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.
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#16951
Yakov Zak
1913 - 1976 (63 years)
Yakov Izrailevich Zak was a Soviet and Russian pianist and pedagogue. People's Artist of the USSR . Born in Odessa, Zak studied piano at the Odessa Conservatory with Maria Starkhova, took classes on special harmony with Mykola Vilinsky, and later studied with Heinrich Neuhaus in Moscow, graduating in 1935. Having made his debut in 1935, he rose to prominence when he won First Prize and the Mazurka Prize at the III International Chopin Piano Competition in 1937. From 1935 Zak taught at the Moscow Conservatory, becoming a professor in 1947 and being granted a chair in 1965. His pupils include E...
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Erika Köth
1925 - 1989 (64 years)
Erika Köth was a German operatic coloratura soprano, particularly associated with the roles of Zerbinetta and Zerlina. Köth began a musical studies in Darmstadt with Elsa Blank in 1942, and after an interruption resumed them in 1945. She made her stage debut in Kaiserslautern as Philine in Mignon, in 1948, and then sang in Karlsruhe . She made her debut at the Munich State Opera and the Vienna State Opera in 1953, and at the Berlin State Opera in 1961. She appeared regularly at the Salzburg Festival , as the Queen of the Night and Konstanze and Sophie, and in Bayreuth , as the Woodbird. She a...
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Jimmie Rodgers
1897 - 1933 (36 years)
James Charles Rodgers was an American singer-songwriter and musician who rose to popularity in the late 1920s. Widely regarded as the "Father of Country Music", he is best known for his distinctive yodeling. Rodgers was known as "The Singing Brakeman" and "America's Blue Yodeler". He has been cited as an inspiration by many artists, and he has been inducted into multiple halls of fame.
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Henry Blue Kline
1905 - 1951 (46 years)
Henry Blue Kline was an American writer. He is perhaps best known for his contribution to the volume I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, as a member of the Southern Agrarians. Kline received an M.A. from Vanderbilt University in 1929. From 1930 to 1933, he taught at the University of Tennessee. He then worked for the Civil Works Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority. From 1944 to 1949, he worked as a journalist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He worked for the Atomic Energy Commission from 1949 until his death.
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Thomas Attwood Walmisley
1814 - 1856 (42 years)
Thomas Attwood Walmisley was an English composer and organist. Life and career He was born in London, the son of Thomas Forbes Gerrard Walmisley , a well-known organist and composer of church music and glees. Thomas Attwood was his godfather, and the boy was educated in music under their tuition.
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Cyril Smith
1909 - 1974 (65 years)
Cyril James Smith OBE was a virtuoso concert pianist of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and a piano teacher. Personal life Smith was born at Costa Street, Middlesbrough, England, the son of Charles Smith, a foundry bricklayer, and Eva Harrison, and had an older brother and sister. He married Andrée Antoinette Marie Paty in 1931, but the couple divorced.
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Edgar Sampson
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Edgar Melvin Sampson , nicknamed "The Lamb", was an American jazz composer, arranger, saxophonist, and violinist. Born in New York City, he began playing violin aged six and picked up the saxophone in high school. He worked as an arranger and composer for many jazz bands in the 1930s and 1940s. He composed two well-known jazz standards: "Stompin' at the Savoy", and "Don't Be That Way".
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Alexander Goldenweiser
1875 - 1961 (86 years)
Alexander Borisovich Goldenweiser was a Russian and Soviet pianist, teacher and composer. Goldenweiser was born in Kishinev, Bessarabia, Russia. In 1889, he was admitted to the Moscow Conservatory in the class of Alexander Siloti . He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1895 in the piano class of Pavel Pabst , winning the Gold Medal for Piano, in 1897 – in the composition class of Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov. He also studied composition with Anton Arensky and counterpoint with Sergei Taneyev .
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Eddie Durham
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Edward Durham was an American jazz guitarist, trombonist, composer, and arranger. He was one of the pioneers of the electric guitar in jazz. The orchestras of Bennie Moten, Jimmie Lunceford, Count Basie, and Glenn Miller took great benefit from his composing and arranging skill.
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Bill Thompson
1913 - 1971 (58 years)
William H. Thompson was an American radio personality and voice actor, whose career stretched from the 1930s until his death. He was a featured comedian playing multiple roles on the Fibber McGee and Molly radio series, and was the voice of Droopy in most of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio theatrical cartoons from 1943 to 1958.
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Nikolai Golovanov
1891 - 1953 (62 years)
Nikolai Semyonovich Golovanov , PAU, was a Soviet conductor and composer, who was married to the soprano Antonina Nezhdanova. He conducted the premiere performances of a number of works, among them Nikolai Myaskovsky's Sixth Symphony in May 1924.
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Doug Watkins
1934 - 1962 (28 years)
Douglas Watkins was an American jazz double bassist. He was best known for being an accompanist to various hard bop artists in the Detroit area, including Donald Byrd and Jackie McLean. Biography Watkins was born in Detroit, Michigan, United States. An original member of the Jazz Messengers, he later played in Horace Silver's quintet and freelanced with Gene Ammons, Kenny Burrell, Donald Byrd, Art Farmer, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Lee Morgan, Sonny Rollins, and Phil Woods among others.
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Henry Hugh Pierson
1815 - 1873 (58 years)
Henry Hugh Pierson was an English composer resident from 1845 in Germany. He was born Henry Hugh Pearson and his middle name is sometimes given as Hugo. His original name was Henry Hugh Pearson, in Germany he used Heinrich Hugo Pierson. He had success in his adopted country with his operas and songs but little in his own, and his music is now rarely performed.
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David Evans
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
David Evans was a Welsh musician, academic and composer. Evans was born at Resolven, Glamorgan. He worked in the coal industry as a teenager, but music was always his primary interest. He won a music scholarship and became a pupil of Joseph Parry, which led to his qualifying at University College, Cardiff, in 1895. He went on to become organist and choirmaster of Jewin Calvinistic Methodist Church in London. He succeeded Joseph Parry, his former teacher, in the Music department at Cardiff, where he was appointed a professor in 1908. Among his students there were Morfydd Owen, Grace Williams a...
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Edward Ballantine
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Edward Ballantine , was an American composer and professor of music. Biography Edward Ballantine was born in Oberlin, Ohio, on August 6, 1886, the son of William Gay Ballantine, the fourth president of Oberlin College, and Emma Frances Atwood. One brother Arthur Atwood was the senior member of the New York law firm of Root, Clark, Buckner & Ballantine—later Dewey, Ballantine, Bushby, Palmer & Wood. Another brother Henry Winthrop was Professor of Law, at Boalt Hall School of Law. Through his paternal grandfather, Rev. Elisha Ballantine, he is distantly related to four U.S. Presidents, and desce...
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Peter Agricola
1525 - 1585 (60 years)
Peter Agricola was a German Renaissance humanist, educator, classical scholar and theologian, diplomat and statesman, disciple of Martin Luther, friend and collaborator of Philipp Melanchthon. Successively tutor to several young princes of German sovereign states and rector of schools in Ulm and Lauingen, where he created and developed the Gymnasium Illustre, he became an important councilor and State minister of the Dukes of Zweibrücken and Palatinate-Neuburg, carrying out many missions in the German Holy Roman Empire and supporting the Protestant Reformation.
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Edward Howell
1846 - 1898 (52 years)
Edward Howell, FRAM was a British cellist and music professor of the late 19th century. He studied cello at the Royal Academy of Music in London later becoming professor of cello at the Royal College of Music, the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music in London.
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Lucky Millinder
1910 - 1966 (56 years)
Lucius Venable "Lucky" Millinder was an American swing and rhythm-and-blues bandleader. Although he could not read or write music, did not play an instrument and rarely sang, his showmanship and musical taste made his bands successful. His group was said to have been the greatest big band to play rhythm and blues, and gave work to a number of musicians who later became influential at the dawn of the rock and roll era. He was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in 1986.
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Giacomo Orefice
1865 - 1922 (57 years)
Giacomo Orefice was an Italian composer. He was born on 27 August 1865 in Vicenza, which was then part of the Austrian Empire, but was annexed into Italy in the following year. He studied under Alessandro Busi and Luigi Mancinelli at the Liceo Musicale di Bologna, and later became professor of composition at the Milan Conservatory. He died in Milan on 22 December 1922.
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Marcel Grandjany
1891 - 1975 (84 years)
Marcel Georges Lucien Grandjany was a French-American harpist and composer. Biography Early life Marcel Grandjany was born in Paris and began the study of the harp at the age of eight with Henriette Renié. At age eleven, he was admitted to the Conservatoire de Paris, where he studied with Alphonse Hasselmans, winning the coveted Premier Prix at age thirteen.
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Arthur Farwell
1872 - 1952 (80 years)
Arthur Farwell was an American composer, conductor, educationalist, lithographer, esoteric savant, and music publisher. Interested in American Indian music, he became associated with the Indianist movement and founded the Wa-Wan Press to publish music in this genre. He combined teaching, composing and conducting in his career, working on both coasts and in Michigan.
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Justus Christian Henry Helmuth
1745 - 1825 (80 years)
Justus Christian Henry Helmuth was a German-American Lutheran clergyman. Biography His father died when the son was a mere boy, but a nobleman, Gotthilf August Francke, sent him to the orphan house in Halle, and afterward to the University of Halle, where he received a thorough education in the classics and theology. He was ordained to the ministry at Wernigerode in 1769, and in the same year went to the United States in response to an urgent call from Lutheran congregations in Pennsylvania.
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Arnold Rosé
1863 - 1946 (83 years)
Arnold Josef Rosé was a Romanian-born Austrian Jewish violinist. He was leader of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for over half a century. He worked closely with Brahms. and Gustav Mahler. Gustav Mahler was his brother-in-law. Although not known internationally as a soloist he was a great orchestral leader and player of chamber music. He was leading the famous Rosé Quartet for several decades.
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Charlie Shavers
1920 - 1971 (51 years)
Charles James Shavers was an American jazz trumpeter who played with Dizzy Gillespie, Nat King Cole, Roy Eldridge, Johnny Dodds, Jimmie Noone, Sidney Bechet, Midge Williams, Tommy Dorsey, and Billie Holiday. He was also an arranger and composer, and one of his compositions, "Undecided", is a jazz standard.
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Costache Aristia
1800 - 1880 (80 years)
Costache or Kostake Aristia was a Wallachian-born poet, actor and translator, also noted for his activities as a soldier, schoolteacher, and philanthropist. A member of the Greek colony, his adolescence and early youth coincided with the peak of Hellenization in both Danubian Principalities. He first appeared on stage at Cișmeaua Roșie in Bucharest, and became a protege of Lady Rallou. She is claimed to have sponsored his voyage to France, where Aristia became an imitator of François-Joseph Talma.
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Alfred Wallenstein
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Alfred Wallenstein was an American cellist and conductor. A successful solo and orchestral cellist in his early life, Wallenstein took up conducting in the 1930s and served as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1943 to 1956.
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Gezina van der Molen
1892 - 1978 (86 years)
Gezina Hermina Johanna van der Molen was a Dutch legal scholar and resistance fighter during the Second World War. From 1924 to 1929, she studied law at the Free University of Amsterdam — the first female student to do so — and was also the first woman to obtain a doctoral degree from there. She dealt with numerous issues: the rights of women, apartheid in South Africa, the United Nations, the South Moluccas and New Guinea.
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Anatoli Papanov
1922 - 1987 (65 years)
Anatoli Dmitrievich Papanov was a Soviet and Russian actor, drama teacher, and theatre director at the Moscow Satire Theatre where he served for almost 40 years. A prominent character actor, Papanov is mostly remembered for his comedy roles in a duo with his friend Andrei Mironov, although he had many dramatic roles as well. As a voice actor he contributed to over hundred cartoons. He was named People's Artist of the USSR in 1973 and awarded the USSR State Prize posthumously.
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Claude Hopkins
1903 - 1984 (81 years)
Claude Driskett Hopkins was an American jazz stride pianist and bandleader. Biography Claude Hopkins was born in Alexandria, Virginia, United States. Historians differ in respect of the actual date of his birth. His parents were on the faculty of Howard University. A talented stride piano player and arranger, he left home at the age of 21 to become a sideman with the Wilbur Sweatman Orchestra, but stayed less than a year. In 1925, he left for Europe as the musical director of The Revue Negre which starred Josephine Baker with Sidney Bechet in the band.
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Elly Ney
1882 - 1968 (86 years)
Elly Ney was a German romantic pianist who specialized in Beethoven, and was especially popular in Germany. Career She was born in Düsseldorf, where her mother was a music instructor and her father was a registrar. Her grandmother introduced her to the works of Beethoven, and supported her piano playing. She studied at Cologne with Isidor Seiss and Karl Bötcher. After winning the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1901, she studied in Vienna with Theodor Leschetizky, with whom she only had two lessons, and Emil von Sauer. She taught at the Cologne Conservatory for three years, then became a touring virtuoso.
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Victor Ewald
1860 - 1935 (75 years)
Victor Vladímirovich Ewald , was a Russian engineer, architect, and composer of music, mainly for conical brass instruments. Biography Victor Ewald was born in Saint Petersburg and died in Leningrad. Ewald was a professor of Civil Engineering in St. Petersburg, and was also the cellist with the Beliaeff Quartet for sixteen years. This quartet was the most influential ensemble in St. Petersburg in the late 19th century, introducing much of the standard quartet literature to Russian concertgoers. He also collected and published Russian folk songs much like other composers of his time.
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Russell Procope
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
Russell Keith Procope was an American clarinetist and alto saxophonist who was a member of the Duke Ellington orchestra. Before Ellington Procope was born in New York City, United States, and grew up in San Juan Hill, where he attended school with Benny Carter. His first instrument was the violin, but he switched to clarinet and alto saxophone. He began his professional career in 1926 as a member of Billy Freeman's orchestra. He recorded with Jelly Roll Morton at the age of 20, and played with bands led by Benny Carter, Chick Webb , Fletcher Henderson , Tiny Bradshaw, Teddy Hill, King Oliver,...
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Paul R. Farnsworth
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Paul R. Farnsworth was an American music psychologist. He had a forty-year career at Stanford University where he researched the psychology of music preference. In addition to authoring three books, he was the editor of the Annual Review of Psychology from 1955 to 1968.
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Filmer Hubble
1904 - 1969 (65 years)
Filmer Edwin Hubble was a Canadian organist, choir conductor, adjudicator, and music educator of English birth. Life and career Born in Dulwich, he immigrated to Canada in 1921 at the age of 17. He settled in Winnipeg where he studied music with Hugh Ross and served as assistant organist at Holy Trinity Anglican Church during the 1920s. He served as organist/choirmaster as many Winnipeg churches during the rest of his life, including St Stephen's Broadway United where he worked from 1943 until his death 26 years later. Under his leadership the St Stephen's choir was twice awarded the prestigi...
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David Dowty
David Roach Dowty is a linguist known primarily for his work in semantic and syntactic theory, and especially in Montague grammar and Categorial grammar. Dowty is a professor emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University, and his research interests mainly lie in Semantic and Syntactic Theory, Lexical semantics and Thematic roles, Categorial grammar, and Semantics of Tense and Aspect.
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Diedrich Hermann Westermann
1875 - 1956 (81 years)
Diedrich Hermann Westermann was a German missionary, Africanist, and linguist. He substantially extended and revised the work of Carl Meinhof, his teacher, although he rejected some of Meinhof's theories only implicitly. Westermann is seen as one of the founders of modern African linguistics.
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Roger Fulford
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Sir Roger Thomas Baldwin Fulford was an English journalist, historian, writer and politician. In the 1930s, he completed the editing of the standard edition of the diaries of Charles Greville. From the 1930s to the 1960s, he wrote several important biographies and other works. Between 1964 and 1981 he edited five volumes of letters between Queen Victoria and the Princess Royal. He was President of the Liberal Party from 1964 to 1965.
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Gustav Mahler
1860 - 1911 (51 years)
Gustav Mahler was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th-century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect, which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 his compositions were rediscovered by a new generation of listeners; Mahler then became one of the most frequentl...
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Gaius Julius Solinus
300 - Present (1726 years)
Gaius Julius Solinus, better known simply as Solinus, was a Latin grammarian, geographer, and compiler who probably flourished in the early 3rd century AD. Historical scholar Theodor Mommsen dates him to the middle of the 3rd century.
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Yevgeny Polivanov
1891 - 1938 (47 years)
Yevgeny Dmitrievich Polivanov was a Soviet linguist, orientalist and polyglot who wrote major works on the Chinese, Japanese, Uzbek and Dungan languages and on theoretical linguistics and poetics. Life He participated in the development of writing systems for the peoples of the Soviet Union and also designed a cyrillization system for Japanese language, which was officially accepted in the Soviet Union and is still the standard in modern Russia. He also translated the Kyrgyz national Epic of Manas into Russian. Polivanov is credited as the scholar who initiated the comparative study of Japane...
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Arnold Schoenberg
1874 - 1951 (77 years)
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. As a Jewish composer, Schoenberg was targeted by the Nazi Party, which labeled his works as degenerate music and forbade them from being published. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1941.
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Margery Allingham
1904 - 1966 (62 years)
Margery Louise Allingham was an English novelist from the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", and considered one of its four "Queens of Crime", alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh.
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James Planché
1796 - 1880 (84 years)
James Robinson Planché was a British dramatist, antiquary and officer of arms. Over a period of approximately 60 years he wrote, adapted, or collaborated on 176 plays in a wide range of genres including extravaganza, farce, comedy, burletta, melodrama and opera. Planché was responsible for introducing historically accurate costume into nineteenth century British theatre, and subsequently became an acknowledged expert on historical costume, publishing a number of works on the topic.
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Muhammad Shahidullah
1885 - 1969 (84 years)
Muhammad Shahidullah was a Bengali linguist, philologist, educationist, and writer. In 2004, he was ranked number 16 in BBC's poll of the Greatest Bengali of all time. Early life and education Shahidullah was born on 10 July 1885 to a Bengali Muslim family in the village of Peyara in the erstwhile Bengal Presidency's 24 Parganas district. His father, Mafizuddin Ahmed, was the guardian of a mazar, and his mother, Marguba Khatun, was a housewife.
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Adolf Noreen
1854 - 1925 (71 years)
Adolf Gotthard Noreen was a Swedish linguist who served as a member of the Swedish Academy from 1919 until his death. Noreen studied at Uppsala University and focused on Swedish dialectology in his earlier works, later shifting to the wider field of historical linguistics. He was a Neogrammarian and supported spelling reform.
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Edward Johnston
1872 - 1944 (72 years)
Edward Johnston, CBE was a British craftsman who is regarded, with Rudolf Koch, as the father of modern calligraphy, in the particular form of the broad-edged pen as a writing tool. He is best known as the designer of Johnston, a sans-serif typeface that was used throughout the London Underground system until the 1980s. He also redesigned the famous roundel symbol used throughout the system.
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Francis Grose
1731 - 1791 (60 years)
Francis Grose was an English antiquary, draughtsman, and lexicographer. He produced A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue and A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions .
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František Čelakovský
1799 - 1852 (53 years)
František Ladislav Čelakovský was a Czech poet, translator, linguist, and literary critic. He was a major figure in the Czech "national revival". His most notable works are Ohlas písní ruských and Ohlas písní českých .
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Joseph Roth
1894 - 1939 (45 years)
Moses Joseph Roth was an Austrian-Jewish journalist and novelist, best known for his family saga Radetzky March , about the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his novel of Jewish life Job and his seminal essay "Juden auf Wanderschaft" , a fragmented account of the Jewish migrations from eastern to western Europe in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution. In the 21st century, publications in English of Radetzky March and of collections of his journalism from Berlin and Paris created a revival of interest in Roth.
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Bette Davis
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis was an American actress with a career spanning more than 50 years and 100 acting credits. She was noted for playing unsympathetic, sardonic characters, and was famous for her performances in a range of film genres, from contemporary crime melodramas to historical films, suspense horror, and occasional comedies, although her greater successes were in romantic dramas. A recipient of two Academy Awards, she was the first thespian to accrue ten nominations.
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