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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Communications,
#16801
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...
Go to Profile#16802
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.
Go to Profile#16803
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.
Go to Profile#16804
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.
Go to Profile#16805
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.
Go to Profile#16806
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.
Go to Profile#16807
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.
Go to Profile#16808
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.
Go to Profile#16809
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 .
Go to Profile#16810
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.
Go to Profile#16811
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.
Go to Profile#16812
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.
Go to Profile#16813
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.
Go to Profile#16814
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.
Go to Profile#16815
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.
Go to Profile#16816
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...
Go to Profile#16817
Aleksey Dmitrievich Popov
1892 - 1961 (69 years)
#16818
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...
Go to Profile#16819
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...
Go to Profile#16820
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.
Go to Profile#16821
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...
Go to Profile#16822
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.
Go to Profile#16823
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...
Go to Profile#16824
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.
Go to Profile#16825
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.
Go to Profile#16826
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.
Go to Profile#16827
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".
Go to Profile#16828
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.
Go to Profile#16829
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.
Go to Profile#16830
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.
Go to Profile#16831
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.
Go to Profile#16832
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.
Go to Profile#16833
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.
Go to Profile#16834
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 ...
Go to Profile#16835
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.
Go to Profile#16836
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...
Go to Profile#16837
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.
Go to Profile#16838
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.
Go to Profile#16839
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...
Go to Profile#16840
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."
Go to Profile#16841
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.
Go to Profile#16842
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.
Go to Profile#16843
Jacob Grimm
1785 - 1863 (78 years)
Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm , also known as Ludwig Karl, was a German author, linguist, philologist, jurist, and folklorist. He formulated Grimm's law of linguistics, and was the co-author of the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the author of Deutsche Mythologie, and the editor of Grimms' Fairy Tales. He was the older brother of Wilhelm Grimm; together, they were the literary duo known as the Brothers Grimm.
Go to Profile#16844
Erasmus
1466 - 1536 (70 years)
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus was a Dutch Christian humanist, Catholic theologian, educationalist, satirist and philosopher. Through his vast number of translations, books, essays and letters, he is considered one of the most influential thinkers of the Northern Renaissance and one of the major figures of Dutch and Western culture.
Go to Profile#16845
Josef Hoffmann
1870 - 1956 (86 years)
Josef Hoffmann was an Austrian-Moravian architect and designer. He was among the founders of Vienna Secession and co-establisher of the Wiener Werkstätte. His most famous architectural work is the Stoclet Palace, in Brussels, a pioneering work of Modern Architecture, Art Deco and peak of Vienna Secession architecture.
Go to Profile#16846
Virginia Woolf
1882 - 1941 (59 years)
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf was born into a very affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen in a blended family of eight that included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. She was home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature from a young age. From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied cla...
Go to Profile#16847
Marshall McLuhan
1911 - 1980 (69 years)
Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is known as the "father of media studies".
Go to Profile#16848
Maurice Denis
1870 - 1943 (73 years)
Maurice Denis was a French painter, decorative artist, and writer. An important figure in the transitional period between impressionism and modern art, he is associated with Les Nabis, symbolism, and later neo-classicism. His theories contributed to the foundations of cubism, fauvism, and abstract art. Following the First World War, he founded the Ateliers d'Art Sacré , decorated the interiors of churches, and worked for a revival of religious art.
Go to Profile#16849
Ford Madox Ford
1873 - 1939 (66 years)
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review were important in the development of early 20th-century English and American literature.
Go to Profile#16850
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
1876 - 1944 (68 years)
Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti was an Italian poet, editor, art theorist, and founder of the Futurist movement. He was associated with the utopian and Symbolist artistic and literary community Abbaye de Créteil between 1907 and 1908. Marinetti is best known as the author of the first Futurist Manifesto, which was written and published in 1909, and as a co-author of the Fascist Manifesto, in 1919.
Go to Profile