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.

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List of the most influential people in Communications,

#17151

Otis Redding

1941 - 1967 (26 years)

Otis Ray Redding Jr. was an American singer and songwriter. He is regarded as one of the greatest singer-songwriters in the history of American popular music and a seminal artist in soul music and rhythm and blues. Nicknamed the "King of Soul", Redding's style of singing gained inspiration from the gospel music that preceded the genre. His singing style influenced many other soul artists of the 1960s.

#17152

Nellie Melba

1861 - 1931 (70 years)

Dame Nellie Melba was an Australian operatic lyric coloratura soprano. She became one of the most famous singers of the late Victorian era and the early 20th century, and was the first Australian to achieve international recognition as a classical musician. She took the pseudonym "Melba" from Melbourne, her home town.

#17153

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.

#17154

Wilbur Schramm

1907 - 1987 (80 years)

Wilbur Lang Schramm was a scholar and "authority on mass communications". He founded the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1936 and served as its first director until 1941. Schramm was hugely influential in establishing communications as a field of study in the United States, and the establishing of departments of communication studies across U.S. universities. Wilbur Schramm is considered the founder of the field of Communication Studies. He was the first individual to identify himself as a communication scholar; he created the first academic degree-granting programs with communication in their name; and he trained the first generation of communication scholars.

#17155

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.

#17156

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.

#17157

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.

#17158

Charles Bally

1865 - 1947 (82 years)

Charles Bally was a Swiss linguist from the Geneva School. He lived from 1865 to 1947 and was, like Ferdinand de Saussure, from Switzerland. His parents were Jean Gabriel, a teacher, and Henriette, the owner of a cloth store. Bally was married three times: first to Valentine Leirens, followed by Irma Baptistine Doutre, who was sent into a mental institution in 1915, and finally with Alice Bellicot. In addition to his edition of de Saussure's lectures, Course in General Linguistics , Charles Bally also played an important role in linguistics.

#17159

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.

#17160

Georg Morgenstierne

Georg Morgenstierne

1892 - 1978 (86 years)

Georg Valentin von Munthe af Morgenstierne was a Norwegian professor of linguistics with the University of Oslo . He specialized in Indo-Iranian languages. Studies During the years 1923 to 1971, Morgenstierne carried out fieldwork in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Iran. In 1924, he undertook the first of his two major linguistic expeditions. He arrived in Kabul with a personal letter of introduction to the King of Afghanistan, from the King of Norway. Together with studying the languages, Morgenstierne collected remarkable scientific materials from the culture of the regional people, like ...

#17161

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.

#17162

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.

#17163

Lorenzo Dow Turner

1890 - 1972 (82 years)

Lorenzo Dow Turner was an African-American academic and linguist who did seminal research on the Gullah language of the Low Country of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. His studies included recordings of Gullah speakers in the 1930s. As head of the English departments at Howard University and Fisk University for a combined total of nearly 30 years, he strongly influenced their programs. He created the African Studies curriculum at Fisk, was chair of the African Studies Program at Roosevelt University, and in the early 1960s, cofounded a training program for Peace Corps volunteers going to A...

#17164

George Frederick McKay

1899 - 1970 (71 years)

George Frederick McKay was a prolific modern American composer. Biography McKay was born in the small frontier wheat farming town of Harrington, Washington. His family later moved to Spokane, where he attended school up to his college years. He was attracted to American folk-song, including jazz and blues and Native American themes, and to a great degree, his music contains a poignant evocation of the West Coast American spirit, including glimpses of a populist era of street marches, honky-tonk dance halls and social chaos along with a recognition of the great natural beauty of his home region and the vitality of its people .

#17165

Ingolf Dahl

1912 - 1970 (58 years)

Ingolf Dahl was a German-born American composer, pianist, conductor, and educator. Biography Dahl was born Walter Ingolf Marcus in Hamburg, Germany, to a German Jewish father, attorney Paul Marcus, and his Swedish wife Hilda Maria Dahl. He had two brothers, Gert Marcus , and Holger, and one sister Anna-Britta.

#17166

Morton Feldman

1926 - 1987 (61 years)

Morton Feldman was an American composer. A major figure in 20th-century classical music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown. Feldman's works are characterized by notational innovations that he developed to create his characteristic sound: rhythms that seem to be free and floating, pitch shadings that seem softly unfocused, a generally quiet and slowly evolving music, and recurring asymmetric patterns. His later works, after 1977, also explore extrem...

#17167

Leon Klepper

1900 - 1991 (91 years)

Leon Klepper was a Romanian composer of classical music. Born to a Jewish family in Iași, Klepper studied in Vienna with Joseph Marx, in Berlin with Franz Schreker and with Paul Dukas and Alfred Cortot in Paris, where he lived until 1939. From 1949 to 1959, he was a composition professor at the National University of Music Bucharest. Afterwards, he lived as a freelance composer and music teacher in Freiburg im Breisgau where he died in 1991 aged 91.

#17168

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.

#17169

Ferdinand Brunot

1860 - 1938 (78 years)

Ferdinand-Eugène-Jean-Baptiste Brunot was a French linguist and philologist, editor of the ground-breaking Histoire de la langue française des origines à 1900 . Brunot was born in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges. He found his first faculty position and published his first book from the Faculté des lettres de Lyon, now the Lumière University Lyon 2. In October 1891 he became a lecturer at the Sorbonne at the age of 31. Here he began his long collaboration with fellow linguist Louis Petit de Julleville and produced the first volume of his monumental History, dealing with medieval French. It would eventually stretch to nine volumes published in his lifetime, and 13 volumes altogether.

#17170

David Diringer

1900 - 1975 (75 years)

David Diringer was a British linguist, palaeographer and writer. He was the author of several well-known books about writing systems. Biography Diringer was born to Jacob Munzer and Mirl Diringer on 16 June 1900, in Tlumacz – at that time considered part of Austria, later Poland, but now Tlumach, Ukraine. He stayed in Tlumacz through high school but moved to Italy to earn, in 1927, his Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Florence. This was followed, in 1929, by a diploma in ancient history. He was appointed a professor at Florence , his first academic interest being the culture of the Etruscans.

#17171

George Philip Krapp

1872 - 1934 (62 years)

George Philip Krapp was a scholar of the English language who was born in Cincinnati. He graduated from Wittenberg College in 1894 and received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1899. His doctoral thesis was on the Legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick.

#17172

Henri Peyre

1901 - 1988 (87 years)

Henri Maurice Peyre was a French-born American linguist, literary scholar and Sterling Professor of French Emeritus at Yale University. Peyre graduated from the École Normale Superieure and the Sorbonne and received his PhD from the Universite de Paris. In 1925 he started teaching at Bryn Mawr College, ten miles west of Philadelphia. From 1933 to 1938 he was professor of French literature at the Egyptian University in Cairo, and from 1938 to 1969 he was Sterling Professor of French at Yale University. Upon mandatory retirement at age 68 from Yale in 1969 to his retirement in 1980, he was Dist...

#17173

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.

#17174

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.

#17175

Mandy Simons

Mandy Simons is a linguist and professor in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University . She researches semantics and pragmatics, in particular phenomena like presupposition and projection.

#17176

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.

#17177

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 .

#17178

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.

#17179

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.

#17180

Pierre Chantraine

Pierre Chantraine

1899 - 1974 (75 years)

Pierre Louis Chantraine was a French linguist. He was born in Lille and died in Paris. A student of, among others, Antoine Meillet, Joseph Vendryes and Paul Mazon, Chantraine became one of the most renowned authorities on Ancient Greek philology of his generation. After teaching at the University of Lyon between 1925 and 1928, he became Directeur d'études de philologie grecque at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris, and also taught at the Sorbonne from 1938, continuing in both functions until his retirement in 1969. For the Collection des Universités de France, he edited and translated Xenophon and Arrian .

#17181

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Benjamin Lee Whorf

1897 - 1941 (44 years)

Benjamin Lee Whorf was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer who is famous for proposing the "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis." He believed that the structures of different languages shape how their speakers perceive and conceptualize the world. Whorf saw this idea, named after him and his mentor Edward Sapir, as having implications similar to Einstein's principle of physical relativity. However, the concept originated from 19th-century philosophy and thinkers like Wilhelm von Humboldt and Wilhelm Wundt.

#17182

Joshua Whatmough

1897 - 1964 (67 years)

Joshua Whatmough was an English linguist, professor, and writer from Rochdale, Lancashire who served as the president of the Linguistics Society of America in 1951. He was also the chairman of the department of linguistics at Harvard University from 1926 to his retirement in 1963. He studied comparative philology and classics at the University of Manchester and the University of Cambridge.

#17183

Vallabh Sambamurthy

Vallabh Sambamurthy is the Albert O. Nicholas Dean of the Wisconsin School of Business of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Education Vallabh Sambamurthy received his Bachelor of Engineering with honors in mechanical engineering from National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli in 1981. He received his Post Graduate Diploma in Management from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta in 1983 and Doctorate of Philosophy degree from Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota.

#17184

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.

#17185

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.

#17186

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...

#17187

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.

#17188

Morris Swadesh

1909 - 1967 (58 years)

Morris Swadesh was an American linguist who specialized in comparative and historical linguistics. Swadesh was born in Massachusetts to Bessarabian Jewish immigrant parents. He completed bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Chicago, studying under Edward Sapir, and then followed Sapir to Yale University where he completed a Ph.D. in 1933. Swadesh taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1937 to 1939, and then during World War II worked on projects with the United States Army and Office of Strategic Services. He became a professor at the City College of New York after the war's end, but was fired in 1949 due to his membership in the Communist Party.

#17189

Michel DeGraff

Michel Frederic DeGraff is a Haitian creolist who has served on the board of the Journal of Haitian Studies. He is a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy. His field of scholarship is Creole language, also known as Lang Kreyòl Linguistics. He is known for his advocacy towards the recognition of Haitian Creole as a full-fledged language. In the fall of 2012, he received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to introduce online Creole language materials in the teaching of STEM in Haiti. He believes th...

#17190

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, ...

#17191

Roland Grubb Kent

1877 - 1952 (75 years)

Roland Grubb Kent was an American educator and a founder of the Linguistic Society of America . He was the first person to translate Marcus Terentius Varro's De Lingua Latina into English. Ken's 1903 doctoral thesis on the history of Thessaly traces the history of the country with particular attention to the times between 600 and 300 BC. Unfortunately, only Chapter V and two appendices were published, and the bulk of his dissertation is currently lost. His Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon is one of the seminal works on the subject.

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