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).
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List of the most influential female people in Engineering,
#1351
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Barbara Brukalska
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
Barbara Brukalska was a Polish architect, an architectural theorist, a prominent exponent of Functionalism, a member of the Praesens group, and a professor at Warsaw Polytechnic. She was also the wife of architect Stanisław Brukalski.
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Margaret Bourke-White
1904 - 1971 (67 years)
Margaret Bourke-White was an American photographer and documentary photographer. She was arguably best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry under the Soviets' first five-year plan, as the first American female war photojournalist, and for taking the photograph that became the cover of the first issue of Life magazine.
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Diane Arbus
1923 - 1971 (48 years)
Diane Arbus was an American photographer. She photographed a wide range of subjects including strippers, carnival performers, nudists, people with dwarfism, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, on the street, in the workplace, in the park. "She is noted for expanding notions of acceptable subject matter and violates canons of the appropriate distance between photographer and subject. By befriending, not objectifying her subjects, she was able to capture in her work a rare psychological intensity...
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