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 female people in Engineering,
#1301
Lara Jackson
#96689
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Lara Marie Jackson is a retired American competitive swimmer who specialized in freestyle. She swam for the University of Arizona from 2005 to 2009 where she was a 9-time NCAA champion. She is the former American record-holder in both the 50-yard freestyle, and the long course 50-meter freestyle.
Go to Profile#1302
Sarah F Clatterbuck Soper
#192301
Overall Influence
#1303
Anahera Morehu
#189305
Overall Influence
Anahera Morehu is a New Zealand public servant. As at 2023, she is the Chief Archivist of New Zealand and general manager of Archives New Zealand. She was appointed on 14 June 2023. She had previously been appointed as acting Chief Archivist from November 2022.
Go to Profile#1304
Christine Webster
#181589
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Christine Webster is a New Zealand visual artist and photographer. Background Webster was born in 1958 in Pukekohe, Auckland. She currently lives in the United Kingdom. Webster has a Diploma in Photography from Massey University and an MFA from Glasgow School of Art.
Go to Profile#1305
Sarah Haffner
#79199
Overall Influence
1940 - 2018 (78 years)
Sarah Haffner was a German-British painter, author, and active feminist. In West Berlin she engaged with the protest issues of the 1960s, on occasion alongside her father, the journalist and writer Sebastian Haffner. Through a television documentary and a book she was instrumental in the late 1970s in establishing the city's first women's shelter. The range of her painting included portraits, still lifes, landscapes and cityscapes.
Go to Profile#1306
Antonia Papandreou
#128547
Overall Influence
Antonia Papandreou-Suppappola from the Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for contributions to applications of time-frequency signal processing.
Go to Profile#1307
Giulia
#177378
Overall Influence
1994 - Present (32 years)
Giulia is an English-born Italian-Japanese professional wrestler. She is currently signed to World Wonder Ring Stardom, where she is the current Artist of Stardom Champion in her second reign and is the leader of Donna Del Mondo. She also makes appearances for New Japan Pro-Wrestling, where she is the current Strong Women's Champion in her first reign.
Go to Profile#1308
Helen O'Toole
#186994
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Helen O'Toole is an Irish-born painter based in the United States, who is known for abstract paintings suggestive of landscape. She has exhibited throughout Ireland and the United States, in Singapore, and at venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Portland Art Museum, Chicago Cultural Center, Tacoma Art Museum, and Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Her work has been featured in the journals Artforum, Arts Magazine, New Art Examiner, and Zyzzyva, as well as the Chicago Tribune, The Irish Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and National Public Radio. Art writers frequen...
Go to Profile#1309
Harriett B. Rigas
1934 - 1989 (55 years)
Harriett B. Rigas FIEEE was a Canadian electrical engineer and innovative lecturer who was recognised worldwide for her hybrid computer and computer simulation research. Early life and education Rigas was born on 30 April 1934 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She graduated from Queens University in 1956 with a bachelor's degree. She completed her master's in electrical engineering in 1959, the same year she got married. Rigas completed her doctorate in 1963 also from Kansas University as the first woman to do so.
Go to Profile#1310
Johanna Piesch
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Johanna Camilla Piesch was an Austrian librarian, physicist and mathematician who is remembered for the pioneering contributions she made to switching algebra, one of the fundamentals of digital computing and programming languages.
Go to Profile#1311
Erna Hamburger
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Erna Hamburger was a Swiss engineer and professor. In 1957, she became professor of electrometry at the University of Lausanne. She was the first woman in the history of Switzerland to be named a professor at a STEM university.
Go to Profile#1312
Charlemae Hill Rollins
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
Charlemae Hill Rollins was a pioneering librarian, writer and storyteller in the area of African-American literature. During her thirty-one years as head librarian of the children's department at the Chicago Public Library as well as after her retirement, she instituted substantial reforms in children's literature.
Go to Profile#1313
Sylvia Lavin
1900 - Present (126 years)
Sylvia Lavin is a professor of history and theory of architecture at Princeton University, School of Architecture. She was previously the head of the Ph.D. in Architecture program from 2007-2017 and professor of architectural history and theory at UCLA, where she was chairperson of the department of architecture and urban design from 1996 to 2006. Lavin is also a frequent visitor at Harvard Graduate School of Design and was a visiting professor of architectural theory at Princeton University School of Architecture. She is a member of the board of trustees of the Canadian Centre for Architectur...
Go to Profile#1314
Hallie Flanagan
1890 - 1969 (79 years)
Hallie Flanagan Davis was an American theatrical producer and director, playwright, and author, best known as director of the Federal Theatre Project, a part of the Works Progress Administration . Background Hallie Flanagan was born in Redfield, South Dakota. When she was around 10, her family moved to Grinnell, Iowa. She attended Grinnell College where she majored in Philosophy and German, and was an active member in the Literary and Dramatic Clubs. During her time at Grinnell she became friends with Harry Hopkins, who had also grown up in Grinnell and was a year behind her at Grinnell College.
Go to Profile#1315
Lillian Moller Gilbreth
1878 - 1972 (94 years)
Lillian Evelyn Gilbreth was an American psychologist, industrial engineer, consultant, and educator who was an early pioneer in applying psychology to time-and-motion studies. She was described in the 1940s as "a genius in the art of living." Gilbreth, one of the first female engineers to earn a Ph.D., is considered to be the first industrial/organizational psychologist. She and her husband, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, were efficiency experts who contributed to the study of industrial engineering, especially in the areas of motion study and human factors. Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their ...
Go to Profile#1316
Katie Atkinson
Katie Marie Atkinson is a professor of computer science and the Dean of the School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. She works on researching and building artificial intelligence tools to help judges and lawyers. Atkinson previously served as the President of the International Association for AI and Law.
Go to Profile#1317
Catherine Bauer Wurster
1905 - 1964 (59 years)
Catherine Krouse Bauer Wurster was an American public housing advocate and educator of city planners and urban planners. A leading member of the "housers," a group of planners who advocated affordable housing for low-income families, she dramatically changed social housing practice and law in the United States. Wurster's influential book Modern Housing was published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1934 and is regarded as a classic in the field.
Go to Profile#1318
Edith Clarke
1883 - 1959 (76 years)
Edith Clarke was the first woman to be professionally employed as an electrical engineer in the United States, and the first female professor of electrical engineering in the country. She was the first woman to deliver a paper at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the first female engineer whose professional standing was recognized by Tau Beta Pi, and the first woman named as a Fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. She specialized in electrical power system analysis and wrote Circuit Analysis of A-C Power Systems.
Go to Profile#1319
Julia Morgan
1872 - 1957 (85 years)
Julia Morgan was an American architect and engineer. She designed more than 700 buildings in California during a long and prolific career. She is best known for her work on Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California.
Go to Profile#1320
Lin Huiyin
1904 - 1955 (51 years)
Lin Huiyin was a Chinese architect and writer. She is known to be the first female architect in modern China and her husband is the famed "Father of Modern Chinese Architecture" Liang Sicheng, both of whom worked as founders and faculty in the newly formed Architecture Department of Northeastern University in 1928 and, after 1949, as professors in Tsinghua University in Beijing. Liang and Lin began restoration work on cultural heritage sites of China in the post-imperial Republican Era of China, a passion which she would pursue to the end of her life. The American artist Maya Lin is her niec...
Go to Profile#1321
Marion Mahony Griffin
1871 - 1961 (90 years)
Marion Mahony Griffin was an American architect and artist. She was one of the first licensed female architects in the world, and is considered an original member of the Prairie School. Her work in the United States developed and expanded the American Prairie School, and her work in India and Australia reflected Prairie School ideals of indigenous landscape and materials in the newly formed democracies. The scholar Deborah Wood stated that Griffin "did the drawings people think of when they think of Frank Lloyd Wright ." According to architecture critic, Reyner Banham, Griffin was "America’s...
Go to Profile#1322
Berenice Abbott
1898 - 1991 (93 years)
Berenice Alice Abbott was an American photographer best known for her portraits of cultural figures of the interwar period, New York City photographs of architecture and urban design of the 1930s, and science interpretation of the 1940s to the 1960s.
Go to Profile#1323
Beatrix Farrand
1872 - 1959 (87 years)
Beatrix Cadwalader Farrand was an American landscape gardener and landscape architect. Her career included commissions to design about 110 gardens for private residences, estates and country homes, public parks, botanic gardens, college campuses, and the White House. Only a few of her major works survive: Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden on Mount Desert, Maine, the restored Farm House Garden in Bar Harbor, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden , and elements of the campuses of Princeton, Yale, and Occidental.
Go to Profile#1324
Käthe Kollwitz
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
Käthe Kollwitz was a German artist who worked with painting, printmaking and sculpture. Her most famous art cycles, including The Weavers and The Peasant War, depict the effects of poverty, hunger and war on the working class. Despite the realism of her early works, her art is now more closely associated with Expressionism. Kollwitz was the first woman not only to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts but also to receive honorary professor status.
Go to Profile#1325
Theodate Pope Riddle
1867 - 1946 (79 years)
Theodate Pope Riddle was an American architect and philanthropist. She was one of the first American women architects and a survivor of the sinking of the RMS Lusitania. Life Born Effie Brooks Pope in Cleveland, Ohio, she was the only child of industrialist and art collector Alfred Atmore Pope and his wife Ada Lunette Brooks and was a first cousin to Louisa Pope, the future mother of architect Philip Johnson.
Go to Profile#1326
Hertha Ayrton
1854 - 1923 (69 years)
Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton was a British engineer, mathematician, physicist and inventor, and suffragette. Known in adult life as Hertha Ayrton, born Phoebe Sarah Marks, she was awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society for her work on electric arcs and ripple marks in sand and water.
Go to Profile#1327
Rachel Shalon
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Rachel Shalon was the first woman engineer in Israel and a professor of structural engineering. Shalon was first of all Technion graduates, male and female, to reach the rank of full professor. Early life and education Rachel Znanmirow was born in Kalush, Poland on the eve of Passover 1904 to Gittel and Hanoch Znanmirow, a Hassidic family. Her father was a lumber merchant, and she grew up in Kalisz.
Go to Profile#1328
Franca Helg
1920 - 1989 (69 years)
Franca Helg was an Italian designer and architect. She also had a career teaching at Istituto Universitario Architettura Venezia and Polytechnic of Milan. She collaborated with Franco Albini from 1945 through 1977.
Go to Profile#1329
Constance Tipper
1894 - 1995 (101 years)
Constance Tipper was an English metallurgist and crystallographer. She investigated brittle fracture and the ductile-brittle transition of metals used in the construction of warships, and was the first female full-time faculty member at Cambridge University Department of Engineering.
Go to Profile#1330
Dorothea Lange
1895 - 1965 (70 years)
Dorothea Lange was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration . Lange's photographs influenced the development of documentary photography and humanized the consequences of the Great Depression.
Go to Profile#1331
Imogen Cunningham
1883 - 1976 (93 years)
Imogen Cunningham was an American photographer known for her botanical photography, nudes, and industrial landscapes. Cunningham was a member of the California-based Group f/64, known for its dedication to the sharp-focus rendition of simple subjects.
Go to Profile#1332
Edith Hughes
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
Edith Mary Wardlaw Burnet Hughes HonFRIAS was a Scottish architect, and is considered Britain's first practising female architect, having established her own architecture firm in 1920. Early life Edith Mary Burnet was born in Edinburgh, the daughter of May Crudelius and George Wardlaw Burnet, an advocate. The family lived at 6 West Circus Place in the Stockbridge district. The family moved to 59 Queens Road in Aberdeen when her father was created Sheriff Substitute for Aberdeenshire around 1890.
Go to Profile#1333
Mabel Keyes Babcock
1862 - 1931 (69 years)
Mabel Keyes Babcock was one of America's early women landscape architects. She taught at Wellesley College and the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture before going on to become Dean of Women Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#1334
Elizabeth Greenleaf Pattee
1893 - 1991 (98 years)
Elizabeth Greenleaf Pattee was an American architect, landscape architect, and architecture professor in the Northeast whose career spanned a half century. About Pattee was born in 1893 in Quincy, Massachusetts. She was descended from an old New England family; portraits of several of her Greenleaf ancestors were painted by the Colonial-era painter Joseph Blackburn, and she would in later life donate a Christian Gullager portrait of her great-great-granduncle Daniel Greenleaf to the National Portrait Gallery.
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Juana Pereyra
1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Juana Pereyra was a Uruguayan civil engineer, and one of the first women to graduate from the Faculty of Engineering of the Universidad de la República. Early life and education Juana Pereyra was born in Montevideo, Uruguay on 8 November 1897. At school she excelled at mathematics. After the initial opposition of her family and having to overcome the difficulties that women had to face in the professional fields of the time, she enrolled in the Faculty of Engineering of the Universidad de la República, graduating with high marks with the title of Ingeniera de Puentes y Caminos in November 19...
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Gertrude Sawyer
1895 - 1996 (101 years)
Gertrude Sawyer was one of the earliest American women architects to practice in Maryland and the Washington, D.C., area. Early life and education Sawyer was born April 2, 1895, in Tuscola, Illinois. She knew she wanted to be an architect from an early age. Sawyer graduated high school in Norborne, Missouri in 1913 and graduated from Tudor Hall School in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1914. She received a Bachelor of Science in landscape architecture from the University of Illinois in 1918 and went on to become one of the first students at the Cambridge School of Domestic and Landscape Architecture for Women, where she met landscape architect Rose Greely.
Go to Profile#1337
Florence Bell Robinson
1885 - 1973 (88 years)
Florence Bell Robinson was a prominent American educator in landscape architecture and a pioneer in introducing women into the field. Life Born in Lapeer, Michigan, Robinson received her undergraduate degree in science from Kalamazoo College in 1908, and the BArch and MID in 1924 from the University of Michigan. She ran her own landscape firm from 1916 to 1926 and worked as a draftsperson for J.W. Case in Detroit.
Go to Profile#1338
Ruth Maxon Adams
1883 - 1970 (87 years)
Ruth Maxon Adams was an American architect. Biography Adams grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, the only child of Yale professor George Burton Adams. As a child, she visited England with her father, where she was first exposed to William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. She graduated from Vassar College in 1904, with no intention of practicing architecture.
Go to Profile#1339
Julia Margaret Cameron
1815 - 1879 (64 years)
Julia Margaret Cameron was a British photographer who is considered one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorian men and women, for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature, and for sensitive portraits of men, women and children.
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Jay DeFeo
1929 - 1989 (60 years)
Jay DeFeo was a visual artist who became celebrated in the 1950s as part of the spirited community of Beat artists, musicians, and poets in San Francisco. Best known for her monumental work The Rose, DeFeo produced courageously experimental works throughout her career, exhibiting what art critic Kenneth Baker called “fearlessness.”
Go to Profile#1341
Jakoba Mulder
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Jakoba Helena Mulder was a Dutch architect and urban planner remembered for her designs of two large city parks and the creation of livable housing and play spaces in Amsterdam. Biography When she was 18, Ko Mulder enrolled in the architecture program at the Delft University of Technology as "one of the first girls to apply to study architecture." She completed her degree as a construction engineer in 1926 and was the first female to graduate in the urban design program. According to Dijksterhuis, she met with early success. When she won a fire station design competition after graduation, he...
Go to Profile#1342
Leman Tomsu
1913 - 1988 (75 years)
Leman Cevat Tomsu was a Turkish architect. Together with Münevver Belen, she was one of the first Turkish women to qualify as an architect when she graduated in 1934 from the Academy of Fine Arts, Istanbul. She was also the first women to teach architecture in Turkey. Later she became a professor at Istanbul Technical University.
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Helen Binkerd Young
1877 - 1959 (82 years)
Helen Binkerd Young was an early New York architect who graduated from Cornell University in 1900 and taught without being paid in the Cornell Home Economics Department from 1910 to 1921. Many of her lectures focused on architectural themes and organization. Her publications are still used in academic studies on housing design.
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Barbara Morgan
1900 - 1992 (92 years)
Barbara Morgan was an American photographer best known for her depictions of modern dancers. She was a co-founder of the photography magazine Aperture. Morgan is known in the visual art and dance worlds for her penetrating studies of American modern dancers Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, José Limón, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and others. Morgan's drawings, prints, watercolors and paintings were exhibited widely in California in the 1920s, and in New York and Philadelphia in the 1930s.
Go to Profile#1345
Herta Hammerbacher
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Herta Hammersbacher was a German landscape architect who taught for more than 20 years at the TU Berlin. Life Hammersbacher was the daughter of engineer and economist John Hammersbacher and his wife Luise Feilitzsch. She initially grew up in Nuremberg. In 1910, the family moved to Berlin, where Hammersbacher attended the Cecilie Lyceum Girls school in Berlin-Wilmersdorf.
Go to Profile#1346
Amaza Lee Meredith
1895 - 1984 (89 years)
Amaza Lee Meredith was an American architect, educator and artist. Meredith was unable to enter the profession as an architect because of "both her race and her sex" as an African-American woman, and worked primarily as an art teacher at Virginia State University , where she founded the art department. She is best known for her residence, Azurest South, where she and her partner, Dr. Edna Meade Colson, resided together. Moreover, she co-founded the Azurest Syndicate Inc., a vacation destination for black middle class Americans on Sag Harbor, New York. As an educated black woman, Meredith is a...
Go to Profile#1347
Christine Salmon
1916 - 1985 (69 years)
Christine Salmon was an American architect and educator, originally from Pennsylvania. After teaching at Pennsylvania State University for a decade, she moved to Oklahoma in the late-1950s and taught at Oklahoma State University. She and her husband founded the architectural firm Salmon and Salmon, which focused primarily on housing and designs which accommodated people with disabilities. At the national level, she served on the National Housing Commission of the American Institute of Architects from 1969 to 1985 and was a Fellow of the AIA. She was the first woman elected as mayor of Stillwater, Oklahoma and had previously served on the Stillwater City Commission.
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Elizabeth Wood
1899 - 1993 (94 years)
Elizabeth Wood was the first Executive Director of the Chicago Housing Authority from 1937 until 1954. Born to missionary parents in Japan, Elizabeth Wood was educated at Illinois Wesleyan University and at the University of Michigan where she received both bachelor's and master's degrees in rhetoric. In 1928, after teaching English at Vassar College for four years, Wood moved to Chicago and found a job with the Home Modernizing Bureau, a trade organization. This organization collapsed with the stock market, however, and soon after Wood began her career as a housing advocate and planner. Wood...
Go to Profile#1349
Marília Chaves Peixoto
1921 - 1961 (40 years)
Marília Chaves Peixoto was a Brazilian mathematician and engineer who worked in dynamical systems. Peixoto was the first Brazilian woman to receive a doctorate in mathematics and the first Brazilian woman to join the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.
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Lotte Reiniger
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger was a German film director and the foremost pioneer of silhouette animation. Her best known films are The Adventures of Prince Achmed, from 1926, the oldest surviving feature-length animated film, and Papageno . Reiniger is also noted for having devised, from 1923 to 1926, the first form of a multiplane camera. Reiniger worked on more than 40 films throughout her career.
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