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,
#4951
Katarzyna Jaszczolt
#93645
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Katarzyna Malgorzata "Kasia" Jaszczolt is a Polish and British linguist and philosopher. She is currently Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy of Language at the University of Cambridge, and Professorial Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#4952
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
#62594
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a Japanese film director, screenwriter, film critic and a professor at Tokyo University of the Arts. Although he has worked in a variety of genres, Kurosawa is best known for his many contributions to the Japanese horror genre.
Go to Profile#4953
Marcia Bartusiak
#32218
Overall Influence
Marcia F. Bartusiak is an author, journalist, and Professor of the Practice Emeritus of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Trained in both communications and physics , she writes about the fields of astronomy and physics. Bartusiak has been published in National Geographic, Discover, Astronomy, Sky & Telescope, Science, Popular Science, World Book Encyclopedia, Smithsonian, and MIT Technology Review. The author of seven books, she is also a columnist for Natural History magazine.
Go to Profile#4954
Mireille Perron
#46924
Overall Influence
Mireille Perron is a Canadian visual artist, writer, scholar, and assistant professor at Alberta University of the Arts based in Calgary, Alberta. Born in Montreal, Quebec, Perron has been exhibiting widely across Canada, the United States, and Europe since 1982, and has published over 80 essays relating to visual art and craft and has been faculty at ACAD since 1990.
Go to Profile#4955
Dong-Suk Kang
#93019
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Dong-Suk Kang is a South Korean violinist. Biography Kang was born in Seoul, and played his first concert at the age of eight. He went to New York in 1967 to study at the Juilliard School and completed his education with Ivan Galamian at the Curtis Institute of Music. In 1971 he won the San Francisco Symphony Foundation Competition and the Merriweather Post Competition in Washington D.C.
Go to Profile#4956
Ilana Mushin
#120492
Overall Influence
Ilana Mushin is an Australian linguist. Mushin's research interests include the Garrawa language, discourse and stance. Mushin is currently an associate professor at The University of Queensland in the School of Languages and Cultures. She is an Associate Investigator with the Centre of Excellence "Dynamics of Language".
Go to Profile#4957
Mario Agnes
#104100
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Mario Agnes was an Italian journalist. In 1984 he was appointed editor-in-chief of L'Osservatore Romano by Pope John Paul II. He held the position until his retirement in 2007, at which point he was honored by Pope Benedict XVI.
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Carole Doyle Peel
#84787
Overall Influence
1934 - 2016 (82 years)
Carole Doyle Peel was an American visual artist, best known for her portraits and still life drawings in graphite, gouache, and watercolor. The work combines appreciation for classical and Old Master painting and drawing with contemporary subjects. Peel was Professor Emerita at California College of the Arts where she taught for forty six years.
Go to Profile#4959
William Strickland
#98820
Overall Influence
1914 - 1991 (77 years)
William Remsen Strickland was an American conductor and organist, noted for his lifelong promotion of American composers. Career Strickland was born in Defiance, Ohio, on January 25, 1914. As a young organist, he served at several prominent Episcopal churches in New York, including Christ Church , Calvary Church , and St. Bartholomew's Church .
Go to Profile#4960
Jane King
#90471
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Jane Kingseed, better known as Jane King , is an American journalist. King is the founder and CEO of LilaMax Media, which provides daily TV broadcast reports from the NASDAQ Marketsite. LilaMax Media launched January 21, 2014. King had previously been doing syndicated business and financial reports for Bloomberg News from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Those reports were discontinued on December 31, 2013. Before that, King covered local Business News for CNN's Newsource division, CNN Marketsource. Before joining CNN, King worked as a business reporter for WPVI-TV in Philadelphia and as an anchor and reporter at both WAND-TV in Decatur, Illinois.
Go to Profile#4961
Kurt Squire
#56290
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Kurt D. Squire is a professor at The University of California, Irvine, member of the Connected Learning Laboratory, and former director of the Games, Learning & Society Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, best known for his research into game design for education.
Go to Profile#4962
El DeBarge
#55319
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Eldra "El" Patrick DeBarge is an American singer, songwriter and musician. He was the focal point and primary lead singer of the family group DeBarge. Popular songs led by El DeBarge include "Time Will Reveal", "Who's Holding Donna Now", "Stay with Me", "All This Love", and "Rhythm of the Night".
Go to Profile#4963
Phoebe Waller-Bridge
#67399
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Phoebe Mary Waller-Bridge is an English actress, screenwriter and producer. As a creator, head writer, and star of the comedy series Fleabag , she won three Primetime Emmy Awards, two Golden Globess and a British Academy Television Award. She received further Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for writing and producing the spy thriller series Killing Eve .
Go to Profile#4964
Martin Ditcham
#68082
Overall Influence
Martin Ditcham is an English drummer/percussionist and songwriter. Ditcham is a prolific session musician, working with artists such as Henry Cow, Status Quo, Elton John, The Rolling Stones, Roger Daltrey, Sade, Mary Black, Nik Kershaw, Chris Rea, Tina Turner, Tom Robinson, Talk Talk, Everything but the Girl, Latin Quarter, Mark Knopfler, and The Waterboys. He resides in London, which is also his hometown.
Go to Profile#4965
Romain Garnier
#86303
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Romain Garnier is a French linguist who specializes in Latin and Indo-European linguistics. He has been an Assistant Professor since 2005 at the University of Limoges. He was the recipient of the Prix Émile Benveniste awarded in 2010 by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and became a member of the Institut Universitaire de France in 2013.
Go to Profile#4966
Jan Hajič
#103362
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Jan Hajič is a Czech computational linguist and the former director of the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics at the Charles University in Prague, from which he also holds a PhD degree. He specializes in empirical NLP, machine translation, speech recognition and creating of treebanks.
Go to Profile#4967
Judy Shepard-Kegl
#99195
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Judy Shepard-Kegl is an American linguist and University of Southern Maine professor, best known for their research on the Nicaraguan sign language. Education Kegl received a Bachelor of Arts with a major in anthropology and a Master of Arts in linguistics both in 1975 from Brown University. They received a Doctor of Philosophy in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985.
Go to Profile#4968
Ethan Johns
#68218
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Ethan Thomas Robert Johns is an English record producer, engineer, mixer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. Johns has worked with artists including Ryan Adams, Kings of Leon, Paul McCartney, Ray LaMontagne, Tom Jones, Kaiser Chiefs, Rufus Wainwright, The Boxer Rebellion, Crowded House, Turin Brakes, Lauren Hoffman, The Vaccines, Laura Marling, The Staves, and Crosby, Stills and Nash. In 2012, he won the Brit Award for Best British Producer.
Go to Profile#4969
Chris Stapleton
#34284
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Christopher Alvin Stapleton is an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and record producer. He was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and grew up in Staffordsville, Kentucky. In 2001, Stapleton moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to pursue an engineering degree from Vanderbilt University but dropped out to pursue his career in music. Subsequently, Stapleton signed a contract with Sea Gayle Music to write and publish his music.
Go to Profile#4970
David Lang
#63627
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
David Lang is an American composer living in New York City. Co-founder of the musical collective Bang on a Can, he was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music for The Little Match Girl Passion, which went on to win a 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance by Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices. Lang was nominated for an Academy Award for "Simple Song #3" from the film Youth.
Go to Profile#4971
Gil Rose
#85629
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Gil Rose is the founder and conductor of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project , founder and General-Artistic Director of Odyssey Opera, Artistic Director of Monadnock Music Festival, Professor of Practice at Northeastern University, and Executive Producer of the record label "BMOP/sound."
Go to Profile#4972
Luděk Navara
#43369
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Luděk Navara is a Czech non-fictional author, publicist, scenarist and historian. He graduated at Faculty of Civil Engineering of Brno University of Technology and later in history at Faculty of Philosophy of Masaryk University. Since 1995, he has been editor by newspaper MF Dnes. He cooperates also with Česká televize in Brno. His predominant coverage of history and journalism are crimes of Communism and Nazism, and flight and expulsion of Germans during and after WWII. In 2009, together with Miroslav Kasáček, he founded the Civic Association Memory, which maps communist totalitarianism in the Czech Republic, especially in the region of South Moravia.
Go to Profile#4973
Jane Torr
#120679
Overall Influence
Jane Torr is an Australian academic in the fields of early childhood language and literacy development in home and early childhood education and care settings. She is an honorary associate in the department of educational studies at Macquarie University, where she has been teaching and researching for over 30 years. Torr's research draws on systemic functional linguistic theory to explore the relationship between context and meaning in adult-child interactions, and the implications for children's learning. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, as well as p...
Go to Profile#4974
Sara Soskolne
#91519
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Sara Soskolne is a Canadian type designer best known for her work at Hoefler & Frere-Jones type foundry on typefaces such as Gotham. After ten years working in graphic design in Toronto, Soskolne attended the University of Reading where she received her MA in 2003. She has taught type design at Yale School of Art, the Book Arts Institute at Wells College, and New York's School of Visual Arts and the Cooper Type Certificate Program. Soskolne has written about the evolution of sans-serif lower case types in the 19th century.
Go to Profile#4975
Gunnstein Akselberg
#93700
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Gunnstein Akselberg is a Norwegian linguist and professor of Nordic linguistics at the University of Bergen. Akselberg was born in Voss. He studied at the University of Bergen and became a candidatus philologiæ in 1979. He received his doctorate in 1995 with a dissertation on sociolinguistic relations in the Municipality of Voss, titled Fenomenologisk de- konstruksjon av del labov-milroyske paradigmet i sosiolingvistikken: Ein analyse av sosiolingvistiske tilhove i Voss kommune . He served as dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Bergen from 2005 to 2009.
Go to Profile#4976
Lena Philipsson
#98906
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Maria Magdalena Philipsson , known by her stage name Lena Philipsson, is a Swedish singer, songwriter and media personality. She represented Sweden in the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest, finishing fifth.
Go to Profile#4977
Danny Seraphine
#51182
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Daniel Peter Seraphine is an American drummer, record producer, theatrical producer, and film producer. He is best known as the original drummer and a founding member of the rock band Chicago, a tenure which lasted from February 1967 to May 1990.
Go to Profile#4978
Henry Allan Gleason
#105448
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Henry Allan 'Al' Gleason Jr. was a linguist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. Career Gleason began studying at Hartford Seminary in 1938 and received his PhD in 1946. His 1961 text "Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics" was described in the journal Language as a suitable update to Leonard Bloomfield's well-known textbook Language. Gleason retired in 1982.
Go to Profile#4979
James G. Webster
#61602
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
James G. Webster is a professor and audience researcher at Northwestern University. Webster's publications have documented patterns of audience behavior, sometimes challenging widely held misconceptions. He has also made foundational contributions to audience theory and the methods of audience analysis.
Go to Profile#4980
Oneohtrix Point Never
#61197
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Daniel Lopatin , best known as Oneohtrix Point Never or OPN, is an American experimental electronic music producer, composer, singer, and songwriter. His music has utilized tropess from various musical genres and eras, sample-based composition, and complex MIDI production.
Go to Profile#4981
Hex Hector
#64485
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Hex Hector is an American music producer and remixer. Early life Hector was born Héctor Ortiz in Manhattan, New York, of a Puerto Rican mother and Cuban father. Career Hector is amusic producer and remixer.
Go to Profile#4982
Mary Murphy
#51632
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Mary Ann Murphy is an American ballroom dance champion, accredited dance judge, and a judge and choreographer on the Fox dance competition-reality show So You Think You Can Dance. Early life and education Mary Murphy was born in Lancaster, Ohio in an Irish family. She graduated from Northwest High School in Canal Fulton, Ohio. After graduating from Ohio University with a degree in physical education and a minor in modern dance, Murphy moved to Washington, D.C. to begin her career.
Go to Profile#4983
Rachel Mayberry
#81365
Overall Influence
Rachel I. Mayberry is a language scientist known for her research on the effects of age of acquisition on sign language acquisition among deaf individuals – research that has provided evidence for a critical period in first language acquisition. She is Professor of Linguistics at University of California, San Diego and director of the Multimodal Language Lab.
Go to Profile#4984
Joseph Jarman
#95466
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Joseph Jarman was an American jazz musician, composer, poet, and Shinshu Buddhist priest. He was one of the first members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
Go to Profile#4985
Moondog
#72506
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Louis Thomas Hardin , known professionally as Moondog, was an American composer, musician, performer, music theoretician, poet and inventor of musical instruments. Largely self-taught as a composer, his prolific work widely drew inspiration from jazz, classical, Native American music which he had become familiar with as a child, and Latin American music. His strongly rhythmic, contrapuntal pieces and arrangements later influenced composers of minimal music, in particular American composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
Go to Profile#4986
Snow
#71237
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Darrin Kenneth O'Brien , known by his stage name Snow, is a Canadian reggae musician, rapper and singer. His 1992 single "Informer" spent seven weeks at No. 1 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Early life Snow was born and raised in the North York district of Toronto, one of four children born to an Irish-Canadian cabdriver and a homemaker. Following his parents' divorce, he was raised by his mother in the Allenbury Gardens public housing project where, he says, he was fascinated with the gangster lifestyle, fell in with a tough Irish-Canadian group and became involved in a cycle of fighting, drinking and stealing.
Go to Profile#4987
Igor Linkov
#123317
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
#4988
Mike Porcaro
#57972
Overall Influence
1955 - 2015 (60 years)
Michael Joseph Porcaro was an American bass player known for his work with the rock band Toto. He retired from touring in 2007 as a result of being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis . He was the middle brother of Toto members Jeff Porcaro and Steve Porcaro. Their father was jazz drummer-percussionist Joe Porcaro.
Go to Profile#4989
H. Paul Grice
#123355
Overall Influence
#4990
Illinois Jacquet
#65371
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Jean-Baptiste Illinois Jacquet was an American jazz tenor saxophonist, best remembered for his solo on "Flying Home", critically recognized as the first R&B saxophone solo. Although he was a pioneer of the honking tenor saxophone that became a regular feature of jazz playing and a hallmark of early rock and roll, Jacquet was a skilled and melodic improviser, both on up-tempo tunes and ballads. He doubled on the bassoon, one of only a few jazz musicians to use the instrument.
Go to Profile#4991
Curt Smith
#66382
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Curt Smith is an American author, media host and columnist. In addition to work as a newspaper reporter, Smith was a political speechwriter until 1992 and a host of radio and television programs until 2002. He has written 17 books, including Voices of the Game, which covers the history of baseball broadcasting. Smith is a newspaper columnist in upstate New York and holds an academic appointment at the University of Rochester.
Go to Profile#4992
Peter Farrelly
#60340
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Peter John Farrelly is an American film director, screenwriter, producer and novelist. Along with his brother Bobby, the Farrelly brothers are mostly famous for directing and producing quirky comedy and romantic comedy films such as Dumb and Dumber; Shallow Hal; Me, Myself and Irene; There's Something About Mary; and the 2007 remake of The Heartbreak Kid. On his own in 2018 Farrelly co-wrote and directed the comedy-drama Green Book, which won the Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018. For his work on the film, he also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay ...
Go to Profile#4993
Michael Schneider
#83842
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Michael Schneider is a German flautist, recorder player, conductor and academic teacher. He is especially connected with later Baroque repertoire such as the works of Telemann and with early Classical repertoire such as the works of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and founded the orchestra La Stagione to perform and record such repertoire.
Go to Profile#4994
Yang Hyun-suk
#49165
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Yang Hyun-suk is a South Korean music executive, rapper, dancer, songwriter, and record producer. He rose to fame as a member of Seo Taiji and Boys during the 1990s. After the group disbanded, he founded and became the executive producer and chairman of YG Entertainment, the fourth-largest record company in South Korea.
Go to Profile#4995
Leo Kottke
#43136
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Leo Kottke is an acoustic guitarist. He is known for a fingerpicking style that draws on blues, jazz, and folk music, and for syncopated, polyphonic melodies. He has overcome a series of personal obstacles, including partial loss of hearing and a nearly career-ending bout with tendon damage in his right hand, to emerge as a widely recognized master of his instrument. He resides in the Minneapolis area with his family.
Go to Profile#4996
Chen Chi-kwan
#17458
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Chen Chi-kwan was a Taiwanese artist, architect, and educator, particularly for his paintings and architectural work for Tunghai University. He collaborated with I.M. Pei to design the Luce Memorial Chapel on the university campus, a hallmark of mid-century modernist architecture completed in 1963.
Go to Profile#4997
Jorge Telerman
#63582
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Jorge Telerman is an Argentine politician and journalist. He was the fourth Chief of Government of Buenos Aires City, replacing Aníbal Ibarra between 2006 and 2007. He was previously Vice-Chief of Government, National Secretary of Culture, and Ambassador.
Go to Profile#4998
Bob Neuwirth
#71306
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
Robert John Neuwirth was an American folk singer, songwriter, record producer, and visual artist. He was noted for being the road manager and associate of Bob Dylan, as well as the co-writer of Janis Joplin's hit song "Mercedes Benz".
Go to Profile#4999
Rebecca Voelker
#123539
Overall Influence
#5000
Terese Marie Mailhot
#59782
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Terese Marie Mailhot is a First Nation Canadian writer, journalist, memoirist, and teacher. Early life and education Mailhot grew up in Seabird Island, British Columbia, on the Seabird Island First Nation reservation. Her mother, Wahzinak, was a healer, social worker, poet, and radical activist, and her father, Ken Mailhot, was an artist. Her father had been incarcerated and was an alcoholic who molested Mailhot when she was young, and was often violent. Mailhot's mother had a letter-writing relationship with Salvador Agron, and shared the correspondence with musician Paul Simon, who used them for his Broadway musical, The Capeman.
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