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,
#16151
Al Dubin
1891 - 1945 (54 years)
Alexander Dubin was an American lyricist. He is best known for his collaborations with the composer Harry Warren. Life Al Dubin came from a Russian Jewish family that emigrated to the United States from Switzerland when he was two years old. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, he grew up in Philadelphia. Between ages of thirteen and sixteen, Dubin played hookey from school in order to travel into New York City to see Broadway musical shows. At age 14 he began writing special material for a vaudeville entertainer on 28th Street between 5th and Broadway in New York City, otherwise known as Tin Pan All...
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Alban Berg
1885 - 1935 (50 years)
Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer of the Second Viennese School. His compositional style combined Romantic lyricism with the twelve-tone technique. Although he left a relatively small oeuvre, he is remembered as one of the most important composers of the 20th century for his expressive style encompassing "entire worlds of emotion and structure".
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Michael Powell
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Michael Latham Powell was an English filmmaker, celebrated for his partnership with Emeric Pressburger. Through their production company The Archers, they together wrote, produced and directed a series of classic British films, notably The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp , A Canterbury Tale , I Know Where I'm Going! , A Matter of Life and Death , Black Narcissus , The Red Shoes , and The Tales of Hoffmann . His controversial 1960 film Peeping Tom, today considered a classic, and a contender as the first "slasher", was so vilified on first release that his career was seriously damaged.
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Cedar Paul
1880 - 1972 (92 years)
Cedar Paul, née Gertrude Mary Davenport was a singer, author, translator and journalist. Biography Gertrude Davenport came from a musical family: she was the granddaughter of the composer George Alexander Macfarren and the daughter of the composer Francis William Davenport . She was educated at convent schools in Belgium, France, Italy and England, and studied music in Germany.
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William Walton
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Sir William Turner Walton was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera. His best-known works include Façade, the cantata Belshazzar's Feast, the Viola Concerto, the First Symphony, and the British coronation marches Crown Imperial and Orb and Sceptre.
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Vincent d'Indy
1851 - 1931 (80 years)
Paul Marie Théodore Vincent d'Indy was a French composer and teacher. His influence as a teacher, in particular, was considerable. He was a co-founder of the Schola Cantorum de Paris and also taught at the Paris Conservatoire. His students included Albéric Magnard, Albert Roussel, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Erik Satie, as well as Cole Porter.
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August Friedrich Pott
1802 - 1887 (85 years)
August Friedrich Pott was a German pioneer in linguistics. Life Pott was a theology student at the University of Göttingen, where he became interested in philology, philosophy, and history. He became a schoolmaster in Celle, but completed his doctoral dissertation, De relationibus quae praepositionibus in Linguis denotantur, in 1827 at Göttingen University. As he was not satisfied giving classes in Celle, he went to the University of Berlin to study with Franz Bopp, an important pioneer in Indo-European linguistics. He became an unsalaried lecturer in general linguistics there in 1830, after...
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Samuel David Luzzatto
1800 - 1865 (65 years)
Samuel David Luzzatto , also known by the Hebrew acronym Shadal , was an Italian Jewish scholar, poet, and a member of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement. Early life Luzzatto was born in Trieste on 22 August 1800 , and died at Padua on 30 September 1865 . While still a boy, he entered the Talmud Torah of his native city, where besides Talmud, in which he was taught by Abraham Eliezer ha-Levi, chief rabbi of Trieste and a distinguished pilpulist, he studied ancient and modern languages and science under Mordechai de Cologna, Leon Vita Saraval, and Raphael Baruch Segré, who later became his father-in-law.
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Antonio Salieri
1750 - 1825 (75 years)
Antonio Salieri was an Italian composer and teacher of the classical period. He was born in Legnago, south of Verona, in the Republic of Venice, and spent his adult life and career as a subject of the Habsburg monarchy.
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Johann Georg von Eckhart
1664 - 1730 (66 years)
Johann Georg von Eckhart was a German historian and linguist. Biography Eckhart was born at Duingen in the Principality of Calenberg. After preparatory training at Schulpforta, he went to Leipzig, where at first, at the desire of his mother, he studied theology, but soon turned his attention to philology and history. On completing his course he became secretary to Field-Marshal Count Flemming, chief minister to the Elector of Saxony; after a short time, however, he went to Hannover to find a permanent position.
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Rodolphus Agricola
1443 - 1485 (42 years)
Rodolphus Agricola was a Dutch humanist of the Northern Low Countries, famous for his knowledge of Latin and Greek. He was an educator, musician, builder of church organs, a poet in Latin and the vernacular, a diplomat, a boxer and a Hebrew scholar towards the end of his life. Today, he is best known as the author of De inventione dialectica, the father of Northern European humanism and as a zealous anti-scholastic in the late fifteenth century.
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Buddy Holly
1936 - 1959 (23 years)
Charles Hardin Holley , known as Buddy Holly, was an American singer and songwriter who was a central and pioneering figure of mid-1950s rock and roll. He was born to a musical family in Lubbock, Texas, during the Great Depression, and learned to play guitar and sing alongside his siblings. Holly's style was influenced by gospel music, country music, and rhythm and blues acts, which he performed in Lubbock with his friends from high school.
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Thomas Moore
1779 - 1852 (73 years)
Thomas Moore , also known as Tom Moore, was an Irish writer, poet, and lyricist celebrated for his Irish Melodies. His setting of English-language verse to old Irish tunes marked the transition in popular Irish culture from Irish to English. Politically, Moore was recognised in England as a press, or "squib", writer for the aristocratic Whigs; in Ireland he was accounted a Catholic patriot.
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Nat King Cole
1919 - 1965 (46 years)
Nathaniel Adams Coles , known professionally as Nat King Cole, was an American singer, jazz pianist, and actor. Cole's career as a jazz and pop vocalist started in the late 1930s and spanned almost three decades where he found success and recorded over 100 songs that became hits on the pop charts.
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Howard L. Chace
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Howard Lambert Chace was a professor of Romance languages at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and is best known for writing poems and stories employing homophonic transformation. Biography Chace's prolonged undergraduate studies at Miami University lasted from 1915 until graduating in 1931 with his A.B. degree. During those years he was interested in music and recording on old wax cylinders, and for a time took leave from school to serve in the Merchant Marines. While later working as a French instructor at Miami University, he completed his master's degree in just four years, writing his thesis on 17th- and 18th-century French novels.
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Mischa Elman
1891 - 1967 (76 years)
Mischa Elman was a Russian-American violinist famed for his passionate style, beautiful tone, and impeccable artistry and musicality. Early life Moses or Moishe Elman was born to a Jewish family in Talnoye, Umansky Uyezd, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire .
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Paul Dukas
1865 - 1935 (70 years)
Paul Abraham Dukas was a French composer, critic, scholar and teacher. A studious man of retiring personality, he was intensely self-critical, having abandoned and destroyed many of his compositions. His best-known work is the orchestral piece The Sorcerer's Apprentice , the fame of which has eclipsed that of his other surviving works. Among these are the opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue, his Symphony in C and Piano Sonata in E-flat minor, the Variations, Interlude and Finale on a Theme by Rameau , and a ballet, La Péri.
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Alfred Bester
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Alfred Bester was an American science fiction author, TV and radio scriptwriter, magazine editor and scripter for comic strips and comic books. He is best remembered for his science fiction, including The Demolished Man, winner of the inaugural Hugo Award in 1953.
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Archibald Sayce
1845 - 1933 (88 years)
Archibald Henry Sayce was a pioneer British Assyriologist and linguist, who held a chair as Professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford from 1891 to 1919. He was able to write in at least twenty ancient and modern languages, and was known for his emphasis on the importance of archaeological and monumental evidence in linguistic research. He was a contributor to articles in the 9th, 10th and 11th editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
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George Nelson
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
George Nelson was an American industrial designer. While lead designer for the Herman Miller furniture company, Nelson and his design studio, George Nelson Associates, designed 20th-century modernist furniture. He is considered a founder of American modernist design.
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Leopold Stokowski
1882 - 1977 (95 years)
Leopold Anthony Stokowski was a British conductor. One of the leading conductors of the early and mid-20th century, he is best known for his long association with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He was especially noted for his free-hand conducting style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from the orchestras he directed.
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Ira Gershwin
1896 - 1983 (87 years)
Ira Gershwin was an American lyricist who collaborated with his younger brother, composer George Gershwin, to create some of the most memorable songs in the English language of the 20th century. With George, he wrote more than a dozen Broadway shows, featuring songs such as "I Got Rhythm", "Embraceable You", "The Man I Love" and "Someone to Watch Over Me". He was also responsible, along with DuBose Heyward, for the libretto to George's opera Porgy and Bess.
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Badiozzaman Forouzanfar
1904 - 1970 (66 years)
Badiozzaman Forouzanfar or Badi'ozzamān Forūzānfar was a scholar of Persian literature, Iranian linguistics and culture, and an expert on Rumi and his works. He was a distinguished professor of literature at Tehran University.
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Natalie Duddington
1886 - 1972 (86 years)
Natalie Duddington was a philosopher and a translator of Russian literature into English. Her first name sometimes appears as Nathalie . Biography Nataliya Aleksandrovna Ertel was born in Voronezh on 14 November 1886, to the author Alexander Ertel. She was Ertel's oldest daughter and considered intelligent as a child. When the English translator Constance Garnett visited Ertel in the summer of 1904, she was much impressed by Natalie, who began studying at Saint Petersburg University the following year. When the university was temporarily closed due to student unrest in the 1905 revolution, Garnett encouraged Natalie to come to England.
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Georgios Hatzidakis
1848 - 1941 (93 years)
Georgios Nicolaou Hatzidakis, aka Georgios Nikolaou Chatzidakis was a Greek philologist, who is regarded as the father of linguistics in Greece. He was the first chair of Linguistics and Indian Philology at the University of Athens in 1890–1923.
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Billie Holiday
1915 - 1959 (44 years)
Billie Holiday was an American jazz and swing music singer. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner, Lester Young, Holiday made a significant contribution to jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly influenced by jazz instrumentalists, inspired a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills.
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Elbert Hubbard
1856 - 1915 (59 years)
Elbert Green Hubbard was an American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher. Raised in Hudson, Illinois, he had early success as a traveling salesman for the Larkin Soap Company. Hubbard is known best as the founder of the Roycroft artisan community in East Aurora, New York, an influential exponent of the Arts and Crafts movement.
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John Bonham
1948 - 1980 (32 years)
John Henry Bonham was an English musician who was the drummer of the rock band Led Zeppelin. Noted for his speed, power, fast single-footed kick drumming, distinctive sound, and feel for groove, he is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential drummers in music history.
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Syed Mujtaba Ali
1904 - 1974 (70 years)
Syed Mujtaba Ali was a Bengali writer, journalist, travel enthusiast, academic, scholar and linguist. He lived in Bangladesh, India, Germany, Afghanistan and Egypt. Early life and education Ali was born on 13 September 1904 to a Bengali Muslim family in Karimganj, Sylhet district, British Raj. His father, Khan Bahadur Syed Sikander Ali, was a sub-registrar. He traced his paternal descent to Shah Ahmed Mutawakkil, a local holy man and a Syed of Taraf, though apparently unrelated to Taraf's ruling Syed dynasty. Ali's mother, Amatul Mannan Khatun, belonged to the Chowdhuries of Kala and Bahadurpur, an Islamised branch of the Pal family of Panchakhanda.
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Luigi Cherubini
1760 - 1842 (82 years)
Maria Luigi Carlo Zenobio Salvatore Cherubini was an Italian Classical and Romantic composer. His most significant compositions are operas and sacred music. Beethoven regarded Cherubini as the greatest of his contemporaries. His operas were heavily praised and interpreted by Rossini.
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Friedrich Maurer
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Friedrich Maurer was a German philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. Biography Maurer started to study classical philology and comparative linguistics at the University of Frankfurt in 1916. The same year, he was drafted, and in 1917, he was gravely injured while he was fighting at the Western Front of World War I, causing him to spend the following period recovering in a military hospital at Heidelberg. After the end of the war, Maurer commenced full-time studies of Germanistics at Heidelberg University and Giessen , where he also took courses in classical philology and Indo-European studies.
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Axel Stordahl
1913 - 1963 (50 years)
Axel Stordahl was an American arranger who was active from the late 1930s through the 1950s. He is perhaps best known for his work with Frank Sinatra in the 1940s at Columbia Records. With his sophisticated orchestrations, Stordahl is credited with helping to bring pop arranging into the modern age.
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Marc-Antoine Charpentier
1643 - 1704 (61 years)
Marc-Antoine Charpentier was a French Baroque composer during the reign of Louis XIV. One of his most famous works is the main theme from the prelude of his Te Deum, Marche en rondeau. This theme is still used today as a fanfare during television broadcasts of the Eurovision Network and the European Broadcasting Union.
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Vladimir Müller
1880 - 1941 (61 years)
Vladimir Karlovich Myuller was a Russian linguist and lexicographer. Müller held a professorial degree and compiled the most popular English–Russian dictionary, which saw numerous reeditions . Müller was also an expert on medieval dramaturgy, particularly on William Shakespeare. He published The Drama and Theatre of Shakespear's Epoch and lectured Shakespeariana to Dmitry Likhachov.
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Pavel Jozef Šafárik
1795 - 1861 (66 years)
Pavel Jozef Šafárik was an ethnic Slovak philologist, poet, literary historian, historian and ethnographer in the Kingdom of Hungary. He was one of the first scientific Slavists. Family His father Pavol Šafárik was a Protestant clergyman in Kobeliarovo and before that a teacher in Štítnik, where he was also born. His mother, Katarína Káresová was born in a poor lower gentry family in Hanková and had several jobs in order to help the family in the poor region of Kobeliarovo.
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Herman Kahn
1922 - 1983 (61 years)
Herman Kahn was an American physicist and a founding member of the Hudson Institute, regarded as one of the preeminent futurists of the latter part of the twentieth century. He originally came to prominence as a military strategist and systems theorist while employed at the RAND Corporation. He analyzed the likely consequences of nuclear war and recommended ways to improve survivability during the Cold War. Kahn posited the idea of a "winnable" nuclear exchange in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War for which he was one of the historical inspirations for the title character of Stanley Kubrick's classic black comedy film satire Dr.
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Alfred Cortot
1877 - 1962 (85 years)
Alfred Denis Cortot was a French pianist, conductor, and teacher who was one of the most renowned classical musicians of the 20th century. A pianist of massive repertory, he was especially valued for his poetic insight into Romantic piano works, particularly those of Chopin, Franck, Saint-Saëns and Schumann. For Éditions Durand, he edited editions of almost all piano music by Chopin, Liszt and Schumann.
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Henri-Georges Clouzot
1907 - 1977 (70 years)
Henri-Georges Clouzot was a French film director, screenwriter and producer. He is best remembered for his work in the thriller film genre, having directed The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques , which are critically recognized as among the greatest films of the 1950s. He also directed documentary films, including The Mystery of Picasso , which was declared a national treasure by the government of France.
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Rasmus Bartholin
1625 - 1698 (73 years)
Rasmus Bartholin was a Danish physician and grammarian. Biography Bartholin was born in Roskilde. He was the son of Caspar Bartholin the Elder and Anna Fincke, daughter of the mathematician Thomas Fincke.
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Marc Bolan
1947 - 1977 (30 years)
Marc Bolan was an English guitarist, singer-songwriter and poet. He was a pioneer of the glam rock movement in the early 1970s with his band T. Rex. Bolan strongly influenced artists of many genres, including glam rock, punk, post-punk, new wave, indie rock, Britpop and alternative rock. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020 as a member of T. Rex.
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Kazimieras Būga
1879 - 1924 (45 years)
Kazimieras Būga was a Lithuanian linguist and philologist. He was a professor of linguistics, who mainly worked on the Lithuanian language. He was born at Pažiegė, near Dusetos, then part of the Russian Empire. Appointed as personal secretary to Lithuanian linguist Kazimieras Jaunius he showed great interest in the subject, and during the period 1905-12 studied at Saint Petersburg State University. After that, he continued his work on Indo-European language under the supervision of Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay. He later moved to Königsberg to continue his studies under the direction of Adalbert Bezzenberger.
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Frederick Delius
1862 - 1934 (72 years)
Frederick Theodore Albert Delius was an English composer. Born in Bradford in the north of England to a prosperous mercantile family, he resisted attempts to recruit him to commerce. He was sent to Florida in the United States in 1884 to manage an orange plantation. He soon neglected his managerial duties, and in 1886 returned to Europe.
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Bohuslav Havránek
1893 - 1978 (85 years)
Bohuslav Havránek was a Czech philologist, Bohemist, Slavist, literary historian and professor who was a prominent member of the Prague Linguistic Circle. Life and career He was born in to the family of a teacher. After his graduation, he worked as a secondary school teacher, before completing his studies in 1928, with his work 'The Genera Verbi in the Slavic languages' .
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Sergio Leone
1929 - 1989 (60 years)
Sergio Leone was an Italian film director, producer, and screenwriter, credited as the pioneer of the spaghetti Western genre. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential directors in the history of cinema.
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Finnur Jónsson
1858 - 1934 (76 years)
Finnur Jónsson was an Icelandic-Danish philologist and Professor of Nordic Philology at the University of Copenhagen. He made extensive contributions to the study of Old Norse literature. Finnur Jónsson was born at Akureyri in northern Iceland. He graduated from Menntaskólinn í Reykjavík in 1878 and went to Denmark for further studies at the University of Copenhagen. He received a doctorate in philology in 1884 with a dissertation on skaldic poetry. He became a docent at the university in 1887 and a professor in 1898, serving until 1928. After retiring he continued work on his subject with n...
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William Bruce Croft
#16197
Sergei Eisenstein
1898 - 1948 (50 years)
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was a Soviet film director, screenwriter, film editor and film theorist. He was a pioneer in the theory and practice of montage. He is noted in particular for his silent films Strike , Battleship Potemkin and October , as well as the historical epics Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible . In its 2012 decennial poll, the magazine Sight & Sound named his Battleship Potemkin the 11th-greatest film of all time.
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Matteo Bartoli
1873 - 1946 (73 years)
Matteo Giulio Bartoli was an Italian linguist from Istria . He obtained a doctorate at the University of Vienna, where his adviser was Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, in 1898. He was influenced by certain theories of the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce and the German linguist Karl Vossler. He later also studied with Jules Gilliéron in Paris. From Gilliéron he acquired a penchant for fieldwork, and from 1900 on he published numerous dialectological studies of Istrian dialects.
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Thelonious Monk
1917 - 1982 (65 years)
Thelonious Sphere Monk was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser", "Ruby, My Dear", "In Walked Bud", and "Well, You Needn't". Monk is the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington.
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Count Basie
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
William James "Count" Basie was an American jazz pianist, organist, bandleader, and composer. In 1935, he formed the Count Basie Orchestra, and in 1936 took them to Chicago for a long engagement and their first recording. He led the group for almost 50 years, creating innovations like the use of two "split" tenor saxophones, emphasizing the rhythm section, riffing with a big band, using arrangers to broaden their sound, and others. Many musicians came to prominence under his direction, including the tenor saxophonists Lester Young and Herschel Evans, the guitarist Freddie Green, trumpeters Bu...
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