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,
#4701
Edgar Froese
#52097
Overall Influence
1944 - 2015 (71 years)
Edgar Willmar Froese was a German musical artist and electronic music pioneer, best known for founding the electronic music group Tangerine Dream in 1967. Froese was the only continuous member of the group until his death. Although his solo and group recordings prior to 2003 name him as "Edgar Froese", his later solo albums bear the name "Edgar W. Froese".
Go to Profile#4702
Susan Strasberg
#65534
Overall Influence
1938 - 1999 (61 years)
Susan Elizabeth Strasberg was an American stage, film, and television actress. Thought to be the next Hepburn-type ingenue, she was nominated for a Tony Award at age 18, playing the title role in The Diary of Anne Frank. She appeared on the covers of LIFE and Newsweek in 1955. A close friend of Marilyn Monroe and Richard Burton, she wrote two best-selling tell-all books. Her later career primarily consisted of slasher and horror films, followed by TV roles, by the 1980s.
Go to Profile#4703
Paul Raven
#64520
Overall Influence
1961 - 2007 (46 years)
Paul Vincent Raven was an English bassist best known for his work in the post-punk group Killing Joke. He later played in the industrial music bands Prong, Ministry, and Zilch. Biography Raven was born on 16 January 1961 in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire. He was the son of folk musician Jon Raven, and nephew of author Michael Raven. His early musical career included stints in Neon Hearts, who released three singles from 1977 to 1979 and the album Popular Music in 1979, and the short-lived 1982 glam rock band, Kitsch, which also included Rook Randle and Tyla, before he would go on to larger success with his band, Dogs D'Amour.
Go to Profile#4704
Cathrine Fabricius Hansen
#88620
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen is a Danish-born Norwegian Germanist. She is a professor of German studies at the University of Oslo; she originally taught in the Department of Germanic Studies, which is now part of the merged Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages.
Go to Profile#4705
Aisin-Gioro Ulhicun
#71546
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Aisin-Gioro Ulhicun is a Chinese linguist of Manchu ethnicity who is known for her studies of the Manchu, Jurchen and Khitan languages and scripts. She is also known as a historian of the Liao and Jin dynasties. Her works include a grammar of Manchu , a dictionary of Jurchen , and a study of Khitan memorial inscriptions , as well as various studies on the phonology and grammar of the Khitan language.
Go to Profile#4706
Jaroslav Rudnyckyj
#69186
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
Jaroslav-Bohdan Antonovych Rudnyckyj was a Ukrainian-Canadian linguist and lexicographer with a specialty in etymology and onomastics, folklorist, bibliographer, travel writer, and publicist. He was one of the pioneers of Slavic Studies in Canada and one of the founding fathers of Canadian "Multiculturalism". In scholarship, he is best known for his incomplete two volume Etymological Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language , his Ukrainian-German Dictionary , and his extensive study of the term and name "Ukraine" .
Go to Profile#4707
Tsai Ming-liang
#60663
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Tsai Ming-liang is a Malaysian filmmaker based in Taiwan. Tsai has written and directed 11 feature films, many short films, and television films. He is one of the most celebrated "Second New Wave" film directors of Taiwanese cinema. His films have been acclaimed worldwide and have won numerous awards at festivals. In 1994, Tsai won the Golden Lion at the 51st Venice International Film Festival for the film Vive L'Amour.
Go to Profile#4708
Bette Midler
#55113
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Bette Midler is an American singer, actress, comedian and author. Throughout her career, which spans over five decades, Midler has received numerous accolades, including four Golden Globe Awards, three Grammy Awards, three Primetime Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards and a Kennedy Center Honor, in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards and a British Academy Film Award.
Go to Profile#4709
Mordkhe Schaechter
#68508
Overall Influence
1927 - 2007 (80 years)
Itsye Mordkhe Schaechter was a leading Yiddish linguist, writer, and educator who spent a lifetime studying, standardizing and teaching the language. Schaechter, whose passion for Yiddish dated to his boyhood in Romania, dedicated his life to reclaiming Yiddish as a living language for the descendants of its first speakers, the Ashkenazic Jewry of central and eastern Europe. He was also the third editor of Afn Shvel , a Yiddish magazine.
Go to Profile#4710
Emily Falk
#50697
Overall Influence
Emily B. Falk is an American psychologist, neuroscientist, and professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, holding secondary appointments in psychology and marketing.
Go to Profile#4711
Hideo Nakata
#73423
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Hideo Nakata is a Japanese filmmaker. Life and career Nakata was born in Okayama, Japan. He is most familiar to Western audiences for his work on Japanese horror films such as Ring , Ring 2 and Dark Water . Several of these were remade in English as The Ring , Dark Water , and The Ring Two.
Go to Profile#4712
George Rochberg
#76823
Overall Influence
1918 - 2005 (87 years)
George Rochberg was an American composer of contemporary classical music. Long a serial composer, Rochberg abandoned the practice following the death of his teenage son in 1964; he claimed this compositional technique had proved inadequate to express his grief and had found it empty of expressive intent. By the 1970s, Rochberg's use of tonal passages in his music had provoked controversy among critics and fellow composers. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania until 1983, Rochberg also served as chairman of its music department until 1968. He became the first Annenberg Professor of th...
Go to Profile#4713
Lenny Pickett
#59376
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Lenny Pickett is an American saxophonist and musical director of the Saturday Night Live band. From 1973 to 1981 he was a member of the band Tower of Power. He is known for his skill in the altissimo register , which can be heard during the opening credits of Saturday Night Live.
Go to Profile#4714
Henry H. Carter
#100703
Overall Influence
1905 - 2001 (96 years)
Henry Hare Carter was an American linguistics professor, commander in the US Naval Reserve, and translator. Among his teaching specialties were Spanish literature; the history of the Spanish language; and Spanish poetry, drama, and prose. He spoke seven languages.
Go to Profile#4715
Ian Levine
#73305
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Ian Geoffrey Levine is a British songwriter, producer, and DJ. A moderniser of Northern soul music in the UK, and a developer of the style of hi-NRG, he has written and produced records with sales totalling over 40 million. Levine is known as a fan of the long-running television show Doctor Who.
Go to Profile#4716
Eric Gale
#70847
Overall Influence
1938 - 1994 (56 years)
Eric Gale was an American jazz and R&B guitarist. Early life and career Born in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York, Gale grew up in a diverse household. His paternal grandfather was from Yorkshire, England. He had extended family in Barbados and Venezuela. Gale often visited the U.K. and Venezuela as an adolescent, which influenced his style into adulthood. He was fluent in Spanish.
Go to Profile#4717
Christa Agnes Tuczay
#74115
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Christa Agnes Tuczay is an Austrian University professor in Medieval German Language and Literature at the Institute of German Studies at the University of Vienna. Tuczay is well known for her research on narratives and fairytales in the Middle Ages.
Go to Profile#4718
Gary Peacock
#77759
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Gary George Peacock was an American jazz double bassist. He recorded a dozen albums under his own name, and also performed and recorded with major jazz figures such as avant garde saxophonist Albert Ayler, pianists Bill Evans, Paul Bley and Marilyn Crispell, and as a part of Keith Jarrett’s “Standards Trio” with drummer Jack DeJohnette. The trio existed for over thirty years, and recorded over twenty albums together. DeJohnette once stated that he admired Peacock's "sound, choice of notes, and, above all, the buoyancy of his playing." Marilyn Crispell called Peacock a "sensitive musician with...
Go to Profile#4719
Michael Maloney
#82317
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Michael Maloney is an English actor. Life and career Born in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, Maloney's first television appearance was as Peter Barkworth's teenage son in the 1979 drama series Telford's Change.
Go to Profile#4720
Paddy Moloney
#73139
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
Paddy Moloney was an Irish musician, composer, and record producer. He co-founded and led the Irish musical group the Chieftains, playing on all of their 44 albums. He was particularly associated with the revival of the uilleann pipes.
Go to Profile#4721
Joe Flaherty
#57373
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Joseph Flaherty is an American actor, writer, and comedian. He is best known for his work on the Canadian sketch comedy SCTV from 1976 to 1984 , and as Harold Weir on Freaks and Geeks, and for his role as Donald the heckler in Happy Gilmore .
Go to Profile#4722
Phil Everly
#68182
Overall Influence
1939 - 2014 (75 years)
Phillip Everly was an American musician, who was one half of the duo The Everly Brothers alongside his older brother Don. Early life Phil was born in Chicago in 1939 to Isaac Milford "Ike" Everly, Jr. , a guitar player, and Margaret Embry Everly .
Go to Profile#4723
Barry Ulanov
#40154
Overall Influence
1918 - 2000 (82 years)
Baruch "Barry" Ulanov was an American writer, perhaps best known as a jazz critic. Background Barry Ulanov was born in Manhattan, New York City. He received early instruction on the violin from his father Nathan who was concertmaster for Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra. He ceased playing the instrument after a car crash in which he broke both wrists. He studied at Columbia University taking his BA there in 1939. While at Columbia, he joined the Boar's Head Society and wrote about jazz and also attended jazz concerts, including an early performance of "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holida...
Go to Profile#4724
Bill Smith
#91857
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
William Overton Smith was an American clarinetist and composer. He worked extensively in modern classical music, third stream and jazz, and was perhaps best known for having played with pianist Dave Brubeck intermittently from the 1940s to the early 2000s. Smith frequently recorded jazz under the name Bill Smith, but his classical compositions are credited under the name William O. Smith.
Go to Profile#4725
Genevieve Oswald
#65918
Overall Influence
1921 - 2019 (98 years)
Genevieve Mary Oswald was an American dance scholar and archivist, founder and curator of the New York Public Library's dance archive. Early life Oswald was born in Buffalo, New York, the daughter of Charles Oswald and Jeannette Glenn Oswald. Her father worked at a shipping company. She earned a bachelor's degree in music at the North Carolina College for Women in 1943.
Go to Profile#4726
K. Viswanath
#47895
Overall Influence
1930 - 2023 (93 years)
Kasinadhuni Viswanath , popularly known as "Kalatapasvi", was an Indian film director, screenwriter, lyricist and actor. One of the greatest auteurs of Telugu cinema, he received international recognition for his works, and is known for blending parallel cinema with mainstream cinema. He was honored with the "Prize of the Public" at the "Besançon Film Festival of France" in 1981. In 1992, he received the Andhra Pradesh state Raghupathi Venkaiah Award, and the civilian honour Padma Shri for his contribution to the field of arts. In 2017, he was conferred with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, the hig...
Go to Profile#4727
Annie-B Parson
#50012
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Annie-B Parson is an American choreographer, dancer, and director based in Brooklyn, New York. Parson is notable for her work in dance/theater, post-modern dance, and art pop music. Parson is the Artistic Director of Brooklyn's Big Dance Theater, which she founded with Molly Hickok and her husband, Paul Lazar. She is also well known for her collaborations with Mikhail Baryshnikov, David Byrne, David Bowie, St. Vincent, Laurie Anderson, Jonathan Demme, Ivo van Hove, Sarah Ruhl, Lucas Hnath, Wendy Whelan, David Lang, Esperanza Spalding, Mark Dion, Salt ‘n Pepa, Nico Muhly, and the Martha Graham ...
Go to Profile#4728
Douglas A. Blackmon
#16372
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Douglas A. Blackmon is an American writer and journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
Go to Profile#4729
Lucy Jones
#92326
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Lucy Jones is a British painter and printmaker. She was born with cerebral palsy. Jones is from London and lives in Ludlow, Shropshire. Career Jones was educated at the King Alfred School, London and studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art between 1975 and 1977. From 1976 to 1979 Jones studied at the Camberwell School of Art and then at the Royal College of Arts from 1979 until 1982. In 1982 she won the Prix de Rome prize which allowed her to study at the British School in Rome for two years. Jones had her first solo exhibition, at the Flowers Gallery, in 1987. She has exhibited her work extensively in the UK and abroad.
Go to Profile#4730
Brenda Laurel
#21680
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Brenda Laurel is an American interaction designer, video game designer, and researcher. She is an advocate for diversity and inclusiveness in video games, a "pioneer in developing virtual reality", a public speaker, and an academic.
Go to Profile#4731
Ali Akbar Khan
#53688
Overall Influence
1922 - 2009 (87 years)
Ali Akbar Khan was an Indian Hindustani classical musician of the Maihar gharana, known for his virtuosity in playing the sarod. Trained as a classical musician and instrumentalist by his father, Allauddin Khan, he also composed numerous classical ragas and film scores. He established a music school in Calcutta in 1956, and the Ali Akbar College of Music in 1967, which moved with him to the United States and is now based in San Rafael, California, with a branch in Basel, Switzerland.
Go to Profile#4732
Jean-Yves Thibaudet
#94185
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Jean-Yves Thibaudet is a French pianist. Early life and education Thibaudet was born in Lyon, France, to non-professional musical parents. His father played the violin, and his mother, of German origin and a somewhat accomplished pianist herself, introduced the instrument to him.
Go to Profile#4733
Diane Lillo-Martin
#96487
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Diane Lillo-Martin is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. She is currently the Director of the university's Cognitive Sciences Program as well as its Coordinator of American Sign Language Studies. She spent 12 years as Head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut.
Go to Profile#4734
Marcus Chown
#28006
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Marcus Chown is a science writer, journalist and broadcaster, currently cosmology consultant for New Scientist magazine. Biography He graduated from the Queen Mary University of London in 1980 with a Bachelor of Science in physics . In 1982 he graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a Master of Science in astrophysics. Chown studied under Richard Feynman at the California Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#4735
Thomas Sancton Sr.
#71136
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Thomas Sancton was an American novelist and journalist. Biography Sancton was born in the Panama Canal Zone. His family later returned to New Orleans, Louisiana, where he was raised and where he resided for most of his adult life. His two novels, By Starlight and Count Roller Skates, are set in Louisiana. Sancton graduated from Tulane University in 1935 and became a reporter at The Times-Picayune. He studied at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow in 1941 and 1942. He wrote extensively on civil rights and the South while serving as the managing editor of The New Republic and, later, as Washington editor of The Nation.
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Jake Heggie
#88871
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Jake Heggie is an American composer of opera, vocal, orchestral, and chamber music. He is best known for his operas and art songs as well as for his collaborations with internationally renowned performers and writers.
Go to Profile#4737
Yasutake Funakoshi
#46148
Overall Influence
1912 - 2002 (90 years)
was a Japanese sculptor and painter. Life and work Funakoshi was born in what is now the town of Ichinohe in the Iwate Prefecture in northern Honshū. Later he attended middle school in Morioka where the painter Shunsuke Matsumoto was among his schoolmates. In 1939 Funakoshi joined the Shin Seisaku Kyōkai and helped to organize its sculpture division. Together with Matsumoto he held a shared exhibition in Morioka in 1941. Both artist remained friends until Matsumoto's early death in 1948.
Go to Profile#4738
Eckhard Bick
#101461
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Eckhard Bick is a German-bornborn Esperantist who studied medicine in Bonn but now works as a researcher in computational linguistics. He was active in an Esperanto youth group in Bonn and in the Germana Esperanto-Junularo, a nationwide Esperanto youth federation. Since his marriage to a Danish woman he and his family live in Denmark.
Go to Profile#4739
Mark Mazzetti
#37339
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Mark Mazzetti is an American journalist who works for the New York Times. He is currently a Washington Investigative Correspondent for the Times. Life Mazzetti was born in Washington, D.C. He attended Regis High School in New York City. He graduated from Duke University with a bachelor's degree in Public Policy and History. Later, he earned a master's degree in history from Oxford University.
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Michele Weldon
#75880
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Michele Weldon is an author, journalist, keynote speaker, and assistant professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. Education Michele Weldon received both her BSJ and MSJ at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Go to Profile#4741
Veneeta Dayal
#98444
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Veneeta Dayal is an American linguist. She is currently the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics at Yale University. Education and research Dayal was born in India. She received a BA, MA, and M. Phil in English Literature from Delhi University. She earned a PhD in Linguistics from Cornell University in 1991, under the supervision of Gennaro Chierchia. Before taking up a position at Yale, she was on the faculty of Rutgers University, where she served as Department chair from 2005-2008 and Acting Dean of Humanities in the School of Arts and Sciences from 2008-2009.
Go to Profile#4742
Mike Westbrook
#100674
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Michael John David Westbrook is an English jazz pianist, composer, and writer of orchestrated jazz pieces. He is married to the vocalist, librettist and painter Kate Westbrook. Early work Mike Westbrook was born in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England, and grew up in Torquay. After a spell in accountancy and his National Service he went to art school, studying painting, in Plymouth. There he also began his first bands in 1958, soon joined by such musicians as John Surman, Lou Gare and Keith Rowe.
Go to Profile#4743
Julius Rudel
#96329
Overall Influence
1921 - 2014 (93 years)
Julius Rudel was an Austrian-born American opera and orchestra conductor. He was born in Vienna and was a student at the city's Academy of Music. He emigrated to the United States at the age of 17 in 1938 after the country was annexed by Germany.
Go to Profile#4744
Kai Kupferschmidt
#119812
Overall Influence
#4745
Shin Sang-ok
#75573
Overall Influence
1926 - 2006 (80 years)
Shin Sang-ok was a South Korean filmmaker with more than 100 producer and 70 director credits to his name. His best-known films were made in the 1950s and 60s, many of them collaborations with his wife Choi Eun-hee, when he was known as "The Prince of South Korean Cinema". He received posthumously the Gold Crown Cultural Medal, the country's top honor for an artist.
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Del Close
#59963
Overall Influence
1934 - 1999 (65 years)
Del Close was an American actor, writer, and teacher who coached many of the best-known comedians and comic actors of the late twentieth century. In addition to an acting career in television and film, he was one of the influences on modern improvisational theater. Close is co-founder of the ImprovOlympic .
Go to Profile#4747
Stephen C. Sergio Netherlands). Language And Cognition Grou Levinson
#119868
Overall Influence
#4748
Henry Doktorski
#91492
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Henry Doktorski III is an American accordionist, organist and author. He has performed on accordion with cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, violinists Gil Shaham and Itzhak Perlman during concerts and recording sessions with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under conductors Lorin Maazel, John Williams, Mariss Jansons, Julius Rudel, David Del Tredici and Howard Shore.
Go to Profile#4749
Julia Preston
#69824
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Julia Preston is an American journalist and contributing writer for The Marshall Project, focusing on immigration. Preston was a foreign and national correspondent and an editor for The New York Times for 21 years, from 1995 through 2016. She was a member of the New York Times team, of four reporters and an editor, that won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1998, "for its revealing series that profiled the corrosive effects of drug corruption in Mexico." She is the co-author, with Samuel Dillon, of Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy, "a sweeping account of a nation's st...
Go to Profile#4750
Adolf Frisé
#47137
Overall Influence
1910 - 2003 (93 years)
Adolf Frisé was a German journalist, author and editor. He was the editor of the literary works of the Austrian philosophical writer Robert Musil. Life Frisé grew up in Viersen in the Lower Rhine region where he attended the Erasmus von Rotterdam Gymnasium. The German writer and historian of culture Gustav René Hocke was a friend and fellow student there. After completing his secondary education, he went on to study at Munich, Berlin and Heidelberg. In Heidelberg he studied under Friedrich Gundolf and took his doctorate in German Studies in 1932. He then worked as a freelance writer in Berlin...
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