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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Ranking

List of the most influential people in Communications,

#401

Jerrold Katz

#6835

Overall Influence

1932 - 2002 (70 years)

Jerrold Jacob Katz was an American philosopher and linguist. Biography After receiving a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1960, Katz became a Research Associate in Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy there in 1963, and became Professor in 1969. From 1975 until his death, he was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at the City University of New York.

#402

Angelika Kratzer

#6484

Overall Influence

Angelika Kratzer is a professor emerita of linguistics in the department of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Biography She was born in Germany, and received her PhD from the University of Konstanz in 1979, with a dissertation entitled Semantik der Rede. She is an influential and widely cited semanticist whose expertise includes modals, conditionals, situation semantics, and a range of topics relating to the syntax–semantics interface.

#403

Qian Zhongshu

#4892

Overall Influence

1910 - 1998 (88 years)

Qian Zhongshu , also transliterated as Ch'ien Chung-shu or Dzien Tsoong-su, was a renowned 20th century Chinese literary scholar and writer, known for his wit and erudition. He is best known for his satirical novel Fortress Besieged. His works of nonfiction are characterized by large amount of quotations in both Chinese and Western languages such as English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. He also played an important role in digitizing Chinese classics late in his life.

#404

Chuck Close

#2587

Overall Influence

1940 - 2021 (81 years)

Charles Thomas Close was an American painter, visual artist, and photographer who made massive-scale photorealist and abstract portraits of himself and others. Close also created photo portraits using a very large format camera. He adapted his painting style and working methods in 1988, after being paralyzed by an occlusion of the anterior spinal artery.

#405

Vyacheslav Ivanov

Vyacheslav Ivanov

#3941

Overall Influence

1929 - 2017 (88 years)

Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov was a prominent Soviet/Russian philologist, semiotician and Indo-Europeanist probably best known for his glottalic theory of Indo-European consonantism and for placing the Indo-European urheimat in the area of the Armenian Highlands and Lake Urmia.

#406

Alain Resnais

#11745

Overall Influence

1922 - 2014 (92 years)

Alain Resnais was a French film director and screenwriter whose career extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct short films including Night and Fog , an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps. He proceeded to make feature films. His films frequently explore the relationship between consciousness, memory, and the imagination, and he was noted for devising innovative formal structures for his narratives. Throughout his career, he won many awards from international film festivals and academies.

#407

Robert Elsie

#8117

Overall Influence

1950 - 2017 (67 years)

Robert Elsie was a Canadian-born German scholar who specialized in Albanian literature and folklore. Elsie was a writer, translator, interpreter, and specialist in Albanian studies, being the author of numerous books and articles that focused on various aspects of Albanian culture and affairs.

#408

Ian Hancock

#7530

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Ian Francis Hancock is a linguist, Romani scholar and political advocate. He was born and raised in England and is one of the main contributors in the field of Romani studies. He is director of the Program of Romani Studies and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has been a professor of English, linguistics and Asian studies since 1972. He has represented the Romani people at the United Nations and served as a member of the US Holocaust Memorial Council under President Bill Clinton, who, Hancock claims, has Romani ancestry. He also repr...

#409

Lou Reed

#3548

Overall Influence

1942 - 2013 (71 years)

Lewis Allan Reed was an American musician and songwriter. He was the guitarist, singer, and principal songwriter for the rock band The Velvet Underground and had a solo career that spanned five decades. Although not commercially successful during its existence, the Velvet Underground became regarded as one of the most influential bands in the history of underground and alternative rock music. Reed's distinctive deadpan voice, poetic and transgressive lyrics, and experimental guitar playing were trademarks throughout his long career.

#410

Ann Curry

#5214

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Ann Curry is an American journalist and photojournalist, who has been a reporter for more than 45 years, focused on human suffering in war zones and natural disasters. Curry has reported from the wars in Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, Darfur, Congo, and the Central African Republic. Curry has covered numerous disasters, including the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, and the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, where her appeal via Twitter topped Twitter's 'most powerful' list, credited for helping speed the arrival of humanitarian planes.

#411

Howard W. French

#5525

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Howard Waring French is an American journalist, author, and photographer, as well as professor since 2008 at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Prior to re-entering academia, he was a longtime foreign correspondent and senior writer with The New York Times.

#412

Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim

#4624

Overall Influence

1930 - 2021 (91 years)

Stephen Joshua Sondheim was an American composer and lyricist. Regarded as one of the most important figures in 20th-century musical theater, he is credited for reinventing the American musical. With his frequent collaborations with Harold Prince and James Lapine, Sondheim's Broadway musicals tackled unexpected themes that ranged beyond the genre's traditional subjects, while addressing darker elements of the human experience. His music and lyrics were tinged with complexity, sophistication, and ambivalence about various aspects of life.

#413

James Pustejovsky

#8054

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

James Pustejovsky is an American computer scientist. He is the TJX Feldberg professor of computer science at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, United States. His expertise includes theoretical and computational modeling of language, specifically: Computational linguistics, Lexical semantics, Knowledge representation, temporal and spatial reasoning and Extraction. His main topics of research are Natural language processing generally, and in particular, the computational analysis of linguistic meaning. He holds a B.S. from MIT as well as a PhD from the University of Massachusetts, ...

#414

Pierre Joris

#9962

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Pierre Joris is a Luxembourg-American poet, essayist, translator, and anthologist. He has moved between Europe, North Africa and the United States for fifty-five years, publishing over eighty books of poetry, essays, translations and anthologies — most recently Interglacial Narrows and Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello, both from Contra Mundum Press. In 2020 his two final Paul Celan translations came out: Microliths They Are, Little Stones and The Collected Earlier Poetry . In 2019 Spuyten Duyvil Press published Arabia Deserta . Other recent bo...

#415

Frank Zappa

#4125

Overall Influence

1940 - 1993 (53 years)

Frank Vincent Zappa was an American musician, composer, and bandleader. His work is characterized by nonconformity, free-form improvisation, sound experimentation, musical virtuosity and satire of American culture. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa composed rock, pop, jazz, jazz fusion, orchestral and musique concrète works; he also produced almost all of the 60-plus albums that he released with his band the Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist. Zappa also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed album covers. He is considered one...

#416

Boris Akunin

#5027

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Boris Akunin is the pen name of Grigori Chkhartishvili , a Russian-Georgian writer. He is best known as writer of detective and historical fiction. He is also an essayist and literary translator. Grigory Chkhartishvili has also written under pen names Anatoly Brusnikin, Anna Borisova, and Akunin-Chkhartishvili. His characters include Erast Fandorin, Nicholas Fandorin and Sister Pelagia.

#417

Ray C. Dougherty

#14554

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Ray C. Dougherty is an American linguist and was a member of the Arts and Science faculty at New York University until 2014 . He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering from Dartmouth College in the early 1960s and his Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968. At MIT, Dougherty was one of the first students of Noam Chomsky, working in the field of transformational grammar. During the Linguistics Wars of the 1970s, Dougherty was a critic of the generative semantics movement. Specializing in computational linguistics, Dougherty has publ...

#418

Walter Murch

#4961

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Walter Scott Murch is an American film editor, director, writer and sound designer. With a career stretching back to 1969, including work on THX 1138, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, The Conversation, Ghost and The English Patient, with three Academy Award wins .

#419

Randy Shilts

#2440

Overall Influence

1951 - 1994 (43 years)

Randy Shilts was an American journalist and author. After studying journalism at the University of Oregon, Shilts began working as a reporter for both The Advocate and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as for San Francisco Bay Area television stations. In the 1980s, he was noted for being the first openly gay reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle.

#420

Robèrt Lafont

#13658

Overall Influence

1923 - 2009 (86 years)

Robèrt Lafont was a French intellectual from Provence. He was a linguist, an author, an historian, an expert in literature and a political theoretician. His name in French reads Robert Lafont. Biography Robèrt Lafont was professor emeritus at the Paul-Valéry University of Montpellier. A professional linguist, he was a polyglot, novelist, poet, playwright, essayist and a medievalist. A versatile writer, Lafont wrote nearly a hundred books in Occitan, French, Catalan and Italian. The wide scope of themes he explores includes the history of literature and of society, linguistics and sociolingui...

#421

Wayne Andre

#17691

Overall Influence

1931 - 2003 (72 years)

Wayne Andre was an American jazz trombonist, best known for his work as a session musician. Andre's father was a saxophonist, and he took private music lessons from age 15. He played with Charlie Spivak in the early 1950s before spending some time in the U.S. Air Force. In 1955 he joined the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra, and in 1956 played with Woody Herman. From 1956 to 1958 he played with Kai Winding and attended the Manhattan School of Music. He composed his "Nutcracker" and arranged "The Preacher" for the Kai Winding septet while performing with the septet. In the 1960s, he performed with Ge...

#422

Chuck Berry

#3350

Overall Influence

1926 - 2017 (91 years)

Charles Edward Anderson Berry was an American singer, guitarist and songwriter who pioneered rock and roll. Nicknamed the "Father of Rock and Roll", he refined and developed rhythm and blues into the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive with songs such as "Maybellene" , "Roll Over Beethoven" , "Rock and Roll Music" and "Johnny B. Goode" . Writing lyrics that focused on teen life and consumerism, and developing a music style that included guitar solos and showmanship, Berry was a major influence on subsequent rock music.

#423

Martine Robbeets

#13190

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Martine Irma Robbeets is a Belgian comparative linguist and japanologist. She is known for the Transeurasian languages hypothesis, which groups the Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages together into a single language family.

#424

John Simpson

#5528

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

John Cody Fidler-Simpson is an English foreign correspondent who is currently the world affairs editor of BBC News. He has spent all his working life with the BBC, and has reported from more than 120 countries, including thirty war zones, and interviewed many world leaders. He was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read English and was editor of Granta magazine.

#425

Caryn James

#4130

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Caryn James is an American film critic, journalist, university lecturer, and writer. Biography She grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and obtained her doctorate in English literature at Brown University. She began working as a freelance journalist at The New York Times; Newsday; TV Guide; and Vogue. She finally landed a three-week temporary position at The New York Times Book Review and later became a permanent staff member.

#426

Chuck Todd

#4400

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Charles David Todd is an American television journalist who was the 12th moderator of NBC's Meet the Press. He also hosted Meet the Press Now, its daily edition on NBC News Now and is currently the Political Director for NBC News. Before taking the helm of Meet the Press, Todd was Chief White House correspondent for NBC as well as host of The Daily Rundown on MSNBC. He also serves as NBC News' on-air political analyst for NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt and Today.

#427

Michael Fortescue

#15621

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Michael David Fortescue is a British-born linguist specializing in Arctic and native North American languages, including Kalaallisut, Inuktun, Chukchi and Nitinaht. Fortescue is known for his reconstructions of the Eskimo–Aleut, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Nivkh, and Wakashan proto-languages.

#428

Peter Oborne

#2525

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Peter Alan Oborne is a British journalist and broadcaster. He is the former chief political commentator of The Daily Telegraph, from which he resigned in early 2015. He is author of The Rise of Political Lying, The Triumph of the Political Class, and The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism, and along with Frances Weaver of the pamphlet Guilty Men. He has also authored a number of books about cricket. He writes a political column for Middle East Eye and a diary column for the Byline Times.

#429

Saul Landau

#5230

Overall Influence

1936 - 2013 (77 years)

Saul Landau was an American journalist, filmmaker and commentator. He was also a professor emeritus at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where he taught history and digital media. Education Landau was born in the Bronx, New York City. A graduate of Manhattan's Stuyvesant High School, he also earned bachelor's and master's degrees in history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

#430

Dominick Dunne

#4385

Overall Influence

1925 - 2009 (84 years)

Dominick John Dunne was an American writer, investigative journalist, and producer. He began his career in film and television as a producer of the pioneering gay film The Boys in the Band and as the producer of the award-winning drug film The Panic in Needle Park . He turned to writing in the early 1970s. After the 1982 murder of his daughter Dominique, an actress, he began to write about the interaction of wealth and high society with the judicial system. Dunne was a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair, and, beginning in the 1980s, often appeared on television discussing crime.

#431

Billy Wilder

#6879

Overall Influence

1906 - 2002 (96 years)

Billy Wilder was an Austrian-born filmmaker. His career in Hollywood spanned five decades, and he is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Classic Hollywood cinema. He received seven Academy Awards , a BAFTA Award, the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or and two Golden Globe Awards.

#432

Philip Glass

#5033

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Philip Glass is an American composer and pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. Glass's work has been associated with minimalism, being built up from repetitive phrases and shifting layers. Glass describes himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures", which he has helped to evolve stylistically.

#433

José Ignacio Hualde

#17015

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

José Ignacio Hualde is a Spanish linguist specialised in Basque linguistics and in Spanish synchronic and diachronic phonology, professor of linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and in the Department of Linguistics, at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is also the current vice president of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.

#434

George Cardona

#12188

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

George Cardona is an American linguist, Indologist, Sanskritist, and scholar of Pāṇini. Described as "a luminary" in Indo-European, Indo-Aryan, and Pāṇinian linguistics since the early sixties, Cardona has been recognized as the leading Western scholar of the Indian grammatical tradition and of the great Indian grammarian Pāṇini. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Cardona was credited by Mohammad Hamid Ansari, the vice president of India, for making the University of Pennsylvania a "center of Sanskrit learning in North America", along with Professors W.

#435

Paul J. Hopper

#19259

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Paul J. Hopper is an American linguist, who was born in Great Britain. In 1973, he proposed the glottalic theory regarding the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European consonant inventory, in parallel with the Georgian linguist Tamaz Gamkrelidze and the Russian linguist Vyacheslav Ivanov. He later also became known for his theory of emergent grammar , for his contributions to the theory of grammaticalisation and other work dealing with the interface between grammar and usage. He currently works as the Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pitts...

#436

Deirdre English

#4109

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Deirdre English is the former editor of Mother Jones and author of numerous articles for national publications and television documentaries. She has taught at the State University of New York and currently teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is a faculty mentor at the Center for the Study of the Working Family at the Graduate School of Sociology. English is co-author, with Barbara Ehrenreich, of For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice along with a number of pamphlets. She contributed essays to Susan Meiselas's photograph...

#437

Michael Hayden

#1854

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Michael Vincent Hayden is a retired United States Air Force four-star general and former Director of the National Security Agency, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He also serves as a professor at the George Mason University – Schar School of Policy and Government. Hayden currently co-chairs the Bipartisan Policy Center's Electric Grid Cyber Security Initiative. In 2017, Hayden became a national security analyst for CNN.

#438

Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino

Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino

#11233

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino is a Peruvian linguist who has crucially contributed to the investigation and development of the Quechuan languages. He has also made outstanding contributions to the study of the Aymara, Mochica and Chipaya languages.

#439

Robert S. P. Beekes

#4627

Overall Influence

1937 - 2017 (80 years)

Robert Stephen Paul Beekes was a Dutch linguist who was emeritus professor of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at Leiden University and an author of many monographs on the Proto-Indo-European language.

#440

Maria Zakharova

#2442

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Maria Vladimirovna Zakharova is the Director of the Information and Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation since 2015. She has a degree of Candidate in Historical Sciences, the Russian equivalent of a PhD.

#441

Teun A. van Dijk

Teun A. van Dijk

#8174

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Teun Adrianus van Dijk is a scholar in the fields of text linguistics, discourse analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis . With Walter Kintsch he contributed to the development of the psychology of text processing. Since the 1980s his work in CDA focused especially on the study of the discursive reproduction of racism by what he calls the 'symbolic elites' , the study of news in the press, and on the theories of ideology, context and knowledge.

#442

Steven Levy

#787

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Steven Levy is an American journalist and Editor at Large for Wired who has written extensively for publications on computers, technology, cryptography, the internet, cybersecurity, and privacy. He is the author of the 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which chronicles the early days of the computer underground. Levy published eight books covering computer hacker culture, artificial intelligence, cryptography, and multi-year exposés of Apple, Google, and Facebook. His most recent book, Facebook: The Inside Story, recounts the history and rise of Facebook from three years o...

#443

Mario Benedetti

#4652

Overall Influence

1920 - 2009 (89 years)

Mario Benedetti Farrugia , was a Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and poet and an integral member of the Generación del 45. Despite publishing more than 80 books and being published in twenty languages, he was not well known in the English-speaking world. In the Spanish-speaking world he is considered one of Latin America's most important writers of the latter half of the 20th century.

#444

J. D. Considine

#2371

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

J. D. Considine is an American music critic who has been writing about music professionally since 1977. Background J. D. Considine's work has been published in numerous newspapers and music magazines, and he has contributed to several books. Considine appeared regularly on the VH1 show Four on the Floor which aired from 1994 to 1996, and earned a Cable Ace nomination.

#445

Maria Ressa

#2475

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Maria Angelita Ressa is a Filipino-American journalist. She is the co-founder and CEO of Rappler. She previously spent nearly two decades working as a lead investigative reporter in Southeast Asia for CNN. She will become Professor of Professional Practice in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University on July 1, 2024, and will be a Distinguished Fellow at Columbia's new Institute of Global Politics beginning in the fall of 2023.

#446

Bob Saget

#2210

Overall Influence

1956 - 2022 (66 years)

Robert Lane Saget was an American stand-up comedian, actor, and television host. He portrayed Danny Tanner on the sitcom Full House and its sequel Fuller House . Saget was the original host of America's Funniest Home Videos , and the voice of narrator Ted Mosby on the sitcom How I Met Your Mother . He was also known for his adult-oriented stand-up comedy, and his 2014 album That's What I'm Talkin' About was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album.

#447

Soledad O'Brien

Soledad O'Brien

#4469

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

María de la Soledad Teresa O'Brien is an American broadcast journalist and executive producer. Since 2016, O'Brien has been the host for Matter of Fact with Soledad O'Brien, a nationally syndicated weekly talk show produced by Hearst Television. She is chairwoman of Starfish Media Group, a multiplatform media production company and distributor that she founded in 2013. She is also a member of the Peabody Awards board of directors, which is presented by the University of Georgia's Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

#448

Ted Chiang

#2982

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Ted Chiang is an American science fiction writer. His work has won four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and six Locus awards. His short story "Story of Your Life" was the basis of the film Arrival . He was an artist in residence at the University of Notre Dame in 2020–2021. Chiang is also a frequent non-fiction contributor to the New Yorker Magazine, most recently on topics related to computer technology, such as artificial intelligence.

#449

David Browne

#1174

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

David Browne is an American journalist and author. He is currently a senior writer at Rolling Stone, where he has been a contributor since 2008. He was the resident music critic at Entertainment Weekly between 1990 and 2006. He was an editor at Music & Sound Output magazine and a music critic at the New York Daily News before EW. He has written articles for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, Spin, The New Republic and Time, as well as stories for NPR.

#450

Kenneth MacMillan

#10652

Overall Influence

1929 - 1992 (63 years)

Sir Kenneth MacMillan was a British ballet dancer and choreographer who was artistic director of the Royal Ballet in London between 1970 and 1977, and its principal choreographer from 1977 until his death. Earlier he had served as director of ballet for the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. He was also associate director of the American Ballet Theatre from 1984 to 1989, and artistic associate of the Houston Ballet from 1989 to 1992.

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