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,
#301
Winfred P. Lehmann
#8061
Overall Influence
1916 - 2007 (91 years)
Winfred Philip Lehmann was an American linguist who specialized in historical, Germanic, and Indo-European linguistics. He was for many years a professor and head of departments for linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, and served as president of both the Linguistic Society of America and the Modern Language Association. Lehmann was also a pioneer in machine translation. He lectured a large number of future scholars at Austin, and was the author of several influential works on linguistics.
Go to Profile#302
Geoffrey Nunberg
#7262
Overall Influence
1945 - 2020 (75 years)
Geoffrey Nunberg was an American lexical semantician and author. In 2001 he received the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistic Society of America for his contributions to National Public Radio's Fresh Air, and he has published a number of popular press books including Going Nucular: Language, Politics and Culture in Controversial Times . Nunberg is primarily known for his public-facing work interpreting linguistic science for lay audiences, though his contributions to linguistic theory are also well regarded.
Go to Profile#303
Thomas Sebeok
#4216
Overall Influence
1920 - 2001 (81 years)
Thomas Albert Sebeok was a Hungarian-born American polymath, semiotician, and linguist. As one of the founders of the biosemiotics field, he studied non-human and cross-species signaling and communication. He is also known for his work in the development of long-time nuclear waste warning messages, in which he worked with the Human Interference Task Force to create methods for keeping the inhabitants of Earth away from buried nuclear waste that will still be hazardous 10,000 or more years in the future.
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Jenny Holzer
#1987
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jenny Holzer is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick, New York. The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other structures, and illuminated electronic displays.
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John J. Gumperz
#3974
Overall Influence
1922 - 2013 (91 years)
John Joseph Gumperz was an American linguist and academic. Gumperz was, for most of his career, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His research on the languages of India, on code-switching in Norway, and on conversational interaction, has benefitted the study of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, and urban anthropology.
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James D. McCawley
#9507
Overall Influence
1938 - 1999 (61 years)
James David McCawley was a Scottish-American linguist. Biography McCawley was born James Quillan McCawley, Jr. to Dr. Monica Bateman McCawley , a physician and surgeon, and James Quillan McCawley , a businessman. In 1939 his father and two brothers moved to Toronto and founded a roofing company, but his mother remained in Glasgow with the children until after World War II. James Sr. moved to New York City and finally Chicago, where the family joined him. It was on his arrival in America that young McCawley changed his name to James David McCawley, dropping the "Junior."
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Stanley Kubrick
#3236
Overall Influence
1928 - 1999 (71 years)
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, producer, screenwriter and photographer. Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, his films—nearly all of which are adaptations of novels or short stories—span a number of genres and are known for their intense attention to detail, innovative cinematography, extensive set design and dark humor.
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André Leon Talley
#5108
Overall Influence
1948 - 2022 (74 years)
André Leon Talley was an American fashion journalist, stylist, creative director, and editor-at-large of Vogue magazine. He was the magazine's fashion news director from 1983 to 1987, its first African-American male creative director from 1988 to 1995, and then its editor-at-large from 1998 to 2013. Often regarded as a fashion icon, he was known for supporting emerging designers and advocating for diversity in the fashion industry; while the capes, kaftans, and robes he wore became his trademark look. Talley also served on the judging panel for America's Next Top Model .
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Cokie Roberts
#3362
Overall Influence
1943 - 2019 (76 years)
Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne "Cokie" Roberts was an American journalist and author. Her career included decades as a political reporter and analyst for National Public Radio, PBS, and ABC News, with prominent positions on Morning Edition, The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, World News Tonight, and This Week. She was considered one of NPR's "Founding Mothers" along with Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer and Nina Totenberg.
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Shaban Demiraj
#10356
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
Shaban Demiraj was an Albanian albanologist, linguist, professor at the University of Tirana from 1972–1990, and chairman of the Academy of Sciences of Albania during the period of 1993-1997. Life Demiraj was born on 1 January 1920 in Vlorë. Despite financial difficulties and the lack of academic institutions in Albania, he managed to study and learn Latin, ancient Greek, and the major European languages. After finishing the Madrasa in Tirana in 1939, he studied Albanian language in the two-year curriculum Pedagogical Institute, branch of Albanian language and literature , and later in the High Pedagogical Institute .
Go to Profile#311
Hermann Zapf
#2929
Overall Influence
1918 - 2015 (97 years)
Hermann Zapf was a German type designer and calligrapher who lived in Darmstadt, Germany. He was married to the calligrapher and typeface designer Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse. Typefaces he designed include Palatino, Optima, and Zapfino. He is considered one of the greatest type designers of all time.
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Russell Kirk
#1284
Overall Influence
1918 - 1994 (76 years)
Russell Amos Kirk was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, and literary critic, known for his influence on 20th-century American conservatism. His 1953 book The Conservative Mind gave shape to the postwar conservative movement in the U.S. It traced the development of conservative thought in the Anglo-American tradition, giving special importance to the ideas of Edmund Burke. Kirk was considered the chief proponent of traditionalist conservatism. He was also an accomplished author of Gothic and ghost story fiction. He is often considered one of the most signific...
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A. K. Ramanujan
#5766
Overall Influence
1929 - 1993 (64 years)
Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan was an Indian poet and scholar of Indian literature and linguistics. Ramanujan was also a professor of Linguistics at University of Chicago. Ramanujan was a poet, scholar, linguist, philologist, folklorist, translator, and playwright. His academic research ranged across five languages: English, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Sanskrit. He published works on both classical and modern variants of this literature and argued strongly for giving local, non-standard dialects their due. Though he wrote widely and in a number of genres, Ramanujan's poems are remembered as enigmatic works of startling originality, sophistication and moving artistry.
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Miles Davis
#3441
Overall Influence
1929 - 1991 (62 years)
Miles Dewey Davis III was an American jazz musician, trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. Davis adopted a variety of musical directions in a roughly five-decade career that kept him at the forefront of many major stylistic developments in jazz.
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Megyn Kelly
#2354
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Megyn Marie Kelly is an American journalist and media personality. She currently hosts a talk show and podcast, The Megyn Kelly Show, that airs live daily on SiriusXM. She was a talk show host at Fox News from 2004 to 2017 and a host and correspondent with NBC News from 2017 to 2018. She is also active in posting to her Instagram page and YouTube channel.
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Javed Akhtar
#1463
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Javed Akhtar is an Indian screenwriter, lyricist and poet. Known for his work in Hindi cinema, he has won five National Film Awards, and received the Padma Shri in 1999 and the Padma Bhushan in 2007, two of India's highest civilian honours.
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Alexander Cockburn
#2737
Overall Influence
1941 - 2012 (71 years)
Alexander Claud Cockburn was a Scottish-born Irish-American political journalist and writer. Cockburn was brought up by British parents in Ireland, but lived and worked in the United States from 1972. Together with Jeffrey St. Clair, he edited the political newsletter CounterPunch. Cockburn also wrote the "Beat the Devil" column for The Nation, and another column for The Week in London, syndicated by Creators Syndicate.
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Barbara Partee
#8574
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Barbara Hall Partee is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst . Biography Born in Englewood, New Jersey, Partee grew up in the Baltimore area. She is the younger sister of professional baseball player Dick Hall. She attended Swarthmore College, where she majored in mathematics with minors in Russian and philosophy. She did her graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Noam Chomsky. Her 1965 PhD dissertation from MIT was entitled Subject and Object in Modern English.
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Nicholas Kristof
#1387
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Nicholas Donabet Kristof is an American journalist and political commentator. A winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, he is a regular CNN contributor and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. Born in Chicago, Kristof was raised in Yamhill, Oregon, the son of two professors at nearby Portland State University. After graduating from Harvard University, where he wrote for The Harvard Crimson, Kristof intermittently interned at The Oregonian. He joined the staff of The New York Times in 1984.
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Sydney Lamb
#9360
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Sydney MacDonald Lamb is an American linguist and professor at Rice University, whose stratificational grammar is a significant alternative theory to Chomsky's transformational grammar. He has specialized in Neurocognitive Linguistics and a stratificational approach to language understanding.
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Robert Caro
#1006
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Robert Allan Caro is an American journalist and author known for his biographies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson. After working for many years as a reporter, Caro wrote The Power Broker , a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses, which was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. He has since written four of a planned five volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson , a biography of the former president. Caro has been described as "the most influential biographer of the last century".
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Wolf Leslau
#9503
Overall Influence
1906 - 2006 (100 years)
Wolf Leslau was a scholar of Semitic languages and one of the foremost authorities on Semitic languages of Ethiopia. Youth and education Leslau was born in Krzepice, a small town near Częstochowa, Poland. When he was a child his family was very poor, and after contracting tuberculosis he usually had to keep a thermometer with him to monitor his body temperature, although the reasons for this are unknown. He was orphaned by the age of 10, and was raised by his brother, and received a yeshiva education.
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Jack Williamson
#1913
Overall Influence
1908 - 2006 (98 years)
John Stewart Williamson , who wrote as Jack Williamson, was an American science fiction writer, one of several called the "Dean of Science Fiction". He is also credited with one of the first uses of the term genetic engineering. Early in his career he sometimes used the pseudonyms Will Stewart and Nils O. Sonderlund.
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Anne Applebaum
#1636
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum is an American and naturalized-Polish journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe.
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Braj Kachru
#8857
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Braj Bihari Kachru was an Indian-American linguist. He was Jubilee Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He published studies on the Kashmiri language. Personal life Braj Bihari Kachru was a friend of Kashmiri poet and writer Zinda Kaul Masterji. Lala Sahab and his friends and colleagues had discussions on politics, literature and philosophy at his house. During their visits, Braj had the opportunity to interact with Masterji and his father's other teacher colleagues.
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Jeff Jarvis
#6919
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Jeff Jarvis is an American journalist, associate professor, public speaker and former television critic. He advocates the Open Web and argues that there are many social and personal benefits to living a more public life on the Internet.
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John McHardy Sinclair
#14399
Overall Influence
1933 - 2007 (74 years)
John McHardy Sinclair was a Professor of Modern English Language at Birmingham University from 1965 to 2000. He pioneered work in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, lexicography, and language teaching.
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Frank Auerbach
#5294
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Frank Helmut Auerbach is a German-British painter. Born in Germany, he has been a naturalised British subject since 1947. He is considered one of the leading names in the School of London, with fellow artists Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.
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Mark Liberman
#4931
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Mark Yoffe Liberman is an American linguist. He has a dual appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, as Trustee Professor of Phonetics in the Department of Linguistics, and as a professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. He is the founder and director of the Linguistic Data Consortium. Liberman is the Faculty Director of Ware College House at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Robert J. Sawyer
#3031
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Robert James Sawyer is a Canadian and American science fiction writer. He has had 24 novels published and his short fiction has appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Amazing Stories, On Spec, Nature, and numerous anthologies. He has won many writing awards, including the best-novel Nebula Award , the best-novel Hugo Award , the John W. Campbell Memorial Award , the Robert A. Heinlein Award , and more Aurora Awards than anyone else in history.
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John Humphrys
#7096
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Desmond John Humphrys is a Welsh broadcaster. From 1981 to 1987 he was the main presenter of the Nine O'Clock News, the flagship BBC News television programme, and from 1987 until 2019 he presented on the BBC Radio 4 breakfast programme Today. He was the host of the BBC Two television quiz show Mastermind from 2003 to 2021, for a total of 735 episodes. Humphrys now presents a regular Sunday afternoon show on Classic FM, where he also sometimes fills in on the weekday More Music Breakfast show.
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Anthony Lewis
#3707
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Joseph Anthony Lewis was an American public intellectual and journalist. He was a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and was a columnist for The New York Times. He is credited with creating the field of legal journalism in the United States.
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Natalia Shvedova
#12559
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Natalia Yulievna Shvedova was a Soviet lexicographer who authored several standard outlines of Russian grammar, for which she was awarded the USSR State Prize in 1982. Yuly Aikhenvald's daughter and Viktor Vinogradov's favourite disciple, Shvedova was elected into the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1997. After Sergei Ozhegov's death in 1964, Shvedova was responsible for updating and correcting his immensely popular explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. Among her later projects was the first semantic dictionary of the language .
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Lawrence Venuti
#6826
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Lawrence Venuti is an American translation theorist, translation historian, and a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan. Career Born in Philadelphia, Venuti graduated from Temple University. In 1980 he completed a Ph.D. in English at Columbia University, where he studied with historically oriented literary scholars such as Joseph Mazzeo and Edward Tayler as well as theoretically engaged cultural and social critics such as Edward Said and Sylvere Lotringer. That year he received the Renato Poggioli Award for Italian Translation for his translation of Barbara Alberti's novel Delirium.
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Larry Trask
#10434
Overall Influence
1944 - 2004 (60 years)
Robert Lawrence Trask was an American-British professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex, and an authority on the Basque language and the field of historical linguistics. Biography Born in Olean, New York, he initially studied chemistry in his home country, but after a brief stint in the Peace Corps he took an interest in linguistics. He received his doctorate in linguistics from the University of London, and thereafter taught at various universities in the United Kingdom. He became a professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex.
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S.-Y. Kuroda
#9326
Overall Influence
1934 - 2009 (75 years)
Sige-Yuki Kuroda, also known as S.-Y. Kuroda, was Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. Although a pioneer in the application of Chomskyan generative syntax to the Japanese language, he is known for the broad range of his work across the language sciences. For instance, in formal language theory, the Kuroda normal form for context-sensitive grammars bears his name.
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Malcolm Garrett
#8006
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Malcolm Leslie Garrett is a British graphic designer, and Creative Director of Images&Co, a communications design consultancy based in London, UK. He is Ambassador for Manchester School of Art and co-founder of the annual Design Manchester festival, which has run since 2013.
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Shana Poplack
#13649
Overall Influence
Shana Poplack, is a Distinguished University Professor in the linguistics department of the University of Ottawa and three time holder of the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics. She is a leading proponent of variation theory, the approach to language science pioneered by William Labov. She has extended the methodology and theory of this field into bilingual speech patterns, the prescription-praxis dialectic in the co-evolution of standard and non-standard languages, and the comparative reconstruction of ancestral speech varieties, including African American vernacular English. She founded ...
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Twyla Tharp
#3423
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Twyla Tharp is an American dancer, choreographer, and author who lives and works in New York City. In 1966 she formed the company Twyla Tharp Dance. Her work often uses classical music, jazz, and contemporary pop music.
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Emanuel Schegloff
#4630
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Emanuel Abraham Schegloff is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. Along with his collaborators Harvey Sacks and Gail Jefferson, Schegloff is regarded as the creator of the field of Conversation Analysis.
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Poul Anderson
#2639
Overall Influence
1926 - 2001 (75 years)
Poul William Anderson was an American fantasy and science fiction author who was active from the 1940s until his death in 2001. Anderson also wrote historical novels. His awards include seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards.
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Jon Krakauer
#987
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Jon Krakauer is an American writer and mountaineer. He is the author of bestselling non-fiction books—Into the Wild; Into Thin Air; Under the Banner of Heaven; and Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman—as well as numerous magazine articles. He was a member of an ill-fated expedition to summit Mount Everest in 1996, one of the deadliest disasters in the history of climbing Everest.
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Richard Perry
#2871
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Richard Van Perry is an American record producer. He began as a performer in his adolescence while attending Poly Prep, his high school in Brooklyn. After graduating from college he rose through the late 1960s and early 1970s to become a successful and popular record producer with more than 12 gold records to his credit by 1982. From 1978 to 1983, he ran his own record label, Planet Records, which scored a string of hits with the main act on its roster, pop/R&B group The Pointer Sisters. After Planet's sale to RCA Records, Perry continued his work in the music industry as an independent producer.
Go to Profile#344
Nicholas Lemann
#2928
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Nicholas Berthelot Lemann is an American writer and academic, and is the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. Lemann was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.
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Irving Kristol
#964
Overall Influence
1920 - 2009 (89 years)
Irving Kristol was an American journalist who was dubbed the "godfather of neoconservatism". As a founder, editor, and contributor to various magazines, he played an influential role in the intellectual and political culture of the latter half of the twentieth century. After his death, he was described by The Daily Telegraph as being "perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the century".
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Henry Kučera
#10982
Overall Influence
1925 - 2010 (85 years)
Henry Kučera , born Jindřich Kučera , was a Czech-American linguist who pioneered corpus linguistics, linguistic software, a major contributor to the American Heritage Dictionary, and a pioneer in the development of spell checking computer software. He is remembered in particular as one of the initiators of the Brown Corpus.
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Meryl Streep
#3481
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep is an American actress. Often described as "the best actress of her generation", Streep is particularly known for her versatility and accent adaptability. She has received numerous accolades throughout her career spanning over four decades, including a record 21 Academy Award nominations, winning three, and a record 32 Golden Globe Award nominations, winning eight.
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Ken Tucker
#2049
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Kenneth Tucker is an American arts, music and television critic, magazine editor, and non-fiction book writer. Early life and education Tucker was born in Manhattan, New York City, New York, and raised in Stamford, Connecticut. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from New York University.
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Vaughan Oliver
#8858
Overall Influence
1957 - 2019 (62 years)
Vaughan Oliver was a British graphic designer based in Epsom, Surrey. Oliver was best known for his work with graphic design studios 23 Envelope and v23. Both studios maintained a close relationship with record label 4AD between 1982 and 1998 and gave distinct visual identities for the 4AD releases by many bands, including Mojave 3, Lush, Cocteau Twins, The Breeders, This Mortal Coil, Pale Saints, Pixies, and Throwing Muses. Oliver also designed record sleeves for such artists as David Sylvian, The Golden Palominos, and Bush.
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Ivor Cutler
#9906
Overall Influence
1923 - 2006 (83 years)
Ivor Cutler was a Scottish poet, singer, musician, songwriter, artist and humorist. He became known for his regular performances on BBC radio, and in particular his numerous sessions recorded for John Peel's influential eponymous late night radio programme , and later for Andy Kershaw's programme. He appeared in the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour film in 1967 and on Neil Innes' television programmes. Cutler also wrote books for children and adults and was a teacher at A. S. Neill's Summerhill School and for 30 years in inner-city schools in London.
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