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 people in Engineering,
#51
Fumihiko Maki
#1075
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Fumihiko Maki is a Japanese architect who teaches at Keio University SFC. In 1993, he received the Pritzker Prize for his work, which often explores pioneering uses of new materials and fuses the cultures of east and west.
Go to Profile#52
Thom Mayne
#1786
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Thom Mayne is an American architect. He is based in Los Angeles. In 1972, Mayne helped found the Southern California Institute of Architecture , where he is a trustee and the coordinator of the Design of Cities postgraduate program. Since then he has held teaching positions at SCI-Arc, the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and the University of California, Los Angeles . He is principal of Morphosis Architects, an architectural firm based in Culver City, California and New York City, New York. Mayne received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in March 2005.
Go to Profile#53
Subra Suresh
#1593
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Subra Suresh is an Indian-born American bioengineer, materials scientist, and academic. Between 2018 and 2022, he was the fourth President of Singapore's Nanyang Technological University , where he is also the inaugural Distinguished University Professor. He was the Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and Dean of the School of Engineering at MIT from 2007 to 2010 before being appointed as Director of the National Science Foundation by Barack Obama, where he served from 2010 to 2013. He was the president of Carnegie Mellon University from 201...
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Valentina Tereshkova
#577
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova is a Russian engineer, member of the State Duma, and former Soviet cosmonaut, being the first woman ever to fly in space. She was the first woman in space, having flown a solo mission on Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963. She orbited the Earth 48 times, spent almost three days in space, is the only woman to have been on a solo space mission and is the last surviving Vostok programme cosmonaut. She was the youngest woman to fly in space until 2023 when Anastatia Mayers flew on Galactic 02 at the age of 18. Since Mayers flew a suborbital mission, Tereshkova remains the ...
Go to Profile#55
Michael D. Griffin
#1583
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Michael Douglas Griffin is an American physicist and aerospace engineer who served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering from 2018 to 2020. He previously served as Deputy of Technology for the Strategic Defense Initiative, and as Administrator of NASA from April 13, 2005, to January 20, 2009. As NASA Administrator Griffin oversaw such areas as private spaceflight, future human spaceflight to Mars, and the fate of the Hubble telescope.
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Thomas Kailath
#2467
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Thomas Kailath is an Indian born American electrical engineer, information theorist, control engineer, entrepreneur and the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering emeritus at Stanford University. Professor Kailath has authored several books, including the well-known book Linear Systems, which ranks as one of the most referenced books in the field of linear systems.
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Peter Zumthor
#3164
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Peter Zumthor is a Swiss architect whose work is frequently described as uncompromising and minimalist. Though managing a relatively small firm, he is the winner of the 2009 Pritzker Prize and 2013 RIBA Royal Gold Medal.
Go to Profile#58
James Stirling
#3138
Overall Influence
1926 - 1992 (66 years)
Sir James Frazer Stirling was a British architect. Stirling worked in partnership with James Gowan from 1956 to 1963, then with Michael Wilford from 1971 until 1992. Early life and education Stirling was born in Glasgow. His year of birth is widely quoted as 1926 but his longstanding friend Sir Sandy Wilson later stated it was 1924. The family moved to Liverpool when James was an infant, where he attended Quarry Bank High School. During World War II, he joined the Black Watch before transferring to the Parachute Regiment. He was parachuted behind German enemy lines before D-Day and was wound...
Go to Profile#59
David Scott
#1094
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
David Randolph Scott is an American retired test pilot and NASA astronaut who was the seventh person to walk on the Moon. Selected as part of the third group of astronauts in 1963, Scott flew to space three times and commanded Apollo 15, the fourth lunar landing; he is one of four surviving Moon walkers and the only living commander of a spacecraft that landed on the Moon.
Go to Profile#60
Kazuyo Sejima
#3879
Overall Influence
Kazuyo Sejima is a Japanese architect and director of her own firm, Kazuyo Sejima & Associates. In 1995, she co-founded the firm SANAA . In 2010, Sejima was the second woman to receive the Pritzker Prize, which was awarded jointly with Nishizawa.
Go to Profile#61
Robert H. Dennard
#1432
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Robert Heath Dennard is an American electrical engineer and inventor. Biography Dennard was born in Terrell, Texas, U.S. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, in 1954 and 1956, respectively. He earned a Ph.D. from Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1958. His professional career was spent as a researcher for International Business Machines.
Go to Profile#62
Dawon Kahng
#1124
Overall Influence
1931 - 1992 (61 years)
Dawon Kahng was a Korean-American electrical engineer and inventor, known for his work in solid-state electronics. He is best known for inventing the MOSFET , along with his colleague Mohamed Atalla, in 1959. Kahng and Atalla developed both the PMOS and NMOS processes for MOSFET semiconductor device fabrication. The MOSFET is the most widely used type of transistor, and the basic element in most modern electronic equipment.
Go to Profile#63
Arati Prabhakar
#3020
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Arati Prabhakar is an American engineer and public official. Since October 3, 2022, she has served as the 12th director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Science Advisor to the President.
Go to Profile#64
Paul Goldberger
#2077
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Paul Goldberger is an American author, architecture critic and lecturer. He is known for his "Sky Line" column in The New Yorker. Biography Shortly after starting as a reporter at The New York Times in 1972, he was assigned to write the obituary of architect Louis Kahn, who had died suddenly of a heart attack in a bathroom in New York's Pennsylvania Station. The next year, he was named an architecture critic, working alongside Ada Louise Huxtable until 1982.
Go to Profile#65
Frank Borman
#801
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Frank Frederick Borman II was an American United States Air Force colonel, aeronautical engineer, NASA astronaut, test pilot, and businessman. He was the commander of Apollo 8, the first mission to fly around the Moon, and together with crewmates Jim Lovell and William Anders, became the first of 24 humans to do so, for which he was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
Go to Profile#66
Giancarlo De Carlo
#4364
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
Giancarlo De Carlo was an Italian architect. Biography Giancarlo De Carlo was born in Genoa, Liguria, in 1919. He enrolled at the Milan Polytechnic in 1939 and graduated with a degree in engineering in 1943. He then enlisted as a naval officer in World War II. Following Italy's surrender to the Allied forces on September 8, 1943, he went into hiding, participating in the Italian Resistance through the Movement of Proletarian Unity alongside other Milanese architects such as Franco Albini. Later, De Carlo and fellow architect Giuseppe Pagano organized an anarchist-libertarian partisan group i...
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Helmut Jahn
#2028
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Helmut Jahn was a German-American architect, known for projects such as the Sony Center on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, Germany; the Messeturm in Frankfurt, Germany; the Thompson Center in Chicago; One Liberty Place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Suvarnabhumi Airport, in Bangkok, Thailand, among others.
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Michael Porter
#142
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Michael Eugene Porter is an American academic known for his theories on economics, business strategy, and social causes. He is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School, and was one of the founders of the consulting firm The Monitor Group and FSG, a social impact consultancy. He is credited for creating Porter's five forces analysis, which is instrumental in business strategy development at present. He is generally regarded as the father of the modern strategy field. He is also regarded as one of the world's most influential thinkers on management and competitiveness as well as one of the most influential business strategists.
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Kenzō Tange
#2234
Overall Influence
1913 - 2005 (92 years)
Kenzō Tange was a Japanese architect, and winner of the 1987 Pritzker Prize for Architecture. He was one of the most significant architects of the 20th century, combining traditional Japanese styles with modernism, and designed major buildings on five continents. His career spanned the entire second half of the twentieth century, producing numerous distinctive buildings in Tokyo, other Japanese cities and cities around the world, as well as ambitious physical plans for Tokyo and its environments.
Go to Profile#70
Stanley Mazor
#1613
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Stanley Mazor is an American microelectronics engineer who was born on 22 October 1941 in Chicago, Illinois. He is one of the co-inventors of the world's first microprocessor architecture, the Intel 4004, together with Ted Hoff, Masatoshi Shima, and Federico Faggin.
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James R. Rice
#7040
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
James Robert Rice is an American engineer, scientist, geophysicist, and Mallinckrodt Professor of Engineering Sciences and Geophysics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Go to Profile#72
Shuji Nakamura
#1988
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
#73
Shigeru Ban
#3015
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Shigeru Ban is a Japanese architect, known for his innovative work with paper, particularly recycled cardboard tubes used to quickly and efficiently house disaster victims. Many of his notable designs are structures which are temporary, prefabricated, or incorporate inexpensive and unconventional materials in innovative ways. He was profiled by Time magazine in their projection of 21st-century innovators in the field of architecture and design.
Go to Profile#74
Paolo Soleri
#2609
Overall Influence
1919 - 2013 (94 years)
Paolo Soleri was an Italian-born American architect. He established the educational Cosanti Foundation and Arcosanti. Soleri was a lecturer in the College of Architecture at Arizona State University and a National Design Award recipient in 2006. He coined the concept of 'arcology' – a synthesis of architecture and ecology as the philosophy of democratic society. He died at home of natural causes on 9 April 2013 at the age of 93.
Go to Profile#75
Robert A. M. Stern
#1648
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Robert Arthur Morton Stern , is a New York City–based architect, educator, and author. He is the founding partner of the architecture firm, Robert A. M. Stern Architects, also known as RAMSA. From 1998 to 2016, he was the Dean of the Yale School of Architecture.
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Marc Raibert
#4508
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Marc Raibert is the Executive Director of the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, a Hyundai Motor Group organization that is focused on solving the most important problems in robotics and artificial intelligence to achieve fundamental advances in the engineering and science of robotics. Raibert was the founder, former CEO, and now Chairman of Boston Dynamics, a robotics company known for creating BigDog, Atlas, Spot, and Handle.
Go to Profile#77
Heinz Wolff
#3538
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Heinz Siegfried Wolff, was a German-born British scientist as well as a television and radio presenter. He was best known for the BBC television series The Great Egg Race. Early life Wolff was born in Berlin. His father, Oswald Wolff, was a volunteer in World War I and a publisher specializing in German history. His mother, Margot Wolff died "of an acute heart infection" in 1938. Father and son fled to the Netherlands in August 1939, and then arrived as Jewish refugees in Britain on 3 September 1939, on the same day that World War II was declared by Britain and France; Wolff was 11. He was ...
Go to Profile#78
Ada Louise Huxtable
#2628
Overall Influence
1921 - 2013 (92 years)
Ada Louise Huxtable was an American architecture critic and writer on architecture. Huxtable established architecture and urban design journalism in North America and raised the public's awareness of the urban environment. In 1970, she was awarded the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In 1981, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. Architecture critic Paul Goldberger, also a Pulitzer Prize-winner for architectural criticism, said in 1996: "Before Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture was not a part of the public dialogue." "She was a great lover of cities, a great preservationist and the central planet around which every other critic revolved," said architect Robert A.
Go to Profile#79
Kevin Granata
#4611
Overall Influence
1961 - 2007 (46 years)
Kevin P. Granata was an American professor in multiple departments including the Departments of Engineering, Science and Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University , in Blacksburg, Virginia. Granata held an additional academic appointment as a professor in the Virginia Tech-Wake Forest School of Biomedical Engineering and was an adjunct professor at the University of Virginia in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery. During the Virginia Tech shooting, he shepherded students into his office in order to safeguard them. He was then killed by Seung...
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Rafael Moneo
#2308
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
José Rafael Moneo Vallés is a Spanish architect. He won the Pritzker Prize for architecture in 1996, the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2003, and La Biennale's Golden Lion in 2021. Biography Born in Tudela, Spain, Moneo studied at the ETSAM, Technical University of Madrid from which he received his architectural degree in 1961.
Go to Profile#81
Bernie Grundman
#1022
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Bernie Grundman is an American audio engineer. He is most known for his mastering work and his studio, Bernie Grundman Mastering, which he opened in 1984 in Hollywood. The studio, which includes engineers Chris Bellman, Patricia Sullivan, and Mike Bozzi, mastered 37 projects which received Grammy Award nominations in 2005. In 1997 he opened a studio in Tokyo.
Go to Profile#82
Yuan-Cheng Fung
#6175
Overall Influence
1919 - 2019 (100 years)
#83
Norman Joseph Woodland
#2847
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Norman Joseph Woodland was an American inventor, best known as one of the inventors of the barcode, for which he received a patent in October 1952. Later, employed by IBM, he developed the format which became the ubiquitous Universal Product Code of product labeling and check-out stands.
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Cynthia Barnhart
#4718
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Cynthia Barnhart is an American civil engineer and academic, serving as the current Provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She previously served as the University's Chancellor, the first woman to hold that position.
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Olgierd Zienkiewicz
#5844
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
Olgierd Cecil Zienkiewicz was a British academic of Polish descent, mathematician, and civil engineer. He was born in Caterham, England. He was one of the early pioneers of the finite element method. Since his first paper in 1947 dealing with numerical approximation to the stress analysis of dams, he published nearly 600 papers and wrote or edited more than 25 books.
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Alexei Leonov
#607
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov was a Soviet and Russian cosmonaut, Air Force major general, writer, and artist. On 18 March 1965, he became the first person to conduct a spacewalk, exiting the capsule during the Voskhod 2 mission for 12 minutes and 9 seconds. He was also selected to be the first Soviet person to land on the Moon although the project was cancelled.
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Aldo van Eyck
#4738
Overall Influence
1918 - 1999 (81 years)
Aldo van Eyck was a Dutch architect. He was one of the most influential protagonists of the architectural movement Structuralism. Family He was born in Driebergen, Utrecht, a son of poet, critic, essayist and philosopher Pieter Nicolaas van Eyck or van Eijk and wife Nelly Estelle Benjamins, a woman of Sephardic origin born and raised in Suriname.
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Robert Zubrin
#2345
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Robert Zubrin is an American aerospace engineer, author, and advocate for human exploration of Mars. He and his colleague at Martin Marietta, David Baker, were the driving force behind Mars Direct, a proposal in a 1990 research paper intended to produce significant reductions in the cost and complexity of such a mission. The key idea was to use the Martian atmosphere to produce oxygen, water, and rocket propellant for the surface stay and return journey. A modified version of the plan was subsequently adopted by NASA as their "design reference mission". He questions the delay and cost-to-ben...
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Zhong Lin Wang
#8664
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
#90
Eduardo Souto de Moura
#4208
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Eduardo Elísio Machado Souto de Moura , better known as Eduardo Souto de Moura, is a Portuguese architect who was the recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2011 and the Wolf Prize in Arts in 2013. Along with Fernando Távora and Álvaro Siza, he is one of the alumni of the Porto School of Architecture, where he was appointed a Professor.
Go to Profile#91
Toyo Ito
#4825
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
is a Japanese architect known for creating conceptual architecture, in which he seeks to simultaneously express the physical and virtual worlds. He is a leading exponent of architecture that addresses the contemporary notion of a "simulated" city, and has been called "one of the world's most innovative and influential architects."
Go to Profile#92
Bruce Graham
#4904
Overall Influence
1925 - 2010 (85 years)
Bruce John Graham was a Colombian-born Peruvian-American architect. Graham built buildings all over the world and was deeply involved with evolving the Burnham Plan of Chicago. Among his most notable buildings are the Inland Steel Building, the Willis Tower , and the John Hancock Center. He was also responsible for planning the Broadgate and Canary Wharf developments in London.
Go to Profile#93
Colin Rowe
#5221
Overall Influence
1920 - 1999 (79 years)
Colin Rowe was a British-born, American-naturalised architectural historian, critic, theoretician and teacher. He is acknowledged to have been a major theoretical and critical influence in the second half of the twentieth century on world architecture and urbanism. During his life he taught briefly at the University of Texas at Austin and, for one year, at the University of Cambridge in England. For most of his life he was a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Many of Rowe’s students became important architects and extended his influence throughout the architecture and planning professions.
Go to Profile#94
Mario Botta
#2267
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Mario Botta is a Swiss architect. Career Botta designed his first building, a two-family house at Morbio Superiore in Ticino, at age 16. He graduated from the Università Iuav di Venezia . While the arrangement of spaces in this structure is inconsistent, its relationship to its site, separation of living from service spaces, and deep window recesses echo of what would become his stark, strong, towering style. His designs tend to include a strong sense of geometry, often being based on very simple shapes, yet creating unique volumes of space. His buildings are often made of brick, yet his use ...
Go to Profile#95
Gordon Murray
#2284
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Ian Gordon Murray , is a South African-British designer of Formula One racing cars for Brabham and McLaren and the McLaren F1 high-performance road car. Founder and CEO of Gordon Murray Design and Gordon Murray Automotive he has subsequently designed and built a number of sports cars and a variety of other automotive vehicles.
Go to Profile#96
Paul Rudolph
#2952
Overall Influence
1918 - 1997 (79 years)
Paul Marvin Rudolph was an American architect and the chair of Yale University's Department of Architecture for six years, known for his use of reinforced concrete and highly complex floor plans. His most famous work is the Yale Art and Architecture Building , a spatially-complex Brutalist concrete structure. He is one of the modernist architects considered an early practitioner of the Sarasota School of Architecture.
Go to Profile#97
David Chipperfield
#2537
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Sir David Alan Chipperfield, is a British architect. He established David Chipperfield Architects in 1985, which grew into a global architectural practice with offices in London, Berlin, Milan, and Shanghai.
Go to Profile#98
Liviu Librescu
#3271
Overall Influence
1930 - 2007 (77 years)
Liviu Librescu was a Romanian–American scientist and engineer. A prominent academic in addition to being a survivor of the Holocaust, his major research fields were aeroelasticity and aerodynamics.
Go to Profile#99
Kevin Roche
#4112
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Eamonn Kevin Roche was an Irish-born American Pritzker Prize-winning architect. He was responsible for the design/master planning for over 200 built projects in both the U.S. and abroad. These projects include eight museums, 38 corporate headquarters, seven research facilities, performing arts centers, theaters, and campus buildings for six universities. In 1967 he created the master plan for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and thereafter designed all of the new wings and installation of many collections including the reopened American and Islamic wings.
Go to Profile#100
Robert Moog
#897
Overall Influence
1934 - 2005 (71 years)
Robert Arthur Moog was an American engineer and electronic music pioneer. He was the founder of the synthesizer manufacturer Moog Music and the inventor of the first commercial synthesizer, the Moog synthesizer, which debuted in 1964. In 1970, Moog released a more portable model, the Minimoog, described as the most famous and influential synthesizer in history. Among Moog's honors are a Technical Grammy Award, received in 2002, and an induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
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