Search People Result | Academic Influence

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,

#17151

Francesco Antonio Bonporti

Francesco Antonio Bonporti

1672 - 1749 (77 years)

Francesco Antonio Bonporti was an Italian priest and amateur composer. Born in Trento, he was admitted in 1691 to the Collegium Germanicum in Rome, where he studied theology. While in Rome, he also studied composition under the guidance of Giuseppe Ottavio Pitoni and possibly violin with Arcangelo Corelli.

#17152

Sergei Aslamazyan

1897 - 1978 (81 years)

Sergei Zakharovich Aslamazyan, also Aslamazian was a Soviet Armenian cellist, composer, People's Artist of Armenian SSR , awarded the Stalin Prize . He was a co-founder and a member of Komitas Quartet from 1925 to 1968. He was the author of quartet versions of Komitas works. From 1947 he was a professor at Moscow State Conservatory.

#17153

Charles Lloyd

1835 - 1908 (73 years)

Charles Lloyd was a pipe organ builder based in Nottingham who flourished between 1859 and 1908. Family He was born in London on 8 September 1835, the son of shoemaker Samuel Lloyd. He was baptised on 18 March 1838 in St Pancras New Church. In 1851, at age 15, he was an apprentice organ builder.

#17154

John Hill

1843 - 1876 (33 years)

John Thomas Hill KS RAM was a church organist, choirmaster and orchestra conductor in Australia. He is remembered for his brief marriage to the prima donna Ilma de Murska. History Hill entered the Royal Academy of Music in 1857 and was elected King's Scholar in 1860 and was subsequently appointed to Her Majesty's private band. He also served as pianist and organist of the Royal Italian Opera at Covent Garden. He was organist of St Patrick's pro-Cathedral and assistant organist of St George's Cathedral, London.

#17155

C. Ramchandra

1918 - 1982 (64 years)

Ramchandra Narhar Chitalkar , also known as C. Ramchandra or Chitalkar or Anna Sahib, was an Indian music director and playback singer. As a composer, he mostly used the name C. Ramchandra, though he also used the names Annasaheb , Ram Chitalkar , and Shyamoo . Further, he often sang and acted in Marathi movies under the name R. N. Chitalkar. For his career as an occasional playback singer he used only his surname Chitalkar. Chitalkar sang some renowned and unforgettable duets with Lata Mangeshkar such as "Kitna Haseen Hai Mausam" in the film Azaad and "Shola Jo Bhadke" in Albela .

#17156

Big Walter Horton

1917 - 1981 (64 years)

Walter Horton , known as Big Walter or Walter 'Shakey' Horton, was an American blues harmonica player. A quiet, unassuming, shy man, he is remembered as one of the premier harmonica players in the history of blues. Willie Dixon once called Horton 'the best harmonica player I ever heard'.

#17157

Leon Payne

1917 - 1969 (52 years)

Leon Roger Payne , "the Blind Balladeer", was an American country music singer and songwriter. Life He was born in Alba, Texas, United States. He was blind in one eye at birth, and lost the sight in the other eye in early childhood. He attended the Texas School for the Blind from 1924 to 1935. He married Myrtie and they had two children together, as well as two children from Myrtie's previous marriage. Payne died at age 52 from a heart attack in 1969 in San Antonio, Texas. Myrtie died in San Antonio in 2008, and Leon's composition "I Love You Because" was played at her funeral service by pe...

#17158

Sidney Clare

1892 - 1972 (80 years)

Sidney Clare was an American comedian, dancer and composer. His best-known songs include "On the Good Ship Lollipop" , "You're My Thrill" , and "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone" . In 1929, Clare wrote his first full film score for Street Girl. He did the film scores for Tanned Legs, Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round, Sing and Be Happy, Hit the Deck, Jimmy and Sally, Bright Eyes, The Littlest Rebel and Rascalss.

#17159

Paul Kochanski

1887 - 1934 (47 years)

Paul Kochanski was a Polish violinist, composer and arranger active in the United States. Training and early career Paweł Kochański was born in Odesa to Polish-Jewish parents and studied violin first with his father and then at age 7 with Emil Młynarski, whose teacher had been Leopold Auer. In 1898 Młynarski went to Warsaw, and upon founding the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra in 1901, summoned Kochanski, then aged 14, to be its concertmaster. He also took charge of his upbringing and education, treating him like a son and stating that he believed he would become a world-class soloist. In 1903,...

#17160

Raymond Aron

1905 - 1983 (78 years)

Raymond Claude Ferdinand Aron was a French philosopher, sociologist, political scientist, historian and journalist, one of France's most prominent thinkers of the 20th century. Aron is best known for his 1955 book The Opium of the Intellectuals, the title of which inverts Karl Marx's claim that religion was the opium of the people; he argues that Marxism was the opium of the intellectuals in post-war France. In the book, Aron chastised French intellectuals for what he described as their harsh criticism of capitalism and democracy and their simultaneous defense of the actions of the communist governments of the East.

#17161

Frank Luther Mott

1886 - 1964 (78 years)

Frank Luther Mott was an American academic, historian and journalist, who won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for History for Volumes II and III of his series, A History of American Magazines. Early life and education Mott was born in Rose Hill, Iowa. His parents were Mary E. and David Charles Mott, publishers of the weekly What Cheer, Iowa Patriot. The Mott family owned a print shop in Keokuk County. He was a practicing Quaker. When he was 10 his father began publishing the Audubon, Iowa Republican and he assisted in the typesetting.

#17162

John C. Merrill

John Calhoun Merrill was an American author and professor of journalism. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and taught at a number of other colleges and universities, and was the author of 30 books and over 100 articles in journals, and has been considered one of the leading scholars in journalism during his time. In 2007, a festschrift, Freedom Fighter, was issued in his honor.

#17163

Robert Gjerdingen

Robert O. Gjerdingen is a scholar of music theory and music perception, and is an emeritus professor at Northwestern University. His most influential work focuses on the application of ideas from cognitive science, especially theories about schemas, as an analytical tool in an attempted "archaeology" of style and composition methods in galant European music of the eighteenth century. Gjerdingen received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 after studying with Leonard B. Meyer and Eugene Narmour. His 2007 book Music in the Galant Style, an authoritative study on galant schemata, ...

#17164

Reginald Ruggles Gates

Reginald Ruggles Gates

1882 - 1962 (80 years)

Reginald Ruggles Gates , was a Canadian-born geneticist who published widely in the fields of botany and eugenics. Early life Reginald Ruggles Gates was born on May 1, 1882, near Middleton, Nova Scotia, to a family of English ancestry. He had a twin sister named Charlotte.

#17165

George Kingsley Zipf

George Kingsley Zipf

1902 - 1950 (48 years)

George Kingsley Zipf , was an American linguist and philologist who studied statistical occurrences in different languages. Zipf earned his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees from Harvard University, although he also studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin. He was chairman of the German department and university lecturer at Harvard University. He worked with Chinese and demographics, and much of his effort can explain properties of the Internet, distribution of income within nations, and many other collections of data.

#17166

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.

#17167

Jonathan Bobaljik

Jonathan David Bobaljik is a Canadian linguist specializing in morphology, syntax, and typology. Bobaljik received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995 with a thesis titled Morphosyntax: The syntax of verbal inflection advised by Noam Chomsky and David Pesetsky. He is currently a professor at Harvard University and has previously held positions at McGill University and University of Connecticut. He is a leading scholar in the area of Distributed Morphology.

#17168

Eric Lenneberg

1921 - 1975 (54 years)

Eric Heinz Lenneberg was a linguist and neurologist who pioneered ideas on language acquisition and cognitive psychology, particularly in terms of the concept of innateness. Life and career He was born in Düsseldorf, Germany. Ethnically Jewish, he left Nazi Germany because of rising Nazi persecution. He initially fled to Brazil with his family and then to the United States where he attended the University of Chicago and Harvard University. A professor of psychology and neurobiology, he taught at the Harvard Medical School, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Cornell University and Med...

#17169

Leonard Bloomfield

1887 - 1949 (62 years)

Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He is considered to be the father of American distributionalism. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics. He made significant contributions to Indo-European historical linguistics, the description of Austronesian languages, and description of languages of the Algonquian family.

#17170

Uriel Weinreich

1926 - 1967 (41 years)

Uriel Weinreich was a Jewish–American linguist. Life Uriel Weinreich was born in Wilno, Poland , the first child of Max Weinreich and Regina Szabad, to a family that paternally hailed from Courland in Latvia and maternally came from a well-respected and established Wilno Jewish family. He earned his BA, MA, and PhD from Columbia University and went on to teach there, specializing in Yiddish studies, sociolinguistics, and dialectology. He advocated the increased acceptance of semantics and compiled the iconic Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary, published shortly after his death...

#17171

Edgar Howard Sturtevant

1875 - 1952 (77 years)

Edgar Howard Sturtevant was an American linguist. Biography Sturtevant was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, the older brother of Alfred Sturtevant and grandson of educator Julian Monson Sturtevant. He studied at Illinois College, where his grandfather was president, and obtained an A.B. from Indiana University, then the University of Chicago receiving there in 1901 a Ph.D. with a dissertation on Latin case forms. He became an assistant professor of classical philology at Columbia University before joining the linguistics faculty at Yale University in 1923. In 1924, he was a member of the organizing committee for the founding, with Leonard Bloomfield and George M.

#17172

I. A. Richards

1893 - 1979 (86 years)

Ivor Armstrong Richards CH , known as I. A. Richards, was an English educator, literary critic, poet, and rhetorician. His work contributed to the foundations of the New Criticism, a formalist movement in literary theory which emphasized the close reading of a literary text, especially poetry, in an effort to discover how a work of literature functions as a self-contained and self-referential æsthetic object.

#17173

Albert C. Baugh

1891 - 1981 (90 years)

Albert Croll Baugh was a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, best known as the author of a textbook for History of the English language . His A History of the English Language was first published in 1935 and praised as "worthy to take a place with the other great histories of single languages". It was revised by Baugh for a second edition published in 1957 and it remains in print, edited by Thomas Cable .

#17174

Clement Martyn Doke

1893 - 1980 (87 years)

Clement Martyn Doke was a South African linguist working mainly on African languages. Realizing that the grammatical structures of Bantu languages are quite different from those of European languages, he was one of the first African linguists of his time to abandon the Euro-centric approach to language description for a more locally grounded one. A most prolific writer, he published a string of grammars, several dictionaries, comparative work, and a history of Bantu linguistics.

#17175

Maria Luisa Zubizarreta

1900 - Present (126 years)

Maria Luisa Zubizarreta is professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Southern California. Education and personal life Zubizarreta was born and raised in Asunción, Paraguay. She obtained her Maîtrise in General Linguistics from Paris 8 University in 1978 and her PhD in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982, with a dissertation entitled On the Relationship of the Lexicon to Syntax. She held various academic positions before arriving at the University of Southern California , where she held a position from 1988 until her retirement.

#17176

Arthur Garfield Kennedy

1880 - 1954 (74 years)

Arthur Garfield Kennedy was an American philologist who served as Professor of English at Stanford University from 1914 to 1945. Biography Kennedy was born in Weeping Water, Nebraska on June 29, 1880, and attended Doane College at Crete, Nebraska. He received his master's degree from the University of Nebraska and his doctor's degree from Stanford University. From 1914 to 1945 Kennedy was Professor of English at Stanford University. He was the author of several books on the English language. In 1925 he, with Kemp Malone and Louise Pound, founded the journal American Speech and he was a frequent contributor.

#17177

George Sherman Lane

1902 - 1981 (79 years)

George Sherman Lane was an American linguist. His research focus was the Tocharian language. Life Lane began his studies in 1922 at the University of Iowa, where he studied under Henning Larsen and received his first award, the Early English Text Society Prize. In 1926, he graduated first of his class, and in 1927 obtained a Master of Arts in English. This was followed by studies in Reykjavík, where he learned Sanskrit, as well as in Paris, where he studied under Meillet, Vendryes and Benveniste. At the University of Chicago he collaborated with Carl Darling Buck on the latter's Dictionary of selected synonyms in the principal Indo-European languages.

#17178

Egon Wellesz

1885 - 1974 (89 years)

Egon Joseph Wellesz, CBE, FBA was an Austrian, later British composer, teacher and musicologist, notable particularly in the field of Byzantine music. Early life and education in Vienna Egon Joseph Wellesz was born on 21 October 1885 in the Schottengasse district of Vienna to Samú Wellesz and Ilona Wellesz . Although his parents met and married in Vienna, they both originated from Hungary and came from Jewish families in that nation. His parents, while ethnically Hungarian Jews, were both practicing Christians in Vienna and Wellesz received a Protestant upbringing. He later converted to Catholicism.

#17179

Edward Bailey Birge

1868 - 1952 (84 years)

Edward Bailey Birge was a founding member of the Music Supervisors National Conference, which later became the Music Educators National Conference . Birge served as president of the organization from 1910–1911, and also as chairmen of the editorial board for the Music Educators Journal for many years. He originated the "MEJ Clubs" on college campuses that made possible student memberships. Though the clubs, the Journal was used in classes with prospective teachers. This greatly increased the circulation of the magazine. In recognition of his long service to the Journal and to the Conference, the MENC board of directors named him chairman emeritus.

#17180

Suniti Kumar Chatterji

Suniti Kumar Chatterji

1890 - 1977 (87 years)

Bhashacharya Acharya Suniti Kumar Chatterjee was an Indian linguist, educationist and litterateur. He was a recipient of the second-highest Indian civilian honour of Padma Vibhushan. Life Childhood Chatterji was born on 26 November 1890 at Shibpur in Howrah. He was the son of Haridas Chattopadhyay, an affluent Bengali Kulin Brahmin. According to the family history, their ancestors were originally residents of a village named chatuti in the Rarh region of present-day West Bengal. During the Turkic invasion of Bengal in the thirteenth century, the Chatterji family left their ancestral village in West Bengal and took shelter in East Bengal.

#17181

Margaret Masterman

1910 - 1986 (76 years)

Margaret Masterman was a British linguist and philosopher, most known for her pioneering work in the field of computational linguistics and especially machine translation. She founded the Cambridge Language Research Unit.

#17182

Li Fang-Kuei

1902 - 1987 (85 years)

Li Fang-Kuei was a Chinese linguist known for his studies of the varieties of Chinese, his reconstructionss of Old Chinese and Proto-Tai, and his documentation of Dene languages in North America. Biography Li Fang-Kuei was born on 20 August 1902 in Guangzhou during the final years of the Qing dynasty to a minor scholarly family from Xiyang, a small town in Shanxi roughly south of Yangquan. Li's father Li Guangyu received his jinshi degree in 1880 and served in minor official posts in the late 19th to early 20th century.

#17183

Anna Granville Hatcher

1905 - 1978 (73 years)

Anna Granville Hatcher was an American linguist. She started her career as a Romance linguist, and later conducted research in medieval literature as well as branching out from Late Latin and Old French to studies on Provençal, Spanish, Italian, English, and German. She was the first woman to hold the position of full professor at Johns Hopkins University.

#17184

Mario Pei

1901 - 1978 (77 years)

Mario Andrew Pei was an Italian-born American linguist and polyglot who wrote a number of popular books known for their accessibility to readers without a professional background in linguistics. His book The Story of Language was acclaimed for its presentation of technical linguistics concepts in ways that were entertaining and accessible to a general audience.

#17185

Eilert Ekwall

1877 - 1964 (87 years)

Bror Oscar Eilert Ekwall , known as Eilert Ekwall, was Professor of English at Sweden's Lund University from 1909 to 1942 and was one of the outstanding scholars of the English language in the first half of the 20th century. He wrote works on the history of English, but he is best known as the author of numerous important books on English placenames and personal names.

#17186

Ernest Campbell Mossner

1907 - 1986 (79 years)

Ernest Campbell Mossner professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and biographer of the Scottish philosopher, essayist and historian David Hume . He was a specialist also on Hume's friend and contemporary, Adam Smith.

#17187

Elizabeth Wiskemann

1899 - 1971 (72 years)

Elizabeth Meta Wiskemann was an English journalist and historian of Anglo-German ancestry. She was an intelligence officer in World War II, and the Montagu Burton Chair in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh.

#17188

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.

#17189

Thomas Thompson

1933 - 1982 (49 years)

Thomas Thompson was a journalist and author. Career Thompson was born in Fort Worth, Texas, to Clarence Arnold Thompson and Ruth Oswalt . He graduated from the University of Texas in 1955. He then worked as a reporter and editor at the Houston Press.

#17190

Norman Cousins

1915 - 1990 (75 years)

Norman Cousins was an American political journalist, author, professor, and world peace advocate. Early life Cousins was born to Jewish immigrant parents Samuel Cousins and Sarah Babushkin Cousins, in West Hoboken, New Jersey . At age 11, he was misdiagnosed with tuberculosis and placed in a sanatorium. Despite this, he was an athletic youth, and he claimed that as a young boy he "set out to discover exuberance."

#17191

Horst Rittel

1930 - 1990 (60 years)

Horst Wilhelm Johannes Rittel was a design theorist and university professor. He is best known for popularizing the concept of wicked problem, but his influence on design theory and practice was much wider.

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