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.
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#17051
Frank Pettingell
1891 - 1966 (75 years)
Frank Edmund George Pettingell was an English actor. Pettingell was born in Liverpool, Lancashire, and educated at Manchester University. During the First World War he served with the King's Liverpool Regiment.
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Ralph J. Gleason
1917 - 1975 (58 years)
Ralph Joseph Gleason was an American music critic and columnist. He contributed for many years to the San Francisco Chronicle, was a founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine, and cofounder of the Monterey Jazz Festival. A pioneering jazz and rock critic, he helped the San Francisco Chronicle transition into the rock era.
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Vincenzo Galilei
1520 - 1591 (71 years)
Vincenzo Galilei was an Italian lutenist, composer, and music theorist. His children included the astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei and the lute virtuoso and composer Michelagnolo Galilei. Vincenzo was a figure in the musical life of the late Renaissance and contributed significantly to the musical revolution which demarcates the beginning of the Baroque era.
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Raymond Hatton
1887 - 1971 (84 years)
Raymond William Hatton was an American film actor who appeared in almost 500 motion pictures. Biography Hatton was born in Red Oak, Iowa. His physician father steered him toward a career in medicine. However, Hatton had become enamored of being on stage after he acted in a school play, and he left home to go into acting as a career.
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Charles Stevenson
1887 - 1943 (56 years)
Charles Stevenson was an American film actor of the silent era. He appeared in 136 films between 1914 and 1925. He was born in Sacramento, California, and died in Palo Alto, California. Filmography Film
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Charles Tobias
1898 - 1970 (72 years)
Charles Tobias was an American songwriter. He was sometimes credited as Charley Tobias. Biography Born in New York City, United States, Tobias grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts with brothers Harry Tobias and Henry Tobias, also songwriters. He started his musical career in vaudeville. In 1923, he founded his own music publishing firm and worked on Tin Pan Alley. Tobias referred to himself as "the boy who writes the songs you sing."
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Richard Constant Boer
1863 - 1929 (66 years)
Richard Constant Boer was a Dutch linguist who specialized in Old Norse. Academic History Boer received his Ph.D. in 1888 from the University of Groningen for his edition of Örvar-Odds saga. From 1888 to 1900, he taught Dutch and geography at the gymnasium in Leeuwarden. He was also a professor of Old Norse at Groningen from 1894 to 1900, and after 1900, professor of Old Germanic and Sanskrit at the University of Amsterdam.
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Richard Wallace
1894 - 1951 (57 years)
Richard Wallace was an American film director. He began working in the editing department at Mack Sennett Studios in the early 1920s. He later moved on to rival Hal Roach Studios where he began directing two-reel films, on some of which he collaborated with Stan Laurel. In 1926, Wallace began directing feature-length films.
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Paul Rubens
1875 - 1917 (42 years)
Paul Alfred Rubens was an English songwriter and librettist who wrote some of the most popular Edwardian musical comedies of the early twentieth century. He contributed to the success of dozens of musicals.
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Alois Vojtěch Šembera
1807 - 1882 (75 years)
Alois Vojtěch Šembera, also Alois Adalbert Sembera or Alois Adalbert Schembera was a Czech linguist, historian of literature, writer, journalist and patriot. Life and work He was born in Vysoké Mýto, Bohemia, Austrian Empire. During 1819–1826 he studied at the gymnasium in Litomyšl, during 1826/27 philology at the Charles University in Prague and then law at the same university .
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Christy Cabanne
1888 - 1950 (62 years)
William Christy Cabanne was an American film director, screenwriter, and silent film actor. Biography Born in 1888, Cabanne started his career on stage as an actor and director. He appeared on-screen in dozens of short films from 1911 to 1915. He became a film director and one of the more prolific directors of his time. He signed with the Fine Arts Film Company and was employed as an assistant to D.W. Griffith. Miriam Cooper credited him with discovering her as an extra in 1912. Cabanne directed child actress Shirley Temple in The Red-Haired Alibi , her first credited role in a feature movie...
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Stanislovas Rapolionis
1485 - 1545 (60 years)
Stanislovas Svetkus Rapolionis was a Lutheran activist and Protestant reformer from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. With patronage of Albert, Duke of Prussia, he obtained the doctorate of theology from the Protestant University of Wittenberg where he studied under Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. After graduation, he became the first professor of theology at the newly established University of Königsberg, also known as Albertina. As professor he began working on several Protestant publications and translations, including a Bible translation into Polish. It is believed that he also started the first translation of the Bible into Lithuanian.
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Helen Humes
1913 - 1981 (68 years)
Helen Humes was an American singer. Humes was a teenage blues singer, a vocalist with Count Basie's band, a saucy R&B diva, and a mature interpreter of the classic popular song. Early life She was born on June 23, 1913, in Louisville, Kentucky, to Emma Johnson and John Henry Humes. She grew up as an only child. Her mother was a schoolteacher, and her father was the first black attorney in her home town. In an interview, Humes recalled her parents singing to each other around the house and in a church choir.
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Jean Boyer
1901 - 1965 (64 years)
Jean Boyer was a French film director and songwriter. He was born in Paris. Selected songs 1930: "Un regardé", in 1931: "Les Gars de la marine", in Le Capitaine Craddock 1932: "Totor t'as tort" - "Un homme" - "L'amour est un mystère" - "Maintenant, je sais ce que c'est" - "Quand ça m'prend" 1934: "C’est peu de chose" 1936: "Y'a toujours un passage à niveau" 1939: "Comme de bien entendu" - "Ça c'est passé un dimanche" - "Mimile" - "Ça fait d'excellents Français" 1945: "Pour me rendre à mon bureau" 1950: "La Pagaïa" and "Je cherche un cœur"
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Vladimír Helfert
1886 - 1945 (59 years)
Vladimír Helfert was a Czechslovak musicologist in the interwar period. Although his early career as a music critic was clouded by the negative influence of his teacher, Zdeněk Nejedlý, with whom he studied at Charles University. After accepting a post in 1922 as professor of musicology at Masaryk University in Brno, he went against Nejedlý's teachings and championed the music of Leoš Janáček.
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Ranny Weeks
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Randall Webster Weeks was an American bandleader, actor, naval commander, and university administrator. Early life Weeks was born in 1907 in Everett, Massachusetts. His father, William E. Weeks, was a politician who served as Mayor of Everett and was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Weeks attended Everett High School and played quarterback for the school's football team. However, his family moved to Reading, Massachusetts, before he finished school. After graduating from Reading High School, Weeks attended Boston University's Business and Law schoolss, but left in 1929 ...
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Henry Coward
1849 - 1944 (95 years)
Sir Henry Coward was a British conductor and composer. Born in Liverpool to parents in the entertainment industry, Coward took an apprenticeship to a cutler in Sheffield. Educating himself, he became a teacher and soon a headteacher.
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Heikki Paasonen
1865 - 1919 (54 years)
Heikki Antinpoika Paasonen was a Finnish linguist and ethnographer best known for his research in the linguistics and folklore of the Mokshas and the Erzyas during his two research trips to Russia. His studies include works on Chuvash, Mishar Tatar, Meadow Mari and Khanty languages, which led to further discoveries in Finno-Ugric and Turkic studies.
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Rosina Lhévinne
1880 - 1976 (96 years)
Rosina Lhévinne was a Russian and American pianist and famed pedagogue. Early life, education and family Rosina Bessie was the younger of two daughters of Maria and Jacques Bessie, a prosperous jeweller from a Dutch Jewish family who emigrated to the Russian Empire to ply his trade as a diamond merchant. There were violent anti-Semitic riots in Kiev during her first year, and the Bessies moved to Moscow in 1881 or 1882. The young Rosina began studying piano at the age of six with a teacher in Moscow, where the family had moved shortly after her birth. When her teacher became ill, a family fr...
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Mikhail Andreyev
1873 - 1948 (75 years)
Mikhail Stepanovich Andreyev was a Russian-Uzbek and Soviet orientalist, cultural researcher of Central Asia, ethnographer, linguist, and archaeologist. He was initially supervised by Vladimir Nalivkin, and was the teacher of Olga Alexandrovna Sukhareva. He was a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
1829 - 1902 (73 years)
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson was an English scholar, from 1863 Professor of Greek at Queen's College, Galway. Life D'Arcy was the elder son of John Skelton Thompson, shipmaster, and his wife Mary Mitchell, both of Maryport, Cumberland; it was a seafaring family, and he was born at sea on board his father's barque Georgiana, off Van Diemen's Land, on 18 April 1829. After twelve years at Christ's Hospital, London, he matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, Michaelmas 1848, later migrating to Pembroke College. At Cambridge his main tutors were Augustus Arthur Vansittart and with Joseph Barber Lightfoot, both of Trinity; his closest friends were James Lempriere Hammond and Peter Guthrie Tait.
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Claude Gillingwater
1870 - 1939 (69 years)
Claude Benton Gillingwater was an American stage and screen actor. He first appeared on the stage then in more than 90 films between 1918 and 1939, including the Academy Award-nominated A Tale of Two Cities and Conquest . He appeared in several films starring Shirley Temple, beginning with Poor Little Rich Girl .
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Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender was a German operatic baritone, particularly associated with Mozart and Verdi roles. He is considered to have been one of the best lyric baritones of the inter-war period. Life and career Domgraf-Fassbaender studied first in Berlin with Jacques Stuckgold and Paul Bruns, and later in Milan with the prominent Italian dramatic tenor Giuseppe Borgatti . His stage debut occurred in 1922 in his native Aachen, as Almaviva in Nozze di Figaro.
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Joseph W. Girard
1871 - 1949 (78 years)
Joseph W. Girard was an American film actor. He appeared in more than 280 films between 1911 and 1944. He was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and died in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles. Before he became an actor, Girard was a printer who worked for newspapers until he and a partner set up their own printing business in Philadelphia. Girard had an interest in the theater, however, and eventually sold his part of the printing company and focused on acting.
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Louis Gruenberg
1884 - 1964 (80 years)
Louis Gruenberg was a Russian-born American pianist and prolific composer, especially of operas. An early champion of Schoenberg and other contemporary composers, he was also a highly respected Oscar-nominated film composer in Hollywood in the 1940s.
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Ted Fio Rito
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Theodore Salvatore Fiorito , known professionally as Ted Fio Rito, was an American composer, orchestra leader, and keyboardist, on both the piano and the Hammond organ, who was popular on national radio broadcasts in the 1920s and 1930s. His name is sometimes given as Ted Fiorito or Ted FioRito.
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Mortimer Wilson
1876 - 1932 (56 years)
Mortimer Wilson was an American composer of classical music. He also scored several musical and dramatic films in the 1920s. Wilson was born in Chariton, Iowa in Lucas County, a rural area in the south-central portion of the state. He studied organ, violin and composition with Frederick Grant Gleason at the Chicago Music College. He then studied in Leipzig, Germany with Max Reger. Upon return to the USA in 1911 he taught composition at the Atlanta Conservatory and conducted the Atlanta Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1916, he moved to Brenau College in Gainesville, Georgia. In 1918, Wilson took a ...
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Joanna Baker
1862 - 1935 (73 years)
Joanna Baker was an American linguist and child prodigy, holding her first college teaching job at the age of 16 and publishing her first book of translations from the Greek at the age of 18. For more than a quarter of a century, she was professor of ancient languages at Simpson College in Iowa, and she also taught at Lake Erie College in Ohio.
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Hermann Reutter
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Hermann Reutter was a German composer and pianist who worked as an academic teacher, university administrator, recitalist, and accompanist. He composed several operas, orchestral works, and chamber music, and especially many lieder, setting poems by authors writing in German, Russian, Spanish, Icelandic, English, and ancient Egyptian and Greek, among others.
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Jack Buchanan
1891 - 1957 (66 years)
Walter John Buchanan was a Scottish theatre and film actor, singer, dancer, producer and director. He was known for three decades as the embodiment of the debonair man-about-town in the tradition of George Grossmith Jr., and was described by The Times as "the last of the knuts." He is best known in America for his role in the classic Hollywood musical The Band Wagon in 1953.
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Jussi Jalas
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
Jussi Jalas was a Finnish conductor and composer. Biography Jalas was born as Armas Jussi Veikko Blomstedt in Jyväskylä in 1908. His father was Yrjö Blomstedt. He studied at the Helsingfors Conservatory 1923–30 , and then in Paris 1933–34, under Wladimir Pohl, Pierre Monteux and Rhené-Baton. He had further study in Germany, Austria and Italy before returning to Finland.
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Ugo Tognazzi
1922 - 1990 (68 years)
Ugo Tognazzi was an Italian actor, director, and screenwriter. Early life Tognazzi was born in Cremona, in northern Italy but spent his youth in various localities as his father was a travelling clerk for an insurance company.
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William Henry Squire
1871 - 1963 (92 years)
William Henry Squire, ARCM was a British cellist, composer and music professor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He studied cello at the Royal College of Music, and became professor of cello at the Royal College and Guildhall schools of music.
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Jimmy Mundy
1907 - 1983 (76 years)
James Mundy was an American jazz tenor saxophonist, arranger, and composer, best known for his arrangements for Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Earl Hines. Mundy died of cancer in New York City at the age of 75.
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Kanaka Dasa
1509 - 1609 (100 years)
Kanaka Dasa was a Haridasa saint and philosopher of Dvaita Vedanta, popularly called Daasashreshta Kanakadasa from present-day Karnataka, India. He was a follower of Madhvacharya's Dvaita philosophy and a disciple of Vyasatirtha. He was a renowned composer of Carnatic music, poet, reformer and musician. He is known for his keertanas and ugabhoga, and his compositions in the Kannada language for Carnatic music. Like other Haridasas, he used simple Kannada and native metrical forms for his compositions.
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Frederick Keel
1871 - 1954 (83 years)
James Frederick Keel was an English composer of art songs, baritone singer and academic. Keel was a successful recitalist and a professor of singing at the Royal Academy of Music. He combined scholarly and artistic interest in English songs and their history. His free settings of Elizabethan and Jacobean lyrics helped pioneer the revival of interest in the genre. He was also an active member of the English folksong movement. During World War I, Keel was held in the civilian internment camp at Ruhleben in Germany, where he played an active role in the camp's musical life, giving many recitals to help boost the morale of his fellow detainees.
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Tommy Cogbill
1932 - 1982 (50 years)
Thomas Clark Cogbill was an American bassist, guitarist and record producer known for his work in R&B, soul and country music. Life and career Cogbill was born in Johnson Grove, Tennessee. He was a highly sought-after session and studio musician who appeared on many now-classic recordings of the 1960s and 1970s, especially those recorded in Nashville, Memphis and Muscle Shoals. He has been credited as an influence by many bass guitarists, including Jerry Jemmott & Jaco Pastorius. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Cogbill worked as a record producer at American Sound Studio in Memphis and was ...
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Giorgio Federico Ghedini
1892 - 1965 (73 years)
Giorgio Federico Ghedini was an Italian composer. In addition to orchestral works, in 1949 he premiered a one-act opera based on Billy Budd by Herman Melville. Life Ghedini was born in Cuneo in 1892. He studied organ, piano and composition in Turin, then graduated in composition from the Bologna Conservatory under Marco Enrico Bossi in 1911. He worked as a conductor for a certain time, then he gave up to devote himself to teaching.
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Freddie Slack
1910 - 1965 (55 years)
Frederick Charles Slack was an American swing and boogie-woogie pianist and bandleader. Life and career Slack was born in Westby, Wisconsin, United States. He learned to play drums as a boy. Later he took up the xylophone, and at the age of 13 he changed to the piano. He studied with a local teacher throughout high school. At the age of 17, he moved with his parents to Chicago, where he continued his musical training. He met Rosy McHargue, a well-known clarinetist, who took him to hear many leading musicians, including Bix Beiderbecke and Earl Hines. His first job was with Johnny Tobin at the Beach View Gardens.
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Camille Everardi
1825 - 1899 (74 years)
Camille Everardi was a Belgian operatic baritone who had an active international career during the 1850s through the 1870s. He particularly excelled in the works of Vincenzo Bellini and Gioachino Rossini. Several music critics of his day likened his voice to that of Antonio Tamburini. He later had a highly successful second career as a voice teacher in the Russian Empire.
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Doris P. Buck
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Doris Pitkin Buck was an American science fiction author. Born in New York City, she graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1920 and Columbia University with a master's degree in 1925. She was a stage actress before marrying Richard Buck. She taught English at Ohio State University and was a founding member of the Science Fiction Writers of America.
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Eduard Hermann
1869 - 1950 (81 years)
Eduard Hermann was a German linguist known for his comparative studies of Indo-European languages. Hermann studied in Leipzig, Freiburg and Jena and defended his PhD in 1893 under Berthold Delbrück. After that he worked at various schools in Coburg and Bergedorf; in 1913 he became an associate professor at the University of Kiel, and in 1914 a full professor in Frankfurt. In 1917 he succeeded Jacob Wackernagel at the University of Göttingen. His work mainly focused on Baltic and Greek languages, and on Homer in particular. He also published some works on language acquisition by children.
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Alberto Mazzucato
1813 - 1877 (64 years)
Alberto Mazzucato was an Italian composer, music teacher, and writer. Mazzucato was born in Udine. Trained at the Padua Conservatory, he composed eight operas between 1834 and 1843, of which his most successful was Esmeralda . He also contributed music to the pastiche La vergine di Kermo which also contained music by Carlo Pedrotti, Antonio Cagnoni, Federico Ricci, Amilcare Ponchielli, and Giovanni Pacini. Along with Luigi Felice Rossi and Guglielmo Quarenghi, he formed the Società di S Cecilia in 1860.
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John Woods Duke
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
John Woods Duke was an American composer and pianist born in Cumberland, Maryland. He is best known for his large output of art songs. Biography John Woods Duke was the oldest child in a large musical family. After teaching him to read music at an early age and starting him on piano lessons at age 11, Duke's mother enrolled him in the Cumberland, MD Allegheny Academy. By age 16 he had won a three-year scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.
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John Wilson
1595 - 1674 (79 years)
John Wilson was an English composer, lutenist and teacher. Born in Faversham, Kent, he moved to London by 1614, where he succeeded Robert Johnson as principal composer for the King's Men, and entered the King's Musick in 1635 as a lutenist. He received the degree of D.Mus from Oxford in 1644, and he was Heather Professor of Music there from 1656 to 1661. Following the Restoration, he joined the Chapel Royal in 1662. He died at Westminster.
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Kerry Mills
1869 - 1948 (79 years)
Kerry Mills , publishing also as F.A. Mills, was an American ragtime composer and music publishing executive of popular music during the Tin Pan Alley era. His stylistically diverse music ranged from ragtime through cakewalk to marches. He was most prolific between 1895 and 1918.
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William Allen Montgomery
1829 - 1905 (76 years)
William Allen Montgomery was an American lawyer, planter and Baptist minister. Trained as a lawyer in Tennessee, he was a cotton planter in Texas in the 1850s and served as a Confederate chaplain in the American Civil War. He served as the President of Carson–Newman University from 1888 to 1892.
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Elsa Enäjärvi-Haavio
1901 - 1951 (50 years)
Elsa Elina Enäjärvi-Haavio, also Elsa Eklund, was a Finnish folklorist who carried out extensive research into folk poetry in the 1930s. As a result, in 1947 she was appointed docent of Finnish and folk poetics at the University of Helsinki. She was an influential member of many organizations, including the Finnish Federation of University Women, for which she represented Finland at the 30th anniversary of the International Federation of University Women in Switzerland.
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Wilford Leach
1929 - 1988 (59 years)
Carson Wilford Leach was an American theatre director, set designer, film director, screenwriter, and professor. Biography Leach was born in Petersburg, Virginia, on August 26, 1929. A performance of Pygmalion he saw as a teenager inspired him to work in theatre. After graduating from the College of William & Mary in 1953, Leach went on to earn both a master's degree and a doctorate from the University of Illinois. Leach began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in 1958. He also taught at the Yale School of Drama during the years 1978 and 1979.
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Alfred Karindi
1901 - 1969 (68 years)
Alfred Karindi was an Estonian organist and composer. Life and work Alfred Karindi was born on 30 May 1901 in the village of Kõnnu, Illuka Parish. In 1920 he entered the Tartu Higher School of Music where he studied organ under Johannes Kärt and composition under Heino Eller. He graduated in 1927, and then studied under August Topman and Artur Kapp as an external student of organ and composition at Tallinn Conservatory, graduating in 1931. He belonged to the "Tartu school" of musicians who studied under Heino Eller, others being Eduard Tubin, Eduard Oja, Olav Roots and Karl Leichter.
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