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,

#5351

Dieter Appelt

#100704
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Dieter Appelt is a German photographer, painter, sculptor and video artist. He studied music from 1954 to 1958 in the Mendelssohn Bartholdy Akademie in Leipzig. There, he discovers and develops a strong interest for Impressionism, Fauvism, and Russian constructivism. In 1959, he left East Germany and settled in West Berlin to study in the music school of Berlin until 1964. That same year, he decided to study fine art and he takes his first steps in painting, photography, etching, and sculpture. In the 1970s, he debuted on the public stage, with his first exhibition at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1974.
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#5352

James William Gaynor

#141921
Overall Influence
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#5353

Stefano Zaffagnini

#141923
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
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#5354

Hermann Koepsell

#141949
Overall Influence
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#5355

Éric Moreau

#142007
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
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#5356

Peter Clive Hayes

#142008
Overall Influence
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#5357

Jean‐pierre Raskin

#142016
Overall Influence
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#5358

B̈ulent Sankur

#142034
Overall Influence
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#5359

Mariusz Malinowski

#112826
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Mariusz Malinowski is a Polish electrical engineer. Professor in the Institute of Control and Industrial Electronics at Warsaw University of Technology. Biography Mariusz Malinowski received the Ph.D. degree with honors in Electrical Engineering from the Warsaw University of Technology in 2001 for his thesis entitled "Sensorless control strategies for three-phase PWM rectifiers". He then attained a habilitation for monothematic publications entitled "Selected problems of modulation and control for two- and multilevel voltage source converters with PWM" in 2012. He is employed as professor at ...
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#5360

Guang-yong Sun

#142060
Overall Influence
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#5361

Masa‐aki Kakimoto

#142063
Overall Influence
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#5362

L. Gerrish Evans

#142075
Overall Influence
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#5363

Florian Dörfler

#142080
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
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#5364

Sungho Millington Jin

#142085
Overall Influence
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#5365

Hoi Jun Yoo

#142097
Overall Influence
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#5366

Keit H. Green

#142099
Overall Influence
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#5367

Viviana Gradinaru

Viviana Gradinaru
#77419
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Viviana Grădinaru is a Romanian-American neuroscientist who is a Professor of Neuroscience and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. She develops neurotechnologies including optogenetics CLARITY tissue clearing, and gene delivery vectors. She has been awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and the National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award. In 2019 she was a finalist for the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists. In 2020 she was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science by the Vilcek Foundation.
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#5368

Valeriy V. Vyatkin

#142100
Overall Influence
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#5369

Yo Kobayashi

#123448
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
is a Japanese researcher in the field of robotics in Waseda University.　 He has developed the needle insertion system, robotic surgery, computer-assisted robot and tremor suppressibility robot. Research Interests RoboticsRobotic surgerySurgical Segment NavigatorMedical, rehabilitation and assistive engineeringComputer-assisted surgeryControl engineeringIntelligent mechatronics
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#5370

Hyo‐sung Ahn

#142131
Overall Influence
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#5371

John T. Harty

#142142
Overall Influence
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#5372

Germán Bannen

#118671
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Germán Bannen Lay was a Chilean engineer and politician. He was Urbanism National Prize in 2003. Bannen developed well part of his professional trajectory as an urban advisor for the Municipality of Providencia, a middle-high class commune of Santiago, the capital city of Chile. He taught lessons at the Pontifical Catholic University School of Architecture and Urbanism, where he trained a large number of generations of architects together with his wife Liliana Lanata Macchi.
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#5373

Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh
#8661
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Steven Andrew Soderbergh is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, and editor. A pioneer of modern independent cinema, Soderbergh later drew acclaim for formally inventive films made within the studio system.
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#5374

Keith A. Joiner

#142163
Overall Influence
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#5375

Mark T. Brookline Keating

#142188
Overall Influence
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#5376

Mohamed Elmasry

#28979
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Mohamed Elmasry is a Canadian engineering professor, imam, and Muslim community leader. Biography He was born in Cairo, Egypt and received his Bachelor of Science in 1965 from Cairo University. He continued his studies in Canada earning masters and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Ottawa in 1970 and 1974. He has worked in the area of digital integrated microchip design for over four decades.
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#5377

Ioannis Vardoulakis

#142212
Overall Influence
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#5378

Dr Douglas Waples

#142221
Overall Influence
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#5379

Robert Prof. Dr. Vaßen

#142231
Overall Influence
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#5380

Mesut E. Baran

#142249
Overall Influence
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#5381

Bill MacMillan

#57267
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Bill MacMillan is a British academic and former Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia. He was educated at the University of Bristol where he graduated with a first class undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering and earned his PhD in Economic Geography. Prior to being appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia in 2006, he worked as an academic at the University of Kent, the University of Amsterdam, and at the University of Oxford where he became a Fellow of Hertford College, and a Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University. He stepped down from his position as Vice-Chanc...
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#5382

Leo Allen Whiteside

#142260
Overall Influence
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#5383

Izuru Takewaki

#142285
Overall Influence
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#5384

Shyue Ping Ong

#142296
Overall Influence
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#5385

Carlos J. E. Niemegeers

#142300
Overall Influence
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#5386

Valery I. Levitas

#142315
Overall Influence
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#5387

Leslie Weston

#33051
Overall Influence
Leslie A. Weston FAA, is a plant biologist, who was awarded a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2023, for her work on weed suppressing ground covers and pest management. She is a professor at Charles Sturt University, at Wagga Wagga, and researches botany, agronomy, weed control and horticulture.
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#5388

Mohan Maheswaran Kumaraswamy

#142328
Overall Influence
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#5389

AnnMarie Thomas

AnnMarie Thomas
#86298
Overall Influence
AnnMarie Thomas is a mechanical engineer, author, blogger, and advocate for early engineering education. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Ocean Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and went on to attain both an M.S. and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology. Additionally, she has her certification in Sustainable Design from Minneapolis College of Art and Design . She is currently associate professor in the School of Engineering, the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship, and the Opus College of Business at the University of St.
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#5390

Gaetano Santulli

#142339
Overall Influence
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#5391

Nie Zaiping

#142346
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Nie Zaiping from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China , Chengdu, Sichuan, China was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for the IEEE Antennas & Propagation Society in 2013 for leadership in engineering and education in electromagnetics.
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#5392

Han-long Liuh.-l. Liu

#142347
Overall Influence
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#5393

Philip Choy

#85790
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Philip P. Choy was an architect and historian of Chinese American studies. He is the author of San Francisco Chinatown: A Guide to Its History & Architecture , Canton Footprints: Sacramento’s Chinese Legacy , and The Coming Man: 19th Century American Perceptions of the Chinese . Choy has been a community activist known for landmark preservation in San Francisco.
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#5394

Samira Kiani

#86580
Overall Influence
Samira Kiani is an Associate Professor in the department of Pathology of University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Pittsburgh Liver Research Center. Formerly, she was a Health Systems Engineer at Arizona State University. Her work combines Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat with synthetic biology. She is a 2019 AAAS Leshner Fellow.
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#5395

Sam Mendes

Sam Mendes
#14493
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Sir Samuel Alexander Mendes is a British film and stage director, producer, and screenwriter. In 2000, Mendes was appointed a CBE for his services to drama, and he was knighted in the 2020 New Years Honours List.
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#5396

Timo Pukkala

#142378
Overall Influence
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#5397

Elizabeth Chang

#142386
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Elizabeth Chang is an electrical engineer at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. Chang was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for her contributions to industrial informatics and cyber physical systems.
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#5398

David Lee Butler

#142387
Overall Influence
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#5399

Michael Jerome Yaszemski

#142458
Overall Influence
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#5400

Arthur C. Nelson

Arthur C. Nelson
#75321
Overall Influence
Arthur C. Nelson is an American urban planner, researcher and academic. He is Professor of Urban Planning and Real Estate Development at the University of Arizona. Nelson's research has been focused on metropolitan development policy and planning, applied demographic and economic analysis, fiscal impact assessment, public facility planning and finance, growth management/smart growth, urban development/redevelopment analysis and policy, real estate development policy, suburban and exurban development patterns, and economic development.
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