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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential female people in Engineering,
#1351
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#1352
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#1353
Edith Schryver
1901 - 1984 (83 years)
Edith Eleanor Schryver was a founding partner of Lord & Schryver, the first female owned and operated landscape architecture firm in the Pacific Northwest from 1929 to 1969. Early years Edith Schryver was born on March 20, 1901, in Kingston, New York. She grew up in an apartment over the Kingston railroad station where her father, George Schryver, managed the restaurant and her mother Eleanor Young was a homemaker. In 1903, her brother Harry Schryver was born.
Go to Profile#1354
Annie Rockfellow
1866 - 1954 (88 years)
Annie Graham Rockfellow was an influential and prolific architect active in Tucson, Arizona during the first half of the 20th century. Life and work Born in Mount Morris, New York on March 12, 1866, Annie was the daughter of Samuel L. and Julia Lucinda Rockfellow. She studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology receiving a special certificate in 1887. In 1905, she moved to Tombstone, Arizona to care for her father, Samuel, then living with his son, John A. Rockfellow. By 1916, she had moved to Tucson and worked for the firm of architect Henry O. Jaastad from 1916 to 1938 as chief designer.
Go to Profile#1355
Eliza Newkirk Rogers
1877 - 1966 (89 years)
Eliza Newkirk Rogers was an architect and a professor at Wellesley College. Biography Eliza Newkirk grew up in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, and pursued undergraduate degrees in art and math at Wellesley College, beginning in 1896 and graduating in 1900. She garnered a fellowship in architecture and attended classes from 1902-4 at MIT and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Subsequently, she spent 15 months in Italy researching her thesis "Domes of Renaissance Italy", which was completed in 1906; she received a master's degree from Wellesley in 1907.
Go to Profile#1356
Vera Prasilova Scott
1899 - 1996 (97 years)
Vera Prasilova Scott was a Czech-American photographer and sculptor. Her main work, which consisted of shadowed, gelatin silver photographs of Houstonian upper class society and intellectuals, has been preserved at the Rice University Woodson Research Center, the Museum of Czech Literature, and the Portland Museum of Art.
Go to Profile#1357
Florence Ward Stiles
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Florence Ward Stiles was an American architect and librarian who in 1939 was appointed the first advisor to women students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . She was awarded an architecture degree as a member of MIT's class of 1923. After graduating, she joined the all-woman firm of Howe, Manning & Almy, Inc. Her career included working at the firm of Stone & Webster. Later she established a private practice with a focus on small dwellings and remodeling historic houses. In 1931 she became the librarian at MIT's Rotch Library of Architecture and Planning. She joined the American Institute of Architects in 1943.
Go to Profile#1358
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#1359
Kate Cory
1861 - 1958 (97 years)
Kate Cory was an American photographer and artist. She studied art in New York, and then worked as commercial artist. She traveled to the southwestern United States in 1905 and lived among the Hopi for several years, recording their lives in about 600 photographs.
Go to Profile#1360
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#1361
Mária Telkes
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Mária Telkes was a Hungarian-American biophysicist and inventor who worked on solar energy technologies. She moved to the United States in 1925 to work as a biophysicist. She became an American citizen in 1937 and started work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create practical uses of solar energy in 1939.
Go to Profile#1362
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#1363
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#1364
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#1365
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#1366
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#1367
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#1368
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#1369
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#1370
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#1371
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