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.
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#16701
Emmanuel Metter
1878 - 1941 (63 years)
Emmanuel Leonievich Metter was a Russian conductor. Emmanuel Metter was born in Kherson, Russian Empire, in a Jewish family running a business. He entered the faculty of medicine at the Imperial University of Kharkov on August 26, 1897; however, he transferred to the faculty of law on September 7, 1898, graduated in 1906 and became a lawyer. He then entered the Saint Petersburg Conservatory as an unregistered student in September 1906 and studied under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov. He left the conservatory in May 1907, taught at Moscow Conservatory and conducted at the Bolshoi Theatre.
Go to Profile#16702
Ferdinand Hellmesberger
1863 - 1940 (77 years)
Ferdinand Hellmesberger was an Austrian cellist and conductor. Biography He was born in Vienna to Joseph Hellmesberger, Sr. Joseph Hellmesberger, Jr. was his brother. He studied at the Vienna Conservatory with Karl Udel and Anton Bruckner . He was a member of the Vienna Hofburgkapelle from 1879. From 1883 he became a member of the Hellmesberger Quartet.
Go to Profile#16703
Kemp Stillings
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Katharine Kemp Stillings was a violinist, composer, and music educator. Early life Katharine Kemp Stillings was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and began studying violin from a very early age. She went to Berlin to study with Joseph Joachim, and to Saint Petersburg for further studies with Leopold Auer.
Go to Profile#16704
Paul Stanton
1884 - 1955 (71 years)
Paul Stanton was an American character actor and bit-part player in American films. Originally from Illinois, he appeared in about 130 films between 1918 and 1952, mostly in supporting roles. He often portrayed authoritarian figures like judges, attorneys, managers, officials and doctors.
Go to Profile#16705
Jan Chiapusso
1890 - 1969 (79 years)
Jan Joseph Chiapusso was a Dutch, later American, classical pianist and teacher. He was a student of Frederic Lamond and Raoul Pugno, and he was the teacher of Rosalyn Tureck, among others. Biography Jan Joseph Chiapusso was born in Gemou, near Semarang, in Java in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. His parents were Dutch, but the last name Chiapusso is of Italian origin. When he was six months old, his parents relocated to the city of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
Go to Profile#16706
Richard Temple
1846 - 1912 (66 years)
Richard Barker Cobb Temple was an English opera singer, actor and stage director, best known for his performances in the bass-baritone roles in the famous series of Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas.
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Enrico Polo
1868 - 1953 (85 years)
Enrico Polo was an Italian violinist, composer and pedagogue. Biography Polo was admitted to the Royal School of Music in Parma in 1879 studying violin and composition. He graduated in June 1887 with honors and received the Barbacini Prize for outstanding graduate of his class. He was a close friend of orchestra director Arturo Toscanini from the earliest years of study in Parma. In the fall of 1887, Toscanini was to conduct Giuseppe Verdi's I Lombardi alla prima crociata and requested Polo to play the lengthy violin solo at the end of Act III.
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Ibn al-Sīd al-Baṭalyawsī
1052 - 1127 (75 years)
Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāḥ ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Sīd al-Baṭalyawsī , also spelled Ibn Assīd or Abenasid, was an Andalusian grammarian and philosopher. He is the earliest Islamic philosopher from the West whose works have survived.
Go to Profile#16709
Ellen Ballon
1898 - 1969 (71 years)
Ellen Ballon was a Canadian pianist. The daughter of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants, she was born in Montreal, Quebec. A child prodigy, she gave her first concert at the age of five and began studying music at the McGill Conservatorium with Clara Lichtenstein at the age of six.
Go to Profile#16710
Annie Patterson
1868 - 1934 (66 years)
Annie Wilson Patterson was an Irish organist, music educator, writer, composer, and arranger. Life Annie Patterson was born in Lurgan, County Armagh, Ireland, and was related through her mother's family to Lord Macaulay. She made her debut performance in Dublin at age fifteen, studied at Alexandra College and the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin , and received her doctorate in 1889, becoming the first Irish or British woman to hold a Doctorate of Music. After she completed her studies, she became an examiner for the Royal University of Ireland and worked as an organist and conductor of the Dublin Choral Union and the Hampstead Harmonic Society.
Go to Profile#16711
Alexander Uninsky
1910 - 1972 (62 years)
Alexander Uninsky was an American classical pianist of Ukrainian-Jewish origin. Life and career Alexander Uninsky was born in Kiev . He initially studied piano there in the conservatory which had been opened in 1913, and whose other graduates included Vladimir Horowitz and Alexander Brailowsky.
Go to Profile#16712
Henryk Pachulski
1859 - 1921 (62 years)
Henryk Pachulski was a Polish-born pianist, composer and teacher who spent most of his life in Russia. Of noble birth, he was born the son of a surveyor and forester, in Łazy, near Siedlce, Poland. He studied at the Warsaw Institute of Music under Stanisław Moniuszko and Władysław Żeleński, then at the Moscow Conservatory from 1880, studying with Aleksander Michałowski, Pavel Pabst, Nikolai Rubinstein, and Anton Arensky. From 1886 to 1917, he was professor of piano at the conservatory. He never returned to his native country.
Go to Profile#16713
Justus Hermann Wetzel
1879 - 1973 (94 years)
Justus Hermann Wetzel was a German composer, writer and music educator. Life Wetzel was born in Kyritz, Brandenburg, the son of a postal clerk. After his Abitur, which he passed in Potsdam in 1897, he studied biology in Berlin, Marburg and Munich from 1897 to 1901. In Marburg he also studied philosophy with Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. In 1901 he received his doctorate there with a zoological thesis. He then turned to music and deepened his knowledge with private studies in Berlin. The Friedrich-Kiel-Gesellschaft recorded him as a student of Friedrich Kiel. He made his living as a music consultant for various daily newspapers.
Go to Profile#16714
F. Morris Touchstone
1897 - 1957 (60 years)
Francis Morris Touchstone was an American lacrosse coach. He served for 29 years as the head coach for the United States Military Academy's men's lacrosse team and is their all-time winningest coach by number of wins. While at Army, he led the Cadets to three national championships and 42 of his players received first-team All-American honors. Shortly after his death he was inducted into the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame. The Touchstone Memorial Award for the men's college lacrosse coach of the year was established in his honor.
Go to Profile#16715
Herbert Baker
1920 - 1983 (63 years)
Herbert Baker was a songwriter and screenwriter for television and films. Biography The only son of composer Maurice Abrahams and singer Belle Baker, Herbert attended Yale School of Drama, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts. His first Broadway credit was in 1944 as the lyricist of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's arrangement of Offenbach's La Belle Helene as well as other songs and musical pieces for the Broadway musical,Goes to Troy
Go to Profile#16716
Ella Sheppard
1851 - 1914 (63 years)
Ella Sheppard was an American soprano, pianist, composer, and arranger of spiritualss. She was the matriarch of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers of Nashville, Tennessee. She also played the organ and the guitar. Sheppard was a friend and confidante of African-American activists and orators Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass.
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Nicola D'Arienzo
1842 - 1915 (73 years)
Nicola d'Arienzo was an Italian composer, music pedagogue, and writer on music. He spent his entire career in his native Naples where all but one of his nine of his operas were premiered. His other compositions included instrumental and sacred music and art songs. From 1909 until 1911, d'Arienzo served as the director of the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella having taught there since 1875. He also wrote several books on the history and theory of music.
Go to Profile#16718
Don Murray
1904 - 1929 (25 years)
Don Murray was an American jazz clarinet and saxophone player. Early life Murray was born in Joliet, Illinois, and attended high school in Chicago. In his teens, he made a name for himself as one of the best young jazz clarinetists and saxophonists in the city.
Go to Profile#16719
Bertha Lewis
1887 - 1931 (44 years)
Bertha Amy Lewis was an English opera singer and actress primarily known for her work as principal contralto in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. Life and career
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Kurt Overhoff
1902 - 1986 (84 years)
Kurt Overhoff was an Austrian conductor and composer. Largely self-taught in music and conducting, he started at the Vienna State Opera as an assistant to its director Franz Schalk and the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. In 1929 he became music director of the city of Koblenz, then in 1932 general music director in Heidelberg, where he remained until 1940. He was the tutor of Wieland Wagner from 1940 to 1950, concerning the musical structure and dramatic themes of Richard Wagner's operas. A product of their work together is Overhoff's Die Musikdramen Richard Wagners: Eine thematisch-musikalische Interpretation, published after Wieland Wagner's death.
Go to Profile#16721
Norman Cazden
1914 - 1980 (66 years)
Norman Cazden was an American composer. The son of Russian immigrants, he studied first at the Juilliard School of Music and New York's City College, and then in 1944 at Harvard University under Aaron Copland and Walter Piston. While still a student at the Juilliard School, he composed for dance companies and wrote his first symphony. He also performed as a concert pianist and was a piano teacher at Juilliard from 1934 to 1949. After 1941, he worked at Camp Woodland in the Catskill Mountains, where he succeeded Herbert Haufrecht as musical director from 1945 to 1960.
Go to Profile#16722
Amvrosy Buchma
1891 - 1957 (66 years)
Amvrosy Maksymiliyanovych Buchma was a Ukrainian and Soviet stage and film actor, director and pedagogue. He stepped onto the stage professionally for the first time in 1905 with the Ruska Besida Theatre.
Go to Profile#16723
James Nokes
1642 - 1692 (50 years)
James Nokes was an English actor, whose laughter-arousing genius was attested by Cibber and other contemporaries. Life Nokes was one of the male actors who played female roles in the newly reopened playhouses shortly after the Restoration of Charles II. This practice didn't last long, as Thomas Killigrew's King's Company put the first English actress on the stage on December 1660, and from then on they appeared more and more frequently, until in 1662 Charles II ordered that only women should play female roles. There was a brief period in late 1660 and early 1661 when both men and women were playing female roles.
Go to Profile#16724
Heinrich Lutter
1858 - 1937 (79 years)
Heinrich Lutter was a German pianist and piano educator. Life Lutter was born in the residence of the Kingdom of Hanover as the son of a music teacher. After the proclamation of the German Empire, Lutter studied piano from 1876 to 1886 with Franz Liszt in Weimar and Budapest, and – also in Budapest – musical composition with Robert Volkmann, and finally, again in Hannover, piano with Hans von Bülow. The content of a letter from von Bülow to Lutter in Hanover, dated 18 November 1877 from Glasgow has survived.
Go to Profile#16725
Lester Trimble
1923 - 1986 (63 years)
Lester Albert Trimble was an American music critic and composer of contemporary classical music. Encouraged by Schoenberg, who had seen some of his scores, Trimble entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology . While there he studied with Nikolai Lopatnikoff and Frederick Dorian and wrote music criticism for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in violin and composition from Carnegie in 1948, followed by a Masters in composition. During this time he also spent summers at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood where he studied with Darius Milhaud and Aaron Copland. In 1950, Trimble went to Paris where he continued studies with Nadia Boulanger and Arthur Honegger.
Go to Profile#16726
Bill Barron
1927 - 1989 (62 years)
William Barron, Jr. was an American jazz tenor and soprano saxophonist. Barron was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He began studying the piano when he was nine years old and later switched to the saxophone. He toured with the Carolina Cotton Pickers when he was 17. He first appeared on a Cecil Taylor recording in 1959, and he later recorded extensively with Philly Joe Jones and co-led a post-bop quartet with Ted Curson. His younger brother, pianist Kenny Barron, appeared on all of the sessions that the elder Barron led. Other musicians he recorded with included Charles Mingus and Ollie S...
Go to Profile#16727
Lulu Vere Childers
1870 - 1946 (76 years)
Lulu Vere Childers was an African-American music educator. Born in Dry Ridge, Kentucky, she graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory in 1896, and in 1905 joined the faculty of Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she is accredited with initiating the Conservatory of Music in 1913 and School of Music in 1918. Childers ran the Howard University Choral Society; over the years they performed works such as Handel's Messiah in 1919. She was musical director of the university from 1905 until 1942. She was a friend of singer Marian Anderson.
Go to Profile#16728
Ed Burke
1909 - 1988 (79 years)
Edward Burke was an American jazz musician. Career Burke was adept at both violin and trombone, and played both professionally in jazz bands. He worked with Walter Barnes late in the 1920s, then with Cassino Simpson and Ed Carry in the early-1930s. He worked with Kenneth Anderson in 1934 before joining Erskine Tate's band through the end of 1935. Following a stint with Horace Henderson, he joined Earl Hines's band in 1938.
Go to Profile#16729
Timothy Brown
1743 - 1820 (77 years)
Timothy Brown was an English banker, merchant and radical, known for his association with other radicals of the time, such as John Horne Tooke, Robert Waithman, William Frend, William Cobbett, John Cartwright and George Cannon; his political views gave him the nickname "Equality Brown". He was also one of the early partners of Whitbread, and became the master of the Worshipful Company of Brewers.
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Helen Frances Gregor
1921 - 1989 (68 years)
Helen Frances Gregor was a Czechoslovakian-Canadian artist who specialised in textile art. Career Gregor was born in Prague in Czechoslovakia, the daughter of Fred and Lily Lorenz. She was considering a career in theatrical design, but moved with her family to England in 1940 to escape the Second World War. She studied art at Newark Technical College, Birmingham College of Art, and at the Royal College of Art's School of Design in London. She exhibited at the Czechoslovak Club, and at Liberty's of London. She also studied at the American School of Craftsmen in Rochester, New York.
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Lev Sverdlin
1901 - 1969 (68 years)
Lev Naumovich Sverdlin was a Soviet and Russian actor. He appeared in more than forty films from 1936 to 1969. Filmography External links
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Edward Danforth Hale
1859 - 1945 (86 years)
Edward Danforth Hale was a music school pedagogue in piano, music harmony, and composition and a collegiate music school dean. Hale was well known during his tenure at Colorado College as a proponent of standardized music education in public schoolss. He argued that curricular music in primary and secondary schools enhanced students' performance in classic core academics and made the classical core more comprehensive.
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Karl Graedener
1812 - 1883 (71 years)
Karl Graedener was a German composer. Biography He was born in Rostock. From 1835 to 1838 he was a cellist in Helsinki. Then, he was musical director of the Kiel University for ten years. In 1851 he founded a singing school in Hamburg, which he directed until 1861. From 1862 to 1865 he taught singing and music theory at the Vienna Conservatory and then at the Hamburg Conservatory until his death.
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Joe Smith
1902 - 1937 (35 years)
Joe "Fox" Smith was an American jazz trumpeter. Career Known throughout his childhood as "Toots", Smith originally started as a drummer but was convinced by Ethel Waters that he was far better as a trumpet player. It has been said that when he reached New York in 1920 he already had a fully formed style, which achieved "the vocalized sound, the blues spirit and the swing which makes for convincing jazz performance".
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William Macready the Elder
1755 - 1829 (74 years)
William Macready the Elder was an Irish actor-manager. Early life The son of a Dublin upholsterer, Macready started his career playing in Irish country towns. He joined the Capel Street Theatre in Dublin in 1782, and the Crow Street Theatre later during the 1782–3 season. The next season, he was brought to the Mill Gate Theatre, by Michael Atkins. He was in 1785 a member of the company at Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin.
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Hermann Scholtz
1845 - 1918 (73 years)
Hermann Scholtz was a German pianist and composer. Life Born in Breslau, Scholtz first studied with Moritz Brosig in Breslau and in 1865 went to the Leipzig conservatory, where he continued his studies with Louis Plaidy , Carl Riedel and Heinrich Schulz-Beuthen . On the recommendation of Franz Liszt, he moved to Munich in 1867 and completed his studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich there with Hans von Bülow and Josef Gabriel Rheinberger .
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Stanisław Łempicki
1886 - 1947 (61 years)
Stanisław Łempicki was a Polish cultural historian, university professor, linguist and writer. He is considered a member of the Lwów–Warsaw school of thought.
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Edward Goll
1884 - 1949 (65 years)
Edward Goll was a Bohemian pianist who settled in Australia in the 1910s and became a noted piano teacher at the Melbourne University Conservatorium of Music. His students included Margaret Sutherland, Waldemar Seidel and Dot Mendoza. He was also the target of anti-German feeling during World War I, despite having become a British subject at the start of the war.
Go to Profile#16739
Olga Steeb
1886 - 1941 (55 years)
Olga Steeb was an American pianist and music educator, based in Los Angeles, California. Early life Olga Steeb was the daughter of Carl Egon Steeb and Sophie S. Steeb, both German immigrants living in Los Angeles. Her father, a French horn player, was said to have taught his daughter to memorize hundreds of compositions as a child, and she was performing in concerts by 1904. She studied piano with Thilo Becker.
Go to Profile#16740
Max Miller
1911 - 1985 (74 years)
Edward Maxwell Miller was an American jazz pianist and vibraphone player. He had a forty year career that peaked in the 1940s and '50s. Many of his compositions use extended chord harmonies, polyphony, and polytonality and were influenced by Stravinsky, Bartók, and Hindemith.
Go to Profile#16741
Carl Schlesinger
1813 - 1871 (58 years)
Carl Schlesinger was a cellist. He originally played the violin. From 1838 onwards, he worked as a solo cellist successively for the Pesth National Theatre in Budapest and the Imperial Opera orchestra in Vienna. He was a member of the Hellmesberger Quartet, which was formed in 1849.
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Samuel S. Losh
1884 - 1943 (59 years)
Samuel S. Losh was a vocalist, composer and music educator in Fort Worth, Texas. Biography Early life and education Samuel S. Losh was born in the community of Lebo in Perry County, Pennsylvania on October 4, 1884. His middle initial has been said to stand for various names including Stephen, Simpson, and even Socrates. He was one of five children born to Charles Silverius Losh and Alice Tamar Wagner Losh , both natives of Pennsylvania. The family moved to Hagerstown, Maryland, where Losh graduated from high school in 1902. As a baritone and pianist, Losh moved to Germany to study at the Le...
Go to Profile#16743
Kurt Leimer
1920 - 1974 (54 years)
Kurt Leimer was a German concert pianist, composer and piano instructor. Life Kurt Leimer demonstrated musical talent from a young age. His great-uncle, Karl Leimer, was instructor to educator Walter Gieseking who together published several piano textbooks. His talent was recognized by Gieseking, Carl Schuricht, and Wilhelm Furtwängler who helped launch his career as a concert pianist. At the age of 18, he received a scholarship to the Berlin Conservatory, where he studied alongside Vladimir Horbowski and Winfried Wolf. The same year, 1938, Leimer made his concert debut in Berlin. In 19...
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Nikolai Orlov
1892 - 1964 (72 years)
Nikolai Andreyevich Orlov was a Russian pianist who was appreciated especially for his interpretations of Frédéric Chopin. Nikolai Orlov studied piano at Moscow and graduated from Moscow Conservatory on 1910. He also studied privately composition and counterpoint with Sergei Taneyev. His first public concert was held in 1912, and he gave the première of the first piano concerto of Alexander Glazunov in the same year.
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Osceola Macarthy Adams
1890 - 1983 (93 years)
Osceola Macarthy Adams was an American actress, drama teacher, director, and clothing designer. She was one of the 22 founders of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. Born to a life insurance executive in Albany, Georgia, Macarthy was mixed with European, Native American, and African-American heritage. She attended schools in Albany, Georgia including Albany Normal School, a predecessor to Albany State University, and then attended Fisk University’s Preparatory School. Later, she attended Howard University, where she studied ancient Greek and philosophy. After graduating from Howard, Osceola marrie...
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Ed Brady
1889 - 1942 (53 years)
Edwin J. Brady was an American film actor. He appeared in more than 350 films between 1911 and 1942. On Broadway, he appeared in The Spy . Filmography The Heart of a Cracksman The Test A Child of the Prairie - The GamblerNeal of the Navy - HernandezSpellbound - Katti HabThe Twin Triangle - MarcoThe Sultana - Count StrelitsoThe Mainspring - JervissThe Double Room Mystery - Bill GreelyGod's Crucible - WilkinsMutiny - Eben WiggsThe Flame of Youth - McCoolThe Reed Case - 'Red'The Stolen Paradise - LerouxThe Spindle of Life - JasonWild Sumac - John LewisaIndiscreet Corinne - P.A. Br...
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Joseph Fischhof
1804 - 1857 (53 years)
Joseph Fischhof was a Czech-Austrian pianist, composer and professor at the Vienna Conservatory of Music, belonging to the Romantic school. Life and career Fischhof was born into a Jewish family in Bučovice, Moravia. He planned to become a medical doctor, but later studied music and composition under Ignaz von Seyfried, and in 1833 became Professor of Piano at the Vienna Conservatory. He was the uncle of composer Robert Fischhof.
Go to Profile#16748
Edmund Burke
1809 - 1882 (73 years)
Edmund Burke was an American lawyer, newspaper editor and politician. He served as the United States Commissioner of Patents and as a U.S. Representative from New Hampshire in the 1840s. Early life and career Born in Westminster, Vermont, Burke was the son of Elijah and Grace Burke. He attended the public schools and studied law with Henry Adams Bellows, future Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court. Burke was admitted to the bar in 1826. He began practicing law in Colebrook, New Hampshire before moving to Claremont, New Hampshire in 1833.
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Sara Cahier
1875 - 1951 (76 years)
Sara Charles-Cahier or Madame Charles Cahier was an American-born Swedish mezzo-soprano or contralto singer in opera and lieder, singing primarily in Europe. The American-born Cahier later acquired Swedish citizenship. She was associated with Gustav Mahler, and was one of the soloists in the posthumous premiere of his Das Lied von der Erde in 1911. She sang at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and was a teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her students included Marian Anderson.
Go to Profile#16750
Krikor Peshtimaldjian
1778 - 1839 (61 years)
Krikor Peshtimaldjian was a prominent ethnic Armenian philosopher, educator, translator, and linguist. He was a key figure in the Armenian reawakening and reformist movement in the 19th century.
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