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,
#1351
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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Jaqueline Tyrwhitt
1905 - 1983 (78 years)
Mary Jaqueline Tyrwhitt was a British town planner, journalist, editor and educator. She was at the centre of the transnational network of theoreticians and practitioners who shaped the post-war Modern Movement in decentralized community design, residential architecture and social reform. She contributed in developing methods for the application of the ideas of Patrick Geddes, as well as publicizing them. Even Tyrwhitt had never met Geddes, she was able to extract from his many writings key ideas and concepts to disseminate among her colleagues and injected Geddesian thinking into conferences...
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Lee Miller
1907 - 1977 (70 years)
Elizabeth "Lee" Miller, Lady Penrose , was an American photographer and photojournalist. She was a fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris, where she became a fashion and fine art photographer. During the Second World War, she was a war correspondent for Vogue, covering events such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.
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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.”
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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...
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May Hollinworth
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
May Hollinworth was an Australian theatre producer and director, former radio actress, and founder of the Metropolitan Theatre in Sydney. The daughter of a theatrical producer, she was introduced to the theatre at a young age. She graduated with a science degree, and worked in the chemistry department of the University of Sydney, before being appointed as director of the Sydney University Dramatic Society, a post she held from 1929 until 1943
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Janet Parker
1938 - 1978 (40 years)
#1367
Jane Teller
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Jane Teller was an American printmaker and sculptor. Early life and education Jane Simon was born in 1911, in Rochester, New York. Simon attended Rochester Institute of Technology and Skidmore College, and earned a bachelor's degree from Barnard College in 1933. She pursued further art studies through Works Project Administration classes in New York City, and in classes with Aaron Goodelman, Karl Nielson, and Ibram Lassaw.
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Dorothy Dandridge
1922 - 1965 (43 years)
Dorothy Jean Dandridge was an American actress and singer. She was the first African-American film star to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, which was for her performance in Carmen Jones . Dandridge also performed as a vocalist in venues such as the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater. During her early career, she performed as a part of The Wonder Children, later The Dandridge Sisters, and appeared in a succession of films, usually in uncredited roles.
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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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Regina Gerlecka
1913 - 1983 (70 years)
Regina Gerlecka was a Polish chess player. In January 1935, she won the Warsaw championships. In June, Gerlecka won the inaugural Polish women's championship, which took place in Warsaw. Two months later, she finished second, behind Vera Menchik, in the 5th Women's World Chess Championship, held alongside the 6th Chess Olympiad , also held in Warsaw.
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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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