Early life Koster was born to Jewish parents in Berlin, Germany. He was introduced to cinema around the year 1910 when his uncle opened a movie theater in Berlin. Koster's mother played the piano to accompany the films, leaving the young boy to occupy himself by watching the films. After working initially as a short story writer, Kosterlitz was hired by a Berlin movie company as scenarist, becoming an assistant to director Curtis Bernhardt. Bernhardt became sick one day and asked Kosterlitz to take over a...

#16145

Robert Newton

1905 - 1956 (51 years)

Robert Guy Newton was an English actor. Along with Errol Flynn, Newton was one of the more popular actors among the male juvenile audience of the 1940s and early 1950s, especially with British boys. Known for his hard-living life, he was cited as a role model by the actor Oliver Reed and the Who's drummer Keith Moon.

#16146

William Sterndale Bennett

William Sterndale Bennett

1816 - 1875 (59 years)

Sir William Sterndale Bennett was an English composer, pianist, conductor and music educator. At the age of ten Bennett was admitted to the London Royal Academy of Music , where he remained for ten years. By the age of twenty, he had begun to make a reputation as a concert pianist, and his compositions received high praise. Among those impressed by Bennett was the German composer Felix Mendelssohn, who invited him to Leipzig. There Bennett became friendly with Robert Schumann, who shared Mendelssohn's admiration for his compositions. Bennett spent three winters composing and performing in Lei...

#16147

Tomás Luis de Victoria

1548 - 1611 (63 years)

Tomás Luis de Victoria was the most famous Spanish composer of the Renaissance. He stands with Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Orlande de Lassus as among the principal composers of the late Renaissance, and was "admired above all for the intensity of some of his motets and of his Offices for the Dead and for Holy Week". His surviving oeuvre, unlike that of his colleagues, is almost exclusively sacred and polyphonic vocal music, set to Latin texts. As a Catholic priest, as well as an accomplished organist and singer, his career spanned both Spain and Italy. However, he preferred the life ...

#16148

Bob Brown

1886 - 1959 (73 years)

Robert Carlton Brown II was an American writer and publisher in many forms from comic squibs to magazine fiction to advertising to avant-garde poetry to business news to cookbooks to political tracts to novelized memoirs to parodies and much more.

#16149

Dorothy Swaine Thomas

1899 - 1977 (78 years)

Dorothy Swaine Thomas was an American sociologist and economist. She was the 42nd President of the American Sociological Association, the first woman in that role. Life and career Thomas was born on October 24, 1899, in Baltimore, Maryland to John Knight and Sarah Swaine Thomas.

#16150

Karl Aben

1896 - 1976 (80 years)

Karl Aben was an Estonian and Latvian linguist and translator. In Estonia, he became known as the country's foremost translator from Latvian at the time , but he also translated from Estonian into Latvian . Aben was born into an Estonian family in Northern Latvia, he studied at the University of Tartu, graduating with a degree in philology in 1940.

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