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).
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#4251
Michel Chion
#96008
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Michel Chion is a French film theorist and composer of experimental music. Life Born in Creil, France, Chion teaches at several institutions in France and currently holds the post of Associate Professor at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle where he is a theoretician and teacher of audio-visual relationships.
Go to Profile#4252
Mark Heap
#86309
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Mark Heap is an English actor and comedian. He is known for his roles in television comedies, including, Brass Eye, Big Train, Spaced, Jam, Green Wing, Friday Night Dinner, Upstart Crow, The World's End, and Benidorm.
Go to Profile#4253
David Gerrold
#36929
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
David Gerrold is an American science fiction screenwriter and novelist. He wrote the script for the original Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles", created the Sleestak race on the TV series Land of the Lost, and wrote the novelette "The Martian Child", which won both Hugo and Nebula Awards, and was adapted into a 2007 film starring John Cusack.
Go to Profile#4254
Gina McKee
#81468
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Georgina McKee is an English actress. She won the 1997 BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress for Our Friends in the North , and earned subsequent nominations for The Lost Prince and The Street . She also starred on television in The Forsyte Saga and as Caterina Sforza in The Borgias . Her film appearances include Notting Hill , Phantom Thread , and My Policeman .
Go to Profile#4255
Eduardo Ulibarri
#101106
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Eduardo Ulibarri Bilbao is a Costa Rican journalist. Summary of life Eduardo Ulibarri is a journalist, diplomat, academic and consultant specialized in international affairs and communication strategies. He was born in Remedios, Cuba on February 3, 1952. At the age of 14 he emigrated out of Cuba with his parents towards Costa Rica. He is married to María del Rocío Fernández Salazar, a journalist specialized in cultural affairs, and have two sons: Fernando, a jazz musician, and Daniel, an actor and producer.
Go to Profile#4256
Paul Callaway
#88579
Overall Influence
1909 - 1995 (86 years)
Paul Smith Callaway, was a prominent American organist and choral conductor, particularly well known for his thirty-eight years at the Washington National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., between 1939–1977. A friend of Leonard Bernstein and Ned Rorem, he was also active in opera and a frequent guest conductor of the Lake George Opera Company and was the founding musical director of the Opera Society of Washington in 1956, now the renowned Washington National Opera. By the time of his death in 1995, he was acclaimed for his great influence on the musical life of the nation's capital. In 1977, C...
Go to Profile#4257
LaVerne Jeanne
#99357
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
LaVerne Masayesva Jeanne is an anthropologist and linguist at the University of Nevada at Reno, where she is an emerita associate professor. She received her PhD at MIT in 1978, where she studied with linguist Ken Hale. Together with MIT her classmate Navajo Paul R. Platero, Jeanne is one of the first two Native Americanss to have received a PhD degree in linguistics.
Go to Profile#4258
Teresa Stratas
#77551
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Teresa Stratas is an operatic soprano and actress from Canada of Greek descent. She is especially well known for her award-winning recording of Alban Berg's Lulu. She has now formally retired. Early life and career Stratas was born Anastasia Stratakis to a struggling immigrant Cretan family in Oshawa, near Toronto, Ontario. At age 13, she performed Greek pop songs on the radio. She graduated from The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. At age 20, Stratas made her professional opera debut as Mimì in La bohème at the Toronto Opera Festival. One year later in 1959, she co-won the Metropolit...
Go to Profile#4259
Marina Joubert
#38481
Overall Influence
Marina Joubert is a senior science communication researcher at The Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology at Stellenbosch University. Previously, she was the communication manager for the National Research Foundation and managed her own independent science communication consultancy for a decade. Her consultancy presented the first online course in science communication in Africa.
Go to Profile#4260
Bucky Pizzarelli
#78917
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
John Paul "Bucky" Pizzarelli was an American jazz guitarist. He was the father of jazz guitarist John Pizzarelli and double bassist Martin Pizzarelli. He worked for NBC as a staffman for Dick Cavett and ABC with Bobby Rosengarden in . Musicians he collaborated with include Benny Goodman, George Barnes, Les Paul, Stéphane Grappelli, Benny Green, and Antônio Carlos Jobim. Pizzarelli cited as influences Django Reinhardt, Freddie Green, and George Van Eps.
Go to Profile#4261
Sandy Wilson
#83349
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Alexander Galbraith "Sandy" Wilson was an English composer and lyricist, best known for his musical The Boy Friend . Biography Wilson was born in Sale, Cheshire, England, and was educated at Harrow School. In 1942 he won a State Scholarship for a wartime course at SOAS and was assigned to study Japanese. He was thus one of the so-called 'Dulwich Boys' who studied at SOAS and boarded at Dulwich College. While there he put together a satirical review titled 'A Matter of Course' based on his experiences on the Japanese course. He was one of the few not to complete the course and he subsequently served in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Great Britain, Egypt and Iraq.
Go to Profile#4262
George Sidney
#59206
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
George Sidney was an American film director and producer who worked primarily at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. His work includes cult classics Bye Bye Birdie and Viva Las Vegas . With an extensive background in acting, stage direction, film editing, and music, Sidney created many of post-war Hollywood’s big budget musicals, such as Annie Get Your Gun , Show Boat , Kiss Me Kate ; Jupiter's Darling , and Pal Joey . He was also a president of the Screen Directors Guild for 16 years.
Go to Profile#4263
Piero Bellugi
#84711
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
Piero Bellugi was an Italian orchestral conductor. Life Bellugi was born in Florence, in Tuscany, on 14 July 1924. He took a diploma in violin at the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini in that city, studying under . He studied conducting under Paul van Kempen at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena and under Igor Markevitch at the summer academy of the Universität Mozarteum Salzburg in Austria. In 1951, with the help of a study grant, he travelled to the United States, where he studied under William Steinberg and Rafael Kubelík, and at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood under Leonard Bernstein.
Go to Profile#4264
Roy Ayers
#45430
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Roy Ayers is an American funk, soul, and jazz composer, vibraphone player, and record producer. Ayers began his career as a post-bop jazz artist, releasing several albums with Atlantic Records, before his tenure at Polydor Records beginning in the 1970s, during which he helped pioneer jazz-funk. He is a key figure in the acid jazz movement, and has been dubbed "The Godfather of Neo Soul". He is best known for his compositions "Everybody Loves the Sunshine", "Searchin", and "Running Away". At one time, he was said to have more sampled hits by rappers than any other artist.
Go to Profile#4265
Charles E. Cobb Jr.
#43077
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Charles E. "Charlie" Cobb Jr. is a journalist, professor, and former activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee . Along with several veterans of SNCC, Cobb established and operated the African-American bookstore Drum and Spear in Washington, D.C., from 1968 to 1974. Currently he is a senior analyst at allAfrica.com and a visiting professor at Brown University.
Go to Profile#4266
Hakan Topal
#18652
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Hakan Topal is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He was the co-founder with Guven Incirlioglu of xurban collective , and is known for his research-based conceptual art practice. He is an Associate Professor of New Media and Art+Design at Purchase College, SUNY.
Go to Profile#4267
Marshall Ganz
#12977
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Marshall Ganz is the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Introduced to organizing in the American civil rights movement, he worked on the staff of the United Farm Workers for sixteen years, became trainer and organizer for political campaigns, unions and nonprofit groups, and returned to Harvard where he earned his PhD in Sociology . He is credited with devising the successful grassroots organizing model and training for Barack Obama’s winning 2008 presidential campaign.
Go to Profile#4268
Robert Melançon
#102939
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Robert Melançon is a Canadian writer and translator. He has been a professor of literature at the Université de Montréal since 1972. Melançon was born in Montreal, Quebec. Publications 1972 – The Poetic Image in France, Philippe Desportes Hopil Claude, 1570–1630
Go to Profile#4269
Valentina Cortese
#94216
Overall Influence
1923 - 2019 (96 years)
Valentina Cortese , sometimes credited as Valentina Cortesa, was an Italian film and theatre actress. In her 50 years spanning career, she appeared in films of Italian and international directors like Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Franco Zeffirelli, François Truffaut, Joseph L. Mankiewicz and others.
Go to Profile#4270
Irving J. Rein
#43537
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Irving Jacob Rein is a professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of many books on effective communication strategies and marketing. Over the course of his career, Rein has researched, taught, and published in the areas of popular culture, crisis management, communication in sports and place marketing. As a member of the Northwestern community he has inspired many students’ love of popular culture. Before beginning his successful career, Rein received a B.A. and a B.S. from the University of Minnesota. After completing his undergraduate studies at Minnesota...
Go to Profile#4271
Jonathan May
#88285
Overall Influence
1958 - 2010 (52 years)
Jonathan May was an American cellist and conductor. He resided in the Orlando, Florida area and was noted for founding and directing numerous youth orchestras and music programs throughout the region.
Go to Profile#4272
Patrick Doyle
#72698
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Patrick Doyle is a Scottish composer and occasional actor best known for his film scores. During his 50-year career in film, television and theatre, he has composed the scores for over 60 feature films. A longtime collaborator of actor-director Kenneth Branagh, Doyle is known for his work on films such as Henry V, Sense and Sensibility, Hamlet, Carlito's Way, and Gosford Park, as well as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Thor, Brave, Cinderella, Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile.
Go to Profile#4273
Corrado Maria Daclon
#55328
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Corrado Maria Daclon is an Italian scientist and journalist. Biography He was born in Milan. Since 1995 he has been a professor of environmental policy and geopolitics at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy, journalist, writer, and a collaborative editorial contributor with periodicals on international energy, environmental and geopolitical issues. Since 1987 to 2012 he has led the oldest Italian environmental organization, Pro Natura.
Go to Profile#4274
Lol Coxhill
#93669
Overall Influence
1932 - 2012 (80 years)
George Lowen Coxhill known professionally as Lol Coxhill, was an English free improvising saxophonist. He played soprano and sopranino saxophone. Biography Coxhill was born to George Compton Coxhill and Mabel Margaret Coxhill at Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK. He grew up in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, and bought his first saxophone in 1947. After national service he became a busy semi-professional musician, touring US airbases with Denzil Bailey's Afro-Cubists and the Graham Fleming Combo. In the 1960s he played with visiting American blues, soul and jazz musicians including Rufus Thomas, Mose Allison, Otis Spann, and Champion Jack Dupree.
Go to Profile#4275
Gillian Murphy
#39936
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Gillian Murphy is an American ballet dancer who is a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre. Early life and education Raised in Florence, South Carolina, Murphy was a member of Columbia City Ballet before attending high school at University of North Carolina School of the Arts. There, under the tutelage of Melissa Hayden, she danced principal roles in several of the school's productions, including The Nutcracker and George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, Western Symphony, Tarantella and Theme and Variations.
Go to Profile#4276
Duncan McTier
#92447
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Duncan McTier is an English double bass soloist and professor. He is a member of the Fibonacci Sequence. Biography Born in Worcestershire, England, Duncan McTier studied a degree in mathematics at Bristol University before joining the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra. McTier won the Isle of Man International Double Bass Competition in 1982 and since then he has performed often with many orchestras, including the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchest...
Go to Profile#4277
Klaus vom Bruch
#52746
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Klaus vom Bruch is a German media artist who is considered a pioneer of German video art. Biography Vom Bruch studied conceptual art at the California Institute of the Arts with John Baldessari from 1975 to 1976, and philosophy at the University of Cologne from 1976 to 1980. With Ulrike Rosenbach and Marcel Odenbach he formed the art group ATV. An early video by vom Bruch, "Schleyerband," contains television clips from 1977 and 1978, with footage of the Red Army Faction. From 1992 to 1998, he taught media art at the University of Arts in Karlsruhe . Since 1999, he is a professor for media art at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.
Go to Profile#4278
R. Reinier Plomp
#113076
Overall Influence
#4279
Ronnie Drew
#83955
Overall Influence
1934 - 2008 (74 years)
Joseph Ronald Drew was an Irish singer, folk musician and actor who had a fifty-year career recording with The Dubliners. He sang lead vocals on the singles "Seven Drunken Nights" and "The Irish Rover", which both charted in the UK top 10 and were performed on TOTP. His voice was once described by Nathan Joseph as being "like the sound of coke being crushed under a door".
Go to Profile#4280
Stuart Diamond
#51495
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Stuart Diamond is an American professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, attorney, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and author who has taught negotiation for more than 20 years at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. He currently teaches the course at University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science as "Engineering Negotiation" and a Negotiations Course at Penn Law School.
Go to Profile#4281
Ellie Greenwich
#47760
Overall Influence
1940 - 2009 (69 years)
Eleanor Louise Greenwich was an American pop music singer, songwriter, and record producer. She wrote or co-wrote "Da Doo Ron Ron", "Be My Baby", "Maybe I Know", "Then He Kissed Me", "Do Wah Diddy Diddy", "Christmas ", "Hanky Panky", "Chapel of Love", "Leader of the Pack", and "River Deep – Mountain High", among others.
Go to Profile#4282
Howard Donald
#70080
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Howard Paul Donald is an English singer, songwriter, drummer, pianist, dancer and record producer. He is a member of English pop-group Take That. Donald was also judge on the German reality talent show Got to Dance from 2013 to 2014, during a Take That-hiatus.
Go to Profile#4283
Danny O'Brien
#47924
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Danny O'Brien is a British technology journalist and civil liberties activist. He is the International Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Career He wrote weekly columns for The Sunday Times and The Irish Times; and before that for The Guardian, and acted as a consultant in helping The Guardian formulate its online strategy. He worked for the UK edition of Wired, as well as for Channel 4 and the British ISP Virgin.net. Together with Dave Green, he founded and wrote the now-defunct email newsletter Need to Know and with whom he also co-wrote and co-presented the television show 40...
Go to Profile#4284
Julia Davis
#72797
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Julia Charlotte L. Davis is an English actress, comedian, director and writer. She is known for writing and starring in the BBC Three comedy Nighty Night and the comedies Hunderby and Camping , which she also directed. Davis has been noted by critics for creating boundary-pushing black comedy that centres female anti-hero characters.
Go to Profile#4285
Carl Lodewijk Ebeling
#83935
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Carl Lodewijk Ebeling was a Dutch linguist specializing in Slavic and Baltic languages. He was a professor at the University of Amsterdam from 1955 to 1985. Career Ebeling was born in Zaandam on 8 February 1924. He finished his in Slavic languages at the University of Amsterdam in 1947. He then moved to the United States and studied Slavic languages at Harvard University and obtained his PhD there under Roman Jakobson in 1950 with a thesis titled: The parts of the sentence in modern Russian: a structural analysis.
Go to Profile#4286
Daniel H. H. Ingalls Sr.
#19466
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls Sr. was the Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University. Early life and education Ingalls was born in New York City and raised in Virginia. He received his A.B. in 1936 at Harvard University, as a major in Greek and Latin. He also earned his A.M. in 1938 studying symbolic logic under Willard Van Orman Quine
Go to Profile#4287
Yasunori Mitsuda
#55644
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Yasunori Mitsuda is a Japanese composer and musician. He is best known for his work in video games, primarily for the Chrono, Xeno, Shadow Hearts, and Inazuma Eleven franchises, among various others. Mitsuda began composing music for his own games in high school, later attending a music college in Tokyo. While still a student, he was granted an intern position at the game development studio Wolf Team.
Go to Profile#4288
Masahiro Shinoda
#64060
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Masahiro Shinoda is a Japanese retired film director, originally associated with the Shochiku Studio, who came to prominence as part of the Japanese New Wave in the 1960s. Early life Shinoda attended Waseda University, where he studied theater and also participated in the Hakone Ekiden long-distance race.
Go to Profile#4289
Gary Anderson
#25437
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Gary Dean Anderson is an American graphic designer and architect. He is most well known as the designer of the recycling symbol, one of the most readily recognizable logos in the world. Gary Anderson's contribution to modern graphic design has been compared to those of early pioneering modernist graphic designers such as Herbert Bayer. His design for a symbol to embody the concept of recycling has been compared to iconic trademarks such as those for Coca-Cola and Nike. It has been called one of America's "most important design icons," it is one of the most recognizable graphic symbols in the world and has helped to encourage global recycling.
Go to Profile#4290
Daniel Lewis
#55479
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Daniel George Lewis was an American orchestral conductor and University Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California . Education Trained as a violinist, Lewis studied at the Claremont Graduate School and the Hochschule fuer Musik in Munich. He also spent time with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Go to Profile#4291
Ivor Wilks
#39157
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Professor Emeritus Ivor G. Wilks was a noted British Africanist and historian, specializing in Ghana. Considered one of the founders of modern African historiography, he was an authority on the Ashanti Empire in Ghana and the Welsh working-class movement in the 19th century. At the time of his death, he was Professor Emeritus of History at Northwestern University in Illinois, USA.
Go to Profile#4292
Jackie McLean
#57040
Overall Influence
1931 - 2006 (75 years)
John Lenwood "Jackie" McLean was an American jazz alto saxophonist, composer, bandleader, and educator, and is one of the few musicians to be elected to the DownBeat Hall of Fame in the year of their death.
Go to Profile#4293
Lew Soloff
#79090
Overall Influence
1944 - 2015 (71 years)
Lewis Michael Soloff was an American jazz trumpeter, composer, and actor. Biography From his birth place of New York City, United States, he studied trumpet at the Eastman School of Music and the Juilliard School. He worked with Blood, Sweat & Tears from 1968 until 1973. Prior to this he worked with Machito, Tony Scott, Maynard Ferguson, and Tito Puente.
Go to Profile#4294
Kevin Fox
#40214
Overall Influence
Kevin Fox is the user experience designer who created the interface for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, and Friendfeed. He was a co-founder of the Internet of Things startup Electric Imp. Since 2015 he has been the chief experience officer at Evan Prodromou's fuzzy.io.
Go to Profile#4295
Russell Gray
#35690
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Russell David Gray is a New Zealand evolutionary biologist and psychologist working on applying quantitative methods to the study of cultural evolution and human prehistory. In 2020, he became a co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Although originally trained in biology and psychology, Gray has become well known for his studies on the evolution of the Indo-European and Austronesian language families using computational phylogenetic methods.
Go to Profile#4296
Richard Buchanan
#33579
Overall Influence
Richard Buchanan is a professor of design, management, and information systems. Currently he teaches at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. Previously he was the head of the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. He serves as an editor of Design Issues and is a past President of the Design Research Society.
Go to Profile#4297
George Perle
#59111
Overall Influence
1915 - 2009 (94 years)
George Perle was an American composer and music theorist. As a composer, his music was largely atonal, using methods similar to the twelve-tone technique of the Second Viennese School. This serialist style, and atonality in general, was the subject of much of his theoretical writings. His 1962 book, Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern remains a standard text for 20th-century classical music theory. Among Perle's awards was the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Wind Quintet No. 4.
Go to Profile#4298
Kenneth W. Church
#113354
Overall Influence
#4299
Stuart Cunningham
#82918
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Stuart Cunningham is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Communication and Media Studies at QUT. Biography He is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Queensland University of Technology, and Former Director of the Australian Research Council ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. He was President of the Council of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in Australia from September 2006 to October 2008.
Go to Profile#4300
Lester James Peries
#65630
Overall Influence
1919 - 2018 (99 years)
Sri Lankabhimanya Lester James Peries was a Sri Lankan film director, screenwriter, and film producer. Considered as the father of Sri Lankan cinema, Lester worked as a filmmaker from 1949 to 2006, and was involved in over 28 films, including shortss and documentaries.
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