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,
#5801
Francis Lévy
#147298
Overall Influence
#5802
Iraw W. Levin
#147308
Overall Influence
#5803
Hubert Klumpner
#130430
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Hubert Klumpner is an Austrian, architect, urbanist, educator, researcher, curator and activist. Klumpner is a tenured professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich , where he directs since 2010 the Chair of Architecture and Urban Design. He is the general director of the Center for Architecture, Society and Environment, ETH CASE . In the Institute of Science Technology and Policy he directs a research group that explores how science, technology and policy are transforming urbanization processes.
Go to Profile#5804
Karel Reisz
#4203
Overall Influence
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Karel Reisz was a Czech-born British filmmaker and film critic, one of the pioneers of the new realist strain in British cinema during the 1950s and 1960s. Two of the best-known films he directed are Saturday Night and Sunday Morning , a classic of kitchen sink realism, and the romantic period drama The French Lieutenant's Woman .
Go to Profile#5805
Hefa Cheng
#147324
Overall Influence
#5806
Subhasish Chaudhuri
#147326
Overall Influence
#5807
James Edwin Smith
#147328
Overall Influence
#5808
Robert W. Ii Hobson
#147346
Overall Influence
#5809
Josep Lluis Mateo
#123576
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Josep Lluís Mateo is an architect since 1974 . His work is mostly in Europe with projects built in France, Germany, Portugal, Holland, Croatia and Spain, specializing in quality buildings specifically adapted to a variety of cultural and programmatic conditions.
Go to Profile#5810
Mehdi Hedayati
#147352
Overall Influence
#5811
Ray Chen
#147354
Overall Influence
Ray Chen is an American engineer, who is currently the Keys and Joan Curry/Cullen Trust Endowed Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, The Optical Society and SPIE.
Go to Profile#5812
Natalie Stingelin
#95256
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Natalie Stingelin , Fellow of the Materials Research Society and Royal Society of Chemistry , is a materials scientist and current chair of the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology , the University of Bordeaux and Imperial College . She led the European Commission Marie Curie INFORM network and is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Materials Chemistry C and Materials Advances.
Go to Profile#5813
Erdogan Madenci,
#147387
Overall Influence
#5814
Virginia L. Miller
#147394
Overall Influence
#5815
Pradipta Kishore Dash
#147403
Overall Influence
#5816
Alex Acero
#147414
Overall Influence
#5817
Yongkun Li
#147422
Overall Influence
#5818
Yrjoe Aunus Olavi Neuvo
#147436
Overall Influence
#5819
Fumitada Itakura
#147438
Overall Influence
#5820
Timothy M. Wright
#147444
Overall Influence
#5821
Andrew Grove
#85758
Overall Influence
1936 - 2016 (80 years)
Andrew Stephen Grove was a Hungarian-American businessman and engineer who served as the third CEO of Intel Corporation. He escaped from the Hungarian People's Republic during the 1956 revolution at the age of 20 and moved to the United States, where he finished his education. He was the third employee and eventual third CEO of Intel, transforming the company into the world's largest semiconductor company.
Go to Profile#5822
Toshioz Hirai
#147487
Overall Influence
#5823
Calin A. Belta
#147489
Overall Influence
#5824
Sanjoy Banerjee
#147494
Overall Influence
#5825
Satish C. Kalhan
#147508
Overall Influence
#5826
Kathleen Janee Green
#147513
Overall Influence
#5827
Venkatesh K. R. Kodur
#147525
Overall Influence
#5828
Gary Tse
#147527
Overall Influence
#5829
Paul Sorajja
#147539
Overall Influence
#5830
Jin-Kao Hao
#147588
Overall Influence
#5831
Sarah Haigh
#129247
Overall Influence
Sarah Jane Haigh is a Professor in the School of Materials at the University of Manchester. She investigates nanomaterials using transmission electron microscopy, including two-dimensional materials such as graphene.
Go to Profile#5832
Andrei Shkel
#145284
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Andrei M. Shkel is a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 "for contributions to micromachined gyroscopes". He served as the President of the IEEE Sensors Council . In 2021, he was elected to National Academy of Inventors Fellow status. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Sensors Letters.
Go to Profile#5833
Nikolaos Stergiopulos
#147623
Overall Influence
#5834
Bill Jay
#68888
Overall Influence
1940 - 2009 (69 years)
William Jay was a photographer, writer on and advocate of photography, curator, magazine and picture editor, lecturer, public speaker and mentor. He was the first editor of "the immensely influential magazine" Creative Camera ; and founder and editor of Album . He is the author of more than 20 books on the history and criticism of photography, and roughly 400 essays, lectures and articles. His own photographs have been widely published, including a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He is known for his portrait photographs of photographers.
Go to Profile#5835
John G. Hunter
#147636
Overall Influence
#5836
Jay Burton Benziger
#147644
Overall Influence
#5837
Thomas J. Mccarthy
#147690
Overall Influence
#5838
Ingvar Holmér,
#147693
Overall Influence
#5839
Eric S. G. Shaqfeh
#147706
Overall Influence
#5840
Javier Pérez-Ramírez
#80838
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Javier Pérez-Ramírez is a Professor of Catalysis and Chemical Engineering at ETH Zurich. Career Javier Pérez-Ramírez studied Chemical Engineering at the University of Alicante, and later obtained his PhD cum laude at TU Delft . He worked for Norsk Hydro and Yara International and returned to academia as an ICREA research professor at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia, related to the Rovira i Virgili University . Since 2010, he is Full Professor of Catalysis Engineering at the Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. In 2018 ...
Go to Profile#5841
Ulisses Braga Neto
#101601
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Ulisses M. Braga Neto is a Brazilian-American electrical engineer and is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. His main research areas are statistical pattern recognition, machine learning, signal and image processing, and systems biology. He has worked extensively in the field of error estimation for pattern recognition and machine learning, having published with Edward R. Dougherty the first book dedicated to this topic. Braga-Neto has also published a classroom textbook on Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. He has also made contributions...
Go to Profile#5842
Brad Bird
#29491
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Phillip Bradley Bird is an American filmmaker, animator, and voice actor. He has had a career spanning forty years in both animation and live-action. Bird was born in Montana and grew up in Oregon. He developed an interest in the art of animation early on, and completed his first short subject by age 14. Bird sent the film to Walt Disney Productions, leading to an apprenticeship from the studio's Nine Old Men. He attended the California Institute of the Arts in the late 1970s, and worked for Disney shortly thereafter.
Go to Profile#5843
Zhengdao Wang
#113122
Overall Influence
Zhengdao Wang is a Chinese-American electrical engineer specializing in coding theory and signal processing for wireless communication. He is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Iowa State University, and a program director in the Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems of the National Science Foundation.
Go to Profile#5844
Peter Delfyett
#139098
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Peter J. Delfyett Jr is an American engineer and Pegasus Professor and Trustee Chair Professor of Optics, ECE & Physics at the University of Central Florida College of Optics and Photonics. He was awarded the 1996 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
Go to Profile#5845
Davide Geneletti
#147753
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
#5846
Tonio Buonassisi
#147756
Overall Influence
#5847
Anders Perner
#147778
Overall Influence
#5848
Han Lin Liao
#147839
Overall Influence
#5849
Andy Bechtolsheim
#74557
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Andreas Maria Maximilian Freiherr von Mauchenheim genannt Bechtolsheim is a German electrical engineer, entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and was its chief hardware designer. As of September 2023, his net worth is $11.2 billion.
Go to Profile#5850
Tim Ibell
#142996
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Tim Ibell is a South African structural engineer. Early life and education Ibell grew up in Constantia, Cape Town, South Africa attended Western Province Prep school and the Diocesan College. He read Civil engineering at the University of Cape Town and graduated in 1988. He moved to the UK and took a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1992.
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