Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Communications,

#3801

Lamberto Bava

#66132

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Lamberto Bava is an Italian film director. Born in Rome, Bava began working as an assistant director for his director father Mario Bava. Lamberto co-directed the 1979 television film La Venere d'Ille with his father and in 1980 directed his first solo feature film Macabre.

#3802

Robert Ashley

#61206

Overall Influence

1930 - 2014 (84 years)

Robert Reynolds Ashley was an American composer, who was best known for his television operas and other theatrical works, many of which incorporate electronics and extended techniques. His works often involve intertwining narratives and take a surreal multidisciplinary approach to sound, theatrics and writing, and have been continuously performed by various interpreters during and after his life, including Automatic Writing and Perfect Lives .

#3803

Teun. A. Van Dijk

#106702

Overall Influence

#3804

Boyd Rice

#52209

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Boyd Blake Rice is an American composer, performance artist, author and painter. A pioneer of industrial music, Rice was one of the first artists to use a sampler, as well as the second, after John Cage, to use a turntable as an instrument.

#3805

Rafael Kubelík

#70508

Overall Influence

1914 - 1996 (82 years)

Rafael Jeroným Kubelík, KBE was a Czech conductor and composer. The son of a distinguished violinist, Jan Kubelík, he was trained in Prague and made his debut with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra at the age of 19. Having managed to maintain a career in Czechoslovakia under the Nazi occupation, he refused to work under what he considered a "second tyranny" after the Communist Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948, and took refuge in Britain. He became a Swiss citizen in 1967.

#3806

Mrinal Chatterjee

Mrinal Chatterjee

#65386

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Mrinal Chatterjee is an Indian academic and author. He heads the Indian Institute of Dhenkanal. He has authored five academic books on media studies in Odia, including History of Journalism in Odisha and Glossary of Terms for Media Persons. His has authored ten novels and seven short story collections in Odia, including Jagate Thiba Jate Dina published , Kandhei , Eka Sundar Chandini Ratire , Yamraj Chutire , Yamraj Number 5003 , which is translated into Assamese, and a series of columns in Odia

#3807

Herbie Mann

#48829

Overall Influence

1930 - 2003 (73 years)

Herbert Jay Solomon , known by his stage name Herbie Mann, was an American jazz flute player and important early practitioner of world music. Early in his career, he also played tenor saxophone and clarinet , but Mann was among the first jazz musicians to specialize on the flute. His most popular single was "Hi-Jack", which was a Billboard No. 1 dance hit for three weeks in 1975.

#3808

K. Subrahmanyam

K. Subrahmanyam

#19771

Overall Influence

1929 - 2011 (82 years)

Krishnaswamy Subrahmanyam was a prominent international strategic affairs analyst, journalist and former Indian civil servant. Considered a proponent of Realpolitik, Subrahmanyam was an influential voice in Indian security affairs for a long time. He was most often referred to as the doyen of India's strategic affairs community, and as the premier ideological champion of India's nuclear deterrent. His son S Jaishankar was appointed India's External Affairs Minister in 2019.

#3809

Michel Contini

#82116

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Michel Contini is a Sardinian, naturalized French linguist, researcher and academic. Biography Born in Cagliari, he completed elementary school in Oristano, middle school in Cagliari, and obtained a scientific high school diploma in Sassari.

#3810

Brigitte Mral

#92151

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Brigitte Mral is a professor of rhetoric at Örebro University. She graduated in 1978 from University of Göttingen with a master's degree, and received a Ph.D. from Uppsala University in 1986. She was active as university lecturer at Örebro University from 1987–2000, as professor of media and communication studies 2000–2002, and as professor of rhetoric from 2002.

#3811

Charles Kaiser

#50711

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Charles Kaiser is an American author and journalist best known for his nonfiction books 1968 in America , The Gay Metropolis , and The Cost of Courage . A former reporter for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek, he is currently a nonfiction book critic for The Guardian.

#3812

Park Seo-bo

#20328

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Park Seo-bo was a South Korean painter known for his "Écriture" series , involvement in the Korean Art Informel movement, and particular formal concerns around painting that have led critics and art historians to identify him as a leading Dansaekhwa artist.

#3813

Björn E. Lindblom

#101031

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Björn E. Lindblom is a Swedish linguist and phonetician known for his contributions to empiricist phonology and phonetics . He teaches at Stockholm University and University of Texas at Austin. He is married to Ann-Mari Lindblom and has two children: Ann Lindblom, dietician, and John Lindblom, journalist, .

#3814

David W. Green

#86569

Overall Influence

David Green is a professorial research fellow in the Department of Cognitive, Perceptual & Brain Sciences, an honorary senior research associate, an emeritus professor of psychology in the Division of Psychology & Language Sciences, and on the faculty of Brain Sciences at University College London. He has researched widely on subjects such as mental models, both construction and manipulation, the lexical organisation, and modelling control processes in speech production, language control particularly biliginual and the imaging of language and object recognition in the neurologically damaged. H...

#3815

Toots Hibbert

#57753

Overall Influence

1942 - 2020 (78 years)

Frederick Nathaniel "Toots" Hibbert, was a Jamaican singer and songwriter who was the lead vocalist for the reggae and ska band Toots and the Maytals. A reggae pioneer, he performed for six decades and helped establish some of the fundamentals of reggae music. Hibbert's 1968 song "Do the Reggay" is widely credited as the genesis of the genre name reggae. His band's album True Love won a Grammy Award in 2005.

#3816

Deborah Burton

#84616

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Deborah Burton is an American music theorist, pianist, and academic. She is particularly known for her publications on Giacomo Puccini and his works, including Recondite Harmony and the 2004 book Tosca's Prism: Three Moments of Western Cultural History. She has contributed articles to numerous music journals, including Nuova Rivista Musicale, Opera Quarterly, Studi Musicali, and Theoria.

#3817

Judith Robinson-Valéry

#64468

Overall Influence

1933 - 2010 (77 years)

Judith Robinson-Valéry was the foundation professor of French and the head of the School of Western European Languages at the University of New South Wales and later a director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. She was an important scholar on the thought and creativity of the French poet, essayist and philosopher Paul Valéry.

#3818

Andrea Arnold

#73440

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Andrea Arnold, OBE is an English filmmaker and former actor. She won an Academy Award for her short film Wasp in 2005. Her feature films include Red Road , Fish Tank , and American Honey , all of which have won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Arnold has also directed four episodes of the Amazon Prime Video series Transparent, as well as all seven episodes of the second season of the HBO series Big Little Lies. Her documentary Cow premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and played at the 2021 Telluride Film Festival.

#3819

Francis Coleman

#59611

Overall Influence

1924 - 2008 (84 years)

Francis Coleman was a conductor and television producer and director. Early life and education Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Coleman began working in an office at the age of fourteen while studying music at evening classes. He continued his musical education at McGill University, the Conservatoire de musique et d'art dramatique du Québec and then the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, before conducting under Pierre Monteux.

#3820

Anne Reid

#71406

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Anne Reid is a British stage, film and television actress, known for her roles as Valerie Barlow in the soap opera Coronation Street ; Jean in the sitcom dinnerladies ; and her role as Celia Dawson in Last Tango in Halifax for which she was nominated for the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress. She won the London Film Critics' Circle Award for British Actress of the Year and received a nomination for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance in the film The Mother .

#3821

Sirkka-liisa Jarvenpaa

#106951

Overall Influence

#3822

Akira Ikegami

#11531

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Akira Ikegami is a Japanese journalist and author. Life and career Ikegami was born in Matsumoto, Japan. He attended and graduated Keio University in economics, and worked for NHK from 1973 to 2005, ultimately serving as the host of the network's news program for children, before resigning to work on a freelance basis.

#3823

Julie Andrews

#58846

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Dame Julie Andrews is an English actress, singer, and author. She has garnered numerous accolades throughout her career spanning over seven decades, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, two Emmy Awards, three Grammy Awards, and six Golden Globe Awards as well as nominations for three Tony Awards. One of the biggest box office draws of the 1960s, Andrews has been honoured with the Kennedy Center Honors in 2001, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2007, and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2022. She was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 2000.

#3824

Roswell Rudd

#80859

Overall Influence

1935 - 2017 (82 years)

Roswell Hopkins Rudd Jr. was an American jazz trombonist and composer. Although skilled in a variety of genres of jazz , and other genres of music, he was known primarily for his work in free and avant-garde jazz. Beginning in 1962 Rudd worked extensively with saxophonist Archie Shepp.

#3825

Julie Posetti

#84082

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Julie Posetti is an internationally published Australian journalist and academic. In 2018 she was appointed Senior Research Fellow with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford . There, she leads RISJ's new Journalism Innovation Project. Posetti is the author of UNESCO's landmark global study 'Protecting Journalism Sources in the Digital Age' which examines the erosion of journalistic source protection conventions essential to investigative journalism in the context of national security overreach, and widening surveillance nets. She has won multiple professional awards , and journalism education and research honours .

#3826

Shigeaki Sugeta

#34310

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Shigeaki Sugeta is a Japanese linguist. Emeritus professor of General, Romance and Italian Linguistics at the University of Waseda, and now advisor to the Institute of Italian Studies of the same university, is the author of the first ever Sardinian-Japanese vocabulary.

#3827

Anthony Braxton

#50670

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Anthony Braxton is an American experimental composer, educator, music theorist, improviser and multi-instrumentalist who is best known for playing saxophones, particularly the alto. Braxton grew up on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, and was a key early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He received great acclaim for his 1969 double-LP record For Alto, the first full-length album of solo saxophone music.

#3828

Ramsey Lewis

#43301

Overall Influence

1935 - 2022 (87 years)

Ramsey Emmanuel Lewis Jr. was an American jazz pianist, composer, and radio personality. Lewis recorded over 80 albums and received five gold records and three Grammy Awards in his career. His album The In Crowd earned Lewis critical praise and the 1965 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance. His best known singles include "The 'In' Crowd", "Wade in the Water", and "Sun Goddess". Until 2009, he was the host of the Ramsey Lewis Morning Show on the Chicago radio station WNUA.

#3829

Dotty Lynch

#95011

Overall Influence

1945 - 2014 (69 years)

Dotty Lynch was an academic, journalist and political pollster, best known for being the first woman to be chief polltaker for a presidential campaign when she worked for Gary Hart. She also served as political advisor to George McGovern and Jimmy Carter.

#3830

André Wlodarczyk

André Wlodarczyk

#98502

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Andrzej Aleksander Włodarczyk , known as André Wlodarczyk, is a Polish-French linguist. Biography André Wlodarczyk lived in Wroclaw, Teresin and Warsaw. In 1969, he settled in Paris. He has dual Polish-French citizenship.

#3831

Joe South

#55403

Overall Influence

1940 - 2012 (72 years)

Joe South was an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and record producer. Best known for his songwriting, South won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 1970 for "Games People Play" and was again nominated for the award in 1972 for "Rose Garden".

#3832

Paul Naschy

#79483

Overall Influence

1934 - 2009 (75 years)

Jacinto Molina Álvarez known by his stage name Paul Naschy, was a Spanish film actor, screenwriter, and director working primarily in horror films. His portrayals of numerous classic horror figures—The Wolfman, Frankenstein's monster, Count Dracula, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Fu Manchu and a mummy—earned him recognition as the Spanish Lon Chaney. Naschy also starred in dozens of action films, historical dramas, crime films, TV shows and documentaries. He also wrote the screenplays for most of his films and directed a number of them as well, signing many of them "Jacinto Molina". Naschy was ...

#3833

Dianne Walker

#81006

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Dianne Walker , also known as Lady Di, is an American tap dancer. Her thirty-year career spans Broadway, television, film, and international dance concerts. Walker is the artistic director of TapDancin, Inc. in Boston, Massachusetts.

#3834

Michael Boddicker

#31064

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Michael Lehmann Boddicker is an American film composer and session musician, specializing in electronic music. He is a three times National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Most Valuable Player "Synthesizer" and MVP Emeritus, he was awarded a Grammy as a songwriter for "Imagination" from Flashdance in 1984. He is the president of The Lehmann Boddicker Group.

#3835

Kamran Talattof

#27697

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Kamran Talattof is the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Chair in Persian and Iranian studies at the University of Arizona. His research focus is on gender, ideology, culture, and language, with an emphasis on literature ; contemporary Islamic issues, Middle Eastern culture; and the Persian language. He has translated contemporary debates in Islam from Persian, Arabic, French, and Urdu into English.

#3836

Kristian Lundin

#46029

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Kristian Lundin is a Swedish composer, music producer and songwriter. Biography Kristian's worked on the song "Quit Playing Games " which he co-produced with Max Martin for the Backstreet Boys. He co-wrote & produced "Tearin' Up My Heart" for NSYNC as a follow-up.

#3837

Vladimir Ivir

#96383

Overall Influence

1934 - 2011 (77 years)

Vladimir Ivir MVO was a Croatian linguist, lexicographer and translation scholar. He was the first Croatian theoretician of translation, highly appreciated among the European linguists. Ivir's early interest was in English syntax. During his postgraduate research at University College London in 1962/63, under the supervision of Randolph Quirk, he completed a thesis on predicative adjectives. During his time in London, Ivir became interested in the "linguistic revolution" stemming from the ideas of Noam Chomsky, and, upon returning home, became the first Croatian linguist to write an outline o...

#3838

Michael Kennedy

#79255

Overall Influence

1926 - 2014 (88 years)

George Michael Sinclair Kennedy CBE was an English music critic and author who specialized in classical music. For nearly two decades he was the chief classical music critic for both The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph . A prolific writer, he was the biographer of many composers and musicians, including Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Barbirolli, Mahler, Strauss, Britten, Boult and Walton. Other notable publications include writings on various musical institutions, the editing of music dictionaries as well as numerous articles for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the sub...

#3839

Jimmy Smith

#61507

Overall Influence

1925 - 2005 (80 years)

James Oscar Smith was an American jazz musician whose albums often appeared on Billboard magazine charts. He helped popularize the Hammond B-3 organ, creating a link between jazz and 1960s soul music.

#3840

Choijinzhab

#62153

Overall Influence

1931 - 2022 (91 years)

Choijinzhab was a Chinese linguist of Mongolian ethnicity. Biography Choijinzhab was born in Jirim League , Inner Mongolia in 1931. After graduating from the Ulaan Bator Normal College in Mongolia in 1949 he taught at a primary school in Ulaan Bator, before returning to Inner Mongolia in 1950. He initially worked as an editor at the Inner Mongolia People's Publishing House, and then studied as a research student at the Central College for Nationalities from 1954 to 1957. After graduating he took up a post at the Inner Mongolia University, where he remained through his career. He was a professor at the university's Institute of Mongolian Studies.

#3841

Gene Barry

#45149

Overall Influence

1919 - 2009 (90 years)

Gene Barry was an American stage, screen, and television actor and singer. Barry is best remembered for his leading roles in the films The Atomic City and The War of The Worlds and for his portrayal of the title characters in the TV series Bat Masterson and Burke's Law, among many roles.

#3842

Serge Gavronsky

#71016

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Serge Gavronsky is an American poet and translator. Life Gavronsky was born in Paris. He fled Nazi-occupied France in 1940. Gavronsky received his A.B. in European History and French in 1954 from Columbia College and an M.A. in European History in 1955 and a Ph.D in European Intellectual History in 1965 from Columbia University, and is now professor emeritus in the French department at Barnard College. He lives in New York City.

#3843

Paul Kantner

#35763

Overall Influence

1941 - 2016 (75 years)

Paul Lorin Kantner was an American rock musician. He is best known as the co-founder, rhythm guitarist, and a secondary vocalist of Jefferson Airplane, a leading psychedelic rock band of the counterculture era. He continued these roles as a member of Jefferson Starship, Jefferson Airplane's successor band.

#3844

William Bolcom

#54691

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

William Elden Bolcom is an American composer and pianist. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Medal of Arts, a Grammy Award, the Detroit Music Award and was named 2007 Composer of the Year by Musical America. He taught composition at the University of Michigan from 1973 until 2008. He is married to mezzo-soprano Joan Morris.

#3845

Mark Plati

#64249

Overall Influence

Mark Plati is a New York–based musician, record producer, and songwriter, best known for his work in the 1990s with David Bowie. Plati also has worked with Spookey Ruben, The Cure, Duncan Sheik, Hooverphonic, Robbie Williams, Joe McIntyre, Dave Navarro, Lou Reed, Fleetwood Mac, Deee-Lite, and Natalie Imbruglia, Sam Moore, Bobbejaan Schoepen. He has also worked in France and Belgium with artists like Kyo, Louise Attaque, les Rita Mitsouko, Alain Bashung, Émilie Simon, Saule, Raphael, Axelle Red.

#3846

John Badham

#62986

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

John MacDonald Badham is a British-born American film and television director. He is best known for directing the films Saturday Night Fever , Dracula , Blue Thunder , WarGames , Short Circuit , Stakeout , Bird on a Wire , The Hard Way and Point of No Return . He is a two-time Primetime Emmy Award nominee, a two-time Hugo Award nominee, and a Saturn Award winner. He is also a Professor at Chapman University.

#3847

Tara Brach

#8532

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Tara Brach is an American psychologist, author, and proponent of Buddhist meditation. She is a guiding teacher and founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, D.C. . Brach also teaches about Buddhist meditation at centers for meditation and yoga in the United States and Europe, including Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California; the Kripalu Center; and the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies.

#3848

Susan M. Ervin-Tripp

#26528

Overall Influence

1927 - 2018 (91 years)

Susan Moore Ervin-Tripp was an American linguist whose psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research focused on the relation between language use and the development of linguistic forms, especially the developmental changes and structure of interpersonal talk among children.

#3849

Asaf Messerer

#60781

Overall Influence

1903 - 1992 (89 years)

Asaf Mikhailovich Messerer was a Soviet ballet dancer, teacher and choreographer. He was born in Vilnius, Lithuania. In 1919 he studied privately with Mikhail Mordkin, until Alexander Gorsky placed him in a class at the Bolshoi Ballet School, from which he graduated in 1921. He then joined the Bolshoi Theatre, where he became one of its most important principal soloists, a position he retired from in 1954.

#3850

Mark Baltin

#92801

Overall Influence

Mark Baltin is an American linguist and member of the faculty of New York University. Originally from the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia, he attended Central High School. He received his BA in Linguistics in 1971 at McGill University, his MA in 1975 at the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD in Linguistics in 1978 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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