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,

#5851

Pearl Sullivan

#138965
Overall Influence
1961 - 2020 (59 years)
Pearl Sullivan was a Malaysian Canadian engineer and the former Dean of Engineering at the University of Waterloo, the first woman to hold the position. Early life and education Sullivan was born in 1961 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and immigrated to Canada in the 1980s. She graduated from the Technical University of Nova Scotia, now part of Dalhousie University, in 1985 with a master's degree in Metallurgical Engineering. Following her time in Halifax, Sullivan completed a PhD in materials engineering at the University of British Columbia in 1990. Her doctoral studies were supervised by Anoush Po...
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#5852

Thomas Laurell

#147892
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
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#5853

Hironobu Fujii

#147896
Overall Influence
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#5854

Siegfried Schmauder

#147903
Overall Influence
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#5855

Dagmar Hülsenberg

Dagmar Hülsenberg
#109576
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Dagmar Hülsenberg is a German materials scientist and university professor. In 1975, at age 34, she became the youngest full professor in the German Democratic Republic. By that time she had already distinguished herself by obtaining doctorates in two barely related disciplines: Economics/Cost accounting and Engineering/Materials science .
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#5856

Kazufumi Ito

#147956
Overall Influence
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#5857

Mervyn Deitel

#147969
Overall Influence
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#5858

Seiichi Tagawa

#147977
Overall Influence
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#5859

José Claudio Geromel

#147979
Overall Influence
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#5860

Noël Bakhtian

Noël Bakhtian
#68870
Overall Influence
Noël Bakhtian is the former director of the Berkeley Lab Energy Storage Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She has served as the director of the Center for Advanced Energy Studies at Idaho National Laboratory and as a senior policy advisor for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
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#5861

Anthony R. Ingraffea

#148015
Overall Influence
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#5862

Derek Bradley

#148029
Overall Influence
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#5863

Thomas Zeller

#148044
Overall Influence
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#5864

Shoou‐jinn Chang

#148053
Overall Influence
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#5865

Leonard Michael Silverman

#148055
Overall Influence
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#5866

Frank Barkow

#91485
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Frank Barkow is an American architect. His practice Barkow Leibinger, founded with his partner Regine Leibinger, is known for industrial architecture , domestic and cultural projects , as well as for the two landmark office towers, the TRUTEC Building in Seoul and the Tour Total in Berlin .
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#5867

Antoinette Galvin

#109229
Overall Influence
Antoinette Galvin is space physicist at the University of New Hampshire. She is known for her research on the solar wind. Education and career Galvin earned her B.S. in physics from Purdue University, and has an M.S. and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland. Galvin was a research faculty member of the University of Maryland before moving to the University of New Hampshire in 1997. As of 2011, Galvin is a research professor in physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire and the director of the New Hampshire NASA Space Grant program and the New Hampshire NASA EPSCoR p...
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#5868

Dan J. Thoma

#136406
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Dan J. Thoma is an American metallurgist who is a Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the director of the Grainger Institute for Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Thoma is also a past President of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers . Thoma is well-known for his research on 3D printing technology, which he has carried out for over two decades.
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#5869

Michael G. H. Bell

#148135
Overall Influence
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#5870

Bobby Ray Hunt

#148157
Overall Influence
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#5871

Jack Edward Cermak

#148182
Overall Influence
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#5872

Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf

#59122
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf was a German metallurgist. Biography Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf was born in Bremen, Germany on February 15, 1922, to Adolph Friedrich and Elsa Kuhlmann. She attended the University of Göttingen from 1942 where she received her doctorate in materials science in 1947. Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf continued her research under Sir Nevill Francis Mott at the University of Bristol. She married Heinz Wilsdorf in 1950, with whom she travelled to University of the Witwatersrand to work as a lecturer in the same year. In 1956 they moved to the United States. In 1957, the University of Pennsy...
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#5873

Stephen Malkin

#82242
Overall Influence
Stephen Malkin was an American engineer. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University at Buffalo, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
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#5874

Blaine Cook

Blaine Cook
#103142
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Blaine Cook is a Canadian software engineer, now living and working in Nelson, British Columbia. Career Cook is the principal co-author of the OAuth and WebFinger specifications. He is the former lead developer of social networking site Twitter. He has also worked for Yahoo! on the Fire Eagle project and for BT Group as part of their open source Osmosoft team. He was founder of collaborative text editing startup Poetica. Poetica was acquired by Condé Nast in March 2016, and Cook remained with the company as a staff engineer.
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#5875

Wu Lusheng

#66644
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Wu Lusheng is a Chinese architect and a professor of Tongji University. In 2004, she was named by the Ministry of Construction of China as a "National Master of Engineering and Design". Over a career spanning more than 50 years, she collaborated with her husband Dai Fudong on about 100 projects.
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#5876

Robert D. Middlebrook

#148239
Overall Influence
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#5877

Elyse D. Foster

#148264
Overall Influence
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#5878

Tomoki Toda

#148269
Overall Influence
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#5879

Edward S. Rubin

#148270
Overall Influence
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#5880

Joel-Peter Witkin

Joel-Peter Witkin
#22349
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Joel-Peter Witkin is an American photographer who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His work often deals with themes such as death, corpses , often featuring ornately decorated photographic models, including people with dwarfism, transgender and intersex persons, as well as people living with a range of physical features. Witkin is often praised for presenting these figures in poses which celebrate and honor their physiques in an elevated, artistic manner. Witkin's complex tableaux vivants often recall religious episodes or classical paintings.
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#5881

David K. Shay

#148278
Overall Influence
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#5882

David Packard

David Packard
#93095
Overall Influence
1912 - 1996 (84 years)
David Packard was an American electrical engineer and co-founder, with Bill Hewlett, of Hewlett-Packard , serving as president , CEO , and chairman of the board of HP. He served as U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1969 to 1971 during the Nixon administration. Packard served as president of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences from 1976 to 1981 and chairman of its board of regents from 1973 to 1982. He was a member of the Trilateral Commission. Packard was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1988 and is noted for many technological innovations a...
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#5883

Klaas de Groot

Klaas de Groot
#103996
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Klaas de Groot is Emeritus Professor at the Tissue Engineering Group at the University of Twente. In the past he also worked as a visiting scientist at the UCLA bone research laboratory. His work has focused on the research and development of bioceramics that resemble the composition of bone. He has developed two types of bioceramic, namely bulk ceramics for mechanically unloaded bone fillers, and coatings for improving the bone bonding of strong, but less biocompatible, metallic orthopedic and dental implants. His group also studied the incorporation of drugs and growth factors such as Bone...
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#5884

Kalyanam Shivkumar

#148295
Overall Influence
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#5885

George Harold Waldo Haag

#121410
Overall Influence
1910 - 1998 (88 years)
George Harold Waldo Haag , FAIA, was an American architect focused on “school plant design and architecture,” based in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who practiced nationally in the mid twentieth century but particularly in Pennsylvania. He was partners in the firms of Berninger, Haag & d'Entremont and Haag & d'Entremont .
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#5886

Robert E. Jordon

#91252
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Robert E. Jordon is Dermatologist who retired in January 2016 as a Professor in the Department of Dermatology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and MD Anderson Cancer Center. He was previously a resident and faculty member of Mayo Clinic before he was recruited to be the Chair of Dermatology at Medical College of Wisconsin. He served as the Chair of the Department of Dermatology at UTHSC from 1982 to 2002, and was succeeded by Ronald P. Rapini. While he was a medical student at the University of Buffalo, he and E. H. Beutner discovered that pemphigus is an autoimmune disease; a finding they subsequently published in 1964.
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#5887

Zhen Jane Wang

#131897
Overall Influence
Zhen Jane Wang is a Chinese-Canadian signal processing researcher whose research includes work on statistical signal processing, image fusion, digital video fingerprinting, biological network inference, and deep learning. She is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia, and the editor-in-chief of IEEE Signal Processing Letters.
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#5888

Carlos Chanfon Olmos

#130802
Overall Influence
1928 - 2002 (74 years)
Carlos Chanfón Olmos was a Mexican architect and professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico , known for his research and publications of various topics in the field of architecture under the UNAM imprint. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Colima in 2001.
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#5889

Grenfell N. Patey

#148365
Overall Influence
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#5890

Chittaranjan Yajnik

#112647
Overall Influence
Prof. Chittaranjan Yajnik is a medical scientist from Pune, India who is a specialist in Diabetes research and maternal nutrition. Yajnik is known for his work on the topic of the ‘thin-fat’ Indian, which explains that though not obese by international criteria Indians are adipose . He has worked in the field of intrauterine programming of diabetes and was successful in showing possible role of maternal micronutrient nutrition in its aetiology.
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#5891

Floyd A. Huff

#148384
Overall Influence
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#5892

Changpin Li

#148386
Overall Influence
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#5893

Jens Richard Rostrup‐nielsen

#148391
Overall Influence
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#5894

Madison S. Spach

#148392
Overall Influence
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#5895

Luigi Di Biase

#148404
Overall Influence
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#5896

Kenneth J. D. Mackenzie

#148419
Overall Influence
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#5897

M. Gamal Moharam

#148468
Overall Influence
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#5898

Julie Ezold

Julie Ezold
#125571
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Julie Ezold is a nuclear engineer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She is campaign manager for the 252-Californium Campaign and was involved with the discovery of Tennessine. Early life and education Ezold took lessons and performed in ballet, tap, jazz, and baton at Merritt's Dance Center in Schenectady, New York. In fifth year she received an award for her examinations at Merritt. During high school Ezold completed a summer program in nuclear chemistry at the University of Lynchburg. She studied nuclear engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, graduating in 1990. She earned he...
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#5899

Nima Amjady

#148477
Overall Influence
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#5900

Christian Berger

#53903
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Christian Berger is an Austrian cinematographer. His 1985 film Raffl was entered into the 14th Moscow International Film Festival. He is mostly known for his work with Michael Haneke. In February 2010, Berger was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography for his work on The White Ribbon at the 82nd Academy Awards. He also won the ASC Award for Best Cinematography for the same film.
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