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,
#6001
Allan R. Kerstein
#149665
Overall Influence
#6002
Shijian Lu
#149669
Overall Influence
#6003
Sanjay Sampath
#149683
Overall Influence
#6004
Masa-atsu Ohtsu
#149689
Overall Influence
#6005
Grant N. Pierce
#149699
Overall Influence
#6006
Douglas A. Dennis*,**
#149705
Overall Influence
#6007
Yogendra Kumar Joshi
#149747
Overall Influence
#6008
Ian Wallace
#20209
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Ian Wallace is a British-born Canadian artist, living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. Wallace has been an influential figure in the development of an internationally acknowledged photographic and conceptual art practice in Vancouver since 1965.
Go to Profile#6009
Juan I. Ramos
#149793
Overall Influence
#6010
Tzu‐chen Yen
#149802
Overall Influence
#6011
Amr Salah-eldin Elnashai
#149809
Overall Influence
#6012
Young-kyu Han
#149810
Overall Influence
#6013
Masanobu Oda
#149817
Overall Influence
#6014
Carmen Ayuso
#149836
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
#6015
Ville Topias Pulkki
#141422
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Ville Topias Pulkki is a Finnish acoustics researcher and professor at Aalto University 2015–. Education Pulkki studied at the Helsinki University of Technology, where he obtained a Master of Science in Technology in 1994, and a Doctor of Science in Technology in 2001.
Go to Profile#6016
Raashid Ahmed Luqmani
#149884
Overall Influence
#6017
Kok Kiong Tan
#149904
Overall Influence
#6018
Phyllis Birkby
#58243
Overall Influence
1932 - 1994 (62 years)
Noel Phyllis Birkby was an American architect, feminist, filmmaker, teacher, and founder of the Women's School of Planning and Architecture. Early life and education Noel Phyllis Birkby was born in Nutley, New Jersey to Harold S. and Alice Birkby. As a child, she made drawings of cities and towns, and miniature three-dimensional environments in her mother's garden. An early fascination with architecture led her to express interest in the profession at the age of 16, to a career counselor who would tell her the profession was inaccessible to her, despite her aptitude: "Well, Miss Birkby, it a...
Go to Profile#6019
David E. Crowley
#149922
Overall Influence
#6020
Mitchell B. Cohen
#149941
Overall Influence
#6021
Walter G. Vincenti
#59307
Overall Influence
1917 - 2019 (102 years)
Walter Guido Vincenti was an American engineer who worked in the field of aeronautics, designing planes that could fly at hypersonic speed. He was elected as a member of several scientific societies, including the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and National Academy of Engineering. He won several prestigious awards, such as the Leonardo da Vinci Medal and the Daniel Guggenheim Medal.
Go to Profile#6022
Madeleine Akrich
#16134
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Madeleine Akrich is a French sociologist of technology. She served as the director of the Center for the Sociology of Innovation at Mines ParisTech from 2003 to 2013. She is known for developing actor–network theory with Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law and others.
Go to Profile#6023
Sophie Tarbouriech
#149963
Overall Influence
#6024
Michael Small
#149965
Overall Influence
#6026
Demosthenis Teneketzis
#130524
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Demosthenis Teneketzis IEEE is a Greek-American electrical engineer specializing in Systems Science and Engineering. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His works are in the fields of control, decentralized systems, and networks. His main research publications are in stochastic control , scheduling and resource allocation in networks with strategic and non-strategic users, and fault diagnosis in discrete event systems. He is a Fellow of IEEE for contributions to the theory of decentralized informat...
Go to Profile#6027
J.orge Chirife
#150030
Overall Influence
#6028
Erhan Budak
#150037
Overall Influence
#6029
Meir Feder
#150061
Overall Influence
#6030
Manohla Dargis
#20899
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Manohla June Dargis is an American film critic. She is the chief film critic for The New York Times. She is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Career Before being a film critic for The New York Times, Dargis was a chief film critic for the Los Angeles Times, the film editor at the LA Weekly, and a film critic at The Village Voice, where she had two columns on avant-garde cinema . Her work has been included in a number of books, including Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader and American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now, published by the Library of America.
Go to Profile#6031
H. P. Baltes
#150100
Overall Influence
#6032
B. Mutlu Sumer
#148181
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
B. Mutlu Sumer is a Turkish scientist and engineer known for his studies on seabed and structure interaction including scour and soil liquefaction, as well as turbulence in coastal and civil engineering. He was previously Professor at the Technical University of Denmark until he retired in 2015. He held a Professor-Emeritus position between June 2015 and June 2017 at the same university. He was Professor of Hydraulics at Istanbul Technical University before he moved to Denmark in 1984. B. Mutlu Sumer relocated to Turkey, his native country, in 2016 and, together with Professor Özgür Kirca, f...
Go to Profile#6033
Hiroyuki Sasabe
#150111
Overall Influence
#6034
George Bentley
#150115
Overall Influence
#6035
Kiyoshi Okada
#150119
Overall Influence
#6036
Hongxing Dai
#150132
Overall Influence
#6037
Karem Slim
#150143
Overall Influence
#6038
Alireza Bahadori
#150158
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
#6039
Bradley J. Roth
#150159
Overall Influence
#6040
Keiichi Tokuda
#150186
Overall Influence
#6041
Vin Tangpricha
#150202
Overall Influence
#6042
Raymond Desjardins
#38378
Overall Influence
Raymond L. Desjardins is a senior research scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in the Agrienvironment Division of the Ottawa Research and Development Centre. His areas of expertise include agricultural meteorology, micrometeorology, air quality, and climate change. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, was co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, and in 2018 was appointed as Member of the Order of Canada for his research in agrometeorology and for his innovative devices to quantify greenhouse gas emissions.
Go to Profile#6043
John Gregory
#38835
Overall Influence
John Gregory was an English railway and naval engineer. He served as engineer aboard HMS Erebus during the 1845 Franklin Expedition, which sought to explore uncharted parts of what is now Nunavut, including the Northwest Passage, and make scientific observations. The ships were outfitted with former railway locomotive engines which served as auxiliary power units, which is why Gregory, who had never been to sea, served on the expedition. All expedition personnel perished in uncertain conditions, mostly on and around King William Island. In 2021, Gregory's remains became the first of the exped...
Go to Profile#6044
Kenya Honda
#150328
Overall Influence
#6045
Karl Fent
#150337
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
#6046
Feng Gao
#150367
Overall Influence
#6047
Anthony Grbic
#150377
Overall Influence
#6048
Ian Anthony Ashcroft
#150379
Overall Influence
#6049
Kim Choon Ng
#150380
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
#6050
Suhas Diggavi
#150389
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Suhas N. Diggavi from the University of California, Los Angeles was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for contributions to wireless networks and systems. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021.
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