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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#201
Merritt Ruhlen
#7212
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Merritt Ruhlen was an American linguist who worked on the classification of languages and what this reveals about the origin and evolution of modern humans. Amongst other linguists, Ruhlen's work was recognized as standing outside the mainstream of comparative-historical linguistics. He was the principal advocate and defender of Joseph Greenberg's approach to language classification.
Go to Profile#202
Lloyd Bitzer
#6596
Overall Influence
1931 - 2016 (85 years)
Lloyd Bitzer was an American rhetorician. In 1962, Lloyd Bitzer received his doctorate from the University of Iowa. He held the title of Associate Professor of speech at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the early 1960s. He continued to be a professor at the institution in the school of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture until 1994, when he retired. Bitzer was involved with many organizations including the National Communication Association and the National Development Project in Rhetoric. In 1968, Bitzer published his famous theory of situational rhetoric.
Go to Profile#203
Ives Goddard
#7302
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robert Hale Ives Goddard III is a linguist and a curator emeritus in the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. He is widely considered the leading expert on the Algonquian languages and the larger Algic language family.
Go to Profile#204
Jake Tapper
#1674
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Jacob Paul Tapper is an American journalist, author, and cartoonist. He is the lead Washington anchor for CNN, hosts the weekday television news show The Lead with Jake Tapper, and co-hosts the Sunday morning public affairs program State of the Union.
Go to Profile#205
Larry Selinker
#9154
Overall Influence
Larry Selinker is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Michigan and former director of the university's English Language Institute. In 1972, Selinker introduced the concept of interlanguage, which built upon Pit Corder's previous work on the nature of language learners' errors. Corder's and Selinker's work became the foundation of modern research into second-language acquisition, and interlanguage is accepted as a basic principle of the discipline.
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Jon Pareles
#341
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Jon Pareles is an American journalist who is the chief popular music critic in the arts section of The New York Times. Early life and education Pareles was born in Connecticut. He played jazz flute and piano, and graduated from Yale University with a degree in music. He began working as a music critic in 1977.
Go to Profile#207
Victor Raskin
#4911
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Victor Raskin is a distinguished professor of linguistics at Purdue University. He is the author of Semantic Mechanisms of Humor and Ontological Semantics and founding editor of Humor, the journal for the International Society for Humor Studies.
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Ruth Wodak
#7362
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Ruth Wodak is an Austrian linguist, who is Emeritus Distinguished Professor and Chair in Discourse Studies in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University and Professor in Linguistics at the University of Vienna.
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Mary Haas
#8861
Overall Influence
1910 - 1996 (86 years)
Mary Rosamond Haas was an American linguist who specialized in North American Indian languages, Thai, and historical linguistics. She served as president of the Linguistic Society of America. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Roberto Matta
#2745
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren , better known as Roberto Matta, was one of Chile's best-known painterss and a seminal figure in 20th century abstract expressionist and surrealist art across the Americas and Europe.
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Sebastian Faulks
#2855
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Sebastian Charles Faulks is a British novelist, journalist and broadcaster. He is best known for his historical novels set in France – The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. He has also published novels with a contemporary setting, most recently A Week in December and Paris Echo, and a James Bond continuation novel, Devil May Care , as well as a continuation of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves series, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells . He was a team captain on BBC Radio 4 literary quiz The Write Stuff.
Go to Profile#212
Maureen Dowd
#1841
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Maureen Brigid Dowd is an American columnist for The New York Times and an author. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Dowd worked for The Washington Star and Time, writing news, sports and feature articles. She joined The New York Times in 1983 as a metropolitan reporter, and became an op-ed writer in 1995.
Go to Profile#213
Robert Christgau
#1000
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Robert Thomas Christgau is an American music journalist and essayist. Among the most well-known and influential music critics, he began his career in the late 1960s as one of the earliest professional rock critics and later became an early proponent of musical movements such as hip hop, riot grrrl, and the import of African popular music in the West. Christgau spent 37 years as the chief music critic and senior editor for The Village Voice, during which time he created and oversaw the annual Pazz & Jop critics poll. He has also covered popular music for Esquire, Creem, Newsday, Playboy, Rolli...
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Ezra Klein
#2075
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Ezra Klein is an American progressive journalist, political analyst, New York Times columnist, and the host of The Ezra Klein Show podcast. He is a co-founder of Vox and formerly served as the website's editor-at-large. He has held editorial positions at The Washington Post and The American Prospect, and was a regular contributor to Bloomberg News and MSNBC. His first book, Why We're Polarized, was published by Simon & Schuster in January 2020.
Go to Profile#215
William Hanna
#1349
Overall Influence
1910 - 2001 (91 years)
William Denby Hanna was an American animator, cartoonist and occasional musician who was the creator of Tom and Jerry as well as the voice actor for the two titular characters. Alongside Joseph Barbera, he also founded the animation studio and production company Hanna-Barbera.
Go to Profile#216
Arthur Scargill
#1391
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Arthur Scargill is a British trade unionist who was President of the National Union of Mineworkers from 1982 to 2002. He is best known for leading the UK miners' strike , a major event in the history of the British labour movement.
Go to Profile#217
David Remnick
#2796
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
David J. Remnick is an American journalist, writer, and editor. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, and is also the author of Resurrection and King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero. Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker magazine since 1998. He was named "Editor of the Year" by Advertising Age in 2000. Before joining The New Yorker, Remnick was a reporter and the Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. He also has served on the New York Public Library board of trustees and is a member of the American Philosophical Society.
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Frederik Kortlandt
#8012
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Frederik Herman Henri Kortlandt is a Dutch former professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He writes on Baltic and Slavic languages, the Indo-European languages in general, and Proto-Indo-European, though he has also published studies of languages in other language families. He has also studied ways to associate language families into super-groups such as controversial Indo-Uralic.
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Adam Hochschild
#2900
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Adam Hochschild is an American author, journalist, historian and lecturer. His best-known works include King Leopold's Ghost , To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 , Bury the Chains , The Mirror at Midnight , The Unquiet Ghost , and Spain in Our Hearts . American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis .
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Ruqaiya Hasan
#7968
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Ruqaiya Hasan was a professor of linguistics who held visiting positions and taught at various universities in England. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University in Sydney, from which she retired as emeritus professor in 1994. Throughout her career she researched and published widely in the areas of verbal art, culture, context and text, text and texture, lexicogrammar and semantic variation. The latter involved the devising of extensive semantic system networks for the analysis of meaning in naturally occurring dialogues.
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Roy Greenslade
#4293
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Roy Greenslade is a British author and freelance journalist, and a former professor of journalism. He worked in the UK newspaper industry from the 1960s onwards. As a media commentator, he wrote a daily blog from 2006 to 2018 for The Guardian and a column for London's Evening Standard from 2006 to 2016. Under a pseudonym, Greenslade also wrote for the Sinn Féin newspaper An Phoblacht during the late 1980s whilst also working on Fleet Street. In 2021, it was reported in The Times newspaper, citing an article by Greenslade in the British Journalism Review, that he supported the bombing campaign of the Provisional IRA.
Go to Profile#222
Charles A. Ferguson
#6924
Overall Influence
1921 - 1998 (77 years)
Charles Albert Ferguson was an American linguist who taught at Stanford University. He was one of the founders of sociolinguistics and is best known for his work on diglossia. The TOEFL test was created under his leadership at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC. Ferguson was also the leader of a team of linguists in Ethiopia under the Ford Foundation's Survey of Language Use and Language Teaching. One of the many publications that came out of this was his article proposing the Ethiopian Language Area , an article that has become widely cited and an important milestone in th...
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Alexandra Aikhenvald
#10871
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Alexandra Yurievna "Sasha" Aikhenvald is an Australian-Brazilian linguist specialising in linguistic typology and the Arawak language family of the Brazilian Amazon basin. She is a professor at the James Cook University.
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Chris Hedges
#1038
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Christopher Lynn Hedges is an American journalist, author, commentator and Presbyterian minister. In his early career, Hedges worked as a freelance war correspondent in Central America for The Christian Science Monitor, NPR, and Dallas Morning News. Hedges reported for The New York Times from 1990 to 2005, and served as the Times Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. In 2001, Hedges contributed to The New York Times staff entry that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism.
Go to Profile#225
Pamela Munro
#10381
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Pamela Munro is an American linguist who specializes in Native American languages. She is a distinguished research professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she has held a position since 1974.
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Pierre Assouline
#7289
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Pierre Assouline is a French writer and journalist. He was born in Casablanca, Morocco to a Jewish family. He has published several novels and biographies, and also contributes articles for the print media and broadcasts for radio.
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Louis Theroux
#1746
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Louis Sebastian Theroux is a British-American documentarian, journalist, broadcaster, and author. He has received three British Academy Television Awards and a Royal Television Society Television Award.
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Kurt Loder
#1827
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Kurt Loder is an American entertainment critic, author, columnist, and television personality. He served in the 1980s as editor at Rolling Stone, during a tenure that Reason later called "legendary". He has contributed to articles in Reason, Esquire, Details, New York, and Time. He has also made cameos on several films and television series. He is best known for his role at MTV News since the 1980s and for appearing in other MTV-related television specials. He has hosted the SiriusXM radio show True Stories since 2016.
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Michael Lewis
#753
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Michael Monroe Lewis is an American author and financial journalist. He has also been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2009, writing mostly on business, finance, and economics. He is known for his nonfiction work, particularly his coverage of financial crises and behavioral finance.
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Nam June Paik
#1488
Overall Influence
1932 - 2006 (74 years)
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use of the term "electronic super highway" to describe the future of telecommunications.
Go to Profile#231
Joe Sacco
#6000
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Joe Sacco is a Maltese-American cartoonist and journalist. He is best known for his comics journalism, in particular in the books Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza , on Israeli–Palestinian relations; and Safe Area Goražde and The Fixer on the Bosnian War. In 2020, Sacco released , published by Henry Holt and Company.
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Matt Taibbi
#1030
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Matthew Colin Taibbi is an American author, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports. A former contributing editor for Rolling Stone, he is the author of several books, co-host of Useful Idiots, and publisher of the Racket News on Substack.
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Keren Rice
#9253
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Keren D. Rice is a Canadian linguist. She is a professor of linguistics and serves as the Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives at the University of Toronto. Education and career Rice earned her PhD in 1976 from the University of Toronto, with a dissertation entitled, "Hare phonology."
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Robert M. W. Dixon
#10012
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Robert Malcolm Ward "Bob" Dixon is a Professor of Linguistics in the College of Arts, Society, and Education and The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Queensland. He is also Deputy Director of The Language and Culture Research Centre at JCU. Doctor of Letters , he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters Honoris Causa by JCU in 2018. Fellow of British Academy; Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America, he is one of three living linguists to be specifically mentioned in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics by Pe...
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Lina Wertmüller
#5577
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller , known as Lina Wertmüller , was an Italian film director and screenwriter. She is best known for her 1970s art house films Seven Beauties , The Seduction of Mimi, Love and Anarchy, and Swept Away.
Go to Profile#236
Joshua Fishman
#6569
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Joshua Fishman was an American linguist who specialized in the sociology of language, language planning, bilingual education, and language and ethnicity. Early life and education Joshua Fishman was born and raised in Philadelphia. His sister was the poet Rukhl Fishman. He attended public schools while also studying Yiddish at elementary and secondary levels. As he grew up, his father would ask his children at the dinner table, "What did you do for Yiddish today?" He studied Yiddish in Workmen's Circle Schools, which emphasized mastery of the Yiddish language along with a focus on literature, history, and social issues.
Go to Profile#237
Stevie Wonder
#1126
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Stevland Hardaway Morris , known professionally as Stevie Wonder, is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and record producer. He is credited as a pioneer and influence by musicians across a range of genres that include R&B, pop, soul, gospel, funk, and jazz. A virtual one-man band, Wonder's use of synthesizers and other electronic musical instruments during the 1970s reshaped the conventions of contemporary R&B. He also helped drive such genres into the album era, crafting his LPs as cohesive and consistent, in addition to socially conscious statements with complex compositions. Blind sin...
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Gunther Kress
#10251
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
Gunther Rolf Kress MBE was a linguist and semiotician. He is considered one of the leading theorists in critical discourse analysis, social semiotics and multimodality, particularly in relation to their educational implications. Kress has been described as "one of the leading academics of the early 21st century".
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John Neumeier
#6609
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
John Neumeier is an American ballet dancer, choreographer, and director. He has been the director and chief choreographer of Hamburg Ballet since 1973. Five years later he founded the Hamburg Ballet School, which also includes a boarding school for students. In 1996, Neumeier was made ballet director of Hamburg State Opera.
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Doug Morris
#2438
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Doug Morris is an American record executive. He is the current chairman of 12Tone Music Group. He previously served as chairman and CEO of the Universal Music Group from 1995 to 2011 and Sony Music Entertainment from 2011 to 2017.
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Amos Oz
#1658
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Amos Oz was an Israeli writer, novelist, journalist, and intellectual. He was also a professor of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. From 1967 onwards, Oz was a prominent advocate of a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
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Harlan Lane
#7744
Overall Influence
1936 - 2019 (83 years)
Harlan Lawson Lane was an American psychologist. Lane was the Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States, and founder of the Center for Research in Hearing, Speech, and Language . His research was focused on speech, Deaf culture, and sign language.
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John Seigenthaler
#2683
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
John Lawrence Seigenthaler was an American journalist, writer, and political figure. He was known as a prominent defender of First Amendment rights. Seigenthaler joined the Nashville newspaper The Tennessean in 1949, resigning in 1960 to act as Robert F. Kennedy's administrative assistant. He rejoined The Tennessean as editor in 1962, publisher in 1973, and chairman in 1982 before retiring as chairman emeritus in 1991. Seigenthaler was also the founding editorial director of USA Today from 1982 to 1991. During this period, he served on the board of directors for the American Society of Newspa...
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Michael Hofmann
#4664
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet, translator, and critic. The Guardian has described him as "arguably the world's most influential translator of German into English". Biography Hofmann was born in Freiburg into a family with a literary tradition. His father was the German novelist Gert Hofmann. His maternal grandfather edited the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie. Hofmann's family first moved to Bristol in 1961, and later to Edinburgh. He was educated at Winchester College, and then studied English Literature and Classics at Magdalene College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in 1979. For the next ...
Go to Profile#245
Henriette Walter
#12319
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Henriette Walter is a French linguist, emeritus professor of French at the University of Rennes 2, and director of the Phonology Laboratory at the École pratique des hautes études at the Sorbonne. She is known for both her specialized academic work and her popular linguistics publications.
Go to Profile#246
Terrence Kaufman
#7317
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
Terrence Kaufman was an American linguist specializing in documentation of unwritten languages, lexicography, Mesoamerican historical linguistics and language contact phenomena. He was an emeritus professor of linguistics and anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh.
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Rod Ellis
#10956
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Rod Ellis is a Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize-winning British linguist. He is currently a research professor in the School of Education, at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is also a professor at Anaheim University, where he serves as the Vice president of academic affairs. Ellis is a visiting professor at Shanghai International Studies University as part of China’s Chang Jiang Scholars Program and an emeritus professor of the University of Auckland. He has also been elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Go to Profile#248
Eric Sevareid
#4211
Overall Influence
1912 - 1992 (80 years)
Arnold Eric Sevareid was an American author and CBS news journalist from 1939 to 1977. He was one of a group of elite war correspondents who were hired by CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow and nicknamed "Murrow's Boys." Sevareid was the first to report the Fall of Paris in 1940, when the city was captured by German forces during World War II.
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Friz Freleng
#2306
Overall Influence
1906 - 1995 (89 years)
Isadore "Friz" Freleng , credited as I. Freleng early in his career, was an American animator, cartoonist, director, producer, and composer known for his work at Warner Bros. Cartoons on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. In total he created more than 300 cartoons.
Go to Profile#250
Tommy Mottola
#630
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Thomas Daniel Mottola is an American record executive. Mottola is currently the Chairman of Mottola Media Group and was previously the Chairman and CEO of Sony Music Entertainment, parent of the Columbia label, for nearly 15 years. Since 2000, he has been married to Mexican actress and singer Thalía.
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