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,
#3401
Peter Smith
#84798
Overall Influence
Peter Smith is an American classical musician been associate principal oboe of the Philadelphia Orchestra since 1991. Education A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, Smith studied with Philadelphia Orchestra Principal Oboe Richard Woodhams; Smith has also studied with Louis Rosenblatt and Marc Lifschey.
Go to Profile#3402
Garrard McClendon
#46403
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Garrard McClendon is an American professor, writer, filmmaker, and the host of the PBS show CounterPoint with Garrard McClendon. He was the host of The McClendon Report and Garrard McClendon Live on CLTV, and earned the Emmy Award for his show Off 63rd with Garrard McClendon on WYCC.
Go to Profile#3403
Alicja Sakaguchi
#63743
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Alicja Sakaguchi is a linguist and university professor in the fields of Esperanto and interlinguistics. Biography Alicja Sakaguchi earned a master's degree after studying Hungarian and Esperantology at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest ; she completed her doctorate in 1982. From 1981 to 1985 she was a lecturer at the University of Paderborn, then from 1986 to 1998 at the Goethe University Frankfurt. She received her habilitation in 2000 after publishing a book on interlinguistics. From 2001 to 2002 she was assistant professor of modern languages at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań; s...
Go to Profile#3404
Walter Levin
#45191
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Walter Levin was the founder, first violinist, and guiding spirit of the LaSalle Quartet , which was known for its championing of contemporary composers, for its recordings of the Second Viennese School , as well as for its intellectually penetrating interpretations of the classical and romantic quartet repertory, in particular the late quartets of Beethoven. Levin was also an important pedagogue, having taught many of the world's leading string quartets, among them the Alban Berg Quartet and the Arditti Quartet; other prominent students include the conductor James Levine, the violinist Chris...
Go to Profile#3405
Yugo Nakamura
#42799
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
is a Japanese web designer. Yugo studied engineering, architecture and landscape design. He is one of the authors of New Masters Of Flash . Yugo has exhibited and lectured in Asia, United States, and Europe. His artwork has been shown at Centre Pompidou in Paris, Vienna Künstlerhaus in Vienna, and the Design Museum in London. His commercial works have received many international awards, including Cannes Lions, One Show, Clio Award, and NY ADC. He utilizes mathematics underlying natural complexity to create online interactions that are usable and familiar because their behavior is modeled on the natural world.
Go to Profile#3406
Liliane Haegeman
#98314
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Liliane Madeleine Victor Haegeman ARB is a Belgian professor of linguistics at Ghent University. She received her PhD in English linguistics in 1981 from Ghent University, and has written numerous books and journal articles thereafter. Haegeman is best known for her contributions to the English generative grammar, with her book Introduction to Government and Binding Theory well established as the most authoritative introduction on the Principles and Parameters approach of generative linguistics. She is also acknowledged for her contributions to syntactic cartography, including works on the left periphery of Germanic languages, negation and discourse particles, and adverbial clauses.
Go to Profile#3407
Charles E. Silberman
#33698
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Charles Eliot Silberman was an American journalist and author. Silberman was born in Des Moines, Iowa. After service in the Pacific during World War II, he gained a B.A. in Economics from Columbia University in 1946 and also undertook graduate studies at Columbia. Subsequently, he taught at Columbia and City College of New York before joining Fortune magazine in 1953 where he remained until the early 1970s.
Go to Profile#3408
Blair A. Rudes
#78471
Overall Influence
1951 - 2008 (57 years)
Blair Arnold Rudes was an American linguist and professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte best known for his expertise in Native American languages. He was hired in 2004 to reconstruct the long extinct Powhatan language for use in the film The New World.
Go to Profile#3409
Vivien Law
#62463
Overall Influence
1954 - 2002 (48 years)
Vivien Anne Law, Lady Shackleton, was a British linguist and academic, who specialised in grammar. Over her lifetime, she "acquired a grammatical knowledge of over a hundred languages". She spent all her academic career at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#3410
Cesare Segre
#21153
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Cesare Segre was an Italian philologist, semiotician and literary critic of Jewish descent, and the Director of the Texts and Textual Traditions Research Centre of the Institute for Advanced Studies of Pavia .
Go to Profile#3411
Dave Bartholomew
#54038
Overall Influence
1918 - 2019 (101 years)
David Louis Bartholomew was an American musician, bandleader, composer, arranger, and record producer. He was prominent in the music of New Orleans throughout the second half of the 20th century. Originally a trumpeter, he was active in many musical genres, including rhythm and blues, big band, swing music, rock and roll, New Orleans jazz, and Dixieland. In his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he was cited as a key figure in the transition from jump blues and swing to R&B and as "one of the Crescent City's greatest musicians and a true pioneer in the rock and roll revolution".
Go to Profile#3412
Jordi Savall
#71589
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Jordi Savall i Bernadet is a Spanish conductor, composer and viol player. He has been one of the major figures in the field of Western early music since the 1970s, largely responsible for popularizing the viol family of instruments in contemporary performance and recording. As a historian of early music his repertoire features everything from medieval, Renaissance and Baroque through to the Classical and Romantic periods. He has incorporated non-western musical traditions in his work; including African vernacular music for a documentary on slavery.
Go to Profile#3413
Ekkehard König
#88985
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Ekkehard König is a German linguist and Professor Emeritus at the Free University of Berlin, specializing in linguistic typology, semantics, and the linguistics of English. Education and career Ekkehard König was born in Jäschkittel in the Province of Lower Silesia and grew up in Bavaria. He studied general linguistics and modern languages at the University of Kiel , as well as the University of Newcastle and the University of Edinburgh . He was an assistant lecturer at the University of Reading in 1967–68. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Stuttgart in 1970, and comple...
Go to Profile#3414
David Beaver
#44602
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
David Ian Beaver is a professor of linguistics and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also directs the cognitive science program and serves as Graduate Studies Advisor of the Human Dimensions of Organizations Master's program. His work concerns the semantics and pragmatics of natural language, including, in particular, research on presupposition, anaphora, topic and focus.
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Harald Bjorvand
#81224
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Harald Bjorvand is a Norwegian linguist. He was born in Askim, and graduated from the University of Oslo in 1970. He was a research fellow at the same institution from 1972 to 1974, amanuensis from 1974 to 1987, associate professor from 1987 and professor from 1990. He took the dr.philos. degree in 1988 with the thesis Holt og Holtar. Om utviklingen av det indoeuropeiske kollektivum i norrønt på sammenlignende grunnlag.
Go to Profile#3416
Martha Cheung
#61345
Overall Influence
1953 - 2013 (60 years)
Martha Pui Yiu Cheung was a researcher and scholar in Translation Studies, Chair Professor in Translation and Director of the Centre for Translation at Hong Kong Baptist University. She is best known for the first volume of her Anthology on Chinese Discourse on Translation, published in 2006. She was working on the second volume of the anthology at the time of her death. Cheung was also noted for her works in translation theory, literary translation, and translation history.
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Chuck Mangione
#48989
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Charles Frank Mangione is an American flugelhorn player, trumpeter and composer. He came to prominence as a member of Art Blakey's band in the 1960s, and later co-led the Jazz Brothers with his brother, Gap. He achieved international success in 1978 with his jazz-pop single "Feels So Good". Mangione has released more than 30 albums since 1960.
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Brian Ferneyhough
#59303
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Brian John Peter Ferneyhough is an English composer. Ferneyhough is typically considered the central figure of the New Complexity movement. Ferneyhough has taught composition at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg and the University of California, San Diego; he teaches at Stanford University and is a regular lecturer in the summer courses at Darmstädter Ferienkurse. He has resided in California since 1987.
Go to Profile#3419
Colin Phillips
#41678
Overall Influence
Colin Phillips is a British psycholinguist who is the director of the Maryland Language Science Center at the University of Maryland. He is an elected fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also a co-editor of the Annual Review of Linguistics.
Go to Profile#3420
Ray Barretto
#64076
Overall Influence
1929 - 2006 (77 years)
Raymundo "Ray" Barretto Pagán was an American percussionist and bandleader of Puerto Rican descent. Throughout his career as a percussionist, he played a wide variety of Latin music styles, as well as Latin jazz. His first hit, "El Watusi", was recorded by his Charanga Moderna in 1962, becoming the most successful pachanga song in the United States. In the late 1960s, Barretto became one of the leading exponents of boogaloo and what would later be known as salsa. Nonetheless, many of Barretto's recordings would remain rooted in more traditional genres such as son cubano. A master of the descarga , Barretto was a long-time member of the Fania All-Stars.
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Damon Mayaffre
#63414
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Damon Mayaffre born in 1970 is a French academic, historian and linguist, specializing in the analysis of political discourse. He is the author of several books on contemporary French presidential speeches evaluated scientifically and statistically via software-supported analysis.
Go to Profile#3422
Lisa Gerrard
#60908
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Lisa Germaine Gerrard is an Australian musician, singer and composer who rose to prominence as part of the music group Dead Can Dance with music partner Brendan Perry. She is known for her unique singing style technique , influenced by her childhood spent in multicultural areas of Melbourne. She has a dramatic contralto voice and has a vocal range of three octaves.
Go to Profile#3423
Amos Gitai
#62280
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Amos Gitai is an Israeli filmmaker, who was trained as an architect. Gitai's work was presented in several major retrospectives in Pompidou Center in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center in New York, and the British Film Institute in London. To date, Amos Gitai has created over 90 works of art, including a wide variety of formats such as feature and short films, fiction and documentaries, experimental work, television productions, installations and theater works.
Go to Profile#3424
Charles W. J. Withers
#43127
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Charles William John Withers, is a British historical geographer and academic. He has been the Geographer Royal for Scotland since 2015, and held the Ogilvie Chair of Geography at the University of Edinburgh from 1994 to 2019.
Go to Profile#3425
Howard Johnson
#79663
Overall Influence
1941 - 2021 (80 years)
Howard Lewis Johnson was an American jazz musician, known mainly for his work on tuba and baritone saxophone, although he also played the bass clarinet, trumpet, and other reed instruments. He is known to have expanded the tuba’s known capacities in jazz.
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Maria Schneider
#77646
Overall Influence
1952 - 2011 (59 years)
Maria-Hélène Schneider , known professionally as Maria Schneider, was a French actress. In 1972, at the age of 19, she starred opposite Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, but being traumatised by a rape scene and hounded by unsavoury publicity negatively affected her subsequent career. Although Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger showcased her abilities, a reputation for walking out of films mid-production resulted in her becoming unwelcome in the industry. However, she re-established stability in her personal and professional life in the early 1980s, and became an advocate for equality and improving the conditions actresses worked under.
Go to Profile#3427
Quentin Crisp
#56013
Overall Influence
1908 - 1999 (91 years)
Quentin Crisp was an English raconteur, whose work in the public eye included a memoir of his life and various media appearances. Before becoming well known, he was an artist's model, hence the title of his most famous work, The Naked Civil Servant. He afterwards became a gay icon due to his flamboyant personality, fashion sense and wit. His iconic status was occasionally controversial due to his remarks about subjects like the AIDS crisis, inviting censure from gay activists including human-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.
Go to Profile#3428
Anita O'Day
#58824
Overall Influence
1919 - 2006 (87 years)
Anita Belle Colton , known professionally as Anita O'Day, was an American jazz singer and self proclaimed “song stylist” widely admired for her sense of rhythm and dynamics, and her early big band appearances that shattered the traditional image of the "girl singer". Refusing to pander to any female stereotype, O'Day presented herself as a "hip" jazz musician, wearing a band jacket and skirt as opposed to an evening gown. She changed her surname from Colton to O'Day, pig Latin for "dough", slang for money.
Go to Profile#3429
Erich Gruenberg
#56642
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Erich Gruenberg was an Austrian-born British violinist and teacher. Following studies in Israel, he was a principal violinist of major orchestras, including the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He was an international soloist, playing the first performance of Britten's Violin Concerto in Moscow. As a chamber musician, he was leader of the London String Quartet and recorded all Beethoven violin sonatas with pianist David Wilde. He was the lead violinist for The Beatles' album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Gr...
Go to Profile#3430
Jennifer Jenkins
#88457
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
#3431
Ann Reinking
#54429
Overall Influence
1949 - 2020 (71 years)
Ann Reinking was an American dancer, actress, choreographer, and singer. She worked predominantly in musical theater, starring in Broadway productions such as Coco , Over Here! , Goodtime Charley , Chicago , Dancin' , and Sweet Charity .
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Milt Jackson
#55336
Overall Influence
1923 - 1999 (76 years)
Milton Jackson , nicknamed "Bags", was an American jazz vibraphonist, usually thought of as a bebop player, although he performed in several jazz idioms. He is especially remembered for his cool swinging solos as a member of the Modern Jazz Quartet and his penchant for collaborating with hard bop and post-bop players.
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Robert Hill
#61615
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Robert Stephen Hill is an American harpsichordist and fortepianist. From 1990 to 2018 he was "Professor of Historical Keyboard Instruments, Performance Practice and Chamber Music" at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, Germany, and he now serves as the “Eugene D. Eaton Jr. Chair in Baroque Music Performance” and teaches harpsichord at the University of Colorado Boulder College of Music, in the United States.
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Safiya Noble
#17247
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Safiya Umoja Noble is a professor at UCLA, and is the co-founder and co-director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. She is the author of Algorithms of Oppression, and co-editor of two edited volumes: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture and Emotions, Technology & Design. She is a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. She was appointed a Commissioner to the University of Oxford Commission on AI and Good Governance in 2020. In 2020 she was nominated to the Global Future Council on Artificial Intelligence for Humanity ...
Go to Profile#3435
Renata Scotto
#66605
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Renata Scotto was an Italian soprano, opera director, and voice teacher. Recognised for her sense of style, her musicality, and as a remarkable singer-actress, Scotto is considered to have been one of the preeminent opera singers of her generation.
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Georges-Elia Sarfati
#53794
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Georges-Elia Sarfati is a philosopher, linguist, poet, and an existentialist psychoanalyst, author of written works in the domains of ethics, Jewish thought, social criticism, and discourse analysis. He has translated Viktor E. Frankl. He is the grand-nephew of the sociologist Gaston Bouthoul.
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Randy Weston
#65084
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Randolph Edward "Randy" Weston was an American jazz pianist and composer whose creativity was inspired by his ancestral African connection. Weston's piano style owed much to Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, whom he cited in a 2018 video as among pianists he counted as influences, as well as Count Basie, Nat King Cole and Earl Hines. Beginning in the 1950s, Weston worked often with trombonist and arranger Melba Liston.
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Fred Landman
#37618
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Fred Landman is a Dutch-born Israeli professor of semantics. He teaches at Tel Aviv University has written a number of books about linguistics. Biography Fred Landman was born in Holland. He immigrated to Israel in 1993. He was married to London-born linguist Susan Rothstein until her death in 2019. The couple had one daughter and resided in Tel Aviv.
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Jane McGonigal
#18884
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Jane McGonigal is an American author, game designer, and researcher. McGonigal is known for her game Jane the Concussion Slayer and her role as Director of Game Research and Development at Institute for the Future.
Go to Profile#3440
Charles Lynch
#64495
Overall Influence
1919 - 1994 (75 years)
Charles Burchill Lynch, was a Canadian journalist and author. Biography Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Canadian parents, he moved with his family to Saint John, New Brunswick when he was two weeks old. In 1936, he started his career in journalism with the Saint John Citizen and then moved on to the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, followed by the Canadian Press in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
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Mira Ariel
#82715
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Mira Ariel is a professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University, specializing in pragmatics. A pioneer of the study of information structure, she is best known for creating and developing Accessibility Theory.
Go to Profile#3442
Margaret O'Brien
#60987
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Angela Maxine O'Brien is an American film, radio, television, and stage actress, and is one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. Beginning a prolific career as a child actress in feature films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at age four, O'Brien became one of the most popular child stars in cinema history and was honored with a Juvenile Academy Award as the outstanding child actress of 1944. In her later career, she appeared on television, on stage, and in supporting film roles.
Go to Profile#3443
Sarafina Nance
#38749
Overall Influence
Sarafina El-Badry Nance is an Egyptian-American science communicator, astrophysicist and Ph.D. student in the Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on supernovae and their applications to cosmology. Nance is known for her use of social media, in particular Twitter, where she discusses astrophysics and activism. She is also an advocate for women's health and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
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Martin Orwin
#83960
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Martin Orwin is a British linguist, scholar and writer, specializing in the languages and cultures of the Horn of Africa. Biography Orwin studied Arabic and Amharic and has a PhD in the phonology of the Somali language. Since 1992, he has been a lecturer in Somali and Amharic at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England, where he teaches both Afro-Asiatic languages. Since 2020, he also teaches both Somali language and Somali literature at the Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale" . He has also published articles on Somali language and poetry and has conducted fie...
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Farshid Delshad
#64789
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Farshid Delshad is an affiliated researcher, scholar of linguistics and Iranian Studies. He was Lecturer of Persian and Comparative Linguistics at University of Freiburg and at University of Bern. Delshad's first PhD and academic thesis at Tbilisi State University in 2000 dealt with Comparative Linguistics and Caucasian Studies.
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Sam Brown
#60002
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Samantha Brown is an English singer, songwriter and musician. Brown is a blue-eyed soul and jazz singer, and ukulele and piano player. She came to prominence in the late 1980s as a solo artist and released six singles that entered the UK Singles Chart during the 1980s and 1990s. Her solo singles, sometimes dealing with lost love, include "Stop!", "This Feeling", "Can I Get a Witness", "Kissing Gate", "With a Little Love" and "Just Good Friends". She worked as a session backing vocalist, working with artists such as Gary Moore, George Harrison, Small Faces, Spandau Ballet, Adam Ant, Jon Lord ,...
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James Ford
#51981
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
James Ellis Ford is an English record producer and songwriter, known for being a member of Simian Mobile Disco and the Last Shadow Puppets as well as his production work with Arctic Monkeys, Blur, Depeche Mode, Foals, Florence and the Machine, Haim, Gorillaz, Klaxons, Jessie Ware, Kylie Minogue and the Pet Shop Boys.
Go to Profile#3448
Frankie Vaughan
#68186
Overall Influence
1928 - 1999 (71 years)
Frankie Vaughan was an English singer and actor who recorded more than 80 easy listening and traditional pop singles in his lifetime. He was known as "Mr. Moonlight" after his signature song "Give Me the Moonlight, Give Me the Girl". Two of Vaughan's singles topped the UK Singles Chart – "The Garden of Eden" and "Tower of Strength" . He starred in several films, including a role opposite Marilyn Monroe in Let's Make Love .
Go to Profile#3449
Igor Kaczurowskyj
#33433
Overall Influence
1918 - 2013 (95 years)
Ihor Kaczurowskyj was a Ukrainian poet, translator, novelist and short story writer, literary scholar, university lecturer, journalist. Life Ihor Kaczurowskyj was born on 1 September 1918 in Nizhyn in a family of graduated of the Kyiv University. His father practised law, afterwards specialized in economy as well, for some time the held the rank of a state secretary assistant in the Central Council of Ukraine .
Go to Profile#3450
Zoot Money
#65142
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
George Bruno Money is an English vocalist, keyboardist and bandleader. He is best known for his playing of the Hammond organ and association with his Big Roll Band. Inspired by Jerry Lee Lewis and Ray Charles, he was drawn to rock and roll music and became a leading light in the vibrant music scene of Bournemouth and Soho during the 1960s. He took his stage name 'Zoot' from Zoot Sims after seeing him in concert.
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