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).
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#17101
Anton Constandse
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Anton Levien Constandse was a Dutch anarchist author and journalist. Biography The son of a Baptist hotelier, Constandse completed the normal school between 1914 and 1918 and in this period came into contact with the teetotalers' movement. In response to World War I, he developed anti-militarist ideas. He joined the Social-Anarchist Youth Organisation in 1919. Within this organisation, he chose the side of the individualist faction when factional struggles erupted, denouncing even trade organizations as counterrevolutionary. Instead of taking a job as a teacher, Constandse devoted himself to spreading anarchist ideas.
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Seymour Shifrin
1926 - 1979 (53 years)
Seymour Shifrin was an American composer. He was described by Time Magazine as "one of the most significant composers of his generation." Shifrin's Satires of Circumstance received the Koussevitzky International Recording Award for 1970. He received the Naumburg Award, Columbia University's Bearns Prize , the Copley Award, the Horblit Prize , and two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1956 and 1959. A graduate of Columbia University , he was a member of the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley and at Brandeis University from 1966 until his death in 1979.
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Pura Belpré
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Pura Teresa Belpré y Nogueras was an Afro-Puerto Rican educator who served as the first Puerto Rican librarian in New York City. She was also a writer, collector of folktales, and puppeteer. Life Belpré was born in Cidra, Puerto Rico. There is some dispute as to the date of her birth which has been given as February 2, 1899, December 2, 1901 and February 2, 1903. Belpré graduated from Central High School in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1919 and enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, where she originally planned on becoming a teacher. But, in 1920, Belpré interrupted her studies...
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Moissaye Joseph Olgin
1878 - 1939 (61 years)
Moissaye Joseph Olgin was a Ukrainian-born writer, journalist, and translator in the early 20th century. He began his career writing for the Jewish press in support of the Russian Revolution in 1910. During the First World War, he moved to the United States in 1915, settling in New York City, where he continued his career in journalism. Much of his work was in support of communism, and he was a founding member of the Workers Party. In 1922, he founded The Morning Freiheit, and served as its editor until his death in 1939.
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Thomas Church
1902 - 1978 (76 years)
Thomas Dolliver Church was a 20th century landscape architect based in California. He is a nationally recognized as one of the pioneer landscape designers of Modernism in garden landscape design known as the 'California Style'. His design studio was in San Francisco from 1933 to 1977.
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Willis Laurence James
1900 - 1966 (66 years)
Willis Laurence James was an American musician, composer and educator. He was on the faculty of Spelman College for more than three decades. Biography Willis James was born in Montgomery, Alabama, United States, and was raised in Pensacola and Jacksonville, Florida. Educated at the Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville, he studied violin with Sidney Woodward. Woodward recognized his musical talent and took James for further study to Atlanta, Georgia, where from the age of 16 he was the protégé of Kemper Harreld, a concert violinist and head of the Morehouse College music department. James e...
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Rudolf Vleeskruijer
1916 - 1966 (50 years)
Rudolf Vleeskruijer was a Dutch professor in the English language and Old English literature at the Utrecht University. Vleeskruijer spent a part of his youth in England. From August 1945 to May 1946, he was an interpreter for the Allied Forces as a conscript NCO in the Dutch Army.
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Ildebrando Pizzetti
1880 - 1968 (88 years)
Ildebrando Pizzetti was an Italian composer of classical music, musicologist, and music critic. Biography Pizzetti was born in Parma in 1880. He was part of the "Generation of 1880" along with Ottorino Respighi, Gian Francesco Malipiero, and Alfredo Casella. They were among the first Italian composers in some time whose primary contributions were not in opera. The instrumental and a cappella traditions had never died in Italian music and had produced, for instance, the string quartets of Antonio Scontrino and the works of Respighi's teacher Giuseppe Martucci; but with the "Generation of 1880...
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Clive Carey
1883 - 1968 (85 years)
Francis Clive Savill Carey CBE , known as Clive Carey, was an English baritone, singing teacher, composer, opera producer and folk song collector. Biography Clive Carey was born at Sible Hedingham, Essex, in 1883. He was a chorister in the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, and then attended Sherborne School before becoming an Organ Scholar at Clare College in 1901. He then entered the Royal College of Music under the auspices of the Grove Scholarship in Composition, studying under Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and James H. Ley . He had further study with Jean de Reszke in Paris and Nice.
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Fran Ramovš
1890 - 1952 (62 years)
Fran Ramovš was a Slovenian linguist. He studied the dialects and onomastics of Slovene. Early life and education Fran Ramovš was born in Ljubljana, the capital of the Duchy of Carniola, Austria-Hungary. He studied linguistics in Vienna and in Graz . While in Graz he selected the topic of his dissertation and completed it in 1912; he submitted it in 1914 to receive his PhD.
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Cecil Effinger
1914 - 1990 (76 years)
Cecil Effinger was an American composer, oboist, and inventor. Life Effinger was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado and resided in the state for most of his life. Reversing the usual cliché, he was the son of musicians and teachers, but initially studied mathematics at Colorado College, receiving a BA in 1935, before deciding to follow in his parents' footsteps. In the meantime, he had studied harmony and counterpoint with Frederick Boothroyd in 1934–36, and went to Paris in 1939 to study composition with Nadia Boulanger. He was first oboe in the orchestras of Colorado Springs and Denver and taught at the Colorado College before the Second World War .
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Charles Cushing
1905 - 1982 (77 years)
Charles Cook Cushing was an American composer, band director, and professor of music. Biography Charles Cushing, a native Californian, studied at the University of California, Berkeley. Encouraged by visiting French Composer Charles Koechlin during the summers of 1928 and 1929, he received his bachelor's degree in 1928 and Master's in 1929. He won the George Ladd Prix de Paris prize, allowing him to study with Nadia Boulanger at the École Normale de Musique in Paris for two years.
Go to Profile#17113
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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 .
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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.
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Hanya Holm
1893 - 1992 (99 years)
Hanya Holm is known as one of the "Big Four" founders of American modern dance. She was a dancer, choreographer, and above all, a dance educator. Early life, connection with Mary Wigman Born as Johanna Eckert on 3 March 1893 in Worms, Rhineland-Palatinate, German Empire. Holm was drawn to music and drama at an early age, she attended the Dalcroze Institute of Applied Rhythm in Frankfurt, studying under Emile Jaques-Dalcroze throughout her childhood and young adult life.
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Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
1710 - 1736 (26 years)
Giovanni Battista Draghi , usually referred to as Giovanni Battista Pergolesi , was an Italian Baroque composer, violinist, and organist, leading exponent of the Baroque; he is considered one of the greatest Italian musicians of the first half of the 18th century and one of the most important representatives of the Neapolitan school.
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Jakob Jud
1882 - 1952 (70 years)
Jakob Jud [ju:t] was a Swiss Romance linguist . From 1922 to 1950 he taught classes in Romance philology and Old French literature at the University of Zürich. With Karl Jaberg, he was the author of Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz . In 1936, with Arnald Steiger, he founded the magazine Vox Romanica.
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Otto Behaghel
1854 - 1936 (82 years)
Otto Behaghel was a germanist and professor in Heidelberg, Basel, and Gießen. He added theoretical contributions to the German and Middle High German language. He formulated Behaghel's laws. His work is still important in Theme and rheme research.
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Madeleine Carroll
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Edith Madeleine Carroll was an English actress, popular both in Britain and America in the 1930s and 1940s. At the peak of her success in 1938, she was the world's highest-paid actress. Carroll is remembered for starring in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps where she originated the "ice cold blonde" role in Hitchcock films. The director stated, "how very well Madeleine fitted into the part. I had heard a lot about her as a tall, cold, blonde beauty. After meeting her, I made up my mind to present her to the public as her natural self". She is also noted for largely abandoning her acting career...
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David W. Maurer
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
David Warren Maurer was a professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville from 1937 to 1972. He was the writer of numerous studies of the language of the American underworld. Biography Maurer received a doctorate from the Ohio State University in Comparative Literature in 1935. He spent much of his academic career studying the language of criminals, drug addicts, and other marginal subcultures.
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Emmanuel Chabrier
1841 - 1894 (53 years)
Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier was a French Romantic composer and pianist. His bourgeois family did not approve of a musical career for him, and he studied law in Paris and then worked as a civil servant until the age of thirty-nine while immersing himself in the modernist artistic life of the French capital and composing in his spare time. From 1880 until his final illness he was a full-time composer.
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Georg Wenker
1852 - 1911 (59 years)
Georg Wenker was a German linguist who began documenting German dialect geography during the late nineteenth century. He is considered a pioneer in this field and contributed several groundbreaking publications, most notably, the Deutscher Sprachatlas.
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Ted Koehler
1894 - 1973 (79 years)
Ted L. Koehler was an American lyricist. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972. Life and career Koehler was born in 1894 in Washington, D.C. He started out as a photo-engraver, but was attracted to the music business, where he started out as a theater pianist for silent films.
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Niccolò Paganini
1782 - 1840 (58 years)
Niccolò Paganini was an Italian violinist and composer. He was the most celebrated violin virtuoso of his time, and left his mark as one of the pillars of modern violin technique. His 24 Caprices for Solo Violin Op. 1 are among the best known of his compositions and have served as an inspiration for many prominent composers.
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Trevor Howard
1913 - 1988 (75 years)
Trevor Wallace Howard-Smith was an English stage, film, and television actor. After varied work in the theatre, he achieved star status with his role in the film Brief Encounter , followed by The Third Man .
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Hans Marchand
1907 - 1978 (71 years)
Hans Marchand was a German linguist. He studied Romance languages, English and Latin, and after fleeing Germany during the Third Reich was a lecturer of linguistics at Istanbul, Yale University, and Bard College. From 1957 to 1973 he was a professor at the University of Tübingen.
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Solomon Birnbaum
1891 - 1989 (98 years)
Solomon Asher Birnbaum, also Salomo Birnbaum was a Yiddish linguist and Hebrew palaeographer. Biography Birnbaum , born in Vienna, was the oldest son of Nathan Birnbaum and Rosa Korngut. He was an Austrian Jew of West Galician descent.
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Raoul Walsh
1887 - 1980 (93 years)
Raoul Walsh was an American film director, actor, founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , and the brother of silent screen actor George Walsh. He was known for portraying John Wilkes Booth in the silent film The Birth of a Nation and for directing such films as the widescreen epic The Big Trail starring John Wayne in his first leading role, The Roaring Twenties starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, High Sierra starring Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart, and White Heat starring James Cagney and Edmond O'Brien. He directed his last film in 1964. His work has b...
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Zainul Abedin
1914 - 1976 (62 years)
Zainul Abedin , also known as Shilpacharya was a prominent Bangladeshi painter. He became well known in 1944 through his series of paintings depicting some of the great famines in Bengal during its British colonial period. After the Partition of Indian subcontinent he moved to East Pakistan . In 1948, he helped to establish the Institute of Arts and Crafts at the University of Dhaka. The Indian Express has described him as a legendary Bangladeshi painter and activist. Like many of his contemporaries, his paintings on the Bengal famine of 1943 are viewed as his most characteristic works. His ...
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Théodore Dubois
1837 - 1924 (87 years)
Clément François Théodore Dubois was a French Romantic composer, organist, and music teacher. After study at the Paris Conservatoire, Dubois won France's premier musical prize, the Prix de Rome in 1861. He became an organist and choirmaster at several well-known churches in Paris, and at the same time was a professor in the Conservatoire, teaching harmony from 1871 to 1891 and composition from 1891 to 1896, when he succeeded Ambroise Thomas as the Conservatoire's director. He continued his predecessor's strictly conservative curriculum and was forced to retire early after a scandal erupted ov...
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Hank Williams
1923 - 1953 (30 years)
Hiram "Hank" Williams was an American singer-songwriter. He is regarded as one of the most significant and influential American singers and songwriters of the 20th century. Williams recorded 55 singles that reached the top 10 of the Billboard Country & Western Best Sellers chart, five of which were released posthumously, and 12 of which reached No.1.
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Andrei Tarkovsky
1932 - 1986 (54 years)
Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky was a Russian film director and screenwriter. Widely considered one of the greatest and most influential directors in cinema history, Tarkovsky's films explore spiritual and metaphysical themes, and are noted for their slow pacing and long takes, dreamlike visual imagery, and preoccupation with nature and memory.
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Walther von Wartburg
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
Walther von Wartburg was a Swiss philologist and lexicographer. He was the editor-in-chief of the Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch . After studying at the universities of Berne, Zurich, Florence and Paris , in 1918 he presented his doctoral thesis . In 1921 he became Privatdozent at Berne. He worked in the method of Lausanne, and later studied, from 1929 to 1939, at the University of Leipzig. From 1940 to 1959, he was Professor of French Philology at the University of Basle.
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Eduard Prokosch
1876 - 1938 (62 years)
Eduard Prokosch was an Austrian historical linguist who specialized in Indo-European and, specifically, Proto-Germanic studies. He was the father of Gertrude Prokosch Kurath, Frederic Prokosch and Walther Prokosch.
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Muddy Waters
1913 - 1983 (70 years)
McKinley Morganfield , known professionally as Muddy Waters, was an American blues singer and musician who was an important figure in the post-World War II blues scene, and is often cited as the "father of modern Chicago blues". His style of playing has been described as "raining down Delta beatitude".
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Marion Davies
1897 - 1961 (64 years)
Marion Davies was an American actress, producer, screenwriter, and philanthropist. Educated in a religious convent, Davies fled the school to pursue a career as a chorus girl. As a teenager, she appeared in several Broadway musicals and one film, Runaway Romany . She soon became a featured performer in the Ziegfeld Follies.
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Edgard Varèse
1883 - 1965 (82 years)
Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse was a French composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States. Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm; he coined the term "organized sound" in reference to his own musical aesthetic. Varèse's conception of music reflected his vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded". He conceived the elements of his music in terms of "sound-masses", likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has al...
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Paul Renner
1878 - 1956 (78 years)
Paul Friedrich August Renner was a German typeface designer, author, and founder of the Master School for Germany's Printers in Munich. In 1927, he designed the Futura typeface, which became one of the most successful and most-used types of the 20th century.
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Michael Bennett
1943 - 1987 (44 years)
Michael Bennett was an American musical theatre director, writer, choreographer, and dancer. He won seven Tony Awards for his choreography and direction of Broadway shows and was nominated for an additional eleven.
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Vayalar Ramavarma
1928 - 1975 (47 years)
Vayalar Ramavarma , also known as Vayalar, was an Indian poet and lyricist of Malayalam language. He was known for his poems which include Sargasangeetham, Mulankaadu, Padamudrakal, Aayisha and Oru Judas janikkunnu and for around 1300 songs he penned for 256 Malayalam films. He received the National Film Award for Best Lyrics in 1972 and was the winner of the Kerala State Film Award for Best Lyrics in its year of inception which he received three more times. He was also a recipient of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry in 1962. His collaborations with G. Devarajan produced the golden ...
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Ferruccio Busoni
1866 - 1924 (58 years)
Ferruccio Busoni was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor, editor, writer, and teacher. His international career and reputation led him to work closely with many of the leading musicians, artists and literary figures of his time, and he was a sought-after keyboard instructor and a teacher of composition.
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Nizam al-Mulk
1018 - 1092 (74 years)
Abu Ali Hasan ibn Ali Tusi , better known by his honorific title of Nizam al-Mulk was a Persian scholar, jurist, political philosopher and Vizier of the Seljuk Empire. Rising from a lowly position within the empire, he effectively became the de facto ruler of the empire for 20 years after the assassination of Sultan Alp Arslan in 1072, serving as the archetypal "good vizier". Viewed by many historians as "the most important statesman in Islamic history", the policies implemented by Nizam al-Mulk would go on to remain as the basic foundation for administrative state structures in the Muslim wo...
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