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,
#551
Dierk Raabe
#18915
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Dierk Raabe is a German materials scientist and researcher, who has contributed significantly to the field of materials science. He is a professor at RWTH Aachen University and director of the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research in Düsseldorf. He is the recipient of the 2004 Leibniz Prize, and the 2022 Acta Materialia's Gold Medal. He also received the honorary doctorate of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Go to Profile#552
Adrian Bejan
#39306
Overall Influence
#553
Robert Plonsey
#23708
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Robert Plonsey was the Pfizer-Pratt University Professor Emeritus of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. He is noted for his work on bioelectricity. Education Plonsey was born in New York City in 1924. He received the B.E.E. degree in electrical engineering from the Cooper Union School of Engineering in New York in 1943, and the M.E.E degree from New York University in 1948. He obtained his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1957. In addition, he completed the first year and a half of the MD curriculum and the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine .
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Erich Bloch
#16136
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
Erich Bloch was a German-born American electrical engineer and administrator. He was involved with developing IBM's first transistorized supercomputer, 7030 Stretch, and mainframe computer, System/360. He served as director of the National Science Foundation from 1984 to 1990.
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Alberto Campo Baeza
#24883
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Alberto Campo Baeza is a Spanish architect and Full-Time Design Professor at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid from 1986 to 2017. He retired the same year. He has built a selected number of awarded buildings.
Go to Profile#556
Steven Izenour
#23336
Overall Influence
1940 - 2001 (61 years)
Steven Izenour was an American architect, urbanist and theorist. He is best known as co-author, with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, of Learning from Las Vegas, one of the most influential architectural theory books of the twentieth century. He was also a principal in the Philadelphia firm Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates.
Go to Profile#557
Constantine A. Balanis
#31905
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Constantine A. Balanis is a Greek-born American scientist, educator, author, and Regents Professor at Arizona State University. Born in Trikala, Greece on October 29, 1938. He is best known for his books in the fields of engineering electromagnetics and antenna theory. He emigrated to the United States in 1955, where he studied electrical engineering. He received United States citizenship in 1960.
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Mohammad Modarres
#22706
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Mohammad Modarres is an Iranian American scientist and educator in the fields of nuclear and reliability engineering. He is a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and Nicole Y. Kim Eminent Professor of the University of Maryland. Within the University of Maryland A. James Clark School of Engineering, Modarres founded world's first graduate curriculum in reliability engineering, which has now become a leading academic program both nationally and internationally with over 400 Master's and PhD graduates. As the Director of the UMD Center for Risk and Reliability, Modarres serves as international exper...
Go to Profile#559
Ali Khademhosseini
#22956
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Ali Khademhosseini is the CEO of the Terasaki Institute, non-profit research organization in Los Angeles, and Omeat Inc., a cultivated-meat startup. Before taking his current CEO roles, he spent one year at Amazon Inc. Prior to that he was the Levi Knight chair and professor at the University of California-Los Angeles where he held a multi-departmental professorship in Bioengineering, Radiology, Chemical, and Biomolecular Engineering as well as the Director of Center for Minimally Invasive Therapeutics . From 2005 to 2017, he was a professor at Harvard Medical School, and the Wyss Institute...
Go to Profile#560
Robert O. Ritchie
#33889
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Robert Oliver Ritchie is the H.T. and Jessie Chua Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and senior faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
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John Houbolt
#12397
Overall Influence
1919 - 2014 (95 years)
John Cornelius Houbolt was an aerospace engineer credited with leading the team behind the lunar orbit rendezvous mission mode, a concept that was used to successfully land humans on the Moon and return them to Earth. This flight path was chosen for the Apollo program in July 1962. The critical decision to use LOR was viewed as vital to ensuring that man reached the Moon by the end of the decade as proposed by President John F. Kennedy. In the process, LOR saved time and billions of dollars by efficiently using the rocket and spacecraft technologies.
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Peter Stoica
#22670
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Peter Stoica is a researcher and educator in the field of signal processing and its applications to radar/sonar, communications and bio-medicine. He is a professor of Signals and Systems Modeling at Uppsala University in Sweden, and a Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, the United States National Academy of Engineering , the Romanian Academy , the European Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society of Sciences. He is also a Fellow of IEEE, EURASIP, IETI, and the Royal Statistical Society.
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Tom Knight
#4523
Overall Influence
Tom Knight is a synthetic biologist and computer engineer for his company, Ginkgo Bioworks. He began his studies at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology at the tender age of 14, taking advantage of the school’s close proximity to his home. With a background in computer programming and organic chemistry, he has made a number of important contributions to computer science. His work featured prominently in the creation of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. He wrote the original kernel for ITS operating system and designed one of the earliest semiconductor memory-based bitmap displays.
Go to Profile#564
Anurag Kumar
#14878
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Anurag Kumar was the Director of the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore, India from 2014–2020. He is a professor at the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, and has served as the Chairperson of the Electrical Sciences Division at the Indian Institute of Science, before being appointed as the Director in 2014.
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Hermann Knoflacher
#14538
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Hermann Knoflacher is an Austrian civil engineer. He was the head of the Institute for Transport Planning and Technology at the Vienna University of Technology. Life and teachings Knoflacher completed degrees in civil engineering, geodesy, and mathematics. Since 1975 he is a professor at the Vienna University of Technology. In 1985 he became head of the Institute for Transport Planning. His research focuses on spatial planning, urban planning, and transport planning. He is one of the key contributors to the sustainable transport movement . Since 2004 he is the president of the Club of Vienna.
Go to Profile#566
Vandi Verma
#15523
Overall Influence
Vandana "Vandi" Verma is a space roboticist and chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, known for driving the Mars rovers, notably Curiosity and Perseverance, using software including PLEXIL programming technology that she co-wrote and developed.
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Gary S. May
#16028
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Gary Stephen May is the chancellor of the University of California, Davis. From May 2005 to June 2011, he was the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. He served as the Dean of the Georgia Tech College of Engineering from July 2011 until June 2017.
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Mark Horowitz
#17845
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Mark A. Horowitz is an American electrical engineer, computer scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur who is the Yahoo! Founders Professor in the School of Engineering and the Fortinet Founders Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He holds a joint appointment in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments and previously served as the Chair of the Electrical Engineering department from 2008 to 2012. He is a co-founder of Rambus Inc., now a technology licensing company. Horowitz has authored over 700 published conference and research papers and is among the most highly-cited computer architects of all time.
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Bernhard Palsson
#28094
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Bernhard Ørn Palsson is the Galletti Professor of Bioengineering and an adjunct professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Education Palsson received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1984 under the supervision of Edwin N. Lightfoot.
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Mike Judge
#1360
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Michael Craig Judge is an American actor, animator, filmmaker, and musician. He is the creator of the animated television series Beavis and Butt-Head , and the co-creator of the television series King of the Hill , The Goode Family , Silicon Valley , and Mike Judge Presents: Tales from the Tour Bus . He wrote and directed the films Beavis and Butt-Head Do America , Office Space , Idiocracy , and Extract , and co-wrote the screenplay to Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe .
Go to Profile#571
J. Brandon Dixon
#37766
Overall Influence
J. Brandon Dixon is a professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He heads the Laboratory of Lymphatic Biology and Bioengineering . Among his most recent publications, Dr. Dixon developed a tissue engineered in vitro model to recapitulate lipid uptake by intestinal lymphatics.
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Ronald N. Bracewell
#8236
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Ronald Newbold Bracewell AO was the Lewis M. Terman Professor of Electrical Engineering of the Space, Telecommunications, and Radioscience Laboratory at Stanford University. Education Bracewell was born in Sydney, in 1921, and educated at Sydney Boys High School. He graduated from the University of Sydney in 1941 with the BSc degree in mathematics and physics, later receiving the degrees of B.E. , and M.E. with first class honours, and while working in the Engineering Department became the President of the Oxometrical society. During World War II he designed and developed microwave radar eq...
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Russell C. Eberhart
#13705
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Russell C. Eberhart, an American electrical engineer, best known as the co-developer of particle swarm optimization concept . He is professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and adjunct professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis . He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.
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Emilio Ambasz
#16815
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Emilio Ambasz is an Argentinian-US architect and award-winning industrial designer. From 1969 to 1976 he was Curator of Design at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. Ambasz has been labeled as "the father, poet, and prophet" of the green architecture by Japanese architect Tadao Ando.
Go to Profile#575
Hideo Hosono
#29008
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
is a Japanese material scientist most known for the discovery of iron-based superconductors. Career and research Hosono is also a pioneer in developing transparent oxide semiconductors: he proposed a material design concept for a transparent amorphous oxide semiconductor with large electron mobility, demonstrated the excellent performance of TAOS thin film transistors for next generation displays and successfully converted a cement constituent 12CaO·7Al2O3 into transparent semiconductor, metal, and eventually superconductors.
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Tomlinson Holman
#10112
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Tomlinson M. Holman is an American film theorist, audio engineer, and inventor of film technologies, notably the Lucasfilm's THX sound system. He developed the world's first 10.2 sound system. Career Early in his career, Holman developed what was known as the Holman Preamplifier for the APT Corporation, a former Massachusetts entity founded by Holman. He holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign .
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Nicholas Ambraseys
#24661
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Nicholas Neocles Ambraseys FICE FREng was a Greek engineering seismologist. He was emeritus professor of engineering seismology and senior research fellow at Imperial College London. For many years Ambraseys was considered the leading figure and an authority in earthquake engineering and seismology in Europe.
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Walter Bender
#15203
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Walter Bender is a technologist and researcher who works in the field of electronic publishing, media and technology for learning. From the MIT Media Lab's founding 1985 through 2006, Bender directed the lab's Electronic Publishing Group. Previous to the lab's creation, the group had also existed in the Architecture Machine Group. The research group is one of the Media Lab's oldest and one of a few that predates the creation of the lab. While at the lab, Bender held the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Chair. Bender's research has attempted to build upon the interactive styles associated with existing media and extend them into domains where a computer is incorporated into the interaction.
Go to Profile#579
Lois Graham
#17483
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Lois Graham was a professor of thermodynamics and cryogenics. She was the first woman to earn a mechanical engineering PhD in the United States. Graham is remembered for her lifelong work recruiting young women into careers in science and engineering. She taught for nearly 40 years in the Illinois Institute of Technology's Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering program. Graham founded IIT's Women in Science and Engineering program, which recruited female high school students into science and engineering careers.
Go to Profile#580
Yonggang Huang
#31912
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Yonggang Huang is the Jan and Marcia Achenbach Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University. Huang was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2017, a member of National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020, and a foreign member of Royal Society, London in 2023 for pioneering work on mechanics of stretchable electronics and mechanically guided, deterministic 3-D assembly.
Go to Profile#581
Theodore J. Williams
#15562
Overall Influence
1923 - 2013 (90 years)
Theodore Joseph Williams was an American engineer and Professor of Engineering at Purdue University, known for the development of the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture. Biography Williams received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, and another M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Ohio State University.
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Julius Posener
#15164
Overall Influence
1904 - 1996 (92 years)
Julius Posener was a German architectural historian, author and higher education teacher. Coming from a bourgeois-Jewish background, son of the painter Moritz Posener and a daughter of the real estate developer Oppenheim, Julius Posener grew up in the middle-class environment in the architecturally stimulating Berlin villa colony Lichterfelde-West. His parents had built themselves a villa in the English country home style there as founders of progressive architecture. This environment had lastingly formed him from his own statement:
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Jerome Apt
#10462
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jerome' "Jay" Apt III is an American astronaut and professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Before becoming an astronaut, Apt was a physicist who worked on the Pioneer Venus 1978 space probe project, and used visible light and infrared techniques to study the planets and moons of the solar system from ground-based observatories.
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Theodore Zoli
#13995
Overall Influence
Theodore P. Zoli, III is an American structural engineer, and a leading designer of cable-stayed bridges. He is currently the National Bridge Chief Engineer at HNTB Corporation and is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow.
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John Ronan
#11926
Overall Influence
John Ronan is an American architect, designer and educator based in Chicago, in the United States. John Ronan FAIA is founding principal of John Ronan Architects in Chicago, founded in 1999. Education Ronan holds a Master of Architecture degree with distinction from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Michigan.
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George N. Hatsopoulos
#24705
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
George Nicholas Hatsopoulos was a Greek American mechanical engineer noted for his work in thermodynamics and for having founded Thermo Electron. Early life Hatsopoulos was born in Athens, Greece in 1927 and is related to the former rector of the Athens Polytechnic School, Nicolas Kitsikis. He attended Athens Polytechnic before entering MIT, where he received his Bachelor and Master of Science , Mechanical Engineer , and Doctorate of Science .
Go to Profile#587
Robert Wilson
#1707
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robert Wilson is an American experimental theater stage director and playwright who has been described by The New York Times as "[America]'s – or even the world's – foremost vanguard 'theater artist. He has also worked as a choreographer, performer, painter, sculptor, video artist, and sound and lighting designer.
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Nathalie de Vries
#20636
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Nathalie de Vries is a Dutch architect, lecturer and urbanist. In 1993 together with Winy Maas and Jacob van Rijs she set up MVRDV. MVRDV In 1993, together with Winy Maas and Jacob van Rijs, she founded the MVRDV studio , which produces designs and studies in the fields of architecture, urban studies and landscape design.
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Paul Werbos
#2176
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Paul John Werbos is an American social scientist and machine learning pioneer. He is best known for his 1974 dissertation, which first described the process of training artificial neural networks through backpropagation of errors. He also was a pioneer of recurrent neural networks.
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Max Frisch
#1777
Overall Influence
1911 - 1991 (80 years)
Max Rudolf Frisch was a Swiss playwright and novelist. Frisch's works focused on problems of identity, individuality, responsibility, morality, and political commitment. The use of irony is a significant feature of his post-war output. Frisch was one of the founders of Gruppe Olten. He was awarded the 1965 Jerusalem Prize, the 1973 Grand Schiller Prize, and the 1986 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Go to Profile#591
Gerhard Klimeck
#27722
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Gerhard Klimeck is a German-American scientist and author in the field of nanotechnology. He is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Go to Profile#592
Jeff Dahn
#12572
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Jeff Dahn is a Professor in the Department of Physics & Atmospheric Science and the Department of Chemistry at Dalhousie University. He is recognized as one of the pioneering developers of the lithium-ion battery, which is now used worldwide in laptop computers, cell-phones, cars and many other mobile devices. Although Dr. Dahn made numerous contribution to the development of lithium-ion batteries, his most important discovery was intercalation of Li+ ions into graphite from solvents comprising ethylene carbonate, which was the final piece of the puzzle in the invention of commercial Li-ion battery.
Go to Profile#593
Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan
#21671
Overall Influence
1979 - 2012 (33 years)
Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was an Iranian nuclear scientist who was assassinated in 2012. He was also deputy of commerce at the Natanz nuclear power plant. Life Ahmadi Roshan was born on 8 September 1979 in the village of Sangestan in Hamedan province, and grew up in a poor family. He was among the students of Aziz Khoshvaght , studied polymer engineering at the Sharif University of Technology, and had published several ISI articles in English and Persian by the time he was 32 years old.
Go to Profile#594
Richard C. Dorf
#16760
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Richard C. Dorf was a professor emeritus of management and electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Davis. He received his Ph.D. from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. Dorf was a Life Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to engineering education and control theory, and was a fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education.
Go to Profile#595
Frank Kreith
#29635
Overall Influence
1922 - 2018 (96 years)
Frank Kreith was an American mechanical engineer. Born in Vienna, Kreith fled Austria after the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938 as a member of the Kindertransport. He obtained degrees from the University of California, Berkeley , the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Paris . Kreith worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, received a fellowship from the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation to study at Princeton University and taught at Berkeley and Lehigh University before becoming a faculty member at University of Colorado Boulder in 1959. He wa...
Go to Profile#596
Yoshinobu Ashihara
#20168
Overall Influence
1918 - 2003 (85 years)
was a Japanese architect noted for projects such as the Komazawa Olympic Gymnasium and the Sony Building . Education and career Ashihara was educated at both the University of Tokyo and Harvard University. After graduating from Harvard in 1953 with a master's degree in Architecture, Ashihara worked in the architectural practice of modernist Marcel Breuer. Founder of his own firm Yoshinobu Ashihara Architecture Associates in 1956.
Go to Profile#597
Robert M. Nerem
#25652
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
#598
John Burland
#23387
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
John Boscawen Burland is an Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Investigator at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Imperial College London. In 2016, Burland was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to geotechnical engineering and the design, construction, and preservation of civil infrastructure and heritage buildings.
Go to Profile#599
Arthur David Hall III
#35888
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
Arthur David Hall III was an American electrical engineer and a pioneer in the field of systems engineering. He was the author of a widely used engineering textbook A Methodology for Systems Engineering from 1962.
Go to Profile#600
Heinz-Hermann Koelle
#14651
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Heinz-Hermann Koelle was a German aeronautical engineer who made the preliminary designs on the rocket that would emerge as the Saturn I. Closely associated with Wernher von Braun's team at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency , he was a member of the launch crew on Explorer 1 and later directed the Marshall Space Flight Center's involvement in Project Apollo. In 1965, he accepted the Chair of Space Technology at the Technical University of Berlin.
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