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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List of the most influential people in Communications,

#1

Noam Chomsky

#5

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

#2

Michael Halliday

Michael Halliday

#502

Overall Influence

1925 - 2018 (93 years)

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday was a British linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistics model of language. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar. Halliday described language as a semiotic system, "not in the sense of a system of signs, but a systemic resource for meaning". For Halliday, language was a "meaning potential"; by extension, he defined linguistics as the study of "how people exchange meanings by 'languaging'". Halliday described himself as a generalist, meaning that he tried "to look at language ...

#3

George Lakoff

#81

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

George Philip Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena.

#4

Morris Halle

#468

Overall Influence

1923 - 2018 (95 years)

Morris Halle, Pinkowitz , was a Latvian-born American linguist who was an Institute Professor, and later professor emeritus, of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The father of "modern phonology", he was best known for his pioneering work in generative phonology, having written "On Accent and Juncture in English" in 1956 with Noam Chomsky and Fred Lukoff and The Sound Pattern of English in 1968 with Chomsky. He also co-authored the earliest theory of generative metrics.

#5

Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite

#130

Overall Influence

1916 - 2009 (93 years)

Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. was an American broadcast journalist who served as anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years, from 1962 to 1981. During the 1960s and 1970s, he was often cited as "the most trusted man in America" after being so named in an opinion poll. Cronkite received numerous honors including two Peabody Awards, a George Polk Award, an Emmy Award and in 1981 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter.

#6

William Labov

#615

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

William Labov is an American linguist widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics.

#7

Akira Kurosawa

#127

Overall Influence

1910 - 1998 (88 years)

Akira Kurosawa was a Japanese filmmaker and painter who directed 30 films in a career spanning over five decades. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. Kurosawa displayed a bold, dynamic style, strongly influenced by Western cinema yet distinct from it; he was involved with all aspects of film production.

#8

Stephen Krashen

#945

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Stephen D. Krashen is an American linguist, educational researcher and activist, who is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Southern California. He moved from the linguistics department to the faculty of the School of Education in 1994.

#9

Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald

#111

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Glenn Edward Greenwald is an American journalist, author, and former lawyer. In 1996, Greenwald founded a law firm concentrating on First Amendment litigation. He began blogging on national security issues in October 2005, when he was becoming increasingly concerned with what he viewed as attacks on civil liberties by the George W. Bush administration in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. He became a vocal critic of the Iraq War and has maintained a critical position of American foreign policy.

#10

Zellig Harris

#648

Overall Influence

1909 - 1992 (83 years)

Zellig Sabbettai Harris was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language. These developments from the first 10 years of his career were published within the first 25. His contributions in the subsequent 35 years of his career include transfer grammar, string analysis , elementary sentence-differences , algebraic structures in language, operator grammar, sublanguage grammar, a theory...

#11

Elia Kazan

#139

Overall Influence

1909 - 2003 (94 years)

Elias Kazantzoglou , known as Elia Kazan , was an American film and theatre director, producer, screenwriter and actor, described by The New York Times as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history".

#12

John McWhorter

#758

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

John Hamilton McWhorter V is an American linguist with a specialty in creole languages, sociolects, and Black English. He is currently an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, where he also teaches American studies and music history. He has authored a number of books on race relations and African-American culture, acting as political commentator especially in his New York Times newsletter.

#13

Tom Wolfe

#293

Overall Influence

1930 - 2018 (88 years)

Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was an American author and journalist widely known for his association with New Journalism, a style of news writing and journalism developed in the 1960s and 1970s that incorporated literary techniques. Much of Wolfe's work was satirical and centred on the counterculture of the 1960s and issues related to class, social status, and the lifestyles of the economic and intellectual elites of New York City.

#14

David Crystal

#1287

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

David Crystal, is a British linguist who works on the linguistics of English language. Crystal studied English at University College London and has lectured at Bangor University and the University of Reading. He was awarded an OBE in 1995 and a Fellowship of the British Academy in 2000. Crystal is a proponent of Internet linguistics and has also been involved in Shakespeare productions, providing guidance on original pronunciation.

#15

Joseph Greenberg

#1303

Overall Influence

1915 - 2001 (86 years)

Joseph Harold Greenberg was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages. Life Early life and education Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915, to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York. His first great interest was music. At the age of 14, he gave a piano concert in Steinway Hall. He continued to play the piano frequently throughout his life.

#16

Lyle Campbell

#1520

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Lyle Richard Campbell is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of indigenous American languages, especially those of Central America, and on historical linguistics in general. Campbell is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

#17

Paul McCartney

#292

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Sir James Paul McCartney is an English singer, songwriter and musician who gained worldwide fame with the Beatles, for whom he played bass guitar and shared primary songwriting and lead vocal duties with John Lennon. One of the most successful composers and performers of all time, McCartney is known for his melodic approach to bass-playing, versatile and wide tenor vocal range, and musical eclecticism, exploring genres ranging from pre–rock and roll pop to classical, ballads, and electronica. His songwriting partnership with Lennon is the most successful in modern music history.

#18

Edward S. Herman

#342

Overall Influence

1925 - 2017 (92 years)

Edward Samuel Herman was an American economist, media scholar and social critic. Herman is known for his media criticism, in particular the propaganda model hypothesis he developed with Noam Chomsky, a frequent co-writer. He held an appointment as Professor Emeritus of finance at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. He also taught at Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

#19

Julia Kristeva

#105

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She has taught at Columbia University, and is now a professor emerita at Université Paris Cité. The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arend...

#20

John C. Wells

#1873

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

John Christopher Wells is a British phonetician and Esperantist. Wells is a professor emeritus at University College London, where until his retirement in 2006 he held the departmental chair in phonetics. He is known for his work on the Esperanto language and his invention of the standard lexical sets and the X-SAMPA phonetic script system.

#21

William Friedkin

William Friedkin

#434

Overall Influence

1935 - 2023 (88 years)

William David Friedkin was an American film, television and opera director, producer, and screenwriter who was closely identified with the "New Hollywood" movement of the 1970s. Beginning his career in documentaries in the early 1960s, he is best known for his crime thriller film The French Connection , which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and the horror film The Exorcist , which earned him another Academy Award nomination for Best Director.

#22

Bob Woodward

#119

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Robert Upshur Woodward is an American investigative journalist. He started working for The Washington Post as a reporter in 1971 and now holds the title of associate editor. While a reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, Woodward teamed up with Carl Bernstein, and the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal. These scandals led to numerous government investigations and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon. The work of Woodward and Bernstein was called "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time" by longtime journalism figure Gene Rober...

#23

Dan Rather

#339

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Daniel Irvin Rather Jr. is an American journalist, commentator, and former national evening news anchor. He began his career in Texas, becoming a national name after his reporting saved thousands of lives during Hurricane Carla in September 1961. Rather spontaneously created the first radar weather report by overlaying a transparent map over a radar image of Hurricane Carla. In his first national broadcast, he helped initiate the successful evacuation of 350,000 people. He reported on some of the most significant events of the modern age, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, 9/1...

#24

Ghil'ad Zuckermann

Ghil'ad Zuckermann

#924

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Ghil'ad Zuckermann is an Israeli-born language revivalist and linguist who works in contact linguistics, lexicology and the study of language, culture and identity. Zuckermann is Professor of Linguistics and Chair of Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He is the president of the Australian Association for Jewish Studies.

#25

Gloria Steinem

#118

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Gloria Marie Steinem is an American journalist and social-political activist who emerged as a nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

#26

Tom Brokaw

#347

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Thomas John Brokaw is an American retired network television journalist and author. He first served as the co-anchor of The Today Show from 1976 to 1981 with Jane Pauley, then as the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News for 22 years . In the previous decade he served as a weekend anchor for the program from 1973 to 1976. He is the only person to have hosted all three major NBC News programs: The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, and, briefly, Meet the Press. He formerly held a special correspondent post for NBC News.

#27

Barbara Walters

Barbara Walters

#144

Overall Influence

1929 - 2022 (93 years)

Barbara Jill Walters was an American broadcast journalist and television personality. Known for her interviewing ability and popularity with viewers, she appeared as a host of numerous television programs, including Today, the ABC Evening News, 20/20, and The View. Walters was a working journalist from 1951 until her retirement in 2015. Walters was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1989, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the NATAS in 2000 and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2007.

#28

Kingsley Amis

#403

Overall Influence

1922 - 1995 (73 years)

Sir Kingsley William Amis was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social and literary criticism. He is best known for satirical comedies such as Lucky Jim , One Fat Englishman , Ending Up , Jake's Thing and The Old Devils .

#29

Steven Pinker

#93

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Cognitive scientist, linguist, and author, Steven Pinker currently holds the title of Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Previously, Pinker taught at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pinker earned his bachelor’s in psychology from McGill University in 1976, and his Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1979 at Harvard. Pinker is recognized for his interdisciplinary work, combining psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics, and is a vocal proponent of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Though he has sev...

#30

Tom Shippey

#489

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Thomas Alan Shippey is a British medievalist, a retired scholar of Middle and Old English literature as well as of modern fantasy and science fiction. He is considered one of the world's leading academic experts on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien about whom he has written several books and many scholarly papers. His book The Road to Middle-Earth has been called "the single best thing written on Tolkien".

#31

Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson

#676

Overall Influence

1937 - 2005 (68 years)

Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author who founded the gonzo journalism movement. He rose to prominence with the publication of Hell's Angels , a book for which he spent a year living and riding with the Hells Angels motorcycle club to write a first-hand account of their lives and experiences.

#32

Dell Hymes

#521

Overall Influence

1927 - 2009 (82 years)

Dell Hathaway Hymes was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist who established disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic study of language use. His research focused upon the languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics". The terminological shift draws attention to the field's grounding in anthropology rather than in what, by that time, had already become an autonomous discipline . In 1972 Hymes founded the journal Language in Society ...

#33

William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs

#203

Overall Influence

1914 - 1997 (83 years)

William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibit...

#34

William L. Shirer

William L. Shirer

#621

Overall Influence

1904 - 1993 (89 years)

William Lawrence Shirer was an American journalist and war correspondent. He wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a history of Nazi Germany that has been read by many and cited in scholarly works for more than 50 years. Originally a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the International News Service, Shirer was the first reporter hired by Edward R. Murrow for what became a CBS radio team of journalists known as "Murrow's Boys". He became known for his broadcasts from Berlin, from the rise of the Nazi dictatorship through the first year of World War II . Along with Murrow, ...

#35

Ian MacDonald

#539

Overall Influence

1948 - 2003 (55 years)

Ian MacCormick was an English music critic, journalist and author, best known for both Revolution in the Head, his critical history of the Beatles which borrowed techniques from art historians, and The New Shostakovich, a study of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

#36

Bob Dylan

#230

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter. Generally regarded as one of the greatest songwriters ever, Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture over his 60 year career. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin' became anthems for the civil rights and antiwar movements. His lyrics during this period incorporated political, social, philosophical, and literary influences, defying pop music conventions and appealing to the burgeoning counterculture.

#37

Charlie Rose

#288

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Charles Peete Rose Jr. is an American former television journalist and talk show host. From 1991 to 2017, he was the host and executive producer of the talk show Charlie Rose on PBS and Bloomberg LP.

#38

Mike Leigh

#974

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Mike Leigh is an English writer-director with a career spanning film, theatre and television. He has received numerous accolades, including prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, the Venice International Film Festival, three BAFTA Awards, and nominations for seven Academy Awards. He also received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2014, and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 1993 Birthday Honours for services to the film industry.

#39

Jeremy Clarkson

Jeremy Clarkson

#286

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Jeremy Charles Robert Clarkson is an English television presenter, journalist, and writer who specialises in motoring. He is best known for the motoring programmes Top Gear and The Grand Tour alongside Richard Hammond and James May. He also currently writes weekly columns for The Sunday Times and The Sun. Since 2018, Clarkson has hosted the ITV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.

#40

Dr. Seuss

#255

Overall Influence

1904 - 1991 (87 years)

Theodor Seuss Geisel was an American children's author and cartoonist. He is known for his work writing and illustrating more than 60 books under the pen name Dr. Seuss . His work includes many of the most popular children's books of all time, selling over 600 million copies and being translated into more than 20 languages by the time of his death.

#41

Elton John

#406

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Sir Elton Hercules John is a British singer, pianist and composer. Acclaimed by critics and musicians, particularly for his work during the 1970s and for his lasting impact on the music industry, his music and showmanship have had a significant impact on popular music. His songwriting partnership with lyricist Bernie Taupin is one of the most successful in history.

#42

Matt Groening

#147

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Matthew Abram Groening is an American cartoonist, writer, producer, and animator. He is best known as the creator of the comic strip Life in Hell and the television series The Simpsons , Futurama , and Disenchantment . The Simpsons is the longest-running U.S. primetime television series in history and the longest-running U.S. animated series and sitcom.

#43

Naomi Campbell

#287

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Naomi Elaine Campbell is an English model. Beginning her career at the age of 8, Campbell was one of six models of her generation declared supermodels by the fashion industry and the international press. She was the first black woman to appear on the covers of Time and Vogue France.

#44

Janet Maslin

#217

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Janet R. Maslin is an American journalist, best known as a film and literary critic for The New York Times. She served as a Times film critic from 1977 to 1999 and as a book critic from 2000 to 2015. In 2000, Maslin helped found the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York. She is president of its board of directors.

#45

John Pilger

#796

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

John Richard Pilger is an Australian journalist, writer, scholar, and documentary filmmaker. He has mainly been based in Britain since 1962. He has also been a visiting professor at Cornell University in New York.

#46

Bill Moyers

#169

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Bill Moyers is an American journalist and political commentator. Under the Johnson administration he served from 1965 to 1967 as the eleventh White House Press Secretary. He was a director of the Council on Foreign Relations, from 1967 to 1974. He also worked as a network TV news commentator for ten years. Moyers has been extensively involved with public broadcasting, producing documentaries and news journal programs, and has won numerous awards and honorary degrees for his investigative journalism and civic activities. He has become well known as a trenchant critic of the corporately structured U.S.

#47

William Stokoe

#3715

Overall Influence

1919 - 2000 (81 years)

William Clarence Stokoe Jr. was an American linguist and a long-time professor at Gallaudet University. His research on American Sign Language revolutionized the understanding of ASL in the United States and sign languages throughout the world. Stokoe's work led to a widespread recognition that sign languages are true languages, exhibiting syntax and morphology, and are not only systems of gesture.

#48

Charles F. Hockett

Charles F. Hockett

#2546

Overall Influence

1916 - 2000 (84 years)

Charles Francis Hockett was an American linguist who developed many influential ideas in American structuralist linguistics. He represents the post-Bloomfieldian phase of structuralism often referred to as "distributionalism" or "taxonomic structuralism". His academic career spanned over half a century at Cornell and Rice universities. Hockett was also a firm believer of linguistics as a branch of anthropology, making contributions that were significant to the field of anthropology as well.

#49

Luce Irigaray

#201

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examined the uses and misuses of language in relation to women. Irigaray's first and most well known book, published in 1974, was Speculum of the Other Woman , which analyzes the texts of Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant through the lens of phallocentrism. Irigaray is the author of works analyzing many thinkers, including This Sex Which Is Not One , which discusses Lacan's work as well as political economy; Elemental Passions can be read as a res...

#50

Henry Widdowson

#3580

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Henry George Widdowson is a British linguist and an authority in the field of applied linguistics and language teaching, specifically English language learning and teaching. Career He gained a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh in 1973.

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