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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,

#16301

Thomas Church

1902 - 1978 (76 years)

Thomas Dolliver Church was a 20th century landscape architect based in California. He is a nationally recognized as one of the pioneer landscape designers of Modernism in garden landscape design known as the 'California Style'. His design studio was in San Francisco from 1933 to 1977.

#16302

Willis Laurence James

1900 - 1966 (66 years)

Willis Laurence James was an American musician, composer and educator. He was on the faculty of Spelman College for more than three decades. Biography Willis James was born in Montgomery, Alabama, United States, and was raised in Pensacola and Jacksonville, Florida. Educated at the Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville, he studied violin with Sidney Woodward. Woodward recognized his musical talent and took James for further study to Atlanta, Georgia, where from the age of 16 he was the protégé of Kemper Harreld, a concert violinist and head of the Morehouse College music department. James e...

#16303

Rudolf Vleeskruijer

1916 - 1966 (50 years)

Rudolf Vleeskruijer was a Dutch professor in the English language and Old English literature at the Utrecht University. Vleeskruijer spent a part of his youth in England. From August 1945 to May 1946, he was an interpreter for the Allied Forces as a conscript NCO in the Dutch Army.

#16304

Ildebrando Pizzetti

1880 - 1968 (88 years)

Ildebrando Pizzetti was an Italian composer of classical music, musicologist, and music critic. Biography Pizzetti was born in Parma in 1880. He was part of the "Generation of 1880" along with Ottorino Respighi, Gian Francesco Malipiero, and Alfredo Casella. They were among the first Italian composers in some time whose primary contributions were not in opera. The instrumental and a cappella traditions had never died in Italian music and had produced, for instance, the string quartets of Antonio Scontrino and the works of Respighi's teacher Giuseppe Martucci; but with the "Generation of 1880...

#16305

Clive Carey

1883 - 1968 (85 years)

Francis Clive Savill Carey CBE , known as Clive Carey, was an English baritone, singing teacher, composer, opera producer and folk song collector. Biography Clive Carey was born at Sible Hedingham, Essex, in 1883. He was a chorister in the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, and then attended Sherborne School before becoming an Organ Scholar at Clare College in 1901. He then entered the Royal College of Music under the auspices of the Grove Scholarship in Composition, studying under Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and James H. Ley . He had further study with Jean de Reszke in Paris and Nice.

#16306

Fran Ramovš

1890 - 1952 (62 years)

Fran Ramovš was a Slovenian linguist. He studied the dialects and onomastics of Slovene. Early life and education Fran Ramovš was born in Ljubljana, the capital of the Duchy of Carniola, Austria-Hungary. He studied linguistics in Vienna and in Graz . While in Graz he selected the topic of his dissertation and completed it in 1912; he submitted it in 1914 to receive his PhD.

#16307

Cecil Effinger

1914 - 1990 (76 years)

Cecil Effinger was an American composer, oboist, and inventor. Life Effinger was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado and resided in the state for most of his life. Reversing the usual cliché, he was the son of musicians and teachers, but initially studied mathematics at Colorado College, receiving a BA in 1935, before deciding to follow in his parents' footsteps. In the meantime, he had studied harmony and counterpoint with Frederick Boothroyd in 1934–36, and went to Paris in 1939 to study composition with Nadia Boulanger. He was first oboe in the orchestras of Colorado Springs and Denver and taught at the Colorado College before the Second World War .

#16308

Charles Cushing

1905 - 1982 (77 years)

Charles Cook Cushing was an American composer, band director, and professor of music. Biography Charles Cushing, a native Californian, studied at the University of California, Berkeley. Encouraged by visiting French Composer Charles Koechlin during the summers of 1928 and 1929, he received his bachelor's degree in 1928 and Master's in 1929. He won the George Ladd Prix de Paris prize, allowing him to study with Nadia Boulanger at the École Normale de Musique in Paris for two years.

#16309

Vladimir Fere

1902 - 1971 (69 years)

Vladimir Georgievich Fere was a Russian composer. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory in 1925 and later taught there. He was a member of a Kirghiz Republic collective assigned by the Soviet government under a plan to integrate national cultures into the arts. Kyrgyz composer Abdylas Maldybaev provided folk melodies and composed music which was organized and prepared by Fere and Russian composer Vladimir Vlasov into six Soviet state opera and other works. Their first full opera was Ai-churek. The collective is usually hypenated as Vlasov-Fere-Maldi'bayev and also composed the Kirghiz nationa...

#16310

Ignacio González-Llubera

1893 - 1962 (69 years)

Ignacio Miguel González-Llubera was a Spanish literary scholar, specialising in Judaeo-Spanish literature. Born in Barcelona, he was educated at the Colegio del Sagrado Corazón, the University of Barcelona and the University of Madrid . He then studied in Madrid, Paris, London and Cambridge before he was appointed the first lecturer in Spanish at Queen's University Belfast in 1920. He was appointed its first Professor of Spanish in 1926, a chair he held until he retired in 1960.

#16311

Esther Ballou

1915 - 1973 (58 years)

Esther Williamson Ballou was an American music educator, organist and composer. She was born in Elmira, New York, began organ lessons at age 13, and began composing in her twenties. She studied at Bennington College, Mills College and The Juilliard School of Music in 1943.

#16312

Hermann Wolfgang von Waltershausen

1882 - 1954 (72 years)

Hermann Wolfgang Sartorius Freiherr von Waltershausen was a German composer, conductor, teacher and writer. Life and career He was the son of the economist August Sartorius von Waltershausen and his wife Charlotte Freiin von Kapherr, a descendant of the historian Georg Friedrich Sartorius. He studied composition with Ludwig Thuille in Munich from 1901 until 1907. He also studied piano with August Schmid-Lindner from 1905 to 1915.

#16313

Bernard Groethuysen

1880 - 1946 (66 years)

Bernard Groethuysen was a French writer and philosopher. His works, which transgressed the confines of history and sociology, concern the history of mentalities and representations and the interpretation of the experience of the world. In the interwar period, he made the works of Hölderlin and Kafka and the sociology of Germany available in France.

#16314

Arnold Elston

1907 - 1971 (64 years)

Arnold Elston was an American composer and educator. Though he studied with Anton Webern, he did not himself use the twelve-tone technique. Early life and career Elston was born in New York on September 30, 1907. He became a private pupil of Rubin Goldmark in 1928, and continued to study with him until 1930, in which year he received his A.B. from the College of the City of New York. He went on to take an M.A. from Columbia University in 1932, in which year he also won a Joseph H. Bearns Prize and the Mosenthal Traveling Fellowship. Using the funds from these prizes Elston was able to study with Anton Webern in Vienna.

#16315

Carl Dair

1912 - 1967 (55 years)

Harris Carleton Dair , known as Carl Dair, was a Canadian graphic designer, teacher, type designer, and author. Primarily a self-taught designer, Dair was internationally known and developed visual design principles for typography which are still in use today.

#16316

Gladys Turquet-Milnes

1889 - 1977 (88 years)

Gladys Rosaleen Turquet-Milnes was a British academic and author. She was Professor of French Language and Literature at Bedford College, University of London, from 1934 to 1952, having been Head of the French Department at Westfield College from 1916 to 1934.

#16317

Ernst Lubitsch

1892 - 1947 (55 years)

Ernst Lubitsch was a German-born film director, producer, writer, and actor. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch". Among his best known works are Trouble in Paradise , Design for Living , Ninotchka , The Shop Around the Corner , To Be or Not to Be and Heaven Can Wait .

#16318

Willis Grant

1907 - 1981 (74 years)

Willis Grant was an English cathedral organist, who served in St. Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham. Background Willis Grant was born on 1 May 1907 in Bolton, Lancashire. He was educated at Astley Bridge School. He studied the organ with Walter Williams of Bury and Edward Bairstow at York Minster.

#16319

David Barnett

1907 - 1985 (78 years)

David Barnett was an American composer. He graduated from Columbia University and later studied music at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and Juilliard School in New York City. Barnett then studied piano with Alfred Cortot in Paris, where he received his teaching degree. At this time, he also made his debut as a concert pianist and composer. Returning to the U.S., Barnett taught piano and music theory, and continued touring and composing.

#16320

Fernando Valenti

1926 - 1990 (64 years)

Fernando Valenti was an American harpsichordist. After studying with José Iturbi and Ralph Kirkpatrick and débuting in 1950, he recorded extensively, especially in the 1950s, and taught for forty years until his death. One of his most-noted students was Igor Kipnis. His recordings of Bach and Scarlatti were highly regarded, and he was regularly mentioned in the pages of National Review by William F. Buckley Jr. In one of the odder musical pairings of the 1960s, Valenti was on the same bill as Jimi Hendrix on Thanksgiving night, November 28, 1968, at New York's historic Philharmonic Hall.

#16321

Carl Orff

1895 - 1982 (87 years)

Carl Heinrich Maria Orff was a German composer and music educator, who composed the cantata Carmina Burana . The concepts of his Schulwerk were influential for children's music education. Life Early life Carl Heinrich Maria Orff was born in Munich on 10 July 1895, the son of Paula Orff and Heinrich Orff . His family was Bavarian and was active in the Imperial German Army; his father was an army officer with strong musical interests, and his mother was a trained pianist. His grandfathers, Carl von Orff and Karl Köstler , were both major generals and also scholars. His paternal grandmother, Fanny Orff , was Catholic of Jewish descent.

#16322

Herbert Matter

1907 - 1984 (77 years)

Herbert Matter was a Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer known for his pioneering use of photomontage in commercial art. Matter's innovative and experimental work helped shape the vocabulary of 20th-century graphic design.

#16323

Kenji Tomiki

1900 - 1979 (79 years)

was a Japanese martial artist who specialized in aikido and judo family of martial arts. He was a pedagogue of martial arts theory . He is the founder of Japan Aikido Association and the competitive aikido style.

#16324

Ernst Victor Wolff

1889 - 1960 (71 years)

Ernst Victor Wolff was a German-born concert pianist and harpsichordist, who maintained a career not only as a soloist but also as a respected accompanist. Singers with whom he performed included Dorothy Maynor and Alexander Kipnis; he accompanied the latter in the Hugo Wolf Society recording project of the 1930s. As a harpsichordist, on February 20, 1938, he participated in the Carnegie Hall premiere of J.S. Bach's Coffee Cantata under the direction of Walter Damrosch; the other performers on that occasion included singers Charles Kullman, Helen Jepson, and Lawrence Tibbett; flutist France...

#16325

Aleksey Dmitrievich Popov

1892 - 1961 (69 years)

#16326

John Barbirolli

1899 - 1970 (71 years)

Sir John Barbirolli was a British conductor and cellist. He is remembered above all as conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, which he helped save from dissolution in 1943 and conducted for the rest of his life. Earlier in his career he was Arturo Toscanini's successor as music director of the New York Philharmonic, serving from 1936 to 1943. He was also chief conductor of the Houston Symphony from 1961 to 1967, and was a guest conductor of many other orchestras, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna...

#16327

Stuart Novins

1914 - 1989 (75 years)

Stuart Novins was an American television journalist. He was a CBS News correspondent for 35 years. Novins covered Fidel Castro's ascent to power in Cuba and later reported on the Bay of Pigs invasion. From 1958 to 1961 Novins was the CBS network's United Nations correspondent. In the 1960s as a Moscow correspondent, he covered the political collapse of Nikita Khrushchev. He was the chief of the CBS News bureau in Moscow from 1962 to 1965. As the second moderator for Face the Nation, he interviewed national as well as international world leaders. In 1960, the year he left his position on Fac...

#16328

Emily Daymond

1866 - 1949 (83 years)

Emily Rosa Daymond was an English musician. Daymond was born in Framlingham, Suffolk, the daughter of the Reverend Albert Cooke Daymond, headmaster of a boys’ school – Timsbury. She entered the Royal College of Music as a Foundation Scholar on 7 May 1883, when the College first opened, studying with Ernst Pauer , Richard Gompertz , Dr. Frederick Bridge and Dr. Hubert Parry, eventually becoming devoted disciple of Parry.

#16329

Ricardo Carballo

Ricardo Carballo

1910 - 1990 (80 years)

Ricardo Carballo Calero , self-styled as Ricardo Carvalho Calero from 1981 onward, was a Spanish philologist, academic and writer. He was the first Professor of Galician Language and Literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela. He was a member of the Royal Galician Academy, the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, and also an honorary member of the Galician Language Association. He was one of the main theorists of contemporary Galician reintegrationism and his works on this field are considered a primary reference. Many consider Carballo Calero as one of the most prominent figures of the twe...

#16330

Lev Shcherba

1880 - 1944 (64 years)

Lev Vladimirovich Shcherba was a Russian Empire and Soviet linguist and lexicographer specializing in phonetics and phonology. Early life and education Born in Igumen to the family of an engineer. Shcherba went to secondary school in Kiev, where he graduated in 1898, and briefly attended Kiev University before he moved to the capital and entered St. Petersburg University. There, he studied under Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and graduated in 1903. In 1906 he traveled abroad, first to Leipzig and then to northern Italy, where he studied Tuscan dialects.

#16331

Alexander Moyzes

Alexander Moyzes

1906 - 1984 (78 years)

Alexander Moyzes was a Slovak neoromantic composer. Biography Moyzes was born into a musical family in 1906 at Kláštor pod Znievom, Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was the composer and educator Mikuláš Moyzes. After earlier technical studies, in 1925 he entered the Prague Conservatory, where he studied organ, conducting and composition. He graduated in 1929 and went on to study in the master class of Vítězslav Novák, from which he graduated in the following year with his Overture for Orchestra, Opus 10. It was Novák who directed his attention to Slovak music, the source of his inspiratio...

#16332

Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure

1857 - 1913 (56 years)

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.

#16333

Pāṇini

500 BC - Present (2526 years)

was a logician, Sanskrit philologist, grammarian, and revered scholar in ancient India, variously dated between the 6th and 4th century BCE. Since the discovery and publication of his work Aṣṭādhyāyī by European scholars in the nineteenth century, Pāṇini has been considered the "first descriptive linguist", and even labelled as “the father of linguistics”. His approach to grammar was influential on such foundational linguists as Ferdinand de Saussure and Leonard Bloomfield.

#16334

Claude Monet

1840 - 1926 (86 years)

Oscar-Claude Monet was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During his long career, he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of impressionism's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein air landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant, exhibited in 1874 initiated by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon.

#16335

Le Corbusier

1887 - 1965 (78 years)

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret , known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner and writer, who was one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and acquired French nationality by naturalization on 19 September 1930. His career spanned five decades, in which he designed buildings in Europe, Japan, India, as well as North and South America. He considered that "the roots of modern architecture are to be found in Viollet-le-Duc".

#16336

John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough

John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough

1650 - 1722 (72 years)

General John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, 1st Prince of Mindelheim, 1st Count of Nellenburg, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, was an English soldier and statesman. From a gentry family, he served first as a page at the court of the House of Stuart under James, Duke of York, through the 1670s and early 1680s, earning military and political advancement through his courage and diplomatic skill. He is known for never having lost a battle.

#16337

Roman Jakobson

1896 - 1982 (86 years)

Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist. A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century. With Nikolai Trubetzkoy, he developed revolutionary new techniques for the analysis of linguistic sound systems, in effect founding the modern discipline of phonology. Jakobson went on to extend similar principles and techniques to the study of other aspects of language such as syntax, morphology and semantics. He made numerous contributions to Slavic linguistics, most notably two studies of Russian case and an analysis of the categories of the Russian verb.

#16338

Michelangelo

1475 - 1564 (89 years)

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , known mononymously as Michelangelo , was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, his work was inspired by models from classical antiquity and had a lasting influence on Western art. Michelangelo's creative abilities and mastery in a range of artistic arenas define him as an archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and elder contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci. Given the sheer volume of surviving correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences, Michelangelo is one of the best-documented artists of the 16th century.

#16339

Walt Whitman

1819 - 1892 (73 years)

Walter Whitman Jr. was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American history. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in his time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described by some as obscene for its overt sensuality.

#16340

Quintilian

35 - 96 (61 years)

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus was a Roman educator and rhetorician born in Hispania, widely referred to in medieval schools of rhetoric and in Renaissance writing. In English translation, he is usually referred to as Quintilian , although the alternate spellings of Quintillian and Quinctilian are occasionally seen, the latter in older texts.

#16341

François Rabelais

François Rabelais

1494 - 1553 (59 years)

François Rabelais , has been called the first great French prose author. A humanist of the French Renaissance and Greek scholar, he attracted opposition from both John Calvin and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Though in his day he was best known as a physician, scholar, and diplomat, later he became better known as a satirist, for his depictions of the grotesque, and for his larger-than-life characters.

#16342

Victor Horta

1861 - 1947 (86 years)

Victor Pierre Horta was a Belgian architect and designer, and one of the founders of the Art Nouveau movement. He was a fervent admirer of the French architectural theorist Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and his Hôtel Tassel in Brussels , often considered the first Art Nouveau house, is based on the work of Viollet-le-Duc. The curving stylized vegetal forms that Horta used in turn influenced many others, including the French architect Hector Guimard, who used it in the first Art Nouveau apartment building he designed in Paris and in the entrances he designed for the Paris Metro. He is also considered ...

#16343

Isocrates

436 BC - 338 BC (98 years)

Isocrates was an ancient Greek rhetorician, one of the ten Attic orators. Among the most influential Greek rhetoricians of his time, Isocrates made many contributions to rhetoric and education through his teaching and written works.

#16344

Georges Méliès

1861 - 1938 (77 years)

Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès was a French illusionist, actor, and film director. He led many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema. Méliès was well known for the use of special effects, popularizing such techniques as substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted colour. He was also one of the first filmmakers to use storyboards. His films include A Trip to the Moon and The Impossible Voyage , both involving strange, surreal journeys somewhat in the style of Jules Verne, and are considered among the most important ear...

#16345

Edward Sapir

1884 - 1939 (55 years)

Edward Sapir was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States. Sapir was born in German Pomerania, in what is now northern Poland. His family emigrated to the United States of America when he was a child. He studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia, where he came under the influence of Franz Boas, who inspired him to work on Native American languages. While finishing his Ph.D. he went to California to work with Alfred Kroeber documenting the indigenous languages there.

#16346

Saint Patrick

385 - 461 (76 years)

Saint Patrick was a fifth-century Romano-British Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland. Known as the "Apostle of Ireland", he is the primary patron saint of Ireland, the other patron saints being Brigid of Kildare and Columba. Patrick was never formally canonised, having lived before the current laws of the Catholic Church in these matters. Nevertheless, he is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, the Church of Ireland , and in the Eastern Orthodox Church, where he is regarded as equal-to-the-apostles and Enlightener of Ireland.

#16347

Louis Hjelmslev

1899 - 1965 (66 years)

Louis Trolle Hjelmslev was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family , Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris . In 1931, he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. Together with Hans Jørgen Uldall he developed a structuralist theory of language which he called glossematics, which further developed the semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. Glossematics as a theory of language is characterized by a high degree of formalism. It is interested in describing the formal and semant...

#16348

Otto Jespersen

1860 - 1943 (83 years)

Jens Otto Harry Jespersen was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language. Steven Mithen described him as "one of the greatest language scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."

#16349

H. L. Mencken

1880 - 1956 (76 years)

Henry Louis Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. His satirical reporting on the Scopes Trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial", also gained him attention. The term "Menckenian" has entered multiple dictionaries to describe anything of or pertaining to Mencken, including his combative rhetorical and prose style.

#16350

Annie Besant

1847 - 1933 (86 years)

Annie Besant was a British socialist, theosophist, freemason, women's rights and Home Rule activist, educationist, and campaigner for Indian nationalism. She was an ardent supporter of both Irish and Indian self-rule. She became the first female president of the Indian National Congress in 1917.

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